Just To Help Him Out and To Help Him On His Way

JUST TO HELP HIM OUT

AND TO HELP HIM ON HIS WAY …

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication ©2013

Just to Help Him Out and to Help Him on His Way…

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

Events in this work are based loosely on real events, but have been changed and compiled to create a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents have been changed and are used in a purely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

PROLOGUE

It was hot, uncomfortably hot. John Lovett paused to mop his balding brow with a grubby hankie before continuing across his field towards a ramshackle, old barn that stood in the corner of the meadow surrounded by ancient oak trees.

Just visible behind the barn was his reason for walking across the field this steamy July afternoon. It was the bonnet of a white van. He had seen it earlier that day when he was driving along a nearby lane, Nightingale Lane, on his way to town, catching sight of it as he glanced towards the barn from the road. There had been no particular reason for him looking apart from the fact that he was always on the look-out for intruders. Travellers, he feared and loathed them the most and it was travellers he suspected as he caught sight of the vehicle.

‘Pikies,’ he said aloud to himself as he stopped his vehicle and turned it around before driving back to the farm to get his gun.

Now armed and dangerous, he was on his way back to the barn, not along the public highway, but across his own land.

He approached the barn cautiously, stepping slowly and deliberately through the weeds and tangled undergrowth that surrounded it. There was no sign of anybody being about. All was silent, save for the gentle soporific cooing of a dove in a nearby tree and the distant sound of traffic on a road. He peeped around the corner of the barn and saw the van parked with its rear towards him. There were windows in the rear of it, but he couldn’t see through them.

He paused. A bee buzzed drunkenly past his head and awoke him from the reverie into which he had fallen. He advanced cautiously towards the van with his shotgun under his arm, safety catch on, and then stopped dead as a slight breeze wafted the scent of death towards him.

It was unmistakeable. The smell of corruption. Anybody who has smelt a dead cat in a roadside ditch will know that it’s a smell you can cut with a knife. This, though, was not a dead cat. This was a dead man sitting in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, his head slumped forward on the steering wheel.

With his grubby hankie held firmly over his nose and mouth, John Lovett walked ahead of the driver’s door and then turned back to look more closely, now upwind of the dreadful smell of rotting humanity. It was only now that he noticed the length of pipe coming through the passenger side window and held tightly in place by the window itself. Without investigating further, he had little doubt that the other end of the pipe would be found over the vehicle’s exhaust.

Carbon monoxide poisoning, he thought as, shaken, he returned to the farm to call the police. He almost wished that it had been travellers after all.

CHAPTER 1

The body was found on the Wednesday. Five days previously, the then living custodian and occupant of that body had been alive and appeared, at least to the casual observer, to be well.

The white van and its driver had arrived on a fine, sunny Saturday evening at the home of Jim Hunt, a solicitor who wearing shorts and watering the garden was not a little surprised at its arrival. Jim groaned and ground his teeth as he recognised the driver. It was Derek Spencer, a builder in his fifties that he had acted for over many years. He liked the man well enough, but it was Saturday evening.

For heaven’s sake, he thought to himself. Was there no privacy? What on earth could the man want?

He forced himself to smile as he wiped his hands on his shorts, turned the hose off and walked towards Derek who was getting out of the van and smiling at him in a lopsided way. Their hands connected in a damp handshake as Derek said apologetically,

‘Sorry to call on you at home like this, but I really need to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ said Jim mystified.

‘Now listen,’ said Derek, putting his hand on Jim’s shoulder in an almost paternal way. ‘I’m not piddled and I’m in my right mind, but I’ve decided to kill myself and I want to change my Will.’

He delivered this announcement in such a matter of fact way that Jim laughed and said, ‘Come on Derek! Pull the other one!’

‘No, no, Jim, listen,’ said Derek earnestly. ‘I mean it. You know the trouble I’ve had with that cow of a wife – I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t get rid of her,’ he continued with mounting irritation and much rolling of the eyes. ‘It’s no good, she’s cleverer than me and she runs rings around me.’

‘That’s no reason to do anything silly,’ interrupted Jim, continuing and stating the obvious, ‘You can sort it out through the courts.’

Again he groaned inwardly. He had been aware for many months of the breakdown of the marriage and had done his best not to get involved. Notwithstanding the fact that he had told Doreen Spencer, Derek’s wife, that he could not help her and that she needed to consult a solicitor other than himself, she had still from time to time rung him sounding desperate and appealing for advice and help he was not able to provide.

So, despite the fact that he had not been directly involved, he had, as it were, watched the shipwreck from afar. When he said to Derek that the pair could sort it out through the courts, he knew that in saying that it was something he had already said repeatedly and which for some reason neither had been able to grasp or attempt, at least as far as he was aware.

Derek continued. ‘I know and you have always seen me right, but,’ he paused and looked Jim straight in the eyes, ‘I’m over 50 and I just haven’t got the strength to fight her anymore. I’ve tried everything I know. I gave her money to go away, but she came back and I’ve had enough. She’s too clever for me.’

‘Look, Derek,’ said Jim, trying to appear and sound serious which was not easy given the air of unreality he felt about the conversation. Was it really happening? Was he imagining it? He patted Derek on the shoulder in a comforting way, but really to satisfy himself that he was actually there. He felt solid enough so he continued, ‘You cannot do something daft just because of a domestic problem that can be sorted out.’

‘True,’ replied Derek, ‘but it’s not just that. The business has gone down the tubes.’ He paused and added, reading Jim’s mind, ‘Oh, I know it’s my own fault with my drinking, but that bastard manager has nicked so much money I don’t see how I can recover. I’m too old now to start again.’

Jim decided to change the subject. ‘Come in the house and have a cup of tea,’ he suggested.

‘Alright,’ said Derek, ‘but you won’t change my mind.’

They went in the house together. It was summer and warm and the kitchen door was open. The smell of baking wafted out of the door as they entered.

Jim knew Derek of old. He was a man of extremes; hard-working one moment then off on a week-long bender the next when no-one would know where he was. He had deliberately and knowingly drunk his way through one marriage and one business to Jim’s certain knowledge.

He had come up the hard way. Born on a pre-war council estate in Barnet with a father who worked as a ‘scav’ or scavenger, as a street sweeper was called, was not the most promising of starts. He knocked about doing odd jobs after leaving school at fourteen until he was called up to do his National Service which, unfortunately for him, coincided with the war in Korea which he had, however, survived with no visible marks apart from the tattoo on his right forearm which depicted a cross and the words ‘Korea, never again!’

After he completed his service, he returned home and drifted into building work. He was observant and had an agile mind, and without serving any kind of apprenticeship he soon acquired a sufficient smattering of knowledge of the various trades to set himself up as a jobbing builder and prospered on the rising tide of England’s post-war economic recovery that began to gather pace during the 1960s.

Derek had a restlessness about him and a kind of self-destruct built into his character so that he would work hard to build a home and a business and then, having achieved that, it was almost as if he became bored with success and he would set about dismantling everything. This he achieved by the simple but destructive process of drinking to excess.

Drink always had a fascination for him. He had no hobbies apart from drinking. His living room in one home Jim had seen actually resembled the inside of a public house, the impression reinforced by the presence of a full-scale bar that he had obtained from a public house he had worked on and which was complete with beer pumps, barrels and all the optics and other paraphernalia that would greet a member of the public on entering a pub.

Behind the bar there was a large mirror which bore the legend ‘In Vino Veritas’ inscribed upon it in letters of gold, and next to it was a large photograph of a scantily-clad and extremely well-endowed barmaid who offered the invitation to ‘Ride Me If You Can’. Quite how it was possible to rise to both challenges was a mystery to Jim.

A complete range of every imaginable form of spirit and liquor completed the bucolic picture of an alcoholic’s heaven.

Both Jim and Derek sat down at the kitchen table after Jim had evicted the family cats from the chairs. Hortense, a really snotty, piebald cat retreated to the window sill where she sat and peered at them both imperiously.

Jim looked at Derek carefully. In his judgement he was without doubt sober. Jim had had some experience of Derek in circumstances where that had most definitely not been the case.

Like all alcoholics, Derek liked nothing better than to have a drinking companion and so if Jim had to meet with Derek about business, then he tried to do so as far away from lunchtime as possible to avoid being dragged out to lunch, which for Derek meant the start of a long drinking session that at best would last hours or until he fell over. Unfortunately, such was his tolerance to alcohol, acquired after much practice; it took a lot to knock him over.

Jim had been caught out by this once and that had been enough. Drunks can turn nasty when you don’t join in and Derek had become unpleasant when Jim had said, in an effort to get away politely, that he had to get back to his office for an appointment. In the end, Jim had simply got up and said, ‘Cheerio,’ and left Derek to it. Derek had taken the precaution of laying in some reserve companions by buying drinks for the whole bar when he had seen that Jim was determined