by CA Sole
‘Surely, if she had me followed, and how else would she know, the private eye would have told her within a day or two?’
‘True, but how are we going to prove that it happened so quickly? She’s not going to admit to hiring a detective anyway, she’ll dream up some other story.’
He put the last of his baguette into his mouth and mumbled, ‘What’s the other ground?’
‘Unreasonable behaviour to the extent that she can no longer bear to live with you. That includes: physical violence?’
‘No, absolutely not, but it’s been damn difficult to resist, as I told you.’
‘Verbal abuse - insults, threats and so on?’
‘No.’
‘Drunkenness, drugs?’
‘No drugs, but I have been pissed a few times without any harm to anyone or thing.’
‘Refusing to pay for housekeeping?’
He scoffed without humour, ‘Not a chance, I pay for everything. All she’s done is stake a claim by paying for the alterations to the house.’
‘Is she a beneficiary on any of your insurance policies? If so, change those as soon as you can. You don’t know when she’s going to start proceedings and you must be ahead of that.’ I thought for a moment, ‘Giles, you had better rewrite your will and take her out of it.’
‘Good point. Why aren’t I thinking like that? It’s a bloody obvious thing to do, but it never occurred to me.’
We sat in silence for a while and I absently watched two girls running up the path. One was wearing a sports bra which flattened her chest, but the other, a heavily endowed lass, obviously wasn’t. Giles was also watching them. He caught my look and laughed, ‘Some things never change. Two almost middle aged men can quickly put their troubles behind them for a chance to admire a pair of bloody great unrestrained boobs bouncing around!’
‘It’s what makes the world go round.’
‘There’s enough kinetic energy in that pair to substantiate your theory,’ he laughed again. It was a good sound after all the gloom. Then out of the blue he asked, ‘How’s Juliet?’ Without giving me a chance to answer, he added, ‘Lovely girl, simply, bloody wonderful! For all the women I’ve had a crack at, I’d drop the lot for a girl like her. You lucky sod!’ Then he looked at me meaningfully, ‘That’s if she doesn’t boot you out.’
The mention of Juliet spurred him on to try again to stop me from participating. He couldn’t bear the thought of either of us suffering from the outcome of his undoubtedly acrimonious divorce. Our names would be dragged through the gutter press. Juliet would only be involved indirectly, but she and her photograph would probably make it into the tabloids as the girlfriend who I cheated on with Giles' wife.
We argued over my involvement for at least five minutes, but when faced with all the negative aspects if he emerged as the guilty party, he eventually capitulated. ‘So what do you propose?’ he asked resignedly.
‘Well, for starters, I’ve bought us both a cheap smart phone with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. The numbers are not known to anyone except me. It means we can communicate without fear of being intercepted.’ He agreed, took the phone and tapped my new number into the contacts list.
Sandra had a record of making unexpected moves and keeping Giles off balance, forcing him into a reactive position. What we had to do was turn that around somehow and take the initiative. We also had to try and think what her next moves could be. ‘If she can’t get you to give her a black eye, then she could ask Tony.’
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but I’m not sure how to deal with it.’
‘Something else occurred to me,’ I said. ‘What were her reasons for seducing me? She might use the episode to drive a wedge between us. To do that, you have to know it happened, so either I would have to confess to it, or she will tell you. One result of you knowing is that you would lose your temper and our friendship would be over or at least fragile, leaving you a weaker person. However, if after a time, you do not react to the knowledge of my sleeping with her, then she will assume that I haven’t told you and she would then do so herself. If this happens, either she uses the episode to taunt you into violence or something rash, or she might claim that I raped her which would again drive that wedge.’
‘Good point, so what do we do about it?’
We fell silent for a short while, thinking. Four young people were sitting below us. They started shoving each other about, laughing and trying to get one of the men to roll downhill. A girl was trying to pin the victim’s arms to his sides, while the others were pushing him over.
Giles made a suggestion, ‘Actually I know what we should do. Involves a bit of pride swallowing, but sacrifices must be made.’ I carefully pulled a stalk of grass out of its base to rid my teeth of crumbs and lay back to watch the air traffic above. Giles rested on one elbow as we discussed his idea and debated the finer points to a rough conclusion. The positive effort restored his humour and lifted his spirits, and by the time we left he was quite buoyant. He could see how we were going to win this and was ready for the fight ahead. For it would be a fight; Sandra was not going to lie down and give in, it wasn’t in her nature. And we both knew she was going to play very dirty indeed.
As Giles had predicted, she called me shortly after the train left Paddington. Her voice, husky and magnetic, was a siren song, but had I not known of the rocks that she was drawing me towards, I would not have had such difficulty in responding with enthusiasm. The possibility of her claiming rape would be annulled by asking for a second encounter, surely? She wanted to meet the next day, but I managed to put her off until Friday; I needed time for the extensive preparation required.
CHAPTER SIX
My home was an old farm house a little way out of the village. The farm had been too difficult for the original owner to manage and so was sold back in the Fifties. Most of the lands were bought by a local war widow who rented them out to surrounding farmers, but the remaining two large fields and the house and buildings were taken on by a succession of owners of which I was the latest.
A tree lined gravel drive led off the lane directly to the house then skirted round it to the right and back again so that the house hid the view of the farm buildings from the road. It continued into a widened area that some occupant in the past had concreted between the two sides. To the right were stables and cow sheds with a silage pit at the end. To the left were two barns, a tractor shed and three storage rooms.
The place was much too big for me as a single man, but I rented out the larger of the barns to a woodworking business and the other outbuildings for garaging, stabling and storage. The second and smaller of the barns was empty. I had advertised it for rent but there had been no takers so far. There was some noise from the carpenter’s shop which, due to its rather traditional nature, didn’t worry me. In any case, there were a host of lovely smells from the different woods that wafted in when the wind was right. It was peaceful enough and there was a bit of security with others around when I was travelling. Beyond the barns and the silage pit were two long adjacent fields which belonged to me and which I rented out under short term grazing lets. I was therefore technically a farmer, even though I wasn’t personally farming.
Shortly beyond the gate from the yard, the ground sank away between the two fields into a shallow valley. This became progressively steeper as it descended and left each field on its own shoulder stretching out from the ridge. At the top of the right hand field and sunken into a slight rise was a WW2 pillbox. It had a commanding view over the valley, as well as the left hand field and the wood which ran downhill from the far end of it. I didn’t own the wood, but often walked Tina, my yellow Labrador in it. People kept asking me why I didn’t bulldoze the pillbox flat, but I rather liked the ugly piece of history which was now almost covered in ivy. I took Juliet there once and we found it full of chip packets, cool drink and beer cans, glass and other junk. We cleaned the place up, shovelling and sweeping years of muck off the floor. We opened the access, which was almost cl
osed with brambles, cleared the embrasures of grass and weeds and finally painted the inside so that it looked almost homely. We looked it up on Wikipedia and concluded it was a type 22, because it was hexagonal with a Y shaped internal wall for anti ricochet purposes. ‘We need some pictures up on that,’ she had pointed, ‘I think it would suit a Picasso!’
When we’d finished the decoration on the second day and a couple of showers had passed by outside, I fetched a bottle of Chablis and some cheese, and we sat on the roof and watched the sun descending past a few red-tinted clouds. Tina, meanwhile, amused herself hunting unseen wildlife in the bushes. The light had that wonderful clarity that comes after evening rain, and a rosy reflection from the clouds bathed the countryside. Halfway through the bottle, I took her hand and led her down through the entrance. With no word of agreement necessary, I pinned her up against the wall so that her head fell back into the embrasure and the light glistened off her hair. She fastened her mouth over mine, wrapped her arms round my neck and her legs round my waist while I struggled out of my shorts. It was urgent and brief but passionate and fun. When we finished, she stayed in the same position for a while, her head in my shoulder, before looking me in the eye and wordlessly smiling her love. ‘I don’t think Picasso,’ I murmured in her ear, ‘some images from the Karma Sutra would be more appropriate.’ She giggled. I became very fond of that pillbox.
In the wood which extended from my other field was a dilapidated shed. The timbers were rotten and covered in moss, and the corrugated iron walls were so rusted at the bottom that they had crumbled away, leaving a foot high gap to the outside in places where brambles tried to fight their way in. The usual litter was strewn across the floor, drink cans, wrappers and packets; the detritus of lazy trespassing litter bugs. The door hung on one broken hinge, threatening to fall off at any time. The floor was wooden but soft with rot, and the window was virtually opaque with mould and water stains. I said we should renovate it with the same enthusiasm as we had used on the pillbox, but Juliet said, ‘Why don’t we stop wasting time and you take me to a nice comfortable bed instead?’ I wasn’t at all fond of the hut.
In the house, the kitchen was enormous with a huge fireplace filled now with a modern oil fired Aga, low beams which looked too old and fragile to support the ceiling above and large quarry tiles on the floor. Juliet loved it. She wasn’t much of a cook but, wearing a red apron she had left in the house a long time ago, she liked using the range which was always on. The living room was sparsely furnished. My needs were few, and a couple of comfortable arm chairs, a book shelf, an old military chest, a TV and a pair of speakers for the iPod dock were all there was. I had built up a small collection of oriental carpets and tribal rugs from my time in the Middle East, and some served to softened the noise from the creaking wooden floor. There was another small room off to the side that I used as an office with an iMac which made the best of an unbearably slow internet connection.
Upstairs were four bedrooms with a common bathroom for two of them, both of which were small and crammed under the slope of the roof. I used a much larger room to which some owner had added an en-suite bathroom and shower, and there was also the main spare room which had a small shower attached to it. The house was warm, comfortable and felt homely to me, though it was probably too Spartan for some. A lady from the village, Janet, helped me keep the place clean and looked after Tina when I wasn’t there. I suspected that she looked after my Scotch as well, but didn’t mind and couldn’t be bothered as long as the tendency didn’t stretch to other things. What the rest of the village knew about my life I had no idea, but Janet did have an active, although kindly, tongue.
As soon as I was home, and after an extensive and playful greeting with Tina, I threw the ball for her for the last time and went to my desk. Computer warming up, I poured a Dalwhinnie, tempered it with a little water and began the search. Tina, named after an old girlfriend called Bettina who would not have seen the funny side, lay contentedly beside the desk.
The number of ‘spy’ cameras on the market surprised me, and it took a long time to decide on which model would best suit the options available for a hidden installation. Cameras disguised as light switches, smoke alarms, wall clocks, bedside clocks, table lamps, room sanitisers, tissue holders and many other options could be found. The video needed to be recorded, of course, and other units were available for this, although some cameras could do it themselves. Combined units tended to have a limited battery life however, so I settled on a pack of two cameras with a separate recording device which had a 500GB memory, which was more than enough for this purpose. The digital recorder could be stored well out of sight, but hiding the cameras, small though they were, was going to be a challenge.
Delivery from an on-line order was going to take four days. That was absurd, it would be quicker to drive to Bristol and collect it direct from the factory shop. They had two left in stock so I asked them to reserve one for me and left the next morning at seven, aiming to eat something along the way and be in good time for their nine o’clock opening. I was back home by eleven, eager to install the equipment.
My normal bedroom had a wonderful view, good lighting and the spacious bathroom. It was a place that always reminded me of Juliet, where we had some of our most precious moments. There were always plenty of her things in there. There was no possibility I was going to infect that room, but the ideal bedroom was the one adjacent with its own small shower and importantly, it had a bookcase. While this was a classic hide for a miniature camera, the first place anyone searching would look, it was the only available option.
I put the recorder in a cupboard outside the bedroom, set it up using the instructions to record immediately, ensured the date and time would be displayed on the film and selected the highest definition; there was going to be no point to all this if the players could not be recognised. Then I drilled a hole through the wall to take the leads. The first camera went on the second highest shelf, just above head height. I pushed it to the back and placed a large book on either side reducing the light in that area and diminishing its presence. A walk around the room and a couple of casual glances in its direction reassured me that it wasn’t easy to see. It was time for a walk test. I went out of the room and came back in again. Then I lay down on the bed and tried to see the camera. I played back the recording, which was on an SD card, on my computer. The definition was good as was the arc stretching from the door around the room, but the bed was not visible in its entirety. I readjusted it and tried again, but there was no way to have the camera see the bed and keep it out of sight. Leaving that camera set in the original position, I set the other model to view the bed as a reflection in the full length mirror on the opposite wall. Running the walk and bed test again proved a success, so I set about disguising the cameras with ornaments between the books and then added some personal items that made the room look as if it was in permanent use.
Finally, I took some still pictures of the bedroom that identified it within the house for possible use in court to verify the video results. I had just finished and was doing a final check of my handiwork, when my phone rang. Juliet called cheerfully, ‘Hello, you. What and who are you doing?’ Women and their sixth sense!
‘Hello Jules, how are you? Sorry, I can’t talk now, but I’ll call you back immediately,’ I sort of lied. I didn’t give her a chance to reply and stopped the call. I had mixed feelings about her calling me though, I needed to tell her what was going on, but not now. She usually had such good ideas and it would be worth having another brain on the case. From the pay-as-you-go, I asked her to call me back to save the minutes. ‘Where are you? I need to talk to you, Jules, but it’s best not to use my main mobile. It’s a difficult story and we need to think.’
‘I can only come down on Sunday, I have to meet a buyer for the neighbour’s horse on Saturday afternoon.’
‘Perfect.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing I wanted was Sandra and Juliet too close together. ‘Can you stay f
or a few days? I’m leaving for Chile on Tuesday night.’
‘I’ll take you to the airport and then go home.’
‘You are the world’s very best, you know, the very best.’ I meant every word.
She laughed with pleasure, ‘Love you too. I’ll see you on Sunday, I’m intrigued.’
You may be intrigued, I thought, but you won’t be happy when you hear what’s happening. Unfortunately there was no way to avoid Juliet being involved. I wasn’t sure what her reaction was going to be when it came to telling her what I had done, and it was worrying me with increasing intensity as the hours went by. I had to tell Juliet because we were always honest with each other, and that was not something I was prepared to destroy. I knew she would never forgive me if I kept the secret from her, and she would eventually find out, especially if this divorce went to court.
First, there was my night with ‘Angela’ Parsons; I had been unfaithful to Juliet and there were no excuses for that at all. Would I be able to justify my alcohol fuelled stupidity in her eyes? I didn’t know, probably not, and I didn’t know where that would leave us. It scared me. Second, there was the plan to help Giles which involved yet another night with his wife. How would Juliet see that? In a better light, hopefully, but it was still going to hurt her. So should I stop this whole thing now? To do that would let Giles down and I had my loyalty to him to consider. Surely Juliet would see this as an unavoidable and honourable action to protect someone who was her friend too? When I think back on those opinions now, I realise how naively optimistic I was.
My house was for Juliet, to have Sandra there was a necessary abomination. It was a job, nothing more than a job that had to be done in a place where I would have control over the evidence we needed, and it had to be done as quickly as possible. Given that businesslike attitude, I was hoping I would be up to the task when it came to Friday night, as I was beginning to understand how Giles had lost his desire for his beautiful wife.