and yet here they were, on paper, in his handwriting and it seemed so natural. Glen hoped that Leonard had had the opportunity to tell his Mother just how much she meant to him before she died.
“Now, that 400,00 your Dad talked about,” Uncle Ken began, “that isn’t the balance in that account now.”
“You know, Uncle Ken, I’m not really that worried about it. I mean it’s 400 grand so it’s not to be sneezed at. But Dad has left me quite comfortable with the will as it is. I’m not fussed about that account at all.”
But, deep down, Glen felt a lot more strongly about that than he could let on. The fact was that he never wanted to see a cent of that money. It was exactly as his father said - blood money. That cash was taken from people for the provision of a service that was evil and abhorrent. Glen’s love for Leonard, for the man whom he knew when he was growing up, was so strong and complete that the new information on his Dad’s past did not diminish it. But it did change things.
Glen was not too different from his father in that regard - the ability to compartmentalise life and separate one part of it from another. Glen was able to separate his father Leonard from the assassin Leonard - to Glen these were two completely different people. Although his father’s voice rang off these pages like he was in the room, it was a different person that spoke to him.
Glen compartmentalised.
Glen dissociated.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree in Glen’s case.
Glen remembered his father’s 50th birthday. He remembered the party they held and it was the first time he could remember seeing his father drunk and enjoying himself. It was like a huge weight had lifted off his shoulders - the truth of that now revealed within these pages.
Leonard slowed down dramatically after the age of 50, he put on weight and he travelled less. Now Glen understood that change - Leonard had already retired.
“There is a third will, Glen,” Uncle Ken said as he handed over an A4 envelope. This one wasn’t sealed with wax - it was a business-style envelope and Glen could feel the pages of the will inside as he took it from his uncle.
“What’s your role in all of this Uncle Ken?” Glen asked. “Have you always known the truth about Dad?”
“Well, I’ve always known about his work if that’s what you mean. We were in the SAS together, fought in Vietnam together. But I was never in his line of work at all. Your Dad had this ability to separate and to delineate between different parts of his life. He could switch from one life to another with no thought or regard. No part of one life would seep into the other...for a while anyway. As you kids grew, as he stayed married, his life away from action began to become the dominant one. There will be more about it in this last envelope I’m sure.”
“What’s in it? Does it reveal why he did these things?”
“I don’t know - I’ve never read this one. Your Dad sealed it before I saw it so I have no idea what’s in there other than the fact that the first part of the will concerning all the previously known wealth and possessions remains unchanged. But the meaty stuff, the revelations that could lie within...that’s just for you.”
Glen put his finger into the corner of the envelope and slid it across the sealed edge, tearing open the paper. Anticipation and tension mounted, grew within him.
What secrets were about to be revealed?
He quickly put down the envelope
“Do I want to know?” He asked Uncle Ken.
His uncle was silent - how could he answer such a question?
Glen looked at the opened envelope, Leonard’s voice felt like it was seeping out of the opened end in a whisper, urging him to extract the paper and free Leonard’s Mea Maxima Culpa.
It was written only five weeks before Leonard’s death.
“To my son, Glen.
“I know my time is up, I can feel this cancer tearing my bones apart and splitting me from the inside. The quacks have told me that the drugs will take away the pain and, at some stage in the next few weeks, I will lose all sense of reality and simply vegetate away. So, before that happens, I am sitting down to write this in one of my last lucid states. There are some things that need to be said.
“Your brother Joey - I loved him with every bit of my heart, just as much as I love you. I understand his pain, his suffering, even better than he did. He inherited the darkness and the evil that I suffer from, but his temper was from his mother. He didn’t have the dissociation that you and I have. He couldn’t switch on and off - he ploughed on to his own detriment. His life was a struggle and I had tried so many times to lead him from the dark - but I am not your mother. He needed someone like her to love him, show him compassion and empathy. That was how I knew I had been lucky to meet Julie - without her I could have ended up like Joey.
“My heart broke in two the day he died. For the first time in my life I wanted to kill for the sheer joy and vengeance of it. I had never enjoyed killing in the past - it was a task, a chore, a necessary function to be performed as part of my contractual obligations. I hadn’t killed in over ten years when Joey died and I thought I had rid my system of its addictive qualities. But it came back with a vengeance. If it weren’t for you and your mother, I would have been back in business for sure...but for all the wrong reasons.”
Glen remembered the deep, deep depression his father went into after Joey died. Joey had been killed in a fight - a one-punch attack that left him in a coma for three weeks before his brain finally turned off. The killer received less than five years in prison - but, in the end, he never left prison. Glen knew someone who knew someone in the prison and the rest was history. It didn’t cost Glen an exorbitant amount of cash - he was able to hide it within the company’s expenditure.
Glen had a lot more in common with his father than he thought.
He read on:
“I know what you did Glen...to help you get over your brother’s death. There is no point being explicit about it here though. One day you might write a last will and testament and explain the things you have done in your life - that’s your call. But your actions saved me from myself. I had never been more proud of you than after that - it showed me that you were truly my son and my respect and honour for you was as high and as proud as it ever could be. To take back your brother’s name like that showed me you were a man of honour and I have always been grateful to you for that.”
Not for the first time today, Glen was shocked. He father knew, all these years, that he had Joey’s attacker killed in prison. How he knew was beyond Glen, but somehow he figured it out.
Glen wondered what else he knew...
“If I can give you any advice son, anything at all that will help...it is this. Do not follow my lead. I am paying for my sins - not just through the cancer that is sadistically eating its way through me. I pay for these things every day and every night. My sleep is regularly invaded by the visions of the past, deeds that relive themselves over and over in my mind, hoping for a different outcome. I review nightly carnage at my own hand, surprised faces and shocked onlookers. I see distraught families, shattered lives, irreparable hearts.
“This is my burden and, if there is an after-life, I may well be paying for these sins then too.
“My advice...don’t do it.
“Don’t read these letters and feel that because you and I have a disposition that enables us to function like an automaton, that you have a predetermined fate to become one. You don’t - each of us determines our fate and yours has a long way to play out. You’re only 34 years old - please do not destroy yourself by allowing the darkness to win. You have a wonderful wife and, hopefully, maybe, you’ll have some children of your own soon.
“Don’t waste your life, son. Make it momentous, make it worth something.”
Glen put the letter down and wiped away the tear that was forming in the corner of his eye. He knew what he was capable of, and what he had already done. By some weird fate he had already begun the journey down the path his father took - a subconscious drive tha
t propelled him in a direction he didn’t understand. He understood it now and was determined not to venture there.
His wife, Amanda, was pregnant. No-one else knew as she was only six weeks into it, but there was a baby coming. If the letters from the past that echoed through Glen’s brain meant anything, they sounded a warning - ‘Don’t be like me’.
Uncle Ken shifted uncomfortably/awkwardly. He, like his brother, was not comfortable with emotion.
Glen continued:
“I don’t have much more to add to this - you know what I need you to know. The last I saw, that off-shore account in Zurich had virtually nothing left in it, maybe just a couple of thousand. I cleared it out years ago and gave the money to Jasmeen and her children. Please don’t look her up or try to contact her - she has no idea I was paid by her father to kill her husband - a man I called my friend. She doesn’t need to know either. Once your mother died, I gave Jasmeen the money.
“Julie, your Mum. She was the strongest woman I ever met. She taught me how to love, how to grow and how to be a man. I always thought being a man was all about being tough, and strong, and invincible. But I was wrong. Your Mum taught me how to be a man through love, fearlessness of commitment and opening my heart to someone. There are things that happen between a man and wife that their children never see - and never need to know about. I’m not talking about sex (and I
The Will Page 3