Free The Candle Man by Alex Scarrow Page B

she uttered softly, then immediately scoffed at her own fuzzy-headed sentimentality.
    He’s not your child, your lover, or your husband. He’s NOT your responsibility!
    Mary chided herself for being soft and foolish. She should have been long gone by now. Like that starling, swooping off to some far-off hot country. He was a grown man and whoever had jumped
him, beaten him, knifed him, they were the ones who should carry any burden of guilt. Not her. Anyway, she had to look out for herself, since no one else was going to. She was in the
position she was in – whoring, thieving in order to pay the rent on that piss-stinking room – because she’d been stupid and naïve enough to let her heart rule her head.
    That wonderful plan of hers. That plan that seemed like a lifetime ago. As it happened, she’d found work not as a piano tutor, as she’d hoped, but as an au pair. A nanny for a
wealthy family – Mr and Mrs Frampton-Parker and their two boys – living in a beautiful, crescent-shaped drive in Holland Park. Such a lovely place. They had another home in Italy they
went to in the winter months. Six months abroad, then returned for spring and summer. They were that kind of rich.
    Mr Frampton-Parker, a man fifteen years older than her, married to a woman ten years older than himself. Quite clearly a marriage for money. His eyes wandered; of course they did. And
they’d very quickly rested on her. Eighteen then, just turning nineteen. Still a child, she realised now. So she had wholly believed him – stupidly believed him – when he said he
was going to announce to his wife that he had fallen out of love with her and was going to instigate a divorce. That they would be free to be together and could live just fine on his half of the
divorce settlement.
    But then, of course, one day not too long after they’d ‘started’, his wife caught them out. A careless tryst in a dark corner of the large house and the man, in a blind panic,
had turned savagely on Mary. Blamed her for everything, for flirting with him, throwing herself at him. That he’d succumbed to a moment of weakness in the face of Mary’s relentless
campaign to steal him away from his wife.
    She wasn’t going to get any work like that again. She wasn’t ever going to get a job like that again. It was the need for a reference that finished her chances. Even chasing jobs as
a shop girl, they wanted to know her life story. She did actually manage to get work on a stall in the Covent Garden market for a while, but the money wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. The
other girls who worked on the stalls there lived with their families still; their money contributed to a family pot. Mary’s money was all she had.
    And that was where her slippery slope began.
    She placed a forkful of a gloriously light sponge topped with thick cream and jam into her mouth and savoured it with eyes firmly closed. Luxury she hadn’t enjoyed in over four years. Not
since she’d packed her bag and been escorted out of that house by the Frampton-Parkers’ cook and valet.
    I could make a home for us.
    Mary opened her eyes. The idea had popped into her head from nowhere. But she could; she actually, really could. The Frampton-Parkers left their home for Italy at the beginning of September,
didn’t they? Like bloody clockwork. Every year. It would be closed for the winter, the furniture dressed in dust sheets, the window drapes drawn. And it remained like that until late
February, a week before they returned, when their staff came back and dusted, cleaned and aired the property, and fired-up the coke-burning boiler in the basement ready for their return.
    She knew Mr and Mrs Frampton-Parker left the keys to their home with a property letting agent in the hope that a convenient and ‘acceptable’ short-term tenant could be found. But
they bemoaned the fact that the agent had been unsuccessful thus far in generating some income from their empty house.
    Mary smiled. I