The Liverpool Trilogy Read Online Free Page B

her head like buzzards searching for carrion. And there was more than one way to skin a cat. It didn’t need to be pills, didn’t need to be here. But it had to be soon, while she could still drive her motorized chair. The Liverpool–Southport line had three or four level crossings nearby. No one would blame him if she arrived home squashed. It needed to look like an accident. He would accept an accident.
    ‘Don’t leave me, Moira.’
    She grinned. ‘Remember the first time I went out in my trolley? I ran over a traffic warden, a woman’s shopping and a post office. Mind, the post office hardly had a dent in it. I wish I could say the same for the warden’s foot and that poor woman’s eggs.’
    He left the room. She could hear him sniffing back tears in the hall. Then her eyes closed and she was gone. They were running into the sea in Cornwall, chasing waves, being chased by waves. Every night in that huge hotel bed, talking, loving, talking again. And all the time, something followed them. Sometimes it was a shadow, a pale thing that hung back whenever she turned. But it grew. It came closer, its colour darkened and consumed her, and she was back in Liverpool with the children and . . .
    ‘Moira?’
    She woke. He gave her a cup of tea. Well, half a cup, because she spilt so much if the cup was full.
    Richard averted his gaze, because he didn’t want her to see the fear in his eyes. She wasn’t simply falling asleep any more; she was losing consciousness, and occasionally she stopped breathing. There was no help. Men walked on the moon – there was money and research enough for that. Moira walked on planet earth scarcely at all, and any possible cure or remedial treatment for multiple sclerosis would be paid for mostly by charities. Somewhere, someone had their priorities wrong.

    The rage lasted for more than three days.
    Cheated and abused by his own wife, Alan Henshaw tore up the few clothes she had left, burnt the wedding album, dug up her old man’s roses, contacted his daughter, and drank himself into near-coma. His wife would come back, he told himself in rare brighter moments. Lucy had nobody apart from her children, and she would be back. The woman hadn’t the guts to go it alone – she would need to come back.
    Wouldn’t she? He had made her money grow – what the hell did it matter whose account was whose? As for the rest of it – his wanderings and his mistresses – what the buggery had she expected? Since the birth of Elizabeth, his wife had been as warm as a butcher’s freezer, as responsive as a corpse. And he liked younger, firmer flesh, which was quite normal in his scheme of things. Successful men needed variety, because variety was the spice of . . . something or other.
    But, on the fourth day, when all the booze had gone, and he returned to a more normal frame of mind, he had to admit that he was beaten. Her solicitor, contacted by his, had outlined the whole damned mess, and Alan had no leg to stand on. The house was hers, as were the heavy mortgages he had obtained via fraud. Except they weren’t hers, because she hadn’t signed for them. Three handwriting experts had declared Lucy Henshaw’s signature to be forged, while a neighbour who had witnessed one of the documents admitted that Lucy had not been present at the time.
    It was the end of the road for Alan. If he fought, she would walk all over him. If he didn’t fight, he might as well be dead. Could the children save him? How much of the stolen money had she given to them? It wouldn’t be enough. All he owned were twenty plots of land in Bromley Cross, a set of plans, and the clothes in his wardrobe. She, of course, would get away with the crime of forging his signature if the case went to court. She was a lady who had married a rogue, and the forging of his signature had been necessary so that she could take back her own money.
    At the back of his mind lingered the suspicion that the land and the plans might well belong to