Desperate Measures
Four women seek the ultimate revenge against the men who betrayed them.The gritty new drama from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Nobody’s Girl.SWINDLED…Val Thorn, Paula Richardson, Cheryl Cutter and Betty Grayson have one thing in common - they have all been betrayed by men.SHAMED…Rape victim Paula has been terrified ever since her brutal attack.High-flyer Val's life has fallen to pieces since she was forced out of her job.Grief-stricken by her grandmother's death, nurse Cheryl was tricked out of her inheritance.Timid housewife Betty sacrificed all for her husband. Now, 20 years later, he's left her and she's destitute.SACRIFICED…Now these four women want revenge. Masterminded by Val, the four women set out to right past wrongs. But will their role of avenging angels take them down a terrible road?
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KITTY NEALE
Desperate Measures
Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers 2016
First published in paperback by HarperCollinsPublishers, 2009
Copyright © Kitty Neale 2009
Cover design © Debbie Clement 2016
Cover photographs: Alamy/Getty
Kitty Neale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781847563514
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN 9780007335626
Version: 2016-04-13
This book is for my adorable new great grandson, Michael Andrew Blofeld. May your life be a joyous one, my darling, full of love, laughter, and a smooth path to carry you forward on life’s journey.
Contents
The woman knew that what she wanted to do was justified, not just for her, but for the others that she had managed to bring into her small circle. It was a lovely day, the sun bright, yet impatiently she tugged her small dog’s lead, too intent on finding her next recruit to appreciate her surroundings. Her life had been ruined and she’d been eaten up with bitterness – but now she had a mission.
She wasn’t the only woman who’d suffered and it wasn’t right, wasn’t fair that these men had got away with it. Her goal now was to make them pay – to make him pay.
To that end she got up every morning, went to work, functioned – but it was as though she were living her life on automatic. Her plans and schemes had become the focus of her whole life and she couldn’t rest until they’d been carried out. Since the day it had happened, since he’d destroyed her life, she’d wanted only one thing. Revenge.
Battersea, South London, 1969
Though it was early on Saturday morning there were already signs that it was going to be a lovely day and the sunshine drew Betty out of her poky flat to the park on the opposite side of the road.
She walked for a while, but it was unusually warm for June and, feeling hot, Betty sat on a bench. The park began to fill and she frowned as two young women walked towards her, still unable to get used to the way youngsters dressed nowadays. They were both in A-line mini-dresses, one blonde, one dark, their hair cut short in the geometrical shapes made popular by the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon. Make-up was skilfully applied – heavy, but at least they weren’t wearing the thick, black, false eyelashes that were at last going out of fashion.
Betty sighed. She was fifty-one now, but as a young woman a bit of powder and lipstick was all she’d been allowed to wear, and her clothes had been respectable, in the same style as her mother’s. And not only that – what about underwear? These young girls didn’t wear vests or corsets and, worse, sometimes they went without a brassiere. She shook her head. Anne, her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, accused her of being old-fashioned, saying that things were different now. Women were no longer shackled to men, Anne insisted. They had freedom, equality, the means to make their own way in the world.
The two young women walked past without sparing her so much as a glance, and Betty blinked away tears as a surge of loneliness swamped her. She watched a small, brown dog as it circled a tree, sniffing the trunk until, finally satisfied, it lifted its leg.
