Classic Bestsellers from Josephine Cox: Bumper Collection. Josephine Cox

he could just walk away from it all. Instead of working for a living, the work had taken him over.

      It was a sobering thought.

      Within ten minutes, Alice was escorting Lilian from the building. Now a shivering wreck, Lilian clung to her. ‘I didn’t mean it to happen,’ she kept saying. ‘I didn’t mean it to happen.’

      Alice helped her into the car. ‘It’s all right,’ she kept saying. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.’

      The driver softly hummed a song as he went away. If there was one thing that unnerved him, it was a sobbing woman.

      In the back, Alice was deeply concerned about Lilian, who was muttering and crying, and telling her how she was ‘sorry’. ‘You don’t need to be “sorry” for anything,’ Alice assured her.

      Yet she could not imagine why Lilian was in such a state. She wondered if it was because of what she had done to the surveyor’s report. Then she wondered if it might be something in Lilian’s private life that had rendered her such a shivering wreck.

      Whatever it was that seemed to be eating away at her, Alice knew one thing for certain: it had sent Lilian dangerously close to a breakdown.

      It was a ten-minute ride to Lilian’s small house; with the streets busy, it was a stop-start journey.

      When they arrived at their destination, Alice thanked the driver and told him he could go. ‘If I need to, I’ll catch the bus,’ she told him.

      At the door, Alice asked Lilian for the key. While Lilian fumbled in her pockets, Alice noticed the front door was partly open. Her first instinct was that Lilian had been burgled. ‘You stay there a minute,’ she told Lilian, who was still preoccupied searching for the key.

      ‘I can’t find it,’ she was muttering. ‘I don’t know where it is.’

      Cautiously, Alice went inside. From somewhere close, she could hear a wireless playing loud music, and Alice began to feel apprehensive of what she might find inside the house. ‘Who’s there?’ Any minute now, she expected to be confronted by a burglar.

      With her heart in her mouth, she came into the sitting room, and what she saw gave her a shock.

      The room was littered with newspapers and empty cups. Two of them had turned over on the table, the spillage of tea now dried on the surface and on the lino, where it had at one stage dripped and had left a dark smudge.

      There were other cups in the hearth, and writing paper torn into shreds and thrown across the rug. The fire-grate was piled high with ash and cinders, and the curtains of one window were still drawn. There was a crumpled pillow and blanket in the fireside chair, as if somebody had been sleeping there.

      Alice couldn’t understand it. This was not the work of a burglar.

      She almost leapt out of her skin when Lilian’s voice whispered in her ear, ‘I’ve been too busy to clean it up.’

      Recovering her composure, Alice took the blanket and pillow from the chair. ‘Here, you sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea, and don’t worry about all this.’ Knowing how Lilian was always so particular about her appearance and the tidy manner in which she kept the office, Alice still could not believe that she had been living in such a pigsty as this. It was unthinkable, and only served to confirm how ill she was.

      Once Lilian was comfortable in the chair, Alice asked her where the doctor’s number was.

      Lilian said she didn’t want the doctor, and when she seemed to grow agitated, Alice calmed her down. ‘All right. Let’s have a cup of tea and a chat first,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll see.’ Though she was determined to get a doctor to her, she thought another few minutes wouldn’t hurt; at least until she had tidied the place up and got a fire going in the hearth.

      After a quick look round, she soon found the matches. Lighting the stove, she filled the kettle and set it on the hob, leaving it to boil while she took the pillow and blanket upstairs.

      Another shock awaited her, and this time she was shaken to her roots.

      In the first bedroom, where the blanket and pillow obviously belonged, there were pictures plastered everywhere: over the wall, on the dressing-table mirror, and even on the bed-head.

      Alice could hardly take it all in. ‘Oh, dear God!’ Never in her life had she encountered anything like this.

      She walked slowly around the room, looking at the pictures, unable to believe her eyes.

       They were all photographs of Tom.

      In different settings: walking from his car; sitting at his desk; climbing into a taxi; even several with his children. And here was another, of him sitting in a café, and yet another, of him with his brother, heads bent over the desk where a sheet of drawings was laid out. And another, of Tom discussing business with John Martin.

      With the exception of the one with his children, which was taken from close up with Tom obviously aware it was being taken, they were all shot from a distance, Tom apparently unaware that his picture was being taken.

      Horrified, Alice began to back off, when she saw other scraps of photographs at her feet. Stooping to pick them up, she pieced them together, one by one, in the palm of her hand.

       The pictures were all of Tom and his wife, smiling into the camera.

      In the background of one, Alice could see a Christmas tree, and baubles strung from the fireplace. In another, Tom had his arm round his wife, looking down with a smiling face and the look of love in his eyes. And in another, they were outside in the snow. All carefully taken pictures of a man and woman, happy and in love.

      And every one torn to shreds, with the woman’s head being deliberately torn off, while the man was kept intact, yet discarded, as though in anger.

      Alice shivered.

      From the doorway, Lilian watched her. ‘That’s private,’ she said, her voice as cold and hard as her hate-filled eyes. ‘You shouldn’t be in here!’

      The streets were busy, with mothers pushing prams and hurrying about their chores. They didn’t take too much notice of the young woman running through the streets, wild and frantic. A female in flight was not an uncommon occurrence in these winding streets.

      Her mind alive with fear and suspicion, Lilian wasn’t even aware of their presence. She was running away; looking for some kind of forgiveness. Driven by the ghosts that would not leave her be, she knew one person who would gladly take her in. One friend in all the world.

       For all their sakes, it was time he knew the truth.

       Chapter 18

      JASPER WAS ON Jack’s boat, the Mary Lou, listening to the news on North Korea, where US Marines had been forced to resort to using flame-throwers in an effort to rid the area of snipers. ‘By! It’s a bad old do, an’ no mistake,’ he muttered, sipping his mug of tea. ‘Thousands med homeless and soldiers being tekken home in boxes. Will it never end?’

      He thought back to the terrible years of the last war, and further back to the time when he had been a sailor. He had seen the horrors of war first hand, and it was not something he would ever want to get involved in again. Yet tragically, premature death had now come to West Bay; he’d arrived back from his visit with Liz and Robbie to find that Kathy’s sister had met with a terrible accident. Poor Kathy was beside herself: more so, since her mother had turned up.

      He thought about Kathy’s mother, Irene. She was a hard, unforgiving woman, it seemed to him. ‘Aye, she’s a bad ’un, is that Irene!’ he muttered, swilling back the dregs of his tea. ‘How a mother can turn agin her own child like that is a mystery to me. All right! I know she’s grieving and I’m sorry it had to happen that way, but to blame that lass