She Is Back

Fedele Cardinale

Description

Helena Manning goes missing from her family home on the night of the celebration of her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

The police investigation opens a can of worms. Multiple scenarios unravel. No one is above suspicion, not even the people who should be looking for her. The deeply divided community of Torginay, rattled by the consequences of the coalition government’s savage cuts on welfare, is in shock. Helena Manning had made some powerful enemies over the years as chair of a local charity, heads of hedge funds and multinationals who may have wanted her gone. The Italian mob, she had accidentally got involved with, was hot on her heels. Or maybe the culprits were to be found closer to home, among her own flesh and blood. Years of agonizing wait without news of Helena follow, until one day…

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse UK
• Date de parution: 21 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665599924
• Langue: English

Extrait

She is Back
 
 
 
 
 
 
FEDELE CARDINALE
 
 
 
 

 
 
AuthorHouse™ UK
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Bloomington, IN 47403 USA
www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: UK TFN: 0800 0148641 (Toll Free inside the UK)             UK Local: (02) 0369 56322 ([phone] from outside the UK)
 
 
 
 
 
© 2022 Fedele Cardinale. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  08/18/2022
 
ISBN: 978-1-6655-9991-7 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-9992-4 (e)
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Contents
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Acknowledgments
Review
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About the Author
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This novel is the work of the author’s imagination, all characters, names and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my friends and family members for taking the time to pre-read my book, my friend Chunia Begum in particular for her precious advice. My wife Kiran, an author herself, for taking the time to edit my work and her patience to listen to my ideas and my many doubts.
Review
An insightful journey into the drawbacks of love and success, examining issues such as political accountability, social division and mental illness through the lens of philosophy, art, the occult and spirituality, leaves the reader wanting more and with plenty of food for thought.
Sophia Quzi Poet – author of The Poetry of Life.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
– Immanuel Kant
The day Helena left something inside Harry Manning died forever. His heartbeat was normal, according to the paramedics his daughter Maria called from her father’s home on that dreadful Sunday morning after she found him lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.
Two days earlier, Harry and Helena had celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Unable to sleep, edgy with excitement for the big day ahead, Harry had risen early and had gone to watch the sea. He had walked along the Flanagan’s marshes up to the public beach, looking for fragments of memories, to retrace the path of their first outing together. Their subsiding steps over the sand dunes, Helena had walked in her impractical high-heeled shoes. He pushed as far as the shoreline, looking for the stretch of shore where they laid side by side, squeezing their palms together, feeling the piercing grains of wet sand pinning their beings into one.
It was as though Harry had a premonition that morning, that something was about to change in his predictable happy life, and that he needed to relive a moment of their mind dazzling beginning before he took a plunge into the obscurity of the imminent ending.
“Few days of absolute rest and he will be like new,” the doctor on duty at Queen’s Hospital predicted after running all sorts of tests.
Six months on from that buoyant prognosis and Harry Manning was a shadow of his former self. His children’s hopes of seeing their father fully recovered were fading fast, as the man who once was a seed of life, who hardly breathed between words, barely spoke. An absent glance and a nod were as far as he would go before, he returned his empty gaze to the floor.
At the time of that heartening prognosis, the doctor at the A&E at Queen’s hospital was unaware of Helena; Harry had been married to for twenty-five years, vanishing out of his life like a shadow at nightfall, leaving no trace or a note of explanation.
“A few words would have done for me, you know,” Harry said to his daughter Maria one day, breaking into a sob. Those whispered words were as far as Harry Manning went, in opening his heart to those around him, when his daughter Maria tried to get him to talk about his gone wife.
1
H arry’s and Helena’s twenty-five years together had been the perfect fairy-tale. The twin-flame-premise become reality seldom anyone experiences outside the setting of their dreams.
Harry was the only son of Nigel Manning, a cobbler who ran his craft in a dingy basement in the old quarters of the town centre. He had taken over from his late father Jack in the late thirties, when he was just a little more than a brat in dungarees - a school drop-out, rated distinctively hopeless. Unable to count past one hundred and to write his full name without misplacing a few letters here and there, but armed with a full gear of dexterity, he had picked up at the underrated school of everyday life that made him just short of being illiterate but incredibly streetwise.
Despite his difficult beginnings - forced to grow up fast, to take control of the family business, aged merely sixteen, when his father became bedridden with a wasting disease, Nigel Manning managed to keep his head above water. J. Manning & Son Cobblers survived a war, two recessions, a depression, Nigel Manning’s own demons and more recently, the invasion of cheap Made in China shoes and leather goods that made shoe-repairing virtually obsolete.
It didn’t help that often Nigel Manning was legless-drunk first thing in the morning. Unable to open the shop, he left it to his little boy to turn away customers with an excuse.
“Tell them that I am out and that I will be back in the late afternoon,” he would say. Sometimes the shop would remain closed for days until Nigel Manning pulled himself together.
When he could stay sober, Nigel Manning was a man of many trades and talents. He hardly ever threw anything away. He would give people’s junk a new lease of life. Litter became raw material in his hands. He once used the straws from an old set of Italian chairs to stuff his son’s collapsed mattress. He rescued the lids of an old set of pans from a dustbin, equipped them with door handles he retrieved from an old cupboard he found in a scrapyard in the outskirt of town.
He often went through people’s skips to recover stuff most folks considered outdated. “Look at what people throw away these days. They haven’t been through the war, that’s what it is,” he would say to his son, visibly embarrassed by the passers-by’s side-glances.
He would come home with bags full of junk, he would gently line up on the floor as if they were collectables. He would sit on the sofa, light up a roll-up and examine them one by one. Assess their hidden potential, decide which piece deserved a new lease of life and which would be heading back to the scrapyard.
Everything in the house was mix and match, a collage of salvaged parts, some people ridiculed him for it. Although not everyone was prejudiced towards Nigel Manning’s recycling talent. In the early seventies, he caught the attention of the manager of a factory of utensils who offered him a job in the design department. Nigel Manning turned him down because he could not work for anyone and could not let go of his old man’s workshop even though he ran it at a financial loss.
Nigel Manning never failed to motivate his son. “Do as I say, not as I do,” he would say, conscious of his shortcomings. “Keep your chin up and your eyes peeled, and you will shine son,” he would say, every time Harry complained about the job being so dull. “I would rather be playing conkers with my mates in the park. I want something better than this for myself when I grow up,” Harry would moan at every chance. Especially when the air became stuffy in the workshop at the peak of summertime and when he heard his mates having a good time out in the street after lunch.
Helena Carver, on the other hand, was of gentry stock. The Carvers were solid upper-class. Second-generation descendants of wealthy Cumbrian landowners, with distant baronial ancestry. Over the years, the Carvers had given the community of Torginay - a small town that stood on the cliffs and mild sands of the English Riviera: a Neurosurgeon, a High Court Judge, a Life Peer and last but not least, a Geologist, who, following his award-winning doctoral thesis on the presence of life in outer space at Oxford University was snapped up by the NASA agency to work on a programme searching for water on Mars.
Helena was the daughter of Tom Carver, the eldest and least successful of the Carver brothers. He was the headmaster of St George’s Secondary. An inflexible disciplinarian feared by both his students and teachers. An ostentatious little man, who kept everyone at arm’s length with his la-di-da pretension.
Tom was the only member of the Carver clan not to have made the grade for Oxford or Cambridge. Yet, he fancied himself as the embodiment of academic success. The face of vanguard education, whose self-published volume: “Turning t