‘That’s a pile of crap!’ Rob said. ‘It’s not like that at all.’
His solicitor gripped his arm.
‘Please keep your client’s outbursts under control,’ the judge said to his brief, glancing down to scan the documentation before him.
He was peering at A4 images Bev could just about see from her vantage point below the bench. She smiled, realising these were the cheeky snaps Angie had taken on her phone in Carluccio’s when she had tracked down Tim, enjoying his pre-match lunch in the Trafford Centre with his homeboys, Rob and Mo. The last thing Angie had had on her mind was Bev’s private life, at a time when she’d been desperately trying to uncover her husband’s financial chicanery. But she’d taken the initiative of getting photographic evidence of the unlikely threesome.
‘How did Angela Fitzwilliam come across these images?’ the judge asked, showing the snaps to Bev and her solicitor. Tim, Mo and Rob, all wearing the latest United strip, shovelling down tortellini. ‘How did she recognise Dr Ashraf?
‘Mrs Fitzwilliam has an eating disorder, Your Honour,’ Eve replied. ‘She’d seen the psychiatrist at the same medical centre where Beverley receives group therapy. Mrs Fitzwilliam attends a support group there too. In the past, she’s observed Beverley there, leaving sessions which had been led by Dr Ashraf.’
‘It’s a set-up!’ Rob said.
‘My ex is big buddies with my shrink,’ Bev said. ‘And my shrink is responsible for sending evaluations into court, testifying to my mental well-being and fitness as a mother. And that’s not a set-up?’
The judge banged his gavel. ‘Silence!’
Bev chewed the inside of her cheek, trying desperately not to smile. Thanks to Angie, she was finally able to chip away at the wall Rob had built around Hope.
‘I’m going to allow unsupervised visits,’ the judge ruled, after having heard the new evidence and refereed the bickering between the two lawyers. He locked eyes with Bev. ‘I think you’ve been wronged and I’m sorry for that.’ His stern expression softened, ushering in a smile. ‘I’ve seen the clip of you in that swimming pool, you know.’
Feeling the heat in her cheeks, Bev bit her lip. Was this a good thing or a bad thing that the judge had seen her in an ill-fitting bikini, wrestling with a grown man? ‘Yes. Sorry. It’s gone viral on social media. I’ve got no control over—’
‘Don’t apologise. You’re quite the heroine, Ms Saunders.’ The judge turned to Rob, addressing him with the castigatory voice of a head teacher, giving a wayward pupil a dressing down. ‘And you, sir, are in contempt of court.’ Back to Bev, in a soft voice. ‘When you have a fixed address that is suitable as a home for a child and the social worker has been satisfied by it, I will hear your case for a custody application, Ms Saunders.’
Punching the air with delight, Bev only just managed to suppress the urge to flip Rob the bird.
‘Get in!’ Bev said, hugging Doc, who was waiting for her on the steps of Trafford County Court.
His body was rigid in her arms, but it didn’t matter. Mo had fallen into disrepute and doubt would therefore be cast on his evaluations. Rob had been put firmly in his place and was in hot water with the judge.
‘I’m taking that bastard to the cleaners,’ she said, linking arms with her business partner.
‘With what money?’ Doc said, treating her to a yellow-toothed smile and presenting her with a Greggs’ ice bun.
Bev bit into the bun. Spoke with her mouth full. Relishing the feeling in the pit of her belly of optimism – and it wasn’t just down to the icing. ‘Dunno. I guess we’d better get some more work in, pronto. One new client and a few hours freelancing isn’t going to cut it. Know any more wife-battering politicians?’
Best of all, Bev considered, as she walked through the side streets back to Doc’s flat, Jerry was – for now, at least – locked up. No more trolling. No more stalking. Though the murderer of Tatjana Lebedev was still at large, Bev was sure the police would squeeze the relevant information out of a politician who had fallen so very far from grace. Meanwhile, she would be left in peace to enjoy a life that was improving daily . . .
CHAPTER 41
Bev
‘Which do you fancy, bum-bum?’ Bev asked, peering up at the menu behind the counter. ‘Cheeseburger or a classic with everything on?’ She put her arm around her daughter, savouring the scent of her hair. It smelled of cocoa butter ; felt like satin.
‘Ooh, can I have a double decker with fries? I’m starving,’ Hope said, her eyes reflecting the backlit multi-coloured Perspex of the menu as rainbows.
When her daughter put her arm around her, Bev felt like a missing piece of her being had been found. ‘You can have whatever you like, my love. You need it, anyway. You’re growing tall like a beautiful, willowy tree.’
‘Nearly as big as Dad, now!’
Bev pictured Rob in her mind’s eye. Dad. What a joke. A college dropout-turned-short-arsed dictator who didn’t even have the genes to qualify him for his reign over Hope’s life. Fuck him. ‘This is our treat,’ she said. ‘Our girls’ weekend away with no interruptions and solid fun. High five!’
Hope giggled, slapping her mother’s hand with a palm that was almost as big as an adult’s. ‘Yay! Hurray for holidays. Can I have a milkshake too, please?’
Setting aside for a moment her concerns about how little money she had in her bank account until Angie settled up in full, she nodded. ‘Just this once. But no more sweet stuff for the rest of the day. I don’t want your teeth to drop out.’ She kissed her daughter on the forehead, savouring every detail of her face : those large, doe-like eyes ; her bow-shaped lips ; the pixie chin with a dimple in the middle. Her build and her bone structure were all her father’s. Her facial features were miniature Bev. She said a silent thank you to the universe for having reached this place, where she had time alone with her daughter.
They sat at a table with their motorway-services feast. Bev tried to make conversation about the latest pop bands that turned out to be old hat, and the latest toy craze that turned out to be yesterday’s favourite Christmas present.
‘Oh, Mum!’ Hope groaned, shovelling a pile of French fries into her mouth but talking nonetheless. Fidgeting in her seat like the excitable ten-year-old she was. ‘You’re so uncool!’ Cheeky laughter, followed by a flurry of heartfelt apologies.
Bev placed her hand on top of Hope’s. ‘It’s been so hard being apart from you,’ she said. ‘I feel bad that I don’t know all your favourite stuff. But I’ll make it up to you. I promise.’ Don’t bad-mouth Rob. Don’t bad-mouth those shits he calls parents. ‘Things are going to change, my love.’
Nodding, Hope frowned. She licked her ketchup-smudged lips thoughtfully. ‘How come we’re allowed to do this, then? Has Janice gone forever?’
Smiling, Bev imagined pushing the social worker on her polyester-clad, interfering arse. ‘Mummy just solved a big case at work and helped the police to catch a terrible criminal. Dr Mo – remember Mummy told you how he’s been a bit like a school pastoral teacher for Mummy and Daddy over the years?’
Hope nodded. ‘You said he has breath like bad eggs and makes you talk about your paper models in front of strangers.’
Bev chuckled. ‘Yes, well Mo said some nasty things about Mummy and had to eat what’s called humble pie.’ She bit into her burger, relishing the news that she’d been assigned a new, impartial psychiatrist for the court’s psychological evaluation. And if her solicitor had anything to do with it, the ongoing assessments and therapy would be dropped entirely. The grounds for Rob’s insistence upon them had been spurious, in any case. ‘So, that’s why we’re going to spend lots more time together, and when I get a new place, you’ll come to live with me. You’ll see Daddy loads, but you belong with your mum, pickle.’
Seemingly oblivious to the high drama that had been playing out between her parents since the time of her birth, Hope merely nodded, grinned and slurped on her mortar-thick milkshake. ‘I love you Mum. I’ve missed you
so much.’ She blew Bev a kiss with those rosebud lips. ‘It’s not the same with Daddy. Best Mum!’
As she cleared the spent packaging onto the plastic tray and carried it towards the bin, Bev’s attention was drawn to a television bolted to the wall of the restaurant. On it, the news flashed up with images of a police crime scene that fluttered with blue and white tape. There was something familiar about the house that the forensic pathologists, clad in their white jumpsuits, stood outside, along with the uniformed constables in their Kevlar vests.
‘Angie,’ Bev said.
She watched the silent footage, open-mouthed, that showed her most recent client, hurrying through a crowd of baying, bulb-flashing reporters. Angie wheeled her pushchair, with Poppy strapped into the seat and Benjamin standing on a buggy-board, at high speed down the tree-lined road, away from the sprawling house. The cameras followed her progress towards her Range Rover. Bev noticed that despite the mayhem, and drawing the world’s attention for the wrong reasons, Angie looked happy. Pink in the cheeks. Shiny-eyed. And was that the hint of a smile that played on her glossy lips?
But the real focus was on Jerry Fitzwilliam. The feature flashed back to the news that had made headlines only two days earlier, when Fitzwilliam had been arrested. Bev watched the snippet she had since seen countless times, on every channel, of Angie’s abusive husband being led in cuffs from the grand entrance of Crewe Hall to a waiting squad car.
‘Ha,’ Bev muttered, grinning up at the screen. ‘Look at that face. Sick as the proverbial parrot, aren’t you, you big lump?’ Fitzwilliam’s colour had drained from his usual pink to a sickly greenish hue. It seemed her old GMP adversaries, Curtis and Owen, had had an axe to grind against Labour’s golden boy and self-proclaimed saviour of the underfunded force. The BBC had been tipped off before any public statement had been issued, triggering a press free-for-all. She felt certain that Jerry Fitzwilliam wouldn’t be liking it one little bit. ‘Serves you right.’
‘All finished?’ Bev asked Hope, cradling her velvety soft face in her hand.
‘Can we get a rowing boat when we get there?’ Hope asked, allowing her to spit on a serviette and wipe the red ghost of ketchup from her mouth.
‘You bet. I’ll let you have a go.’
Bev held her daughter’s warm, clammy hand as they walked out to the car park, returning to her repaired Polo. With bruising skies above them, it was no surprise when fat beans of rain started to bounce on the bonnet of her car almost the moment they crossed the invisible border between Lancashire and Cumbria. As they sped down the M6 with the undulating peaks of the Lake District on the horizon, with the soporific hee-haw of the windscreen wipers counting down the metres covered, the weather seemed inconsequential.
She started to sing. ‘We’re off, we’re off. We’re off in a motor car. Sixty coppers are after us and we don’t know where we are! We’re off, we’re off . . .’
With Hope singing along in the back seat, Bev’s lack of funds and painfully stiff arm, now that the cast was off, mattered not a jot.
Settling into the Brackenrigg Inn – the modest black and white B & B that was perched by the banks of Ullswater – Bev was able for the first time in a long while to notice the birdsong ; breathe in the fresh scent of the unsullied air. The light was beginning to fail but the rain had abated. The lake shimmered as though God had spread out a giant sheet of foil, anchoring it to the earth with trees and stapling it fast with tiny white dots that were sheep, scattered across the hills on the far shore.
‘Come on,’ she said to Hope. ‘It’s a bit late to take a boat out. Let’s skim stones. I’ll show you how.’
They found a perfect spot along the river’s shoreline and started to search for the flattest pebbles.
‘My dad showed me how to do this,’ Bev said, flinging her first pebble almost horizontally across the water’s surface with a practiced flick of her wrist. It bounced.
‘One, two, three, four . . .’ Hope counted. ‘Five! You got five bounces!’ She jumped up and down, clapping her hands together. ‘Clever Mum-Mum.’
‘Here. You try.’ Bev gave Hope the finest stone she had in her collection and encased the girl’s hand in her own, showing her the slick movement of the wrist that was required to flick it out onto the water like a Frisbee. ‘You’re a quick learner,’ she said, when Hope had had success, skimming the dead calm of the lake like an old hand after only a few tries.
As twilight started to nudge daylight from centre stage, they were the only people left by the lake’s edge but for a man, standing some two hundred metres away, watching bats swoop and dart from the trees through a pair of binoculars. It was so peaceful. Too tranquil to imagine for a second that that man might be pointing his binoculars in their direction.
CHAPTER 42
Bev
Bev yawned. ‘Bedtime,’ she said, gathering her daughter in her arms and planting a smackeroo on her forehead.
How wonderful it was to tuck her little girl into bed in the chintzy family suite – the only place that had been available, thanks to a last-minute cancellation.
Stroking her brow, Bev drank in the smell of Hope’s freshly showered skin and her clean winceyette pyjamas. ‘I see Daddy’s changed the washing liquid,’ she said, wrinkling her nose at the unfamiliar fragrance. Not explaining to her daughter how it hurt that even her own motherly washing detergent preferences had been swept aside by Rob, in a bid to expunge her from Hope’s childhood. ‘Lovely smell.’ But this weekend was not a place where bitterness belonged. This was the beginning of the end of the nightmare and a time for quiet celebration. ‘Na-night, my bestest love.’
‘I love you, Mummy. You’re the best, too. Na-night.’
Exhausted, Bev turned out Hope’s light, repairing to her adjacent room where she checked that the door to the courtyard and windows were all locked. However chintzy the décor was, and the loose lampshade on the bedside lamp notwithstanding, it was a relief to climb into a freshly made bed, in a place that didn’t smell of mildew. Tomorrow, if it’s dry, we’ll go out. If it’s raining, I’ll teach her how to make an origami sheep, she thought, remembering the kit she had brought with her, secreted in the zip compartment of her case. She smiled at the thought and drifted off into a shallow sleep ; jerking, twitching, then finally relaxing, falling deeper, deeper . . .
With no idea of how much time had passed, Bev awoke in the dead of night, roused by a cracking noise. Still half in the clutches of an intoxicating dream, she opened her eyes, wondering where she was. Then she remembered that she was in the main bedroom of a family suite at the Brackenrigg Inn ; Hope in the adjacent room. There was the rectangular outline of the wardrobe. There was the glimmer of the dressing table mirror, dimly reflecting the moonlight outside. But there at the end of the bed was a silhouette she couldn’t place at first. Then, suddenly, she realised she was looking at a giant of a man, dressed all in black, wearing a balaclava. She tried to scream but he threw himself on top of her, slamming a hand over her mouth.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ he said.
His voice was muffled by the fabric covering his mouth, almost drowned out entirely by the blood rushing in Bev’s ears. A vaguely familiar timbre to his voice nevertheless which she couldn’t place.
‘One word and I’ll kill her – your daughter. And then I’ll kill you, you interfering piece of shit.’
Bev lay perfectly still for five seconds, allowing the terror to flood in. The crushing weight of him on top of her compressed her lungs as though she were at the bottom of the Crewe Hall pool again with Jerry Fitzwilliam. What did he want? To rape her? To kill her? Whatever his intentions, she had to get her attacker far, far away from Hope.
With all the strength she could harness, Bev brought her knee up fast between his legs, mashing it into his groin. He cried out, rolling off her, onto the floor. Doubled up, now.
Bev leaped off the bed on the far side, sprinting over to the en suite. Lock yourself in? No. You can’t leave Hope defenceless. Yo
u’ve got to neutralise this threat. Think! Think! She snatched up a can of body spray that she’d unpacked and left above the sink. Leaped back out of the bathroom and over the open suitcase on the floor. But as she kicked at her attacker’s head, hoping to knock him out while he was down, he grabbed her ankle with one of those shovel-like hands, trapping it in a vice-like grip.
Bev grunted as he unbalanced her and she hit the deck awkwardly, sustaining a glancing blow to her head on the edge of the bed’s divan base. Writhing for all she was worth, she broke free just long enough to expel a cloud of fragrance from the can of body spray directly into his face. Warm vanilla engulfed the room.
‘My eyes!’ He started to cough violently, pressing his fists to the balaclava’s eyeholes.
‘Shut your face and get the fuck out of here!’ she half-whispered. The fury rose within her like a wall of flames, snuffing out her cold dread. ‘If you dare wake my daughter—’
But her half-baked threat was an empty show of bravado. The intruder was on his feet again. He trapped her from behind in a painful arm lock she simply didn’t have the strength to free herself from. He bent her over the bed, pushing her down onto her knees.
‘Who are you, you bastard? Do I know you? Are you some perv who read that website?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I don’t really like to be raped and beaten, for Christ’s sake! I didn’t publish any of that.’
‘I know.’
He clearly knew of redhotslut.com, though. ‘Then, why are you doing this to me?’
‘I’m The Wolf. And I’m here to teach you a hard lesson in what happens when you lie and cheat and treat men like dirt.’
She could feel him rummaging behind her, pulling at the waistband of her pyjamas with one hand. The other hand, he shoved beneath her chest, squeezing and kneading her breasts as though they were spongey corporate stress balls.
‘I’ll scream.’ Bev tried to free her left arm. If she could only reach the bedside lamp . . .
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