As the holiday season approaches, a unique kind of magic fills the air. The scent of pine needles, the twinkling lights adorning homes, and the laughter echoing through gatherings create an atmosphere that can uplift even the heaviest of hearts. Christmas cheer is more than just festive decorations and gift-giving; it’s a tonic that nourishes our spirits and fosters connection, joy, and hope.

At its core, Christmas is about togetherness. It’s a time when families come together, friends reconnect, and communities unite. These moments shared over hot cocoa or a hearty meal are vital for our well-being. Studies show that social connections enhance happiness and reduce stress levels. So this season, reach out to loved ones — whether through a phone call or an in-person visit — and soak in the warmth of their presence.

Traditions play a crucial role in cultivating holiday cheer. They give us something to look forward to each year and create lasting memories. If your old traditions feel stale or if you’re looking for something fresh, consider starting new ones! Bake cookies with your family using recipes passed down through generations or host a game night filled with laughter and friendly competition. These small rituals can rejuvenate your spirit and make the season feel special.

There’s an undeniable joy that comes from giving during the holidays. Whether it’s wrapping up gifts for loved ones or volunteering at local charities, acts of kindness amplify our own happiness. Research indicates that helping others boosts our mood significantly more than receiving gifts ever could.

So why not spread some cheer? Donate toys to children in need or serve meals at a local shelter. Each act of generosity creates ripples of positivity — not just for those on the receiving end but also within us.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, take time to reflect on what you’re grateful for this season. Practicing gratitude has been shown to improve mental health by shifting focus from what we lack to appreciating what we have. Start a gratitude journal where you jot down things you cherish each day leading up to Christmas. This simple practice can transform your perspective and fill your heart with warmth.

Your environment greatly influences your mood! Decking your halls isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about creating an atmosphere that inspires joy and comfort. Hang ornaments that evoke fond memories or light candles with scents reminiscent of holiday treats like gingerbread or cinnamon.

Consider crafting homemade decorations as well — this adds personal flair while engaging creativity! Invite friends over for an ornament-making party where everyone contributes their artistic touch to adorn your home.

No holiday celebration feels complete without music! Create playlists filled with classic carols alongside contemporary tunes that resonate with you and your family. Singing along — or simply listening — can elevate moods instantly; music has an unparalleled ability to connect us emotionally.

Don’t forget about hosting cozy movie nights featuring heartwarming films centered around Christmas themes! Share stories over popcorn while immersing yourselves in tales celebrating love, friendship, and goodwill.

Christmas cheer is not merely found in festivities; it resides within us all — waiting patiently for us to embrace it fully! By nurturing relationships, practicing gratitude, spreading kindness through giving back generously…and infusing our surroundings with joyful elements — we can cultivate a spirit that shines bright throughout this magical season!

So this year as December unfolds before us like an open gift waiting to be unwrapped — let’s savor every moment together! After all — the true essence lies not just in celebration but also within how we choose to uplift one another along life’s journey during these precious days filled with wonderment…and cheer!

Let this be your tonic — a reminder that joy exists everywhere if only we take time out amidst busy schedules…to breathe deeply…connect meaningfully…and celebrate life itself!

I’ve been in many places, but I’ve never been in Cahoots. You cannot go alone. You must be in Cahoots with someone.

I’ve also never been in Cognito. I hear no one recognizes you there.

I have, however, been in Sane. They do not have an airport; you have to be driven there. I’ve made several trips there, thanks to my friends, family, and work.

I’d like to go to Conclusions, but you have to jump, and I’m not too much on physical activity anymore. I’ve also been in Doubt. That is a sad place to go, and I try not to visit there too often. I’ve been in Flexible, but only when it was important to stand firm.

Sometimes I am in Capable, and I go there more often as I am getting older. One of my favorite places to be is in Suspense! It gets the adrenalin flowing and pumps up the old heart! At my age, I need all the stimuli I can get!

I have been in Sincere, but it’s full of folks that are not all there. And that’s in Sensitive.

As the holiday season approaches, a time typically filled with joy and celebration can also bring an undercurrent of melancholy. For many, including my dear friend, this time of year serves as a poignant reminder of struggles faced and battles fought. Living with a terminal illness is no small feat. Yet, despite these overwhelming challenges, my friend embodies an unyielding spirit that shines brighter than the twinkling lights adorning our homes.

My friend’s unwavering optimism stands out like a beacon of hope in a world often overshadowed by negativity and despair. He faces each day with a smile — a genuine expression that belies his pain. Rather than allowing his health problems to define him, he has risen above them. This resilience is not just admirable; it’s inspiring.

While many would retreat into self-pity when confronted with such serious health issues, my friend demonstrates that joy can be found even in the darkest moments. He reaches out to others who are struggling — offering support, sharing laughter, and spreading kindness wherever he goes. It’s as if he understands deeply what it means to suffer and has made it his mission to alleviate the burdens of those around him.

Imagine if politicians possessed even half their heart for service! My friend would be a breath of fresh air in an era where cynicism runs rampant in political discourse — where leaders often focus on division rather than unity. His ability to empathize with others transcends mere sympathy; it fosters genuine connection and community.

What if we had more leaders like him? Those who prioritize compassion over rhetoric? Who understands that true leadership is about uplifting others rather than merely holding office? If only more people could embrace life’s challenges as opportunities for growth and connection!

Christmas is often depicted as a season overflowing with happiness — yet for many, it is a stark reminder of what they have lost or continue to endure. My friend navigates this emotional landscape gracefully. He reminds us all that while life may throw curveballs our way — chronic illness being one — we still possess the power to choose our response.

His laughter echoes through gatherings like a joyous melody amidst the winter chill. When asked how he stays so positive despite everything he faces daily, he replies: “Life is too short not to find joy in every moment.” This philosophy resonates deeply during this festive season — a call for us all to embrace gratitude over grief.

This Christmas season presents an opportunity — not just for celebration but for reflection on what truly matters in life: love, friendship, compassion — and above all else — the resilience of the human spirit. My friend teaches us invaluable lessons about strength in vulnerability and joy amidst suffering.

As we gather around tables adorned with festive feasts and surrounded by loved ones this holiday season, let us take inspiration from those like my friend who choose light over darkness daily.

Let’s cherish our relationships; uplift each other through tough times; let’s remember that there is always something beautiful waiting beyond our struggles.

In closing this tribute to my remarkable friend — a man whose heart shines brighter than any Christmas star — I encourage everyone to read this article: Be like him! Spread positivity! Embrace empathy! And perhaps most importantly — never underestimate your ability to make someone else’s day slightly brighter.

Happy Holidays!

I peered out of the window and watched Mum wave to me as the train pulled out of Waterloo Station, on the first leg of my journey to my new prep school. By my rough guess I was sharing the train with approximately 30 boys and two masters who oversaw all the boys. I was 10 years old, and it was the first time I’d been away from Mum and Dad, and I was scared.

Two hours earlier, Mum and I had gone to the cinema at Waterloo to watch cartoons. This cinema was an obvious ploy in my mind, to lull small children, on their way to boarding school, into a false sense of security. It clearly worked, as for the next 75 minutes as I watched Tom and Jerry and Laurel and Hardy, I forgot about being torn away from the only security I’d ever known and thrust into the abyss of the unknown. But as I sat there on a train amongst a group of strangers looking through a window at my Mum waving bye to me, all my fears came roaring back. And so, I retreated.

Several months earlier, my family had flown home from 3 years living in the island paradise of Jamaica. Fond memories came flooding back to me, of Daniel “Fatty” Webster, my buddy who lived next door, and Henry our gardener, who was married to 2 different women, 1 in the north and 1 in the south, who when confronted by one of them, went after her with a machete. We never saw dear Henry again after that incident.

We settled back into Brit life, and I was enrolled, along with my brother at the local day school, just up the road. It was springtime in England, and the daffodils were in full bloom. I’d made some new friends at school and started hanging out with a few of them. In June a field trip to the beach was arranged and along with chaperones, a group of us left one early morning on a rented coach. Everyone was excited and when we arrived at the beach, we all went dashing to the water to swim, and jump the waves. As I think back on that day, I don’t have any clear recollection of much if any supervision, but at the time all of us kids were just having fun and so when it came time to clean up and prepare to get back on the bus there was, I remember, a roll call. It turned out that my new friend, Pete, was missing. At first everyone assumed he’d strayed off, and gone for a walk, but 30 minutes later, after he didn’t turn up the grown-ups began to get worried.

An hour went by, and still no sign of Pete. Finally, one grown up suggested we all link arms and walk into the ocean to see if we could find Pete’s body. (can you imagine these days, the trauma that would cause a child if by chance he stepped on a lifeless body?)

There was a pier at the beach, and I was in the water walking beneath it, looking for any sign of my friend, when my worst nightmare came true. I stepped on something that felt alarmingly like a body. I looked down and there just beneath the waterline with his foot caught in a steel tether was Pete’s body, eyes wide open with a terrified look on his face. I immediately tried to untangle him from the tether and shouted to the boys next to me to get help. It was too late. The police were called, and much later, after it had been determined that Pete had drowned by accident, we all drove home in sombre silence.

Pete’s drowning affected me deeply. Months went by and I began to act out. I would skip school; my grades were awful. Prior, I had been a good if not exceptional student. In Jamaica, I’d had a cancer scare, and my baby sister had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, two things that gave rise to the belief that I could benefit from therapy. My mum and dad clearly living in an alternate reality would not even consider that my finding my friends body might be traumatic for me and would not let me talk about it but decided to have me evaluated anyway by a child psychologist. No mention however must be made about Pete’s unfortunate death. To mention it might be considered below par. Stiff upper lip, and all that. I knew however exactly what was wrong with me. I was suffering from a form of PTSD. Severe trauma brought on by the discovery of my friend’s lifeless body beneath the pier on that fateful day.

I was seen by a clinical paediatric psychologist at Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital in London. I attended 6, 1-hour sessions with the doctor who was never informed of my recent trauma. Mum drove me to the sessions and sat with me in the consulting room. Never at any point had I been allowed to mention the death of my friend Pete. My Dad who’d never attended a single session but had suggested that I could benefit from “some therapy,” showed up for the final one to receive the recommendation of the doctor.

The psychologist wrote. “Greville is a sensitive child who has a flair for “the extreme.” It is my recommendation he be educated at home where his imagination can flourish and grow. To place him in a boarding school would in my opinion cause him great harm.”

And so, my parents behaved like they always did, and ignored every warning the psychologist recommended and sent me away anyway to boarding school.

And so it was that I found myself on a train to Hastings in rural Sussex with 30 total strangers who had been dumped by their parents too and who would become strange bedfellows for the next 3 years until it was time for me to head to Public School.

The next few years were hell on wheels for me. I hated my school and the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that mum, and dad would be coming down to see me in a few weeks. The day would arrive and at 11:00 am right after church, they would arrive and Dad would shake me warmly by the hand while mum, slightly more effusive would hug me until it hurt. We then would drive a few miles to Hastings on Sea, the town that William ravaged at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when he conquered Ethel the Red, or some other nonsensical character from the history books becoming William the First and making Hastings a massively significant town. Mum and Dad visited me twice a term. (a term lasting generally 12 weeks) The day was always spent identically. Drinks, lunch, at the best hotel in town, (the Queens Hotel) and then a walk along the sea front, by which time it was time to deposit me back at school just in time to celebrate Evensong in the chapel. We would go through the same ritual we had gone through a few hours earlier with Dad occasionally slapping me on the back and instructing me to try harder. What he meant by that I was never quite certain. With a wave through the window of their Rover, and a big smile from mum, they would roar down the driveway of the school, eager to get away so they could stop at the first pub they could . I would wave at the car and then I would enter school life again for another 6 or 7 weeks until the day was repeated in excruciating similarity. I was 10 years old, and in pain.

My formative years passed and slowly I forgot what Pete looked like. I made friends, and discovered quickly that I had a knack for making people laugh. Even the headmaster found me funny. At 13 I was accepted to a decent school that was willing to put up with all my foibles, and on the day, I took the train to Brighton to begin the next 5 years of my academic adventure.

My new school wasn’t nearly as bad as my last one and I soon realised that I was going to enjoy myself. I joined the drama club and discovered that I had surrounded myself with likeminded people. I discovered a love of Shakespeare and began reading voraciously about this amazing playwright. Before I knew it, I had several lines in our new production of Julius Caesar, playing a centurion. I invited my parents to come and see the end of term play, but they declined for reasons unknown. No problem. My life suddenly had meaning and the following day I left to go home for the Christmas holidays. I couldn’t wait to get back and spent most of my time at home writing humorous scripts that I intended to present to the drama club when I returned in the new year.

I won’t bore you with the details of my high school years but suffice it to say that I found a niche for myself writing and producing comedy sketches for the drama club. These sketches or skits as we would call them became very popular with my fellow students. In my 3rd year I became a founding member of the “footlights society,” a group of wannabe actors/comedians. Our main job was to write a series of topical sketches lampooning students and teachers alike, that we would perform at intermission of the play the drama society had produced for that term. Those reviews became a roaring success, becoming ever more popular with each term we performed them in.

Five years later, I won a place to Magdalen College, Cambridge. I would be reading English. 2 of my friends from the “footlights society,” were also accepted to Cambridge and we made a pact to share rooms at Magdalen (pronounced Maudlin) for the first year. The following autumn the 3 of us took up residence at Cambridge University.

To say the three of us caused a creative explosion at Cambridge would be a vast overstatement. It was more like, “a been there, done that” ripple, on a past tide of remarkable creative genius. We arrived in the wake of the comic brilliance of Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, (the goodies) and John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and Graham Chapman. (that were to become Monty Pythons Flying Circus)

It seemed the harder we tried the more we failed, and the words of my dad came flooding back to me, “try harder my boy, try harder.”

2 years into my time at Cambridge I had all but given up on a career in comedy. My writing was non-existent, and I had lost interest in performance. One Saturday evening I was sitting alone in my rooms at Maudlin reading a good book, when I heard a knock on my door. I stood up and answered it and much to my surprise two policemen were standing there. “Good evening, sir. Are you one of Christopher Abbots roommates?” I nodded my head, and the policeman continued. “Mr. Abbot was involved in a car accident this evening. Currently he is in stable condition and has been transported to Cambridge General infirmary. Do you by any chance have his parents’ address?” “I thought for a moment and replied, “Yes, I have their address and phone number. You better both come in while I look for it.” The two walked in and began shuffling their feet uncomfortably while I searched for the Abbot’s information. I found it eventually and quickly wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to the policeman. As I did so, I asked them about the accident, where it had happened, and how badly Chris had been hurt. “All I can tell you sir, is that Mr. Abbot is in stable condition. Anything more than that, you’ll have to discuss with the attending physician.” I could tell that the policemen weren’t going to give me anything more, and so I thanked them for letting me know, and told them I would wait until the morning before I spoke with his parents. They thanked me and took their leave shortly afterwards.

My other cohort who came with us from school had dropped out of Cambridge at the end of his first year. Not his thing, he explained, referring to university life, I guessed. He had never really fit in anyway, and the last I heard was that he had got married a few months after he left and was now working as a stockbroker “in the city,” at his new father in laws firm. Good luck to him I thought.

Chris Abbot on the other hand had done well at uni. He’d made lots of friends and as always, was the life and soul of the party, and he and I were just as close as we had always been.

There was nothing much I could do that night, and so I decided to just go to bed and head over to the hospital in the morning. I didn’t sleep well, tossing and turning all night, and having a series of bad dreams, one of which was about Pete, my friend who drowned back when I was a kid. For the first time in years, I saw his face again, looking up at me, eyes wide open with a terrified look on his face. I awoke with a start, covered in sweat, and looked at the clock. It was two thirty. I lay there wondering if there was anything I could have done to save my friends life. Why did he wander off alone. For years I had beaten myself up for not staying with him, but I was mainly angry with my parents for not allowing me to tell the psychologist the root of my trauma. To me that was unforgivable.

Finally at seven I gave up, and got out of bed, took a shower, and headed over to the Cambridge General Infirmary four miles away. When I got there, I asked to see Chris Abbot my college roommate who had been involved last night in a car accident. The receptionist checked admissions and directed me to the critical care unit of the hospital. “Critical Care Unit,” I repeated incredulously. “The policemen who came to my rooms last night told me that he was in stable condition which I assumed to mean that he had a broken bone or two, and a bump on his head.” “Sir, Mr. Abbot took a turn for the worse later last night and was moved into the critical care unit for observation. You’re welcome to go there now and speak to the nurse in the waiting room. That’s all I know to tell you sir.” And with those slightly terse words I ran all the way to the CCU fearing another tragedy was about to unfold. I made it in seconds flat and immediately saw Chris’s parents and his younger sister, Claire. All three of them looked exhausted having huge bags under their eyes. But the moment they saw me their faces brightened, and they hugged me as if there was no tomorrow.

I had first met the family in my 2nd year of high school after Chris and I had become fast friends. All 3 of them attended a school play where Chris and I performed silly skits during intermission. For instance, one of 7 sketches we performed that evening was where Chris walked onstage holding a large banana. He walked to centre stage and began to peel his banana, and says “1 skin, 2 skin,3 skin.” the audience begins to understand where this is headed and start to chuckle apprehensively. Chris looks over at the headmaster who is looking very nervous, and peels the fourth but cheekily says, “5 skin.” The audience roared with laughter and Chris receives a standing ovation. The headmaster laughs approvingly. After that evening I became part of the Abbot family and was invited to stay with them for Christmas and several other holiday celebrations. The crowning glory for me was when they invited me to spend the summer with them at their villa in Corfu. That holiday was magical, and we spent 6 wonderful weeks in the island paradise swimming, snorkelling eating and laughing. As far as I was concerned this was as close to my having a real family.

Charles Abbot, Chris’s father, would come and go, depending on his work schedule but his mum stayed on Corfu for the entire time. Mr. Abbot was “something” in “imports and exports,” and was always a wonderful host. And so, it was devastating to see them now in such a state. “Chris is in a medically induced coma, and the doctors are hopeful they can bring him out of it in 10 days or so.” I knew the Abbots well enough to ask, “what is Chris being treated for? The police told me last night that he was fine and in stable condition, but clearly, it’s a lot more serious than they first told me.” Mrs. Abbot looked across at her husband and they exchanged an imperceptible glance. “Chris has a broken back, and the doctors are saying that he may never walk again.” And she started to cry. Her husband put his arms around her and held her tight, while we looked on, praying for a miracle. At that moment Dr Warnock, Chris’s primary physician walked into the waiting room and gave us all an update on Chris’s condition. Because Chris had lost a lot of blood in the accident and because he had a rare blood type, they were looking for a donor. His mother mentioned that Charles had the same blood type and could donate some for his son. Charles nodded his head in agreement and was whisked away to another room. An hour later he returned, looking somewhat paler than when he had left, but with a hopeful smile on his face.

CHAPTER 2. The Right Place the Right Time.

Carol had been a nurse at the Cambridge general infirmary since she had graduated summa cum laude from uni back in 1975. At the time, she was nursing her mum who was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease. They lived alone, in a ground floor 2-bedroom flat just a mile from the university. One night Carol who had tucked her mother in for the night, was up late swatting for her exams, when she heard a noise in the living room. She called out, “who’s there?” but of course the intruder didn’t reply, and so she assumed she’d been mistaken and so went back to her studies. A few minutes passed and then without warning all hell broke loose. Someone came up behind her and with one swift movement attacked her, tearing at her clothes and at the same time forcing her onto her bed face down. The more she struggled the more violent he became, hitting her on her face and knocking her unconscious. One of the most notable things she remembered that evening was his revolting smell. A mix of halitosis and body odour, it was a smell she would never forget. The attacker kept one hand on her head as he raped her that evening and Carol remembered that as he was raping her, he was whispering “sweet nothings,” in her ear, at the same time he was telling her how much she was enjoying the ride! And then suddenly as fast as it had begun, it was over, and the man was making a hasty retreat with a final warning that she should never tell a soul what had happened because he knew where she lived and if she ever mentioned it there would be hell to pay.

Carol had done as she had been told because she was terrified. She never told a soul about her attack and lived with the shame long after her mother had passed away. She graduated from nursing school with honours and was offered her first job at the Cambridge general infirmary where she stayed for nearly 30 years. One night she was on duty in the ER when a phone call came through requesting an emergency blood transfusion be performed and then administered to a car accident victim. This was not a particularly unusual occurrence at the hospital and because Carol was the duty nurse that evening it was her responsibility to take the blood from the donor.

Mr. Abbot walked through the double doors from the waiting room and went down a hallway until he arrived at room 1023 where he was to donate the blood for his son. He walked in and was met by a stout middle-aged woman who he assumed to be the phlebotomist. “Good evening, sir. If you could sit here and roll up your sleeve, I’ll be with you in a moment,” the nurse instructed him. A few moments later she approached him and tied a rubber cuff around his left arm. As she leaned into him, she smelled a familiar odour she hadn’t smelled in over 30 years that nauseated her. It took her a second to identify but the moment she did she was transported back to her ground floor flat and the night she had been attacked all those decades earlier. She felt herself beginning to panic, but then, as is often the case in emergencies her mind became completely focused. She allowed her professionalism to take over and carried out the job at hand. Helen Keller once said, “smell is a potent wizard that transports you across a thousand miles and all the years you have lived.” Carol Drinkwater knew without a doubt she was in the presence of the vile human being who had viciously attacked and raped her. She took the blood, but on the spur of the moment decided to take a small vial she could potentially give to the police if she ever decided to report the crime he had committed. Under the current law in England and Wales, there is no statute of limitations for rape and other serious sexual offenses, meaning that charges can be brought at any time, regardless of how long ago the alleged offense took place.

3 months later after hours of daily physical therapy Chris Abbot was released from hospital. The good news was that it turned out that he had a spinal fracture, but the cord was not completely severed and so with intense therapy Chris managed to recover completely from his car accident. That same good fortune cannot be ascribed to his father. Carol left the hospital that night after pulling a double shift, and arrived home to the same ground floor flat she had lived in.

Inspector Trevor Holloway picked up the phone at his desk on the second ring. “Inspector Holloway. How can I help you?” “Good morning this is Carol Drinkwater. I’m a nurse at the Cambridge Infirmary and I wanted to talk to you about something that happened a while ago.” “Yes Ms. Drinkwater. Why don’t you tell me about it?” The Inspector replied. And so, Carol found herself explaining in detail about every aspect of her attack and subsequent rape all those years earlier. Inspector Holloway listened carefully, absorbing everything this obviously conservative woman had told him. When she finished, he expressed how sorry he was for her trauma and reminded her that there was no statute of limitations on rape in the UK. “Sadly, we don’t have a lot to be going on with,” he continued. “We need hard evidence, before we can charge the rapist. Had you ever seen the man before?” “Not until a month ago.” Carol said. The Inspector looked at her quizzically and asked. “Tell me his name and all about the circumstances of meeting him.” Carol Drinkwater took a deep breath and launched into Chris Abbot’s car accident, and how the boy had survived but had suffered a broken back. She explained how he had required a transfusion but had a rare blood type, and that the following morning after the accident his parents had visited him in hospital and that his father, Charles Abbot, who had the same blood type had agreed to donate some of his blood there and then and that she, Carol Drinkwater was the duty nurse that day and administered the father’s donation. Carol explained that initially she didn’t recognize the man, but when she stood close to him, she recognized the stench of her rapist. So much so in fact that she took an extra vial of blood from him for analysis by the police to see if it turned out that he was indeed the rapist. “Ms. Drinkwater,” began Inspector Holloway. “Where are you right now? It’s imperative that we take a statement from you as soon as possible.” The Inspector’s tone had changed. There was something in his voice that concerned Carol. “I’ve just finished my shift at the hospital, and I was just getting ready to go home,” she explained. “I’m sending a car for you right now. Would you mind waiting for it at the hospital. I’d like you to come into the station and give a statement about everything that happened to you. Would that be alright with you Ms. Drinkwater?” “Yes of course I’ll give you a statement. I’ll wait right here for the car.” “Thank you, Ma’am. I’ll meet you at the station when you arrive.” And with that Chief Inspector Holloway hung up and made a phone call in preparation for Carol Drinkwater’s statement. 20 minutes later Carol Drinkwater was at the station giving her statement. The phone call Inspector Holloway had made earlier was to the head of the Cambridge cold case unit, Chief superintendent Bogle. When Trevor Holloway had first joined the police force his boss was Ian Bogle, and they had been friends ever since. Back then Bogle, as a young detective, had been investigating a series of rapes that occurred in the space of 3 years ending as abruptly as they had begun. Detective Bogle asked a young detective sergeant to help him with this perplexing case. The young sergeant was Trevor Holloway. The two of them followed up on 9 particularly savage attacks on young women, all of them university students. The modus operandi was the same in each case. 1) single woman living alone. 2) ground floor flat. 3) poor outdoor lighting, making it easy for the rapist to gain access without being seen. 4) fairly remote location. Detectives Bogle and Holloway searched their database for recently released sex offenders to no avail. They interviewed the victims and their families with no success. They investigated if the victims shared anything in common such as a part time job or a favorite pub or church they would go to. Everywhere they checked they hit a brick wall.

“You say that you never reported the attack. Ms. Drinkwater, back when you were attacked, I was investigating nine rapes that had taken place during that time. Your statement increases that number to 10 unsolved rapes, all carried out by possibly the same individual. Your statement has been extremely helpful to us, and now that we have the name of a suspect, I’ve been in contact with the head of the cold case unit, a friend of mine, who will investigate if Mr. Abbot was living in or around Cambridge during that time. I worked on the original case with Chief superintendent Bogle, and what you have just given us will go a long way in apprehending the guilty party. Thank you so much. We are most grateful to you and will be in touch as soon as we learn anything more.

CHAPTER 3. THE MET

Ian Bogle was an unusual policeman. First of all, he was an academic, who graduated from Edinburgh University with a double first in criminology. That is not to say there are many highly intelligent police officers on the force today, but Ian Bogle had one ingredient that set him apart from all others. He was the son of a woman who had been murdered in front of him at the hands of a serial killer. He was 4 years old when it happened. It took Ian ten years to talk about what happened, but after he talked to a pediatric psychologist it was as if a floodgate was opened and truth came spilling out. It turned out you see that the serial killer was his grandfather on his father’s side, and it seemed that young Ian had been so traumatized by witnessing his mother being murdered by his own grandfather that he never spoke another word for 10 years. During his silent years he learned to read. First of all, simple storybooks but as he grew older, he raided his family’s voluminous library. He and his father lived in Edinburgh on Mossop Street near the university, and he dreamed of studying someday at his father’s college. After “the incident,” and when Ian’s grandfather had been punished for his crimes, his father had been shunned by society, and the two of them moved to a tidy little house on Mossop Street far away from all the gossip. His father hired a tutor, explaining that his son was a “special needs” child. The tutor did little more than leave Ian to his own devices, and soon this prodigy was tackling complex problems far above his actual years. At 14 his tutor suggested that he apply to university and six months later was accepted to Edinburgh university. He chose criminology as his major, and on the first day of classes began to speak again. Ian never talked about the trauma he’d experienced but just moved forward taking one day at a time. He had no friends to speak of and was a solitary child whose ambition in life was to rid the world of crime. Ian Bogle became a foot patrol officer after he left university, which was the custom in the United Kingdom since the metropolitan police force had been founded by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. It wouldn’t have made any difference if you had been the Queen or a vagrant, the rules applied to everyone. PC Bogle had graduated with high honors from university and spent a couple of years pounding the beat. It taught him a valuable lesson in humility. He learned a lot about policing and how to interact with the public. In his 3rd year he was allowed to apply some of the skills he had learned at uni and took and passed the detectives examination with flying colors. Ian Bogle was a highly intelligent young man who had excelled at university. He rose through the ranks fast and before he was 27 years old, had become a Detective Inspector. That was when Detective sergeant Holloway and Inspector Bogle first met when they were asked to investigate a series of rapes that had happened around Cambridge.

The phone rang on Inspector Bogles desk. “Good morning, Inspector, this is Terry Jones of the Cambridge Sun. I understand a woman was raped last night in Longwood Gardens. Could I get a statement from you?” “Yes, you can. No comment, Bogle replied grumpily and slammed the phone down. “Now, what was I saying?” he continued as he chatted to his new sergeant. “This is now the 3rd attack in as many weeks. The woman who was raped last night was Angela Jenkins. She is 19 years old and an undergraduate here at Cambridge. She is currently being checked out at the Infirmary. (Cambridge General Infirmary) Ms. Jenkins has been admitted to hospital, due to a particularly vicious attack and subsequent rape. She’s currently in stable condition and the doctors expect to release her in the next day or so. She’s renting a bedsit at Longwood Gardens, an old Victorian home, that was purchased by investors and transformed into small flats and student bedsits. The bedsit Ms. Jenkins lives in is located on the ground floor at the back of the house.” Bogle paused and his new sergeant asked, “how many ground floor bedsits are in that house, and how many of them are rented by women?” “Good question sergeant, I’m not sure yet, but maybe you could find out the answer for me.” “Happy to do so Inspector,” sergeant Cowan replied breezily. “Would you mind telling me about the first and second rapes that you believe were committed by the same attacker?” And so, Inspector Bogle told his new sergeant the details of the two previous rapes. This was sergeant Cowan’s first day since he had been promoted, and while he’d had some experience as a detective constable his main jobs up until that point had been making the detectives’ pots of tea ad infinitum. He hadn’t minded doing that, because he kept his ears and eyes open and listened and watched everything being said.

Inspector Holloways’ background was a bit more mundane than Chief Superintendent Bogle’s. He came from a large family, having 3 sisters and a brother 4 years younger than Trev. He lived on a council estate with his mum who was a cleaner for rich people on the other side of town, and his dad who was a haulage driver for a construction company delivering heavy equipment to the booming building business all around Cambridge. Sometimes young Trevor would ride along with his dad to deliver a loader to a building site in the area. He treasured those days and remembered his dad to be a kind and jolly man, who loved to help everyone. Sadly, when Trevor was just 14 his dad suffered a heart attack and died. The extended family was wonderful and helped them through a couple of really tough years, but it taught Trevor a valuable lesson, making him realize the importance of family. He left school at 16 and took a job washing dishes at night and stocking shelves during the day at Marks and Spencer, the giant UK retailer. The money he earned helped pay the bills his mum was now solely responsible for. It was the least he could do. Over the next 2 years Trevor grew to be a man, and on his 18th birthday he applied to become a “Bobby.” He came up the hard way never receiving a single favor or handout, and so when he teamed up with Inspector Bogle, it truly was a perfect match. Respect was the umbilical cord that was the life blood of their professional relationship. Just like a married couple who had been married for over forty years, they finished each other’s sentences and as they did, laughed about what they’d just done. In many ways they became a dream team as their success rate was unprecedented. The one case, however, they failed to solve was the very first case they worked on together.

Looking back on those years, Chief Inspector Holloway wondered if he and Ian Bogle had solved those 9 rape cases things might have been different. One thing was for sure. He would never know, but the fact that he now knew the name of a suspect, Charles Abbot, was a huge bonus. And now he intended to follow it up and see if Abbot was living in the area at that time. Too much time had been wasted, and he didn’t want another rape on his patch.

The first thing Inspector Holloway did was run a thorough background check on Charles Abbot. It turned out the man wasn’t as squeaky clean as he let on. Back in the day he was known as Charley Abbot and was the son of a bricklayer and an aggressive drunk who liked to take it out on his wife and kids. Charles had a younger brother Tommy, 15 years younger than him, who the family joked had been a mistake, but if truth be known the father had come home one night so drunk, he could hardly stand and raped and beat up his wife. She became pregnant and gave birth to Tommy 9 months later. The 2 boys ran afoul of the law on a couple of occasions, but only enough to get them a slap on the wrist by the local cops. They grew up in Brixton a working-class neighborhood in London but as Charley’s wealth grew, he spent a lot of money obscuring those roots. He owned an import/ export business selling medical supplies to UK hospitals and clinics. His business attracted attention from the fraud squad on a few occasions for dodgy dealings, but the police never had enough evidence to press charges.

5 days after Carol Drinkwater gave her statement and the blood sample from Charles Abbot to Inspector Holloway, the lab determined conclusively that it was a familial match to Charley Abbot’s DNA on the 9 rape victims that were attacked two decades earlier. A warrant was applied for and granted, and Mr. Charles Abbot was subsequently arrested two days later at his house in Hampstead without fuss. He was jailed overnight and arraigned the following morning. Abbot pleaded not guilty but was remanded without bail because of the severity of the charges and then Abbot was relocated to Cambridge where the 9 rapes had occurred. This number did not include the rape of Carol Drinkwater, the nurse who’d identified Abbot after he gave blood in order to save his sons life but at the time never reported her attack.

In the meantime, there had been 3 rapes that had occurred within the past few weeks. These attacks were similar, yet something bothered Chief Superintendent Bogle as he sat at his desk and read the files. He’d always trusted his old partner, Trevor Holloway, and he picked up the phone a gave him a ring. On the third ring a familiar voice answered. “Inspector Holloway speaking.” “Trevor, Ian speaking. Well done on arresting Abbot. That’s marvelous news. I have some concerns though about the three rapes that have just happened.” Ian Bogle had a habit of cutting out the bs and getting straight to the point. “There’s something about these 3 cases that set them apart from the ones Abbot allegedly committed. First of all, it doesn’t ring true that given his age, Charles Abbot would still be carrying out these vicious attacks. Yes, it’s possible but unlikely. No, I think we may have a copycat on our hands. What do you think, my friend.” Funny you should say that because I was thinking exactly the same. It’s fantastic we’ve possibly solved the earlier rapes, but has the DNA come back from the lab yet?” Trevor Holloway began. Ian Bogle remained silent for a moment and then replied. “I was just reading the reports before I rang, and the answer is that no it hasn’t come back yet. Of course, if the DNA is a match on all 3 victims we’d have a slam dunk on our hands, but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more convinced I am that the rapist was another man. I’m afraid we’ll just have to be patient.” The 2 old friends chatted for a minute or two more and then made noises about both of them getting on with their day. Trevor Holloway sat there for a moment thinking how much he’d liked working with Chief Superintendent Bogle back when they were younger men, smiled to himself and walked pensively to a meeting he had with his team of detectives in order to strategize how to deal with the barrage of legal arguments that he knew that Charley Abbot’s legal team were about to fire at the Cambridge police force. Little did he realize just how dangerous a salvo it would become.

3 days later Abbot’s legal team filed a brief requesting all charges be dropped because consent was not given by Charles Abbot to draw a blood sample for police analysis in the rape case, he was accused of being the rapist. Upon filing the brief his defense team then applied for bail which the court agreed to with the proviso that Mr. Abbot post a £100,000 bond. Later that day Charles Abbot returned to his expensive home in Hampstead. The prosecution appealed but were denied after a judicial hearing and so the Cambridge police force found themselves back at square one.

Meanwhile the investigation into the 3 rapes that occurred within the past few weeks continued. A footprint had been found at the flat of the second victim but so far hadn’t helped identify the rapist. Inspector Holloway was becoming impatient. 4 days later the lab contacted his team with the news they’d been waiting for. The DNA was a familial match to Charles Abbot, meaning that the DNA collected at all 3 crime scenes had a large percentage of similarities to the blood that had been collected by the nurse Carol Drinkwater but wasn’t enough of a match to convict Abbot. The DNA, however, could belong to Abbot or a close relative.

Familial DNA is the practice of creating new investigative leads in cases where DNA evidence found at the scene of a crime strongly resembles that of an existing DNA profile (offender profile) in a DNA database but there is not an exact match. After all other leads have been exhausted, investigators may use specially developed software to compare the forensic profile to all profiles taken from a state’s DNA database to generate a list of those offenders already in the database who are most likely to be a very close relative of the individual whose DNA is in the forensic profile.

CHAPTER 4. Back to the Drawing Board

Running a two-tiered investigation is good police practice. It’s been a tried-and-true practice within police departments worldwide for decades. The 2 teams, the Cambridge Cold case unit being run by Chief Superintendent Bogle, and the team led by Inspector Holloway had 10 detectives on their teams collectively. Bogle and Holloway, after they discussed the idea of joining forces, received the sanction of the Cambridgeshire Police Commissioner, a longtime friend and colleague of theirs named Russell Handy, who had come up through the ranks with them both. The two teams divided the files between them and revisited every aspect of the case, leaving no stone unturned. Trevor Holloway was handling the investigation into the 3 current rapes and Ian Bogle was responsible for the 10 rapes that happened decades earlier. This division was intentional in order not to confuse the cases.

Between the 2 teams they were now investigating 13 rapes, 10 cold cases and 3 current attacks, allegedly carried out by their main suspect Charles Abbot. Initially the CCU, the Cold Case Unit re-read every file Bogle and Holloway had assembled back in the day, and then tried to create a timeline to see if it was possible that Abbot could have carried out all of the attacks. Some might say that this should have been done before Abbot was charged, but Chief Bogle, in error, was so delighted that after 25 years they had the name of a suspect, due diligence may not have been at the top of the agenda and so Abbot was charged in spite of that. In his bones Bogle felt absolutely 100% certain they had the right man.

In an office down the hall from Bogles’ team was Inspector Holloway and his team of 6 detectives, who were investigating the 3 current rapes, including the 25-year-old attack on the nurse Carol Drinkwater, who had never reported her rape. Bogle had decided that Holloways’ team should investigate that particular case as he feared that if his team investigated the case, they could become biased against Ms. Drinkwater. Holloway’s team became known as the Cambridge Sex Crimes Unit, or CSCU for short. His team initially read and re-read the case files of the 4 victims. It was also decided that if there were any more attacks then the CSCU would be the investigative unit.

One month after Inspector Holloway filed charges against their client, Charles Abbot’s legal team responded by contacting Cambridge Police and stating that on 3 of the 9 dates the rapes were committed on, their client was abroad which would have made it impossible for him to have committed the crimes. The team included copies of round-trip airline tickets where Abbot was visiting and hotel receipts for the time away. After Holloway received this bombshell news, he met up with Chief Superintendent Bogle and Commissioner Handy and then issued a statement to the press. Two days later the charges against Charles Abbot were dropped amidst threats by his legal team of an impending lawsuit against the Cambridge Police Force. Holloway was severely reprimanded by the Commissioner for jumping the gun.

Trevor Holloway had married his high school sweetheart just a year after he graduated from school. Patricia Holloway, née Samuels, was gorgeous and Trevor was the envy of every bloke who knew them. On March 13th Trevor and Trish were married at their local Cambridge Presbyterian church by Father Thomas and 13 months later became the proud parents of, what would be their only child, Lara. Lara was bright as a button and began walking at 11 months and began to talk a few months after that. She developed a fascination for science and won a scholarship to St. Mary Magdalen girl’s school a few miles from Cambridge where her mum and dad worked. Her mum, a stenographer, worked at the Cambridge courthouse for Judge Engoron and her dad at the Cambridge Police Department. Years went by and young Lara excelled academically and was beautiful to boot. When it came time to take her A levels, she took 4. Biology, chemistry, physics, and further mathematics, and passed all of them with flying colors. Lara applied to Cambridge, Oxford, and several red brick universities, one of which was Bristol. She was accepted into all of her main choices, contingent upon passing her A levels. She eventually decided to attend Bristol University partially because she’d recently met a nice fellow who she was now dating. The romance didn’t last long but it turned out to be an important ingredient in the ‘making of Lara.’ Lara Holloway subsequently graduated with a degree in chemistry, and then took a master’s in forensic science and got her MSc 2 years later, after which she received her PhD 2 years later. Lara was the first member of the Holloway clan ever to go to university. At 25 years old she was offered a job at Oxford University.

It was during a Sunday phone chat from Oxford with her dad that he asked her a question about DNA that had been worrying him. “I’m confused about what exactly genetic DNA is. Can you explain it to me in words of one syllable.” Lara chuckled and replied patiently, “sure dad. Genetic DNA is an interesting subject. But you realize that it’s a tiny percentage of our DNA that makes all of us different. Humans are genetically very similar. We share about 99.9% of our genetic code with one another.” “How could that be, he asked, We’re all so different.” Lara smiled and replied, “I’m afraid that’s a chat for another day, dad.” “Okay,” he replied, “but just tell me very quickly about the DNA of a blood relative, like say a brother or a sister?” Could his DNA match his brothers? “It’d be very very similar dad. My advice is to get a DNA sample from the brother if possible.” And with that the two said their goodbyes and hung up the phone.

Trevor Holloway had been fomenting the idea for weeks now but sometimes it helps to talk about the idea with an impartial party. What if?? Could it be possible?? Could he have charged the wrong man?? Of course, he had known all the ins and outs of familial DNA since long before Lara had been born, but his chat with his daughter had clarified things in his mind persuasively. In some ways his chat had been his own way of talking out loud, and the more he thought about it that Sunday evening, the more convinced he became that the course he was now sailing was the correct path.

Tommy Abbot had been known to law enforcement for decades. In and out of detention centers most of his young life, his infractions had been youthful violations such as shoplifting, joy riding and the occasional car theft. His crimes were enough to incarcerate him for short terms at Borstal, the young offenders prison system, but not really serious enough to paint him as a hardened criminal. Tommy was 15 years younger than his older brother who he worshipped. Charley considered his younger brother to be a bit of a nuisance, but deep down there was love there, and a mutual love and respect they shared for what they’d had to suffer from their alcoholic father.

CHAPTER 5. Probable Cause

The first thing Inspector Holloway did on Monday morning was apply for a search warrant for Thomas Abbot. He knew now that the blood test he had received from Carol Drinkwater would be challenged in any court in the land and so he wanted to approach this new direction with absolutely clean hands. There must be no hint of bias being leveled against Tommy Abbot because of his having DNA that was familial to his brother. Holloway considered looking at Tommy’s juvenile record but quickly dismissed that idea as he knew that only Tommy’s fingerprints would have been taken. In the UK however there is a statute that allows search warrants for what is known as “probable cause.” This would then allow the police to collect his DNA from a toothbrush or a comb or hairbrush. Inspector Holloway knew Tommy, given the debacle of his brothers’ blood sample, would never give his DNA voluntarily and so he simply let the judicial process play out. A week later the warrant was approved, and the search carried out and several items were found at the suspects home and sent on to the lab for analysis.

Turnaround time is a high priority in the UK. Nationally established targets for crime scene sample analysis are 24 days. Holloway tore Tommy Abbots life apart during that time, concentrating mainly on the most recent attacks. One thing still bothered him though, and that was the firsthand testimony of Carol Drinkwater who said that her rapist had a most distinctive and vile body odor. A member of his team suggested that this might have simply been coincidental because the attacker had been trudging through the undergrowth and consequently had become hot and sweaty and might not have been the most manicured of human beings. Certainly, that was something worth considering.

Holloway was limited in his approach regarding the possible incrimination of Tommy Abbot. So far, the team had been looking into him in as low key a way as possible. He must have known that he was under investigation because of the warrant that had been executed but as much as possible CSCU was being low profile. Because they were waiting for the DNA to come back from the lab, they hadn’t interviewed Tommy yet and so it came as a surprise when Detective Chris Rogers discovered that young Abbot had received a traffic violation just 3 miles from the crime scene of Angie Jenkins on the day that she was brutally raped at her ground floor flat at Longwood Gardens on the outskirts of Cambridge.

CSCU spent the following week checking and double-checking Tommy’s movements during the time the current rapes had been reported. Surveillance was being conducted by the CCU, as it had more detectives than CSCU, and 2 teams of 2 detectives kept a 24-hour watch on Tommy Abbot’s whereabouts at all times. The surveillance team was required to contact both Inspector Abbot and Chief Superintendent Bogle in the event that Tommy Abbot behaved unusually. This meant that if he drove anyplace farther than a few miles from his patch the 2 team leaders would be notified. Abbot was currently living in Clapham just a few miles from Brixton where he had grown up. Tommy had never married and lived in a converted 2-bedroom condo that he had bought a few years ago. Detective constable Lynne Reid, and Detective Sergeant Terry Johns were parked in a gray Ford Fiesta about a hundred yards down Melbourne Lane the street Tommy lived on eating Pizza and talking about nothing in particular when all of a sudden Abbot appeared walking at a fast clip towards his own vehicle. Lynne nudged Terry Johns who was busy taking a bite of his delicious pizza and whispered to him to be ready to follow him. Terry nodded his head, swallowed, and turned the key in the ignition. Tommy Abbot arrived at his car and climbed in. Seconds later the vehicle lights came on and he drove towards the main road. The detectives followed at a safe distance. It soon became clear that Abbot was headed to the ring road which led to the M11 that would take them towards Cambridge and the east. As soon as the two realized Abbots’ intentions Lynne Reid telephoned her superior officers with the update. Surmising he was heading for Cambridge 55 miles away; Terry kept a safe distance from the Ford Fiesta while Lynne alerted Bogle and Holloway of Tommy Abbots current status. The 2 superior officers told the surveillance team to keep following and stay in touch with them as soon as it was certain that Tommy Abbot was driving to Cambridge. The detectives on both the Cambridge Cold case unit and the Cambridge Sex Crimes Unit were alerted and told to report to work immediately. 40 minutes later the van Tommy Abbot was driving took the Cambridge exit off the M11. Detectives Reid and Johns following closely in their nondescript Ford Fiesta took the same exit.

Inspector Holloway was sitting at his desk coordinating 5 unmarked police cars that were waiting at various locations near the exit. As Abbot entered the area surrounding Cambridge the unmarked cars were ready to follow him anonymously in order that he wouldn’t grow suspicious. The cars would switch every mile or so until Holloway could get a fix as to where he was heading. All cars were in direct contact with Inspector Holloway who was also in direct contact with Chief Superintendent Bogle. After a few moments of driving, it became clear that Tommy Abbot was headed towards the northeast of town. A couple of days earlier Holloway had asked sergeant Cowan to find out how many ground floor flats at Longwood Gardens were being occupied by young women. It appeared that Tommy Abbot was headed directly back to the same building where Angela Jenkins lived. Sergeant Cowan had found out there was one other woman, Jesse Owens aged 18 who was a resident there also. Holloway suddenly remembered his sergeant telling him about Jesse Owens and realized that Tommy Abbot must have staked her out on the same day he had raped Angela Jenkins and had planned to attack her at a later date. Now, it seems, was the time he’d decided to break in and attack her, the Inspector thought to himself. Everything now made perfect sense to him. He sprang into action and ordered his team to go immediately to Longwood Gardens and watch and wait for Abbot to arrive. He called Chief Superintendent Bogle and alerted him with the same directive, and then gave Sergeant Cowan orders to wake Jesse Owens up by banging on her front door and explaining the imminent danger that was about to occur. Holloway recommended his sergeant take a female officer with him in order that Ms. Owens not be scared or intimidated by a solo male pounding on her door at three fifteen in the morning.

It took the two teams just minutes to be ready for Tommy Abbot’s arrival. They parked their cars unobtrusively in the parking lot and crouched low so they wouldn’t be seen by him, and patiently waited until they all simultaneously received a signal that he was arriving at the parking lot.

CHAPTER 6. Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens was woken up by a loud banging on her front door. Bleary eyed she roused herself and walked to the front door. “Who is it?” She shouted through the door. “It’s the police, Ms. Owens. It’s sergeant Cowan and constable Ann Smothers. We’d like to have a word with you. Would you mind letting us in.” A moment later the two police officers were standing in the darkened sitting room of the tiny bedsit explaining to her why they were there. They intentionally kept the lights off and when they’d finished explaining suggested she go back to bed while the two of them sat in the sitting room waiting for the next move by Tommy Abbot.

Jesse Owens flat was located to the back of the building but adjacent to Angela Jenkins flat. Jesse was a first-year undergraduate at university coming from Cardiff in Wales. This was her first experience away from home and Jesse was excited to be studying at one of the best universities in the world. She had of course heard about the Angela Jenkins attack a couple of weeks earlier but never considered the attacker would target her. As she lay in her bed after the officers had explained what was about to happen, she felt safe in the knowledge that the police had everything in hand and attempted to drift off to sleep.

Tommy Abbot pulled into Longwood Gardens and drove through the parking lot looking for any unusual or suspicious activity. Satisfied that nothing looked unusual he pulled out of the parking lot and parked a couple of blocks away on a quiet side street. He exited the small Ford van and walked slowly toward the building he planned to break into, making sure that nothing raised his warning antenna. It was three thirty as he donned a black ski mask and slipped into the underbrush that surrounded the large Victorian house known as Longwood Gardens. He knew precisely where the window was that would give him direct access to Jesse Owens flat, and like a well-trained cat he slunk toward his prey. A twig snapped below his foot sounding like a pistol shot and he stopped momentarily to make certain no one woke up. Freezing for a moment gave him a chance to get his bearings and then, when he was absolutely sure it was safe to continue, moved stealthily toward the window. Tommy was an expert in unlatching windows, so it only took him a second. He pushed the window upwards, and it slid open with ease not making a sound. He then pulled himself onto the windowsill and rolled silently into the darkened room landing in silence on the carpeted floor.

Unbeknownst to Tommy Abbot the two police officers who were now in Ms. Owens flat had been watching his break in. The detectives who were parked in the parking lot were in contact with Inspector Holloway who ordered two of them to discreetly follow Abbot and watch as he broke in and then remain in place to prevent him from fleeing and arrest him if he tried to run for it.

Abbot rolled onto the carpeted floor of Jesse Owens flat and stood up, his eyes getting used to the darkness. As Tommy stood up, sergeant Cowan flicked on the light switch illuminating the room. The look of surprise and horror on Abbot’s face, even though it was covered by a black ski mask was almost funny had it not been so serious. Initially he did a half turn and attempt to climb out of the window he’d just come in by but was stopped in his tracks as he saw two burly policemen standing there looking up at him. So, he turned back to sergeant Cowan and constable Smothers and looking around quickly assessed there was no means of escape and so with a defeated sigh removed his mask and held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender, and Sergeant Cowan read him his rights and took him into custody. Within seconds Jesse Owens’ flat was teeming with police officers and a forensic team showed up soon afterwards who cordoned off the flat and collected samples to compare them to any previous attack sites. Jesse Owens was relocated temporarily to a small hotel near the police department, until the time when forensics had cleared her flat.

Tommy Abbot was sitting in interview room 1 the day after his arrest looking depressed and glum. He was a slight man of around 50. No one would accuse him of looking like Brad Pitt. If you bumped into him at a football match 5 minutes after you met him, you’d be hard pressed to describe him as anything but nondescript. His life just hadn’t really worked out well for him. Bullied as a child he only had one person who’d ever stood up for him, and that was his brother, Charley. But by the time he was 17, Charley, who was 15 years older than him, was 32. Tommy worshipped his older brother and would do anything for him.

Trevor Holloway and Ian Bogle were watching Abbot through a 2-way mirror. Technically they were sweating him, a term that is used after a criminal has been caught, but before he is formally charged. The tactic is clever and often produces results in the form of a confession or a partial admission of guilt. In any case Holloway and Bogle wanted him to wonder just how much evidence they had against him. The two seasoned policemen had been chasing this man for over 25 years and until now they’d never found a drop of evidence that might convict him. They needed to catch him in the act and hopefully match his DNA to the 3 previous rapes in order not to have the cases thrown out of court on the familial DNA charge that his brother had been accused of. It was vital that any charges leveled against Thomas Abbot must have “clean hands,” and not have any whiff of bias.

“Good morning Mr. Abbot.” The Inspector began. “You’ve been charged with breaking and entering 56 Longwood Gardens, the home of Ms. Jesse Owens, a university student. Would you like to say anything?”

I felt an ominous quiet click somewhere in my neural substrate, as I remembered my friend Pete staring up at me eyes wide open, from beneath the water. It seemed like such a frightfully long time ago since I’d been a schoolboy at Milbourne Lodge prep school. It was a whole lifetime ago and now Tommy Abbot was eventually arraigned and charged with multiple rapes over a 27 year period. After a long and emotional trial Tommy Abbot was sentenced to a life sentence for each of the 13 rapes he was convicted for.

THE END

A note from the author. Thank you so much for reading my short story. If you would like to know more about me please visit my website.

Joe Wilson was an ordinary bloke. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. He lived in a nice house that he’d inherited from his parents after they died at 37 Disraeli Road in London. He drove a bus for a living. He started driving right out of school. His Dad had been a driver as well. He drove the number 11 bus from Fulham to Liverpool Street station every day of his working life. After his shift finished Joe was responsible for making sure that his bus was empty. That meant that he would have to walk through the passenger cabins both upstairs and down to make sure that nothing had been left behind by any of his passengers. As soon as he had checked and double checked he could clock off for the day and go and buy himself a pint at his local. He steadfastly stuck to his routine for years, rarely finding anything of great value or importance. Like I said Joe was an ordinary bloke who never seemed to move the needle too much. One Thursday evening on a cold November day he walked the top cabin and found a leather satchel sitting on the seat right at the front of the bus. It looked like a backpack and Joe picked it up intending to turn it into the lost and found before he clocked out at the Fulham bus depot. For some reason that evening the lost and found was closed and so he shrugged and just carried it out with him clocking out as he walked with the satchel slung over his right arm. He arrived at the Cock and Bull at 6:14 pm and as he walked in the bartender, a friend of his was already pouring him his first pint. “Cheers Jack,” he said to the bartender as he put the pint to his lips and took a long drink from the frothy beverage. “Think we’re going to get some snow tonight?” Jack Armitage sighed and thought about heading to sunny Spain to get away from this dismal rain but instead replied kindly to his friend. “Yeah, maybe Joe. Maybe.” Joe went and sat down at his little table near the fire in what the pub generously called The Snug. He slung the satchel down on the chair next to his and took another long drink of his beer. Joe loved this time of day. His routine seldom varied and after downing seven pints of bitter he staggered the 2 blocks home to Disraeli road and plonked himself down in front of the TV where he would invariably fall asleep and wake up in time for the 10 pm news and then head upstairs to bed. This evening was no different from every evening for the past 12 years except that tonight he was carrying the satchel which he’d found on the bus. Joe slept like the dead until 5.30 am the next morning when he awoke and rolled into the shower and then got dressed and walked downstairs to grab some breakfast. It was only then that he remembered the satchel. There it was on the kitchen table where he had left it last night. As he ate his cereal, he opened the top flap. What he saw amazed him. Bursting out of the satchel spilled piles of cash all neatly wrapped in thick bundles. His heart began to race faster as he looked at this new treasure. Joe, being an ordinary bloke had never seen such quantities of money before in his life and the first thing he did was tip up the satchel so the contents could spill out onto the kitchen table. Being a methodical man he proceeded to count the money bundle by bundle. Each bundle of cash was a different denomination and so he sorted the bundles into piles of the same denomination of notes. He began by separating the largest denomination there was which was a £100 stack. After 20 minutes he was still counting the notes. He had discovered there were 80 stacks of £100 pound notes and each stack had 40 bank notes. By his quick accounting he figured that there was £320,000 alone in the £100 stacks. Joe then moved on to the lesser denominations and after he had counted all the £50 stacks determined there were 90 stacks amounting to a total of £360,000 90 stacks of £20 pound notes amounting to £90,000 and 100 stacks of £10 pound notes that amounted to £50,00. After Joe finished counting the individual denomination stacks, he turned his attention to counting the total amount of money he had found in the satchel, and it came to a mind blowing £720,000 that was sitting on his kitchen table. Joe had grown up in the house where he now lived but when his parents died, he moved into their bedroom from his childhood bedroom. When he had been a little boy, he had created a hiding place for his treasures stuck between the floorboards and tucked between the rafters of the living room below. It was still there, and he had always kept it a secret. He bundled all the money back into the satchel, walked it upstairs and hid it in his old bedroom beneath the rug that covered that floor. It fit perfectly and Joe, feeling pleased with himself, replaced the floorboards and left for work that Friday morning. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground as Jack the bartender at the Cock and Bull had correctly predicted the night before and Joe walked pensively to work where he arrived at 7:14 am slightly late and hurried to get his number 11 bus on the road on schedule. When Joe returned home 10 hours later, he found that his home had been ransacked. Every room in the house had been systematically turned over. The burglar was clearly looking for something and as soon as Joe walked in the front door, he knew exactly what they were looking for. The first thing he did was run up to his old bedroom and check to see if the floorboards had been messed with. Miraculously when he checked, the money was still there safely in the leather satchel where he had left it tucked away safely beneath the floorboards. He breathed a sigh of relief. He figured that the gang were probably drug dealers and were clearly smart enough to have figured out who had found the money and where he lived. Joe, while just an ordinary bloke, didn’t take well to people threatening him and spent the next hour tidying up the mess the burglars had left. On the kitchen table they left a note to Joe. “We know you have it. Wait for my instructions. SOON.” Joe didn’t bother calling the police. While he didn’t like being threatened, he realized it was only a matter of time before he returned the satchel. The whole affair now left a dirty taste in his mouth, and frankly he wanted nothing more to do with the money or the satchel.

CHAPTER 2. A surge of anger

A day later a note was stuffed through his letter box. It was from the drug dealers and said. “Hand the satchel and all its contents over to Jack at the Cock and Bull and then leave the pub. If you do this no harm will come to you or your friends. If you deviate from my instructions, you will bring your world crashing down around you. As soon as you get this take the satchel to the pub immediately. We are watching you.” Joe felt a surge of anger building up in him. Joe was an ordinary bloke who had served 2 tours of duty in Afghanistan in the Royal Marines 45th commando unit. The reason Joe was an ordinary bloke was because he had seen his share of action and being an ordinary bloke was his response to all the death and destruction he had seen while serving his Queen and Country. Joe had been a British commando sniper a highly trained soldier capable of killing a man quietly from a great distance. Joe had distinguished himself in the field of operations dozens of times by saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Instead of handing over the satchel as he had been told to do he walked down to the bus depot and spoke with a friend of his who was in charge of IT for the district. Leonard Crichton was a quiet thoughtful man unmarried and about 39 years old who Joe had known since he had been a boy. They went to school together and became friends after a bullying incident where Leonard had been surrounded by bully’s and Joe who was walking home that day saw the incident and without thinking went in with full force to beat the bully’s off this poor kid who was being picked on. Joe was badly beaten that day but Leonard (or Lenny to his friends) was spared a severe beating by this good Samaritan who just happened to be passing. From that day forward Lenny and Joe became nodding acquaintances and years later after Joe had come back from Afghanistan and become a bus driver much to his delight, he bumped into Lenny in the depot cafeteria who told him that he had got his degree in computing and was now the IT guy at the Fulham bus depot in charge of routing bus schedules and being Mr. Fixit for the numerous computers in the administrative offices. Lenny had told Joe proudly that he had been responsible for installing what he called “eyes in the sky,” (cameras) on every bus in the division. It was now his job to keep the video equipment maintained and serviced. It was with this in mind that Joe walked down to the depot right after he received the blackmail note. He knocked on Lenny’s door and when he was asked to enter, he opened it to be met by a smiling man sitting behind a desk with mountains of paraphernalia around him. Lenny was clearly in his element. “Hello Lenny,” Joe started. “I was wondering if I could ask a favor?” “Yes of course you can,” his friend replied without hesitation. “What do you need?” “I’d like you to look at some video from my last shift. It was 2 days ago, and I’d like to see who was riding on the top deck of my bus. I’m not sure how many of them there were. It may have just been one person but whoever it was they left a red leather satchel on the seat. I would like to try and identify who it was if possible. Do you think you could take a gander for me?” “Yeah, no worries. Were you driving the number 11 that shift?” Lenny replied and Joe nodded his head. “Okay give me a sec and Lenny began scrolling through files on his computer. After a few minutes he brought up a video of the night in question and they both began looking at it together. At 5:37 two guys came into frame and one of them was carrying the red satchel. “Got him,” Lenny triumphantly stated and then drew breath and said to Joe. “That’s Richie Edwards from school, isn’t it?” Joe looked hard and suddenly recognized one of the boys who’d been bullying Lenny at school all those years before. “Yup, and he’s still hanging out with Billy Jenkins.” Lenny nodded his head in agreement. Joe and Lenny continued watching the footage and after about 5 more minutes they watched the two men stand up and walk towards the stairs and exit the bus. The satchel, however, remained on the seat forgotten by Richie Edwards who had placed it there ten minutes earlier. Joe thanked his friend for showing him the video and went back downstairs and clocked in for his shift driving the number 11 bus back and forth from Fulham Broadway to Liverpool Street for the next eight hours. Driving let him think, so by the end of his shift he had come up with a half decent plan. Joe Wilson had known Richie Edwards for most of his life. They had never been friends, but it’s hard to live in a smallish community like Fulham used to be without running into each other at the occasional party or school function. Any interaction however was halted after Richie, Billy Jenkins and a guy called Tommy something or other were picked up and arrested for stealing cars and selling drugs. Richie the ringleader pulled a 5 year sentence but because he was 15 years old at the time of his trial the crown had to release him on his 18th birthday. Joe heard through the grapevine that after Richie was released, he went hard core into selling drugs and became a notorious London drug dealer. It did not surprise Joe that Richie figured out so fast who had taken the satchel, and Richie knew where Joe lived. It stood to reason therefore that Richie or one of his thugs had broken into Joe’s home and ransacked it a couple of nights before. Now Joe had to decide if Richie was all bluster or whether he might carry out his threat. The next morning Joe came to the awful realization that Richie Edwards’ threats had suddenly become reality. As he was getting ready for work, he was listening to his favorite radio station that suddenly broke in with a news update that reported a fire had demolished the Cock and Bull Pub late last night. Luckily, no fatalities had been reported but Joe knew exactly what that fire meant. It was clear that Richie had set the fire after Joe did not obey what he had been told to do in the note that Joe found. As far as Joe was concerned, this was now war. He knew he’d have to work fast if he were to succeed, and he knew that Richie was basically a coward who would back down the moment he was confronted. So Joe Wilson set out to find where Richie Edwards lived.

CHAPTER 3. Richie Edwards

He knew it’d be somewhere in Fulham as people like Richie tend not to wander too far from their home patch. It took him two days to get hold of Richie’s address and it turned out to be not far from his childhood home on Nye Avenue, about 3 blocks from where Joe had grown up on Disraeli Road and still lived since the passing of his parents. Richie Edwards now lived in a modern and expensive single family house on Logan Road. It appeared that he also ran his drug business out of the same address. He had 5 employees, all burly thugs who Joe had known for most of their lives. Each hooligan certainly wouldn’t have done well as a Royal Marine commando what with the rigorous physical training schedule that every cadet had to adhere to. Joe never bragged about his time as a sniper green beret, but word had it that he could take out his quarry perched high on a hill from hundreds of yards away. He had gone through extensive training when he joined up and his sergeant major found that he had a knack for shooting and so he had been sent on a six week training course in the midlands where he did nothing else but learn to shoot and become the best that he could. Joe Wilson had a lot of Marine buddies who he could call on at the drop of a hat. Many of them lived quite close and for a day or two Joe considered asking some of them if they would help bring this thug and his gang down. The trouble was, the more he thought about it, he didn’t want any of them to get in trouble and the things he was considering doing to this scumbag would definitely guarantee a room in Her Majesty’s Prison service. Back when Joe was growing up Fulham was a relatively small community. Still part of the Greater Metropolitan area, it was one of 32 boroughs that comprised London itself. Known as the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham as of 2013 it had 178,000 people living there with roughly half in Hammersmith and half in Fulham. Every generation as they grow up replace the previous generation within the workplace. Joe Wilson was a good example. When he returned from Afghanistan his father nearing retirement age got Joe a local job driving a bus for the local bus company. Many of his friends now worked for government agencies in the finance department, the building department, the police department, the planning department, and the social services department. The list went on and on. Joe found that many of the kids he’d grown up with were now employees of the government. Often, he would go into the DMV to pay for a car tax sticker and run into an old schoolmate working behind the desk who he hadn’t seen for years. It was comforting for him to come back to his community, and he was damned if he was going to allow someone like Richie to bully him and destroy everything that was good about his community. The Metropolitan Borough of Fulham was a Metropolitan borough in the County of London between 1900 and 1965, when it was merged with the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith to form the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It was a riverside borough, and included the areas of Fulham, West Kensington, Waltham Green, Parsons Green, and Sands End. The SW6 postal district approximately follows the old Fulham parish. When the metropolitan borough was formed it carried on using the unofficial arms adopted by its predecessor, Fulham vestry in 1886. This was a quartered shield, with a depiction of a bridge in the first and fourth quarters. The bridge in the first quarter was the original wooden Putney Bridge, opened in 1729 with its toll houses. Its replacement, the present Putney Bridge, constructed of stone, was shown in the fourth quarter. The new bridge was opened in 1886, when the arms were designed. The second quarter showed crossed swords, from the arms of the Bishop of London. The manor of Fulham was held by the bishop from 691, and his official residence, Fulham Palace, was built in the area. The third quarter was the arms then associated with the county of Middlesex, in which Fulham lay until 1889. The three knives (seaxes) on a red field was also regarded as the arms of Essex. In 1927 councilor F. H. Barber, proprietor of Barber’s Department Store in the borough, offered to pay the costs of a grant of arms and new civic regalia. Accordingly, an official grant was obtained from the College of Arms on 12 October of that year, blazoned as follows: Barry wavy of ten, Argent and azure, on a Saltire gules, two swords in Saltire points upwards of the first enfiled of a Mitre Or, and for the Crest upon a Mural Crown of Seven turrets Or an Ancient Rowing Ship in full sail Sable, the Flags per fesse Argent and Azure charged on the sail with a Rose Gules, surmounted by a Rose Argent barbed Vert and seeded proper. The silver and blue wavy field was for the River Thames, the swords and mitre signifying the Bishop of London. The crest rose from a gold mural crown, resembling a city wall, and thus municipal government. The crest itself was a black ship, recalling an expedition to Fulham by the Danes in 879. The main sail was charged with a Tudor rose, recalling the importance of the area in that era, when Fulham Palace was rebuilt. The Latin motto, Pro Civibus Et Civitate, was translated as “for citizens and state”. The waves from the shield, the two swords, the mitre and most of the crest was brought to the coat of arms of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham when Fulham and Hammersmith merged to form a new London borough in 1965. Joe Wilson visited his friend Jack Armitage the publican who owned the Cock and Bull on the Fulham Road that had been burned to the ground a few nights earlier. Luckily Jack hadn’t been hurt and had managed to climb out of his bedroom window and run across the rooftops to safety. He was now staying in a lovely Mews cottage a couple of blocks from the pub. When he saw his friend, he told him about his close escape and Joe told him about his recent run in with their old nemesis and schoolmate Richie Edwards. Joe being an honest guy wanted to explain that he may have been the reason for the fire. He asked Jack to come and get a sandwich with him at another local pub. When they were seated with 2 pints and 2 roast beef sandwiches in front of them Joe told Jack the whole story of how he had found the red leather satchel on his bus and had meant to turn it in as was the protocol but on that night the lost and found attendant had gone home early so Joe decided to bring the satchel home with him that night. “Yes, I remember seeing it when you came home that evening, and you stopped in for your pint.” Said Jack. “I remember it because it was an unusual color.” “Yes, it was,” Joe replied. When I got it home out of curiosity, I opened up the flap and thousands of pounds came spilling out on the kitchen table. In all I counted a total of £720,000 lying on my table. I freaked out and hid it in a place I had used as a hiding place when I was a kid and went to work the next day. When I got home my house had been ransacked and the following morning, I got a note through my door telling me to bring the money and give it to you at the pub or else. Instead I went back to the bus depot and asked Lenny to bring up the video of the night the satchel was left and find out who it was that had threatened me and ransacked my home. 2 hours later we had our answer. There on the screen was our old school chum Richie Edwards with his best mate Billy Jenkins showing their ugly mugs and being the ones who had forgotten to pick up the satchel on the seat next to them. For a moment Jack was silent letting the new information sink in. Then he said. “Wasn’t Richie the lad who was bullying young Lenny Crichton at school and you stepped in and confronted him?” “If you mean, was I the bloke who beat up a bully then yes guilty as charged.” Joe responded. Jack smiled but then as he realized that had it not been for Joe disobeying the bully now, then his pub would never have been torched in the first place. He sat quietly mulling over the pros and cons of the last few days and then coming to a satisfactory conclusion, smiled, and said, “I would have done the same thing as you Joe. Bullies like him are a blight on our society and need to be stopped. Why do I think you’re cooking up a scheme to deal with him?” Joe laughed and took a big swig of beer and asked his friend, “ready for another one?” To which Jack stood up and replied, ”thanks Joe but let me get this one. It’s my turn.” Joe sat there for a moment, glad he had told his friend what’d happened, and that Jack obviously didn’t blame him. As a matter of fact he had told him that his insurance company had already agreed to replace the building at no cost to him.

CHAPTER 4. Sammy Copley

When Jack came back with the drinks, he asked Joe what he was planning. And so Joe laid it out in words of one syllable. “Sink the SOB.” When they both stopped laughing Joe told Jack exactly what his intentions were. “A mutual friend of ours, Jenny Copley lost her son to drugs a few years ago. Those drugs were sold to Sammy by one of Richie’s gang. Sammy was strung out on heroin and had been since Richie first sold him drugs when he was in high school. Sammy was hooked on crystal meth for a while until he graduated to freebasing heroin. One Friday morning he was found dead by his girlfriend. She immediately rang 999 but it was too late, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at Fulham hospital. He was 19 years old. Jenny is a mum of two other kids a boy, Troy 15 and a girl Shanna 17 and both of them are doing wonderfully well and seemingly have no interest in doing drugs. Jenny has indicated to me that she would love to testify against Richie if I could find a way to have him arrested. And I think I may have just found a way.” One of Joe’s army buddies was a policeman, a detective in the metropolitan police force that is known as Scotland Yard. Jimmy Grainger had been a sharpshooter like Joe in the Green beret regiment of the Royal Marines. Jimmy had been a friend of Joe’s since they first met in Kandahar in Afghanistan. They were naturals together and shared a similar sense of humor. They were demobbed at the same time and when Jimmy announced he was getting married to his longtime sweetheart Rachel, Jimmy asked Joe to be his best man. Jimmy joined the police force right out of the Marines and like all cops in the UK he was required to initially become a foot patrol officer. He decided to take his sergeant exams and passed with flying colors and with his exams under his belt decided to try out for a detective exam which he took and passed. And so here Jimmy was 11 years later a fully-fledged detective at Scotland Yard. “Detective Grainger.” “Hi Jimmy, its Joe Wilson. How are you?” “Joe, it’s good to hear your voice. What have you been up to?” “You know me,” replied Joe. “Getting up to no good just like the old days. What about you Jimmy?” “I’m fine thanks,” he replied. “It’s time we got together again. Rachel was talking about you just the other day. Anyway my friend what can I do for you?” Joe took a deep breath and launched into his reason for the call. He told his friend about Richie the drug dealer and how he had left a bag full of money on his bus by mistake and that when he discovered his error, he’d threatened him to return the money and then when he didn’t return it in a timely manner, he had burned the pub that he drinks in down to the ground. “How did he know that you’d found the money?” Jimmy asked. “He knew I drove the number 11 bus and knew that at the end of my shift I always checked the bus for lost property. He and I go way back, and there is no love lost between us.” Joe answered. “What can I do to help?” replied Jimmy. “I intend to return his money and also return 50 one gram bags of cocaine that were bought from him by one of his street dealers who overdosed 3 years ago. His mother, a friend of mine found his stash after he died and hid it away until she and I were chatting a few days ago. She told me that I was welcome to the cocaine and frankly, she would be glad to be rid of it. I would like to hand the satchel full of money and the drugs back to Richie in a public location like a coffee house and have you guys be there to confirm the exchange and then as soon as it is done, swoop in and arrest Richie. You will have evidence of Richie accepting the £720,000 and a stash of 50 bags of cocaine with his fingerprints on the bags as well as Sammy’s the young son of my friend Jenny Copley who overdosed.” “Mm” said Jimmy. “Let me run it by my boss. It’s a great idea, on the surface, but I’d like to talk to our lawyers about the legal implications. First of all, Joe, thank you so much for doing this. It’s very brave of you, and I’d love it if we could work together again like the old days. Let me ring you in a day or two to tell you, our decision. Okay. ”Sure, that would be fine,” replied Joe Wilson. “Give my love to Rachel and I look forward to hearing back from you.” And Joe hung up the phone. Two days later Joe Wilson was driving his bus down the Fulham Road, returning to the depot on his last run of the day when his phone rang. Company policy dictates that one can’t talk on the phone whilst driving so Joe waited until he had parked the bus and clocked out before he saw that Jimmy Grainger had called. “Hey Joe, Jimmy here. I spoke to my boss who spoke to legal, and it looks like your idea has been approved. Legally it was right on the edge, but they feel that the benefits of his arrest far outweigh the negatives. Give me a call as soon as you get this, and we will set up the drop.” Joe heard the message and smiled. He walked back home to Disraeli Road stopping in for a quick pint at his new pub The Whistle and Crow. As he was sitting at the bar he rang Jenny Copley and explained to her that his plan was about to go into effect. He mentioned that he had spoken with his Green Beret chum who was now a detective and Jimmy had assured him that she wouldn’t get into any legal hassles by turning over her sons drug stash and including it in the satchel with the money. He arranged to go round to her house later to pick it up. Joe then called Richie Edwards on the only number he’d ever had and amazingly after three rings one of his thugs picked up. “Can I speak to Richie?” Joe asked. “Who’s calling,” replied the thug. “Tell him it’s Joe Wilson the guy who you tried to rob my house the other day.” A few minutes later Richie came on the line. “Yes,” he uttered in an unfriendly fashion. “Richie,” Joe replied. “I have something that belongs to you that you left on my bus the other day. I expect you’d like it back, wouldn’t you?” “Yes, I would,” he replied. Joe could hear him sneering through the phone. “Let’s meet at Bernie’s Café on the Broadway tomorrow, and I’ll bring the satchel with me.” “What’s the catch?” Richie asked. “No catch. I know what’s in the satchel, and I don’t want anything to do with your filthy money. So I just want to return it to you. For the record there was no point in threatening me, breaking into my home, and burning the Cock and Bull to the ground. The only reason I brought the satchel home that night was because the guy who works in the lost and found office went home early due to sickness that evening so I kept it for safe keeping. I had no idea that the satchel was yours otherwise I probably would have just delivered it to you personally. That all changed when I got home and opened it to find out if there was an address of the owner inside but instead found a huge cache of money. I decided to hide it in my safe place and give myself time to think. Sadly you beat me to the punch and decided to break into my house.” There was an exasperated gasp on the other end of the line as Richie interrupted Joe and asked. “What time would you like to meet at Bernie’s?” Joe replied, “how about 11?”

CHAPTER 5. Detective Jimmy Grainger

The following day was Saturday and Joe had the day off and so they both agreed to that time. “See you then, and no tricks.” Richie threatened. “No tricks. See you then.” Joe hung up the phone and immediately called Jimmy Grainger. “We’re on for tomorrow at Bernie’s Café on Fulham Broadway at 11 am. Will that work for your squad Jimmy?” “Hell yes, we will be there waiting and watching.” “Brilliant.” Joe replied. “Bernie is an old mate of mine and went to school with all of us. He knows Richie Edwards well and has had a few run ins with him over his lifetime I reckon. Bernie had installed state of the art video equipment a year or so back, because of some trouble he had been having with kids. So everything Richie says and does will be recorded for posterity and he has agreed to give you guys the tapes. I plan on getting there around 10:30 and will stash the coke beneath the money, so I think it is unlikely Richie will be crass enough to open the satchel other than give it a cursory glimpse. Are you planning on arresting him the moment he leaves Bernie’s?” Jimmy thought for a second and then told Joe that yes that was the plan. “I’m proud of you Joe. I wish there were more citizens like you.” Jimmy and Joe chatted for a few more minutes and then said their goodbyes and hung up. Joe downed his pint and left the pub walking at a fast clip towards Williams Street where Jenny Copley lived. He arrived at 413 Williams Street, a tidy brick row house typical of thousands of other post world war 2 buildings and knocked on the front door. A beautiful woman answered and the moment she saw it was her old friend Joe Wilson her lovely face lit up and she hugged him and invited him in. “You look great Joe,” she said, and he blushed just like he used to when they’d been in school together. “You do too Jen.” He blurted meaning every word of it. “Come on in and have a drink. It’s only me and the kids. We were just watching a movie, but I’ll let them watch it and you and I can chat in the kitchen. What can I get you Joe?” “Well I’d love a beer if you have one?” Joe asked, and she nodded her head as she walked to the refrigerator and got one for him and one for her as well. When they were sitting, she asked. “How’ve you been Joe? Are you well and happy. Are you seeing anyone at the moment?” They both laughed as he shook his head and replied. “What is this, 20 questions?” “I’m sorry Joe I suppose I’m just nervous. Before I forget, here’s the cocaine that Tommy was selling for Richie Edwards. And she produced the 50 one gram bags from a drawer in the kitchen table. Joe picked them up and tucked them away in a briefcase he was carrying. “Thanks Jen, we are going to get this son of a bitch once and for all. He has been fucking with us all our lives and hopefully now we have Jimmy on our side we can put him away in prison for decades.” “Wow, that’ll be fantastic,” replied Jenny. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you about Jimmy Grainger. Did he grow up around here?” “No, actually Jimmy is an army buddy of mine. We met in basic training, and both were trained as snipers. Jimmy is seriously good. He took out an enemy combatant we had been hunting from about a mile away.” “Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “How could he do that without being able to see him?” “Aaah well that is where the wonders of technology come into play. We were trained to use coordinates and wind speed and direction. Using a computer program somewhat like the program a guided missile uses we had to plot our coordinates and then determine the wind speed which could alter the trajectory with any sudden change. Jimmy happened to have a knack for determining everything that makes a long distance sniper highly successful. He rarely missed his target. He and I became friends quickly. We had each other’s backs and worked together closely for over four years. We joined up at the same time and were demobbed at the same time. A year after we became civilians again Jimmy got married to his childhood sweetheart and asked me to be his best man. I was honored to accept. He joined the metropolitan police force when he came home and worked his way up to become a detective first class. Suffice it to say that the arrest of Richie Edwards and his crew will be a feather in his cap, so he is most grateful to you for letting us use the stash that Tommy had. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that all goes to plan.” Joe stood up and thanked Jenny for her generosity and told her that he would let her know how everything worked out and then he gave her a hug and walked toward the front door. That night Joe didn’t sleep well. He kept on playing different scenarios around and around in his head. He was certain that Richie had murdered some of his drug gang rivals and he wondered what made someone become as toxic as Richie. He thought back to the day he had intervened in the fight between Richie and Lenny when Richie and his gang of bullies had unmercifully beaten up a defenseless kid over lunch money or some stupid shit. The guy had a long history of violence and he had made a choice to sell drugs for a living and the pain those drugs had caused to families of good hard working families was inestimable. He was doing the right thing now he was certain. As he lay there tossing and turning, he replayed all the different things he might have done to Richie had he been more of a vigilante. He fantasized about climbing high onto a rooftop overlooking Richie’s house and taking him out with one shot from his high powered rifle with the telescopic sights. The world sure as hell wouldn’t miss him but the effect on Joe’s psyche would far outweigh any benefits, he may get from assassinating the scumbag. No it was an interesting fantasy, but he valued his freedom too much. He was going to carry out his original plan and have the man arrested and charged with drug distribution and watch him be sent to prison. Joe fell into a restless sleep and awoke having dreamed of soldiers chasing him. He awoke with a start and got us and showered and dressed and gathered the satchel from its hiding place beneath the floorboards of his house and at 10 walked the short distance to Bernie’s Café on Fulham Broadway. He arrived at precisely 10:30 and grabbed a window table in the bustling breakfast place. He noticed one or two people who he thought may have been cops. At 10:40 he texted Jimmy Grainger with a message. “Im in place,” and received a reply a few seconds later, “I can see you. I’m waiting too.” Joe Wilson sat drinking coffee at Bernie’s Café until 11:45 when it became obvious that Richie Edwards was not going to show up. Finally Joe texted Jimmy and told him that their quarry was a no show. The operation was a resounding failure. At 10:45 Richie Edwards opened the front door of his house at 537 Logan Road and walked down the steps to the sidewalk below. It was a lovely Saturday morning and Richie was feeling good. In roughly an hour he would have his money back and he could carry on with his busy plans for the weekend, starting with a boozy lunch with friends at the Harlequin Club and then head off to Craven Cottage to spend a happy afternoon watching his favorite football team Fulham FC play Queens Park Rangers for the championship. It was going to be a good day. Parked just 3 doors down from Richie’s house was a beat up old Ford Cortina with no license plate. Behind the wheel was a dark haired man with thick glasses. The moment he saw Richie exit his house and begin to walk down the steps to the sidewalk the man started his engine and pulled on a rubber mask of Donald Trump to cover his face. He then accelerated and at high speed mounted the curb just twenty feet behind Richie Edwards. The Cortina was traveling at approximately 47 mph when it hit Richie square on killing him instantly.

CHAPTER 6. The Man in the Mask.

There were no witnesses that morning and the Ford Cortina sped away without stopping. The man behind the wheel removed his Trump mask and threw it in the back seat. He had been careful to wear rubber gloves the whole time. He drove just a short distance away, to a deserted salvage yard where he left the Cortina to be crushed and demolished and walked out to the road where he had left his own car. He climbed into it and drove home to Putney where he lived. It was nice he thought to himself that he didn’t have to work this weekend. Aaah 2 long days of rest and recreation. And the man sighed happily. Joe Wilson walked home after Richie’s no show at Bernie’s Café that morning. He’d texted Jimmy and asked if he’d like to join him for a drink, but his friend declined saying that he had work to do, and they would catch up soon. As Joe was walking home, he heard sirens in the distance and thought to himself that someone’s day was starting out badly. He got home and went back to bed to catch up on his sleep. Several hours later he was woken by a loud banging on his front door. He rousted himself and walked downstairs in his dressing gown and answered the door. It was Jimmy Grainger. “Joe, sorry to wake you but can I have a word with you?” “Yes of course Jimmy. Come on in. I’ll make some coffee.” After they had sat down in the kitchen and Joe was bustling around making the coffee Jimmy told him about Richie Edwards being involved in a hit and run while they were waiting for him at the Café. “Do you mean he’s dead?” asked Joe and Jimmy nodded his head. “Oh my God. I’m shocked but I can’t say I’m too cut up about it. Have you caught the bloke who did it?” Jimmy shook his head and said, “Nope nobody saw a thing. All we know at the moment is that a bystander saw someone who looked like Donald Trump speeding away from the scene of the crime in an old Ford Cortina.” “Did they get the license plate?” Joe asked and Jimmy once again shook his head. “Too bad,” muttered Joe under his breath. And then said. “Well I suppose that puts an end to that gang anyway?” “Yes, I suppose it does,” answered Jimmy, “until one of the other gang members makes a play for the crown. But we will have to keep our eyes on them.” “Jimmy, I have a question to ask you.” “Sure Joe, ask me anything.” “What about the satchel with all the money I found. What should I do with it?” Jimmy looked at Joe for the longest time with a questioning look in his eyes and then finished his coffee and stood up. “What money my friend. You never mentioned any money to me, but the 50 one gram bags of cocaine should be placed in the evidence room so if you’d be so kind as to hand them over to me, I’ll be on my way. Oh and by the way Rachel sends her love and wants me to invite you over to dinner next week if you can make it?” “Sure,” Joe replied as he gave the cocaine bags to his friend. “Tell her I’d love to. So let’s text on Monday to firm up a day? Are you sure about this Jimmy?” Jimmy nodded his head and walked onto the street and said “see you next week. Have a great weekend.” Joe stood there for a moment after Jimmy left and wondered what the hell had just happened. Jenny Copley was a single mother. Her husband Jamie had taken up with a younger woman shortly after Troy was born. He disappeared to Spain where he had 2 or 3 kids and never paid poor Jenny a dime in child support. Jenny worked tirelessly to provide a decent home for Tommy Troy and Shanna, often taking on extra jobs on the weekends. She never complained and was one of the most positive human beings Joe had ever known. Later that day Joe dropped in to see her and give her the receipt that Jimmy had given him for the bags of coke. He told her about the debacle at Bernie’s Café and then told her about the death that morning of Richie Edwards. “Good riddance,” she responded. I’ll never know why Tommy got involved with that guy. He was bad news when we were at school back in the day, but when he became a serious drug dealer and killed my son, that did it for me. Good riddance is all I have to say.” Joe certainly didn’t disagree. On Monday Joe arrived at work at 6:30 am as usual. He clocked in and had his number 11 bus running by exactly 7:00 am. That day was one of those days where everything clicked like clockwork and so by the time, he finished his shift 8 hours later he was ready to get a pint or two. As he was leaving, he ran into Lenny Crichton who waved him down. Although Joe was in a hurry to get off work he decided to chat to Lenny for a few minutes. “Did you hear that Richie Edwards was killed on Saturday?” Joe asked his friend. Suddenly Lenny looked terrified. There was guilt written all over his face and the moment Joe mentioned that Richie had been killed, Joe realized that Lenny must have been the driver of the Ford Cortina. Nothing more needed to be said, the guilt was right there on poor Lenny’s face. Now for the second time in Joe Wilsons life he was faced with a dilemma. Should he protect the weakling from the bully, or should he just walk away? Joe chose the former. He had to protect his friend from ever being questioned by the police, or otherwise Lenny’s face would give him away. All the CCTV cameras on the street are administrated by the borough they are in. In this case the borough was Fulham and as it happened Joe Wilson had been at school with the head IT guy at the government offices. The guy’s name was Rory Duncan and he and Joe had been good mates since 1st grade. After Joe had taken his leave of Lenny, he put a call into Fulham admin offices and asked to speak with Rory. A moment later Rory came on the line and was delighted when he heard his old friends voice. “Begorrah” exclaimed Rory in his lovely Scottish brogue. “What can I do for you Joe. It’s good to hear from you.” “I have a favor to ask Rory.” “Can I watch the CCTV tapes for Logan Road and the surrounding roads between 10:00 and 11:00 am Saturday? Would that be possible?” Joe asked his old friend. “Well of course you can. I can cue it up whenever you’re ready.” Rory replied. “How about now?” Joe asked. And then I’ll buy you a drink.” “That sounds like a winner to me. See you when you get here.” Joe was crammed into Rory’s office watching the videotape. He watched Richie walk down the steps onto the sidewalk and then in the distance saw an old Cortina jump the curb and mow him down. The driver appeared to be Donald Trump. The car never swerved or slowed down but intentionally seemed to mow Richie down and then speed up and disappear around the corner. Joe watched the video a few more times to make certain that Lenny’s face had never been seen, and then he asked Rory to switch to the next street over. There Joe just saw the car speeding away. So he checked the next street and the next street, but the car never appeared again. There were clearly some blind spots in the system, and these would prove to be most beneficial to Joe’s case. Once Joe was completely satisfied that Lenny Crichton’s face had never been seen he breathed easier and suggested a drink to his Scottish friend. “Oh Aye, that sounds great, and you can tell me why you wanted to see that video.” And he laughed and he and Joe went next door to the pub and had the pint they were both thirsting for and Joe never had to say a word as to why he was interested in the tape. 7 pints later Joe thanked Rory for his help and wobbled home to Disraeli Road. Joe satisfied that nobody could identify Lenny as the driver of the car that killed Richie and knowing the police wouldn’t break too much of a sweat investigating the death of a drug dealer, he turned his attention to more important matters. He opened a trust account in the name of Jenny Copley and deposited 720,000 pounds into the account securing a favourable interest rate that gave her an income of 50,000 pounds annually. He then told the bank manager to inform Jenny Copley that a wealthy anonymous donor had donated the trust in her name in perpetuity. Joe breathed a sigh of relief when he was finished with the banking details and got ready to have dinner with his friends Jimmy and Rachel Grainger at their home in Swiss Cottage . He walked to the off license and bought a bottle of wine for his hosts and whistled all the way to the bus stop. He told himself that he would be sure not to leave the gift on the bus when he got to his bus stop. And he chuckled to himself.

A note from the writer: Thanks for reading my short story. If you would enjoy learning more about my novels please visit www.timbattersby.com

Since a pesky health crisis torpedoed my musical career several years ago, I had been running around like a headless chicken not knowing what to do with myself. A friend suggested I try my hand at writing and so I cast my bread upon the waters and secured a gig as a contributor for the HuffPo. I had always been fascinated by the career choices of my fellow artists and so I plumped for writing a twice-monthly article on the lives and careers of the aforementioned. Word travels fast and before I knew it I was inundated with requests from musicians who wanted me to write a piece about their career. I was sincerely touched that so many talented artists were interested in my writing abilities. Over the next 18 months, I wrote 38 articles on our musical colleagues many of whom La and I had become friends with during our career, including Janis Ian, Eric Clapton, Rowan Atkinson, Terry a la Berry, Muriel Anderson, Robin Williams, AB FAB, Duffy King, Laurie Berkner, Kevin Lucas, Paul Winter, Jenny Oaks Baker, Bobby Susser, Dan Crow, and Lori Henriques. I loved writing the articles but sadly the HuffPo was purchased by AOL and their new policy dictated that I was no longer needed.

What my introduction to journalism taught me was invaluable, and I decided to push on with my writing. My stroke had left me partially paralyzed on my left side and I found typing was good physical therapy and so after a week or two lolling around the house I decided to try my hand at writing a novel.

I had always loved reading mystery novels, a couple of my favorite authors being Dame Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so I pondered for a while and finally came up with an idea that seemed like a good storyline. A female cub reporter fresh out of journalism school is hired by a Chicago paper. The young woman Jamie Stroud, is asked to report on a story about a Chicago businessman who’d been accused of behaving inappropriately toward a female co-worker. Upon further investigation Jamie discovers that this businessman is not only involved in sexual assault but also with money laundering, drugs, and murder. Jamie enlists the help of two friends who help her investigate the man and bring him to justice. My first book was called The Newspaper Chronicles and is the first book in the trilogy. It is available at Amazon Books.

Buoyed by the marginal success of my first book, I wondered if I had another story in me? The Newspaper Chronicles was approximately 30,000 words and had taken me almost a year to complete. I was pleased with the characters I had created and loved that they were now sharing a flat above a pizza parlor and seemingly coexisted without any sexual tension between them enjoying each other simply as friends. After I had shopped the book around to hundreds of literary agents without success I decided to self-publish and went to Amazon where I learned how to publish my book using KDP (kindle direct publishing) KDP provides you all the tools and advice you need to publish your book for free. I even designed the book cover, something which I was used to doing as I’d always designed our CD covers when we produced new albums in our music career. Once I published the book, then I was off to the races again and I began writing book number 2. During my time when I was publishing the Newspaper Chronicles, my mind was running on overdrive and I managed to write the outline of my next book completely in my head. I decided I liked Jamie Stroud enough that I would devote a second book to her exploits with her two friends, Sir Christopher Fenton and Lucy D’Tremont.

In the new novel, the 2nd in the trilogy called the Bloodhound Affair the intrepid trio latch onto a case where a serial killer starts choosing his victims throughout Chicago and killing them in a most gruesome manner. Jamie is the journalist who was covering the story for the Chicago Clarion and her investigation turns up that the killer appears to walk everywhere thereby leaving no trace of himself. Or so he thought. Chris and Lucy buy a trained bloodhound and with the help of a friendly cop they manage to get the scent of the killer and allow Poirot to sniff an article of clothing the victim was wering and reverse track the killer through Chicago to where he lives. When the trio discovers his identity they realize that, incredibly they know the killer. Finally, after an international chase across Canada, the suspect is caught and arrested but not before he has killed 2 more victims.

The Bloodhound Affair took me approximately 10 months to complete. I was starting to find my stride as an author and while sales were pretty well nonexistent I published my second book using KDP. In order to become an Amazon author with their POD (print on demand) program Amazon charges nothing upfront. They let you know the print charge (normally around $4.00 per book for my type of novel) and then take about 40% commission off the top of whatever I decided to charge. (e.g. Retail $16.00 — $6.40 commission minus $4.00 which leaves a tad under $6.00 for me.) Amazon sets you up with an account and an author’s page and pays you every month without fail. Each time you write a new book you can add the title to your author page. The figures I quoted are just approximate but accurate details of all costs can be found at www.kdp.com

My third novel, The English Affair involved Jamie Stroud losing her job at the newspaper and moving lock stock and barrel with her two partners, Lucy and Sir Christopher to the United Kingdom where Chris owns a 600-acre estate in Buckinghamshire and a large flat in Knightsbridge near Harrods in London. Lucy, wealthy in her own right had been a friend of Jamie’s since they’d been small kids growing up in Arlington Texas in the same neighborhood and riding the school bus together. It didn’t take long for the three of them to find trouble when one day shortly after Christmas they are kidnapped and held for ransom. In an unusual twist, they find themselves in the midst of a multi-million dollar art forgery ring. 279 pages this rousing tale is inspired by little else than an active imagination and is the 3rd book in the trilogy

I had found a comfortable rhythm writing. I loved the quiet of developing my stories. I still missed performing to kids. It had been my life for 35 years until the day I got sick. Laura, my wife and singing partner and I never became children’s performers with any expectations of fame or fortune but in spite of our lack of ambition amazingly we were nominated for a Grammy Award for our children’s album Sunny Days. We flew to Los Angeles and had the best weekend of our lives, being wined and dined by musical royalty for 3 days straight and flew back to Florida sitting next to Whitney Houston who just a few weeks later died. We’d seen her perform at the awards show just 1 day earlier. Her beautiful voice and lovely spirit will always be missed.

For my fourth book, I decided to write a book of short stories. I called the book Paperback Writer as a nod to my musical heroes The Beatles. I wrote 8 short stories for the book, and the book was well-received by my adoring fan. Not only had I managed to write several full-length mysteries of around 30,000 words per novel but I had also managed to write a few 30-page shorts that allowed my readers (the few of them that I have) to enjoy a love story or a murder mystery that they could easily read in one sitting. I was getting better at putting the pieces of the puzzle together so each book I was creating and editing was starting to look pretty good and really almost professional. Now all I needed was to become a better writer!

It was around that time that my friend Terry Hall who is the longtime drummer for Arlo Guthrie (Alice’s Restaurant) called me up and asked if I would be willing to edit and help him publish a book he’d just written about his 40 years on the road working for Arlo. Now Terry has been friends with us since we all met while performing at The White House in the mid-1980s. Terry has played drums on dozens of our songs over the years and so it was my absolute pleasure to agree to help him publish his new book Just a Berkshire Kid. I loved editing the pages and reading about his life working with such luminaries as Carly Simon and Pete Seeger (who won the Grammy the year we were nominated)

Spurred on by the avalanche of positive vibes by members of the music community I decided to take the bit between my teeth and write my fifth novel. Sugar and Spice, the Child in us all was born on May 16th, 2019 a healthy little tome coming in at 190 pages. Initially, Sugar and Spice created quite a buzz in the press but the 9 people who were the reason for the buzz soon drifted away to find nectar from a new flower, and so as not to be outdone by the sycophantic nature of modern-day honey bees I began writing my sixth full-length novel. Since I’d been a nipper I had been obsessed with history and so it made sense to me to write a book about a time in history that has always fascinated me. War is awful but no war interests me more because of the sheer insanity of one main participant, Adolf Hitler than World War II. My 6th novel was about a 10-year-old German Jew living in Berlin who loves helping his Dad tinker with cars until one night in 1942 when his entire family is arrested and sent to Buchenwald. Johann survives the camp but never sees his family again. What keeps Johann alive is that he uses his imagination and at night manages to sleep by dreaming of rebuilding his Dad’s favorite car a Mercedes Benz touring sedan. This novel is called The Boy who Loved Cars and was released on October 18th, 2020, and came in at 270 pages.

As I was editing and publishing the 6th novel I began thinking about the similarities between Adolf Hitler and our former President Donald Trump. They were both deeply narcissistic human beings having delusions of grandeur and I realized not for the first time that America’s 250 year experiment was being sorely tested and that our democracy was on the brink. Donald Trump had authoritarian tendencies which left to their own devices could have catastrophic consequences. I re-read my book and realized that with a few clever twists and turns this was the book I had always wanted to

write and so on November 1st, 2020 The Autocrat was born. 408 healthy pages filled with terror and fear were thrust upon the public and I was delighted. A Russian, a beautiful woman, and an American politician. Blend vigorously and what do you get? The Autocrat a new and exciting novel by Tim Battersby. President Cramer has a very active libido and as such is vulnerable to being blackmailed by foreign adversaries. Enter Ron Classon an NSA agent who discovers inequities in the Federal Government and recruits his best friend Stephen Landrieu a Secret Service agent to covertly investigate the situation. What they discover is enough to end democracy as we know it.

And so finally, on January 21st, 2021 I finished my 7th novel a children’s book called The Enchanted Playground which is a story about a writer from England called Timothy Tuttle, Tut to his friends. He comes to live in the United States with his 3-year-old daughter Emily and their Old English Sheepdog named Sadie. Tut buys a cabin on 3 acres on top of the Blue Ridge mountains near Upperville Virginia. Tut Emily and Sadie take daily walks around their new property and after a couple of months of exploring they discover an enchanted playground that sits behind a tall brick wall near their house. Only people with highly vivid imaginations are able to see the enchanted playground and they soon meet the fairies and tree trolls that live in the castle that is adjacent to the playground. The Trolls and the fairies become very protective towards Emily and make sure that wherever she and her father Tut go, they are always safe. The only problem with having magic tree trolls for friends is that you are the only human that can see them. The enchanted playground follows the life and adventures of Tut, Emily and Sadie as they explore their wonderful new life living in a cabin high up in the Blue Ridge mountains nestled on 3 acres in a lovely grove of fir trees.

For the past several months I’ve been recording my books for Audible. So far I’ve completed 4 books, The Enchanted Playground, Paperback Writer, Sugar and Spice and The Autocrat. I have started recording The Newspaper Chronicles. All 4 books are now available on my Amazon Author’s page at BOOKS

I write books for the same reason I wrote songs back in the day. My legacy hopefully is what is up in my head and I’d like my kids, and grandchildren to be able to hear and read about who I was. Over the years I’ve come to recognize that “I ain’t Dostoevsky” but I’m comfortable with that. I’m a normal bloke, storyteller, raconteur and lover of life. Nothing more and nothing less. I am an unexceptional man with a desire to get it right. Will I ever write another book? Maybe but if I get the urge I will consider it an honor, but if I never write again I can honestly say that I did my best, and that is all we can hope for.

Get your copy of a Tim Battersby novel or audio recording on my Author’s Page

Dostoevsky, I Ain’t but I love to read. was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

CHAPTER 1

Harriman Holdings

John Richard Harriman died in September 2015 at the age of 88. He was my uncle and the nicest and most honest man I’d ever known. He was a quiet man filled with inner wisdom who always had a kind word for everyone he came in contact with. He was buried in Arlington cemetery with full military honors, a funeral to which my husband Jim and I attended. A week after the funeral, I received a letter from his lawyer saying I’d been mentioned in my Uncle’s will and asking me to contact him as soon as possible to make an appointment to meet with him so he could read the will.

My name is Jenny Harriman Holland and I live in Pensacola Florida. I am a 10th-grade teacher at Mullins High school right here in town along with my husband Jim Holland who is the music teacher at the same school. As Jim and I sat in the vestibule of Jerry Ludlow’s downtown Pensacola office waiting to have the will read, we held hands nervously like two teenagers even though we’d been married for over thirty years at the time of Uncle John’s passing. After about 15 minutes Jerry Ludlow popped his head around the door and with a welcoming smile beckoned us both in and waved us to two chairs with a flourish. I won’t bore you with the details of the mechanics of Uncle John’s will but suffice it to say that we learned that morning that Uncle John had been an extremely wealthy man. After the mention of several gifts to his relatives, friends, and employees he left the bulk of his estate to me. It turned out that Uncle John had, at the time of his mother’s death, become the recipient of a living trust which he was charged to administrate for the rest of his natural life. When he died he had decided to pass on the administration of that living trust to me.

In essence that gave me an annual salary and the responsibility to invest and oversee a vast fortune that as a direct descendent of the Rockefeller family (on his mother’s side) Uncle John had decided to bestow on me. In addition to the trust, Uncle John left me his house in Pensacola and several million dollars in an account that he liked to refer to as “his unsecured money.” Jim and I walked away from that meeting in shock. We both knew that Uncle John was comfortably off but had no idea he was the administrator of a massive trust worth in excess of 300 million dollars. Along with the reading of the will Jerry Ludlow had handed me a sealed envelope with my name written on it in Uncle John’s handwriting. I tucked it away in my purse to read at a later time.

Teachers by definition don’t earn a lot of money and while Jim and I were comfortable we were by no means rich. We both drove cars that by yuppie standards were ancient and our house was tucked away in an older Pensacola neighborhood that had seen better days. We’d lived there our entire marriage and saw no reason to move. We were comfy in our lifestyle. Both of us nearing retirement, me less than a year away and Jim about 2 years away. I was sad obviously at the demise of our beloved uncle but was delighted to have been left some money by someone who’d been so important to both of us throughout our long marriage. I grew up in McLean Virginia, the daughter of Bill and Ginger Harriman. Dad was a cabinet maker in nearby Fairfax and Mom was a homemaker. I was one of four children and we all went to local schools. Like all families who grew up in the 60s, we were diametrically different. Family is God’s way of teaching children how to get along in society later as an adult. His little sociological joke I guess. In my family, the dinner table was ruled with the iron fist of a domineering patriarch, and a timid mother who if she dared speak out of turn had to suffer the ire of my dad. Similarly, if any of us kids had the audacity to display emotion of any kind they’d receive a tongue lashing from him. My entire childhood felt like we were constantly walking the plank.

I won a full scholarship to George Mason University which was where I first met Jim Holland, the man who would later become my husband. By the time we graduated 4 years later both of us couldn’t wait to get out of the area and start looking for teaching jobs that were available at the time. To cut a long story short that was the first time Uncle John had interceded in my life. I’d always been close to him and Aunt Rachel and out of the blue he telephoned me one day shortly after I graduated and told me about a job that had come available for a teaching position in the Pensacola school system in Florida where he and Aunt Rachel had moved some years earlier. The call surprised me because I had no idea that he knew anything about the school system in Florida. As far as I knew he was my Dad’s cousin who we used to see for picnics and family functions when I was a kid. I followed up on the job and wrote to them and they asked me to come down and interview for the position of 10th-grade teacher at Mullins High school starting on August 5th just 6 weeks away. I was overjoyed and rang Uncle John right away who invited me to stay with them, as they lived just outside Pensacola, for a few days during my interview. He also arranged to pick me up from the airport. The interview went exceedingly well and after the first meeting, the principal of Mullins asked if I could return the following day to meet the school board. Over dinner that evening Uncle John mentioned that he knew most everyone on the board and to please give the chairman a letter from him introducing me to the system! The following day I arrived at the school board offices in downtown Pensacola and introduced myself to the secretary. After a while, I was ushered into a large room where 7 elderly men were sitting in a row at a long table. I took a seat in a chair set up as an interviewee’s solitary perch. When I first entered I once again saw the principal of Mullins sitting amongst the 7 judges. I nodded to him and took my seat. They quizzed me on my political beliefs, my religious beliefs, and my marital status. After a few minutes, I realized that I was now officially in the Deep South where all the aforementioned questions I’d been asked were vitally important to answer in the manner they wanted to hear, for me to be accepted into their school system. Before I answered their audacious questions I had a brainwave. Quick as a flash I stood up and walked over to the chairman’s seat, looked him squarely in the eye, and handed him the letter Uncle John had given me. “My uncle sends his best regards,” I said confidently, swiveled, and took my chair again. After a few moments, the chairman having read the letter turned to his colleagues and in very much of a stage whisper began chatting to all of them. Then after deliberating for a moment longer, he turned to me and said. “Ms. Harriman welcome to the Pensacola school system. Your first day will be August 5th and you will be employed as a 10th-grade teacher at Mullins High school. Mr. Herschel over here,” waving his hand toward the principal, “will be sending you a contract within the next few days. Welcome aboard Ms. Harriman.” And with that, the meeting concluded and I left the building realizing for the first time in my life that my uncle had apparently helped me in more ways than I could imagine. I stayed with Uncle John and Aunt Rachel for a couple more days and then flew home to tell the exciting news to Jim. 4 weeks later he and I drove south in our old Volvo packed with all our belongings and moved into a sweet 1 BR flat in a charming old Victorian house on Trinity street just a couple of miles away from Uncle John and Aunt Rachel’s in downtown Pensacola. Jim planned on applying for a job in the music department in the school system as soon as we settled. 3 days later we arrived and spent our first night in our new flat. It wasn’t until years later I discovered that the sweet flat was owned by none other than Uncle John.

My dear Jenny,

If you are reading this letter, it means I am dead and you have now been informed that you are my beneficiary. You have spoken to Jerry Ludlow and he has filled you in on what will be expected of you. For the past 55 years, I’ve loved administering this trust fund but now I’m handing the reins over to you my dear Jenny. I have absolute faith that you will handle the day-to-day operations admirably and once you have been filled in on your new responsibilities you will succeed with all the aplomb of the lady I know you to be. There are so many things about me that you know nothing about, and I hope you don’t think less of me after you discover my other world. For the moment I am introducing you to my right-hand woman, a lady called Cynthia Hawkins who has been with me for over 40 years. You can find her at 27 Majestic Drive at my building Harriman Holdings. She knows all about you and will fill in all the blanks and answer any questions you may have. The office number is 471–389–2756. Since I was a boy I have always loved old cars. I have been fortunate in my life to be able to indulge that passion. I own 25 antique cars that I’m leaving for you. They are in varying degrees of restoration and are being housed in a warehouse that I own close to Pensacola. Cynthia will furnish you with the address. Amongst my treasures, I own a Model T Ford, a 1929 Duesenberg Touring car, and a Mercedes Benz 300s. Now you own the collection, maybe in your spare time you can achieve what I could not, and that is to restore as many of them as you can and then pass them on to whomever you choose to be your successor? I was not the man you thought I was my dear Jenny. At some point in the not too distant future, I have asked Jerry Ludlow to release one final letter to you which will explain why I chose to live the way I did and also the rationale of how I chose the companies that I bought. In the meantime, I suggest that you meet Cynthia and have her tell you more about my story so you can embark on a journey of getting to know some of my companies. I love you like my own daughter and hope you enjoy what I have bequeathed to you.

Forever your loving,

Uncle John.

As I folded the letter and put it away with my important papers, I wiped a tear from my eye knowing the adventure I was about to embark on would be one of mystery and intrigue. That afternoon I rang Cynthia Hawkins and made an appointment to meet her the next day at 10 am. I knew downtown Pensacola very well. My husband Jim joined me after I was first hired 30 years earlier in our new 1 BR flat and despite not yet having a teaching job he spent our first year working for a building company headquartered in downtown Pensacola and so we would meet after work and cruise the restaurants and go for long walks in the balmy southern climate. He applied to the school district for a job in the music department and finally was offered a job as the music teacher of 5 schools within the district. Over the past 30 years of working within the school system, he has done great things for music students including building a fine orchestra.

Pensacola is a classic small southern city. A shining treasure. It’s the site of the first Spanish settlement within the borders of the continental US in 1559, predating the establishment of St. Augustine by 6 years, although the settlement was abandoned due to a hurricane and not re-established until 1698. Pensacola is a seaport on Pensacola Bay, which is protected by the barrier island of Santa Rosa and connects to the Gulf of Mexico. A large United States Naval Air Station, the first in the United States, is located SW of Pensacola near Warrington; it is the base of the Blue Angels flight demonstration team and the National Naval Aviation Museum. The main campus of the University of West Florida is situated north of the city center. As I entered Uncle John’s tiny office the following day I was mulling over the magnificence of the city. Sitting at what must have originally been his desk was a heavy set woman poring over stacks of papers. As I walked in she looked up and a smile telegraphed across her face. She jumped up and walked over to me and said. “You must be Jenny? I’m so glad to meet you” and gave me a big bear hug that told me how welcome I was.

Within a few moments, I realized why Uncle John had initially hired this woman. In a word, she was a dynamo. Everything she said had a point, and the point to this woman was an undying loyalty to my uncle. Her respect for him knew no bounds and in that first meeting, she told me things about my Uncle John that no one had ever mentioned before. For instance, she told me that soon after she was hired Uncle John made a series of bad investments that threatened to bankrupt him. After he got started in the “salvage” business as Uncle John liked to describe his job, he went out on his own and began making quite a bit of money by buying up failing businesses and adding a new business model by streamlining it until it was profitable again. He then sold the company and purchased another. Bit by bit his reputation grew and he became successful until he made several bad deals all of which went belly up. Rather than quit, Uncle John tightened his belt and worked harder. In the space of 3 years, he turned his business around. This gave him the impetus to change his methods. He worked harder and became more businesslike and over the next 20 years made a fortune working from this office with just me and him working long hours. 10 years earlier he had begun an incentive program for me that has ultimately made me a wealthy woman. I will always be most grateful to your uncle.”

Over the next few days, I learned all about Harriman Holdings. I learned that Uncle John owned more than one hundred companies ranging from bakeries to tire manufacturing plants, to several lumber mills, and a tech company in Silicon Valley. His business model was always the same no matter what he was selling. Profit profit profit. When he started out he would buy a failing company. It didn’t matter to him what the product was, he knew that if he applied the identical business principles to each firm he had acquired, as long as the employees pulled their weight, he could make the business a viable operation. The very first company he bought back in 1954 was in Milwaukee. It was a family-run metal die manufacturing plant. The forming dies were typically made by tool and die makers and put into production after being mounted into a press. A die is a metal block that is used for forming materials like sheet metal and plastic. For the vacuum forming of a plastic sheet only a single form was ever used, typically to form up transparent plastic containers (blister packs) for merchandise. Vacuum forming was considered a simple molding thermoforming process but used the same principles as die forming. For the forming of sheet metal, such as automobile body parts, two parts were used: one, called the punch, performed the stretching, bending, and or blanking operation, while another part that was called the die block securely clamped the piece and provided similar stretching, bending, and or blanking operation. The piece passed through several stages using different tools or operations to obtain the final form. In the case of an automotive component, there’d usually be a shearing operation after the main forming was done and then additional crimping or rolling operations to ensure that all sharp edges were hidden and to add rigidity to the panel.

The Maple Tool and Die Company: Sadly for the company the process was complex, and the family who had owned the company for 100 years was eager to make a profit, the current board of directors was made up of the wealthy Grandson and Great Grandson of the founder of Maple Tool and Die Company. The Maple family had run their company into the ground through greed and bad business practices and had jeopardized the careers of 24 employees at the plant. Uncle John purchased Maple Tool and Die Company at a bankruptcy sale for a song. The following week he flew to Milwaukee and met with the employees. The Maple family had abandoned ownership of the company and a team of auditors was engaged to go over the company books with a fine-tooth comb. It didn’t take long for Uncle John to realize something was terribly wrong. Young Mr. Maple or Mr. Ben as he was known around the plant had been dipping his hand into the company till for years and had bled the company dry. That time Uncle John realized that Mr. Ben’s malfeasance was none of his business, bought the Maple Tool and Die Company and allowed the authorities to handle Mr. Ben’s wrongdoing, but he made a mental note to himself that if he were to buy this kind of business again, he must protect himself and open a gumshoe private eye investigation business. Uncle John clearly did not approve of ignoble people.”

Cynthia Hawkins had been talking for about an hour now and she was just revving up to launch into another story when the phone rang and she began chatting to a sales rep. It gave me a chance to collect my thoughts. I’d always known that Uncle John was good and kind. He and Aunt Rachel, who was childless, had spent every Christmas, Easter, birthday, and special occasion with Jim and myself celebrating with other members of our family at our table. In all the years that we knew them, I never heard them utter a harsh word to each other, and I never heard Uncle John complain about anyone. They loved our one daughter Molly and watched her grow up with all the pride of loving grandparents and joined Jim and me at Molly’s high school graduation. Seven years later at UMD, School of Medicine they attended Molly’s graduation as she celebrated becoming an M.D. I was deep in my memories as Cynthia hung up the phone and continued telling me about the companies that I now owned.

After a few more hours she handed me a list of companies with 107 names, contacts, and addresses on it and suggested that we stop for the night and pick up tomorrow so we could continue discussing my new life and my new responsibilities. I didn’t get much sleep that night, spending a lot of time googling the 107 companies that I owned. They were spread across 37 states and included production plants, construction companies, retail outlets, and even some restaurant chains. It appears I was now the proud owner of a Steakhouse franchise with 22 restaurants throughout Florida. “hmm,” I thought. “I must pay them a visit real soon.” I laughed silently to myself. I made a list of questions I could ask Cynthia in the morning and turned the light out around 4.00 a.m.

Early the next morning I got to Harriman Holdings to find Cynthia Hawkins working hard at her desk already. The office was only about a 15-minute walk from my house and so I decided to walk along the charming leafy streets of Pensacola. Cynthia looked up from what she was doing and with a bright smile leaped up poured me a cup of coffee and bounded over and placed it on the desk in front of me. “Here we are then,” she said “good morning to you Miss Jenny. And how’re you this fine morning?” Slightly startled by her heartiness I picked up the cup nodding my thanks and replied. “I’m very well and how’re you today?” After we’d dispensed with the formalities I asked Cynthia the questions I’d written down the night before, and she answered them like the professional she was. To say I was impressed with Cynthia Hawkins would be an understatement. She turned out to be a walking encyclopedia producing names and addresses of companies with ease; which I found to be a tool that proved vital on a number of occasions.

“How did Uncle John choose to buy the 107 companies on the final list?” I asked having asked a number of earlier questions that Cynthia had happily answered. “Quite early on shortly after I started working for Mr. John it became clear that he needed a way to vet companies he was considering purchasing. Everyone had a sob story, and frankly, not all of the stories were true. All the companies that Mr. John was interested in were going through bankruptcy proceedings and the owners were rarely honest as to why their company had got into such a position. And so after a while, Mr. John decided to hire an investigator in order to get to the truth so that he could make a determination on the potential of the business he was interested in buying. I knew a man called Bill Rein from Virginia. He ran a security company. Mr. Rein could vet a company and produce a time and motions study giving us a report on the viability of the company within a month and the reason for its failure. It made perfect sense to hire Mr. Rein.” “Were there any companies where Bill Rein found any illegal activity?” I asked. Cynthia paused for a moment and then said “There were a couple, I remember.” Then she switched her attention from me and looked at her screen, scrolled through a few pages, and finally said, “here we are then, I thought those two were ones I remembered.”

The Paley Shoe Company: “This company had a very strange story to tell but after considerable thought, Mr. John decided to go ahead and purchase it shortly after the court case and the conviction. The Paley Shoe Company was located in Salem Oregon and had been family-owned since 1845. John Paley the founder had 3 boys who eventually took over from their Dad and ran the business after he retired. With hard work and a rigid work ethic, the boys turned The Paley Shoe Company into a supremely successful shoe manufacturing plant. By the time Jerry Brady came to work for them on the factory floor in 1957 the 3 Paley boys had long retired and the company still family-owned was being run by the great-grandson of John Paley the founder, a man named Terry Paley. One of Terry Paley’s employees was Jerry Brady whose illegal activities caused so much attention from the press that it torpedoed the business. Orders dried up and within a few months, Paley’s Shoe Company went into Chapter 11. The press that Jerry Brady had received was after he was arrested for the murder of multiple women in the Salem area.

Jerry Brady was a serial killer who committed the murders of at least four women in Oregon between 1965 and 1969. He was born in 1939 in Billings, Montana as the younger of two sons. His mother had wanted a girl and was very displeased that she had another son instead. She would constantly subject him to emotional and physical abuse. As a child, Brady and his family would move into different homes in the Pacific Northwest, before settling in Salem, Oregon.

Brady had a fetish for women’s shoes that surfaced at the age of 5, after playing with stiletto-heeled shoes at a local junkyard. He reportedly attempted to steal the shoes of his first-grade teacher. Brady also had a fetish for women’s underwear and claimed that he would steal underwear from female neighbors as a child. He spent his teen years in and out of psychotherapy and spent time in psychiatric hospitals.

In his teenage years, Brady began to stalk local women, knocking them down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes. At age 17, he abducted and beat a young woman, threatening to stab her if she did not follow his sexual demands. Shortly after being arrested, he was taken to the psychiatric ward of Oregon State hospital for nine months. There it was found Brady’s sexual fantasies revolved around his hatred towards his mother and women in general. He underwent a psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite being institutionalized, Brady graduated from high school with his class in 1957. Shortly after graduation, he got a job at Paley’s Shoe Company as a factory worker. Paley was never told about his employees’ childhood.

In 1961, Brady married a 17-year-old girl with whom he would father two children and settled in a Salem suburb. He asked his new bride to do housework naked except for a pair of high heels while he took pictures of her. It was at about this time that he began complaining of migraine headaches and “blackouts,” relieving his symptoms with night-prowling raids to steal shoes and lace undergarments. Brady kept the shoes, and the underwear, and (for a time) the bodies of his victims in a garage that he would not allow his wife to enter without first announcing her arrival on an intercom that he had set up. Between 1965 and 1969, Brady strangled four young women and attempted to attack two others.

Linda Howard, 19, a saleswoman knocked on Brady’s door in January 1968. Brady lured her into the basement while his wife and children were in the house, knocked her out with a 2x4, and strangled her. He dressed her in different female undergarments and shoes he had stolen, and arranged her body in provocative poses, and used a hacksaw to cut off her left foot, which he kept in a freezer and used to model his collection of high-heel shoes. He disposed of Linda Howard’s body later in the Willamette River.

Karen Tanner, 18, was abducted at gunpoint by Brady from a parking lot outside a department store in May 1968. He was dressed in women’s clothes during this attack. He brought her to his garage, made her try on his collection of undergarments and pose while he photographed her, raped her, and strangled her by hanging her by her neck from a pulley. Brady had sex with the body on several occasions and cut off her breasts to make plastic molds. Afterward, he tied the body to a 6-cylinder car engine with a nylon cord and threw it in the Willamette River.

Jan Salmon, 23, a motorist whose car broke down on Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany on November 26, 1968. Brady offered to drive her to his home with the excuse of letting her call a tow truck there. While still in the car, he strangled her with a leather strap and raped her post-mortem. He kept the body hanging from the pulley in his garage for several days, during which he dressed, photographed, and had sex with it. This time, Brady cut off one of her breasts and made a resin mold of it that he used as a paperweight. Afterward, he tied the body to a piece of railroad iron and threw it in the Willamette along with Linda Howard’s foot, (who he’d murdered 10 months earlier) which by this time had rotted.

Sharon Harner, 24, and Gloria Jones, 15, were 2 females who Jerry Brady attempted to abduct at gunpoint respectively from the basement floor of a parking garage in Portland on April 21, and April 22 1969 unsuccessfully.

Linda Edwards, 22, was abducted from a shopping mall parking lot on April 23, 1969. Jerry Brady brought her to his garage where he raped and strangled her and played with her body. He decided not to cut her breasts off because they were “too pink,” by his own admission, but instead drove an electrical current through her in an attempt to make it jump which failed. Afterward, he tied her to a transmission with a nylon cord and threw it in the Willamette River.

Brady would dress up in high heels after committing a murder. In May 1969, a man found the bodies of Linda Edwards and Karen Tanner in the Long Tom River. The police asked students at a nearby university campus about suspicious men and one student interview led them to Brady, who had phoned her several times to ask her for a date. Brady gave police a false address, which increased their suspicions. When they located him, police found the copper wire in his garage that was determined to have been cut with the same tool that cut the cords used to tie the bodies. Jerry Brady was arrested and he then made a full confession.

The ensuing criminal case against Jerry Brady was the final nail in the coffin for The Paley Shoe Company. For months reporters had been camped outside the factory in the vain hope they might be able to interview John Paley the founders' great-grandson.

On June 28, 1969, Brady pled guilty to three first-degree murders (Tanner, Salmon, and Edwards) and was sentenced to three life terms of imprisonment in Oregon State Penitentiary. Though he confessed to Howard’s murder, Brady was neither tried nor convicted for it because at the time DNA evidence was not available and he did not take photographs of the body, unlike in all the other cases, but only of her foot. The case had a relatively short shelf life and soon the media and the public forgot about the weird fetish-driven murderer named Jerry Brady. Mr. John had in the meantime flown to Salem and interviewed the remaining employees of the Paley Shoe Company and had put in an offer with the bankruptcy court which eventually was accepted.

Mr. John had been learning about profit sharing during the previous year. Up until this point he’d had no actual interaction with any profit-sharing companies; however, the Paley Shoe Company could be a perfect “trial balloon,” for him.” Cynthia stopped just long enough to take a sip of her coffee. I was busy scribbling as fast as I could. She was a fast talker and I was fearful I’d miss something important. “What exactly is profit sharing,” I asked which when Cynthia heard my question her eyes lit up. It was clearly a subject she loved.

“Profit sharing refers to various incentive plans introduced by businesses that provide direct or indirect payments to employees that depend on the company’s profitability plus employees’ regular salary and bonuses,” Cynthia explained. “In publicly traded firms these plans amount to the allocation of shares to employees. One of the earliest pioneers of profit sharing was a Brit named Theodore Cooke Taylor, who was known to have introduced the practice in his woolen mills during the late 1800s.”

I looked at my watch and realized it was lunchtime. As Cynthia paused I suggested that there was a charming café just down the street, and would she like to join me for a bite to eat? She nodded her head and replied, “I’d love to Ms. Jenny. As a matter of fact, you own that café.” I looked back at her in amazement, “Really are you joking? Jim and I have been eating at Celine’s forever and Uncle John never mentioned that he owned it.” “That was just how Mr. John was,” Cynthia replied, collecting her purse. “He was a very private man.” Over lunch sitting in a shady alcove on the sidewalk outside Celine’s, I asked Cynthia how she’d first started working for Uncle John? “Well it was simple really, but I never totally understood.” Cynthia rolled up her sleeve and showed me a tattoo that identified her as a survivor. “I was in Auschwitz. Mr. John read an article when I first came to Pensacola. I’d changed my name from Sophia Engelmann to Cynthia Hawkins when I came to America, but the reporter who did the story must have done a background check and put that in the newspaper. A few weeks after I arrived Mr. John called me and asked me if I would like a job? I went for an interview. We never discussed Auschwitz. He offered me a job and I’ve been working for him ever since. That’s really all there is to it.” It was clearly still a sensitive subject and so I decided to let Cynthia keep on talking. First, she told me about her time in Auschwitz, and then she moved with ease into her favorite subject.

That afternoon I learned why my Uncle John did what he did. He loved people. He was the original socialist seeing the good in everyone he met. His intentions were always pure when he was considering purchasing a new but distressed company. He learned that the company’s financial downfall was rarely the fault of the workforce but always of upper management. He devised a plan early in his career to make every company he bought one where the employees would have a say in the running of the company and would all own stocks in it as well. He’d worked out a way for Harriman Holdings to keep ownership of the company until the debt had been repaid. Then after all the running costs had been met, Mr. John would divide the profit between the employees, keeping a 20% management fee for himself. The profit incentive worked like a charm and before long every company that Harriman Holdings had purchased was turning a profit and putting money directly into the pockets of the people who deserved it the most. He initiated visits to each of his 107 different on a bi-yearly basis, and with the advent of technology he and Cynthia Hawkins were able to keep tabs on all the company’s that he owned at the click of a keystroke. His door was always open and Mr. John would always entertain a visit from any of his employees in his tiny office. Profit-sharing made perfect sense to a man like Mr. John.

On that day, Cynthia Hawkins told me the reason for his kindness was that he’d grown up in a home where his mother and father taught him to be kind to everyone. He was an only child whose parents had married for love and they both worshipped young Mr. John. When his parents met on Cape Cod MA on vacation, Peggy his mother, the Rockefeller heiress had been staying at a summer resort where John his father was employed as a busboy at the resorts only restaurant. It took John all summer to conjure up the nerve to invite young Peggy on a date. He finally asked her out on her last night at the resort and took her to the only drive-in in town. That night they fell in love for all the right reasons but it took them 2 more years of long-distance dating for John to summon up the nerve to ask Peggy to marry him. After what amounted to an act of congress, her parents allowed this “fine young man” to date their daughter, and a year later John and Peggy were married in the Presbyterian church in Chantilly VA. As a wedding present, Peggy’s parents gave the happy young couple a lovely 2 bedroom clapboard farmhouse just steps away from the home where Peggy grew up.

Although Uncle Johns’ mother was an heiress, Cynthia continued the family never flaunted it. He attended public school with the rest of the community children and when it came time to go to college he chose an in-state school William and Mary University where he took a bachelor’s degree in business. When he graduated four years later Uncle John joined his father’s firm, a local Virginia firm selling farm equipment, and put his education to the test. His father with a keen nose for business liked to dabble with the buying and selling of land. He’d never liked to raid his wife’s inheritance but when John graduated college she set up a land-buying budget for him to see if he was any good at it. The first few purchases went well, but the fourth purchase did very poorly. Sadly John was persuaded to buy into a collective purchase with 3 businessmen who went in together to buy a building in NW Washington DC. Within 2 years the building went bankrupt and John was left “holding the bag.” Unbeknownst to him, his partners had sold their shares without so much as a word to him. It was only after crafty negotiations that John’s father managed to extricate his son without too much damage being done. It was a lesson learned for young John; a mistake he never made again.

Five years later his father died leaving the farm equipment business to Mr. John. Just a year later his beloved mother tragically died leaving her estate to John, who had in the meantime met, dated, and married a lovely girl from upstate New York named Rachel Mandel.

John and Rachel originally lived in the two-bedroom clapboard farmhouse just steps away from his parents’ house until John went away to college. In his first year at William and Mary, they decided to move into the big house on the property since John’s parents and grandparents had died. The house sat on 15 acres of land and in his dotage, John’s grandfather Arthur liked to potter around the acreage building walls and fences. The land of course was worth a small fortune being located just a few miles from Washington DC. That left the smaller home vacant, and so when John married Rachel, John’s parents gave them the house as a wedding present.

Uncle John and Aunt Rachel finally moved to the big house many years after his parents had died. Sadly they were unable to have children and so Aunt Rachel concentrated on her charities and Uncle John his business. As a family, we would visit them almost every weekend as they had a lovely swimming pool on their property and as kids, we would swim all day while the adults would cook burgers and take us for rides on Uncle John’s golf cart. I remembered we’d spend every holiday with them, and because they didn’t have any kids we became their family. In 1970 Uncle John and Aunt Rachel moved to Florida. They kept the houses in Chantilly but decided to live in Pensacola in a house that had been in Aunt Rachel’s family since she’d been a little girl.

THANKS FOR READING CHAPTER 1 OF THE 30 CHAPTER NOVEL BY TIM BATTERSBY THE AUTOCRAT. TO BUY THIS BOOK IN EITHER DIGITAL OR PAPERBACK VERSIONS VISIT MY AUTHOR PAGE AT AMAZON BOOKS

Have you noticed when you head for the grocery store to shop for food there is plenty of beer and wine on the shelves? Plenty of coke and Pepsi and plenty of fizzy drinks. Plus frozen Okra! Why is that? Obviously many hate Okra! but beer? Kudos to the beer distributors for keeping tons of beer in stock. What we all need however is TP, paper products, milk, eggs, hydrogen peroxide, fresh meats, and hand sanitizers. The cupboard is bare. How come, beer suppliers can deliver while most other products are not available. There is I’m told no shortage of any of the foods I mentioned. While farmers are growing, truckers are driving, we should be able to supply the stores with the products we need. The problem is that buyers can be greedy and people have been stockpiling. When they find TP in the grocery store rather than buying the amount they would normally buy, they decide to stockpile rather than offer their ‘surplus’ quantities to customers who were too slow or too polite to fight. We call this panic buying.

Empty shelves in our stores just mean there’s a bottleneck, not a shortage. There’s still plenty of food out there. We just need to relearn how to distribute it. Fast. There’s plenty of everything and we have the means to distribute it, so c’mon America, let’s get up and mobilize our systems so we can get our supply chain working faster and efficiently. It’s now time. We deserve better. Don’t be greedy, be kind. Imagine the customer you’re trying to beat out is an elderly neighbor or your grandmother. You’d never do that to them. So C’mon now; Let’s get up and be the nation we know we are. Let’s have faith that our supply chain will kick in and once again we will be able to smile at fellow customers rather than scowl. Supply chains are built to react to disruption, and this virus is certainly a disruptor. But we as consumers must have faith that the grocery stores that we shop at are in contact with their distributors and are working as fast and hard as they can to bring back full shelves to your store, so they can not only fill their shelves but fill their aisles again with satisfied customers. That is what America is all about.

Once upon a time in a lovely house in Notting Hill Gate there lived a man called David Langdon who would sit in his garden and paint every day. He lived with his wife Sarah of 50 years who’d watch him from an upstairs window as he placed a new canvas on his well-worn easel so he could draw his picture of the day. She would glance at him from her piano stool as she sat there composing a new jingle for a tv commercial she was writing. David had inherited the house after his father died. He had grown up in the same house and remembers visiting his grandfather Wilbur as a young lad. Sarah and David had lived at 57 Windsor Square in London for their entire marriage and had raised 2 boys, Chris, and Ben and a daughter Gemma in their home. The kids were now all grown up but still visited them regularly bringing their own families to add to the fun of Sunday lunches and games of spirited rounders in the garden with David and Sarah’s beloved grandkids Adrian, Trevor, and Ashley. David Langdon was a television mystery writer whose hobby was to draw wildlife in his garden. He was really rather good at it but knew that he wasn’t as good as his idol Beatrix Potter. He was, however, a very talented writer who had won multiple awards including several baftas in the course of his long career. Sarah was a classical musician who’d been writing jingles for decades in order to help pay the bills. You may have heard a few of her jingles such as the Better Life commercial? The garden where David liked to draw was small with enough room to host a casual drinks party on a summers eve or host Sunday lunch on the picnic table that they were able to set up in the middle of their postage stamp lawn. It was quiet there and allowed David to draw butterflies, robins and the occasional cat that liked to sun itself. The place that David loved to paint in however was across the road from their home. It was a private community garden that allowed residents of the square to visit with friends or paint or sit and read or throw a frisbee or walk the dog. Windsor Square was a circle of 40 homes with the community garden in the middle of the square. The homes were all classic mid-Victorian terrace houses that were all painted white to maintain uniformity. To enter the garden all the residents had to use a key to gain entrance.

Families in the Windsor Square community had lived there for generations. If they wanted to sell their house or a homeowner died the home was passed on to family members which meant that this close-knit community had known each other most of their lives. Occasionally a house was sold to an outsider but it was rare. Because everyone knew everyone pickup soccer games or cricket matches were often played in the garden. Nothing really organized you understand but whoever was about was roped in to play, then spirited matches were fought until dusk drove everyone home. On the edge of the open area where the games were played, there was an area for homeowners who liked to grow their own vegetables. It was called an allotment. Along the edge of the designated area was an old potting shed which was thought to have been built in the late 1800s. It was a glasshouse that had weathered over a hundred years without any significant damage to its structure. It was a roomy potting shed with shelves along one whole side of it and a massive long wooden table that ran the entire length of the shed. Gardeners potted their plants on that table. The shed measured 14’ x 48’ with one door on the end. Occasionally a cricket ball would manage to break a windowpane but the residents all pitched in and repaired it instantly.

Chris Langdon the eldest son of David and Sarah was 43 years old and had married a lovely lady he had known most of his life named Giselle. They lived 2 miles away from his parents and would often visit on a Saturday or Sunday with their son Trevor who had just turned 12 and adored his grandparents. Trevor was a gentle boy who loved to read. One of his passions in life was gardening and his parents had secured him an allotment in the community garden where he grew potatoes, peas and runner beans and other assorted vegetables. One day he was sitting at the long table in the potting shed getting ready to transplant a flower that he had been growing, into a clay pot so he could give it to his grandmother as a birthday present the following day. There were clouds in the sky and it was threatening to rain and so Trevor decided to damp down the manual vent in the glass roof to prevent rain from entering the building. He’d never done it before, but figured, “How hard can it be?” He leaned over to crank the handle and as he did so there was a flash and a cracking sound. He thought it must have been a thunderclap, but as he looked around the potting shed he saw that the table where he was sitting looked rather different. All of a sudden there were people he had never seen before sitting at the table. Just a few moments before he had been alone in the shed but now there were seven other people in his presence. Trevor thought he was dreaming. He looked around the table and realized that he didn’t know any of these people who had suddenly appeared, and they all seemed to be wearing most unusual and old fashioned clothing. Trevor stood up and walked out of the shed. It was now raining hard but he didn’t mind and he walked swiftly towards the wrought iron gate to the garden that was opposite his house. He opened the gate to walk across to his grandparents’ house when he noticed a couple walking towards him. The man was dressed in a well-tailored grey morning coat with black trousers, a cravat and a tall black top hat, while his female companion was wearing a high and boned Tea Dress that flowed to the ground. She carried a pink parasol that shielded her from the rain as they hurried to their destination. What Trevor noticed, was the total absence of any cars in the square. Suddenly a horse-drawn buggy appeared from the west carrying a driver pulling a black enclosed carriage. He stopped, trying to absorb what he was seeing. Confused and scared he ran back to the potting shed to ask the people who were there a few questions that might begin to answer his concerns.

When he got back to the shed because he was a friendly boy he asked the old man who’d been sitting next to him what he was working on? The man who was also dressed in a black frock coat with a silk cravat looked up smiled and told him he was potting a shrub that he intended to take home and plant in his front garden to line the fence. The man smiling now then asked Trevor what he was working on? Trevor told him that he was potting a shrub to give to his Grandmother as tomorrow was her birthday. The old man knowing everyone in the square asked Trevor who his Grandma was and Trevor told him that her name was Sarah Langdon. The man scratched his head and replied, “How odd Langdon is my name as well.” He was looking more confused than ever and then asked which house she lived in? “Number 57 Windsor Square,” Trevor answered truthfully. “Well that is strange,” the old man said. “That’s my address. Are you sure you’ve got the right number? “Yes,” he replied. “Actually I can see it from here if I crane my neck.” And he pointed to his Grandparents’ house. “Well that is remarkably rum,” the old man said, now clearly worried. “Let’s walk over there and just make sure that you’re not confused shall we?” Trevor thought for a moment about what his parents had told him about going off with strangers, but he discounted any notion of worry that he might have, as the old man was ancient and really didn’t seem to pose much of a problem. So they both got up and walked out of the potting shed as if they had been friends for years and headed towards the wrought iron gate.

The old man was wearing strangely unfashionable clothing as if he was about to attend a 1920s fancy dress party. The old man looked at Trevor and thought that he too was dressed somewhat strangely but put the thought behind him by dismissing it as a “kids today” kind of thing. As they walked across the road the old man suddenly said “Here we are old chap. This is my house. Where do your Grandparents’ live from here?” “Actually sir, this is my Grandparents' house,” Trevor replied. “Nonsense boy,” insisted the old man. I have lived here for the past 30 years. Come inside and I will prove it to you.” That’s when Trevor’s radar began going crazy. He began to walk somewhat reluctantly up the stairs to the front door. The old man then inserted a key and sure enough, the door opened. It looked identical to Trevors’ grandparents' home but it was painted differently and the furniture in the hallway was completely different. And then it suddenly hit young Trevor. “Would you mind telling me what the year is?” The old man looked at Trevor with astonishment. “Why it’s June 13th, 1919.” the old man answered with a surprised look on his face. “Why on earth are you asking me a question like that young man?” Trevor, a smart lad, thought back to the moment in the potting shed when all of a sudden things had changed. He remembered looking at the sky and thinking that it might rain. He remembered reaching for the window crank to close the skylight window so that rain wouldn’t come in and then he remembered there had been a crack and a flash. The next thing he knew there were suddenly seven people in the potting shed when 2 minutes earlier he had been alone. Having just recently read HG Wells The Time Machine he suddenly wondered if he had managed to travel through time by cranking that ancient window crank. “I’m sorry sir but I don’t know your name?” “It’s Wilbur Langdon,” the old man replied. “Quick Mr. Langdon, we must get back to the potting shed as fast as we can,” answered Trevor. “I think I know what may have happened. The old man looked at the boy and realizing that he was serious, complied and so he and the boy returned to the potting shed in the community garden and walked in just as the rain began to bucket down even harder. “We must be quick,” insisted Trevor, and they walked to the window crank that had closed the window earlier. “Please just do what I ask now sir. The old man nodded. “On the count of 3, I want you to grab the handle of the crank. I will grab it at the same time that you do. Are you ready?” Mr. Langdon who’d always been an adventurous man was starting to enjoy this charade and nodded. “One, Two. Three.” And both Trevor and Mr. Langdon grabbed the handle at the same moment. All of a sudden there was a thunder crash and the boy and the old man were thrown to the floor. The old man laughed and got up helping young Trevor stand up too. They dusted themselves off and then Trevor spoke. “Let me now show you my Grandparents' house. I’m sure they’d love to meet you and would love to give you a cup of tea.” The old man suddenly felt young again and chuckled as he replied. “Good idea Trevor. I thought I knew everyone in Windsor Square. Lead on my young man. I can’t wait to meet them. They walked out of the potting shed and Trevor noted the rain had slowed down and was it was turning into a lovely afternoon. They came to the wrought iron gates and went through them, crossed the road and stood on the bottom step of the old man’s house. Trevor could see the old man was confused and didn’t want to scare him so he took him by the hand and led him up the stairs and opened the front door. The old man looked in amazement. Initially, he was bewildered but he too was an intelligent man and was starting to understand the import of what had just happened. The hallway, though identical to what they had seen 20 minutes earlier was now painted a cheery white and was furnished with modern elegant Swedish Teak furniture. Mr. Langdon gripped on to his great-great-great grandson’s hand tightly. They walked into the living room where the family was sitting and talking. As they walked through the door David Langdon stared at the old man dressed in Edwardian clothes walking into the room holding his grandson’s hand. Trevor Langdon, wise beyond his years broke the awkward silence. “Grandpa,” he announced, “I'd like to introduce you to your GrandPapa Mr. Wilbur Langdon who I met over the road this afternoon in the potting shed. David Langdon walked over to the gentleman and reached over and shook his Grandfather warmly by the hand. “It’s lovely to see you again sir, and they both smiled.

If you enjoyed this short story, it is one of 8 short story’s that are part of a book I wrote called PAPERBACK WRITER. Please consider buying this book at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Tim-Battersby/e/B07PR6WZ3D in Paperback (11.99) or Kindle (5.99) 170 pages

My latest novel is a classic murder mystery, where good wins over evil but not without a helluva fight. In The BloodHound Affair, I pit my heroine, Jamie Stroud a female investigative journalist against a series of villains who kill, murder, kidnap and blackmail their way through this story of lust and greed.

The Bloodhound Affair starts by telling the story of a young mother Maria and her daughter fleeing the gangs of her native country Guatemala. The gangs have killed her husband and her son and kidnapped her oldest daughter in order to sell her into the sex slave market. Maria Hernandez and her young daughter flee the tyranny and migrate to the US border where they are granted asylum but are torn away from each other immediately and placed in a detention camp in Brownsville Texas. Maria ’s daughter Sofia is then flown to New York and fostered out to an elderly couple who are unqualified to look after her. Jamie Stroud writes about their plight in her newspaper and receives a heartwarming response from her readers in Chicago who write letters to intercede in this travesty of justice. The President’s cruel policy is enacted that very day, as he attempts to alter the welcome the US has offered to immigrants for the past 250 years.

“In religion, ethics, philosophy, and psychology good and evil is a very common dichotomy. In cultures with Manichaean and Abrahamic religious influence, evil is usually perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good should prevail and evil should always be defeated.”

As Jamie writes her heart-wrenching story of Maria Hernandez, back at home a serial killer has arrived in Chicago to terrorize residents of this lovely city. A year before Jaimie had asked her best friend Lucy to help her catch a killer. They were so successful that they started a private eye business called TMI and with one other partner, a British aristocrat named Sir Christoper Fenton they begin to analyze the clues the killer left. After he kills his fifth victim TMI decides to buy a tracker dog, a lovable bloodhound named suitably Hercule Poirot from a retired FBI dog handler who now raises and trains tracker dogs. His farm called Scents of Smell Farm is just east of Chicago, and Sir Chris and Lucy pay a visit to the farm where they fall in love with the adorable nature of Poirot the bloodhound.

“The conflict between good and evil is one of the precepts of the Zoroastrian faith, first enshrined by Zoroaster over 3000 years ago. It is also one of the most common conventional themes in literature and is sometimes considered to be one of the universal parts of the human condition.”

As in book 1 The Newspaper Chronicles, The Bloodhound Affair employs many of my friends who I chose to profile or pay tribute to because of their kind and honorable approach to life. Both Lucy and Sir Christopher are actual friends of ours. Also, a dear man named David Attwooll (Winnie) who I have known my whole life. I cast him as a British lawyer in the book, but in real life, he was an academic who worked for Oxford University Press. We sadly lost him a year ago to an aggressive form of cancer. He leaves behind a wife and three grown children. I chose to pay Winnie the love and respect I felt for him through a lifetime of friendship we shared. In real life, he was a wonderful poet and musician. who as a young man played drums in a blues band. In my book, I pay tribute to him when at Buddy Guy's club in Chicago, Buddy Guy asks Winnie to drum with his band on the song Mustang Sally. Winnie, of course, brought the house down as he always did. His laughter will stay with me forever.

I have now started book 3 of The Newspaper Chronicles Trilogy and I am excited to bring you more tales of murder and mayhem. I can promise you the cases will be solved with integrity by our inveterate female journalist Jamie Stroud.

I have no aspirations of being offered a publishing contract any time soon. I have been rejected by hundreds of literary agents. As a musician for 35 years, I’m used to rejection so I’m content writing my books because I love telling a good story and am doing my best to improve as a writer. One thing is for sure. Being a huge fan of The Beatles, I can now call myself a PAPERBACK WRITER LOL. Thanks for reading this article, and I hope you enjoy the book.

I would be most grateful if you’d consider buying The Bloodhound Affair.