Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge by T. Belshaw (best reads of all time .TXT) 📗

have a problem with it, but I’ll do my best, Frank,’ I replied. ‘One big thing to remember though. I’ve got a foreman, and until he retires, foreman he stays.’

Frank nodded and leaned towards me; his lips pursed.

‘Good night, Frank,’ I said, stepping aside to avoid his overfamiliar gesture. ‘Good luck with your mother.’

Chapter 26

Alice

‘What an interesting solution to your problems, Nana. I really disliked Frank, but it seems he did have a good side to him.’

‘He did his duty by me, there’s no disputing that,’ replied Alice. ‘A great many men would have just denied any knowledge. It would have been my word against his, really. There was none of this fancy hi-tech DNA thingy back then. A blood group was as close as you got to identifying someone. He was honest enough to admit it and he couldn’t really deny the confession once he’d come clean in front of Amy.

‘He may have only disclosed it in shock when the two of us confronted him, but once he’d told his mother, there was no going back. She held seriously old-fashioned attitudes. I met her a while after he moved into the farm. She was a cold woman who had taken a lot of hard knocks in life. She brought Frank up on her own after his father did a runner during World War One. He wasn’t in the army fighting in France or anything. He was a reserved occupation, coal miner. As soon as he found out Nancy was pregnant, he was off. She found out later that he was hanged for the murder of another woman who fell pregnant by him, so, she had a lucky escape really. She raised Frank to know the difference between right and wrong and he must have had the story of how she was left in the lurch, drilled into him over the years.’

‘So, he wasn’t such a bad man then, Nana?’

‘Oh, he was a pleasant enough man,’ replied Alice, ‘He had a dark side when he hit the bottle though.’

‘Was he a big drinker, Nana?’ asked Jess.

Alice shook her head. ‘Not at first. He’d have a few beers with the lads from the farm on payday but that was about it. I never begrudged him that. Farming is hard work and they all deserved a drink at the end of the week. I’d have gone with them sometimes, but it wasn’t the done thing back then. After my father died, that all changed. But, that’s a story for another time. We’re getting too far ahead of ourselves.’

Jess packed away her things and checked her phone for messages. She had muted the usual message alert because she was recording and she didn’t want Alice’s thought stream interrupted by pings and dings from her mobile. There was one message from Calvin. It said simply, Get coffee. Not the cheap crap.

‘Do you want me to stay until Gwen gets here, Nana?’ asked Jess.

‘No, get yourself off home, Jessica. I don’t want you getting on the wrong side of that man again.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ replied Jess with more confidence than she felt. ‘We just need to talk things through, that’s all.’

Jess gave Alice a hug, then one more for luck and kissed her on the cheek. When she straightened up, she ran her tongue over her lips and felt a cream-like substance on them. She ran a finger over her bottom lip and studied it.

‘Nana, are you wearing make-up?’

‘Just a little bit of rouge cream,’ replied Alice. ‘We girls have to make an effort.’

‘We do.’ Jess smiled. ‘See you tomorrow evening then, Nana.’

‘I’ll be here,’ promised Alice. ‘My diary is empty.’

Jess looked at her watch. ‘Gwen shouldn’t be long.’

‘Go,’ said Alice forcefully. ‘You have a life outside of here.’

When Jess had gone, Alice cursed the clock for ten minutes before slipping into a troubled sleep.

This time she didn’t go straight into the tunnel. Instead she was back on the farm in the winter of 1938. Building contractors were preparing the base for a large milking parlour. She stood with the farm foreman, Barney, and watched the men dig out the foundations. Barney was speaking, but Alice couldn’t hear the words. Then the image faded and she was at the entrance of the tunnel again. The darkness was now reduced to a tiny, almost pencil-drawn line around the circumference. The light itself was even softer than usual and a swirling mist had formed inside. Out of it came a male figure, still too nebulous to make out a face, but he was walking slowly towards her, arms outstretched. There was sound this time too, a voice that became louder as she watched. The voice, deadened by the fog, spoke to her from the depths of time. It was last voice she wanted to hear.

‘Alice…Alice…’

Alice blinked twice, then looked around the room to confirm that she was still in her armchair at the farm.

‘You were having a bad dream, Lovely. I thought I’d wake you.’ Gwen removed her hand from Alice’s forearm. ‘How about a nice cup of tea to help you wake up properly?’

Alice nodded, weakly. Anything to keep her awake. She considered ringing Jess and asking her to stay over tonight as well. She was dreading going to bed, she didn’t want to face the night alone.

She remembered the part-used pack of sleeping pills in the bedside drawer. The doctor had prescribed them months ago when she had bruised her hip after a fall. The hip cramped overnight causing her to lie awake in pain for hours. The pills had worked. For two solid weeks she had slept soundly and dreamlessly, or at least she couldn’t remember any dream she may have had.

Gwen came back with her tea.

‘I’m just going to put dinner on. ‘Ham and eggs tonight. Your favourite.’

Alice sipped her tea and stared at her bedside cabinet drawer. She hoped to God that Gwen hadn’t thrown them away.

Chapter 27

Jess

Jess fired up the engine of her little Toyota