“Depends on your point of view but legally everything. You see Rachel Cox was my wife and whoever this impostor thinks he is, he’s definitely not Tom Cox. That privilege and the fortune that goes with it, is all mine… my name is Tom Cox.”
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not… and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues"
All’s Well That Ends Well
POSTSCRIPT
THE COMPLETED CIRCLE
July 2011
“Here is my journeys end.”
William Shakespeare, Othello
The following three pressing cuttings were found in an album of over two hundred and forty press cuttings at the home of John McGovern, who died recently at his home in Bath. Mr McGovern was a senior fraud investigator with the Bristol and Bath Insurance Company and died peacefully at home of a suspected heart attack. The neighbour and close friend who found his body told police that he had been troubled and perplexed by one of his cases for a number of years but she had no idea that it had become such an obsession with him.
The last entry in the album had been made two days before his death and was from a Danish newspaper…
WESTERN MORNING NEWS, Plymouth 5th December 2010
LOCAL BUSNESSMAN GUNNED DOWN
Replying to reporter’s claims that the man had fallen foul of some underworld vendetta, Detective Inspector Denise Morris told reporters that there was no evidence to suggest that the recent murder of Mr Tom Cox was in any way connected to a local gangland dispute.
In a recent interview with the glossy lifestyle magazine, ‘Cornwall Today’ Mr Cox, a wealthy business man from Padstow, took the opportunity to explain his apparent disappearance as nothing more than escaping the ‘rat race’ and all the rumours circulating in the press about his businesses being tied to drugs and prostitution were wholly fictitious and the imagination of a madman.
Asked about his apparent ‘vanishing act’, he told the magazine’s celebrity editor that after being badly beaten in an unprovoked attack whilst on a short break in Padstow, all he could remember in the immediate aftermath was waking up, face down inside a helicopter and fearful that his attackers might still be looking for him, he simply started to walk away from the town. Pushed as to why he done that, he’d simply replied that it seemed like the best course of action at the time.
He went on to explain that a mile or two later, he was offered a lift by a French lorry driver and he hadn’t woken up until he was on the outskirts of Paris. At the time, with little in the way of options and even less money, he’d made his way to the home of an old friend and never left.
Pushed as to why he’d not made contact with his ex-wife or the police, he said that living the Bohemian lifestyle just seemed to fit his personality and that he’d only recently learnt of Rachel and Patrick’s murders after reading an article in a copy of The Times, which had been left in the Irish bar where he was working.
Never a man to shirk the direct question, when asked if his sudden reappearance was as a result of his wife’s brutal slaying or whether it had more to do with the possibility of inheriting an apparent fortune, Mr Cox told the magazine that it had always been the money.
Mr Cox was gunned down whilst opening his latest venture, Shady Grey’s Sex Toys in Truro. The mystery attacker, who was described as male, possibly white, of average height escaped on a waiting motorbike, which was later found burned out on wasteland outside the city. The police are appealing for witnesses.
Mr Cox leaves a widow, Lisa, who told our reporter that as soon as her husband’s affairs were settled, she was selling for an undisclosed sum, the family’s chain of hotels and returning to Paris. When pressed as to the possible purchaser, she would neither deny nor confirm suggestions that the local ‘business man’ was one Reginald Dickens… brother of the late Clarence Dickens who mysteriously disappeared some years.
THE SCOTSMAN, Edinburgh 6th June 2011
NEW EXHIBITION OPENS IN EDINBURGH
Scottish artist and outspoken wildlife conservationist, Martha Monroe was in Edinburgh yesterday to open the latest exhibition of her work. Accompanied by her husband Donald, she spent most of the morning talking with fans and collectors of her work before moving onto the Scottish Parliament, where her husband was due to give a speech on the need to protect Scottish marine life.
Donald Monroe, a self-taught expert in marine conservation, who survived a near fatal gun attack, which left him with a form of speech impediment, has become an outspoken critic of politicians from all sides of the house for their poor record when it comes to wildlife protection and the destruction of their habitats. A spokesperson for the Scottish Parliament told the small group of reporters that everyone in the building had been extremely impressed with Mr Monroe’s knowledge and passion for marine wildlife and politicians would help in any way they could with his plans to educate local fishermen and preserve all marine habitats, which were such a fundamental part of Scotland’s heritage.
NORDJYSKE STIFTSTIDENDE, Copenhagen July 30th 2011
MAN ADMITS TO MURDER OF ACTIVIST
Police in Aalborg, Northern Denmark, said today that they had arrested a man for the murder, in March 1999, of Professor Mikkel Oledatter.
Professor Oledatter, 31, who at the time of his disappearance was a marine biologist, was working on a project looking at the conservation of seals in the North Sea and the effect of their numbers on local fish stocks. It is understood that the arrested man is a Norwegian fisherman. Professor Oledatter, who was fluent in several languages including Norwegian and English, was last seen alive talking to a group of fishermen in the Norwegian port of Haugesund about the illegal shooting of seals.
Whilst details of the killing remain sketchy, a source close to the police has confirmed reports that one the fisherman took Professor Oledatter out in his boat to show the scientist the damage the seals were doing to his livelihood but that the boat had developed an intermittent engine problem and had been towed into the port of Cromarty, off the east coast of Scotland by a Scottish trawler.
The arrested man is alleged to have told police that during their enforced stay in Cromarty, whilst his boat was repaired, they’d spent the entire day drinking in the local pub, where they’d worked their way through most of the hostelry’s fine collection of malt whisky. Fuelled by the copious amounts of alcohol and with tempers frayed over the subject of their discussion, Professor Oledatter left the pub, telling the fisherman that he was going for a walk to clear his head. It was shortly after the professor had left the inn that the man claimed he followed the academic and attacked him.
Asked what he’d done with the body, the fisherman reportedly told police that he’d left the body on the beach, in the hope that it the incoming tide would wash it out into the Firth and from there into the depths of the North Sea.
Sergeant Jim McTavish, of the Cromarty police is reported to have told his Danish counterparts that whilst he was new to the area, he could find no record of a body having been found on the beach at that time. But he added, according to some the spring tides combined with a severe storm the previous day had meant that most of the coast around the town had been scoured of anything that wasn’t securely anchored.
Drawing a line under the whole sorry incident, the authorities in both countries have concluded that Professor Oledatter must indeed be dead and his body had been washed out to sea.
A Danish police spokesperson said that the Aalborg Police Department was pleased to have brought the mystery of Mikkel Oledatter’s disappearance to a conclusion but regretted that his mother had died before the news of the arrest could be made. The fisherman is alleged have confessed to the murder, after being arrested for drunkenness… the case continues.
Professor Oledatter’s body has never been found.
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Stranger at the Wedding Page 51