Unforgiving

U n f o r g i v i n g

by

Helma Pietsch

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Helma Pietsch

All Rights Reserved

*~*

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Another Job

Chapter 2

Welcome To Down Under

Chapter 3

Vanished

Chapter 4

A Deadly Visit

Chapter 5

Greed And Real Estate

Chapter 6

How To Settle A Score

*~*

Introduction

Disclaimer: Unforgiving is a true story and the characters are real. In some cases, the names have been changed, some dealings were condensed for story telling purposes, but the overall chronology is an accurate description of actual events and compiled from diaries and letters relating to the 1970s in Europe and Australia.

Adult content rating: This book contains contents to be considered unsuitable for young readers 17 and under and may be offensive to some readers of all ages.

Chapter 1

Another Job

It was apparently the summer season in Germany, but the weather altered between pouring in buckets to a drizzle, with razor sharp winds and constantly grey clouds, which would have been depressing for anybody’s state of mind and did not help to get Helen out of her lethargy she was in.

She only celebrated her 26th birthday two months ago, but she was feeling to be an old woman in a young body since she lost her love.

Helen was ready to look for work again, to keep her mind occupied away from the all consuming question, ‘Why did he have to die?’

Soon she was working for the American company Revlon, as a make-up consultant and promotion officer in a large department store, and it happened to be in the same city as her apartment, which was still rented to the steel company.

The lease agreement had lapsed long ago and the company continued to rent her apartment under a periodic tenancy agreement, without any problem from either side.

Helen contacted the manager from the apartment building, to organize thanks to the mining company and to terminate their tenancy with plenty of notification of three months.

On the day she moved back into her own apartment, the representative from the mining company was still there. He had a friend lending a hand to shift his few private belongings, although her apartment was fully furnished rented out to him. While he intended to move out – within the midst of it – Helen’s countless boxes and bags were simultaneously arriving.

All three sat down amongst the chaos and drank a bottle of old port, which none of them was sure of owning.

They were considerable more relaxed with the eventually empty bottle in front of them and decided together to go out for dinner, as the mess in the apartment would still be there on their return.

The representative from the mining company introduced himself as Thomas and his friend Klaus, who was leaving for Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia.

During dinner Helen found out the reason, for the mining company renting her apartment such a long time. They advertised in most German cities on a regular basis wanting hard-working adventurous single young men, to work for a Swiss mining company, part owner of ‘Mount Isa Mines’ in Queensland.

Helen’s apartment was being used to interview individually the applicants for suitability and then help them with the endless paper work for the migration.

Dinner was more fun than Helen anticipated and she agreed with her mother’s advice to go out more often.

Klaus was smiling encouragingly, but she was not ready to get in any way involved with another man and besides, he was due to leave in a few days for Australia.

The next day, they completed their mutual moving in and out and Klaus was there again to help, finally asking if he was allowed to write to her.

Sure why not. Helen replied, not really expecting to hear from him and if she did, probably could not be bothered to write back.

A few days later, Helen was settled in again amongst her own four walls and to some extent, it gave her a feeling as if she had never been away, despite the fact that a great deal had happened since she was leasing out her apartment several years ago.

Her new job was exactly what she needed, to keep her mind active and sane, although never far enough away from depressing thoughts, which were always waiting just out of reach from consciousness to spring on her when she least expected it.

Helen never watched television again, since the event of the burning yacht and consequently blamed any T.V. set for her loosing her love. It was the reason she asked her cleaning lady to accept the television as a gift.

The happy woman took it straight away, hoping Helen would not change her mind about the generous offer. Helen instead was pleased to get rid of the set as soon as possible.

Her work in the department store as a cosmetic consultant/promotion officer was fairly routine work from 9 to 5, after the initial one month long training at the German Revlon office in Cologne, to learn all about the different products.

Helen was thriving in her capability being able to tell female customers what they liked to hear and therefore selling them whatever Revlon promoted as a new product.

The training with the Sherri-Lynn Slimming Institute a few years earlier came in very handy, but she avoided wisely any of the hard core sales techniques.

She applied the sales pitch in a milder version, which worked out nicely for selling the cosmetic products, especially that the company had constantly incentives for a bonus – not money which would have been a taxable income – but gifts from silk shawls and croc handbags to holidays.

Helen was the proverbial plain Jane herself with ash blond hair, very fair skin, blond eyebrows and eyelashes. Since teenager age, her opinion about mascara was always that it was designed mainly for blond people like her.

A dark haired person was using it only as an enhancement, but for a real Blondie it was the difference between looking good with dark eyelashes and coloured eyebrows, or instead of it to look like, as if she just came out of a hospital after a week long stay.

She had two photos from herself, enlarged into posters for the display on the wall behind her Revlon counter.

One in black and white showed her face without any make-up and the hair pulled away from her face with a head band.

Next to it a poster in colour, this one with flawless make-up applied to enhance her best features, from individual attached false eye-lashes, finely pencilled eyebrows and tricolour eye-shadow plus a flattering hairstyle of cascading waves around her face.

She first tried to engage some photo models for the before and after photos, all of them demanded alterations and airbrushing – to make them look better, especially for the black and white photo – which would not have served the purpose.

Each morning it took Helen nearly two hours to do the coloured poster justice, including painstakingly gluing individual eyelashes between her own, applying three different shades of foundation, blended in to create the desired effects of light and shade, afterwards eyeliner, eye-shadow and blusher with a different nail polish each morning to compliment the lipstick of the day.

Scarves accessorized her gold embossed logo uniform, also hiding the make-up line. She also began to wear wigs and hairpieces, to make it out of the bathroom in the morning before lunch break.

Deliberately she kept her life simple and concentrated on her job, which became so predictable to the point, where her neighbours on the same floor in the apartment building could have set their watches accordingly to the time she left, up to her returning home in the evening, parked her car in the carpark beneath the building and took the lift to the sixth floor.

The only contact with any person in the building was her cleaning lady, who had the habit of occasionally leaving her umbrella behind in the apartment and never said No to a glass of port, while she spoke about the latest gossip.

Once a month on a regular basis, arrived a postcard or a short letter from Klaus in her mailbox, but she never replied.

Sometimes he apologized in a humorous way for travelling around that Helen could not keep track and catch up with him to his present address and in the letters he blamed Australia Post, although after half a year, he had from then on always the same post box number in Strathpine as a sender.

She just finished reading another postcard from Klaus. He showed a good sense of humour and the message made her laugh, while she answered a knock on the door to find the cleaning lady looking confused.

Helen assumed it was again the forgotten umbrella and to get a glass of port, but this time she even ignored the offered drink and came straight to the point of the utmost important news.

It made Helen listening fully alert, with an uneasy feeling inside her that this newsflash would somehow affect her personally.

Apparently the janitor found a dead man next to the door of the internal staircase leading up to the sixth floor. He did not recognize the man as a tenant of the building and he was certain that the stranger was definitely dead, with an extreme pale face and the eyes were open, staring into nothing.

The janitor didn’t want to touch or disturb the body to look for some form of identification. He left to call the police after locking the steel doors to each of the 10 connecting floor, as three lifts could not break down all at the same time and the stairs were only there as a fire department requirement. Nobody walked the stairs for getting fit, that’s what the gym was for on top of the building.

The janitor did not hurry, because as he said, Dead people are dead. They don’t go anywhere.

When the police finally arrived, the dead man was gone! From the description, the body was an elderly gentleman, not very tall, with roundish figure, dressed in a suit, wearing an old fashion tie and a hat. Down to the last detail, it was the accurate description for Mr. Caspari, her stalking ghost!

The police interviewed all the occupants including Helen about the mysterious man, but she had absolutely nothing to help them in their investigation.

It was not her intention to say:Oh yes, I know him. He used to be a friend of my family and since his death he is following me to wherever I go, to the Canary Islands, also Morocco, eventually he is always catching up with me.

Since the incident, she didn’t sleep very well at all and needed much more than two glasses of Glayva, to lure her into a restless sleep. She constantly woke up during the night and then had great difficulties going back to sleep again.

One night, rather than staring at the ceiling and the four walls, she decided to visit a nearby private casino only a street away, to kill