A single event driven by fate, after Ben told his wife Charlotte he would be late home one night, he left early, and by chance discovers his wife having dinner in their favourite restaurant with another man.
A single event where it could be said Ben was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Who was this man? Why was she having dinner with him?
A simple truth to explain the single event was all Ben required. Instead, Charlotte told him a lie.
A single event that forces Ben to question everything he thought he knew about his wife, and the people who are around her.
After a near-death experience and forced retirement into a world he is unfamiliar with, Ben finds himself once again drawn back into that life of lies, violence, and intrigue.
From London to a small village in Tuscany, little by little Ben discovers who the woman he married is, and the real reason why fate had brought them together.
How many of us would ever get caught up in a dangerous situation ever in a lifetime?
How many of us have skeletons in the closet that we don’t know about?
I had been thinking about it a lot when I discovered my mother’s previous boyfriend, the man whom was the love of her life.
Then, in terms of coming up with an idea for a story, what if she had a child by him that we didn’t know about, a half brother or sister.
There were many ways of putting a spin on this premise.
Then, in the back of my mind I remembered a story an acquaintance at works was once telling us over morning tea, that a fried of a friend had a mother who had a twin sister and that each of the sisters had a son by the same father, without each knowing of the father’s actions, both growing up without the other knowing of their half brother only to meet by accident on the other side of the world.
It was an enormous coincidence.
And we all wondered what the sisters had planned as retribution for the man who had lied to them both.
Of course it could also be said that they could have spoken to each other long before it came to that, but like a lot of families, small problems become much larger ones when allowed to fester, and cause almost unhealable rifts. It had n this case.
Sometimes the backstory can be just as interesting as the story itself.
Today’s effort amounts to 2,573 words, for a total, so far, of 49,443.
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.
Usually, from a very early age, you have some idea of what you intend to do with your life.
Those early choices of fireman, policeman, doctor, fighter pilot, slowly disappear from the list as the education requirements become clearer, and their degree of impossibility.
Then you have to factor in academic achievement or failure, hone situation, what blows life has dealt you, and your financial ability to fund any it all of your hopes and dreams, especially for that all-important university education, and even then, it has to be the right one.
Then there are the family aspirations where parents really want you to follow in their footsteps, as a doctor or a lawyer or in the military.
And if you get past all that, and everything has fallen into place, and you’re ready to head out on that highway of life, you should be fully imbibed with the knowledge and the drive to make everything happen.
…
Now I was lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling wondering at what point it all went wrong.
Right on the starting line where everything I had worked for was about to come to fruition, it had all come to an abrupt halt.
My memory got as far as driving home from a work party where we had been celebrating the company’s most recent success, and my progression to the next level of management, when a car failed to stop at a stop sign and T-boned me.
The car was a write-off. I was still not sure what happened to me, but I had heard someone say, in that murky twilight of pain medication, that if I was a horse, they would have to shoot me. It was the only thing I remembered between the car hitting mine and waking up in the hospital bed.
But that was not all the story, and I had plenty of time mull over everything that had happened in that last week. There was a certain symmetry to it all, as if one event led to the next, and then the next, and it was the last straw, on the last day, that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
…
And here’s the thing.
I would not have been in that accident had I not taken the car. I wasn’t going to, I had intended to take the train to a friends place and stay there for a few days, what the boss had told me would be a well earned rest.
Even then, I might have not taken the car, except for a cryptic text message I received from my sister, about needing to be ‘rescued’ from a bad date.
Nothing unusual for her, she was currently on a dating site binge, and after half a dozen bad experiences, I thought she had given up.
That was the thought that ran through my head as I watched her curled up in the chair next to the bed, half asleep.
Her first words, on arrival, and when she was allowed to see me, was to apologise, believing it had been her fault. She knew I hated driving in the city, so coming to get her, as I always did, had been preying on her mind, and I could see the tangible effects of it in the worried expression, and unkempt manner which was so totally unlike her.
“It was simply an accident, and could have happened to anyone,” I told her.
“You were going to Jeremy’s, I should have sorted my own problem out for once. IT’s not as if I couldn’t just call up an Uber, and now look what’s happened. I’m so sorry.”
She wouldn’t accept that it was not her fault, nor would she leave until she knew I would be OK. I didn’t understand what she meant by that because in the three discussions I had with the head doctor, I was going to make a full recovery.
He had used the work lucky more than once, and seemingly the sequence of events, and other factors like the car safety features, the angle the car had struck, and where, the fact the other driver had to dodge a pedestrian, all of it played a part.
Had they not, quite simply I would be dead.
My sister and her dating was only one aspect of how my life was being driven.
Another memory returned, from that week, that of another text message, from a girl I used to know back at University.
Erica.
She was what some might have called a free soul. She didn’t conform to what I would have called normal. Her clothes sense was somewhat odd, she always looked as though her hair needed combing, and she never had any money.
And, for a while, she lived with me, in a small, cramped room ideal for single University students on a budge, but not for two. Yet, for some strange reason, she never seemed to get in the way, or mind the closeness of our existence.
In that short period, she became my first real love, but she had said that while we were together, it was fine, but she was not seeking anything permanent. Nor, she said, did she believe in monogamy. Until she left, studies completed, I wanted to believe she would stay, but a last lingering kiss goodbye and she was gone.
Now, the message said, she wondered if I was still free, and like to meet. Of course, ten years of water had passed under that bridge, so I was not sure where it would go. I hadn’t replied, and the message was still sitting on my phone.
That invitation, however, had been n my mind moments before the crash, and I had to wonder, thinking of her, contributed to it.
Then, on top of all that, there was my parents. Married for 40 years, and the epitome of the perfect marriage.
Or so I thought.
That morning, before I went to work, I had called in to see them after my mother had called the day before saying she wanted to talk to me about something.
Before I knocked on the door, I could hear yelling from behind the door, and it seemed the perfect marriage had hit a rocky stretch.
Or simply that my father had chosen to have an affair, and had been caught out by the simplest of means, my mother answered his phone when he was out of the room thinking it was important work matters, only to discover it was his ‘floozie’.
No guessing then why my mother had called me. After hearing all I wanted to, and not wanting to face an angry couple I just headed on to work.
My mother had yet to come to the hospital to see me. My father had been, but he made no mention of her, or anything else, except to tell me if there was anything I wanted, all I had to do was ask. Then he left, and hadn’t come back.
Then, last but not least, were the rumours.
The owner of the company I worked for was getting older and didn’t have an heir. One thing or another had managed to foil his succession plans, and in the end, he did not have a son or a daughter to pass the reins to.
With the latest success, the company was about to have a bigger profile which meant more work, and plans to open branches in other cities. It was too much for one man, now in his 70s, and looking to wind down.
A rumour had started about a week before the accident that he was looking to sell, and there were at least half a dozen suitors. There was supposed to be an announcement, but it hadn’t happened while I was at work, but, considering how long I’d been in hospital, and the two weeks in an induced coma, anything could have happened.
Louisa stretched, and changed positions.
“You look better,” she said.
“Relative to what, or when?”
“Half an hour ago.”
I shook my head. Sometimes Louisa was prone to saying the oddest stuff. “What’s the deal between our parents. Dad was here for all of five minutes. Where’s our mother?”
“She left.”
OK. Blunt, but plausible. “Why?”
“Dad was being an ass.”
“Does she know I was in an accident?”
“I told her.”
“So, you’re seeing her?”
“She calls. I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone to stay with one of our aunt’s.”
I sighed. Louise had an awfully bad memory, and I was sure one day she was going to forget who I was.
There were four sisters, mother the youngest. She had a love hate relationship with the middle two, so the best bet would be the eldest sister, Jane. Jane was also the crankiest because she hated children, never got married, and was set in her ways.
Then, there was something else lurking in the back of my mind. Another item I’d overheard when I suspect I was not meant to be listening.
I might not have a job to go back to if the company had been sold, I might not have a home to go back to if my parents had split up, and I might not be able to do anything for a long, long time. Recovery might be complete, but it wasn’t going to happen overnight.
I had a sister who blamed herself for my accident, and an old girlfriend who wanted to see me, though I suspect not like this, broken and useless. What else could there be.
Oh, yes. Another snipped from the shouting match behind the door. And an explanation why my father had all but abandoned me. My mother had also had an affair, and his son, well he was not his son.
No surprise then I had a father who didn’t want to know me.
What else could go wrong?
There was movement outside the room, and raised voices, one of which was saying that whoever was out there couldn’t go into the room. It didn’t have any effect as seconds later, a man and a police officer came in. The officer stood by the door.
Louisa looked surprised, but didn’t move.
The man, obviously a detective, came over. “Your name Oliver Watkins?”
It was, and hopefully still is. “Yes.”
“I need you to answer some questions.”
“About the accident?”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then realised what I was referring to. “No. Not the accident. About the embezzlement of 50 million dollars from the company you work for. It seems you didn’t cover your tracks very well.” He turned around to look at Louisa, “You need to leave now, miss.”
“I’ll stay.”
He nodded to the officer, “You leave now, or he will remove you.”
She looked at me, a different expression, “You didn’t tell me you were a crook, Olly.”
“Because I’m not.”
The officer escorted her from the room and shut the door.
The detective sat in the recently vacated chair. “Now, Mr Watkins. It seems there is such a thing as karma.”
Everyone knows what a stick is, it’s a lump of wood that you throw out in front of you, and if your dog is inclined to, he will run out and fetch it back.
Of course, there’s the obstinate ones who just lie down on the ground and look at you like you’re foolishly throwing away something useful.
For instance, that stick, and a few others that would be very useful to light a campfire, or just a woodfire in the house, during winter.
Or it can be a stick of wood needed for something else, like a building project, of of those highly secret affairs that go on in the locked shed at the bottom of the garden.
I’m sure the dog who refuses to fetch sticks knows exactly what is going on there, but is disinclined to say.
But..
If you are looking at the gooey sense of the word, there is an old saying, if you throw enough mud, some of it sticks’.
Yes, you can stick stuff to stuff, such as words cut out of various newspapers to make up a ransom, or warning, note.
Too many mystery movies, I know.
Paint will stick to timber, or any surface really.
Mud sticks to the bottom of shoes or boots and then becomes analysable evidence.
I can stick to you like glue, which means, really, where you go I go, quite handy if you are trying to stop an opposition player from scoring in a game.
I can use a walking stick, beat someone with a stick, use a stick to fly a plane, or a gear stick to move a car.
I’m sure, if you think about it, you can come up with a dozen more ways to use it.
Jack finally gets to spend those moments with Rosalie that were so tantalisingly close before he left.
The question is, would he had got the courage to do so if it had not been for the events that had just occurred. There always seems to be an element of danger that spurs people on to do things they might not necessarily do if life had not taken a particular turn.
But, it was everything he expected, and more.
Of course, as advised yesterday, there are problems, not of their making but of the intrepid Maryanne, who reveals herself now as an agent working for an organisation that is equally after the package that Jack’s mother had left in Rosalie’s safe keeping.
And ironically it is Rosalie who captures Maryanne in the act of trying to steal it.
So, if an effort to keep it from everyone Rosalie agrees to leave with the package and tell no one where she is. Not until Jack decided what he’s going to do with it. One possibility is to use it to get his mother back, but like all ransom exchanges, it never turns out the way it’s supposed to.
So, Maryanne is going to have to come up with a convincing plan to get Jack onside, but the lies and deception are not a very good start in forming trust.
It’s an interesting premise, and beyond the raw writing, I fear it will need some more work to get it where I want it to be.
Today’s effort amounts to 3,111 words, for a total, so far, of 46,870.
Usually, from a very early age, you have some idea of what you intend to do with your life.
Those early choices of fireman, policeman, doctor, fighter pilot, slowly disappear from the list as the education requirements become clearer, and their degree of impossibility.
Then you have to factor in academic achievement or failure, hone situation, what blows life has dealt you, and your financial ability to fund any it all of your hopes and dreams, especially for that all-important university education, and even then, it has to be the right one.
Then there are the family aspirations where parents really want you to follow in their footsteps, as a doctor or a lawyer or in the military.
And if you get past all that, and everything has fallen into place, and you’re ready to head out on that highway of life, you should be fully imbibed with the knowledge and the drive to make everything happen.
…
Now I was lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling wondering at what point it all went wrong.
Right on the starting line where everything I had worked for was about to come to fruition, it had all come to an abrupt halt.
My memory got as far as driving home from a work party where we had been celebrating the company’s most recent success, and my progression to the next level of management, when a car failed to stop at a stop sign and T-boned me.
The car was a write-off. I was still not sure what happened to me, but I had heard someone say, in that murky twilight of pain medication, that if I was a horse, they would have to shoot me. It was the only thing I remembered between the car hitting mine and waking up in the hospital bed.
But that was not all the story, and I had plenty of time mull over everything that had happened in that last week. There was a certain symmetry to it all, as if one event led to the next, and then the next, and it was the last straw, on the last day, that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
…
And here’s the thing.
I would not have been in that accident had I not taken the car. I wasn’t going to, I had intended to take the train to a friends place and stay there for a few days, what the boss had told me would be a well earned rest.
Even then, I might have not taken the car, except for a cryptic text message I received from my sister, about needing to be ‘rescued’ from a bad date.
Nothing unusual for her, she was currently on a dating site binge, and after half a dozen bad experiences, I thought she had given up.
That was the thought that ran through my head as I watched her curled up in the chair next to the bed, half asleep.
Her first words, on arrival, and when she was allowed to see me, was to apologise, believing it had been her fault. She knew I hated driving in the city, so coming to get her, as I always did, had been preying on her mind, and I could see the tangible effects of it in the worried expression, and unkempt manner which was so totally unlike her.
“It was simply an accident, and could have happened to anyone,” I told her.
“You were going to Jeremy’s, I should have sorted my own problem out for once. IT’s not as if I couldn’t just call up an Uber, and now look what’s happened. I’m so sorry.”
She wouldn’t accept that it was not her fault, nor would she leave until she knew I would be OK. I didn’t understand what she meant by that because in the three discussions I had with the head doctor, I was going to make a full recovery.
He had used the work lucky more than once, and seemingly the sequence of events, and other factors like the car safety features, the angle the car had struck, and where, the fact the other driver had to dodge a pedestrian, all of it played a part.
Had they not, quite simply I would be dead.
My sister and her dating was only one aspect of how my life was being driven.
Another memory returned, from that week, that of another text message, from a girl I used to know back at University.
Erica.
She was what some might have called a free soul. She didn’t conform to what I would have called normal. Her clothes sense was somewhat odd, she always looked as though her hair needed combing, and she never had any money.
And, for a while, she lived with me, in a small, cramped room ideal for single University students on a budge, but not for two. Yet, for some strange reason, she never seemed to get in the way, or mind the closeness of our existence.
In that short period, she became my first real love, but she had said that while we were together, it was fine, but she was not seeking anything permanent. Nor, she said, did she believe in monogamy. Until she left, studies completed, I wanted to believe she would stay, but a last lingering kiss goodbye and she was gone.
Now, the message said, she wondered if I was still free, and like to meet. Of course, ten years of water had passed under that bridge, so I was not sure where it would go. I hadn’t replied, and the message was still sitting on my phone.
That invitation, however, had been n my mind moments before the crash, and I had to wonder, thinking of her, contributed to it.
Then, on top of all that, there was my parents. Married for 40 years, and the epitome of the perfect marriage.
Or so I thought.
That morning, before I went to work, I had called in to see them after my mother had called the day before saying she wanted to talk to me about something.
Before I knocked on the door, I could hear yelling from behind the door, and it seemed the perfect marriage had hit a rocky stretch.
Or simply that my father had chosen to have an affair, and had been caught out by the simplest of means, my mother answered his phone when he was out of the room thinking it was important work matters, only to discover it was his ‘floozie’.
No guessing then why my mother had called me. After hearing all I wanted to, and not wanting to face an angry couple I just headed on to work.
My mother had yet to come to the hospital to see me. My father had been, but he made no mention of her, or anything else, except to tell me if there was anything I wanted, all I had to do was ask. Then he left, and hadn’t come back.
Then, last but not least, were the rumours.
The owner of the company I worked for was getting older and didn’t have an heir. One thing or another had managed to foil his succession plans, and in the end, he did not have a son or a daughter to pass the reins to.
With the latest success, the company was about to have a bigger profile which meant more work, and plans to open branches in other cities. It was too much for one man, now in his 70s, and looking to wind down.
A rumour had started about a week before the accident that he was looking to sell, and there were at least half a dozen suitors. There was supposed to be an announcement, but it hadn’t happened while I was at work, but, considering how long I’d been in hospital, and the two weeks in an induced coma, anything could have happened.
Louisa stretched, and changed positions.
“You look better,” she said.
“Relative to what, or when?”
“Half an hour ago.”
I shook my head. Sometimes Louisa was prone to saying the oddest stuff. “What’s the deal between our parents. Dad was here for all of five minutes. Where’s our mother?”
“She left.”
OK. Blunt, but plausible. “Why?”
“Dad was being an ass.”
“Does she know I was in an accident?”
“I told her.”
“So, you’re seeing her?”
“She calls. I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone to stay with one of our aunt’s.”
I sighed. Louise had an awfully bad memory, and I was sure one day she was going to forget who I was.
There were four sisters, mother the youngest. She had a love hate relationship with the middle two, so the best bet would be the eldest sister, Jane. Jane was also the crankiest because she hated children, never got married, and was set in her ways.
Then, there was something else lurking in the back of my mind. Another item I’d overheard when I suspect I was not meant to be listening.
I might not have a job to go back to if the company had been sold, I might not have a home to go back to if my parents had split up, and I might not be able to do anything for a long, long time. Recovery might be complete, but it wasn’t going to happen overnight.
I had a sister who blamed herself for my accident, and an old girlfriend who wanted to see me, though I suspect not like this, broken and useless. What else could there be.
Oh, yes. Another snipped from the shouting match behind the door. And an explanation why my father had all but abandoned me. My mother had also had an affair, and his son, well he was not his son.
No surprise then I had a father who didn’t want to know me.
What else could go wrong?
There was movement outside the room, and raised voices, one of which was saying that whoever was out there couldn’t go into the room. It didn’t have any effect as seconds later, a man and a police officer came in. The officer stood by the door.
Louisa looked surprised, but didn’t move.
The man, obviously a detective, came over. “Your name Oliver Watkins?”
It was, and hopefully still is. “Yes.”
“I need you to answer some questions.”
“About the accident?”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then realised what I was referring to. “No. Not the accident. About the embezzlement of 50 million dollars from the company you work for. It seems you didn’t cover your tracks very well.” He turned around to look at Louisa, “You need to leave now, miss.”
“I’ll stay.”
He nodded to the officer, “You leave now, or he will remove you.”
She looked at me, a different expression, “You didn’t tell me you were a crook, Olly.”
“Because I’m not.”
The officer escorted her from the room and shut the door.
The detective sat in the recently vacated chair. “Now, Mr Watkins. It seems there is such a thing as karma.”
Stranger’s We’ve Become, a sequel to What Sets Us Apart.
The blurb:
Is she or isn’t she, that is the question!
Susan has returned to David, but he is having difficulty dealing with the changes. Her time in captivity has changed her markedly, so much so that David decides to give her some time and space to re-adjust back into normal life.
But doubts about whether he chose the real Susan remain.
In the meantime, David has to deal with Susan’s new security chief, the discovery of her rebuilding a palace in Russia, evidence of an affair, and several attempts on his life. And, once again, David is drawn into another of Predergast’s games, one that could ultimately prove fatal.
From being reunited with the enigmatic Alisha, a strange visit to Susan’s country estate, to Russia and back, to a rescue mission in Nigeria, David soon discovers those whom he thought he could trust each has their own agenda, one that apparently doesn’t include him.
What happens when your past finally catches up with you?
Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.
Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment Will’s life slowly starts to unravel and it’s obvious to him it’s time to move on.
This time, however, there is more at stake.
Will has broken his number one rule, don’t get involved.
With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.
But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.
