The Trafficked Read Online Free PDF

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 everythingI 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.’
    ‘Your father saw something in him: a ruthlessness, a mercenary heart. He knew the triads well and heknew that Chan had been enlisted.’ Molly gave an involuntary sigh and picked up Ginger the cat and held him close to her. ‘You have