For One Night Only
Page 23
His question hung in the air.
She didn’t know how to say it. But then Marigold stepped forward. “The man killed him,” she said simply.
Roger gasped. Constance wondered why. He’d never liked Eddie, why now did he look so upset?
“Oh, god,” Roger said with an expression of disbelief on his face. “This is all my fault. I caused all of this by firing Fisher.” His head dropped in shame. Then he looked up again with sheer anger. His fingers were curled together in fists. He was ready for a fight. “I’m going to fix this. I’ll find that Drake Fisher and I’ll send his arse back to hell where it belongs.”
Constance wondered if she should own up to killing her husband. She looked to where Marigold was standing and saw her shake her head as if she knew what she was thinking.
“Where is Fisher?”
“On the beach.”
Eva tried to stop him, but he was crazed. He tore himself from her grip and with his shoulders erect, with sheer determination, he rushed out of the house and headed towards the place that said Descend at your own peril.
Drake watched him come down the steps. Roger Lang, like a gift from the devil. What luck.
He watched him practically run half of the way down, charging towards Drake as if he was a bull seeing red. Drake had only just emerged from the cellar…the cave…after being unable to find mother, to stop her laughing. When she did stop, he was relieved, but it still took him ten minutes to go back out into the open. By then, the tide had washed up to the entrance. It had taken out the bottom of the cliff staircase as the sea came in thick and strong.
Drake still had the scissors he’d removed from his chest after Marigold had stabbed him like the trooper she was. He admired her, but the guy coming at him now, not so much. Before he killed him, he’d give him a piece of his mind.
“You idiot,” Roger screamed from the second step as he held onto the wall of the cliff, steadying himself.
Drake shook his head. He remembered his father yelling at him. It made him feel inferior, but his father was always doing that, putting him down all the time.
“I give you a simple set of instructions and you blow it,” Roger Lang screamed at the top of his lungs.
Drake could hardly hear him over the noise of the crashing waves.
When he’d gone to Lang’s office that week to get his notice of redundancy, it wasn’t the first time he’d been there. The whole debacle had been on the cards for a while. Roger Lang had even set him up with the job last summer doing chores for the residents. It was an opportunity to stake out the place, he’d said. He’d paid him top dollar. Eight grand. Enough for Drake to clear out of mother’s house and go abroad. If the police went looking for him, he’d be long gone, living the life of Riley in some foreign land with Kiki at his side. Lang thought it was the money that had motivated him, but Lang didn’t know about the feelings he had for Kiki. He’d have given back every penny just to be with her.
But now Drake knew she didn’t want him. She’d proved that tonight. He just wished he’d had the opportunity to finish it. To let Tyrone have her in death only.
Roger had paid him to get rid of his wife, Eva. It had all been planned. Lang would go off on a golfing trip and take the other men with him. That would have been his alibi. While they were gone, Drake was to find a way to dispose of Eva, so that Roger could be with that other woman, Jade. She’d been to his office a few times too, but according to Roger she didn’t know a thing. He wasn’t so stupid to trust a woman with a plan to murder his wife. But he had been stupid enough to trust Drake Fisher.
The way his plan had gone terribly wrong made Drake laugh his head off at the thought of Lang not getting his money’s worth. It was the funniest thing, especially as he watched him now, yelling from the slippery steps while the waves crashed over the rocks.
It wasn’t Drake’s fault he had become distracted with Kiki…and Tyrone…and the Butlers, and anyone else he’d managed to injure that night. Lang should have known better, but Drake had to admit he’d had a grand ol’ time.
Drake held up the scissors in front of him like a silver dagger. The tips were closed to a point facing Lang. Then, as luck would have it, a wave greater than the two of them, came out of nowhere and knocked Lang off his pedestal, making his body fall head first in front of Drake while the scissors took the brunt of his fall in his stomach, puncturing him and making a hole big enough for his blood to flow freely over the waves.
That was the end of Roger Lang.
And as Drake looked down and saw the red amid the white of the wash, he was reminded of the walls in the cellar painted exactly that colour, bleeding sin all over his three-year-old mind, taking away his childhood, his life, his innocence.
Before the final wave took him, taking him out to sea, he thought about his father, around there somewhere, and he hoped more than anything he wouldn’t meet him along the way.
Final
The funeral went on all day. The wake went on all night. It was held at No.5. Eva’s house, appropriately, since it was her husband they’d buried.
They’d tried to piece together the events that happened down on the beach that night when Roger went after Drake Fisher. And when Eva told the tale to the press and it showed on Panorama two nights later, this is what she’d said:
‘My husband wanted to avenge the death of his good friend, Eddie, and our dear friends, the Butlers. None of them deserved to die, so you can imagine how he felt when he went down those steps that night. Drake Fisher had been hiding out in the cave on the beach. We knew that because Eddie’s wife, Constance, had left him there. Fisher had curled into a ball on the sand, like he was a little boy again, and he watched her as she went slowly past him to escape. He looked as if he feared her, but no one could possibly fear Constance. Anyway, when my Roger went down to the cove, he must have found him, but the tide had almost covered the beach by then. Roger drowned, along with a stab wound to the stomach, but he died a hero’s death.
The news covering the story told the tale of Tammy from No.4.
‘She was a wonderful sister and full-time carer to her disabled brother Tom. She was brutally murdered by Drake Fisher when she was pushed over the cliff on the left side of the headland. Next to her body on the rocks below were the broken remains of her brother’s wheelchair. No one knows why she had met her end, but her brother Tom told Panorama that he had been taken out of his chair by Fisher to prevent him from getting away. It was just one callous act of the perpetrator to undermine and disable his victims.’
Panorama covered the story of Eddie, the loving husband of Constance and his mother, Gladys.
‘He was brutally murdered when he came upon Fisher in the Butler’s greenhouse. He was undoubtedly stripped of his wetsuit and tossed over the cliff like he was garbage. His wife Constance spoke of her remorse at the death of her husband. ‘There will never be anyone like him,’ she told this reporter. ‘Not in my lifetime.’
Towards the end of the programme, the news reporter summed up: The body of Drake Fisher has yet to be found. A representative from the Devonshire Coast Guards commented, “We’re keeping our eyes open for his body. We’re optimistic it will emerge over the next couple of days.’
Epilogue
One Year Later
Kiki cutter drove home on Friday night, the same route she took every Friday. She didn’t go to the wine bar after work. It wasn’t expected of her anymore.
Kiki and Tyrone had been married soon after the terrible episode that had occurred in Seaview. Tyrone who now walked with a limp, took his old job back at Phillips as Kiki was promoted to Roger Lang’s job, an unexpected vacancy in higher management.
The in-house newsletter reported Kiki as being the first female to take a senior management position with Phillips Electronics in Taunton and they wished her luck for the future.
Rhianna and Tom were married soon after the debacle of that night in Seaview. He mourned the loss of his sister, Tammy, and considered her death
a waste of a life.
Her work was dispatched to another electronics expert oversees in America. For now, Word Processing would have to wait, but they hoped sometime in future, someone else would take on that particular project and that the computer industry would make some small advances to benefit the world.
Tom had his first novel published. It was a thriller about a murderer on the loose in a gated community in Devon. He hoped to make it rich one day.
Rhianna was now a respected journalist. She had discovered some meaty cases after all and reported them back to London for the Evening Standard. She lived over the road from her uncle Rolf who still made her a regular fry-up of bacon and eggs on a Saturday morning.
Marigold and Wilbur had one of their children move back home. Their daughter said she was worried about leaving them alone in such a dangerous place as Seaview. Now Wilbur spent more time in his shed down the bottom of the garden, supping on party fours when he had a quiet moment and going down the pub to play darts with his good friend Rolf.
Marigold was happy to have her daughter back, but she wished she’d clean up after herself now and then.
She had remained great friends with Kiki and Constance, keeping an eye out for them. She and Kiki still enjoyed an evening together after Kiki got back from work. Marigold still couldn’t understand why Kim had kept her job after getting married, but she guessed that was her decision.
Now, Marigold wondered if she too should think about a career. A few women were making it in the workplace, and she did have a degree in bookkeeping. She wondered if Phillip’s had an opening for a female accountant. She might ask Kiki and call in a favour.
Constance and Gladys lived together now. After Gladys had suffered a stroke that terrible night, Constance thought she had died of a heart attack. It turned out Gladys’ body had been paralysed down one side. Later, Gladys told of how she was unable to move when she watched Drake Fisher enter Eva’s house and confront Marigold. Gladys was relieved, she said when she saw Marigold plunge the scissors into the killer’s chest, but as Marigold scarpered out the back, it freaked Gladys out when she realised she was alone in the house with a murderer.
Gladys had made a wonderful recovery. She still had no feeling in her left arm, but she enjoyed the relationship she had with her daughter-in-law. Her son had been killed by Drake Fisher. That’s the story she told, and she wouldn’t be enlightening anyone to the truth anytime soon.
The police believed everything they were told about Eddie’s demise. Why wouldn’t they?
Constance took up acting again when she joined an amateur dramatics company. There she met a man, but when he asked her out on a date, she saw Eddie’s face and she turned him down. She hoped one day she’d get over the abuse of her husband, but perhaps she’d been permanently scarred. Time will tell on that one.
Eva married Jack after he’d divorced Jade. It turned out Jade had been seeing Roger after all. Everyone knew it when she threw herself over Roger’s coffin at the funeral. She’d sobbed and sobbed, and as Jack watched, he knew that divorcing her was a no-brainer.
Eva and Jack were happy. Eva received a substantial pension and a useful insurance pay-out after the death of her previous husband, Roger.
She knew he’d loved her, despite his little sordid affair, but wherever he was now, up there in heaven, she hoped he’d think about everything he’d lost for the sake of one night only.
Two new residents moved into Seaview.
A young, up-and-coming working couple took the old Butler’s house at No.8. They had heard about the tragic events of the year before, but the Butler’s daughter had convinced them that her parents had been very happy there. She had to reduce the asking price by a couple of thousand.
Despite the sordid history of the home, the young couple bought it for £30,000 in 1981, with the promise that house prices would take an upturn in the future and that they would surely gain some healthy equity. They didn’t know if that was true, but they decided to take it anyway.
Now, in the dark of night, they would sometimes hear the screaming of an animal coming from the greenhouse. They didn’t believe in ghosts, but they never found the cat no matter how hard they looked.
The new family who had bought No.3 put the house back on the market. They had been horrified to learn about the events of that night and wouldn’t risk their children growing up in such a dangerous place as Seaview.
They sold the property to an anonymous buyer.
No one knew much about him, but some said he was a bit strange, especially when they looked through the window and saw he’d painted the walls in the house bright red.
The End
A note from the author
Thank you for reading. I sincerely hope you enjoyed ‘For One Night Only’ as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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Until the next time,
Wendy