Free Without a Trace by Lesley Pearse Page B

life?’
    ‘I can’t leave you here alone with Dad. You’re already a bag of nerves. Even if he doesn’t hit you, he’ll make you do all the work I do now, and he’ll be on at you constantly.’
    ‘I just won’t do all the work,’ she replied. ‘I’ll ignore him. He’ll have to get someone else to help, or the shop will go under. Maybe I can persuade him to sell it and retire.’
    Molly thought that retirement would be even worse for her mother: her father would have nothing at all to do, and he’d grumble, demand and find fault even more. But she couldn’t say that. Her poor mother had to be left with some hope for the future.
    Mary Heywood knew what her daughter was thinking as she hugged her to her breast. Molly was right in believing Jack wouldn’t change; he couldn’t, he was too set in his ways. But she had to find a way to make her daughter see that she wasn’t responsible for either of her parents and that she was entitled to choose her own path in life.
    Of course, Mary knew she was partly to blame for this state of affairs. She should’ve put her foot down with Jack long ago, at the first sign of violence and nastiness, instead of caving in and allowing him to do it. Maybe if she’d walked out yearsago he would’ve come to heel when he realized what he stood to lose. But, instead, she’d just kept quiet, and that had added more fuel to his fire.
    It might be too late now to change Jack, but it wasn’t too late for Molly to start out afresh. Emily had made the break and got away; Molly could, too. Mary knew she had to be a real mother now and protect her child, whatever the cost to herself.
    She moved back slightly from Molly and, putting one hand on each side of her daughter’s face, she lifted it to look at her. Such a sweet face, wistful blue eyes, a neat, up-tilted nose and a generous mouth. She would never be a beauty queen, but the warmth of her personality and the way she cared about people meant she would always be liked and admired. Mary hoped she’d find love soon with a man who really deserved her.
    ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘You are leaving home, Molly. Not today or tomorrow, but as soon as we can make the arrangements without your father finding out. I won’t sit back any longer and watch you working without being appreciated or being given a fair wage. I want you to have fun, to make new friends and be happy. So please don’t refuse.’
    ‘But I’ll need money –’
    Mary cut her short by putting a finger on her daughter’s lips. ‘I’ll get you the money, and in the next few days we’ll work out together where you’re going to go. Now, I suggest you go and have a lie down for a bit. You’ve had a nasty shock.’
    After two days of lying around nursing her wounds and trying hard to think of where she could go if she did leave home, on the afternoon of the third day Molly decided to go and see Simon. She might hardly know him, but he seemedto be a man of the world, he’d liked Cassie, too, and she thought he would give her good advice.
    She put make-up over her bruised eye, hoping he wouldn’t notice it, and, taking a pot of local honey and a few buns her mother had made as a little present, she walked down the high street to his flat, which she knew to be over Weston’s, the funeral directors.
    There was a concrete staircase up to his flat, reached from the back of the building. Molly remembered that when she and her friend Christine had been about seven they came round here to find out where Mr Weston kept the dead bodies. He had caught them trying to peer in a window of an outhouse, and he’d taken them back to Heywood’s grocery shop, holding each of them by the ear.
    ‘You should teach your child to have some respect for the dead,’ he had raged at her mother. ‘Death is not a sideshow at the fair, something to snigger about.’
    She was very lucky that her father was out of the shop that day and he never got to hear about the escapade. She and