Maura's Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

rosaries placed across the frames. Four of them butchered she blamed Maura for those deaths. In Sarah’s eyes even Leslie’s car crash was attributable to her daughter and not to the amount of alcohol and drugs he had consumed. Hadn’t he been working at her club that night? Even though they all knew he had developed a drink problem, she’d still had him working where he could get the whisky he craved, Sarah thought grimly.
    In fact, Leslie was actually a coke head and an accident waiting to happen. When it finally did, it not only killed him but the nineteen-year-old hostess with him and an elderly couple in a dark blue Lada.
    All Sarah could see was that five of her gorgeous sons were dead as doornails and that bitch was still walking around like she owned the whole world.
    She knelt down and crossed herself.
    As she prayed her gaze took in the view through the window and she marvelled that now this whole area of Notting Hill was worth a fortune. They even had a pop star living two doors down from them in Lancaster Road. It was amazing to Sarah that anyone would want to spend so much money on any of these places. She remembered the days when they were infested with roaches and the tenants were hard pushed to feed their broods of children. This was once the last refuge for the poor and now it seemed people were killing themselves to live here. She blamed that eejit Tony Blair. A classless society? Whoever heard such rubbish!
    Her grandson Benny poked his head around the door.
    “All right, Nan. Me dad here already?”
    His voice was neutral, as if she was a stranger he had just asked directions from.
    “He’s in the kitchen. Can I get you something to eat?”
    “Nah, Abul’s mum done us something earlier.”
    He shut the door gently and she smiled to herself. He was getting better was Benny. But like her Michael who he was the head off, as she pointed out on a daily basis, he could be a moody little bugger.
    Sarah wouldn’t admit to herself that he didn’t like her but she felt it off him and knew she wasn’t alone in suffering his contempt. His mother bore the brunt of it. Yet if her grandson gave her a civil word it made Sarah’s day.
    Garry had been to early Mass with her so she was relatively happy, but Terry’s death had cast a shadow over the whole family. She wondered idly when Maura would be back on the street. And more to the point, what was her darling daughter going to drag them all into next? That was what Sarah would like to be told.
    Knowing her, the streets would run with blood. Maura was hard and she was dangerous. The beautiful blonde-haired angel she had given birth to with such happiness all those years ago was now the bane of Sarah’s life. She had become a force to be reckoned with, by police and criminals alike.
    If only she lay dead instead of that good man, how much easier Sarah would feel. Now, though, Maura would cause more mayhem, more death. It was what her daughter did when thwarted or angered.
    Sarah kissed the cross of Christ on her rosary and began praying once more, her eyes raised heavenward as if Jesus Himself was communicating with her.
     

     
    Carla swept back her thick red-brown hair. The action made her look even more like her mother Janine, but that was as far as the similarity went.
    Carla was a sweet-faced woman who lived for her son Joey and for her Aunt Maura who had been a surrogate mother to her all her life, even though there were only five years difference in age between them.
    It was odd but Maura was like her mother, sister and soulmate all rolled into one. Carla knew she was the child her aunt had never had, and she cherished the fact that even after all these years they loved one another and still held the closeness they’d had from childhood.
    As she walked into the hospital she checked over in her mind that she had all Maura needed.
    In her private room at the Nuffield in Brentwood, Maura was watching Sky News and fuming as the presenter referred to her