Even Stranger Read online

  Even Stranger

  Marilyn Messik

  Copyright © 2016 Marilyn Messik

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

  the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events

  and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination

  or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 9781 78589 6750

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To Sophie, Charlotte, Reuben, Emily and Raphaella –

  thank heaven you were all born with a sense of humour!

  About the Author

  Marilyn was a regular feature and fiction writer for national magazines when her children were small. She set up her first business, selling toys, books and party goods from home, before opening first one shop then another. When she sold both shops she moved into the world of travel, focusing on Bed and Breakfasts and Country Inns in New England, USA. Her advisory, planning and booking service flourished and she concurrently launched a publishing company, producing an annual, full-colour accommodation guide.

  In 2007 she set up a copywriting consultancy, to help businesses shape their messages to optimum effect. She’s the author of the Little Black Business Book series and the novel Relatively Strange. She’s been married to her very patient husband for more years than he deserves and they have two children, five grandchildren and, somewhat to their surprise, several grand-dogs.

  www.marilynmessik.com

  By the same author

  Relatively Strange

  “What a brilliant unique book. I couldn’t put it down” Off-the-Shelf Book Reviews

  *

  “. . . keeps you both on your toes and at the edge of your seat throughout each chapter. A must-read.” Elisheva Sokolic. Under Cover

  *

  “A wonderfully strange book and I hope the author is writing a follow up. Definitely recommend.” Tracy Fenton. The Book Club (TBC)

  *

  “Beautifully written, this book will grab readers on a visceral level. Stella is both heroine, victim and villain, and one of the most compelling characters I have encountered in some time.” For the Love of Books

  *

  “I spent the first few chapters of this brilliant novel wondering if it really was a crime book, since it seemed to be a very funny description of Stella’s mad relatives – then I got swept up in the story, and after I’d finished I couldn’t quite see what else it could be. Imagine a John Wyndham character strayed into a McDermid, Kate Brannigan novel, that might give you an idea of this quirky book. If you want to try something a bit different, I’d really recommend this.” Promoting Crime Fiction

  Contents

  About the Author

  Relatively Strange

  CHAPTER ONE

  Part One

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Part Two

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Part FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Part FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  INTO THE LAKE

  Don’t walk before you can run and

  don’t run before you can fly!

  CHAPTER ONE

  There are a lot of things that get easier, as you get older. Flying isn’t one of them.

  I only got halfway across the lake, before I fell in. As the freezing water closed icily bleak and black over my head, I thought it’s a load of hooey, what they say about drowning – you know, your life flashing before you. If, after struggling repeatedly to the surface shrieking, ‘Help me for God’s sake!’ you’ve time left for a memory lane mooch, you’re clearly not trying hard enough to live. I went under again.

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” She muttered in my head. With a mouth full of foully brackish-smelling water, components of which I didn’t even want to contemplate, I wasn’t in any position to maintain external hollering, mentally I was more than making up for it.

  “I’m drowning!”

  “You’re not drowning.” That bloody woman was always so certain of everything, I was tempted to die damply, just to spite her. “It’s only deep in the middle,” she pointed out. She wasn’t wrong, there indeed, if I’d thought to lower my feet from their panic-stricken doggy-paddle, was terra firma. “See?” she said.

  I wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer. The lake bottom, as it shallowed towards the bank, was thick with silt, a staggering amount of which was accumulating in my soft-soled shoes. It slowed progress no end, as did the lethally concealed clumps of reeds entangling my legs. At least, I hoped they were reeds. For a moment, a vision of palely rott
ing, white and reaching arms, courtesy of my recent encounter at the hotel, filled my head. That did me no good at all, neither did the November wind, snipping spitefully round me. I was as far from happy, as it’s possible for any one person to be.

  “What’s happened?” Another voice in my head, Glory this time.

  “Her own stupid fault,” said Rachael Peacock, “Tried to save time going over, not round.”

  “Hey,” I snapped, “Still here! And I thought you were supposed to be helping.” They ignored me.

  “Glory,” said Rachael. “I see her now, get Ed to drive round to meet us, quick as you can.”

  Had my teeth not been otherwise occupied, chattering, they’d have been grinding. I staggered ungainly from the water – no Aphrodite me – and squelched towards a tall thin form, heading purposefully from the creaking darkness of the trees.

  “Not,” she said aloud, “Your brightest move, and I thought we said keep it low key. Can you not do anything, without all hell breaking loose? Here get this round you.” I reached for the blanket she was holding, but it wasn’t my night. From the blackness behind her, a dark shadow had detached itself and was loping towards us at speed. Above the wind, rose the sound of hoarse panting and a shaft of moonlight, struggling against the odds, refracted briefly from a pair of gleaming eyes. Rachael and I reacted swiftly and simultaneously, but there was no time. He hit me with the force of an express train. I went down soundlessly.

  “Can’t think, for one moment why he’s pleased to see you, you smell disgusting. Hamlet, off!” She gave him an authoritative mental tug. He treated my face to a final comprehensive lick from cheek to chin, then reluctantly backed away. Breathing’s always easier when a ten stone, Great Dane cross, eases off your chest, though I shivered harder as wind replaced warmth. Rachael Peacock eyed my soaked and spread-eagled form with exasperation and was extending an impatient hand to haul me up, when we were both rocked back by Glory’s shock.

  “Rachael,” she said, “We’ve just knocked someone down. I think we’ve killed her.”

  Part One

  LEADING UP TO THE LAKE

  When people can’t believe their eyes – they don’t!

  CHAPTER TWO

  By the time the swinging sixties staggered, slightly shamefaced and flustered, into the minimally staider seventies, I was twenty-two. All around me, mini skirted, Mary Quant-eyed girls were becoming Berketex brides, to the moist-tissued delight of mothers, who’d thought the pill and too many women’s libbers, might have put paid to those sort of happy ever afters. My own mother’s aspirations were no different. Come to think, neither were mine. After some of the things I’d seen and done, a chartered accountant, a quiet life and a couple of kids seemed mighty attractive.

  Naturally, in our close-knit Jewish family, anything involving my mother, involved a lot of other people too. I’d become accustomed to serried ranks of raised eyebrows at family gatherings, accompanied by a chorus of unabashed inquiry into my love life, or lack of. Aunt Edna, my mother’s older sister, having seen off her own two girls in a highly satisfactory manner, one to a doctor, the other to a solicitor, viewed me as a further, slightly more challenging hurdle.

  “So,” she’d pounce, pinching my cheeks absent-mindedly – a little colour never hurt. “I’m still waiting for some exciting news from you.” Then she’d turn back to my mother, to bend their formidably combined energies to the locating of yet another young, unfortunate, professional to take me on an excruciatingly awkward date. Throughout their lives, she and my mother tackled all problems jointly. Well, nearly all problems.

  I think it dawned on my poor parents only gradually, when blessed by my arrival, that I wasn’t quite what you’d call run of the mill, though there was probably nothing they could quite put their finger on, until I was about five. If it was disconcerting to me then, to discover other people couldn’t fly, how much more so for my parents to find I could. Heroically pragmatic, under these most trying of circumstances, they were nonetheless in complete accord – whatever the extent of my odd aptitudes, it was, beyond doubt, something best played close to our chests. They shared my strangeness with no-one.

  Directed by this decision, life for them, not surprisingly had its ups and downs, with the emergence of each new development taken manfully on the chin. Moving objects, without going to the bother of touching, was, I believe, the next thing that came to light, or maybe it was the fire-starting thing – can’t really remember now, which we stumbled across first. Then of course, there was the gradual acknowledgement that I could hear what was going on in other people’s heads, accompanied by the equally revelatory realisation for me that everyone else couldn’t. I honestly don’t know which of us was more disturbed by what.

  In my early years, we were just ten years or so post WW2, so maybe my parents had taken on board Careless Talk Costs Lives more than they knew, or perhaps it was down to Grandma’s influence. My mother’s mother trusted no-one, always worked on a strictly need to know basis, and wouldn’t, on principal, let her left hand know what her right was up to, even in an emergency. But whatever their reasons, my parents were unwavering in their decision and determination that my upbringing should be as normal as the next person’s, even if I wasn’t.

  Cocooned as I was, not only in the affection of my parents, but in that of our extended, somewhat eccentric family, things jogged along, if not smoothly, certainly not over-dramatically, until I was about twelve. Then I was one of several hundred children selected to participate in a government-funded study which, fuelled by Cold War fears, was actively, albeit covertly, trawling for out of the ordinary abilities like mine. Mercifully, and with help from an unexpected source, I’d emerged unscathed and undiscovered, if not unalarmed. Confirmation though it was, of my long-held conviction that I couldn’t possibly be unique, it clearly demonstrated that just because my parents were inclined to the paranoid, didn’t mean nobody was after me.

  Up till then, what I was hadn’t worried me unduly, how could it when I knew no different? But there was no doubt, events had moved into a far darker and altogether stickier area. Things didn’t lighten up much when I killed a man. But if you’ve followed my story, you’ll know all about that, and perhaps you feel the same way I did at the time – there was little choice, it was him or us. So, no more to be said.

  It was shortly after this, I was around sixteen then, that Glory Isaacs, blind, psychic, chronically short on patience, and last encountered during my unsettling stint at the Newcombe Foundation, stropped back into my life. I owed her, big-time. She came to call in the favour and in an alarmingly short while, my horizons broadened in all sorts of uncomfortable, previously unimaginable ways. They do say, your teen years are tough, and some of them certainly were for me. I couldn’t, for one moment, deny the fascination of being for the first time, amongst others like myself. But the rescue of a small boy called Sam, in which I took a highly reluctant leading role, and the appalling price paid for its success, wasn’t one I was prepared to pay again. I knew, at that point, with no doubt whatsoever, that normal, or as near as damn it, was going to be the name of the game I played from thereon in.

  My parents naturally were delighted at my resolution to put, what they delicately termed ‘all that stuff’, behind me and to see their lie-low, tell no-one policy paying off. Mind you, had they known even the half of what had gone on during my time with Glory and the Peacock sisters, I suspect defibrillators and CPR might well have been required. But with some rigid self-training and exercising a good deal of restraint – which got easier with time – my life proceeded, for a good long while, along my chosen route. I felt, against the odds, I’d hauled myself on to the normal bandwagon and if I slipped off occasionally, it was simply for my own satisfaction, caused no grief to anyone and didn’t detract in the least from my avowed intentions.

  By the time I was nineteen I’d acquired shorthand, typing and other equally e
ssential office skills – operating a dolls-eye switchboard and dealing with the diva tendencies of Gestetner duplicating machines. I’d found myself a job I enjoyed and felt I’d got it all satisfactorily sussed. But doesn’t smugness always go before a fall? Just as I had things on an even keel, I found myself slap-bang up against something I wanted very much to, but couldn’t, run away from.

  You probably remember the Lollipop Man? The papers were hysterical about little else at the time and no-one, reading even only some of the details of his vicious attacks, would ever forget. His sixth and last victim – the only one who lived, was Lauretta Sears. She was my friend and work colleague. In her hot, airless, hospital room we spent a lot of time together, she and I. Between us we dredged, from the depths of shock, disbelief and trauma, such an unequivocally clear description, that within a very few weeks they had him behind bars, and the whole sorry, savage saga came to an end. Although for Lauretta, of course, it didn’t, it never would.

  What happened to Lauretta, ripped a hole in the fabric of a lot of lives, as violence always does. The comfortable routine of our office, offering ad hoc secretarial services and office space, was irretrievably damaged and re-shaped. When the lease on our rambling suite in Hay Hill, off Berkeley Square, came up for renewal, it was no surprise that Colonel and Mrs Hillyer-Bowden called us in to tell us they’d decided not to continue with the business. They planned to retire somewhere warm so they could, as the Colonel put it,

  “Piddle about on boats, tackle the odd G and T. Make hay while the sun shines. Because,” and he favoured us all with a rueful smile. “You never know, do you, what’s going to bite you on the bum, round the next bally corner?” Certainly, it has to be said, when it came to my own onward progress, never a truer word was spoken.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Back in those days, finding yourself a new job, with shorthand and typing under your belt, wasn’t hard. You couldn’t walk two paces down London’s Oxford, Bond or Regent Streets without tripping over and into an employment agency, each one’s window bedecked with coloured cards, shrieking of bigger and better opportunities. Seated across from energetic, enthusiastic women with bulging rolodexes, pregnant with possibilities, you were spoilt for choice; seduced by luncheon vouchers, wooed by three weeks holiday and tantalised by the latest IBM Golf-ball typewriters, self-correcting no less. And if nothing instantly appealed in one agency, there was always the one next door, or indeed the temping option, offering well-paid placements and the comfortable fact that if you didn’t like it, you didn’t have to stay.