by A. B. King
“That,” said Martin deliberately, “is a bit of long story; I’ll tell you later.”
“Hm, sounds interesting,” Charles said, and rose from the chair again. “Anyway,” he added, “I have to go now; I’ve quite a few things to do if all this mess is to be cleared up. I’m really glad you are ok, and I’m sorry I doubted you to begin with but I’m glad it’s sorted out; I only wish it could have been done in a much less dramatic manner.”
“I guess that makes two of us,” Martin commented wryly. “It has been quite an experience.”
“Yes, it has certainly been that. I’ll look in again tomorrow; meanwhile, I’ll let Beverley know that she can come in to see you now. Cheerio, Martin.”
“Bye Charles; thanks for everything.”
The door closed, and Martin laid back thinking. Now that it was all over it seemed somehow unreal. That so much could have happened, and all in the span of about a week, was hard to take in. He had only come down to Springwater House in an effort to stave off depression, and the trip had all but cost him his life. What was worse, indirectly it had brought at least three other people to their own sad end. It was a sobering thought. He looked up as the door opened again, gently at first, and then it was flung wide.
“There, I told you my Dad was a tough old bird,” cried Beverley as she rushed through the doorway closely followed at a more sedate pace by June. She said the words brightly, yet there were tears in the corners of her eyes. “He may be singed,” she added as she bounded forward, “but he will be as good as new in no time, you’ll see!” As she reached the bed she flung her arms round him and hugged him as if frightened he might escape.
“Whoa,” Martin exclaimed, “with a squeeze like that you could be a professional wrestler!”
“Not so much ‘an oven ready chicken’ as a bit of a phoenix,” June commented, crossing over to the far side of the bed and smiling down at him. “How are you feeling?”
“Like somebody clouted me with a bargepole,” he said hoarsely, “but I’ll live!”
He caught sight of the bandages on her hands, and the badly singed state of her hair.
“I hope the burns aren’t too bad?” he added.
“I think June deserves a medal,” Beverley announced. “She’s the bravest person I’ve ever met! Do you know what she did?”
June looked embarrassed. “Now don’t exaggerate, Bev,” she protested.
“She dragged me out through the flames,” Beverley continued undaunted, “and before anyone could do anything to stop her, she went straight back in! I was sat outside bawling like a silly kid, and she just went straight back in! I thought I’d lost both of you, but minutes later she dragged you out! I couldn’t believe it, you were both on fire, I could see the flames all round you, but she wouldn't let go until two fire-fighters pounced on you! I didn’t know whether to scream with delight or cry my eyes out! I think she’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known!”
Martin looked up at June’s embarrassed face, and then reached up a bandaged hand towards her.
“Charles told me,” he said quietly. “I owe you my life. I’ll never forget that.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she protested. “I didn’t know what I was doing! If I’d stopped to think, I would never have done it!”
“Don’t you believe it, Dad,” Beverley cut in. “The fire engines and emergency services were already pouring in through the gateway when she went in. There were police, ambulances, you name it, but it was June that saved you!”
“Police, ambulances, fire engines?” Martin asked, “I’ve been wondering about that. How did they get to the house so quickly?”
“Georgie,” Beverley answered straight away.
“Oh good grief,” he exclaimed as it suddenly dawned on him that he forgotten all about the missing child. “Georgie; is she ok? There’s been so much going on. Please tell me she is all right?”
“Don’t worry dad, she’s fine,” Beverley answered at once. “She stayed in the hospital last night too, and Charles is taking us both back to the school this afternoon. Boy, will we have a story to tell!”
“But what happened?”
“We were in the tree house,” Beverley explained, settling down on the side of the bed. “I know we shouldn’t have been but, well, you know how it is?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but continued; “Anyway, we decided that we couldn’t go back to the school without spending one more night there. You weren’t supposed to know, that’s why we put dummies in the bed. We hadn’t been there long when I realised I’d forgotten to bring my camera. I left Georgie where she was and came down the tree to go back indoors to get it, and suddenly, I was grabbed from behind by this horrible man. He clapped his hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t cry out. I was terrified; I thought he was going to kill me. He marched me away to a tree up by the fence near to the lane where there was another man waiting. He told me that if I made so much as a sound he was going to cut my throat!”
She stopped for a moment, looking at the horrified gaze on her father’s face.
“It’s all right Dad, he didn’t do it!” she went on, happily stating the obvious. “Anyway, it turned out that Georgie saw the man grab me. She told me afterwards that to begin with she was so frightened she didn’t do anything for quite a while, but eventually she came down from the tree house. She still didn’t know what to do for the best and that was when she realised she had forgotten her mobile! She thought first of all that she should come back into the house to wake you up. She came in through the kitchen, and she heard voices in the hallway. She looked through the keyhole, and what she saw frightened her even more. She went out the way she has come in, deciding that she had to go for help.
She was halfway towards the front gate, but luckily in the shadow of the trees when she saw another man coming up the drive, and there was something about the way he was moving that frightened her. She hid in the shrubbery until he had gone by. She watched him go up to the front of the house, and then she ran down to the gate. She was going to run all the way down into Wellworthy, but part the way down the lane a car pulled up alongside her, and Mr What’s-his-name, Perkins I think it was, the man we met when we had lunch at the Rose and Crown, got out and spoke to her. I think by this time it was all getting a bit too much for her; she told me that she fainted! She must have been really scared, because I’ve never known her do anything like that before!
Well, when she came out of it, she was sitting in his car, and I gather it took him some minutes to calm her down. He seemed to know all about you and June, so she blurted out the whole story of what had happened. I don’t think he really believed her at first, but she insisted that he had to do something. I think he wanted to make sure that she wasn’t imagining things, because they both sneaked back into the grounds to investigate. They were pretty close to the front door when they heard raised voices, and a threat to hurt someone with a knife! She told me that convinced both of them that something pretty serious was happening!
Mr Perkins didn’t have his mobile phone with him either, because he’d left it at his girl friend’s house at the top of the lane. Isn’t always the same? Whenever you really want one, there’s never one to be found! Anyway, the pair of them ran back to his car, and they drove down to a phone box just outside Wellworthy, and raised the alarm. Afterwards they drove back to the house, but parking just a little way back from it. Perkins wanted Georgie to stay in the car, but by this time she had got over her fit of ‘wobblies’, and insisted on staying with him.
Now, although Georgie didn’t know it, whilst all this was going on, I was still in the garden with this horrible man. He was really frightening, and kept putting his hands on me in a funny way. I suddenly thought of all the warnings I’ve had been given about men like that who fancy young girls and I wanted to be sick. Then suddenly he grabbed me and started trying to get my jeans off. I couldn’t scream because he had his other hand over my mouth. Then suddenly I heard a loud crack, and he went sort of l
imp and fell down.
It all came about so suddenly I couldn’t at first understand what had happened. Then a figure emerged in front of me, a man I didn’t know, a man with a beard. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what another man was doing there at that time of night, and honestly, I was too frightened to even try. He could see how upset I was, and he helped me up and spoke to me in a very nice way, and I suppose I calmed down a bit. I told him what had happened; yet I kept looking at the man lying on the ground. I just couldn’t believe I’d just seen someone killed!
He told me that he was a special agent, which was why he carried a gun. A sort of real-life James Bond, he said. He was very nice to me. He said that he would see what the other man was up to. I had to go with him in case there were any other criminals about, and to do everything he said. That’s when he went into the house, and that’s when he shot the man who had grabbed me in the garden.
Well, like I said, while this was going on, Georgie and Mr Perkins had been to Wellworthy and come back from the phone box. They sneaked up the side of the driveway, and hid behind the garage block when they saw the man that Georgie recognised as Mr Edwards leaving. Georgie wanted to come into the house as soon as Mr Edwards had gone, but Mr Perkins said it might be too dangerous. Suddenly, they saw the man that had grabbed me coming out of the door, he was staggering, and hadn’t gone more than a few steps when he fell and lay still.
They waited a few moments, and then advanced to see what they could do for the man who had collapsed, but when Mr Perkins saw flames flaring up all over the lower floor he dragged Georgie back, and it was then that the fire brigade and the first police car appeared. The flames spread very quickly, and then they saw June dragging me out of the door, and before they could do anything to stop her, they saw June diving back into the flames again!”
She suddenly paused as the true enormity of what she was relating really hit home.
“I thought you were dead,” she said in a very tight voice, and she suddenly ran round the bed and flung her arms round June.
“I love you,” she blurted out. “You risked everything to save my dad. I’ll never forget that, never!”
“And if your dad hadn’t broken down that cellar door, none of us would have been saved,” June said quietly, “you were just as brave; in fact if I ever had a daughter, I would like her to be just like you.”
“Then please say that you will marry me,” Martin said, looking up at her earnestly. “You are a free woman now. All you have to do is say ‘yes’ and then you will most certainly have a daughter just like her!”
“Please, PLEASE PLEASE say yes,” Beverley pleaded. “I will cry for ever if you don’t say yes!”
June looked at the pair of them. “Is that what you both really want?” she asked. “Truly?”
“We won’t let you leave here until you agree!” Martin assured her with mock severity. “Bev, lock the door and get the thumb-screws out!”
June looked from one to the other of them and back again, and what she read in their eyes was the final proof she needed.
“Then I suppose I’d better say yes then!” she said at last.
Beverley’s squeals of sheer delight were so loud that a startled nurse looked in to see if everything was all right.
“I must tell go and tell Georgie or I’ll explode!” Beverley cried, and raced off, leaving June and Martin together.
For a while they looked at each other, but said nothing. In a way there was nothing to say that hadn’t already been said before. They sat there, holding bandaged hands, and each in their heart knew that they had found their destiny.
“What did Edwards mean when he said that Charles had suggested that you should make me ‘an offer that cannot be refused?” June asked at last.
“I think he was talking about me offering you an inflated price for the lease of the flat.”
“I see,” she remarked in a slightly dubious tone of voice. “Somehow, I’ve a feeling he may have been hinting at something else?”
“I expect he was indulging in a bit of mind reading,” Martin answered smugly, “because I’d already thought of a much better option.”
“Oh, and what was that?”
“A proposal of marriage.”
There was a brief silence.
“I hope he and I were both right?” Martin asked tentatively.
“I guess he was at that.”
She smiled, and laid her head on his breast.
The End.
You have been reading
A WELL KEPT SECRET
By
A. B. KING
Twitter @A_B_King
[email protected]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR - A. B. KING
‘A.B. King’, known to his friends and associates as Tony is a retired professional hypnotherapist, who now divides his time between writing, working as a volunteer at a local community hall, and caring for his family.
Born in England's premier Naval Sea-Port of Portsmouth, the second son of a regular Royal Marine NCO, he remained as a child in the city throughout the Second World War, witnessing much of the devastation and hardship associated with this period in history. He openly admits that due to chronic ill-health and the exigencies of the war he left school very poorly educated to work as an office boy in a brush factory. It was not until he was called to do his National Service that he finally managed to catch up on his education. Most of his service life was spent in Germany, where his life-long penchant for writing and reading books was recognised when he was appointed unit librarian. Returning eventually to civilian life he found it difficult to settle, and tried his hand at a wide range of careers from engineering to salesmanship before he found his true forte as a qualified Therapeutic Hypnotherapist.
Although he started writing stories very early in life, he recalls that his first effort was at the age of about nine years old. His first full-length story he wrote when he was eleven, and it ran to fifteen exercise books before it was finished. These dog-eared relics are still in his possession, and although obviously the work of a child, give clear evidence of the imagination inseparable from successful creative writing. He broke into print with a book on Self Hypnosis in 1986, although prior to this he had innumerable articles and short stories published in various magazines. Having spent so much of his professional life helping people to resolve personal problems he has a keen insight into what motivates the people around him, and this is often illustrated in the incidents he relates in his tales.
He still enjoys writing, but he maintains that a work of fiction should be aimed solely at entertaining the reader, and nothing else. Now, in the twenty-first century, with the ease of digital publishing and the pressure of his fan-base behind him, his works have been made available to a wider audience than ever before on 'Kindle'.
Also by A B King
Disaster books
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Detective/Mystery Books
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Inheriting a large country house complete with a very acid housekeeper thrusts the new owner into an ever deepening mystery that centres on a twenty five year old crime that suddenly places him face to face with death.
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THE BROMLEY INHERITANCE
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THE KISS OF LIFE
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A mysterious and beautiful young woman appears and vanishes. Is she real, or is she a spirit of someone who needs help. In a desperate race against time only one man can prevent a
callous murder.
THE VALENTINE STRANGLER
Genre - Mystery
He was the only one who could save his wife from a serial killer, but the police thought that he was the killer.
THURSDAY’S CHILD
Genre - Mystery
Grant’s father had scarred him for life, and even from beyond the grave he was leading his son into the biggest danger he had ever been required to face.
THE WISE CHILD
Genre - Mystery
Trying to discover her unknown origins brings a young heiress close to madness as the horrors of her past unfold. Only one man can save her, but will he be in time?
Thrillers
AN ILL WIND
Genre - Thriller
A number of people become trapped in a remote moorland hotel, only to discover that a killer is hiding amongst them, a killer determined that before another day can dawn, death will finally triumph.
THE WRONG KILLER
Genre – Suspense Thriller
Alana’s sister had been brutally murdered, and then when she started to ask questions someone decided that she had to die as well.
Fantasy books
MOONSPEAR TO COMETFALL
Genre - Fantasy
Projected into a parallel universe as a slave on an unbelievably huge airship, Garnet must conquer a world in order to rescue the one person who means more to him than life itself.
THE PEOPLE OF THE CRYSTAL
Genre - Fantasy
A crystal of unbelievable power becomes separated in time. All the parts must be re-united, and only one man can do this. But he is not the only one who wants it!
SHANI
Genre - Fantasy
Faced with extinction from the results of a global catastrophe and the appearance of an alternative life form, the few remaining humans on Metanya have to rely upon an Earthman who has become marooned on their world.
Supernatural books
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Genre - Supernatural Mystery