Chapter 5
Now that a few days had slipped by and Tony was still alive and untroubled, he had slipped back into a state of foolish complacency. Costard was a maniac and Tony wished he had never set eyes on him, but after the frightening confrontation, the man and his ambassadors had been consolingly absent from his life. He had with modest success pushed most thoughts of their inevitable reappearance deep into a locked corner of his mind. On an even more positive note he now had an unexpected and handy supply of cocaine which he was determined to ration out to himself with absolutely no binging. He had no debt now and since their visit to the woods, even Darren and Kevin had faded from his immediate thoughts. The prospect of having to liberate a car for the villains was still hovering over him however and was the regular prompt for an unpleasant ache that twisted his insides when his guard slipped and he allowed the prospect to rise to the surface of his thoughts. On the whole though, and thanks to Jimmy, he was able to medicate the worst of his worries into oblivion.
As for the cottage, it remained central to his long term escape plan. His mother's insistence that it be rented, was not what he wanted. But despite his best efforts, he could find no reasonable argument to stop her plans. Suzanne had been quietly vetting prospective tenants that came into the office and she had one particular potential client in mind. A young man who seemed eminently suitable. Now that Tony had finally if grudgingly agreed with the cottage being rented she was ready to contact the prospective tenant. Although it represent progress of a kind, it was not what Suzanne really wanted... What she wanted was Emily back there safe and well as if none of this nightmare had ever happened.
Alexander Havers, in his early thirties with soft blue eyes and short sandy hair, pinched the bridge of his nose. He then replaced his wire framed glasses and hung up the telephone receiver. He had just taken a welcome phone call from the real estate office. Barker and Barker had been trying to locate a suitable rental property for him for some time and finally they had found something that may well fit his needs. Modest yet comfortable, located in a quiet spot and importantly to Alexander affordable, it sounded promising. Alexander was not naive enough however to take the hardly disinterested opinion of a real-estate agency at face value. He needed the see the cottage with his own eyes before getting too excited. The office had made an appointment with him to see Suzanne Wilcox, a woman who at least on the telephone with her delightful trace of a French accent, sounded entirely genuine. She would drive him down later that afternoon to a place that would, they told him, undoubtedly exceed his expectations. The proof of that particular pudding lay in the eating but Alexander was hopeful.
The description that he had been given along with a photocopied photograph did nothing to diminish his interest. It seemed that the cottage had been recently given a sympathetically modernised interior, all amenities with two small bedrooms and a living space that gave a glimpse of the sea. It was apparently situated so that it was at once isolated and yet within easy access to the charming village of Hegfold. He built up a mental picture of what he might expect and if the reality came close, he would be likely to accept the lease. The prospect of moving on from his present accommodation came as a welcome relief. He looked round the room. The décor screamed 70s. the faded wallpaper, peeling at the corners, jarred with the heavily patterned curtains. He gazed at the thread bare carpet and worn furniture and shuddered. His eyes lifted to the damp patch that was creeping ominously mildewed from the corner of the dingy ceiling. Alexander wondered how he could have put up with this place for so long. But his recent past was a blur of tragedy, anger and sadness, he could probably have lived in a pigsty and hardly noticed.
It was hard for him to imagine now, but a little over a year ago Alexander's life had been verging on the idyllic. He had been recently married to Jane, a lovely young woman with whom he shared not only a deep and mutual love but a true life partnership. He had a perfectly satisfactory job and a good middle class home with an affordable mortgage. The only worm in his apple was a rather uncomfortable relationship with his wife's mother, Alice Bentley. She rather tended to avoid Alexander, having taken an instant and unwarranted dislike to the man who was courting her only child. Alexander was happy not to have to see Alice, but it did pain his young wife that they could not get on. Jane had hinted that her mother was starting to behave irrationally and she was getting a little worried about her health. Jane tried to discuss it with Alexander but he found he had little sympathy for the woman who treated him so poorly for no reason. He had worked hard at making friends with Alice, but he had been rebuffed so often that he had finally given up trying. A silent but brooding truce would have to suffice.
Only six months into the marriage things suddenly fell dramatically apart in Alexander's comfortable world. It happened one late summer evening coming like a thunder bolt from an angry god, a god that Alexander didn't even know existed. They were still in the first flush of their love for each other and Alexander had fought his way home through heavy traffic eager to be back with his wife. He arrived home a little later than usual as he had been tied up all day with a rather intense sequence of meeting at one of the companies more remote branch offices. Alexander worked as a financial manager for a security systems company. His competence was highly regarded and his future success seemed assured. His father-in-law Frank Bentley was a director of the company and it was through him that he had met Jane.
As he entered his home on that fateful evening, there was no sign of Jane. He called out to her, but there was no response. Normally Jane arrived home from her nursery school position well before he did. She would usually be waiting and would come out to meet him, taking his arm and walking her new husband back inside. Feeling just the slight intimation of disquiet, Alexander called her name again but there was still no reply. He wondered if she had told him of some appointment that had slipped his mind. He was sure she had not so he went up stairs to their bedroom. The room looked normal, there was still the faint lingering odour of fresh paint following the recent decoration. He noted that the sliding door to the balcony was open allowing the curtains to billow out into the evening air. He walked out onto the balcony and called her name again... He thought she may have gone down to the far end of the garden beyond the willows. But there was still no reply to his increasingly urgent voice. The cool air wrapped itself around him and he shivered slightly, feeling a little stupid at being so easily alarmed. But then he looked over the rim of the low glass retaining wall, his gaze drifted down to the gravel path and the neatly planted rockery, there on the ground, below the balcony twisted and broken he saw her. She had somehow fallen backwards over the glass partition and lay there caressed by the cool breeze of the evening, eyes open staring up into the darkening sky, unmoving... clearly dead.
The police were called. Eventually Jane was taken away and Alexander was left feeling empty. His grief did not really take hold until the next day when the events finally came into painfully sharp focus for him. He should have been able to give and receive consolation from Jane's parents but the animosity shown to him by Alice had only been increased by Jane's death. Alice, bitten by her own grief which showed itself as anger as much as sadness, wasted no time in launching a viscous attack on Alexander. As he turned inwards as a way to cope with his loss, Alice seemed to gain her version of solace from becoming enraged, she needed something, someone, to blame. This all came to a head with Alice eventually making the outrageous claim that Alexander had actually murdered her daughter and despite having no evidence to support her position, had made a sworn statement to the police to that effect. Alexander was taken into custody and spent an uncomfortable and harrowing night in the police cells. There was no evidence to substantiate Alice's allegations, and there were plenty of people who were able to corroborate Alexander's account that he was in meetings half a county away when Jane had died. Alice was not surprisingly further outraged when her son-in-law was released without charge.
On the day after Jane's funeral
when Alexander had started thinking a little more clearly again, it occurred to him that one of the security cameras which his firm had installed was placed to catch sight of anyone attempting to make an entry via the balcony. He wondered if the video had captured anything of the accident. He found the appropriate time-coded disk and placed it in the player. With more than a little reluctance he scanned forward to the time of the accident. Before his incredulous eyes he saw what had happened to send Jane toppling over the edge. Clearly it was an accident, Jane was not pushed and nor did she jump; it was a tragic and unhappy thing to watch his wife fall so pointlessly to her death. He tossed the disk into a box with a mix of disgust and sadness and promptly chose to forget what he had seen. He spoke to no one about the images on the disk and tried to shut the whole business away in a dark recess of his mind.
Alice, however, did not give up her vendetta, she demanded that Alexander pay back the money that she and Frank had given the newly-weds towards their home. This was a substantial sum, amounting to half the value of the house. Alexander was forced to sell the property into a sinking market in order to pay back the money. Not satisfied with this, Alice also contacted Alexander's insurance company, claiming that he had murdered his wife for her insurance. The insurance company soon realized that there was no foundation to the allegation, but took the opportunity to delay paying out on the accident. They even investigated the possibility of suicide before finally honouring the claim after a protracted and harrowing period of acrimony. The final blow came when Alexander was told that, after a lengthy director's meeting, the company no longer required his services. Alexander thought of making a claim for unfair dismissal, but his position at the security firm was becoming untenable with Frank as a director and he hardly had the strength, or will for the battle. He decided to make a clean break and found a room to rent where he spent some months grieving for Jane, and licking his wounds. He was still not yet financially destitute but finding a job was proving to be more difficult than he had expected.
In his student days Alexander had been fortunate enough to have some articles published in a technical magazine They were of a rather obscure financial nature and of little general interest but it had left him with an urge to one day try his hand at fiction. There had been a book humming away at the back of his mind for years. He was completely aware that breaking into the world of published authorship was not an easy thing to do, let alone making a decent living from it. But now, with the money that was left over from the sale of his house, the severance pay which the company was contractually obliged to pay him and Alice's life insurance pay-out, he had enough to support himself for at least a year. Now divested of responsibilities, he decided to plunge into the unknown and finally attempt write his novel.
If he could get it published all the better, if not it would be a healing process which he knew he would never regret. He needed a quiet and affordable place to live, somewhere without distractions and especially, well away from the orbit of his mother-in-law. She had apparently run out of ideas on ways to attack Alexander and had been missing from his radar for some time now. Alexander had absolutely no wish to change that situation.
Alexander's novel was based very loosely on the medieval romance of Tristram and Isolde, brought up to date and set against a background of the conflict between global business and environmentalism. There was a lot he still had to work out in developing the plot and characters but it was a challenge that might just pull the fraying warp and weft of his life back to a meaningful purpose. He dearly wished that Jane could be at his side to help with the book, be there to bounce ideas off and give the moral support which he so sadly missed. After a year he no longer wept when he thought of Jane, but the pain of her loss was still as raw as ever. But it was time for him to move on.
Comatose Page 10
