Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  Elizabeth paused as she questioned her own motives. Thomas had been such a handsome boy. He had been so receptive to her teaching. They had shared a love of drawing and of poetry. ‘Ah, love,’ she thought. And she knew it clouded her judgement. She had loved Thomas as if he were her own son. And like any mother, she could not believe him truly false and black-hearted.

  Elizabeth’s thoughts drifted back to that humble cottage overlooking the fast-flowing stream and she could hear her husband uncharacteristically raising his voice in anger.

  ‘Look what he did to that poor, innocent Irish girl when she found out their marriage was a bigamous sham! She had barely washed ashore on the banks of New York harbour and then he lied to and married some other poor woman. And now he wants to inveigle his way back home, leave his misdeeds on the other side of the ocean before they catch up with him! Well, let him face them!’

  Elizabeth found herself mouthing a response that was less memory, more the amalgam of a thousand repetitions in her head. ‘But he explains what happened, his motivations. The Irish girl was beautiful and kind. He fell in love. Probably for the first time in his life. And then… His guilt is one of, shall we say, human frailty.’

  ‘Frailty! It’s all deception and excuses! Wife, you are blind where that man is concerned! You always were. He is the child you never had. There! I’ve said the words.’

  That sentiment had ended the discussion. Elizabeth had left the parlour in tears. And she wept now, but her mind was set. These were her husband’s memoirs and they should be told in his way, not sanitised by an emotionally irrational woman who could not hope to understand the intellectual reasoning of a man who had devoted his life to ecclesiastical study. She would prevaricate no more.

  Taxi home

  Jane was woken by an awful racket that seemed to be making her bedroom windows rattle on their hinges. She checked her bedside clock; it was nearly 9:30 am. Slowly, through the deafening noise, the previous evening began to come back to her. She had stayed up late talking, and drinking, with Sarah. The conversation had lightened when Duff had returned from the pub and regaled them with droll anecdotes from his and their past. That Jane had heard the stories before made them all the funnier. She and Sarah could be players in the comedy, not just its audience. When Duff’s repertoire and energy were exhausted, Jane had said goodnight and caught a cab. Now she wished she had taken up their offer of a bed. Whatever was going on outside could surely never disturb the remote tranquillity of Duff and Sarah’s rural home.

  Jane opened her curtains and looked down into the street below. 30 yards up the road, a section of pavement was surrounded by barriers and a Dayglo-vested man with a hardhat and ear defenders was shaking and bouncing over a pneumatic drill. Two similarly attired colleagues were leaning against shovels and watching. Something about their stance suggested they should have cigarettes in their mouths but neither did. Jane surveyed the scene looking for clues and quickly settled on a white van with a gas company logo on the side. Her curiosity satisfied, her attention refocused on her aching head and neck. She desperately wanted to slip back into the warmth of her sheets and sleep the pain away. There was a brief encouragement when the hammering stopped but the cacophony all too quickly resumed. Jane pulled out the drawer on her bedside cabinet and rummaged around until she found the pair of foam earplugs that had once been the counter to Dave’s snoring. They proved of limited effect, so she gave up on sleep, threw on a T-shirt and her slouchiest jogging bottoms, and went downstairs. As she passed the bathroom she thought about brushing her hair but decided she couldn’t be bothered. Should the postman come to her door this Saturday morning, he would have to take her as she was. He was always unrelentingly, perhaps unhealthily, cheerful. A grimace might do him good.

  20 minutes later, Jane had forced down a single piece of dry toast, and was sitting at her dining room table with her laptop and her second cup of coffee. The gas men seemed to have finally got through whatever mass of concrete had been in their way and Jane dared to remove the earplugs. She was still struggling to concentrate and found herself distracted by the asymmetry of her temporary repairs to the French windows. She resolved to visit a nearby double glazing shop that afternoon and then turned her attention back to her screen. There was an email from Tommy. She had seen it come in on her mobile when she arrived at Sarah’s, but had been more interested in its tone than its content. Now she was trying to study it properly.

  Hi Jane

  Just a quickie. They’ve called a final wrap-up meeting in Derby. I’m typing this on the train and will be arriving at the station any minute now. While I’ve been sitting here, I’ve been doing some digging around online and it’s come up trumps.

  I was looking at the census records for Blackwell Holme again and found the local Baptist minister was called Harry Richards. He was there for decades and must have known the Ramsbottoms well – most of them are buried in his churchyard after all.

  Anyway, I did some research on the man and up popped his memoirs. They’re out of copyright, obviously, and have been scanned in full on the Web.

  Click on the link and zap down to page 89.

  He’s not given any names – ‘to protect the innocent rather than those less so’ – but if he’s not talking about Thomas Ramsbottom, then I’m Steven Seagal. And/or a Dutchman. Steven Seagal’s Dutch cousin? Would that be Rutger Hauer?

  We’re just pulling in. Let me know what you think.

  Tommy x

  Jane was often lost by Tommy’s humour and cultural references, but resisted the temptation to google Rutger Hauer and opened the link as instructed. She found herself looking at the image of a relatively fresh cover sheet with a handwritten Dewey Decimal code and the crest of a college library at Oxford University. It was followed by a somewhat foxed title page that read ‘A Baptist Ministry in the Barren Hills of Lancashire by The Late Reverend Harry Richards’. The heavy serif typeface and simple layout also spoke of age and Jane could almost smell the mustiness rising from the paper. She scrolled on and began reading the preface. The language was piously convoluted, containing phrases such as ‘sublimely glorious exhibition of the divine Being’s perfections’ and ‘the triumph of the gospel is inscribed as a monument in every transgressor converted from the error of his way’. It was going to take some effort to get through.

  Jane reached for her coffee but managed to knock the cup and spill some of its contents on the table. Her fragile patience snapped and she swore angrily at herself and at the world. Then, begrudgingly, she stood up and went into the kitchen in search of a cloth. She was about to re-enter the dining room when she saw a shape at the window. She quickly hung back and watched through the gap between the half-open door and its frame.

  A man was close up to the glass peering in. He was mixed race, tall and thin with short black hair. At a passing glance it could have been Tommy, but it wasn’t. Jane had never seen him before in her life but knew him immediately. It was the man who Mrs Metcalfe had seen, the man who broke into her house and into her laptop and into her privacy.

  Had she paused to think, Jane would have realised the sensible thing was to grab her phone from the hall table where she’d dumped it the night before and dial 999 while leaving through the front. She could enlist the protection of the workmen who were hopefully still out there, not off on a mid-morning tea break.

  Not for the first time in her life, anger and indignation barged reason aside. This scumbag would not have a chance to get away.

  Jane went to the side door and quietly turned the key. She stepped out and round the corner into her back garden. The man was now leaning his weight against the French windows, clearly wondering how well they’d been secured.

  He didn’t notice Jane until she spoke out.

  ‘You won’t get through those this time. Not easily anyway.’

  He was visibly startled, but immediately tried to sound guiltlessly relaxed. ‘Oh, hello, duck.’ He smiled amiably but then coughed, betraying the anxiety in
his throat. ‘We’re doing some building work in the area. I’m just knocking on doors seeing if folk have got any jobs that need doing. While we’re here like.’

  The excuse had rolled off his tongue with seemingly practised ease but Jane wasn’t in a mood to be conned. ‘Do you always sneak around the back of people’s houses and nose through their windows?’

  He adopted an expression of amused disbelief. ‘It’s not like that, duck. I rang your bell first, but the lady of the house is quite often round the back. In the kitchen or whatever.’

  He was holding his nerve and Jane found herself hesitating as she considered the evidence. Judging by his accent he was a local lad. Duck was the all-purpose Nottinghamshire term of endearment, though he was laying it on condescendingly thick. His clothes were casually fashionable and most of all clean, and his trainers looked expensive. He was not dressed for any kind of building site. Jane remembered she’d come home the previous night by taxi. Her distinctive green car’s absence from outside her house would suggest its owner was also away. This cocky, arrogant chancer might have tried the doorbell to double-check, but it wasn’t the loudest and she’d been wearing earplugs to deaden the noise from the street. If he had been remotely monitoring her laptop he would want to know why it was no longer responding, why he could no longer read her private emails and watch her getting undressed.

  Jane reached a conclusion and expressed it as concisely as she could. ‘Bollocks,’ she said, adding a scowl to communicate the perceived insult to her intelligence.

  He read her face and his tone became more forceful. ‘Now, come on, duck. You’re overreacting. You’re being a little bit silly here.’

  Jane had picked up her phone on the way out and now raised it in front of her face. ‘Maybe,’ she said calmly. ‘In which case you won’t mind if I take your photo and then call the police.’

  His composure cracked and he stepped forward and slapped the phone onto the grass. ‘Don’t muck me around!’ he snarled, all pretence of friendly innocence abandoned.

  Jane stood her ground. ‘I’m not scared of a scrawny prat like you. Who the hell are you? What’s going on? Why are you spying on me? Are you just a pervert or what?’

  Angrily, he made a grab for her. As he lunged, she leant back, caught hold of his right arm with both hands and tried to use his forward momentum to pull him down and over her outstretched left leg. But he was too quick and the leverage in his long limbs too strong for her. After a brief struggle of yanks and pulls, she found herself facing away from him, being held around the neck, pressed into his body and with his mouth panting into the side of her face.

  ‘I told you not to muck me about!’ You should have listened. Bitch!’ He spat the words into her ear and there was a tremor to his voice that suggested he was close to losing control.

  Jane squirmed and writhed, but his grip tightened around her throat and chest. ‘Let me go!’ she insisted, gasping for breath.

  ‘Stop fighting me or I’ll hurt you,’ he threatened, maintaining his hold. ‘I mean it. I’ll give you a proper slap in a minute. Just stop it.’

  ‘Let me go,’ croaked Jane. ‘You won’t get away with this. Let me go before things get too far out of hand.’

  ‘Shut up! I need to think.’ There was a palpable panic to his words now. He knew he had made a bad call.

  ‘You’ll be looking at prison unless—‘

  ‘I said shut up!’

  This time Jane acquiesced, sensing his hesitancy to dig himself too much deeper. But his attempt at rational calculation was interrupted by another noise. It was faint, drifting through the open side door, but then it sounded again.

  It was the doorbell.

  Jane saw her chance. ‘That's my husband. I’d run while you have the chance.’ She stretched her neck free enough to scream out. ‘Dave! Dave! Round the ba—‘

  Jane felt the side of the man’s fist being jammed hard into her mouth, forcing it wide and choking the words. ‘Shut it!’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I know all about you. You’re divorced. The bastard lives in London. It’s just some poxy Jehovah’s Witness. Now just let me think and maybe you’ll get out of this in one piece.’

  Jane tried to wriggle free again but he wrenched her roughly, causing her to wince and let out a muffled squeal. But as her eyes reopened, she saw another figure reflected in the dining room windows and coming towards them from behind. Suddenly there was a sharp yank and Jane found herself toppling backwards. She reacted quickly, coming down with the point of her elbow jabbing hard into her assailant’s stomach. She span over to see him lying winded on his side. She grasped his wrist and pushed up with all her strength, bending his arm back and flipping him onto his face. She jammed her knee into him and increased the force on his twisted shoulder. He cried out in anger as well as pain.

  Jane glanced up at her saviour and thanked him with her eyes. Had it been Dave he would have taken violent charge by now, but it was Tommy standing there and he looked confused and frightened. She turned her attention back to the groaning man pinned to the floor.

  ‘Trust me, I’ll happily snap your bastard arm,’ she said, emphasising her threat with a blip of pressure. ‘So talk to me. Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Piss off!’

  Jane had been pushing his head into the ground with her other hand. She now began to reach round the right side of his face, which was partly buried in the grass. Her nails formed into a claw beside his eye socket. She knew then that she was going to make him answer. Or maybe she was just going to make him pay.

  Tommy saw her fingers move and began to reason urgently. ‘Jane! Not his eye! Let’s just call the police. Please, Jane.’

  Jane looked up again and she saw the concern on her friend’s face. Memories of previous lapses slowly filtered into her consciousness and her passions quelled. Her hand relaxed. ‘Okay, Tommy,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Call them.’

  ‘No, stop! Don’t do that!’ begged the man on the floor. ‘I’m here because of your father.’

  ‘What?’ Jane shook her head at Tommy to indicate he should wait and then brought her mouth closer to her captive’s ear. ‘Start talking. What do you know about my father?’

  ‘He’s thinking of coming home. His sister said you were sniffing around. He wanted to know whether, I don’t know, whether you hate him. Whether you were likely to stitch him up with your police pals, maybe that ex-husband of yours.’

  ‘My father told you to break into my house?’ said Jane incredulously.

  ‘No, of course not. Oh Christ! I’m going to get killed. Like, literally, killed. Even if I go back to jail, they’ll have my throat slit while I’m in there.’

  Jane’s eyes flicked from side to side as she tried to grasp the threads of the story. It made little sense.

  ‘Just explain properly. From the beginning.’ She had begun speaking in her old ‘good cop’ voice, hoping it might covey leniency, a potential way out.

  ’‘Okay.’ He was audibly trying to slow his breathing and steady his nerves. ‘I’ve done time for thieving. It’s a mug’s game. I’ve always been good with computers and stuff so I thought I’d try to get into cyber. You get away with that, unless you piss off the Yanks by breaking into the Pentagon. So I told him I could do it.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘No. I’ve never met your father. Billy…’ He hesitated as he wondered if he was buying himself more trouble. ‘Look, never mind about his surname. Though you probably know it already. He basically runs things round here. They go back a long way and your father was calling in a favour. Anyway, Billy said he’d put out some feelers, and I told him it would be easy to snoop on your emails. I just wanted to impress him.’

  ‘Impress Billy?’ Jane had never been stationed in Nottingham. She didn’t know the local criminal hierarchy, though it didn’t seem overly critical at that moment. ‘Impress this Billy, and my father, by breaking into my house?’

  No. I told you, Billy’d kill me if he knew. I sent you som
e, you know, like viruses. You were supposed to download them but you wouldn’t take the bait. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I panicked. I’d seen that knackered old laptop of yours and reckoned I could hack into it. It’s all on the Web if you know where to look. I saw you going away and I had to take the chance.’

  The means, motive and opportunity seemed on the cusp of plausibility, so Jane tightened her focus. ‘So what do you know about my father?’

  ‘Not much. Just what I’ve been told. Huge bloke, nasty with it. You wouldn’t want to piss him off. Oh God! If Billy doesn’t do me, he will. He lives abroad. There’s something wrong with face. Had plastic surgery. I don’t know. What do you want me to tell you? I’ve never met the guy.’

  ‘Don’t piss me about! You must know more than that!’ insisted Jane, her inner cop switching from good to bad.

  ‘That’s all I have. Honest. I was just asked to find out about you.’

  Jane felt rage surging within her again. ‘So what about the camera? Why did you want to watch me like some kind of deviant? And what sort of father asks someone to do that to his daughter?’

  ‘I was more interested in the microphone. I thought I might overhear you talking to people, saying stuff about your dad, you know. I think I mucked it up and turned the camera on too.’

  Tommy, who had returned to listening in nervous silence, rolled his eyes in disbelief at the would-be cybercriminal’s ineptitude.

  The man’s voice grew tremulous again. ‘Look, I will get killed. Legs broken, minimum. If you call the police. If Billy finds out. I’m really scared.’ He was whimpering now. ‘You weren’t supposed to know. I was just supposed to find out if you were still in touch with your husband. For your father. It’s because of him. I was only meant to read a few emails. What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. But I cocked things up.’