Chapter 45
Sheila, who’d been charged with a brittle, nervous energy since she’d learned that the letter she’d thrown in the fire could have value after all, had been smoking twice as much as usual.
At seven o’clock on Sunday, several hours after the lady from BBC Cornwall and her team had left, she sent Cheryl for a new packet.
Cheryl went willingly enough. Being away from her mother for a whole half-hour was more than worth the effort of walking up the hill. Even in the drizzle that had started sometime during the afternoon.
She pulled on a raincoat and found an umbrella, waited patiently while Sheila handed over the required amount of cash. There was nothing wrong with her mother’s brain, she reflected. She knew, to the penny, how much everything cost.
Movement caught her eye as she stepped out onto the street.
Lesley, the woman next door, was standing in her front window.
Had she actually banged on the glass? Shifting the umbrella over to her other shoulder, giving herself an excuse not to have seen, Cheryl set off.
She’d barely gone ten paces when she heard a door opening.
‘Cheryl!’
Lesley was on her doorstep, her arms folded over her chest. ‘Is it true?’ she called. ‘I saw your mum on the news.’
‘I’ve got to catch the shop,’ Cheryl called back. The shop didn’t close until ten, but it was all she could think of. ‘Can’t stop.’
A nasty thought occurred to Cheryl as she pressed on: Lesley had three teenage sons.
She really didn’t need a small army of young people offering to search the house.
A youngster would probably find the token in a jiffy.
She’d have to drop some subtle hints to her mother about not being able to trust anyone.
In the meantime, she’d better get a move on.
Cheryl was close to breathless by the time she reached the top of the hill and was dismayed to see a gang of lads outside the shop.
They’d seen her, were watching her approach.
‘Hey, fattie, buy us some cans.’
Cheryl let the umbrella drop lower, so that it was almost completely covering her face.
‘I’m telling you, it’s her. Number seventy-three.’
A pair of grubby trainers appeared in front of her. The umbrella blocked everything else from view.
‘Excuse me,’ she tried. The trainers didn’t move.
‘Excuse me,’ her words were echoed back at her. ‘Can I ask you something?’
She lifted the umbrella.
‘Is it your mum who’s got that token thing? The one who was on the telly earlier?’
‘That was my mum,’ she admitted. ‘But we burned the letter. By accident.’
‘Harsh.’
The group backed off, leaving Cheryl to enter the shop and buy her mum’s cigarettes.
To her relief, there was no sign of them when she came out.
Light had all but left the sky by this time but the streetlights – those that hadn’t succumbed to vandalism – were reflected in the puddles and the rain-streaked road, casting a golden gleam over the street.
The road was quiet, not a single moving car in sight, and the curtains of the houses she passed were all drawn against the darkness.
Cheryl felt a rare moment of peace, all the more welcome for the turmoil of the past few days.
She had no idea how she was going to handle the meeting with the solicitors.
They’d almost certainly demand to see the token; sooner or later she’d have to admit the truth.
And then she’d be exposed as a liar on television.
She’d probably be accused of trying to cheat her elderly mother.
The blow came totally out of the blue. One second, she was making her way down the shining gold street; the next she was spinning towards the road.
She caught the rear bumper of a parked car with her hip, registered the flash of pain as her foot slipped off the kerb and she slammed down, hard, onto the wet road.
Dark-clad figures, at least four of them, were surrounding her.
One of them had leapt out from behind the thick hedge outside number forty-three, had swung his fist into her stomach as a second had grabbed hold of her handbag.
If it hadn’t been hanging from the crook of her elbow, he would have made off with it immediately.
Instead, it had become tangled in the umbrella and the resulting tussle had sent her flying.
Lying in the road, conscious of puddle water seeping into her clothes, she watched the boys kick the umbrella away, grab her handbag and run off down the street. Only when she realised that no one was coming to help her did she get painfully to her feet.
The boys, the same ones who’d been outside the shop earlier, would be disappointed in their haul.
They’d no doubt make use of Sheila’s cigarettes, but the loose change in Cheryl’s tatty old purse didn’t even add up to a pound.
Apart from that, they’d find a packet of tissues, opened, a comb and hairbrush, a set of door keys and a lip-salve.
They hadn’t been looking for money or cigarettes, though. They’d been after the token.
They’d try again. They knew where she lived. And now they had keys to the house.