Wrong'un (Clement Book 2)

by Keith A Pearson

  “I’ll save you the bother, Fiona. I’m thinking about resigning.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I’m thinking about resigning. This whole mess has taken its toll and I can’t stand the added pressure of being under scrutiny by all and sundry.”

  Much like Rupert, I suspect Fiona has been stunned into silence.

  “Why though?” she eventually sighs. “You told me there was nothing to this stupid video.”

  “There isn’t. To be honest, it’s just made me realise how little I want to remain a politician.”

  “But you’re a damn fine politician, William.”

  “Right,” I snort. “I think we both know that’s not true.”

  Before Fiona can mount a defence, I tell her it would be better to discuss my plans on Monday morning. She agrees to meet with me and the weak mobile signal brings the call to a premature end. In truth, I have no idea if I do want to resign but hopefully the threat alone will keep Fiona off my back while I consider my next move.

  I return to my seat where I find Clement gazing out of the window.

  “Alright,” he mumbles.

  “Depends what you mean by alright?” I reply, retaking my seat.

  “Like, are you gonna throw up again?”

  “No. But I have thrown something — the towel in.”

  He shoots me a look to suggest he’s not in the mood for puzzles.

  “I’ve instructed my solicitor to sell both my properties to Gabby.”

  “You’ve done what?” he growls. “What the bleedin’ hell for?”

  “I’m done, Clement. She’s won, and I just want this over with.”

  “Nah, that ain’t happening,” he snaps back.

  “I appreciate all your help but this is my decision and it’s made.”

  Worryingly, he looks more agitated than he did last night before taking on those men.

  “I ain’t done here, Bill. You might wanna give up but I sure as fuck don’t.”

  “What’s to give up? She’s won.”

  He suddenly leans forward and jabs his finger in my chest with more force than is necessary. I’m not sure why but he seems incensed at my decision.

  “She ain’t won, not by a long chalk. And you need to grow a pair.”

  If I wasn’t so concerned he might jab his finger through my chest, I might have offered a sterner defence. As it is, I try to placate him.

  “Look, Clement. I really do appreciate all your help but you have to understand it’s my future at stake here. If the truth about Gabby comes out, I’ll be ruined. It’s just too great a risk.”

  “And you reckon she’ll keep shtum once she’s got what she wants?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Hope? Do me a favour, Bill. She ain’t exactly played by the rules so far, has she?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “You could at least put up a fight. For crying out loud, we’ve still got six days to come up with something.”

  Perhaps I might have been a tad defeatist, but I can’t see any way forward. And why Clement is so clearly upset by my decision is anyone’s guess.

  “Forgive me for asking, but why is this so important to you?”

  “Cos’ it just is, alright,” he huffs, finally sitting back in his seat.

  He appears to have blown himself out. Mumbling a couple of expletives, he returns his gaze to the view beyond the window. I really don’t know what to say and an uncomfortable silence sets in.

  Long minutes pass and the tension hangs. I can’t stand it and decide to head back to the deck. Just as I’m about to get up, Clement suddenly sits forward and throws me a proposition.

  “Tell you what, answer me a question and I’ll walk away without another word.”

  “Okay,” I reply with some hesitancy.

  “But if you can’t answer it, I want you to rethink where you’re heading. Deal?”

  On the face of it, I have nothing to lose. “Deal.”

  He looks me straight in the eye. “My question is: why now?”

  I’m not sure I understand and my furrowed brow says as much.

  “Why is she doing this now?” he clarifies.

  “I’m not with you.”

  Clearly frustrated, he kneads his temple with a knuckle.

  “How old is that Gabby bird?”

  I think back to the birth certificate she took so much pleasure in showing me. “About thirty, give or take a year.”

  “Right, so that Susan woman has sat on this secret for thirty years. She clearly hated your old man so why is her daughter suddenly blackmailing you after years of doing nothing?”

  It’s a good question but I can only guess at an answer.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Gabby has only just found out who her father is. Maybe she stumbled across the trinket box by accident and her mother had to confess the truth.”

  “Nah, I don’t buy that. That was one bitter old woman we met and she’s had years to get her revenge without her daughter getting involved. Any newspaper would have paid a decent chunk of change for your old man’s confession letter so why didn’t she sell her story years ago?”

  “Perhaps she wanted to protect her young daughter from the fallout.”

  “So I’ll ask you again: why now?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I sigh. “But I don’t see how it helps one way or another.”

  “Because it means something ain’t right about all this.”

  “And what is that something?”

  “If I knew that, I’d know how to fix it.”

  “Marvellous,” I groan. “We know something isn’t right but we don’t know what it is, or what we can do about it.”

  “So we find out.”

  “How?”

  “We start with the one man who created this bleedin’ mess — your old man.”

  “Unless you have a Ouija board to contact the dead, I’m not sure he’ll be much help.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he mumbles.

  “Sorry?”

  “Look, I know he’s dead,” he says, returning to the subject. “But we can still dig into his past. He must have left paperwork and stuff from that time?”

  “Well, yes. There’s a dozen boxes of his paperwork in my loft. I meant to send it to one of those paper shredding companies but never got around to it.”

  “Gotta be worth a look ain’t it? There might be something in there for us to work with.”

  I try my hardest to portray some semblance of optimism. Not so easy while contending with a pounding head, sleep deprivation, mild nausea, and the minor fact I’m about to be financially ruined.

  “If you’ve got nothing better to do then I suppose so. I’m not sure what you think we’ll find though.”

  “Who knows. Just call it a hunch.”

  I let out a sigh and confirm my acceptance with a nod. Content to have won the battle, Clement settles back in his chair and closes his eyes. I wish I shared his faith but I’m already consigned to defeat. All we’re likely to do is waste several hours and what remains of my patience. Still, I owe him the chance to check, if for no other reason than to put his mind at rest.

  As Clement dozes, I stare out the window and watch the mainland edge ever closer.

  With a little over ten minutes before we dock, I turn my thoughts to my immediate future. In exactly one week from now, I’ll no longer own the flat in Blackfriars or Hansworth Hall. By default, the cottage I rent in Marshburton will become my home. Perhaps it might be a fitting time to end my political career too, although paying rent on the cottage could be problematic without any income. They say that money can’t buy happiness but it certainly buys you options. And despite my spur of the moment threat to quit, I fear it’s not a realistic option. It would be an inadvertent twist of Gabby’s knife if her actions consign me to a job I have no heart for.

  Thankfully, the ferry docks at Lymington before I can depress myself any further. I nudge Clement awake and we disembark.

 
After a short walk from the ferry terminal to the station, I’m relieved we only have a five minute wait for the train to Marshburton. It promptly arrives and we take our seats in an empty carriage. Seconds later, it departs Lymington and we begin the final leg of our journey.

  On any other morning I’d sit back and enjoy the views of rural Hampshire rolling by, but not even the combination of autumnal colours and bright blue sky can lift my mood. If Clement has any apprehension about my predicament, it doesn’t show on his face as he dozes once more.

  He wakes up a minute before we arrive at Marshburton.

  We’re the only passengers to get off at an otherwise deserted station, as it is most Saturday mornings. We cross a footbridge which puts us outside the station entrance. Besides the wind rustling through the trees lining the front of the station, there isn’t a sound to be heard.

  “Fuck me,” Clement mutters, coming to a halt. “You live here?”

  “Yes, and I happen to like the fact it’s quiet.”

  “Too quiet, like the Village of the Damned. Makes my balls itch.”

  “How pleasant. Now, if you’ve quite finished insulting my village, shall we get going?”

  He looks off to the distance, frowning. “Before the locals arrive with pitchforks?”

  I shake my head and set off down the lane towards my cottage. After catching up with me, Clement spends the whole five minute walk grumbling about it being too quiet for his liking. I suspect he’ll have more to grumble about a few hours from now; once we’ve wasted the afternoon pointlessly sifting through boxes of paperwork.

  23.

  According to an article I once read, there are over eleven thousand properties in the country named Rose Cottage. My rented home is one of them. I believe it once provided a home for the workers who tended the hop fields surrounding the village. It’s a bitter irony that such desirable rural dwellings are now beyond the means of all but the most affluent.

  While the rent of Rose Cottage might be high, the door frames are not, much to Clement’s annoyance. He stoops past the front door and follows me into the kitchen where my most pressing task is to consume strong coffee.

  “Coffee, Clement?”

  “Tea.”

  I scrap the idea of using the percolator and grab a jar of instant coffee. Today is not a day for appearances so I extract two large mugs from the cupboard, in lieu of the usual china cups and saucers.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any fresh milk in. Black okay?”

  Presented with Hobson’s choice, he half shrugs.

  Once we’re both furnished with caffeine-laden beverages, we head upstairs to the landing.

  “It’s a little cramped up in the loft so shall I pass the boxes down to you, and we can go through them in the spare bedroom?”

  I point out the room to my right.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  I open the loft hatch and pull the ladder down. After a nervous climb up the rickety steps, I switch the light on and clamber in. It must be five or six years since I last stepped foot in the loft; a fact affirmed by the pungent smell of stale air that greets me.

  I let my eyes adjust to the dim light and shuffle over to the pile of boxes. This is their second home after spending eight years in a storage facility, after my father passed away. I leased the cottage when I returned from my second stint in Africa, only ever intending to stay here for six months. Little did I know that within a few months of my return, I’d be elected as a member of parliament and it would remain my home for the next decade. So, rather than continuing to pay for storage, I had a removal firm deliver the boxes to my loft. With my father’s solicitor having dealt with his estate and all the accompanying paperwork, I had no real urgency to sort through the boxes before their ultimate disposal — until now.

  I grab the first box and carry it back to the loft hatch where Clement is waiting. I pass it down to him and he carries it off to the spare bedroom while I return for the next box. Working together, it takes only minutes to move all fourteen boxes. I switch the light off and climb back down the ladder. By the time I enter the spare bedroom, Clement already has the lid off one of the boxes.

  “Shit,” he groans.

  “I did warn you. My father was a stickler for paperwork and kept everything.”

  Clement returns the lid and we both stare at the boxes, hands on hips.

  Detecting his reluctance, I throw him a lifeline. “We don’t have to do this, Clement. There must be over ten thousand individual documents to sort through, and we don’t even know what we’re looking for. Perhaps we should just leave it.”

  He puffs his cheeks and turns to me. “Nah. There’s gotta be something in this lot — I can feel it in my bones.”

  I remind myself I did agree to this. It feels such a pointless task, though. I take a large gulp of coffee in the hope it will boost my enthusiasm for the task ahead. I fear it will take more than a cup of coffee.

  “What year was she born?” Clement asks.

  “Gabby? Err…1987, I think. Why?”

  “Cos’ if we are gonna find anything, it’ll be around the time she was born. I reckon the year before and the year after.”

  “Makes sense, although it doesn’t make our job any easier.”

  A thought occurs. I pull the lid from the nearest box and check the dates on a dozen documents.

  “These are all from 1995.”

  “How does that help?”

  Ignoring his question, I pull the lid from another box. I’m hoping for two things: firstly, that my father had a chronological filing system, and secondly, whoever transferred the paperwork from his study to these boxes did so in the same order.

  I randomly pluck six documents from the box. “Thank heavens,” I sigh, seeing they’re all dated 1991. “It looks like each box covers a specific period of time so hopefully we can narrow our search to three or four boxes.”

  Thanks to Clement’s pragmatism and my father’s fastidious filing system, we’re quickly able to locate three boxes containing documents from 1986 through to 1988; a year before Gabby was born and the year after. If there is anything to be found, which I still doubt, it’s unlikely to be anywhere else. We shift all the other boxes to the landing and Clement drops the first box on the unmade double bed, ready for us to sort through.

  We start at opposite ends of the box and scan every document. Tedious doesn’t cover it.

  Fifty minutes later, it’s clear 1986 was an uneventful year in my father’s life, overlooking the one night he spent with Susan Davies, and my sister’s conception. Despite sifting through countless bank statements, tax notices, utility bills, and dozens of benign letters, we find nothing of significance. The only thing of interest I find is a receipt from Curry’s for a Commodore 64 computer — a present for my eleventh birthday. Perhaps my parents never considered it, but it made the ideal gift for a solitary child. I appreciated it nonetheless and it filled many a lonely hour.

  “What’s that?” Clement asks as I mindlessly stare at the receipt, reminiscing about my childhood.

  “Oh, just a receipt for a birthday present; an old computer. Did you have one back in the eighties?”

  “Nah.”

  “Really? Were you not into computers back then?”

  “Wasn’t really into anything in the eighties. I was somewhere else at the time, and there weren’t much of anything there.”

  Based on last night’s events, I suspect he may well be referring to a young offender's institute, or possibly prison, depending how old he is. Either way, I think I’d rather not know.

  “Anyway, 1986 was always gonna be a long shot,” he remarks, swapping the box for the next. “I reckon we’ll have more luck with this one.”

  And so we begin sifting through 1987. We get ten minutes into it when Clement asks where the toilet is.

  “Turn left and it’s the first door.”

  He ambles off while I offer a silent prayer he doesn’t need to evacuate his bowels again. I draw breath and continu
e plucking documents from the box. It’s all much of the same and reveals nothing untoward. Every paper cut brings more annoyance and more frustration. This feels such a waste of time.

  Clement returns within two minutes — hopefully not long enough to have contaminated my bathroom. Having made slightly more headway than Clement, I slow down slightly to ensure we meet in the middle of the box. It’s a lazy move that immediately summons guilt so I move on with a little more enthusiasm.

  Time drags and my eyelids get heavier with every document I scan. I still have at least two more inches of paperwork to check when Clement suddenly gets to his feet.

  “You’re not skiving off to the toilet again?”

  “Not yet,” he mumbles, his attention fixed on a single sheet of paper in his hand.

  “When was that mad cow born?” he asks.

  “Gabby?”

  “Who else?”

  “Gosh, I can’t recall the exact month but if my father and Susan Davies got together at the conference, that would have been in October. Nine months on from there would put her birth around July I guess.”

  His eyes narrow as he studies the document in more detail.

  I get to my feet. “Why do you ask?”

  “Look at this,” he replies.

  I sidle up to him. It turns out he’s clutching a statement from one of my father’s three bank accounts, dated August 1987. At first, I don’t see why Clement’s interest was piqued, until my eyes scan halfway down the list of transactions.

  “Twenty-five thousand pounds,” I murmur.

  “Yeah, and look who it was paid to.”

  My eyes dart across the page to see who benefited from such a sizeable payment. In bold type are the names of the recipients — Mr Kenneth Davies & Mrs Susan Davies.

  “Bloody hell,” I gasp. “Susan Davies was married.”

  “Yeah, and so much for her bullshit about not getting any money from your old man.”

  Stunned, I sit down on the edge of the bed and attempt to work out the implications of this revelation.

  “So both Gabby and Susan lied to us. They both said they were living in poverty because my father never gave them a penny, and neither mentioned this Kenneth character.”

  Clement flops down next to me. “And if they’re lying about the money, what else are they lying about, and why?”