Though it was rather inconvenient for Ryan and Nikki, there was a general view that it would have been the way he wanted to go.
Melanie Newton never went back into a betting shop. She didn’t need to. Her laptop offered everything she required. She could play the virtual casinos and roulette wheels twenty-four hours a day. Which she did. And as her credit card debts grew, she kept taking up offers of new credit cards. And kept moving to ever more dingy accommodation, one step ahead of her creditors.
Andy Constant was not the kind of man to change. He recovered completely from his stab-wound, and the scar became another part of his seduction technique. He told wide-eyed female freshers how a woman had once been so desolated by his ending their relationship that she had persuaded her brother to attack him. He continued to entice women into his little kingdom of the Drama Studio. And his wife Esther continued to think that they had a happy marriage, though Andy’s workload did mean he often had to stay late at the university.
Whenever Jude thought of Andy Constant, she felt very sheepish and shamefaced. She realized how near she had come to making a complete fool of herself. But she knew that, if the same circumstances were to arise, she might again prove susceptible.
So she continued to do some good by her healing. And to wonder whether she really ought at some point to move on from Fethering.
Zofia Jankowska stayed there, though, moving after a few weeks out of Woodside Cottage to a flat of her own. She enrolled in a journalism course at the University of Clincham, and subsidized her studies by continuing to work at the Crown and Anchor. Ted Crisp grudgingly admitted that she was the best bar manager he’d ever had, ‘even though she is foreign’.
Carole Seddon watched the miracle of her granddaughter Lily’s development with growing awe. The child’s existence brought her closer to Stephen and Gaby, but she resisted their ongoing attempts to include David in family encounters.
And she appreciated increasingly the sedate friendship of Gerald Hume. They didn’t often go out for meals or anything like that. Such activities would have had too much of the flavour of a ‘date’ about them. But they did quite often meet in the betting shop.
Carole became very quickly convinced that Gerald’s ‘system’ for applying his accountancy skills to gambling was just as ineffectual as every other ‘system’ that had been invented since mankind had first bet on horses. But logic did occasionally work, and she drew satisfaction from her own infrequent wins (though the largest sum she ever bet was two pounds).
Her attitude had changed, though. She could begin to see the appeal of gambling. In fact, one rainy day some weeks after Hamish’s arrest when she was sitting in the betting shop with Gerald Hume, she surprised herself. Looking at the wet window, Gerald had turned to her with a grin. “Two quid says the raindrop on the left reaches the bottom of the window frame before the one on the right.”
Carole assessed the relative size of the two raindrops. She knew a good thing when she saw it. “You’re on,” she said.
