He began screaming and holding his mangled hand.
‘I didn’t do nothing,’ Ivan had roared with pain, as he lay on the ground clutching his hand.
Alys knew he was telling the truth, that he hadn’t actually done anything yet.
Yet.
She’d been so quick following him.
‘You’re a fucking bitch, Alys Flint, and I’m going to get you!’ he yelled, which was a mistake.
Alys realised that she’d just made him more dangerous.
He needed more injuries so he’d be moved away from Aberystwyth. She couldn’t risk him staying near Adriana.
‘No, you won’t, you little prick,’ she said coldly, angling the cistern a bit better this time.
The cistern lid broke after it had been bashed against Ivan’s ankle a few times but it had done its work well.
With a hand and an ankle requiring medical intervention, Ivan would not be hurting small children for a while.
Alys yelled for Aunt Patsy.
‘Tell her the truth about why you dragged my little sister up here or I’ll break your other ankle,’ she hissed to Ivan. ‘You touch Adriana again, and you’ll regret it.’
To the accompaniment of Ivan’s squeals of pain, Alys had scooped Adriana up and brought her out of the bathroom.
‘You’re my little sister now,’ she said to Adriana. ‘I’m going to look after you. Let’s tell Aunt Patsy what Ivan has done. We like nice people, not nasty ones.’
Ivan never came back to Aberystwyth. She always kept tabs on him. He was in jail now for two brutal assaults.Best place for him, she thought.
Ivan had been in her mind when she first met Theo’s parents.
It had been talking of Wales that had done it.
Rose’s cover story was that she’d travelled around a lot as a child, mainly in France, briefly in Wales (to cover any accent issues) and, of course, she mentioned her conveniently dead parents.
They died.
Such a pity.
Life moves on.
If people thought she sounded cold discussing them, they assumed she was hiding grief behind a façade.
‘We love Wales,’ Theo’s father had said. ‘We went there in the nineties to Snowdonia and we visited the Jurassic part, the Glamorgan Coast I think it is.’
‘Of course,’ Rose had echoed, smiling.
She thought for a millisecond about how she’d never heard of the Glamorgan Heritage Coast as a child and then how these kind people would be shocked to hear she’d crushed another foster kid’s hand and ankle with a cistern lid.
She’d even managed to give Ivan a limp for good measure. It was mentioned in all his criminal trials. He was disabled, the reports said.
Rose did not feel guilty about him. He’d been in the system the same as she had. Her childhood had been about pure survival. But she had not preyed on weaker kids.
She was sure that Theo’s parents, educated, thoughtful people, would have viewed her asotherif she’d told them or her beloved Theo the truth.
They knew childhoods like hersexisted– but they’d never seen such damage so close up.
