‘Your Army training?’
‘In part. But I had grown up with Hamish; I knew what the man had become.’
‘It’s bizarre,’ Larry said. ‘We could arrest McIntyre with your testimony.’
‘He’ll die in his bed. I’ll die in a prison cell. Marcus died in the room at the top of a house. I only hope that my wife is looked after.’
Fred Wilkinson sat there and wrote out his confession. He had not requested legal aid. In the end, he stood up and was taken back to his cell.
Isaac knew that the man was right; he’d die in a prison cell, alone but not unloved. His wife would always be at their house, waiting for the day he would come home.
***
Wally Vincent and Larry visited Charles Stanford’s house in Brighton.
Outside the house, an eerie silence. In the house, no lights were visible, nothing to indicate that the man was at home.
Larry knocked on the front door; nothing could be heard from inside.
The two men walked around to the back and tried the back door; it was locked.
‘I’ll break a window,’ Vincent said.
‘He may have a key hidden,’ Larry said.
They looked under a potted plant to one side of the door.
‘I’ve found it,’ Vincent said.
Inside the kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator.
‘Something’s up,’ Larry said.
They put on shoe protectors. Both men had gloves on. Progressively they moved through the house, careful what they touched. They used the torches on their phones to guide their way.
On the second floor, the man’s bedroom. On the bed, the body of Charles Stanford.
‘There’s a letter,’ Vincent said.
‘Leave it. This place is for the crime scene investigators. It’ll be a confession about how he became involved with Wilkinson and Matthews.’
‘And I thought he’d told us everything.’
‘He was always smarter than us. How did he die?’
‘Poison, probably. It doesn’t matter, not now, does it?’
Outside the house, a dog walked by on Stanford’s side of the street. Unable to run away, it started yapping.
Wally Vincent knelt down and patted the dog on its head. He didn’t have the heart to give it a swift kick; not that day.
The End
Grave Passion
Phillip Strang
Chapter 1
Brad Robinson was about to break the law, not that he knew it, and he was in too much of a hurry to worry anyway. He was a bright child, his mother would say, but then she had a soft spot for him, seeing that he was the only one of her three children who wasn’t taking drugs, incarcerated in prison, or, in the case of her daughter, selling herself. To the sixteen-year-old’s mother, it looked as though he might make his way in the world without resorting to crime, even becoming a worthwhile member of society, which she had aspired to but had failed to achieve.
Jim, the eldest of her three children, had at twenty-two seen the inside of more than a few prison cells. He had had to grow up hard; his father was a criminal as well as a drunk, and on many a night, he had beaten his mother senseless.
At the age of fourteen, Jim, strong for his age, had taken on the bane of the Robinson household and thrashed his father mercilessly with a cricket bat. The upshot was that Jim, the saviour of his family, spent time in a young offender’s institution, and his father, once the wounds had healed, had briefly returned to the family home, a squalid council house with little charm, picked up his clothes, packed them in a suitcase and had left; not a word of farewell to anyone in the house, other than a pat on the shoulder for the eight-year-old Brad.
The second eldest, Janice, was an attractive blonde-haired child until puberty hit. After that, she had discovered boys, and then men, and then drugs. She was now twenty-one and living a transient life, moving from one place to another, eking a living by selling herself, injecting when she could, eating whatever food she could afford.
Brad tried to see her every couple of months, but it wasn’t easy. He was sixteen, and his life should have been a time for exams and sport and chasing girls. Not that he tarried on the latter, as he had grown up a good-looking lad, and the genetic traits that had made Jim violent and Janice a tart hadn’t touched him. He was more like his mother, except that he had tried alcohol on a couple of occasions and never found a love for it. He was glad of that.
The house wasn’t somewhere you took Rose Winston. Brad didn’t want to destroy her impression of him. She lived not far away in a better house and her parents owned it; her father was a professional man and her mother was a schoolteacher.
Rose had made it clear that sex was the next step in their relationship; after all, they had passed through passionate kissing and heavy petting. The next stage was the final act, where he, the over-eager Brad, and Rose, the expectant female, would come together in a crescendo of drums, the sound of waves lapping on the shore, an abandonment of themselves as they became one.
That was how Rose, an avid reader of love stories, saw it. Brad, sensitive as only a sixteen-year-old male could be, knew that wasn’t how it was, but he wasn’t about to tell her the truth, not just yet. It was messy, he could have told her, over far too quickly, and if she wanted banging drums and the music, then she’d better take a radio with her.
The best he could hope for was a balmy summer’s night, a secluded spot in
