Twenty Years a Stranger (The Stranger Series Book 1)

by Deborah Twelves

  ‘Right then. If you’re sure you’re ok now, I’ll get off and leave you to it. Have a good day,’ he said cheerily.

  I felt a surge of relief as he drove away and I was left alone. Suddenly the pressure was off and I had all the time in the world to find the answers I needed.

  I already knew far more than Daniel thought I did, but I still needed the evidence to back it up. I was essentially looking for files and paperwork, but I had a creeping suspicion that there was something else going on there and that the bedsit was merely masquerading as the company office. I could not get rid of the ominous feeling of some deeper, darker secret lurking in the background and I felt a sudden frisson of fear at what I might find inside. There could be Eastern European girls kept hidden in there for all I knew. My imagination conjured up unwelcome images of wanton debauchery and for a moment I regretted going there alone.

  I hastily put all that to the back of my mind and took a moment to congratulate myself on my own ingenuity and deviousness in finally gaining entry to the flat. I was becoming more inventive and resourceful all the time, but I had to admit it had proved to be a lot trickier than I had initially anticipated.

  First, there was the visit to the letting agents to get the key, which should in all fairness have been the end of the matter. I rocked up to the office, wearing my glasses instead of my contact lenses and my hair scraped into a tight bun in a half-hearted attempt to disguise my appearance. I launched immediately into the pre-prepared cover story I had concocted, explaining that my husband and I rented the bedsit but he was abroad and I needed to get in urgently to deal with important company business. I punctuated my story with lots of hand gestures and rolling of the eyes, to emphasise my frustration with the situation. As I spoke I was half expecting the woman in the office to call the police immediately, so it really wasn’t difficult to look genuinely stressed as I explained that I had mislaid my own set of keys.

  I needn’t have bothered. She showed no interest whatsoever in my story and was more than happy to hand over the keys to number 12b, together with the alarm fob, in return for my passport (which conveniently still bore my husband’s name of course) and a signature. In fact, she couldn’t wait to get me out of there and get back to her coffee and chat with her colleague which I had so rudely interrupted. I felt very uneasy about leaving my passport behind, not to mention signing my name, but I had to bite the bullet and do it as there was no way around it. I did at least have the presence of mind to make sure my signature was completely illegible and bore no resemblance to the real thing.

  Back in bedsit land, I eagerly put the key in the lock, delighted that it actually fitted, turned it and pushed. Nothing. As I shoved harder at the door to no avail, I realised in dismay that it had been fitted with an additional lock, one that the letting agents clearly did not know about and did not have a key for.

  Disappointment and frustration hit me again.

  Why did Daniel always manage to be one step ahead of me?

  I retreated to the car and tried to remain calm as I pondered my next course of action, feeling more determined than ever. Clearly, he was hiding something in there if he had gone to the lengths of putting an extra lock on the door. He was obviously not prepared to risk the letting agents going in without warning, so there was absolutely no way I could leave without getting in there. Failure at the last hurdle was simply not an option.

  Fate intervened on my side for once and I remembered an evening the previous week when I arrived at my friend Bethany’s house to find her sitting on the doorstep, locked out. We called the emergency locksmith who turned up looking highly suspect in jeans and a hoodie and, worryingly, took less than two minutes to break in with a tool that looked exactly like a credit card. He turned and looked triumphantly at us, pocketed his fee of £120 and was off without having asked at any point in the process for identification or proof that Bethany actually owned the house.

  Thanks to my friend’s carelessness, I knew exactly how easy it was to get into a locked house without a key and Hi-vis Man performed exactly as I expected him to. Ten minutes to pick the lock. No questions asked. A simple cash transaction and he was gone.

  Standing in the doorway of the bedsit, I reached into the pocket of my black hoodie, purchased specially for the occasion from Decathlon on the way down to Stainsford, and pulled out a pair of latex gloves, struggling to get them on over my sweaty palms. I was taking no chances. I forced the door open against the squashy blockage and squeezed in through the gap, before closing it firmly behind me to stop prying eyes and allowing myself time to take stock of my surroundings. The tiny hallway was cramped and dingy and I could finally see that the cause of the problem was fortunately not a dead body, but a pile of four large bin bags jammed in between the door and the foot of the stairs.

  I opened one of the bags and immediately recognised some of Daniel’s signature M&S polo shirts and a load of other clothes belonging to him. It looked like someone was having a charity shop clear-out. The first shirt I took out of the bag had Knob scrawled on it in black marker and had been ripped or cut with scissors. The next one had Tosser written on one side and Dickhead on the other. There was definitely a theme here.

  I remembered what Lorraine had told me about chucking all his stuff out of the ‘dream house’.

  Serves him right - I thought to myself with a smug smile, taking inspiration from the untidy pile and making a mental note to get creative myself with the contents of his wardrobe at home later.

  I replaced the shirts in the bag, exactly as I had found them. Further analysis of the clothes could wait until later. I was anxious to get on with my real mission and the bin bags were nothing more than a mildly amusing distraction.

  I looked up at the two doors leading off the landing at the top of the stairs, took a deep breath and stepped over the pile of bin bags.

  As I began to climb the stairs, I could not shake off the undeniable feeling of dread that I was about to open Pandora’s box.

  The Mistake

  Lorraine

  Lorraine was fuming. She sat alone in her kitchen and vowed that John would learn the hard way what happened to people who crossed her.

  Up until now, she had played her part well and everyone seemed convinced by her performance. She was the vulnerable woman in an abusive, controlling relationship. The

  woman who was afraid of her lying, cheating partner and who simply wanted to be free of him to move on with her life. The police and lawyers had certainly bought into it and a court date was scheduled for the harassment case she had brought against John. A restraining order would almost certainly be put in place, they had confidently told her, and he would no longer be allowed anywhere near her or their ‘dream house’.

  That would teach him to mess with her.

  He was already starting to turn nasty, now that he realised he was not going to get his own way and was making noises about instigating a claim against her for the house. Lorraine’s solicitor had told her categorically that he hadn’t got a cat in Hell’s chance of getting anywhere with it, as it was Lorraine’s sole name on the deeds. John had ploughed the best part of £200k into the extensive renovations one way or another, but she had been careful to destroy the file of receipts and invoices they had kept for the house, making sure there was no evidence of his contributions, which were mostly cash transactions. She had no intention of him seeing anything from his investment. It would be his word against hers at the end of the day. And where was his credibility after this fiasco?

  When the police turned up unexpectedly at her house one day she reasonably assumed it was to give her an update about the harassment case.

  Not so.

  They had the audacity to accuse her of sending an email to some woman she had never even heard of.

  They had used the words stalking and hacking.

  They had warned her to be very careful about doing anything that might jeopardise her case against John.

  Lorraine did not want to be port
rayed as the slightly unhinged, crazy woman, hell-bent on stalking her ex. That didn’t fit her desired image at all. She did not know for certain who had sent the email, but she could hazard a pretty good guess. Her money was on the wife. The cheeky bitch had not even bothered to reply to her email, and then just turned up one night on her doorstep, large as life. Lorraine still didn’t know quite what to make of her, but she had a sneaking suspicion she could turn out to be more of a problem than she had originally imagined. She had made a mistake in trying to frame Lorraine with her own email though, and she would do well to watch her back from now on.

  As Lorraine looked around her she began to calm down as she realised she had pretty much got rid of all traces of John from the cottage. His clothes and any other personal effects had all been placed in bin bags and put outside for him to collect. She had allowed herself to have some fun modifying them first of course. The numerous M&S polo shirts he loved now had terms of endearment such as Wanker, Dickhead, Knob, Cheat or Tosser scribbled on them in black marker pen. Other items had pieces cut out of them or buttons removed. It had been quite an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours when she was bored one afternoon and she hoped he would appreciate the effort she had gone to.

  Her eyes alighted on the box chest containing all his car documentation, the certificates of authenticity for the Vettriano paintings he had recently invested in and a load of other personal stuff of his. She thought about burning the lot, imagining his face when he found out and knowing that would really hit him where it hurt. On a practical note, however, she decided it could be worth money to her. His wife was clearly after it all for starters. She decided against burning it for the moment.

  Besides, Lorraine had other ideas for making John pay.

  The American Connection

  Jane

  Jane could not believe her ears. Matthew was clearly far more delusional than she had at first thought. They were sitting on the sofa in her living room, sharing a bottle of Rioja and discussing the ‘situation’.

  ‘I’d really like the two kids to meet,’ he was saying, with a straight face. ‘I’m going over to America in a week or so and I want to discuss it with Anita then. I want to arrange something soon. What do you think?’

  What Jane actually thought was that it was a bloody good job she did not have a knife in her hand at that particular moment, especially when she heard him mention the name Anita out loud. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes to dispel the murderous thoughts from her brain, reminding herself that their son was asleep upstairs. She had to hold it together for both their sakes, at least until after the divorce.

  ‘I suppose it has to be done,’ she conceded. ‘I certainly don’t want Aaron finding out about his long lost sister from anyone else. I don’t trust that tart Lorraine or your bitch wife further than I can throw them. The pair of them are out to cause trouble.’

  ‘I know. They’re both so bitter and jealous. I don’t understand why they can’t just accept what’s happened as you have so that we can all move on with our lives. What’s done is done and, quite frankly, I’m actually relieved it's all out in the open now. We can’t change the past, so we need to look to the future, I say,’ he concluded, rather too chirpily for her liking.

  ‘Hmm. The meeting has to be on my terms though,’ Jane added, thoughtfully. ‘Anita and her daughter will have to stay in a hotel nowhere near here and you must have no contact with them at all unless I’m there. You need to make it very clear to her that we are together, as a family, and all meetings happen on neutral ground. This is hard enough for me as it is.’

  Matthew seemed happy enough to allow her to dictate terms, given that his negotiating position had been somewhat undermined by recent events.

  ‘That sounds reasonable to me. And thank you for doing this. You’ve been amazing. You are literally the only person I can trust.’

  Trust. That was exactly what Jane wanted to hear. She had made the snap decision when she first received the email from Lorraine that she would stand by Matthew, at least so far as the others were concerned, and stake her claim from the start. She had made sure she left Lorraine under no illusions as to where she came in the pecking order.

  No child. No wedding ring. Bottom of the pile.

  Of course, Jane did not really buy into all that nonsense Matthew had tried to feed her to keep her on his side, but it suited her to go along with it for the moment. She had been invoicing him regularly for ‘work’ done through her own company for several years now. It had proved to be a useful way for both of them to syphon off money from his company and far more lucrative, as far as she was concerned, than any conventional child maintenance payments. He had created a new umbrella company, Jupiter Holdings LLC, based in Delaware and large sums of money made their way over there regularly, via several other subsidiary companies, to avoid the taxman in the UK. The subsidiaries were all named predictably after the planets, but avoiding Uranus for obvious reasons, she thought with a snigger. Money circulated round them all as fast as a game of pass the parcel. Jane helped him with the company accounts and reminded herself that she had plenty of stuff she could hold him to ransom with if he did not play ball, although she had a strong suspicion there was also an awful lot she did not know about.

  Before the email from Lorraine, Jane believed she was holding all the cards, smugly laughing at his wife behind her back, believing her to be as thick as two short planks. Jane had known all along she was ‘the other woman’, but she was working on that. What she hadn’t bargained for was that she was not the only one with that particular job description. Matthew had played her for a fool and he would not be getting off lightly.

  Jane had never heard any mention of an American woman with a child prior to the email and she was now faced with a massive problem, given that the American daughter was five or six years older than Aaron. This gave the girl seniority in status as well as age. The American partner had clearly been on the scene for a long time and Jane was concerned about how much money she may already have managed to get her hands on. She worried about the American bank accounts and this woman’s access to them. It certainly appeared, from the bits she had managed to find out, that Matthew had carved out a very nice little life for himself over there with her on Rhode Island.

  Rhode Island, for fuck’s sake. Not exactly slumming it - she thought angrily.

  Whatever else may be going on over there, she had no idea, but she needed to find out and that was why she agreed to the meeting.

  ‘I’m doing this for Aaron, Matthew. He’s confused enough as it is since he found out about Daddy being married to someone other than Mummy,’ she said sarcastically.

  The divorce papers had been served on him at Jane’s house on Christmas Eve, which had triggered a load of questions from Aaron, given that the visitor was most definitely not dressed like Santa.

  Christmas fucking Eve! That bitch!

  The gloves were off now after that little stunt. If his wife (Jane could not bring herself to call her by her name) wanted a fight, she had picked the right person.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Matthew whined. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry about all that. I had no idea she was going to do that. I will make sure you and Aaron are okay, don’t worry.’

  ‘Well, you say that, but we need to get things put in place properly. And fast. Now that the divorce is underway, everything you own will come under scrutiny. Your wife will be aiming to clean you out, you can bet on that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about her. I’m making progress with her. I reckon I can persuade her to hold off on the divorce, which will buy us some time to sort everything out.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’

  ‘I can assure you, she’s the least of our worries. The real problem is that most of my assets are owned by the company, not me personally, and I’ve got the sodding taxman breathing down my neck. I’m not lying about HMRC you know. They’ve really got it in for me this time and they’re threatening to bankrupt me. Not just
the company, me personally. I’m trying to do a deal with them, but they just won’t accept it, so God knows what’s going to happen with that.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ she screamed. ‘Do not lie to me Matthew, or I may just decide to hand over everything I have to HMRC in a gift-wrapped package. There’s enough there for them to put you away behind bars for the merry dance you’ve been leading them all these years, never mind bankrupt you. You and I both know that you and The Company are very much one and the same thing and you have never been one for sticking to the usual rules of business practice, shall we say?’

  Matthew stood up abruptly and began pacing around in irritation.

  ‘Look, Jane, I don’t know what the hell you want from me. I’ve told you I’ll see you right, and I will. I don’t need any more fucking pressure.’

  He was clearly riled. He deserved to be. Jane was not letting him off the hook that easily.

  ‘You have a collection of several high end and very collectable cars, not to mention the motorcycles and the artwork. I know how much all that is worth. Between HMRC and your wife, the vultures are circling and you need to think about providing for your son. You need to transfer as many things as possible into my name and you need to do it fast because from where I’m standing, it looks to me like I’m your only chance of hanging onto anything at all. Surely you would prefer me to have things rather than have them snatched by the taxman or your wife? Keep it in the family, so to speak?’