A Perfect Christmas (28 page)

Frowning at her, he asked, ‘What’s going on, Jan?’

She took another long swallow from the bottle before she told him. ‘Harry came round. You’ve not long missed him.’

Glen was surprised. ‘Harry Owens was here?’ He couldn’t understand what the man would need to see him about that was urgent enough to pay him a visit at home. How would he know his address anyway as Glen hadn’t told him?

Jan shook her head. ‘No, not him. My husband Harry . . . the last person I expected ever to knock on the door. It’s shaken me up. He told me that one of his fellow church members was visiting someone around here on a mercy mission and recognised me as I came home one night.’ She took another long swallow from the bottle before she continued, ‘He came to tell me he’d forgiven me and he was allowing me to go home.’

Glen was shocked by how much this news unsettled him. Just as shocked to realise he would miss her, and not just a little. Regardless, he wouldn’t be much of a friend if he didn’t show her he was happy for her. He forced a bright smile to his face and told Jan, ‘Well, I wish you the best but I’m sure you won’t need it.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not going back, so you can take that happy expression off your face.’

He was shocked at himself again when he realised how glad he was to hear that she was not going back to her husband. Glen had no choice then but to admit to himself that, in the short space of time he had known her, he’d grown very fond of Janet Clayton.

She was continuing, ‘Our marriage was over the night Keith died and Harry and I both know it now. He’s met someone else, someone who suits the man he has become, and he wants to marry her. I’ve told him he won’t have any trouble from me over a divorce. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about his visit any more. Now I think I’ve been patient enough! I want to hear your account of what happened at work today.’ She drained her bottle and picked up another, parted it from its top and this time picked up a cup to fill as well. She handed these to Glen, telling him, ‘Go and make yourself comfy in your chair while I sort myself out another drink. I’ll follow you through.’

A minute later Jan sat looking expectantly at him. ‘So how did Lucy take the news that you’re her father? I bet she was shocked.’

He took a long swallow of his drink then shocked Jan by telling her, ‘She’s not my daughter, Jan. She’s not Lucy.’

‘She’s not! Then . . . then who is she?’

‘Her name is Caitlyn Thomas.’

‘Oh! Well, that doesn’t mean she isn’t Lucy, Glen. Nerys just changed her name, that’s all.’

‘That was my immediate thought, but I managed to find out that she’s eighteen just after Christmas, and Lucy would only have been seventeen at the end of January. And she has a birth certificate to prove it.’ To Jan’s distress she saw tears glinting in Glen’s eyes when he continued, ‘I still see so much of Julia in her, though. She has her eyes, her hair colour . . .’

Jan cut in gently, ‘That’s because you want to see Julia in her, Glen. We can all see what we want to at times, even when it’s not really there.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, I realise that.’ He took a deep breath and gave himself a shake. ‘This means that Nerys had a year-old daughter herself when we met and I can’t understand why she hid the fact from me. After all, it wasn’t as if I had an aversion to children, not with one of my own, was it? And who was looking after her while Nerys was with me?’

Jan’s mind was turning somersaults and she was talking to herself more than to him, trying to get them in order. ‘So this Caitlyn Thomas would be Lucy’s elder sister . . . well, not her real sister . . . but they might not know they’re related or even if they did . . .’

‘Jan, Caitlyn told me she hasn’t got a sister. She’s an only child.’

‘Oh! Oh, I see. But then that means . . .’

‘That Nerys must have had Lucy adopted or put in an orphanage.’ Deep sorrow filled his face as he uttered, ‘I’ll never find her now.’

Her face stern, Jan wagged a finger at him. ‘Eh, now, don’t you dare give up hope. We’ll find Lucy, if I have to break into the archives at City Hall myself to get her records and find out where she is.’

Glen could not help but smile at the vision that rose before him of Jan kitted out all in black, her face blackened with boot polish, skulking around City Hall looking for the best place to break in.

She was saying, ‘Despite the fact that the authorities won’t tell you who adopted Lucy or her whereabouts, I’m sure they would pass a letter on from you to her, and then it’s her choice whether she contacts you or not. Which of course she will, Glen. Any child would want to meet their natural parent, even if it’s just from curiosity, but I’m sure Lucy couldn’t fail to want to get to know you better, once she’d met you. Anyway, there’s also the chance that Nerys had her privately adopted and that means she will know the names of the people and where they are . . . or where they were if they have moved since, but it shouldn’t be that hard to track them down. If she did have Lucy privately adopted then it wouldn’t be any skin off Nerys’s nose to tell you who she gave her to after all this time, would it? She’s got what she wanted from you after all, and I doubt the couple who took Lucy can do anything to prosecute Nerys as it would all have been off the record and might not even have been legal, if you see what I mean?’

Jan saw hope return to Glen’s eyes. He said to her, ‘Nerys can’t stay away for ever, can she? I’ll just have to bide my time until she gets back and tackle her then for the information I want. If she’s got an ounce of common decency in her, she’ll tell me.’

‘
We’ll
go and tackle her,’ Jan told him. ‘Two people standing firm against her won’t be as easy to get rid of as one. Anyway, that’s sorted. Like you said, all we can do now is wait patiently until she gets back from her jaunt.’ She drained the last drop of beer from the bottle, drank it back then got up. ‘Ready for another?’

He nodded. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

‘Me neither. Then you can tell me what happened in the office when you went up. Oh, I’ve just remembered, I’ve already drunk my share of the beer. It’s not that I’m a drinker, but it’s been slipping down so well.’

He grinned. ‘You can share my other one with me.’

She smiled back at him. ‘You’re a gent, Glen Trainer, and don’t dare let anyone tell you otherwise.’

After sharing the bottle equally between them and having settled comfortably back in her chair – or as well as she was able to in the lumpy old thing – Jan said to Glen, ‘Right, I’m all ears.’

A troubled expression clouded his face. ‘Well to tell you the truth, Jan, I might have got Miss Thomas to see sense, but I’m not proud of myself for the way I managed it.’

A picture flashed into her mind. He had tied Caitlyn Thomas to a chair and was standing over her, gun in hand, threatening to kill her if she didn’t do what was necessary to put an end to the strike. Then she gave herself a shake. She might not have known Glen long but she knew he wasn’t the sort to hurt a fly. ‘So what did you do, then?’

With his eyes fixed on the glowing wood in the grate, he said, ‘As soon as I discovered she wasn’t in fact Lucy, the need to save the factory from possible ruin and the workers from losing their jobs was paramount. I was very conscious that I hadn’t much time before the union chaps would be knocking on the door delivering their ultimatum, so I went in all guns blazing, so to speak. I really gave her some home truths, Jan. Was very blunt with her.’

‘It wasn’t her you were angy with, though, was it, Glen? It was her mother you wanted to set straight, having just learned the latest lie in a long string of them. She promised to care for Lucy, didn’t she, raise her as her own while you were inside . . . and she didn’t at all but passed her on to strangers.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, it was all that in my mind and it was wrong of me to take it out on Caitlyn Thomas. But still, my harsh words did seem to make her take a good look at herself and she couldn’t have liked what she saw as she told me she didn’t want to be that person any more. So some good might have come from it. I think out of all I said to her, what had the most impact was when I told her that if she didn’t do something to change her ways, she’d end up a lonely old woman. She was crying, Jan. It didn’t make me proud to see I’d made a woman cry. And the worst thing of all was when she asked me what she should do to make herself into a better person. I did my best by telling her a couple of things she could do but said that the only person who could really help her was herself. Once she’d dropped her superior attitude, I found her to be a very pleasant young woman.’

Jan looked thoughtful. ‘Do you think she will manage to change herself? I mean, leopards don’t change their spots, do they?’

He pondered this for a moment before he said, ‘I agree that as a general rule they don’t, but there is always the exception. Miss Thomas was adamant that she didn’t like the person I’d made her see she was. I warned her that it’s not going to be easy for her, changing the habits of a lifetime, but I did get the impression she was determined to. So hopefully she will succeed, Jan.’

‘Well, from the gossip I heard in the canteen, she’s certainly trying, I’ll give her that. Dilys came back from delivering the afternoon tray of tea up to her in the office and told us that she found Miss Thomas and Miss Trucker deep in discussion. Well, it was Miss Trucker that was doing all the talking and Miss Thomas was listening to her apparently. Dilys got the shock of her life because Miss Thomas actually thanked her for the tea. I heard via the union representative when they came back and told us the outcome of their visit to the office that she’d agreed to all their terms, admitted to them she wasn’t up to the job and promised to get a temporary manager in to run the place until her mother gets back. You could tell they were all shocked by this turnaround in her.’

‘She offered me the job of manager.’

Jan exclaimed, eyes lighting up with excitement, ‘She did? My God, this is the answer to your prayers, Glen! Just accept it long enough to have a good rummage through the files, Nerys’s address has got to be in there somewhere, and with a bit of luck you might find something incriminating you can use against her to make her hand back the company.’

He tutted at her. ‘Jan, if Nerys was clever enough to plan and carry out her scheme to frame me, she isn’t going to be daft enough to leave any incriminating evidence around, is she?’

She conceded this. ‘Well, thinking about it, not in the office admittedly, but somewhere at her house . . . and as manager you can find her address in the private files without having to use any underhand means.’

‘And then we break into her house? Come on, Jan, look at us, two middle-aged people who have never broken the law in their lives . . . well, I certainly haven’t, although there were times when I was close to it after not eating for a few days. But I still couldn’t bring myself to steal from anyone. I’d have been too worried I’d taken food from a child’s mouth. I doubt you’ve ever done anything wrong either.’

A guilty look crossed Jan’s face. ‘Well, I have actually.’ She saw Glen glance at her in surprise and with a twinkle of amusement in her eyes, told him, ‘I’m ashamed to admit that I stole a penny out of my mother’s purse once to buy some sweets. I was only seven at the time. And then I felt so guilty I couldn’t eat the sweets so I gave them away and never did it again. And before you say anything . . . as far as I’m concerned, that money I took from Harry’s church fund was not stolen as it was used for the purpose for which it was intended.’

‘You have a point, I suppose, but despite the fact we wouldn’t be sitting toasting ourselves by this fire and have a bed to sleep in tonight if you hadn’t helped yourself to that money, I still don’t feel comfortable about it. I will make donations to the church when I can afford to. I suppose as you’ve admitted your crime-ridden past then I should too.’

She eyed him, intrigued. ‘Oh, what did you do that was illegal then?’

‘Not exactly illegal but I did blatantly lie to my father once. I’d told him I was going to a friend’s to study for my exams, which was where I was going, but it wasn’t to study as he was having a party while his parents were away. I was fourteen at the time.’

‘Did your father ever find out?’

Glen nodded. ‘I got as drunk as a lord on my friend’s father’s best Scotch and passed out on the sofa. When I didn’t come home at the time I should have my father became worried and came to collect me, found me in the state I was in and banned me from going out for a month. He showed no sympathy whatsoever for the dreadful hangover I suffered, which it took me days to get over.

‘Anyway, neither of us deserves jail, Jan, but if we got caught breaking into Nerys’s house, well, that would be different. I’ve been in jail, remember, and I wouldn’t recommend it. And there’s a problem about me taking the manager’s job even for just long enough to have a look through the files. It would be just my luck if Nerys chose that moment to return and caught me behind the desk. She could have a field day then. Throw me out without a by-your-leave, accuse me of taking advantage of the situation to extort money or steal goods, and have the police brought in to investigate. Don’t forget, I’ve already got a criminal record. Although they won’t find any wrongdoing this time, I’d still be out of a job.

‘And don’t forget also, Jan, some people at work know that you and I are good friends and live in the same building. They could even know it’s the same flat we live in together and believe we’re a couple . . . you know how nosy folk are. That means you would automatically be seen as my accomplice, be thrown out as well, and in the circumstances I can’t see them paying us for the days we’ve worked, can you? So we’d both have no jobs at a time when it’s hard to get another, being close to Christmas. There’s no way we could pay the rent on this place, which is due next Friday, so where would that leave us? Back where we were just days ago, in that shop doorway.’

The look on Jan’s face told him that was unthinkable to her.

Glen continued, ‘I know it’s pathetic, but can you imagine what it would be like for me, managing a company I used to own and for the woman who stole it from me? For just that reason alone I couldn’t take the job, Jan. My male pride, you see.’ He paused for a moment to drain his cup of beer, then tip the remains of the bottle into it. ‘I’ve been giving my position a lot of thought. Up to now I’ve been lucky that the people I’ve come across in the factory have accepted my explanation about my name, but I haven’t been everywhere yet and there’s a chance that there might still be people working for the firm who worked for me. If they recognise me and start talking about the past, it will get back to Nerys and she’ll cause trouble.