by Stan Mason
‘I don’t understand it,’ her husband bleated. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘Why should I? I never ask you anything about your friends!’
‘That’s because I haven’t any,’ he countered, angry that she had failed to mention her association with the man. Even more so that she had passed on confidential information without his knowledge.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re most angry about,’ she continued brusquely, ‘Is it my friendship with Mr. G. or the fact that I contacted him about your new idea?’
He shook his head slowly in disbelief. ‘I thought I always had your support,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t realise you had any kind of relationship with another man.’
‘Grow up, Bob!’ she told him point-blank. ‘What do you expect me to do? I never really loved you, and I have to say that living with you hasn’t been pleasant. You’re so boorish and obstinate. Nothing will change you even when you’re’ totally in the wrong. You’re dull and pathetic!’‘
He bridled at her comments stung by her revelation about their marriage and retaliated sharply. ‘Well you haven’t been a bundle of laughs either,’ he snapped. ‘Living with you has been a real challenge and now it’s stretched to the point.’
At that point, Jake clapped his hands together to stop them both talking. ‘All right... all right,’ he interjected loudly. ‘Enough of this domestic row. This isn’t bringing home the bacon.’ He stood up and went to the door. ‘You’re coming with us, Bob. You’re not going to come up with the goods so we’re going to move on to Plan B.’
‘What’s Plan B?’ asked the scientist with a worried expression on his face. He reflected the pain when his hand had been placed on the hot electric ring. This time he knew it would be worse... much worse.
‘You don’t need to know. In fact, I can tell you, you’ll never know.’
He nodded to his giant henchman who took hold of Harris’s arm to lead him out of the room. After they had gone, Rose picked up her magazine, thumbed through a few pages, and continued to read as though nothing untoward was about to happen. She realised that it was the last time she would see her husband but she wasn’t concerned in the slightest. The action that Jake and his giant henchman intended to take would avoid all the problems of separation and divorce, as well as the arguments that would ensue over property, money and chattels, and she could stay in the marital home for the rest of her life without any fuss. It was an ideal situation. He had no life insurance policies which she could use in her favour but there was enough money in their joint savings account to allow her to pay all her expenses for some time to come.
It was no surprise that the scientist did not return home that evening. In fact his absence became a permanent feature because he never came home again at all. No one seemed to be troubled by his disappearance... not his employer or Don Wise or his wife. He was very much a nonentity! A day after he had disappeared, Rose went to the police station to record the fact that her husband was missing. She told them that they had argued and he had stormed out of the house and had not returned. It was mainly to cover herself in case anyone started an investigation as to his disappearance. She never expected anyone to find his body so, as far as she was concerned, after making a statement at the police station, that was the end of the affair. Her husband had been a weedy quiet man, very poor at socialising so he had no friends. Ultimately, there was no one to grieve over him if his body was ever found.
It was two months later when a boatman saw something in a local river floating up to the surface. He rowed his boat towards it to see a man’s necktie floating upwards. He tugged on it and Harris’s body appeared. He was well and truly dead with some weights still hanging from his body, most of which had slipped off allowing the body to rise slightly upwards. The police were called immediately but they had no clues as to the motive for the murder, or who had perpetrated the act, and the only lead they had with regard to the case was the fact that the man had been strangled. It clearly wasn’t a robbery followed by murder because there was money in Harris’s wallet together with some plastic cards and details of his identity. At least it allowed them to close the case... the one related to the complaint by Rose Harris that her husband was missing. He had finally been found albeit in very adverse circumstances.
The police came to her with the sad news and she acted out an element of grief in their presence, with tears in her eyes, secretly accepting that Mr. G. had played a part in the crime. He was very fair ordinarily but, at the same time, he was very strict that his demands should be carried out to the letter. If anyone didn’t comply, they were forced to suffer the penalty. In Harris’s case, it was his life and, instead of becoming a millionaire and residing in a far distant tropical place in comfort for the rest of his life, with all the money he ever needed, he had forfeited his right to achieve that aim for himself and his wife. However Rose had no real concern about the loss. She knew that she would inherit a great deal of money as soon as Mr. G. sold the idea to someone else. He forever reminded himself that he was indebted her twofold. Firstly for helping to save his life in hospital after the heinous robbery at the shop on the High Street causing him to lose his arm and, secondly, for passing on the information of the hydrogenetics project. Yes... he would definitely look after her!
Chapter Seven
Although his association with Zelda had irrevocably ended as a result of his ostensible failure to turn up at the restaurant to meet her, and she no longer corresponded with him, her image still remained in his mind. However much he tried, he was unable to expunge the vision he had of her and his love for her that persisted in his head. He knew that continuing to think about her was a lost cause but he couldn’t help himself. She continued to haunt his mind like a ghost.
At night, he would go to bed and dream about her. He would see himself looking really dapper in a tuxedo with a black bow-tie and she would be wearing a rose-coloured frock down to her knees, with sparkles across the top. He would see her beautiful face, her lovely red lips, the slim curve of her figure and her shapely long legs. They would dine at a plush restaurant and then take a taxi to go back to his apartment. There they would crack open a bottle of wine and then kiss, embrace, and fall onto the bed laughing and smiling at each other. The jollity would last for a while as he allowed his fingers to race through her hair before kissing her again and again, His hands would gently stroke the nipples of her breasts and move downwards. Then he would kiss her a hundred times all over her body and just when he was about to seduce her it would all stop and he would suddenly wake up. That was the worst part of it... he always woke up at that point although he had no idea why the dream wasn’t allowed to continue. He considered that it might be something within his sub-conscious mind that prevented him from doing so. Perhaps it was the fact that he placed her on a pedestal and considered it a violation to engage with her intimately and sexually or commit an act that would demerit her purity. Such concepts were ridiculous for he knew that she had been married and had given birth to a child. It was not as though she was a pure virgin, untouched by any man. Therefore it was not possible to violate her unless he committed rape and that was something he would never do... especially in a dream! In was really a travesty that she had gone to the same dating agency as himself as it had brought her to his attention which was anathema for he had no chance of wooing her or starting a relationship with her in any sense of the word. Now that they had lost contact with each other, and it was final, it was quite possible that she had met another man and may even have married him. Time passed by very quickly in life and one had to grasp the nettle and act at the time or be left far behind with nothing to show for it. However he knew one thing for certain... there was no point in thinking about her any more. Yet, despite that realisation, she still intruded into his mind even though he knew there was no hope of any future contact with her. She was definitely a ghost that continued to come back to haunt him.
>
The next morning, he awoke at two-thirty and, for a reason which he failed to understand, he went directly to the full-length mirror which was fixed to the front of the small wardrobe in his room and stared bleakly at his figure.
‘What a mess!’ he thought to himself. ‘Eighteen-and-a-half stone, ugly as sin, a great paunch for a stomach, a long curved nose... not a very pleasant sight to say the least. How different he looked compared with the men just down the road let alone the male stars on the cinema screen. To boot, there was his stuttering and the fact that he became tongue-tied whenever he came into contact with women. Everyone else in life seemed to have been lucky to be born normal, fairly attractive reasonably good-looking, very confident about themselves, and being able to think and speak clearly. It wasn’t that way with Done Wise. He had been cursed from the time of his birth to look and think as he did. For a long time, he thought about ending his life to end all the pain and suffering which had imposed itself on his mind in an attempt to eliminate all the misery, the loneliness and the lack of confidence which he deplored. He considered taking an overdoes of tablets one evening so that his body could be found dead in bed on the following day. In that way he would inconvenience no one and his suicide note would be sufficient for the police to close the case. Alternatively, he could throw himself over a bridge and be done with it by that means! They would find his body floating down the river within a day or two and believe that he had accidentally fallen in. The aftermath hardly mattered because he had no family or friends so no one would turn up at his funeral. Yet despite his intention to end his life, he was too much of a coward to go through with it and so he continued in the same old way. He was a scientist and at least that took up his attention every weekday. The problem occurred at the evenings and weekends when he felt he was going out of his mind. His interest in stamp-collecting only took up a small amount of his time. He needed a lot more. With no friends and no social life, there was nothing else to do but to read and write, although he wasn’t capable of producing any written work of readable quality. He did own a television and a hi-fi but he rarely turned on either of them becoming quickly bored by the multitude of programmes of crime and detection and the modern-styled music. And yet, if his scientific colleague was correct, he was on the verge of gaining the Noble Prize for Science if the tests of the hydrogenics theory proved to be successful. Perhaps he had been born for that one reason, to assist the world with its energy crisis at a time of need. If so, a single lonely existence was the price he was having to pay for it and he had no choice but to accept it.
He went back to bed and awoke again at seven-thirty when the alarm went off. He climbed slowly out of bed and went over to the mirror to stare at himself once more. He had dreamed that he had changed into a handsome prince but now he could see his image in the mirror, it was clear that the dream had been very far from the truth, He was still as fat and ugly as he always had been. Zelda would never look twice at him even if she was available. However he could not rid himself of her. She was an obsession feeding on his mind like a cancer and he had to do something about it or drive himself completely mad. He recognised that she was no longer a pure woman of great beauty but someone who had married another man, had shared her bed with him, had regular sex with him, and had given him a daughter. She was clearly tarnished and if there was any kind of relationship with her she would bring along emotional baggage and almost certainly spend a great deal of time looking after her daughter. Life with her would be quite different to the way he imagined it would be. Most of the time he would be left out in the cold as she cared for another man’s daughter.
He stared bleakly at his image, recalling the time when he had dressed up as Father Christmas to meet her in the restaurant. That day had been a disaster. She wasn’t that beautiful, he thought to himself. Then he recalled the vision of her face in his mind. Of course she was beautiful but he had to stop thinking about her in that way. She was gone for ever and he needed to move on with his life... for whatever it was worth!
‘I hate you, Zelda!’ he shouted at the mirror. ‘I hate you! You’re not beautiful at all! You betrayed me by marrying someone else, slept with him in your bed, allowed him to seduce you, and then you had his child! You don’t think I’m stupid, do you? I don’t want you any more! I’m not interested! Stay out of my mind! Stay out of my life!’
He stared more closely at his image realising that he hadn’t meant any of those words and, in his anguish, he reached for a paperweight from the cabinet at the side of his bed and threw it with great force at the mirror. It smashed into a hundred pieces, the jagged glass shards being flung across the room in large sections. He looked at the mess in despair and sank back on the bed deep in thought. If he was unable to rid himself of her image in his mind, he could pick up any one of those jagged shards of glass and cut his wrists. In that was he would end it all and be rid of her for good. However he didn’t have the courage to follow it through with the idea and he laid back on the bed with tears running down his cheeks. He was a prisoner of his love for her and she was his warder. Somehow he had to break free!
***
Mr. G. had a weakness for women. He always invoked sympathy with regard to the fact that he had only one arm and he played the field as a hero by telling people how he tried to prevent a robbery from taking place. It was true that women were attracted to him generally because he was handsome, but he was also very clever, he had the gift of the gab and he used body language to his advantage. However women didn’t flock to him in great numbers nor did they faun over him. He was a little too clever for most of them and, in particular, they took him to be rather snooty, somewhat pompous, and a little too full of himself. Nonetheless, he very much fancied the nurse who had looked after him in hospital. Her name had been Rose Delaney at the time but she met Robert Harris and married him.
After the robbery had taken place and he was badly wounded in his arm, he was taken to Woodbury General Hospital where Rose was employed as a senior nurse. She was two years older than him and he found her to be extremely attractive. When he emerged from the hospital theatre, having had his arm amputated, she took great care of him, seemingly always by his bed, feeding him regularly, giving him dry baths and giving him various tablets to ease the pain. In many cases, patients fell in love with their nurses although the spirit of romance tended to vanish into thin air after they had left the hospital. The relationship... if one could call it that... ends extremely quickly as the patient leaves the loving care behind and re-enters the real world, In Gardner’s case the feelings were so strong that they did not go away and remained in force long after Rose had married Robert Harris.
In their continued relationship, he met her one day each week, taking her out to dine at an expensive restaurant and showering her with compliments. It was a regular feature that they always kept as their secret. Rose explained away her absence by telling her husband that Wednesday was the Girls Night Out and that she spent it with her friends so that the secret would remain intact, Being of a suspicious and jealous nature when it came to his wife, Harris would never understand her relationship with another man outside their marriage so she thought it was better not to inform him.
After dinner every Wednesday evening, she would go with Gardner to a hotel where they always signed in as Mr. & Mrs. Smith and they would go to their room to make passionate love with each other. The handicap of having only one arm never came into the equation. He was exceptional in every way, kissing her, caressing her, stroking her hair, and paying her a great deal of attention. Rose was delighted to be seduced by him for he was so alive... unlike her husband who had a tendency to fade swiftly after twenty seconds when he pathetically made love to her, leaving her feeling empty and frustrated. It was nothing like that with Mr. G. He was a long-lasting sexual lover with great stamina when it came to seduction and a love session with him would take an hour from the beginning of the foreplay to the final orgasm. However sadly she
regarded her marriage when being with Mr. G. raised her to Paradise. It was the most exciting thing in her life and she waited eagerly for Wednesday to come around each week.
When news of her husband’s death came about, she recognised that Mr. G. had a hand in it. There was no doubt in her mind that he was the person who gave the order for the man’s demise. Not that she was concerned about it in the slightest. The fact that her husband was dead came as a relief to her for she was becoming very tired of living with him, having to suffer comparative boredom and non-compliant sex year after year. His scientific mind was always working on one theory or another and he rarely showed her hardly any attention at all. She had told him often that a woman had needs... and they were very sensitive... attention and love were two of them, but he failed to take any notice which meant that their lives went on like different planets avoiding each other. He husband was so unlike Mr. G. who lavished her with attention, love and gifts which he gave to her regularly. On one occasion, she came home with a new pair of ear-rings. They were real diamonds but her husband didn’t recognise them to be that valuable. He made a comment about them and she told him that she had won them at bingo in a raffle. Two months later, she came home with a sapphire necklace and when he asked her about it she told him that she had won that in a raffle as well. On the third occasion, she came home with a beautiful bracelet telling him the same story, and she asked him to run a bath for her. He went upstairs to do so and, after a short while, he told her it was ready. When she went into the bathroom, she found that there was only half an inch of water in the bath.
‘You’ve not run the bath properly,’ she complained bitterly. ‘There’s only a small amount of water in it.’
‘Well,’ he replied casually, with an element of anger in his voice, ‘I don’t want to get the raffle ticket wet!’
