Dead Lucky

by Lee Wood

  Like many of the people on the traveller sites along Fen Road over the past couple of years, he was gradually moving out of the tarmac business and into landscaping. Nowadays it was far more lucrative.

  He was well aware people would always be willing to spend money on their houses. Especially when they got elderly they could not do the jobs themselves, so they looked round for someone to undertake the work.

  All you needed was a basic website. You could find photos from other sites that showed outstanding examples of work and claim they were your own. Then simply add some fake testimonials and a fake address. If you had the knowledge, you could even include what looked like a landline phone number but was actually a link to your wife’s mobile. Far better to have it sound like a secretary taking calls to an office. Older people liked that. Just like they still read the local newspaper. So a small advert in the classifieds section more than paid for itself.

  Years back, before the tarmacking business, Kevin had offered his services as a builder, but the shoddy work and payments for work that was never completed was when he had first come to the attention of the local trading standards officer and eventually led to him being sentenced to three years for deception.

  Luckily his crafty barrister had managed to persuade the judge his client if given this one final chance would reform and so he had walked out of court with a suspended sentence.

  He had even managed to get his costs put onto legal aid. The £165,000 he’d conned from people was never recovered. And no tax was ever paid. And with a new sucker born every minute, there was no shortage of mugs he would be able to take advantage of.

  4

  Roger Maynard

  It was late in the day when Roger Maynard’s PA, Wendy Northgate buzzed through to say he had a call from Arthur Turnball of Turnball’s Transport who at the time was one of his biggest customers.

  “Roger, I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve just discovered my brother George has been syphoning off money from the business to pay for his gambling addiction. We’re close to bankrupt. I won’t be able to pay your invoices next week.”

  There was a momoent’s silence. “Arthur, I’m sorry to hear that, for both of our sakes. You’ve always been a good customer and payments have never been an issue until now. Tell me one thing. If he wasn’t in the picture and if I gave you some breathing space could the business survive and pay me in the future?”

  Arthur felt some of his tension reduce. “We’ve worked together for more than five years now, you know me. I can honestly tell you, with him gone, the business could survive but MacDonald’s who we use for some of our welding work say they won’t wait and have put our account on hold. They won’t do any more repairs until we pay them and I can’t do that until I sort out this mess.”

  Roger thought for a moment. “What if I offer to do the repairs in place of MacDonald’s? You know we have the equipment to do it.”

  “You’d trust me and undertake that repair work as well? If that’s the case, we could get over this and get back on track.”

  “Arthur, the only proviso would be George is no longer associated with your business. I’d need to be assured of that and have it in writing.”

  “I’ll get on to the lawyers first thing in the morning and have them send you the paperwork. Roger, I can’t thank you enough.”

  Four months later, Turnball’s won a massive contract with one of the major supermarket chains. It doubled the size of their business, and despite MacDonald’s going back to them and offering lower prices, Arthur Turnball repaid Roger’s loyalty and help by keeping all their repair business with Trentbridge Engineering. It was a contract that grew five-fold over the years, and the two men had become close friends.

  Two years later, MacDonald’s went into receivership, and Roger was able to purchase some of their equipment and plant for a fraction of its value.

  Another ‘stroke of luck’ came about because the four-acre site the Trentbridge Engineering occupied happened to be directly behind the depot of Felix Marks Containers Ltd. In fact, the property of the two companies backed onto each other.

  This became handy when their depot needed containers repaired quickly. And they always needed the work done quickly. So who better to use than Trentbridge Engineering who specialised in container repairs and were just a stone’s throw from your back door.

  Over its twenty-four-year history, Roger Maynard’s business Trentbridge Engineering had expanded beyond recognition. What had started in a rented commercial unit on the edge of town had grown into a purpose-built award-winning freehold building set on its own a four-acre site.

  After leaving school at fifteen, he had been offered an apprenticeship at a local engineering business, over time Roger had gained the skills and become an outstanding engineer with a lot of diplomas to hang on the wall.

  When the company he worked for was bought out by a large multi-national, he found the friendly atmosphere started to change, and not for the better. Finally, one day after being told what to do by a so-called management fast tracker with no knowledge of engineering, Roger decided enough was enough and when the company offered some of the workers a redundancy package he put his name forward.

  With eight years behind him, the package wasn’t a fortune, but his parents had taught him to be cautious with his savings. With the redundancy package it was enough to get his new business off the ground. His old company in their wisdom decided to sell off some of the machinery the previous management spent a fortune on. Roger had been lucky and managed to purchase it for a song. He had even arranged a deal so the company would deliver and install it into his new unit.

  The struggle of those early years and the various fights with the bank to borrow a few thousand pounds when customers were slow in paying were thankfully a distant memory. The business was now extremely cash rich and had grown by specialising in the maintenance of shipping containers. Perhaps it had been a question of being in the right place at the right time, but Roger felt it was more than that.

  One of the turning points came when he’d been running his business for ten years. They had moved to a new four-acre site, which Roger managed to buy the freehold to for a knockdown price during the recession. At that time, things were going well. He was making a decent living, and the company employed four people. The work was coming in, and a couple of large contracts kept things on track.

  In the fourteen years since then the business, had expanded beyond recognition. It employed nearly sixty people and Roger made sure everyone who worked in his company were well paid, and enjoyed the benefits of private healthcare and a subsidised canteen. The company even had a small crèche. And no so-called management fast trackers telling his highly experienced engineers how to do their job.

  Roger liked to think he set a good example. He gave to charity, was a regular blood donor and involved in helping out with several local community projects. He kept himself fit at the gym. He’d liked to have become a vegetarian but couldn’t quite manage it so ate as little meat as possible.

  The success of the business meant in 2006, Roger had been able to purchase a beautiful five-bedroom luxury detached house with almost an acre of garden at 36 Fieldview Lane in Cherrywood, the swankiest part of town. It cost £295,000. With the added extension and improvements he made, it was valued close to £850,000.

  The day they moved in, their only child, Julie, was nine and the new neighbourhood meant she attended a new school. It was there she met Sarah Parks whose father was a solicitor with his own practice.

  The two girls hit it off right away and had remained best friends ever since. In turn, the parents of both girls gradually became friends.

  But Roger had his faults.

  A year after Wendy Northgate become his PA, the pair were working late one night to finish a contract bid that need to be finalised. Wendy lent across Roger’s desk facing him. As he looked up he couldn’t help but notice the top two buttons of her blouse were undone and her exquisite cleavage was on dis
play. She caught him peeking and in a sexy voice he’d never heard her use before, said, “They’re very sensitive to a man’s touch.”

  Two minutes later, all the paperwork had been scattered and she was lying across his desk, the pair frantically going at it like rabbits.

  Wendy loved to talk dirty. During their affair, it was the thing that turned him on. She would walk into his office and say things like “I want you to fuck my brains out” or “I’m not wearing any knickers today.”

  The affair lasted for two years until Wendy found a boyfriend and she and Roger agreed it was for the best to end things.

  The only other time was three years later, when Wendy had been married for just over a year and her husband was eight days into a two-week training course in Canada for his new job. Just before it was time to go home for the day, Wendy walked into Roger’s office and said in the sexy voice he remembered so well, “Steve’s not back for another five days and I’m bloody gagging for it.” Roger couldn’t resist.

  Since then, over the past seven years, it had returned to a normal boss and PA relationship.

  Despite his liaison with Wendy, it hurt him when his wife was unfaithful and moved out to live with someone else. Roger’s young daughter decided to stay with her dad, and that was the turning point that made him realise he spent too much time working and not enough time with his family. He loved his wife. The fling with Wendy had just been about sex.

  Maybe his wife wouldn’t have gone off if he had spent more time at home. But he was trying to secure their financial future during a time of recession where it was touch and go if his business would survive. Luckily his hard work had paid off, and now it was highly successful. Nowadays, most of his customers were large well-established companies and needed the services he offered more than he needed them.

  5

  Kevin O’Connor

  The headline of the Trentbridge Times read ‘Schoolteacher in Car Park Coma Attack Dies’.

  When he saw it, Kevin O’Connor knew it meant trouble.

  The incident happened outside the Five Bells pub nearly three months earlier. Kevin had hit the man over the head from behind with an iron bar.

  He hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. And the brutal kicking he and his two sons, Lennox and Tyson, had given the man as he lay unconscious on the ground didn’t help matters.

  For a while, it seemed the man would regain consciousness and make a recovery of sorts, but recently he had taken a turn for the worse, and now he was dead.

  There was a witness sitting in his car who had seen the entire event and called the ambulance and police but had then driven off. However, the police had tracked him down through the 999 call he made and he gave a statement describing the three assailants. Detective Inspector Eden Gold who had been heading up the enquiry interviewed Kevin at the time but as the victim had looked set to recover and there was only one witness prepared to come forward, the Crown Prosecution Service had decided there wasn’t enough to be certain of a conviction in court.

  However, even in the current flawed justice system murder was seen as a top priority case and the police now upgraded it to a murder enquiry. They would come back to question Kevin again as they had done at the time of the incident. The extra resources required in such a case would be made available in the hope of obtaining a conviction.

  Maybe it was a good time to go back to Ireland for a few months until things had blown over? Although he and his family had lived in Trentbridge for the past twelve years, he still had property back home.

  The last thing he needed was the police sniffing around again. He had a large drug shipment due in shortly, and was aware from his contact inside the local police station the drug squad looked into his affairs from time to time but so far he had managed to keep two steps ahead of them. He had laid false trails so they would use up their resources and budget concentrating on the low-hanging fruit. But with everything going on, the pressure was beginning to mount.

  Most days he was his normal self. Nothing seemed to worry him, and if anyone got in his way, he simply took care of them.

  For the first time in years he argued with his wife Sadie, and was aware his intake of alcohol had increased considerably, but he had always been able to handle it in the past and was sure once the pressure was off things would go back to normal.

  Most of the time he was a laid-back sort of character but not a man to cross if you knew what was good for you.

  6

  Julie Maynard – Saturday 7 July

  As she woke up and opened her bright blue eyes, Julie Maynard knew this was going to be a day to remember. For once she was sober on a Saturday morning. She held back the previous night because this was the special day she had been looking forward to for weeks. She was saving the hangover for after that night. When she went to sleep the previous night, she was twenty years old. That morning she was twenty-one, and the main reason for her smile was at seven o’clock that night the place to be in Trentbridge was going to be 36 Fieldview Lane in Cherrywood.

  Her lovely wonderful daddy had spared no expense for his princess. It had taken a lot of planning. But now everything was ready. Invitations had gone out to sixty guests inviting them to an outrageous and over the top fancy dress party. The caterers and entertainment had been booked. The local wine merchants thought it was Christmas and New Year all wrapped into one.

  Julie was certain none of her friends would forget Saturday the seventh of July.

  She yawned as she stretched her arms above her head. She walked over to the large south-facing window and flung open the curtains, letting the bright rays of sunshine burst into her room.

  It was her dad’s house. Since he and Julie’s mum Francis had separated he lived alone, apart from his only spoilt daughter.

  Six years earlier, her mum had got tired of him working long hours and had found refuge in the arms of another man. At first, it was because someone had noticed her, but as time had gone on, they had fallen in love, and she had made the decision to move out. Now Julie’s mum lived a few streets away on Welham Park with her long-term boyfriend.

  It affected Julie at the time and she had gone a little off the rails. However, her dad had cut down on his work and spent more time with her. Thankfully all of that mess was behind her. Now she had her whole life ahead of her.

  As she stepped into the shower, the party was all she could think about. It would be a night of pure celebration. All of Julie’s family and friends would be there. Dad had hinted he’d bought her something special. For the past week at breakfast, he had teased her, showing her two gift-wrapped boxes. One was about six inches by four inches. The other was flat and slightly larger than the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Julie had an idea the small box contained the keys to the bright red Audi TT car she hinted she wanted when they had visited the car showroom a few weeks earlier. And she was her daddy’s girl and usually got her way.

  She had no idea what the other gift was. Dad was beaming about it but giving her no hints or clues. She would just have to wait and see.

  Two years earlier, Julie started working for her father in his engineering business. She was the office junior, learning the trade from Wendy Northgate who had worked for Julie’s dad for the past eleven years.

  Although Wendy was thirty-nine, she remembered what it was like to be twenty and cut Julie a fair amount of slack, especially when she arrived at work late, after a night of excess alcohol and clubbing. But she didn’t take any crap, even if Julie was the boss’s daughter.

  The two women got on well. Wendy was extremely good at her job and ran the office like a well-oiled machine. Julie, on the days she wasn’t suffering from a hangover, was learning a lot from her. But she lived for her free time when she could let her hair down.

  Young free and single and with blonde hair, five feet six, a slim body, a good figure and long legs meant Julie was extremely popular with the opposite sex. And she liked to party – hard. A typical night would be having her best friend Sarah co
me round at about seven o’clock, listening to music, opening a bottle of wine, followed by a glass or three of Baileys. Then taking a taxi into the town centre and hitting their favourite bar. Then walking across town from club to club in short skirts and high heels whatever the weather or temperature. It was what all the girls did.

  She hadn’t had a long-term regular boyfriend since Craig Dawson. He was from a council estate on the other side of Trentbridge. They met when she was fifteen and she was rebelling against everything. He was eighteen. He had taken her virginity two days after she turned sixteen. Over the next two years, they had been an item. She thought she loved him, even though he treated her like shit. She couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t be together. She could forgive him everything even the occasional slap or punch when he was drunk or angry. After all, the next day he would be full of remorse.

  Then one night as they had fallen asleep in his bed, the police had called and taken him away. It appeared he liked taking cars that didn’t belong to him. It was his fifth offence, and was sentenced to two years in prison. Attending court, Julie suddenly found herself confronting two other girls who also claimed to be his girlfriend.

  The whole affair had made Julie realise men couldn’t be trusted.

  When Craig was released from prison after serving ten months, he called at the house to see Julie. When she told him she had moved on and she didn’t want to see him anymore, and he should do the same, he started to stalk her. He would stand outside the house and watch for her light to come on as she went to bed. If she looked out of the window in the middle of the night, he would be standing there. He bombarded her with up to twenty texts or calls a day, slashed the tyres on her dad’s car and damaged the bodywork; killed the family cat and left it on her front doorstep. The police cautioned him on several occasions, but he just kept coming back. After nearly five months, just as it seemed to be getting worse, he was arrested for his involvement in a car-ringing operation and was jailed for six years.