The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

again, her words slightly blunted at the edges with the effects of the alcohol she’d consumed.

‘I remember only too well, Bridget, how fond you were of leaving Jesse to work it out.’ Tom and his father stared at her, mute and aghast. ‘It usually ended up with school ringing you to threaten his exclusion, or even worse, the police knocking at your door.’

‘That’s enough!’ Robert raised his voice and Jill froze on the spot, seeming suddenly to realise how badly she’d behaved.

I stood very still and looked at the floor. Tom flew across the room.

‘Brid, are you OK? I’m so sorry, Mum wasn’t thinking. She—’

‘It’s OK, Tom,’ I said magnanimously, turning to meet Jill’s basilisk stare. ‘I understand we’ve a long way to go. I thought having dinner together tonight would help us bond a little, but I can see now that’s probably not going to happen.’

Jill turned her entire body away from me and took an unsteady step towards Tom.

‘You’re making a big mistake, Tom, and I will prove it to you.’ She started breathing heavily with her mouth open, her chest rising and falling. ‘It’s not too late to get this ridiculous marriage annulled. I won’t stand by and see her ruin your life. I won’t let that happen.’

Tom looked winded, as if she’d punched him in the stomach.

‘Bridget, Tom, I’m so, so sorry.’ Robert looked at his wife in disgust, clearly mortified. ‘Jill, get your coat, I’ll call a cab. It’s time for us to go.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until I have some answers about this farce of a marriage.’

‘Jill! Coat … now!’

She stood up, adjusting her terrible outfit. The shapeless dress hung on her frame, clinging in all the wrong places. But she didn’t follow Robert to the door. Instead, she turned desperately to Tom.

‘Is that what you want, Tom? For me to leave before we’ve talked about everything that’s happened?’

She waited. I waited. Robert sighed and looked at his watch.

‘I think it’s for the best,’ Tom said without meeting her eyes. ‘We’re married now whether you like it or not, and you knowing all the ins and outs of it isn’t going to have any bearing on that. You need to accept it, Mum, like we talked about.’

Robert nodded and glared at her. ‘What Tom’s saying, Jill, is that you’re going to have to like it or lump it.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said. ‘Good night, Jill.’

Twenty-Seven

2005

Tom stood outside the disused factory and glanced nervously down the track again. This place was not exactly remote, but it was out of the way, down a long dirt road off Little Carter Lane, a five-minute bike ride from Jesse’s house.

Years ago, this place used to be a joinery, but now it was boarded up and disused.

Tom wasn’t interested in drugs but there was no telling Jesse, who’d collect weed for older boys for a fee. Everything Tom said to try and reason with him fell on deaf ears, and so here they were yet again.

‘I’m not asking you to come in with me, am I?’ Jesse said scornfully. ‘You can wait out here with the bikes. I’ll only be five minutes.’

Before Tom offered any further warnings, Jesse had disappeared through a loosely boarded door at the front and was swiftly swallowed up into the shadows.

It was a long lane and there were several other working businesses down here. A scrapyard and some kind of car repair shop. It was nearly eight at night and all were in darkness.

Tom coughed and scraped the toe of his trainer into the broken concrete of the track. It was quite spooky, being out here on his own. Silly really, but there weren’t that many places to go where it was this quiet. Where the leaves rustled behind you and the odd branch cracked as some small animal scurried invisibly through the bushes.

Like a far-off party, he heard faint voices and laughter from deep within the bowels of the building. Jesse had told Tom that infamous local drug dealer Jason Fletcher and his crew had taken over the basement, where the joinery workshop had once operated from.

‘It’s freaky, man, there’s still some metal equipment down there. One machine had this big vice on the end and Jason told me they crushed some loser’s fingers who didn’t pay for his gear.’

Tom shivered. He wasn’t a coward but these weren’t the kind of people he wanted to associate with.

The sound of wheels on the loose gravel of the track, still some way off, made Tom jerk to attention. The lane was mainly long and straight, but there was a sharp bend about a hundred yards before the spot where Tom stood. There were no headlights yet, but it was easy to guess why they might be coming here.

Only people doing business with Jason Fletcher and his cronies came this way, and if they were driving, it meant they weren’t kids like Tom and Jesse, but adults. Tom had watched enough movies to know about rival drugs gangs and the methods they used to extract information from people.

The back of his neck prickled and, almost as a knee-jerk reaction, he grabbed Jesse’s bike and tossed it clumsily behind a cluster of gorse bushes. He did the same with his own, then, as the crunch of wheels on crumbling asphalt drew closer, he dashed to crouch behind another group of bushes nearby.

These people might be already high and looking for trouble …

He tried to stay calm, but his breathing became more and more erratic as he waited, the noise of the vehicle growing louder as it neared the bend. He drew in air, feeling queasy as he inhaled the sweet, rotting smell of the damp earth and leaves around him.

Headlights flooded the area in front of the old factory, exactly where he had been standing a few seconds ago, but he was wrong about it being rival drug dealers. He gasped as a marked police car emerged from the lane, parking