LITMIR.BIZ

       8

      Johnny Mann went back to his flat to unpack and repack his case before he headed over to Stanley Bay to see his mother and explain why he wouldn’t be over for Sunday roast. He knew she would be looking forward to seeing him. He hadn’t caught up with her for a while. The last case had kept him working twenty-four-seven and then the aftermath had left him needing to get away and recover his sanity.

      ‘They’re lovely.’

      He stood behind her in the hall mirror and finished fastening the string of pink pearls around his mother’s neck. She reached up and touched the hand he had placed on her shoulder and smiled at him in the mirror. Molly was about to hit seventy but she kept herself fit and active and stood erect. She was a good-looking woman, strong-featured with piercing grey eyes and a straight roman nose; she had high cheekbones and ivory skin. Her hair was a beautiful mix of grey and silver interwoven with darker shades. It was long and thick and she twisted it into a bun and caught it with a clasp at the back of her head. Now that Mann stood behind her he realised how slight she was. Her shoulders felt bony beneath his hands.

      ‘You shouldn’t have spent your money on me, but it’s very thoughtful of you, Johnny.’ She patted his hand before turning away. Mann followed her through to the kitchen.

      ‘Nonsense—it’s a pleasure. How have you been, Mum?’

      She put the kettle on. ‘I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.’

      He watched her make tea. He liked the familiarity of her actions—her hands never dithered or wavered. Her actions were always measured and decisive and her fingers moved with grace.

      She was not a gabbler or a waster of words. She was a woman who took her time and thought things through. She was a holder-in of emotions. He had never once heard her raise her voice in uncontrolled anger. Molly didn’t boil over, she just simmered. She was prickly, almost, except her heart was soft—not everyone could see or knew that, but Mann did.

      He looked around him. Something was missing in the flat—the maid hadn’t come in to say hello to him as she always did.

      ‘Where’s Deborah?’

      ‘Day off.’ Molly didn’t turn to look at him as she answered.

      ‘Mum?’ He could tell by her sudden busyness—looking for a teaspoon in a drawer for seconds that she knew where to put her hand on at once—that she was not telling him the whole story.

      She glanced over to him on her way to get milk from the fridge.

      ‘Well, I don’t need anyone full time. What will I do if I have nothing left to occupy my time? I gave her some money to go back home to the Philippines for a while. She has kids she hasn’t seen for months. It’s not right. I am able to look after myself.’

      ‘And you have enough money to afford an army of maids—it’s Hong Kong, you have to have a few maids, Mum; it’s just the way it is. You have all the money you could ever need in the bank. Why don’t you spend some of it?’

      She brought the tea over to Mann, who was sitting at the kitchen table.

      ‘When the time comes you will inherit it, then you can decide what to do with it—for now I don’t need the money.’ She was getting agitated.

      ‘I don’t want it. I want you to make a point of spending every last dollar of it, leave me nothing. You are still young, Mum—you look great for your age. You need to get out more. It’s time to make some more friends: join clubs, go on singles’ holidays.’

      ‘Ha!’ she laughed. ‘With a bunch of other oldies, you mean?’

      ‘I am sure amongst all the incapacitated octogenarians you will find a few that are like you. Why don’t you go on a cruise or go around Europe and look up family and friends. Use the money to have some fun?’

      She stared into her tea.

      ‘I don’t want to touch the money. I have everything I need.’ She got up and went to wipe the work surface where she’d made the tea.

      Mann could see that the time had come for him to drop it, otherwise she was going to clam up completely. He held up his hands in a surrender gesture.

      ‘Okay, sorry. Let’s drop it. Please come and sit with me. This must be the only kitchen in the whole of this expensive block of flats in which the owners sit and drink tea. Better make sure no one catches us or you’ll be chucked out of the wealthy widows’ club.’

      ‘Ha…’ she laughed. ‘If such a thing exists, I don’t think they would ever ask me to join, do you?’

      ‘No, you’re right—you’d have them donating all their money to the poor and making baskets to sell.’

      A ginger cat appeared and wound itself around Mann’s legs. Molly’s face lit up when she saw it.

      ‘Hello, Ginger—just woken up, have you?’

      ‘I didn’t think you’d agree to take on David White’s cat…Never thought I’d see you with a pet; I always thought you hated them.’

      ‘Nonsense, it was your father who hated animals, not me. I always had animals when I was a girl, back on the farm. I grew up with them.’ She leaned her hands against the rim of the sink and stared out through the kitchen windows at the wooded hills that rose in a bank of emerald green opposite. ‘My life was very different then.’

      ‘I can imagine little Molly Mathews running around with straw stuck in her hair and mud on her knees.’

      She turned from the window and smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes.

      ‘That was such a long time ago, it feels like another life. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for years until recently. Now something comes back to me almost daily—vividly—I’m not sure I like it.’ She sighed and turned back from the window, buffing the taps with a cloth as she did so. ‘Anyway, son, tell me…How is it with you? Did you get the rest you needed?’ She came and put her arm around his shoulder and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

      ‘I did a lot of thinking. As the saying goes, Mum—you can run but you can’t hide.’

      She sat opposite him and leaned forward to hold his hands in hers.

      ‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself. You have been through such a lot these last few months.’

      ‘It’s nothing to what others have endured, Mum, and I feel responsible for some of that.’

      ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Johnny. No one could have known that Helen would be killed.’

      ‘But I let her go, Mum; I have to live with that.’

      ‘You let her go because you didn’t think she was the one for you. You didn’t know she would be killed.’

      ‘If Helen had never met me she’d be alive today.’

      ‘Chan was the one to blame, not you. None of us could ever have imagined he would turn out like that. All those years we knew him as a child, we never realised how envious, how vindictive and downright evil he was.’

      ‘Father saw it in him. He hated him.’

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