Ignoring the jug and the inherent dangers contained within it, Jenny screamed with fury at the treatment meted out to her lover and leaped at him. He had no option but to floor her with a straight left. Immediately he turned his attention back to Naomi who looked as if she might cause him yet more trouble. ‘I wouldn’t do anything stupid if I were you, Naomi,’ he snarled. ‘Now, sit down and don’t make another move.’
With Naomi safely seated, he wasted no more time. Picking up the telephone, he rang the police. Then, while waiting for their arrival, he poured himself a strong cup of coffee to clear his head. He needed it. Ten minutes later with sirens blaring, the police arrived.
Once again, his confidence proved to be misplaced. He had completely failed to take into consideration that in the final analysis it would be his word against that of Jenny, Phil and Naomi. Bill Wragg, was still not back in the land of the living and was no help. DI O’Connell, freshly transferred to Edinburgh from the Met. in London, was the attending officer. This was his first serious case since his transfer and he was determined to do a good job.
The crime scene was a confused one, but when O’Connell looked at those involved in the fracas, he saw on one side two innocent-looking, very attractive ladies, one with a large bruise on the side of her face from the punch Zak had thrown; a large slumped man who was covered in blood and who didn’t seem to know what day of the week it was; and another, older man a young police officer was trying to revive from what appeared to be a drugged stupor. On the other side was the suave, well-dressed, wealthy, lucky bastard called Zachary Storie. Not unnaturally, O’Connell jumped to the obvious conclusion. In any case, Zak’s was one voice against three, possibly four.
After an initial half hour of questioning, O’Connell had made little progress. The house owner claimed the other three had planned to kill him having already drugged Bill Wragg. Disbelief was printed deeply on O’Connell’s face as Zak tried to persuade him that the others had planned to plant evidence on Wragg that would point to him as the murderer and who, in his drugged state they had intended taking back to Carlisle. In support of his claim was the fact that Zak was the person who had called the police. His story, however, made little sense. It seemed totally implausible to O’Connell that someone like Zak would emerge the unscathed victor in an attack from Phil. The other man was so much bigger, stronger and younger and, according to Zak, he’d even had the assistance of those two attractive ladies. Based on his many years of experience down in London, it simply did not ring true. Regardless of what one might see on television, three people will invariably overcome a single person. What was also true was that regardless of the outcome, such an encounter will always leave the single person damaged. In this case, other than a lump on the side of his head, Zak appeared to be free from injury, especially when compared with the others. O’Connell also found it hard to accept his tale about people being drugged and then blamed for murder. Nor could he understand what Carlisle had to do with it. It was all too far-fetched.
Naturally, Jenny, Phil and Naomi told a completely different story, but one that was much more believable. According to Jenny, after Zak got hold of some extremely incriminating photographs taken by Bill Wragg, he seized the opportunity to use them to blackmail Wragg into parting with his thriving business. Her story had the ring of truth about it, not only because she was the man’s husband - so why should she wish to incriminate him - but also because, that very morning, Storie had acquired Wragg’s successful business. As O’Connell saw it, he was the only one to benefit from the transaction. Jenny, with a tremor of fear in her voice, also confided that her husband had recently got into his head the idea that she was having an affair with Phil Williamson, the man he had attacked. There was nothing in that silly story of course, she said looking deep into O’Connell’s eye. She claimed she had only met Mr. Williamson privately once, and that was when she was trying to work out a way to stop her husband from blackmailing Wragg but when Zak discovered they'd been together, he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, and that was why he had tried to kill poor Mr Williamson, she sobbed. She also told O’Connell that far from her and Williamson trying to pin Zak’s murder onto Wragg, it had been Zak’s intention to use poor Bill Wragg as the scapegoat for Phil’s murder.
‘Just look at the state Mr Williamson is in,’ she said pointing at her lover. ‘Does he look like a murderer?’ And there was no doubt about it, at that moment no one looked less like a murderer than did Phil. Thanks to the bang on his head when he had fallen against the corner of the fire surround and then the bash Zak had given him, he had come off by far the worse in the encounter. ‘It was only because Naomi arrived at the house when she did that Phil, I mean Mr Williamson, is still alive,’ she piteously claimed. Naomi, all heaving bosom and dimples, backed up Jennie’s story all the way.
Zak, of course, was utterly astonished when, after taking detailed statements from all four of them - Bill Wragg was still in the land of the fairies, - instead of taking the three crooks away, the police handcuffed him, shoved him into the back of a police car and charged him with attempted murder. As far as O’Connell was concerned, it was an open and shut case. He refused to be persuaded even when Zak pointed out that if he really had been trying to kill Phil Williamson, why would he call the police to his house?
O’Connell had a ready answer for that one.
‘You were prepared to commit one murder but even you thought better about committing three, which is what you’d have had to do to ensure the silence of the two women. If you think you’re going to bluff your way out of this, think again. Take it from me, it’s not going to work. We’ve got far too much evidence and too many witnesses against you. You’re going down for attempted murder and no mistake. Take him away, constable.’
Through a miraculous transference into this new dimension, Zak had escaped a frame-up for a double murder so it seemed like a bad dream when, once again, he was being wrongly accused, though this time only for attempted murder. Just when he thought he was about to come out on top, fate had caught him in her scissors-like grip. He had no friends to speak out for him and with Phil, Jenny and Naomi all supporting each other, he’d been well and truly stitched up. It was hard to accept but it seemed that, regardless of the dimension in which he was living, he’d always been destined for jail.
As he was formally charged, and with those thoughts racing through his mind, he shook his head in disbelief and gave a wry smile. Spotting the smile and mistaking its meaning, DI O’Connell said:
‘You’ll be smiling on the other side of your face when you’re sent down for ten years.’
‘You don’t understand Inspector and, what’s more, I’d never be able to make you understand,’ he said, resignation in his voice’
Again, O’Connell mistook his meaning.
‘You smart asses make me sick,’ he said with some rancour. ‘You always think you’re so bloody clever and everyone else is so thick, don’t you. But I’ll give you this one bit of advice for free. You don’t have to worry about me, matey. I’ve done everything by the book to make sure this charge sticks and unless you can make the judge understand what you think I’m too stupid to understand, you’re going down for a long time. Watch me at your trial; I’ll be the one smiling. Just wait and see.’
Zak spent a very uncomfortable night in the police cells and the next morning the officer on duty brought him the morning newspaper to read with his breakfast. His smiled his appreciation but his smile quickly froze on his face when he realized what was behind the apparently thoughtful gesture. There, on the front page, giant headlines proclaimed, ‘Prominent Edinburgh Car Dealer Charged with Attempted Murder.’ The article did not actually name him but gave sufficient information that anyone who knew him would easily be able to recognise him. He pushed the food away. His appetite had suddenly deserted him. Indeed, he felt suicidal. Without a word, he went and lay back on his bunk. With a sardonic smile on his face, the police officer went back to report the effect the newspa
per had had on their latest prisoner.
Later, that same afternoon, O’Connell appeared in Zak’s cell.
‘It seems you might have been telling us the truth after all, sir,’ O’Connell said, the disappointment not quite hidden in his voice.
Zak sat up on bunk. ‘You don’t know how pleased I am to hear that, Inspector. But what’s brought about the change?’
O’Connell didn’t answer directly. Instead, he asked a question of his own. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you’d asked someone to bug your house, sir? You’d have saved yourself, as well as us, a lot of trouble if you had.’
That’s when it all fell into place. As Brierley explained when he and Zak were finally allowed time together:
‘I didn’t know what had happened until I read this morning’s headlines. Of course, I immediately guessed that you were the Car Dealer they were referring to and that’s when I checked the tapes. As you know, I was unhappy about your chosen course of action. I could see it all going horribly wrong and it seems I was right.’
Zak nodded glumly. He knew he’d been pig-headed and should have listed to the sound advice Brierley had offered.
‘Fortunately,’ Brierley continued, ‘because of my concern, I hadn’t got around to disconnecting my bugs which picked up everything that happened in your sitting room. The voices are unmistakable and the police have accepted them in evidence as it was you who authorized them. They are questioning the other three as we speak.
Jenny and Phil were jointly accused of attempted murder, blackmail and attempted kidnapping and were each given seven years imprisonment. Naomi, as their willing accomplice, received a three-year sentence. They found Bill Wragg guilty of paedophilia and he was placed on the sex offenders register. He escaped a prison sentence on a technicality largely because his niece, not wanting to make a full and frank confession, which might also damage her, refused to testify against him, saying only that while she had posed for the incriminating photographs, nothing else had taken place. There was considerable doubt about the truth of her statement but in the end it was accepted.
After the case, Zak contacted Bill Wragg and offered to hand back his business. By that time, Wragg fully understood that Zak was as much a victim as he was and had nothing to do with the blackmail and extortion. Wragg refused the offer. He realized his career as a business man was at an end now that he had been exposed as a child molester so he was happy to take the money and hide somewhere in the sun.
Jeannie had never been very far from Zak’s thoughts and with time at last to do so, he flew down to London and then on to Croydon. He was determined to locate his wife, so badly was he missing her. Strangers were living in his old house in Disraeli Street, which he hardly recognised so gentrified was it. There were even window boxes on the ledges outside. By a stroke of luck, Jeannie’s mother, Mrs Granger, was still living where Zak remembered, but she lived alone.
She did not recognize Zak, of course, and he pretended he was an old school friend of Jean’s trying to contact everyone in her class to arrange a class reunion. Mrs Granger was suspicious of him at first but she was also lonely and eventually invited him in for a cup of tea. On being shown into the old lady’s parlour, Zak immediately noticed that though her mantelpiece and shelves were full of photographs of Barry and his family, as well as of Gloria and her husband, there was not a single one of Jeannie. Mrs Granger was very proud of both Barry and Gloria, as well as of the successes they had made of their lives. She was most eager to show him all the photographs she had of them. It seemed that Barry, who looked strangely domesticated to Zak’s eyes, was now married and had a good job up north somewhere. Gloria, too, was married. Strangely, her life appeared to be unchanged since she was still married to George Costello. Mrs Granger, however, was reluctant to speak about her other daughter and only after a lot of persuading was she prepared, very grudgingly, to produce a few photographs of Jeannie to show her visitor.
She was just as Zak remembered her; gorgeous and with a lovely smile. He ached to be with her. According to Mrs Granger, she had had one boy friend after another and had never settled down. ‘A regular fliberdy jibbert, is what she is,’ the old lady said.
‘Where is she now; is she married and if not, what does she do?’ Zak said trying to hide his eagerness for information.
‘I don’t know where she is and I don’t care,’ Mrs Granger said.
Her answer really surprised Zak. Jeannie and her mother had always been so close. What had gone wrong, he wondered.
Mrs Granger continued in a voice devoid of emotion. ‘That one’s not married and never will be, if you ask me. After all, who’d want to marry someone like her?’
‘I don’t understand, Mrs Granger. Why wouldn’t anyone want to marry Jean? She’s absolutely beautiful to look at and she looks as though she would be a really kind, caring person.’
When Mrs Granger looked sideways at him, Zak wondered if he had let his love for his wife run away with his tongue. But, after a few thoughtful moments, Mrs Granger poured him another cup of tea and sank back into her chair. At first Zak hardly noticed that she was speaking, so quiet was her voice, and he had to concentrate hard to hear her.
‘She used to be just like that; lovely, kind and warm she was. That was before she took up with that rotten swine from up Mayfair way. Said he was a film director and promised her the world, he did. He weren’t anything of the sort of course. He just wanted to use my Jeannie, he did, and when he got tired of her, he just threw her out. I’d warned her about him. I could see what he was after. But she wouldn’t listen. She had stars in her eyes by that time. She thought I was trying to stand in the way of her big chance and when it all turned sour, she was too proud to come home.’
‘Where is she now, Mrs Granger?’
‘I told you. I don’t know. I reckon she got a taste for the high life ‘cause the last I heard, she’d moved into a flat in Chelsea, somewhere. That was a couple of years ago, though. Don’t ask me where she is now. She might even be married, not that she’s ever told me, but you’d have to be a very special or a very odd sort of man to want to marry someone like that, I’d have thought. I blame that swine Rawlings. That was his name, Tony Rawlings. He was the one what spoiled my Jeannie.’ She gave a little sniff and Zak wondered if she was crying. But, when he looked closer, he could only see a cold look of hatred for what Rawlings had done to her lovely daughter.
Zak tried for weeks to locate Jeannie but finally concluded she must have changed her name or was no longer living in Chelsea.
Eventually, he was obliged to return to Edinburgh where he tried to find a replacement for Phil Williamson. Following a whole string of indifferent Financial Managers, his business gradually fell into terminal decline and a few years later he was obliged to sell up while there was still some value left in it. The truth was, he had spent too much of his life as a waster to be able to turn his life around quite so completely. If he had had the love of a good woman, things might have turned out differently, but the love of his life had disappeared without trace.
Things were quite different for Zachary. In his new dimension, he was at last enjoying the fruits of his labour. His home life was thriving as never before, as was his growing business. Many of the ideas he had carried over from his last dimension were proving to be winners and he had already established a reputation for innovation. Not only did he make many of his new devices, he also licensed the manufacture of other, more complex devices to partner organizations. He was riding on the crest of a wave.
One day, after returning from business in America, where he had been attending to his burgeoning business interests, he arrived home a day earlier than expected. Jeannie was not at home but she had left a short note for him.
Dear Zak
While you are away, I have decided to take that trip up to Edinburgh I have for so long promised myself. I’ll be driving but don’t worry, I intend breaking the journey by stopping off in Carlisle. I thought I’d stay at that Motel you stayed i
n when you went to Carlisle, remember? I know it’s not a great place but I thought it would be nice to stay where you had once stayed. When I rang up to book a room the manager was very nice. He sounded Indian. Anyway, he said the room you stayed in was free so even though we are apart, it’ll still feel like we are together.
I’ll give you a ring when I get to Edinburgh.
Lots of Love
Your Jeannie.
Zachary went cold. What if…? But no! What had happened to him was a one in a hundred billion chance. Nevertheless, he still could not shake off his concern. With a heart that was heavy with worry, he rang the Trusty Motel.
Even after all this time, he immediately recognised the voice of Mr Gupta, the one at which the buck stopped.
‘Oh, yes. I remember Mrs Storie. A very lovely lady, if I may say so, sir. And indeed she did stay with us two nights ago and don’t you worry one little bit, Mr Storie. The doctor said it was only a very mild electric shock and her confusion will very quickly go away.’
If Gupta said anything else, it was lost on Zachary. In a daze he put the telephone down.
SWITCHED: The man who lost his body but kept his mind. Page 34