Donald overspent himself, and lavished the biggest local wedding of the year when he married Kay in the village church just beyond the city boundaries, a wedding that took place before hundreds of guests, some of whom the happy couple barely knew. By the time Kay returned from their Cretan honeymoon she was already expecting the first of those agonising miscarriages.
He made his living through his own business, The Shelbourne Motor Company. For some time he craved changing the name to Shelbourne and Son, Motor Dealers, or better still, Sons, but he would have to wait for that. He had another target too, to land a main dealership with one of the prestigious manufacturers; one of the self-selling brands that would make his fortune.
He was unlucky in that.
Perhaps it was because of his lack of finance, or maybe, as he suspected, his lack of connections. But for whatever reason, whenever he was interviewed and vetted by the big boys, they would always turn him down.
Thank you for your application but we regret on this occasion we cannot offer you a dealership. But please try again in another year or two. In the meantime, we wish you well and shall bear you in mind.
They never did, or at least if they did, they never advised Donald Shelbourne of their interest, or their reasons for his rejection.
He was forced into marketing marques that few people had heard of, and even fewer people wanted to buy. He stumbled from one useless foreign supplier to the next, damaging his reputation, because of his inability to make any of the franchises work. The major manufacturers hated that, to see a dealer flitting from one to another. They revelled in long-term loyalty, and Mr Shelbourne, with his sales site at the bottom of the high street in the small town just outside the city, had showed repeatedly that he could not be relied on.
The Shelbourne Motor Company stumbled on, making a living by selling other peoples’ second-hand cars, not so different from the one man bands that proliferated everywhere, and stuck their wares up for sale on the greens in front of the council estate, gaudy handwritten price notices tossed in the front window.
When the economy was good, Shelbourne would do well enough to treat his family to exciting holidays in Barcelona, Tuscany or Sicily. In the poor years when few people were buying, they would pile into the big car, take to the road, and spend the week in rainy Newquay, not that Armitage cared about that. He could find pleasure and mischief wherever he went.
Four months after Kay’s death, Donald moved Donna into the house. She was a flighty woman, painted and over fragrant, who had been employed by the Shelbourne Motor Company to keep the books. That was another of Donald’s weaknesses. Accounting and bookkeeping skills were not high on his list of priorities, a fact that more than one German manufacturer had noted when inspecting the finances. How could they work hand in glove with a person, a company, that could not produce accurate records?
It was unthinkable!
There was more to Donna than met the eye.
She realised that Donald relied on her. True, the accounts were annually audited, but only by old Fotheringay from the village. His eyes were not what they once were, and things had moved on since he had done his training forty years before. Donna knew what he checked and what he didn’t. She knew his weak spots and where to set up the dummy company, Laddon Motor Supplies. She imagined she was being ridiculously clever because Laddon was an anagram of Donald. She created several fictitious identities, bought an accommodation address service in London, had some striking green and yellow letterheaded invoices produced well away from the district, and Laddon Motor Supplies was in business, and sending bills to the Shelbourne Motor Company, a regular monthly invoice of inventory, not too large to invite investigation, not too hefty to cause Shelbourne financial difficulty.
Donna paid the invoices on the nail.
Donald signed the cheques. He never looked at them twice.
Donna treated Shelbourne as a cash cow, her own personal savings bank. She had never possessed any real money of her own, and she would milk it, not wanting to weaken it so that it ailed and died. She was good at it too. No one suspected a thing, and each month she would draw the looted money from Laddon’s bank account in cash, jump on the train, head to London, travelling first class in her best frock, where she would pay it in over the counter of the Geneva & Zurich Bank. The funds would be zipped to Switzerland, well away from prying eyes. No one in Britain would ever know it was there.
Donna’s little nest egg grew and grew.
Armitage detested Donna the instant he set eyes on her. Who was this loud painted lady who sat in his mother’s seat at the dinner table, and worse still, slept in her bed? Who was this brazen cow who would hug and kiss his father in public, in the garden, in the car, in the house, every blinking where, in front of Armitage, passionate and longing kisses that had no business being displayed before an infant?
Donald encouraged her to play hide and seek with the boy, seeing as he knew his son enjoyed that pastime with his mother. Donna wasn’t keen, but once let herself be persuaded. Armitage led her to the far corner of the garden, beyond the viburnum bushes where he knew a wasp’s nest festered. It was a blazing hot day, Donna, stumbling in new high heels in the unkempt grass, lost her footing, threw her hand up for support, set it through the nest that was still in the early stages of construction.
The wasps went crazy.
Stinging Donna twenty times.
Her face wouldn’t look the same for weeks.
She shrieked and
