Free Gypsy by Lesley Pearse Page B

indicator to rise as far as puny, while other lads far smaller than him were making the bell ring. But he did win a coconut on the coconut shy. They had their photograph taken in a booth on the beach too. They had to queue for ages while the mothers in front of them turned to their grubby children and wiped their faces with a spit-dampened rag and pulled combs through unruly hair.
    Beth found it hard not to laugh when she finally got into the booth and was told to sit on the chair with Molly on her lap. Sam stood behind, one hand on her shoulder. The background scenery was of a castle and a lake. She wondered if one day in years to come Molly would look at the photograph and ask where that castle was in Liverpool.
    It was almost eight before they arrived home, and Sam’s sunburnt face was the colour of a lobster. ‘I’ll make some tea while you put Molly to bed,’ he said and bent to kiss the little girl as she lay sleepily in Beth’s arms.
    That was the crowning moment of the day for Beth. It might have taken eight months to come, but it was all the sweeter for knowing he hadn’t done it out of duty, but real affection.
    ‘You little charmer!’ Beth whispered to Molly as she took off her clothes and napkin to wash her. ‘You finally won him round.’
    Beth stayed in the kitchen long after Sam, Ernest and Peter had gone to bed. She thought how good it had been to see Sam laughing again, to feel hope for the future in her own heart, and a certain pride that she’d done so well at being a stand-in mother for Molly. Molly’s dark hair was curly now, her cheeks like little apples, and a great many people had stopped to admire her today. Soon she would be walking and talking too. Beth smiled as she remembered how frightened she’d been that night she was born and Mrs Craven said she must take care of her. But she’d done all right and so had Sam.
    Beth woke up suddenly, and finding she was very hot, she sat up to push the blankets back to the foot of the bed. She didn’t think she’d been asleep long for she could still faintly hear drunks in Church Street. But as she turned her pillow over and lay down again, she heard a sound out in the back alley.
    She stiffened. She was well used to people walking up and down the alley — nearly everyone who lived above the shops used their back doors to go in and out. And people like the Cravens who lived in the houses in the street behind Church Street had access to it as well. But the sound she heard wasn’t someone walking home purposefully, or even stumbling drunkenly, it was more like someone creeping, trying not to be heard.
    Beth had double-checked that she’d locked the back door when she went out last thing to the privy, so she knew no one could get in. But remembering Ernest and Peter’s bicycles were out in the yard, she thought it might be someone trying to steal them.
    She got out of bed and went to the window, but although she could just about make out the back gate in the moonlight, she couldn’t see the bicycles because the boys had probably leaned them against the side wall of the privy, and the roof of the lean-to was obscuring her vision.
    As she couldn’t hear anything more, she decided it was probably only a cat and got back into bed. But when she heard another small noise a few moments later, she jumped up and padded out of the bedroom into the kitchen to look out of the window where she had a view of most of the backyard.
    She pulled back the lace curtain, and while there wasn’t enough light to make out anything more than a dark shape against the privy wall, she could see a glint of chrome, so that satisfied her that the bicycles were still there. But as she dropped the curtain she heard another sound, and snatching it up again, this time she saw a silhouette as someone ran across the yard, pulled open the gate and disappeared through it.
    The shape was in her line of vision for no more than a second, but she felt certain it was a woman. Yet while