Patient Man

Lynn Scott S.

Description

It is 1976 and Mikey, eight-years-old and street-wise beyond his years, is looking forward to a summer of freedom, roaming the creeks and the mud-flats of Canvey Island. But violent emotions are rumbling beneath the surface, about to destroy all that he thought he knew. When Mikey's neighbours, the Freemans, win a great deal of money, the old couple become the targets of a criminal act that leaves Peggy Freeman dead and her husband, Bert thirsting for revenge. Believing that young Mikey's family is responsible, Bert devises a highly unusual but devastatingly effective form of reprisal. But where does the guilt really lie, and will there be punishment or redemption?Told from Mikey's viewpoint with light touches of humour,A Patient Manis a gripping crime novel peopled with believable characters who are drawn inexorably in to a story that explores the effects of greed, money and the human need for retribution.

Sujets

• Essex

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 23 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789012330
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A PATIENT MAN





S. Lynn Scott
Copyright © 2018 S. Lynn Scott

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.

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ISBN 9781789012330

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
For Desiree and Tobias
Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden
Contents
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1
Life being what it is,
one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin
The man who murdered my mother lived at the end of our street. We didn’t know him well. Hardly at all, in fact. He was retired, living contentedly with his quiet wife and, until the momentous event that changed the course of all our lives, he was a nonentity to us, a cipher, just one of the vast army of little old men living with their little old wives in little old England.
I was just eight years old when the first thing happened.
That was half a lifetime ago and of course, I am not now the child I was then. ‘Life piled on life’ has intervened. It has educated me, despite my occasional resistance, and it has matured and mellowed me. That boy who was all feeling and reaction still exists as a small voice within me but learning and experience has squeezed the passion from him. I don’t know if I am really the better for it. I should be. At least I am alive. And free.
I also don’t know much about the ‘butterfly effect’ but I do know that one small event that should not have touched me or mine at all created a seismic change that altered all the course of my life. My own boy will be eighteen in a few weeks. His youth has been comfortable and secure. Mine was not.
I lived with my family on Canvey Island. Canvey is a scrubby expanse of low-lying land and salt marsh situated in the muddy waters of the Thames Estuary, not far from the brash seaside resort of Southend. Island is a grand designation for an area that is only separated from the mainland at high tide, but islanders we believed ourselves to be. At low tide, an adventurous soul with a stout pair of Wellington boots and a strong pair of thighs, who is prepared to do battle with the glutinous, grasping mud, can make it on foot to Benfleet station on the mainland and be on their way to London in very few minutes. However, the island is also served by two bridges and to use one of them is almost always a much better option.
Canvey was then an eccentric little island boasting a quaint Dutch heritage, a lively population of East End Londoners escaping the city smog, and a vast petrochemical site on one side of the island lowering darkly over a colourful mini-seaside resort on the other. The oil refinery, now long defunct, was in my youth a big feature both on the political and the actual landscape. I remember the huge tanks and steel towers as a constantly brooding presence on the outskirts of my life and, mingled with the scent of petroleum that lent to the air a sort of oily warmth, they were comfort and home and the equivalent of a warm embrace to the eight-year-old me. I doubt if many shared my enthusiasm though. The refinery was considered by most who lived under its long-reaching shadow to be a catastrophe waiting to happen.
In fact, Canvey Island was a very exciting place to live in the 1970’s. I thought so anyway. Lying below sea level in the Thames estuary and riddled with salt marsh creeks it was always at risk of flooding and so, in the distant past, Dutch expertise had been brought in to drain the brackish land and build protective dikes. Their efforts had made the island habitable, but even so dire consequences were predicted when, not if, another storm like the great North Sea Storm were to strike. That angry tempest had united with high tides to drown many helpless Islanders and had devastated and scarred the little community. In 1976 therefore, we lived on a knife edge believing that should we be lucky enough to survive the devastation of imminent flood then it was surely inevitable that the IRA, or failing those murderous conspirators, an innocent spark, would ignite the gas and oil in the vast storage tanks on the east of the island and blow the little Victorian sea-side resort to hell and back.
I found these possibilities rather exciting than otherwise and looked forward to either, or preferably both, with eager anticipation.
When I was that snotty nosed boy, running wild over the island, pretty much all the houses were small ramshackle bungalows, cheap little erections with bags of character but few comforts. Some of them were lovingly tended and, as is so often the way the world over, some were not.
We, however, lived in one of the burgeoning new builds off Smallgains Avenue and from my bedroom window I just about see in the distance the many masts of yachts and dinghies piercing the grey sky above the shabby moorings of the creek that led to the estuary that led to the sea. Our honey-colored detached house was next to one of the grass-covered sea walls, beyond which was an expanse of marshy greenbelt, kept as a potential reservoir in preparation for that exciting flood that was expected at any moment. Beyond that was the Holiday Park with its tiny ‘chalets’, caravans, glamorous nightclub and outdoor swimming pool. To me, this park was a land of delights, all of them forbidden. It was, therefore, one of my favourite haunts and, although they tried very hard to keep me out, it was easy to get in and I contrived to spend an inordinate amount of time there.
Bert and Peggy lived at the other end of our road, on the same side as us and about ten small houses away. Bert appeared to my young eyes to be incredibly old. He was grey, spare, craggy and bent with thin white hair worn a little too long, watery pale blue eyes, framed by ugly glasses, and a sharp, hooked nose. He shuffled rather than walked and yet, thinking back, he was probably not much more than sixty and, despite his gait, was wiry rather than frail. He smoked of course. Hell, everyone did in those days. Even I cadged fags when I could and had no compunction in smoking them jauntily as I practiced my man of the world swagger along Canvey Seafront. Smoking was grown-up and glamorous, and I saw no correlation at all between the cigarette hanging from my young lips and Bert’s fingers which were yellowed with nicotine or the racking cough that wheezed from his waist-coated chest with wearisome regularity. He had a neat little front garden and a neat little car that he kept very clean and, when the weather was good, he could be seen tending them both or taking his neat, little wife to the shops. He appeared to be on good terms with all his neighbours, apart from Mrs. B in the house opposite, but more of her later.
He was not the sort of man that you would think of as a murderer, or as someone likely to cause immeasurable suffering and yet he most definitely did both. And he did it coldly and deliberately, taking pleasure in the suffering he caused. Whether you with your fine, educated, well informed twenty-first-century morality will consider his actions evil, however, remains to be seen. But I know where I stand.
His little wife was the cause. The innocent cause I will freely admit and to her attach no blame unless you consider an unshakable belief in forgiveness and redemption to be a criminal tendency. It is my experience that when Christian values are taken to extremes, as they were in this case, they can have unintended and quite catastrophic consequences. If you ask me, the road to hell is most definitely paved with good intentions.
Well, however that might be, Peggy was a quiet, plump woman who knitted non-stop and wore an apron and heavy-rimmed glasses very similar to her husband’s. They were National Health, of course. She kept house for her husband and I don’t think she had ever done anything else since she married. They came from a generation where women did keep house. It was their raison d’etre , or so they had always been told, and anyway, Peggy was a natural homebody, keeping their little house neat and their garden pretty and her husband’s every need catered for.
We lived at opposite ends of the same street, but it might as well have been at opposite ends of the world for all we had in common. I saw them often. I was a boy who wandered freely, usually over the sea wall and down to the muddy shores, but I found interest everywhere. With a sort of innocent voyeurism, I had acquainted myself with every house and every occupant in the street.
The Briggs lived in a semi diagonally opposite us and they had four loud children, all possessed of red hair, long freckled legs and a quite astonishing degree of stupidity. Mr. Briggs, who was lean and careworn, worked on the buses and blowsy Mrs. Briggs was having an affair with his brother who didn’t work at all. Curiously none of the intriguing love-trian