A Greater Evil Read Online Free Page B

my gaw got broke. If you have’nt gote it, the nurses must of stowl it, or your foster parence. I cride till I was sick when I red what they done. First yore farther an then them. It broke my hart to putt you their, but I done it becos I din’ kno what else too do. Of corse your’ angry. I don expec you to fourgive me. But I wanto mete you. I no you won’t beleeve Im’ youre muther and not mad, so Ill’ take a DNA test to show you. I don neede it to no. You look jus like my farther. Yor reel names’ Giovanni Daniele. It was his to.
    Yore muther, Maria-Teresa Jackson
    It was easy to imagine how Sam must have felt as he read the letter for the first time, and just as easy to understand why he didn’t want to have anything to do with the woman who had written it.
    ‘Do I have to?’ he’d asked Trish.
    She had seen his hands ball into fists so tight the knuckles looked as if they might burst through the skin, which had made the bruises look darker than ever. He’d turned his head away, as though he couldn’t bear her to see his face.
    ‘I spent so much of my childhood longing for a mother that it sounds mad not to want to find out now; but I’ve made myself into something that works. I survived. I’m married to Ceel. My work’s doing well. Do I have to risk it all for this … this person?’
    ‘No,’ Trish had said at once and she still believed it. No parent who abandoned a child had any right to demand anything from that child in adulthood. ‘Not even if she is your genetic parent. Why is she in prison?’
    ‘God knows! I haven’t done anything about the letters, so all I know is there on your desk.’
    Now Trish examined her uncomfortably lively conscience, aware her views on the subject of deserting parents had been coloured by her own father’s disappearance from her life when she was seven. But she’d had a warm, intelligent, supportive mother, so her loss was as nothing in comparison to Sam Foundling’s.
    Trish’s father was a charming, feckless, undomesticated Irishman, who had also tried to re-establish contact after seeing in a newspaper article that his only child had gone on to public success. For years she’d resisted his approaches. She’d got over that, though, and learned to enjoy his company, even acknowledging the parts of her character she’d had from him. Her growing affection had been stunted only by the discovery that Paddy Maguire had also fathered David and abandoned him and his mother to poverty and fear in one of the worst inner-city housing estates.
    Had she given Sam the wrong advice? No, she decided, still staring at the letters. However pathetic this woman was, however cleverly she’d phrased her illiterate pleas for his understanding, she had given up her rights on that February morning twenty-nine years ago. And if she were not the woman who’d put him there in the cardboard box, with or without a wedding ring, then she was no more than a manipulative chancer in search of a free ride on Sam’s earnings.
    And yet, Trish could also understand why he hadn’t torn up the letters or sent them back unopened. Facing fatherhood himself for the first time, he must have wanted to know more about his own parents and so about himself. But it had been hard to see what she could do for him.
    ‘I’ll pack these up again for you,’ she’d said and watched his mouth tighten and his eyelids droop. Diagnosing hurt and yet more disillusion, she’d felt a powerful urge to offer amends, to do something that might justify his scary trust in her. ‘Would you like me to see if I can find out a bit more about her? That might make it easier to decide what to do.’
    ‘Yeah. Maybe. And will you keep the letters for me? I haven’t told Ceel anything about them. She’s got enough on her plate with the baby, so I don’t want her finding them when she’s tidying my stuff.’
    ‘Does she do that?’ Trish had grimaced at the thought of George or David rifling her papers. ‘Even in your