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    The Legacy Stick
    The Legacy Stick
    The Legacy Stick
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The Legacy Stick

    By Chuck Alan

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    About this ebook

    The chance discovery of a memory stick at the scene of a road accident sets Joe Banks on an investigation which will bring both danger and reward. The reward comes in the form of Jane, the girlfriend of the man who died in the accident. And the danger comes from those who want to suppress the truth at all costs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaphne Coleridge
    Release dateDec 15, 2015
    ISBN9781516376360
    The Legacy Stick

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      Book preview

      The Legacy Stick - Chuck Alan

      The Legacy Stick

      Chuck Alan

      Editor: Daphne Coleridge

      Copyright © Chuck Alan 2015

      This was becoming something of a routine for Joe Banks. It was Friday and he had taken a walk round the park which led, inevitably, to the Cock Inn, where fish and chips was the special of the day. His meal had been accompanied by a pint of best bitter, which had been so good that he had treated himself to an additional half. He knew this would mean that when he sat down to read the daily paper that he had picked up at the newsagents his eyelids would droop, but he judged that this was a small price to pay for a satisfying lunch. After all, he had been retired now for nearly a year and, as a divorced man with adult children, he only had his own needs to consider, and he was quite content with things being that way.

      Turning the corner into the road that led down to his flat, he recalled the fact that there had been a tragic road accident there only a few days previously. From his flat he had been aware of the ensuing commotion – the comings and goings of police cars and an ambulance – even though the big Georgian house in which he lived was far enough down the road to be out of eyeshot. There was little sign of the accident now, the path and road perhaps a little too cleanly swept, but otherwise purged of the grisly aftermath of a pedestrian being hit by a van which had failed to stop and had not been identified. Only a police sign asking for witnesses to come forward and providing a contact phone number remained to tell the tale.

      Joe stepped off the curb to cross the road when something caught his eye – a flash of silver amongst the fresh fall of twigs and other debris which had blown off the trees overnight when the wind had been blustery. Joe was of that frugal disposition which is inclined to pick useful objects out of skips and would not walk past a discarded biro or cigarette lighter without checking to see if it was reusable. Instinctively stooping down to examine the object, Joe saw that it was a memory stick – he had one similar, which his son had given him to use to back-up information on his computer. But Joe had never used it. He was moderately competent on the computer, but only so far as to exchange emails, check his bank balance, and instigate the occasional search if he wanted to determine the best price for a new household object, such as a washing machine. Without giving the matter any further thought, Joe retrieved the memory stick and placed it in the pocket of his raincoat. He then promptly forgot about it.

      It was nearly a week later when Joe, fumbling around in his coat pocket for the receipt to a letter he had sent by special delivery, found his fingers closing on the memory stick. For a few moments he wondered what the object was. But then he recollected picking it out of the gutter in the road. It happened that his computer was turned on as he had been looking at some photographs of his grandson which his son, David, had emailed to him. Joe sat down at his desk and plugged the memory stick in.  The stick flashed into life and he went through the process of selecting to open the folder and view the files. Joe was motivated by ordinary curiosity. He hadn’t really engaged his imagination sufficiently to have any expectation of what the files might disclose. He wasn’t expecting to be voyeur to anyone’s intimate photographs or to read private correspondence. The sight of someone else’s financial records would have found him a disinterested reader. But what appeared on the screen somehow piqued his interest more than any of these possibilities. There was only one file available and this he opened. What he saw was pure gobbledegook. Joe was no amateur cryptanalyst eager to decipher what he saw. He merely grunted with mild disappointment and closed the file.

      It was steak and chips at the Cock Inn that day and, despite the sky being a steel grey and the wind cutting, Joe was invigorated by his daily walk around the park. Now into his sixties, he was a wiry man of middle height and undistinguished appearance – greying, balding, but with good strong features and keen blue eyes. In his younger days he had enjoying running, being decent at middle-distances. But these days he found that a brisk walk sufficed to keep him fit. But the stimulation of his walk had set his mind to work and the single file on the memory stick niggled at him. Curiosity is a powerful impulse and behind many of man’s greatest achievements. In this instance it meant that, instead of returning to his home and sitting in a comfortable chair with a newspaper open on his lap, Joe actually fired up his computer for a second time in one day, reinserted the memory stick, and again accessed the file. For some inexplicable reason the document opened correctly on this occasion. It was very short, consisting of a list of eight names. Flicking his eye down the list, Joe saw only one name that he recognised – the name of the Home Secretary. Except that the name was not in itself a unique or unusual name, and it may have been belonged to any ordinary individual. And as the list was simply made up of Christian and surnames, Joe could not immediately link them to any particular organisation or group.

      Nonetheless, now that his interest was fully engaged, it did occur to Joe that he could search the names on his computer to see if there was some common denominator that connected the individuals. The first name was promising: it was Theodore French-Herbert. This was sufficiently unusual that Joe thought a search might not produce so many people as to be unhelpful. Sure enough, he found a short Wikipedia entry about the man which described him as a British academic and author, and provided a bibliography of his books, which were mostly on the subject of biology. No personal details of family or other interests were given. But there was a note about his death – and it was dated about a month previously.

      The second name on the list was less distinguished, and yielded results for several different individuals. But the one that caught Joe’s eye was the one who was named in an obituary which declared that the man had died suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of weeks earlier and gave details of the time and place of the funeral. Of course the list could be one of the recently deceased which had been made for some reason. Perhaps the owner of the memory stick was a funeral director. But Joe still found it slightly unnerving. And the Home Secretary was alive and kicking – at least, she had been that morning when Joe had heard her pontificating about some matter on a breakfast news programme. But she was fourth on the list, and he still hadn’t searched the third name.

      Like the first name, this was somewhat unusual, so Joe knew that he would not be deluged with a lot of results for his search. In fact there was no exact match to the name in the list of results that came up. Joe felt inexplicably relieved. Without further suggestion of an emerging pattern he felt justified in letting the matter rest there. He shut down his computer and retired to his favourite armchair to relax and browse the paper. After closing his eyes for a few minutes he galvanised himself to go into the garden – which was a communal responsibility, but usually fell to him – and  spent the remains of the afternoon cutting back undergrowth and preparing the garden waste to be collected by the bin men the next morning.

      It was the sound of the bin men which woke Joe the following day. He rolled over in bed for a

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