Survivor: Only the strongest will remain standing . . .

by Roberta Kray

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked out,’ she said, avoiding a direct answer. ‘Can you imagine me and Esther living there together? Anyway, I fancied a change. I like living in London.’

  Mal inclined his head while he read between the lines. ‘You’ll need some money. I’ll talk to Considine, get a monthly payment organised.’

  Lita knew she should jump at the opportunity to solve her financial problems. She could get her own flat, pay the bills and never have to worry about where the next meal was coming from – so why was she hesitating? Because taking the cash would be the easy option. She knew it was time to make her own way, her own decisions, to start standing on her own two feet as Mrs Gough had so succinctly put it. ‘Thanks, but I’m okay. I’ve got a job lined up, nothing special but it’ll tide me over.’

  ‘I’ve let you down. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You haven’t let me down.’

  ‘I promised you a job at Fury’s, didn’t I? Things aren’t looking too good on that front. I’ll probably have to cut my losses and close the place – people don’t like doing business with murderers – but I could ask around, try and get someone else to take you on.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Lita said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Please. You’ve done enough. You took me in when Brenda didn’t want me any more. You’ve taken care of me for the past five years.’ She almost added that he’d been like a father to her, but thought of Kay and bit her lip. ‘I don’t even know why you did all that.’

  Mal gave a soft laugh. ‘To salve my conscience, to have someone young around the house, to do the right thing for once? Take your pick. None of them are what you’d call selfless.’

  ‘Nobody’s selfless,’ she said. ‘Well, hardly anyone.’

  Mal frowned as he looked across the table, noticing something for the first time. He leaned forward and peered at her. ‘What happened to your neck?’ he asked, touching the mirror spot on his own throat.

  Lita’s hand lifted to where the blade of Tony’s knife had sliced through her skin. It was healed up now with only a short pink scar to remind her of the terror of that afternoon. ‘It’s nothing, just a scratch.’

  The lines between his eyes grew deeper, but perhaps there was something in her tone, her expression, which made him think twice about challenging her explanation. ‘What’s it like where you’re living?’

  ‘Much the same as it always was. Kellston doesn’t change much.’ She pushed the plastic cup away, drew it back again, knowing that their time was running out. The atmosphere in the room had altered, a subtle shift, a sense of drawing in as people prepared themselves for separation. In a few minutes she’d have to leave. Already some of the visitors were scraping back their chairs, standing up and saying their goodbyes.

  ‘Will you come again?’ Mal asked.

  Lita looked at him and nodded.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I want to.’

  She let her hand rest on his for a moment. Sometimes the people you loved looked after you, and sometimes you looked after them. That’s just the way it was.

  Epilogue

  Six months later

  Lolly’s flat was small and beige and often smelled of curry from the takeaway downstairs, but she still loved it. For the very first time she had a place of her own and nothing could beat the feeling. When she closed the door, there was no one to answer to but herself. She could do what she liked when she liked. She could walk around stark naked if she wanted to. She could shut out the rest of the world and forget about it.

  On the table by the window was a box of broken watches. When she wasn’t working for Terry, she would spend her time repairing them, carefully restoring the pieces to their former glory before flogging them on a stall she had on Camden Market. The watches came from all over the place, second-hand and charity shops, auction houses, pawnbrokers and from an ad she ran in the local paper. It was surprising how cheaply she could pick them up, even the big names like Omega and Breitling and Rolex.

  There was some profit to be made, but the work was time-consuming. It was the jobs she did for Terry that brought in the bigger bucks, valuing jewellery and sometimes selling it on. Despite her age, he’d given her a chance and she didn’t think she’d disappointed. Once a month or so, she’d get dressed up to the nines and Vinnie would drive her out to some fancy jeweller’s in the country where she’d put on her best cut-glass accent and spin them a yarn about her grandmother dying and leaving her some rings. The first time she’d done it, she’d been terrified of being caught, sure that they’d see straight through her. But maybe they’d mistaken her nerves for grief because she’d walked out of the shop with six hundred quid in her pocket.

  Lolly didn’t intend to do this indefinitely – everyone’s luck ran out at some point – but for now it provided a much-needed boost to her income. It was a means to an end, a way of keeping afloat. In truth, she didn’t much care that she was breaking the law. Her sense of what was right and wrong had started to blur around the edges. Some people had so much and others so little and often that was decided by pure chance, an accident of birth. She had experienced both sides, rich and poor, and although she didn’t miss the lavish surroundings of the Fury house, she was determined never to go without again.

  Every fortnight Lolly travelled to Wandsworth to visit Mal. The judge had not been too harsh on him – a three-year sentence of which he’d only serve half – and already he was making plans for when he was released. There, in the visiting room, she became Lita again, a different girl to the one who did business with Terry Street and hung out with the whores on Albert Road. It was odd, she thought, like having a split personality.

  Although she kept in touch with Theresa and Mrs Docherty – duly passing on any juicy gossip to Mal – she wondered if she’d ever see them again. Sometimes the beautiful house with the shimmering lake seemed a distant memory, something so far away it might almost be a dream. She inhabited a different world now, one without peacocks and plump white towels.

  Lolly picked up the seashell box from the table. Inside was the Fanta cap she’d saved from all those years ago, a reminder of Jude Rule. She hadn’t seen him since the trial, since he’d turned up at the courtroom to support Esther. They hadn’t spoken. There was nothing left to say. She was still haunted by the awful suspicion that he had murdered Amy Wiltshire and she had helped him get away with it. Would the truth ever come out? Only time would tell.

  She went over to the window and opened it. A cold blast of winter air rushed into the room and made her hair fly horizontal. After checking that the coast was clear, she pulled back her arm and hurled the cap as far as she could. It caught on the wind for a second before arcing down into the road, bouncing twice and rolling into the gutter. She slammed shut the window with a grunt of satisfaction.

  The next item she picked out of the box was Stanley Parrish’s business card. It reminded her of Nick and she wondered when she’d see him again. He had a habit of turning up out of the blue, acting as though they were friends, although she couldn’t quite recall when she’d agreed to this. She both liked and disliked him, found him simultaneously annoying and intriguing, and these were contradictions she hadn’t quite come to terms with. She didn’t have the heart to throw the card away and carefully placed it back where it had been.

  Finally she took out the black and white photo taken in the Woolworths booth. A scrawny kid stared at the camera with startled eyes and a sad mouth. ‘Look at you,’ she murmured, feeling an odd combination of pity and pride. Eventually she smiled. She’d survived, hadn’t she? That was no small thing. Against all the odds, she’d found her way.

  Nick Trent had plans. The first of these was to go home and have a long hot bath. The second was to get a less tedious job. He’d been on the tail of an adulterous husband for the past four hours and felt like his bones were turning to ice. The heating in his car didn’t work and his teeth were chattering. He’d been hired by the private investigators Marshall & Marshall, two ex-co
p brothers who sat on their fat arses all day and delegated all the crap assignments to new recruits like him.

  Nick glanced at the clock on the dashboard for the umpteenth time before his gaze returned to the modern detached house. He hoped the guy wasn’t planning a sleepover. Unlikely as he was married, but you never could tell: the lying sod probably had a ready-made list of excuses as to why he couldn’t make it home.

  In order to oil the cogs of his rapidly freezing brain, Nick started going over the Fury case again. It still bugged him that he couldn’t prove his uncle had been deliberately killed. Had Mal Fury been involved? That had been his original theory. Now he had another, although this wasn’t one he could prove either. He reckoned Stanley, following up on the Teddy Heath lead, had gone back to the café to ask Maeve more questions. Maybe something he’d said had spooked her, making her think he knew more than he did. Maybe Jackie had been there when it happened. Maybe the two women had conspired to get him down to Albert Road, and maybe Joe Quinn had been tipped the wink that Stanley Parrish was asking questions about Billy Martin again, even threatening to go to the law.

  ‘That’s a shit-lot of maybes,’ Nick said out loud.

  But he thought the truth was buried in there somewhere. Perhaps not exactly in the form he had it, but something similar, a variation on the theme. However, no one was going to confirm his suspicions. Neither Maeve nor Jackie were about to implicate themselves in a cold-blooded murder.

  Whenever Nick thought about Stanley, it wasn’t long before Lita Bruce sprang into his head. She wasn’t his responsibility and yet in an odd kind of way he did feel responsible for her. Like an obligation he’d inherited from his uncle. Except that made it sound like a duty, which wasn’t what he meant at all. Far from it. He liked the girl, even though she could be impossible, stubborn and defensive, a tangled mass of contradictions. Or maybe that was why he liked her. She was tough and vulnerable, sassy and naive. She was different.

  Mal Fury lay stretched out on the bed with his hands behind his head. Even in the dead of night, prison was never quiet. The potential silence was like an empty vessel into which every man’s pain was poured, a jet-black liquid of rage and regret and frustration. Fists pummelled against locked doors, the sound echoing along the empty corridors. Curses travelled through the thick walls. Awake or asleep, the men still called out, a never-ending cry of hopelessness.

  But Mal knew now that he could survive this. He could endure the claustrophobia, the routine, the perpetual air of menace. The trick was to keep your head down and make yourself useful. He wrote letters for the illiterate to wives and girlfriends, read out the replies and listened to their problems. He helped with legal queries, translating jargon into plain English whilst clearing a way through the tortuous maze of parole boards and appeals.

  And then there was Lita. Her visits kept him going, gave him something to look forward to. He remembered the girl she had been – a lost soul – and thought of how she was now, strong and independent and fiercely loyal. Not that any of that was down to him. She had forged her own path and always would. She was the kind of young woman he would have wanted Kay to become, a daughter to be proud of.

  Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he would see Teddy Heath’s sly face, goading him, taunting him about the kidnap. He had lied about the bastard’s motives. It had only ever been the money, nothing else. By persuading Esther that Teddy had acted out of revenge, payback for being used and discarded, he had laid a burden of guilt from which she could never be free. Her casual infidelity had cost them their daughter. He had never felt bad about doing this. Why should he? Guilt was a great leveller. She had always had the upper hand, always been loved more than she had loved.

  Mal knew their relationship was toxic but it was, ironically, his connection to Esther that did most to secure him a position within these walls and keep him relatively safe. Even in jail, there was a fascination with celebrity. It gave him a peculiar status, which he was careful not to abuse.

  ‘Esther,’ he whispered.

  Her name hung from his lip in the cold night air, a stalactite of love and hate, of agony and despair. Even after everything that had happened, he was not prepared to relinquish her yet. They were bound together, joined by secrets and lies. He had heard that she was back with Claud Leighton, but it wouldn’t last. Nothing ever did with her. In time she would return to him. Their whole marriage had been a drama and this was just another act.

  It was seeing the story in the newspaper that brought it all flooding back: Mal Fury being up in court for manslaughter. Hazel’s mouth had fallen open. Somehow, after all these years, she’d been convinced it was finished, over with, a nightmare she’d buried long ago. There was an old photo of Teddy smiling for the camera. She’d never seen that picture before. It made her stomach flip.

  Everyone has a first love and hers was Teddy Heath. She’d forgiven him everything: his drunkenness, his infidelity, even the habit he had of disappearing for weeks on end. She shouldn’t have put up with it but she’d been too young to know any better. Infatuated, that was the word. She would have walked over hot coals if he’d asked her too.

  In the event, he’d asked her to do much worse. She could have refused, but he’d always been able to twist her round his little finger. And it was foolproof, he’d insisted, no way it could go wrong. And after, when it had all gone wrong, she’d been the one left to pick up the pieces.

  ‘You’ve got to help,’ he’d pleaded. ‘Leave her somewhere, anywhere she’ll be found.’

  And Hazel would have done exactly that, dumped the baby on the church doorstep or down by the library, if he hadn’t scarpered, taking off in the middle of the night without so much as a goodbye note. She’d waited and waited but he hadn’t come back. Of course she could have still gone ahead, but she didn’t see why she should take the risk. What if someone saw her? She’d have been the one who paid the price for Teddy’s crime.

  An accessory, that’s what the law would have called her. At the very least she would have been done for aiding and abetting. And who wants to spend the best years of their life in jail? She was scared, that’s the truth. And the longer it went on, the more terrified she became. In the end, she had made her own choice and whether it was right or wrong was irrelevant now.

  She didn’t feel any guilt over Esther Gray. Why should she? How much guilt had Esther felt when she was screwing Teddy behind her husband’s back? The bitch hadn’t thought twice about it. You reap what you sow, as they say. What goes around comes around. Anyway, there was no turning back time. What was done was done and couldn’t be changed. There was no point dwelling on it.

  When she looked at her daughter, she saw a strong, capable girl with a good future ahead of her. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt. The past was the past. It didn’t need digging up and raking over. Why ruin another life? There had been enough damage already. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  It was freezing in Kellston cemetery, but still and peaceful too. Lolly walked between the graves with one hand deep in her pocket, the other clutching a bowl of blue hyacinths. Her feelings towards Angela had changed a lot in the past six months and she was starting to understand how love wasn’t always straightforward, how it could twist and turn like a plant searching for the sun.

  It pained her to think of how much her mother had suffered, of how the fragile edifice of everything she’d built had slowly crumbled away as the illness ate away at her. Perhaps she would have got better if Billy Martin hadn’t turned up. Perhaps she would never have jumped if she hadn’t talked to Maeve that day.

  Lolly was sure it hadn’t just been fear that had made her take that fateful leap. It would have torn her mum apart to think she had been the cause of someone else’s pain, that she had stolen a baby who was loved and cherished. And she wouldn’t have run, not in a hundred years. Her conscience wouldn’t have allowed it. Faced with a future without her child, she had chosen death instead.

  Lolly came to the place where her
mother’s ashes had been interred. She stopped and gazed down at the new white headstone with its marble sheen and its angels and doves. It had taken five years but she had finally done it. People always said that life wasn’t a fairy tale, but in many ways it was – a battle between good and evil, a struggle out of darkness towards the light. It was just the happy ending that didn’t always quite come off.

  Angela Bruce

  Beloved mother of Lolly

  Rest in peace

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