4
Positively upbeat, Lyssa turned to her laptop and revisited Elizabeth’s notes. Now that she was feeling inspired, she wanted to tackle a major element of the book.
Lyssa knew that Elizabeth was keen to ‘rebrand’ Monty from her present status as a misunderstood self-indulgent wild child to someone far more well rounded and sympathetic, and was relying on her to do that through the medium of the first book to be written and published about her.
And one of the ways they could do that, they had both agreed, was to concentrate on the charity that Monty had set up.
So to be told by Elizabeth that Monty had founded a charity only a year before her death had forced Lyssa to confront just how unintentionally biased she had been.
And now, still feeling guilty about that, she was determined to research this aspect of the dead woman with a chastened heart and a resolve to start to get to grips with the true character of Amelia Montrose.
Alas, Elizabeth’s notes on this aspect of her late relative’s life were rather meagre.
She knew it had been called the YMT, short for the Young Mothers’ Trust, and that Monty had asked someone called Deborah Simmonds to help her run it.
To make matters worse, Elizabeth had been able to find very little documentation for it, and assumed, sadly, that it had all fizzled out after Monty’s death.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth insisted that family lore had it that Monty had used a good portion of her own money from her trust fund to set it up and get it going, but if she had actively campaigned for other donors, Lyssa might find corroborative proof that way.
Sitting at her work desk, Lyssa couldn’t help but wonder if Monty’s lover, Glen, had been a contributor as well? He would certainly have been in a good position to make a sizeable donation to the new venture. Maybe that was something that could ultimately be ascertained?
Putting that aside to be investigated for another day, she concentrated on what Elizabeth had managed to dig up, finding that the bulk of it consisted of newspaper references to the charity, which were nearly all as scathing as the references to Monty and the band.
It was as if the media at the time was determined to find nothing good in the new, emerging youth culture of the day, and so had derided the YMT as yet another sign of Monty’s degenerate nature.
Basically, the self-righteous editorials had argued, if this indulgent and wayward young woman genuinely wanted to do good, why didn’t she support the perfectly valid and upstanding institutions that already existed?
It wasn’t as if there were a shortage of good causes to support, they’d gleefully pointed out.
Instead, Monty had set up a charity for unmarried mothers, with the aim of allowing them to keep their children instead of giving them up for adoption, whereby their offspring could be raised by decent families, with decent values.
It was, they decried, typical of the increasingly degenerate ethos of the times that she should actively support the immoral behaviour of young unwed mothers.
Reading it now, Lyssa could only shake her head in wonder. The gutter press coverage was a mixture of the usual headline-grabbing rubbish, but the editorials written in the more quality broadsheets were in some ways even worse.
Abandoning Elizabeth’s slim file, she went online, and eventually tracked down something more useful, in a News of the World (of all things!) interview with a young woman who had been one of the first to benefit from the YMT.
Janet Connor had been a fifteen year old with a baby son who had been kicked out of her family home by her outraged parents when her pregnancy had become obvious.
She, at least, had nothing but praise for Monty, who had taken a personal interest in her plight.
Despite the reporter’s obvious nose for scandal and salaciousness, Janet Connor had still somehow managed to put across some of Monty’s compassion and had vigorously praised her for the practical help Monty and the YMT had been able to provide for her and her son.
It took Lyssa nearly two hours online to track Janet down on social media.
She’d married later in life, but had then divorced and reverted to her maiden name again, and now, aged seventy-six, she lived in a trailer park in a seaside resort in Hampshire.
She had been surprised by Lyssa’s phone call, but obviously had never forgotten the woman who had helped her all those years ago, and would, she assured Lyssa, be very happy to talk about Monty for the book.
They quickly arranged a suitable day and time for them both, and deciding she’d quit whilst she was ahead, Lyssa finally closed her laptop and rubbed her tired and now somewhat dry eyes.
She felt a familiar soft headbutt against her leg, and looked down at her cat.
‘Hello, Bibbie – finished giving the sparrows a hard time, hmmm?’ she murmured.
Her cat liked to sit on the balcony, lying in wait for any birds that might land on the railings, and then give them the fright of their lives.
So far, he’d never caught one, for which she was heartily grateful.
He was a big and hefty cat, and as she lifted him up and put him on her knees, she gave a little grunt. ‘If you get much bigger, I might have to consider cutting back on your treats.’
She rubbed under his chin, which was warm and soft, and his green eyes half closed with pleasure. She leaned down and rubbed her chin on top of his head and smiled when he started to rub his cheek against hers.
‘Well, someone loves me,’ she said with a smile. ‘Or else, someone is trying to get around me so that I don’t cut off his supply of fishy-wishes.’
It was at this time of the day, when it was drawing to a close, that she wished her husband would walk through the door as he’d used to, wondering what was for dinner, and asking how her day had been, and did she fancy doing something silly over the next weekend?
But the door didn’t open, and Kyle didn’t come through it, and Lyssa fought her usual battle against the ache of his loss as she put Bibbie down and walked over to the kitchen area.
Opening the fridge, she reached determinedly for the salmon fillet that she’d bought that afternoon and put it under the grill to cook.
Naturally, Bibbie wound himself around her ankles whenever she tried to move.
As she steamed some vegetables, she forced her mind to think about work again, this time focusing her thoughts on money. Money, it seemed to her, had played a major part in the Lucky Cuckoos’ and Monty’s story in one way or another.
Monty, of course, had always had money and had grown up secure in the knowledge that she’d always have it, whereas the working-class boys from the band, when they’d started out singing in the local pubs, hadn’t a bean to their name.
When that had begun to change, Glen had bought his parents a house and car, as well as giving sizeable gifts of money to all his siblings in one way or another.
So, it had undoubtedly come as a severe shock to them that, when he’d died so suddenly, his last Will and Testament had left all his estate, including all future royalties on his records, to Monty.
Even when it came out that Monty had made her own Will at the same time, leaving Glen all her worldly goods also, and that the couple had done it as a typically extravagant gesture of their love and commitment to one another, she’d still come in for huge criticism – most of it from Glen’s parents, naturally enough, as well as from her ever-present foe, the hostile media.
Why should she, who already had a wealthy family behind her and access to a substantial trust, profit from the death of her lover, a working-class boy made good?
And when Glen’s parents, Frank and Joan, vowed they would fight to have the terms of the Will overturned in court, the press had been right behind them.
Monty had refused to make her thoughts on the threatened lawsuit public, perhaps knowing it would be pointless to try and get public sympathy behind her.
Instead, she’d apparently tried to make every effort to mediate the problem herself and had been trying to come to some sort of compromise with her dead lover’s parents.
Elizabeth had managed to find some letters written to Monty from one of her friends that confirmed all this, although in the letter her friend made it clear that she thought Monty was wasting her time trying to be nice, and that the Bannisters were a greedy bunch who wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d got the lot.
But the fact that Monty had invited Joan, Frank and their youngest daughter to stay over in her house on the night she’d chosen to celebrate her birthday, certainly indicated that she had still been trying to keep things civil, and hadn’t yet given up trying, even on what was to turn out to be the last night of her life.
But what must have been going through her mind about it all?
Lyssa paused in the act of putting her plate under the grill to warm.
Glen would have been dead for barely six months, and his loss must have been still very raw for her indeed.
Plus, Monty must have remembered the reasons why they’d named each other as sole beneficiaries, and loyalty to his memory must have made her feel that if her lover had wanted her to have his legacy, then she shouldn’t go against his last wishes.
And yet, if she loved him (and Lyssa was already quite convinced that Monty had loved him fiercely) she must have been torn by the desire not to upset his parents either.
The acrimony and in-fighting must have been unbearable for her.
Had it been enough for her to want to end her own life?
Was it possible that the verdict of accidental death had been the wrong one?
Drunken, lonely and not thinking straight, might she not simply have decided that she’d rather rejoin her lover in the next life than stay and fight things out in this one?