Veil of Darkness Read Free

catch her up, guess at her plans, unearth some clue by using a devilish form of interpersonal communication, pad stealthily onto the station platform and lay a patient, malicious hand on her shoulder, this thought she must dismiss. She cannot live her life with a fugitive’s instincts in every fibre of her being. Her eyes water with the strain of staring out into the dim evening, ludicrously seeking him out from the flocks of umbrella-slick strangers, while willing the bus to move faster, the traffic to ease, her head to stop aching.
    Trevor will not lie down and take it. No way will he accept defeat. No doubt he will be forming some plan even now. No doubt he will make up some hackneyed tale of a runaway wife with a mental condition who’s a danger to herself and her children, so plausible that they will believe him and activate some search before she has time to leave the city. ‘You’re hysterical,’ he would often mock her. ‘You’re off your bleeding head.’ As if he despised her sanity just as much as her happiness. Thank God the children aren’t with her. At least the children are safe, and if everything works out well they will soon be together.
    She had often had wild thoughts of running away, but common sense always came to her rescue. If she was going to go then she had to go properly, she had to make sensible plans or he would find her.
    Hence the idea of Cornwall. The centre helped her to find a job. She used to sneak there while the kids were at school, taking time off work for the dentist. She almost lost her job through doing that. Her supervisor, Mrs Graham, said she would dock her wages, the dentist was not for working hours. But the girls in the food department rebelled and she told Mrs Graham it was root-canal work and she had to have several appointments. The Burleston Hotel, a Victorian pile with its own private cove, owned by a Colonel Vincent Parker, offered summer work and a self-contained cottage next winter. They held their local interviews in a suite at the Adelphi Hotel. Kirsty, self-confidence nil, never thought she would get picked, but she did. Kerry at the centre tried her best to persuade them to let Kirsty have the cottage at once, without going into her personal details, but the Burleston Hotel said it was let and would not be free till the winter. It was an offer too good to miss. A battered woman she might be, but Kirsty abhorred the thought of a hostel.
    He rolls his own fags. His first two fingers are stained yellow. He keeps his tobacco in a genuine old Bisto tin that he reckons is worth some money.
    He won’t use tissues. Trevor demands crisp white handkerchiefs, which he insists she boil on top of the stove in the same way his mother does.
    He makes her dial if he wants to phone.
    The top of his egg must be sliced by a knife so that no bits of shell are broken.
    In the meantime the kids will stay with Maddy, a friend and sympathizer from the centre, who sometimes helps out as a stop-gap measure for women with temporary problems. The best thing about Maddy is that she’s unlikely to be traced: she is not a battered wife. Madeleine Kelly is a middle-aged woman of independent means who lives in a cottage in Caldy, the posh side of the river. Kirsty met her just once at the centre, and once was all it had taken for her to feel reassured. If only she’d had a mother like Maddy, a large, round Mrs Apple with a body all soft and folded, who could have come straight from a nursery rhyme. She searched her face most carefully. There was gaiety and relaxation about her, and her laugh was wholesome and catching. She has fostered difficult kids all her life and lives in a homely muddle under thatch, her garden has a stream running through it and she keeps three gentle old dogs. She would be overjoyed to have Jake and Gemma until the end of September and wouldn’t hear of accepting any money. They will not attend school through the summer, but Maddy will teach them herself, give them