Faith - Lesley Pearse [100]
Her in-laws lived in a beautiful old country house near Brentwood in Essex, and the church where she and Greg got married was next door, but Laura had never got close to his parents. She had always felt they looked down their noses at her and Mrs Brannigan was very critical of her, sniffing and making remarks like ‘Well, of course I don’t understand you modern girls, in my day a wife followed her husband’s wishes.’
Mrs Peebles, the housekeeper, answered the phone. She said the Brannigans were in Wales staying with friends. When Laura asked if Barney was with them, Mrs Peebles seemed puzzled by the question, and although Laura was a little drunk she realized from the woman’s responses that Barney wasn’t with his grandparents and never had been.
Laura rang the house in Chelsea then, but there was no reply. She phoned a neighbour and they said they hadn’t seen Greg or Barney for at least two weeks. Next she rang John Merchall, Greg’s closest friend, and his hesitation suggested he knew exactly where Greg was, but needed time to think up a lie. ‘He said something about maybe going to a hotel for a bit of a break,’ he said eventually, but couldn’t or wouldn’t say where.
Laura knew immediately that Greg must have a mistress, and that she had a hand in this. Few fathers, and certainly not an inept one like Greg, would choose to take a small toddler to a hotel in the middle of winter on their own. But they might very well take their child to the woman waiting in the wings to be their next wife.
Laura cursed herself for not insisting she spoke to her mother-in-law about Barney the moment she came out of hospital, and for being stupid enough to let Greg convince her that a psychotic drug dealer had laced the black bombers with strychnine, not him. She had no doubt now that he’d told, or implied to, everyone he knew that her spell in hospital was to do with drug dependency. Unfortunately even the medical staff at the hospital, if called to give their opinion, would confirm she’d been taking amphetamines as they’d found traces of the drug while doing tests on her.
To any court she would look like an unfit mother. And it he was awarded custody of Barney, Greg would get to keep his precious house and she’d be out in the cold.
She left Reid’s the following morning after persuading the hotel manager to give instructions to his staff that if her husband rang, they were to say she wasn’t in her room, but not to let on she’d left the hotel. She used the excuse that she was going home because she missed him and wanted to surprise him, and the man seemed touched by the romantic gesture.
Changing her flight home was no problem and as the plane took off, all she could think of was Barney. She didn’t care about possibly losing her home, it had never felt like hers anyway, and she knew she could make a new life for herself without Greg’s money. But she couldn’t bear to lose her baby. Nothing and no one had ever come close to making her feel the way she did about him. She loved Meggie and Ivy, she had claimed to have loved Greg and other men, but when she held Barney or even just looked at him she knew exactly what real love was. It was something so strong and pure it made her heart swell and beat faster. She was never going to let some other woman bring him up; he was hers, and if she had to, she would kill for him.
By the time she got into Heathrow airport she had her plan worked out. As image was everything to Greg she had to put him in a position where he would have to do right by her, or lose face. So she got a taxi straight to his factory in Acton.
To her relief his silver Mercedes was parked by the offices. She had always known that work was more important to Greg than love or family, and this confirmed