She loves animals. And then she thinks in a rush of lovely Biscuit, with a warm canine heart and the most loving eyes. What happened with Biscuit was what started the whole series of lies.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Alys Rosemarie Flint thought animals were more reliable than people when she made friends with Aunt Patsy’s small, fluffy brown mongrel, Biscuit.
Biscuit was a sweet old dog and liked lying with children having his tummy petted. He was always there for children to sit with him and tell him their woes. Biscuit never told anyone of the secrets whispered to him. He asked for nothing and gave love eagerly.
Aunt Patsy’s house was on the outskirts of Aberystwyth, and as well as five foster kids, she had two apricot gerbils. Biscuit watched the gerbils’ cage with jaw-dropped fascination. The gerbils didn’t last. Someone opened their cage and let them out for Biscuit to chase.
Teenage Alys was grown up beyond her years and had known exactly who’d done this. Biscuit didn’t mean to be cruel: he was merely being a dog.
The gerbils had been a warning.
Aunt Patsy had been one of the best foster mums Alys had known. She’d been thirteen when she’d gone there and had long since given up the notion that one day herreal parents would appear out of the mist and take care of her.
What Alys had long realised was that she wanted to go to college to learn how to help kids like her. To change something, anything, because she had so many skills after a childhood in care.
She was wise, as wise as if she’d lived a thousand years. She knew that the care people considered her worryingly silent. Thought that she kept all her pain inside.
But she was fixing herself slowly. One day, she would help other people.
She’s been in Aunt Patsy’s house for two years when Ivan, nicknamed The Terrible, arrived.
He was fifteen, skinny and had an innocent face. But Alys didn’t trust that face. Ivan had been in eleven different homes at this point. A childhood in that many homes said he’d either been very unlucky – or was trouble. He let the gerbils out, And after that, Alys was on her guard.
She discovered that Ivan was watching violent porn videos late at night. Had seen him watching Adriana, the smallest of Aunt Patsy’s foster children. When he didn’t think anyone was looking, he sat open-mouthed and stared at her, his eyes dull with longing.
Adriana was small for her age, with dark hair and glowing dark eyes that shone in an eager little face as if she was always waiting for the sheer happiness she just knew was coming.
Alys was sure that Ivan wanted a real-life victim. There was no point, she thought, in telling her foster mother. Aunt Patsy was lovely, but she was like the other foster carers Rose had known: too worn down trying to care for an assortment of tricky, traumatised kids to give any of them the absolute love they all longed for.
‘Alys, give him a chance,’ Aunt Patsy would say.
Alys Flint was too young for people to believe that she understood the cruelties of life.
When she was older and had left the memory of Alys behind for a new name and a new life, Alys was determined that people would take her seriously.
She’d come up with a name for this new person she’d become: Rose Talisman.
She told nobody of her plans and watched her little sister carefully.
She knew Ivan had opened the gerbil cage so they’d be killed by poor Biscuit. Could see he bullied the other kids. Could see him watching Adriana, trying to sit beside her at meals and touching her little legs, pinching her, scaring her.
What he didn’t realise was that even though Adriana and Alys weren’t blood relatives, over the past two years Alys had grown to love the little girl as her sister. Adriana felt like the only family Alys had.
The two of them slept in the same room: Alys in a single bed and little Adriana in a child’s bed set at a ninety-degree angle to hers. Adriana told her stories about her teddies and Alys vowed that nobody would ever hurt Adriana.
The day it had happened, Alys saw Ivan make his move through Aunt Patsy’s glass doors.
He’d thought it was safe. He hadn’t understood Alys’s love for Adriana and her awareness of the damage that could be inflicted on small children.
Ivan didn’t understand love because he loved nobody.
He’d taken her four-year-old sister by the hand and led her upstairs.
Alys made it into the bathroom just in time.
‘Fucking bitch—’ began Ivan and then she crashed the cistern lid down on his right hand.
