“You haven’t collected it?”
“Well, as you see, we’d want the police with us anyway if he has put the half a million pounds in the left luggage. We wouldn’t be happy walking through York with a bundle like that.”
“I can imagine. So, shall we go and see what he has left us? I can arrange for a number of constables to bolster our numbers.”
“Thank you.”
Hennessey and Penge rendezvous-ed with three constables at York station’s left-luggage office and presented the receipt. In return they were handed two large suitcases. Both were unlocked, and when opened both were observed to contain large quantities of banknotes.
“We’ll escort you back to the bank with this,” Hennessey said. “A police vehicle and a couple of constables.”
“Appreciate it,” Penge had said. “It’s all going to be here. All half a million. Poor Darius…I know why he killed himself…he couldn’t live with himself after doing this. But why, why did he do it in the first place?”
“I’d like to know that too,” Hennessey had said.
By the time Hennessey had recollected this, Olivia Stringer was about halfway through the glass of port and staring into space, chatting quite amicably with herself. Hennessey couldn’t remember who supplied the name: Mr Penge, or Mrs Webster, or one of the bank staff. Hennessey couldn’t even remember the name, but it was the name of a man who was of Webster’s age and he and Webster were described as being “like brothers”. Hennessey met him the day after Webster’s suicide by which time the man had heard the news and was in a state of shock. They sat together on solid wooden garden furniture in the pleasingly mature garden at the rear of the man’s house in Nether Poppleton where, beyond the garden, there was a pleasant view across the meadows to the River Ouse.
“I should have seen it coming,” the man said. “All those signals, clear as daylight in hindsight.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, it started, or stopped, whichever way you look at it, after the birth of their second child. After that Mrs Webster moved into the spare room, saying, ‘He’s got two children, no further point in our sleeping together.’”
“She said that?”
“Yes, in this house. Darius didn’t know where to put himself.”
“A man wants more than that.”
“Of course he does, and a woman too, but not Mrs Webster. From that point onwards, her idea of keeping romance alive in her marriage was walking arm in arm with her husband to and from the ten o’clock service. So long as it all looked right, the reality didn’t matter. And he stuck it too. For fifteen years more he put up with that charade. Then, maybe it was because he’d finally snapped, maybe it was because he’d found himself in a mid-life crisis, he told me that he’d found ‘a girl’.”
“A girl?”
“That was what he said. He was delighted, he could not contain his excitement, he was like an adolescent with his first real girlfriend. It was all a bit embarrassing. That was about three months ago.”
“Did he mention her name?” Hennessey remembered that he had asked that question.
“Olivia. Never told me her second name. She’s about thirty, that makes her twenty years his junior. Didn’t like the sound of her really, seemed a bit of a good-time girl, not Darius’s type at all. Then earlier on this week he phoned me. He said ‘I’ve ruined my life’ and then he put the phone down. I phoned him at his work, then at his home, he wasn’t at either place. He was nowhere to be found.”
Hennessey watched Olivia Stringer drain the glass and then look disappointed and lost. She stared at the glass as if willing it to refill by magic. He remembered meeting her for the first time.
“My boyfriend pays for it,” she had said, smiling, designer clothes, designer jewellery. “This flat, it’s rented, as is, furnished, but my boyfriend pays for it all. Well, he’s older than me, a bit of a sugar daddy, I suppose, and I’m his sugar baby.”
“I see,” Hennessey growled disapprovingly.
“Men do what I want them to do,” she said, twirling her figure. “I can make men do anything.”
“Can you?”
“Oh, yes. I’m thirty, have to start thinking about settling down, so I told my sugar daddy that if he got some serious money, I’d go away with him and we’d settle down together. Anyway, how did you find me? And what do you want?”
So Hennessey had told her that her name had been found in her “sugar daddy’s” address book. He also told her that just the previous day said “sugar daddy” had stood on a railway line and said “thank you” to the driver of the train a second before the impact despatched “sugar daddy” to the hereafter.
And that, Hennessey mused, as he drained his glass of tonic water, was the first part of the story.
The second part occurred some ten years later when George Hennessey and his son Charles, by then a student, had whiled away a winter’s evening by burning faggots in the hearth of the living room of their home in Easingwold, and “jawing”. George Hennessey’s dear wife and dear mother to Charles had died sadly young some years earlier but had left a strong and a warm “ghost” in the house and garden, and father and son had bonded in her absence. It had grown to be George Hennessey’s practice to tell his son of cases he had been involved in, never compromising his professionalism by naming names or cheapening their “jaw sessions” by relating salacious or sensational incidents, but rather choosing incidents which offered his growing son some insight into the human condition. The story of the man who took his hat off to the train driver was one such, and he had related the story one evening as the dried twigs crackled and flamed in the fireplace.
The third part of the story was a wholly unexpected exchange between Olivia Stringer and George Hennessey. That lunchtime an emaciated Olivia Stringer, focusing her eyes on Hennessey as the only other customer in the pub, had staggered over to him and said, “Can you buy me a drink, sir? I’m down on my luck, sir.”
Hennessey had stood and said, “No, Olivia, I can’t,” and had walked away, out of the Waggoner’s Rest, feeling Olivia Stringer’s eyes burning into him, wondering who he was, and how he knew her name?
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS by Carol Anne Davis
FROM THE START, I did everything in my power to split them up, to make him exclusively mine again. But the bitch just wouldn’t let go so I had to kill. The psychologist here at the prison thinks that I overreacted but she clearly hasn’t loved enough…
I met him, of all places, on a sponsored walk for breast cancer. Both his mother and mine had died of the disease and it created an immediate bond between us. We were both forty, both divorced, both had one grown-up child who lived far away. Even our names sounded good together – Jack and Gill. My work as the assistant headmistress at a girls’ school brought me into contact with very few men and his job as an aeronautics engineer meant that he worked with very few women. Neither of us had been dating for years so we were ready for action, fell hard.
Jack praised everything about me at the start – my looks, my figure, my somewhat dry sense of humour. He said that I was cute, that he loved my body, that I was very entertaining and that he loved spending time with me. I reciprocated with ardour, forever hugging and kissing him. He was always freshly showered and sweet-scented, so there was nothing that I wouldn’t do…
And, at the onset, it seemed enough. He appeared to set out his stall, telling me that if he remarried, his wife would get his sizeable pension. He was disappointed that his first wife had had so little interest in his work. Many women hear the word “engineer” and turn away – they want a man with a job which they can understand, someone in sales or teaching. But I’d had friends in the engineering faculty when I studied English at university, simply because one of my sister’s boyfriends was an engineer.