I’m back home and this story has been sitting on the back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.

The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.

But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.

Chasing leads, maybe

---

Just because you have a security card with your name on it doesn’t mean you are cleared.  Yesterday, maybe, but today?  Anything can happen in 24 hours, much like the political landscape.

When I walked in the front entrance and up to the scanning gate, I was just another employee coming into work.  I ran my card through the scanning device, and the light turned red.

It failed.

In the time it took for me to scan it a second time, a security guard had arrived from the front desk, and a soldier, armed and ready was standing behind me.

I didn’t doubt for one minute he would shoot me if I tried to run.

“What seems to be the problem?”  The security guard was polite but firm.

“My card that scanned the last time and worked, doesn’t seem to work now.”

I could read his expression, ‘you just got fired, and are trying to get back in.”

“Let me try.”

I gave him the card, he looked at it, no doubt to see if there was any damage, then tried it.”

“Have you any other means of identification?”

Now, here’s the thing.  This was the office full of spies and support staff all of whom could be using assumed names, different guises, or just plain secretive with their private information.  Luckily I had a driver’s license with the name on the card, but not much else.

I thought about telling him about the place he was guarding, but I doubted he would listen.

He looked at both, then handed back the license. 

“Come with me over to the counter and we’ll see if we can sort this out.”

It was not a request, nor was I unaccompanied.  I now had a soldier permanently attached to me.

When we all arrived at the desk, he joined another guard behind.

“Who is your immediate superior?”

It was a toss-up between Dobbin and Monica.  Since Dobbin spent a lot of time in his car or appeared to, I said it was Monica.

I watched him search slowly through the phone list until he found her number, then called her.

He had his back to me when they spoke, but it wasn’t for long; after a minute, perhaps two, he replaced the receiver and turned back.

“Ms. Shrive will be down in about five minutes.”  He pointed to a row of chairs against the wall, remnants from the last world war.  “If you would like to wait over there, sir.”

He didn’t hand back my card.

The wait was more like a half-hour, but I had become engrossed in an old copy of Country Life, and an article that made me consider retiring to the country in an old thatch cottage beside a babbling brook somewhere in the Cotswolds.

Until I read the price. 

The arrival of Monica came at a fortuitous moment.  Coming to the desk.

“Nnn, I was hoping you would drop by sooner rather than later.”

“My card doesn’t work.”

“Oh, that’s because we revoked it.”  She held out another in her hand.  “We’ve replaced it with one with better access, or as we say jokingly, you’ve moved up in the pay grade scale.”

I took the card and went to put it in my pocket.

“You need to register your presence, so I’m afraid you’ll have to go out and come back in again.”

I did as she asked, this time greeted by the friendly green light.  The soldier seemed disappointed that I was not free of his attention.  The security guard on the desk had alt=ready forgotten I existed.

“Come.”

I followed Monica to the antiquated elevator, we stepped in, closed the door and she pressed a button for the third and fourth floors.  It seemed creakier than usual this time.

“I’m assuming you have come in to use the computer resources?”

“Yes.”

“Good thing then we upgraded your access level.”

“And is there someone who manages access to CCTV footage?”

“Yes.  Same floor, four.  Her name is Amelia Enders.  Tell her what you need, and she’ll find it.  I assume it will have something to do with the surveillance exercise of yours.”

How could she guess, or had she been already investigating?”

“Come and see me when you’re finished.  I live on the third floor.  Literally.”

The elevator stopped on the third floor with a creak and a thump.

A smile and she headed off down the passage.

If I wasn’t mistaken, she had that cat who ate the canary look, and it worried me.

…

© Charles Heath 2020-2022

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

See below for an excerpt from the book…

Coming soon!

An excerpt from the book:

When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.

Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.

It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.

Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.

But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.

His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.

At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.

For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.

Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.

Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.

Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.

It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.

It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.

Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.

Except, of course, when it came to Harry.

He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.

So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.

There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.

So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.

There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.

She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.

Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.

Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.

Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.

Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.

Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.

© Charles Heath 2019

I’m having fun with chapter one.

Can you reach a point where you are never satisfied with what you’ve written?

What more can I say?

…

Looking at the mess constituting my room and my life, slob may have been an appropriate description.  I considered myself old, overweight though not necessarily fat, hair graying at the edges, and few wrinkles around the eyes, there were no real pluses in my description.

Some said I had a kindly face, but perhaps I had the look of a paternalistic grandfather.  There were several men in the office who were the same age and had grandchildren.  And some who had children at a time when they should be planning for retirement, not parenthood.

World-weary and perpetually tired, I’d passed the mid-life crisis, wondering what it was that affected other men my age.  Twenty-odd years later, I was still wondering.

I used to think I’d missed a lot in half a lifetime.

Now, I didn’t know what to think.

Did I deserve pity?  No.

Did I deserve sympathy?  No!

The only person who could get me out of the rut was myself.  For years I’d traded on Ellen’s good nature.  She deserved better, left me, and was now happier in the arms of a man who I wanted to believe treated her far better than I.  She had told me so herself, and judging by her manner, it had to be true.  Only recently had she got her smile back, the one that lit her face up, one that infectiously spread happiness to anyone near her.

There were reasons why I became the person I was now.  Some might say they were valid.  In the cold, hard light of dawn, I could see it was time I stopped using my past as a crutch and got on with the business of living.

Perhaps today would be the first day of the rest of my life.

I took the bus rather than drove.  At that hour of the morning, the traffic would be bad, and there would be no parking spaces left.  And I was using public transport more and more, have become accustomed to the convenience.  Time to read the paper, or a good book, or just dream about a different life.

This morning I thought about Ellen.  I hadn’t for a while, but that might have been fueled by the arrival of the divorce papers she wanted me to sign.  I’d had my time to be angry, and disappointed, she’d said, and she was right.  It was time to move on.

And she had stuck by me through thick and thin, coming back from overseas service a basket case after nine months in a POW camp, after a war that was more horrible than anyone could imagine.  Two mental breakdowns, periods of indolence and lassitude, leaving her to bring up the girls on her own.  I had not been a great father, and much less a husband.

I remembered that argument word for word.

I could see the looks of pain in the girl’s faces.

I remembered the hug, the kiss on the cheek, the tears.  It had not been out of hate, but a necessity.  For her and the children.  Until I found some lasting peace, they were better off at arm’s length.  Away from the arguing, the silences, the absences.

And disappointment.

After she left I tried to get my life in order.  Drugs, professional help, alcohol, meditation, then work.

Over ten years ago, it took a year, perhaps a little more before sanity returned.

She did not.

By then I knew she had found someone else, a mystery man, whom neither she would tell me who, and the girls honestly didn’t know.  She’d promised that much, any new man in her life would not get to meet the girls.  And she would tell me, and then when she was ready.

Then, suddenly, the children were no longer children but young adults and out in the world on their own, and I had become more a banker than a father, an observer rather than a participant, and it was as if we were more like ships passing in the night.  And overnight, the ships had sailed to the other side of the world.

My own fault, of course, and a bit late now to change history.  I could see Ellen’s influence over them, her prejudices and dislikes, and their contempt, like their mother, for me, simmering beneath the surface, but in fairness to them, I really hadn’t been much of a help as a parent should be.

And now I was getting my life back in order, perhaps I could try and make it up to them, and that first meeting, with them and Ellen, nearly a month ago, had been a step in the right direction.  They’d agreed to see me again, without her, during the holidays, which had now arrived.  All I had to do was make the call, and get on a plane.

This mess I was heading into, it would not take long.  I pulled out my phone and after searching for a travel agent near where I worked, I made an appointment to see about going overseas.

She had spoken to me about the divorce papers several days ago, alternately pleading with, and then abusing, me.  There had been some very strong language in the conversation, words I’d thought her incapable of using, but I confess, finally, I didn’t really know her all that well anymore.

Since then I had been calling her to arrange a meeting.  She had not yet replied.  With some distance to go before I reached the office, I tried calling her again.  I was almost glad when she didn’t answer.

…

I never realized just how hard it was to revise and re-write, and how much time it takes.

Perhaps that’s why first novels take so long to write!

…

© Charles Heath 2016-2023