Second Intention (9 page)

Nine

I wasn’t really sure of what to do with myself, after being exiled from my place of work. I didn’t really feel like going home just yet, so I thought the obvious thing was to drive over to the gallery and talk to Sue about it. She is my wife and my soul mate, but also my best friend. If there was anybody I needed to be able to speak to just then it was her.

Of course, it wasn’t a smart move, and I realised it just as I was pulling into a free space across the road from the gallery. Through the enormous picture window I could see, from the hustle and bustle of people in there, that they were all frantically busy. I had completely forgotten that they were in the final stages of preparing for the exhibition, which would be kicking off with a champagne and nibbles reception at lunchtime that day. Both Sue and Amy would be making all the last-minute adjustments, and trying to keep the exhibitors calm at the same time. The last thing my wife would be needing to do right then was stop and chat to me.

She probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but I knew it wouldn’t have been fair. Just then she needed to be able to focus on what she was doing. It was important to her, and because it was important to her it was important to me. My problems could wait. I’d talk to her about the business at Medicom when she got in later.

Just as I turned the key in the ignition I caught a glimpse of her through the glass. She looked gorgeous, and seeing her just then gave me a lift, although only briefly. She had a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, and she was talking enthusiastically to a scruffy looking young man with spiky hair and a goatee beard. When he threw his arms around her and they embraced I honestly felt like somebody had scooped my insides out with a blunt spoon.

*                   *                  *                   *

What I desperately needed right then was the chance to do some fencing. Jumping about and sticking swords in somebody is the second best stress buster I know, but at half past ten on a Friday morning there was absolutely no possibility of it. It takes two to tango, after all, and at that moment I was probably the only swordsman in East Anglia with both the inclination or free time to do it. I would have to content myself with the next best option.

I’ve never been a huge fan of running, although the pentathletes I have had occasion to train with over the years go crazy over it. It’s like an addiction with them, but for me it’s just a means to an end. I really only do it to maintain my fitness, but I also tend to do a lot of my best thinking when
I’m out pounding the pavements. I pushed myself hard that morning, and it was like a kind of cathartic therapy. I thought about all the things which had been happening over the past couple of weeks, and knew that I was the target of a very deliberate campaign. Too many things had happened for me to put it all down to coincidence. Somebody really had it in for me.

The tyres, the body wires, the phone calls, and now the business with the e-mails. Easy enough to do, if you knew what you were doing and had the nerve. Thinking about it, I realised it is just
so
simple to mess with somebody’s head by doing all these little things. You didn’t need to send somebody a letter bomb, or kidnap their dog, or burgle their house. You just had to set a series of little disasters in motion, and not let them know who’s doing it, or why.

Micro-terrorism.

Yes, that’s the best way to describe it. Planting terror in somebody’s heart, through a sequence of small-scale upsets in their normal life, and letting their mind start to play tricks. And it was easy, because like all terrorists, the perpetrator had chosen a soft target and also cloaked themselves in a veil of anonymity.

There was absolutely no question about
what
was happening.

The questions were
who
and
why.

My thoughts kept circling back to Sue and the man in the gallery. I was doing everything I could to try and keep what I was thinking in perspective, but I couldn’t help it. When faced with a situation like that, our minds tend to run riot, and our imagination starts filling in the gaps. We put two and two together and make eighteen million.

And right then, when all the other stuff was weighing so heavily on me, I succumbed. I desperately wanted to believe that there was a perfectly sensible explanation, but kept going back to the few clues I had - the embrace, the story about being on the internet on Tuesday, and her demeanour when she got in so late on Monday night.

What other reason could there be?

I got home and did just about the stupidest thing I could. I opened a bottle of wine.

*                  *                  *                 *

There is an old saying in Japan, which I think I once heard about in a film, that
you
drink the first drink, the first drink drinks the second drink, the second drinks the third, and so on. That’s just how it was on that Friday afternoon. I certainly had no intention of getting drunk.

It just, well,
happened.

I had been lying on the sofa watching a video of the previous year’s World Championships when the door bell ran
g. I was half way through my second bottle of Frascati, and probably wasn’t in much of state to be receiving any visitors just then, but certainly not Geoff Prentice and the I.T. consultant, Green.

I invited them in. I didn’t really have much choice about it, as whatever they had to say wasn’t something I wanted to discuss on the doorstep. I led them through to the sitting room and offered them a seat.

Derek Green looked at the wine glass and the bottles on the coffee table but said nothing. He didn’t need to. His expression spoke volumes. Geoff, on the other hand,  gave me a look more of patient concern than anything else. In my position, he could possibly have been doing the same.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ I said, taking care to enunciate my words carefully. ‘How can I be of help now?’

‘We’ve got some good news, Richard,’ Geoff began.

‘Oh, good news is it?’ I cut in. ‘How nice.’

‘Yes,’ he went on, clearly not wanting to give me the opportunity to say anything which would make me look a prat. ‘Derek here has been rooting around and we think we’ve got to the bottom of it.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ said Green, not actually sneering, but it was close enough for me to not feel any warmth toward my possible saviour. ‘It was what you said about the e-mail that did it. Tell me, just who is Phillip McAllister?’

‘Phil? He’s my coach.’

‘Your coach?’ Green glanced towards Geoff, as if seeking reassurance that I really was talking sense.

‘Yep. I’m a fencer.’ I slurred the words. ‘Bloody good one too, if truth be told. Phil McAllister is my coach. He’s a
fencing
coach.’

‘And you opened the attachment on an e-mail thinking it was from him? Sixteen twelve on Tuesday?’

‘Er … yeah … if you say so.’

‘And when nothing came up, did it occur to you that it was a little strange?’

‘Course it did.’ I looked across at Geoff and smiled. ‘Not what you normally expect, is it?’

‘And did you speak to him about it?’ asked Geoff. ‘Did you ask what it was he was trying to send you, when you got an attachment that wasn’t there?’

‘Er … no … no I didn’t.’ I spoke quietly, realising I must have sounded very foolish. ‘I was going to, but I forgot. Had a lot on my mind that evening.’

‘Pity,’ said Green, reaching for a laptop case he had carried in with him. ‘If the alarm bells had started ringing a little earlier this could all have been avoided.’

He opened up the laptop and powered it up. There was an awkward silence for a moment as he tapped away and found what he was looking for.

‘Hey,’ I said brightly, and they both looked my way. ‘Either of you fancy a glass of wine? Come on, there’s plenty more in the fridge.’

Green said nothing, but just gave me a contemptuous look over the top of his glasses, while Geoff declined, adding that it might be best if we all tried to keep a clear head.

Feeling like a little boy who had just been told off I thought it best not to try and press my hospitality on them.

After a moment Green found what he was after and turned the laptop round so we could all see the screen.

‘Whoever did this knows his computers,’ he began explaining. ‘It’s not particularly high level stuff, but it’s beyond the know-how of most ordinary dabblers. See here? This is a listing of the e-mail addresses from which mail is most often received by your desktop account at Medicom. This one is your man McAllister.’

He pointed to an address in the middle of the list. It was an address I recognised well enough. I must have seen it a few hundred times over the years.

‘So what’s that got to do with what happened?’ I said, looking up from the screen. ‘Phil would never do anything like this.’

‘No, you’re absolutely right, and he
didn’t.
’

‘Eh …?’

‘Just look at the address of the e-mail you received on Tuesday.’ He brought up a different listing, one showing my incoming messages for the day in question, and pointed with the tip of a pencil. ‘See this? It’s an extra full stop in the address, just where nobody would be likely to take any notice of it. Unless you spotted it, which is unlikely, it just looked like a regular message from Phil McAllister.’

‘So the person who sent it set me up?’ My befuddled brain was beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

‘Mmmm. Somebody engineered an e-mail account, somewhere out there in the ethers, which looks almost exactly like McAllister’s. You got an e-mail which you didn’t give any thought to, and as soon as you clicked on the attachment it downloaded the software equivalent of a time bomb into your desktop. Set to go off at whatever time the person who put it together chose.’

‘And the people who got the smut?’ I still wasn’t sure how this could all have happened.

‘They were just unlucky. His program was designed to scan through the internal mail addresses in your user account and chose six completely at random.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said quietly, after a moment. There wasn’t really much else to say.

‘Quite.’ His tone seemed to have softened a little now that he knew I wasn’t a pornographer. No, now that he knew I was merely a drunk and an inept I.T. user, he seemed more sympathetic than before.

‘But what does it all mean?’ I said, staring at the screen on the laptop.

‘It means two things, Richard,’ replied Geoff, matter of factly. ‘First, you’re in the clear. Second, for anyone to go to this sort of trouble, you must have pissed somebody off big time.’

*                  *                  *                  *

Why?

That was the question.

After they had left I began giving it the best of my reasoning ability, which, as it happened, wasn’t particularly brilliant, but it did strike me that “
why”
was most definitely the best road to go down.

There were about sixty million people out there in Britain, and whilst I knew they weren’t all suspects in the great Richard Teasdale Persecution Mystery, there were too many possibilities for me to figure it out that way.
No, I had to work out
why
anybody would want to do this to me. What would possess somebody to go to these lengths? If I could only figure out just what I had done, maybe going back over the years, then the
who
of it would become clear.

Over the years …
?

Yes. It
was a distinct possibility.

Ten

My career as an undergraduate
was pretty unremarkable, really. I worked, socialised, worked some more, and was, I suppose, pretty boring to tell the truth. It was a shame that I didn’t take up fencing until a few years after leaving, as having the chance to represent the university on the BUSA circuit might have been fun, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

While I was a student there were
big changes in the way the colleges were going to have to run themselves, and all had to look at funding themselves more efficiently. It was this which probably led to one of the more regrettable episodes in my life.

One of the more obvious ways the college could utilise its assets more effectively in generating income was to go down the vacation conference route. From now on all those empty bedrooms and lecture halls were to be filled, and a new structure was going to be needed to help it happen. The Student Accommodation Office was renamed the University Conference and Accommodation Bureau, and they were going to need more staff, for the vacation periods at least.

Of course, I jumped at it like a shot, and got my application form handed in to them within an hour of first seeing the advertisement posted up on the common room notice board. Why they chose me over the dozens of other applicants I really don’t know, but it certainly was going to help. While the financial burden on students back in those days was nothing like it is now, I was still finding it hard to get by on my meagre grant. The prospect of free board and lodging during the vacations, along with a hundred and fifty quid a week, tax free, was most welcome.

It was hard work, but it was actually pretty good fun, too. We had courses of every sort being held on our campus, from MBAs to landscape painting for the over sixties. Students of all shapes and sizes, with a whole range of different requirements, now filled the place. There were countless times when we were rushed off our feet, interspersed with periods when we were sat around waiting for something to happen. Moments of madness and moments of boredom, which led to a fairly zany outlook on things. We played harmless practical jokes on each other, and partied pretty hard in the evenings, being invited to all the social events our visitors laid on. But nobody seemed to mind - morale was high, and we got the job done. It was a
really
good place to be.

The real jewel in the crown though, for me at least, was Grace.

She was twenty-six years old, and held the post of administrative officer in the bureau, which meant that she was my senior both in age and position. I had absolutely no intention of falling in love with her when we first met, since she was my boss, after all, but within the first couple of weeks I realised it was something over which I had no control.

She was really tiny, barely five feet tall, but she had quite a commanding presence. She was pretty, in a fairly understated way, and her auburn hair, cut into a restrained, workmanlike bob, caught the eye as soon as she walked into a room. Yes, she was sexy, without really meaning to be, but behind her vivid green eyes there always seemed to be a touch of sadness.

It was the sort of thing which would bring out the chivalrous, protective instincts in any red-blooded young man who saw himself as one of life’s good guys. It made me want to take whatever was troubling her and make it go away.

Within a very short time, we both realised there was a spark there: a mutual understanding, a shared sense of humour, the odd glance across the office when it seemed nobody else was looking. It was all harmless enough, on the surface, and could easily have been written off as just one of those things, but as the days wore on it became obvious, deep within.

It really hammered home one afternoon, just as she was standing by my desk and pointing out some error I had made on the cleaning schedule for one of the accommodation blocks. She was standing very close to me, and I could smell her perfume, and feel the warmth of her hip gently touching my elbow as she leaned forward and pointed at something on the schedule. It took a moment for me to realise she was standing
much
closer than she needed to.

It was absolutely clear. There was no mistaking it. The only question really was what a woman like her would see in a young man like me, but I guess I was past worrying about that right then.

I was totally smitten, and knew that I had to talk to her about it.

It should all have been so simple, except for one thing.

Grace was married.

I really would like to be able to say that there were mitigating circumstances, and that there were perfectly valid reasons why her espousal wasn’t relevant, except in that it was an inconvenience to our union. I’d like to say that my actions were justified by the fact that I was rescuing her from her boorish pig of a husband who was, as I later discovered, conducting an affair of his own. I’d like to claim the moral high ground, but I can’t. The reason why, deep down, I felt it was alright to flout the sanctity of marriage was that I just wanted her, and when you’re in your early twenties you don’t think too much about the rules. Not the way you should, anyway.

She was desperately unhappy, but I only really learned the full truth of it after several months. She had never particularly wanted to marry
him,
she had just wanted to be married, and he was the first serious prospect to present itself. She had been brought up in the sort of environment where it was just what you did, no question about it. You found somebody, you got married, you started having kids, and you made the best of it. You got your raw material and then moulded it into what you wanted to share the rest of your life with.

The problem was that they were
totally
unsuited. She had never enjoyed the physical side of their marriage, and that was where part of the difficulty lay. He was an extremely successful salesman, and his frequent trips away on business presented him with the ideal opportunity to do pretty much whatever he wanted with one of his colleagues.

She had been dreadfully hurt by it. She had put a lot of herself into their married life, not that he really appreciated it, and her reluctance to make love with him was borne more from his brutal and unsophisticated technique than an innate lack of passion on her part. She had cooked him wonderful meals, she had kept their house looking perfect, and she had been a perfect hostess when called to, and all on top of holding down a career of her own. And he had made it clear that it wasn’t enough.

When he finally revealed to her that somebody else was fulfilling one of his more earthy needs she was stunned, but that was not the end of it. No, not by a long way. He added the ultimate insult to the injury of his adultery by drinking a huge amount, describing to her in uncompromising terms just what had been going on, and then falling into a deep sleep on their bed, right in front of her.

It was a challenge. It was as though he was goading her to some extreme act of violence, just when he was most vulnerable, knowing that she couldn’t do it.

‘Go on,’ his unconscious form seemed to be shouting at her, ‘do it now. What’s to stop you? One of the Kitchen Devils ought to do it. Go on! Do it! But you can’t, can you?’

No, she couldn’t. He had been absolutely right. Unable to bring herself to kill the man who had belittled her so cruelly she took the only option which realistically presented itself at that moment. She moved into the spare room, and got on with her life.

Then I came along.

We fell in love, we spent time together, we laughed and joked and watched old movies. We took long walks in the woods and we had dinner at restaurants in towns which were a discreet enough distance from the
university
for us not to be recognised.

And we never once had sex.

No, really. We drew the line at that. It probably wouldn’t be strictly true to say that I never laid a finger on her, since there were several occasions when I did precisely that, if you follow me, and she most certainly enjoyed it, but we never went the whole way.

Maybe it was some internal safety valve which stopped us, as though we didn’t want to drag ourselves down to
his
level. I don’t know. It all seems rather irrelevant now, since the fact remained that we were committing adultery
in our hearts.

In the end, of course, despite all this, it came crashing down around our ears. We just weren’t discreet enough, and tongues began wagging. People are very good at taking what they see in public and assuming that it must be magnified in private. I don’t know, but word must have got back to him somehow. She never really made it clear what it was, to be honest. She just told me, on a gloriously sunny afternoon three days after my graduation, that we could never see each other again.

I was devastated. I had been telling myself for months that this was all going to turn out for the best, and yet there I was, being dumped so she could get on with her life with the man who had treated her so badly.

It was years before I ever had it in me to give myself to somebody so completely again. I’m okay now, of course, since having Susan in my life is just perfect, but I still feel bad about the circumstances under which my relationship with Grace took place, and I guess I’ve been carrying that, as a burden, for the last
couple of decades.

Did it have anything to do with what was happening to me all those years later? Was Grace’s loathsome husband, Martin, really the sort who could harbour a grudge about what had happened for such a long time? Enough that he would come back at me now?

Yes, probably. I had actually met him on two occasions, and he really hadn’t struck me as being a very nice man at all. Just the type to overlook his own indiscretions and want to extract revenge on the boy he believed had cuckolded him. Yes, I wouldn’t put it past him at all.

And there was one other thing.

Martin was an extremely successful salesman. For a
computer
company.