The Loyal Servant by Eva Hudson

Author:Eva Hudson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Westminster, scandal, education, DfES, academies scandal, British political thriller, academies programme, labour, academy, DfE, murder, government, Department for Education, whistleblower, crime fiction, prime minister, Evening News, Catford, thriller, tories, London, DCSF
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

28

Angela Tate dumped her bag on the desk and collapsed onto a chair. She slowly eased off first one shoe, then the other. Three toes on her left foot and two on the right were bleeding through her tights. She held her breath and carefully pulled the nylon away from the skin. Sudden tears sprang into her eyes.

She had walked from Sadler’s Wells to Holborn before finally managing to flag down a cab. Her shoes hadn’t been designed with pavement pounding in mind. But then neither had her feet. She pressed a tentative thumb into the ball of her left foot, then pushed it deeper into the flesh. She massaged anti-clockwise for a couple of minutes, reversed direction for a couple more, then switched to the other foot, sniffing back the tingle in her nose and dabbing her eyes free of moisture.

She threw the offending footwear into the bottom drawer of Jason Morris’s console, slammed it shut and dragged her handbag across the desk. A handwritten note had somehow attached itself to the bottom of the bag. She unpeeled it from the leather and held it at arm’s length. She could only just make out her editor’s tiny initials at the bottom. Dominic Evans wanted to see her. He’d struck through ‘at your earliest convenience’ and written ‘ASAP’ and underlined it three times. Angela screwed the paper into a tight ball and tossed it in the bin under her desk.

Jumped up little sod.

She retrieved her notebook from her bag and flicked through it until she reached the two pages she’d scribbled on at the Family Records Office in Clerkenwell. She’d tried as best she could to duplicate the format of the original ledger, even drawing the boxes around each entry as she copied them onto the page. The official copy of Freddie Larson’s birth certificate she’d ordered wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks. In the meantime she would have to make do with her hastily drawn facsimile.

Betty Larson had visited the register office to record the birth of baby Freddie a month after he was born. His full name was Frederick Joseph Larson. Betty must have allowed herself a little creative licence when describing her estranged husband’s occupation. Fred Larson was down as Building Engineer, when in fact at that time he would have been no more qualified than the other hod carriers he worked with. Angela suspected Betty had wanted to give the young Freddie something to aspire to, though God knew what story she’d spun over the years when her son had asked difficult questions about his father.

Daddy abandoned Mummy when you were still in her tummy.

Maybe she hadn’t explained at all, or told him his father was overseas. Angela often thought her own upbringing had left much to be desired, but Freddie’s story was in a different league. She shook her head as she stared at her scribbled notes.

The meagre facts contained in her reporter’s pad were all she knew for sure about Freddie Jr. It wasn’t

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.