Stranger at the Wedding

by Jack G. Hills

  Stranger at the Wedding

  By

  Jack G. Hills

  All characters and events described in this book, which was formerly published under the title ‘The Wheel is Come Full Circle’, are purely fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is definitely coincidental.

  Also by Jack G. Hills

  Inspector Rudolph Riley Mysteries

  Murdered Subject to Contract

  The Body in the Graveyard

  Other Novels

  Five Days to Catch a Monkey

  Shadows in the Sand

  In the Beat of a Butterfly’s Wing

  The Weird and Wonderful World of Frank T. Hitchcock

  Benjamin Franklin’s Doppelganger

  Dreamverse

  Return to Mount Zion

  The Casual Thief and the Constable

  Blueprint for murder

  PROLOGUE

  THE BLOODY DIVORCE

  June 2010

  “Tis in my memory lock'd, And you yourself shall keep the key of it.”

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  The lead slug exploded from the small calibre revolver like a laser-guided missile and unerringly sought out its intended victim. The accidental stranger, who had stumbled into the wedding uninvited, realised too late his fatal error and raised his hands in a desperate bid to save his meaningless life.

  But the deadly projectile had other ideas. It had been programmed to kill and nothing, not even the hand, which the man had raised in meek submission and pathetic self-preservation, could prevent that. With its deadly intent undaunted, the bullet smashed through his meagre defences and zeroed in on its target.

  The horrified guests, who were mere bystanders to the unfolding morbid tableau, could do little but stand like marble sculptures in a gallery and watch as the bullet smashed into man’s temple. Under the intense spotlights of the wedding marquee, the brilliant-cut diamond stud in victim’s earlobe caught the rays of light and as he spun out of control, scattered them round the canvassed room like the twinkling light from a dancehall’s glitter ball.

  The power of the small revolver and the interloper’s close proximity to the bride combined to ensure that the viciously spiralling bullet, like some ferocious metal mole, ploughed a deep furrow through the man’s brain. But the soft convoluted tissue provided only a token-resistance to the overpowering force of the lead projectile, which having completed its mission tore through the side of his skull in a shower of bloody tissue.

  The groom, if he’d been surprised and bewildered by his new bride’s overwrought reaction to the uninvited man, was now totally bemused to see the bright red circle suddenly appear and continue to grow in waves from the hole in his grey morning suit. He’d been married for a mere ten minutes and now stood on the brink of a messy gory divorce. His closest friends had all told him the marriage wouldn’t last but he’d never expected the decree absolute to be delivered quite so soon after saying ‘I do’.

  Who he wondered, as the light appeared to dim, had prompted such a reaction from his new bride. The violent resolution of their recent troubles proved that she was certainly capable of homicide and she’d never denied having baggage… but even he would never have imagined that it might include a Walther .22 automatic tucked discreetly into the garter of her designer wedding dress.

  Like a hole punched in the side of a dam, the bullet’s path through the stranger’s brain unleashed a tidal wave of blocked neural impulses. The violent emancipation of this monumental synaptic logjam, which had resembled Spaghetti Junction on a Bank Holiday Friday at five o’clock, after there’d been three multiple pile-ups, the closure of all routes south and a herd of bullocks running loose along the hard shoulder of the motorway, released a wave of sights, sounds and memories, which like a flash-flood during a rain-drenched storm, crashed over his sensory centres and washed away the pain of the attack.

  His eyes pleaded for answers and help from the stunned audience, but he asked for neither. Lost for words and seeking answers to the countless numbers of questions that had suddenly come battering on the door of his consciousness, he staggered uncontrollably forward like Dr Frankenstein’s abominable monster who was still high on the barrel of Bloody Marys he’d drunk on the previous night’s stag party. The wedding guests though, like the rabble of terrified villagers in the Hammer Horror blood-fest, ignored his pleading eyes and fled his outstretched arms.

  None of the faces, who gasped and gaped at his antics, were recognisable. Memories, like the daily tide, ebbed and flowed. Images and sounds appeared and then disappeared with equal rapidity but nothing lingered to face the consequences of his injudicious action. The truth was frustratingly within his grasp but like rainwater in a sieve, it was impossible to keep hold of.

  The distraught bride let the small automatic slip from her hand. Her day, which had started so full of hope and which had been the culmination of so much scheming and sacrifice, had come crashing down around her at the appearance of the spectre-at-the feast. She’d expected trouble from some quarter but the appearance of the uninvited guest so soon after the final toast had been proposed had caught her on the back foot and entangled in her own happiness.

  She looked around at her guests but could see no one she recognised. The friends who had travelled so far to see her marry, were nothing more than a crowd of blank faces who had been blurred by the tears, which filled her eyes and now ran like rivers down her cheeks.

  Through the watery haze, she glanced down at the man who she’d so recently married and who now lay motionless on the marquee’s grassy well-manicured carpet. His grey morning suit, which only a short while earlier had been pristine and replete with a cream carnation, had been splattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas with varying shades of bloody magenta that had at its heart the neat hole caused by his bride’s errant slug. Fearing for her own sanity and his failing grasp on life, she dropped to her knees and cradled his limp head in her lap.

  With her trembling hands, she gently cleansed and caressed her lover’s… her husband’s face with the hem of her white silk dress. Her tears, flowing more freely now, ran like a waterfall over the delicate line of her chin and splashed onto his face. Each teardrop appearing bigger than the last and each one washing more of the bloody gore from his features.

  Momentarily his eyelids flickered and opened at her touch but shock and death had robbed her of the chance to gaze one final time into his soul and plead his forgiveness.

  Her grief sounded as blood-chillingly cold and piercing as any Banshee could ever hope to wail and if the fleeing guests needed a rallying call to return and help their friend, they could not have heard a more pitiful and harrowing sound had they been stood on the edge of a sulphurous pit filled with the torn and tormented souls of hell.

  The stranger ignored by the demented bride and abandoned by the terrified guests, thought it strange, as he staggered backwards that the throbbing beat of yet another hangover should start before he’d had chance to sink his first shot of alcohol. Normally it had at least the good grace to wait until the following morning before it came banging on his forehead. But as he teetered on the edge of consciousness, it wasn’t the searing pain that seemed so weird, as much as the fleeting memory of his own occasional drunkenness that made him question what he was doing in the marquee. Maybe it was a dream but he seemed to remember someone, he couldn’t recall who, telling him that alcohol would be the death of him… Was that the answer he wondered, was he in fact dead or was it simply that he couldn’t ever remember being alive.

  He tried to think clearly, to focus and remember everything but the memories kept appearing through some cloudy haze and then disappearing into the fog of darkness. It was lik
e reading a book where the sentences had all been jumbled… he knew the memories must all be there but not in any order that made sense.

  He wobbled to a standstill and placed his hand to the side of his head where the unrepentant headache was starting to build into a crescendo of pain. The cure to his drunken woes shot into his head on the back of another bolt of pain… in the past massaging his temples had always helped to relieve the throbbing ache but today was turning out to be unlike any other day and before he could administer the temporary relief, a new flash of neural impulses burst free from his sub-consciousness and like a pianist practicing their scales, danced over his tongue and played havoc with his taste buds.

  Suddenly an intense flavour of a dark malt whisky was fresh and alive in his mouth… it was as though he’d just swallowed his first wee dram and his senses tingled with anticipation. His tongue caressed his lips in some vain effort to bolster the warming influence of the heavy liqueur and as he blissfully wallowed in that fleeting moment, another image from his past shot into his head.

  The clarity of the picture strengthened, as he focused his mind on the group of strangers who were sat chatting and laughing around a roaring log fire. But no sooner had the memory prickled his senses than the foul taste of blood washed away the sensation and pushed all thoughts of happier times back into the black box from whence they had come and the painful, pulsating noise started to reverberate through his head once more.

  Instinctively, he closed his eyes and placed his hands against the sides of his head in some pathetic attempt to stop the whistling, which had started so suddenly and with such finality that it reminded him of the steam escaping from a side of an old train.

  The hole in his right temple felt attractively strange to touch. It was neat, smaller than his index finger and like the Dutch boy at the dyke, he felt an overwhelming compulsion to push his finger into the fractured hole that was the window to his soul. Maybe it was just morbid curiosity, which prompted his action, but whether it was or it wasn’t he knew he had to stem the flood of incomprehensible emotions that seemed to be pouring out from his head. Nothing was making sense… especially who he was.

  But unlike the fabled boy, who successfully stemmed the flow of water, his memories, good and bad, just kept pouring out. No matter how hard he tried to control the flood, he couldn’t stop them escaping and then as his left hand stroked the other side of his head, the reason for the flood became apparent.

  Shocked into a bloody trance and oblivious to all the turmoil and terror that was unfolding around him, he stood at the entrance to the marquee like a lookout in the prow of a boat and tried again to comprehend what had happened.

  He remembered some grand entrance hall adorned with animal trophies and then waking up in the white room where nothing seemed to make sense. There was a beach with sand and pebbles… he couldn’t remember how he got there but he was sat watching the seals… the seals that were so important to him.

  Then there were the other women. He could see their faces, but like so many blank canvasses their features remained elusive… and then there were the fishermen, why were they so angry with him? He was only trying to explain… to talk to them.

  Like a time-traveller jumping between moments in his life, he dropped back into the present and looked around at the masses of wedding guests swirling in every direction. Why, he wondered was he there? What was it that had drawn him to such a place? Bemused, he stared vacantly up at the ivy-clad rear wall of the building. Suddenly and inexplicably, another memory hit him like a pugilist’s right hook… the vision seemed so familiar but he didn’t know why… what was it about the building’s façade that elicited such a reaction?

  Closing his eyes, he hoped that the black veil of obscurity might sort out the mass of images and help him understand but the answer he desired remained steadfastly buried under a pile of other memories somewhere at the back of his mind. It was like trying to find a single photograph of an anonymous stranger in an album jammed with photographs of unknown faces.

  With his head pounding and the blackness that enveloped him making his legs feel like jelly, he abandoned his search for the truth and opened his eyes to steady himself. The ivy and the wall were still there… the only difference was the open window and the partial outline of the person who appeared to be hiding behind the heavy lush drapes that so perfectly framed the sash window. He didn’t know how long he’d been gone… how long his eyes had remained closed shut, but however long it had been, he was certain that before he’d plunged into the darkness of lost memories, the window had been firmly shut.

  The glint of reflective light, as the sun’s rays bounced off the small glass object, lasted for only a fraction of a second but it was long enough for him to raise his hand to shield his eyes and pull his head back to avoid the laser-like bead of sunlight.

  In that moment, as he recoiled backwards to avoid the flash of blinding light, he heard the soft, muted discharge that was so distinctive and which instantly transported him back to his youth and the fleeting memory of his first hunting trip with his father.

  The forests that had surrounded their granite house had been teeming with wildlife, but the only animal he’d shot that day had been the small rabbit. He’d spotted the creature in the nearby field, as they’d emerged from the woods and rather than take his father’s experienced advice to leave the animal well alone, he’d taken a bead on its head and gently squeezed the trigger. Of course he’d been warned that the target was too far away for a clean shot and a quick kill, but his disappointment at the thought of returning home empty handed, fuelled by his keenness to prove himself to his father had simply resulted in him ignoring the more experienced voice.

  The mortally wounded animal had run and jumped frantically around in ever-decreasing circles, until out of pure exhaustion and loss of blood, it had curled into a ball of bloody fur and died.

  Divine retribution had ultimately taken more than twenty years but like a long-lost letter it had finally and violently been delivered to the stranger’s door.

  As the memory of that day came and went in an instant, the stranger realised too late that whoever he might have been, the past was where his old life belonged. Relieved that the burden of doubt had been lifted from his weary shoulders, he closed his eyes, lost that last memory of his cruel childhood and like a blind mountaineer stood on the edge of some crumbling crevasse, he gratefully and willingly collapsed into the dark, peaceful abyss of nothingness.

  PART ONE

  THE DAYS THAT WENT BEFORE

  Spring 2009

  “A young man married is a man’s that’s marred”

  William Shakespeare: All’s Well that Ends Well

  The table at the restaurant was supposed to have been his way of saying sorry…

  Sorry for behaving like such an insensitive moron, sorry that he’d forgotten Rachel’s birthday, sorry that he’d been so weak and agreed to go to Paris in the first place, sorry for staying longer than necessary and sorry that he’d bumped into Lisa and spent almost the entire weekend in her bed… especially when there was so much of Paris that he’d left unexplored!

  Although if he’d been totally honest with himself, he didn’t really understand why anyone would think him insensitive in the first place… it was a known fact that men forgot important dates. It wasn’t their fault, it was just that their genetic makeup was different to a woman’s. It was no different to driving a car and reading a map… he never complained when Rachel took the longer route into town and couldn’t park in the space that was twice the length of the car, neither did he shout at her when she’d tell him to go left when logic, reason and the roadmap said go right… it was simply a genetic thing, nothing personal.

  Just like the trip to Paris was business, pure and simple, he hadn’t gone there to avoid her birthday... it was merely that he’d forgotten she was thirtysomething on the Saturday. Anyway, if he’d not agreed to the trip then someone else would have and it wasn’t as though he’d been
asked to visit Baghdad or Kabul… it was Paris. What was not to like about spending a wife-free weekend in the most romantic city in Europe.

  If pushed though, he’d have had to admit that the obscene amount of grovelling that he’d had to embark upon after his return from the business trip, had more to do with the wall of silence and sleeping in the spare room, rather than the fact that he’d felt guilty about cheating on his wife.

  However, he’d salved his own warped conscience and salvaged his male pride by telling himself that there would be other opportunities to go to Paris on business… and next time he’d not feel the least bit guilty… he’d just make sure it didn’t clash with Rachel’s birthday or their wedding anniversary.

  In reality though, missing a day’s sightseeing hadn’t been that disappointing… so what if he’d missed going up the Eiffel Tower or walking round the Louvre and gazing into the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic eyes, he’d had more than an eyeful of the real thing… of Lisa’s naked body and the sensuous way in which she had reminded him just how good in bed she really was, and that body… oh boy, what a body. The contours were still as he remembered them. There’d been no landslips, no continental drifting and her nipples were still inverted, like two small inactive volcanoes. No matter how hard he’d sucked and caressed them, the little beauties had stayed hidden away and refused steadfastly to come out and play. So after two hours of trying to prove a point, he’d given up and relaxed in his own small deluded world where it was a known fact that if he couldn’t persuade them to pop up, nobody could.

  ~~~~~