The Sinister Side of the Moon

By TONY NASH

A terrifying trip into yesterday.
A man enjoying a quiet life, Mike Blake steps out of his front door one morning to find himself in a different time dimension, where everything looks the same but everything is different. Anita, his wife who is incapable of normal sex and averse to any other kind, he discovers is a raging nymphomaniac, though still wants nothing to do with him. His lover disdains him, but the girl he has always fancied is all over him. Because he can, and in order to help his business partner, he plays the lottery and the horses - his big mistake. It brings him to the attention of two organisations who use those capable of crossing the dimensions, one on the side of law and order, the other a nest of terrorists. Anita is abducted by the terrorists, leaving him little choice. Against his will he carries out tasks for them, while also working for the other agency, keeping the two threads as separate as he can, believing that there is a traitor in the apparently lawful organisation. Always looking for a way out of his dilemma, he at last, with the help of a good friend, devises a method that might just work...

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Dec 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310372056

TONY NASH

Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

Book preview

THE SINISTER SIDE OF THE MOON

TONY NASH

Other works by Tony Nash:

The Mayhem in Norfolk thrillers:

Murder on Tiptoes

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Bled and Breakfast

The John Hunter mysteries:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Blood Lines

Blockbuster

Beyond Another Curtain (Sequel to Blockbuster)

The Thursday Syndrome

The Harry Page thrillers:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

The Norfolk Farming Historical Trilogy:

A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Salt

A Handful of Courage

Hell and High Water

Hardrada’s Hoard (with Richard Downing)

The Devil Deals Death

The Makepeace Manifesto

The World’s Worst Joke Book

The Last Laugh, a Norfolk tale

Copyright © Tony Nash December 2015

Smashwords Edition

All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

"l’heure innatendue et folle, où l’on voit apparaître et rever les yeux sinistres de la lune" Victor Hugo, 1822.

"The mad, unexpected hour, when one sees the sinister eyes of the moon appear and awaken."

CHAPTER ONE

I kissed Anita and got some of her breakfast egg on my lips, giving us both a laugh.

I loved her as much as ever, despite everything; every bit of her, from her shoulder length, glossy, dark brown hair that always smelled so good from the hyacinth scented shampoo she used down to her dainty little size three feet. I also loved the other important pieces that were now off-limits and would probably always remain so. I hated playing away from home but had got beyond the guilt complex I’d had to begin with. After three months of abstinence I’d felt ready to explode and couldn’t let that happen. I was a healthy, red-blooded male who had to have sexual relief and had to get it somewhere. If Anita knew about it she made a brave show of ignoring it. I’d convinced myself that my way of handling it was a damned sight better than the divorce that would almost certainly have happened otherwise, but even I knew that it was a feeble excuse.

She brushed the egg fragments off, ‘Now you don’t want that on your suit, darling. What would Russ say? You know how meticulous he is.’

She saw my top lip go over the bottom one and stopped me with, ‘Don’t say it, darling. He is your best friend and partner.’

I laughed, ‘That’s why I can say ‘Fuck him’ and know he wouldn’t mind, sweetheart.’

What she said was not strictly true. Russ had changed over the years. Partner he still was, but best friend no longer.

Toffee, knowing with her cat’s intuition that I was about to leave, fussed around my ankles and I bent to pull her tail gently, knowing that was what she was liked best.

She was a strange cat in many ways; to look at a genuine moggy, but was, in fact, half pedigree, daughter of Princess Jasmine-Hadassa, a pure-bred Persian with a registered line stretching back over thirty generations, who escaped the house one night and met up with a scraggy tom; a travelling man, whose genes were much the stronger.

Toffee’s fur had every colour imaginable; every colour, that is, except Persian, and the only giveaway to her ancestry was the set of her eyes. Like all cats she had one accepted human - me, though she tolerated Anita enough to let her stroke her occasionally. For some reason, she hated other men with a vengeance and hissed viciously, her fur raised, whenever one came into the house. With our nomadic lifestyle, Anita had arranged for a cat-sitter, Nicola, from three doors down, to come in once a day at around lunch time to feed her and clean out the litter tray.

Turning at the door I told Anita, I’ll be a bit late home tonight, darling. Sales meeting.’ It was the feeblest of excuses; we were scarcely Footsie 100, or even close to the 250, but the turnover was a couple of million a year and we were doing quite nicely. The firm virtually ran itself, and I sat around kicking my heels or making paper aeroplanes for much of each day, bored out of my skull, while Russ spent most of his time on the golf course. The problem was that I was running out of excuses, not that she seemed to notice. Or did she?

She nodded distractedly, already re-immersed in her crossword puzzle, and murmured, ‘You told me already, Mike.’

I controlled the sigh of relief. There was no trace of suspicion; at least none I could detect.

That was when it happened.

I turned the key in the lock, pushed open the front door and saw the Skoda facing me.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I had never in my life driven into a parking space. When I learnt to drive in the Army, my instructor had hammered in the dangers of backing out. ‘Always,’ he insisted, ‘back in, so that you can drive out with full vision. Back out and you lose three quarters of the possible view, where all those other nut cases who aren’t paying attention are lurking. Bang!’

It made so much sense that I had always followed his advice.

I knew Anita had not been out in the car since I arrived home the day before, and if someone had taken it for a joyride we would have heard the engine noise. Our bedroom was at the front of the house, almost over the top of the car port. In any case, the alarm was set, and cars nowadays are almost impossible to steal without the key.

I stood and shook my head. Had I had one of those momentary mental aberrations? What my old French teacher called ‘un égarement d’esprit momentaire?’ (He reckoned I was prone to them during his lessons and was right). Was I going ga-ga? Had I, in fact, driven in?

It was eight-twenty on Monday morning, a gentle southerly breeze making the leaves on the immature silver birch in the centre of the lawn dance; the early morning sun was shining down at me from a cloudless sky, and apart from the car facing the wrong way, all seemed well with the world.

Wanting a second opinion, I turned, re-inserted the key in the lock and went back inside.

Anita was not at the table, there were no breakfast things in sight and no crossword. Most strangely, there was no sign of Toffee or her basket.

Where the hell could Anita have gone in such an all-fired hurry, I wondered, and washed up so quickly too?

The only sound in the kitchen was the soft ticking of the clock in the Aga cooker, and it was so quiet that I picked up the other sounds from upstairs; sounds I didn’t believe; animal-like sounds I’d heard often enough before to recognise them.

I tiptoed up the stairs, avoiding the left hand side of the fourth one, which always creaked when you stood on it.

Our bedroom door stood slightly ajar and I peeked in.

A porn channel that I had no idea we subscribed to was on the television, and Anita was lying naked on top of the bed, watching it and giving it to herself large with her hand, something I’d asked her to do or let me do scores of times, only to be told it was filthy and disgusting.

It turned me on like a four-alarm fire and I slammed the door fully open, tearing off my tie and jacket.

Anita screamed, thinking a stranger was attacking her, then saw it was me. She pulled herself upright and started shouting, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Fuck off!’

I protested, ‘But, darling, I can give you something much better than your hand.’

She looked incensed, ‘You don’t touch me for three bloody years and now you want a quick fuck? Get lost, Mike! Aren’t your floozies enough for you? And don’t call me darling!’

It was not her words that stopped me. My perversion abhorrent, non-swearing wife, who had always been a brunette, was a flaming redheaded nymphomaniac, with a vocabulary that would make a navvy blush.

I backed away, stunned, realised my mouth was hanging open and closed it, eased out of the bedroom door and turned, descended the stairs and ran out of the house, my mind whirling. For three years, she said, I had not touched her. That was correct; Anita and I had not made love for three years, but nothing else made sense.

Automatically, I pressed the electronic key pad and heard the car doors unlock, and only then did I notice that my Skoda Octavia was not my Skoda Octavia. This one was blue ice metallic. Mine was silver.

I looked in the window. Cloth upholstery; mine was leather.

I closed my eyes, shook my head and opened my eyes again.

Everything was still the same.

I could hear my heart hammering away in my chest and wondered for a moment if maybe I was having a heart attack and all these things were just my imagination, but apart from the differences everything around me seemed normal. The garden was laid out as it always had been, the house opposite had its garishly painted mauve door and bright red curtains, so Mrs Pullman, the stick-insect-like, cigar smoking, lesbian artist, who liked to insist she was avant-garde, must still live there.

I opened the car door and slid onto the seat. When I turned on the ignition I noticed that the mileage on the odometer showed twenty-nine thousand odd miles, which was the same as on my car. What was I thinking about – this was my car, wasn’t it?

I shoved the gear into first, but before the car hit the wall remembered that it was facing the wrong way and moved it into reverse.

Maybe when I got to the office things would make more sense.

Whom was I kidding? Only me!

Pushing open the door to the outer office proved that.

Lisa, my regular bed partner for the last three years, usually gave me a smouldering glance and ran her tongue over her lips when I came in, Not that day! She glared angrily at me and went back to her keyboard. I thought back to the previous evening. When I’d kissed her before leaving her bedroom everything was hunky-dory. The sex had been terrific, as usual, so it wasn’t that. She’d murmured, ‘I wish you could stay, darling.’ Something must have happened since then that I wasn’t aware of.

Blond, blue-eyed, beautiful Angela, the cold fish with the 36C mammary glands I had tried to chat up so many times without ever getting to first base, smiled sexily and let her eyes linger on the area of my groin for several moments before looking up into my eyes again, nodding gently.

I was obviously having an affair, but with a different girl. Interesting! I smiled back at her, my lascivious thoughts centred on the delights of getting into her knickers.

One by one I nodded a greeting to the other four girls in the office, Valerie, Liz, Bella and Linda. Two of them had completely different hairstyles to those I was used to. What surprised me were the more than warm looks they gave me, not too dissimilar to those I’d received from Angela. Christ! Was I flinging it around all over the place – the office Lothario?

Our most valued staff member who had been with us from the very start, Mrs Vera Phillips, fifty-five, prematurely grey-haired and with the classic facial structure of a 1930s film star and a strict disciplinarian with the girls, was the only one who brought a touch of normality to the situation. She was hammering away on her keyboard and did not look up; her usual reaction when I arrived at work. I knew perfectly well that she was quite aware of my presence. I liked her a lot and Russ and I owed her a great deal. Her business acumen exceeded both mine and my partner’s by miles, and she had steered us through a great many deals that we would have cocked up completely without her. She had been offered a partnership but refused it on the grounds that she did not want the responsibility. It was left as an open offer.

Through the clear glass on the far wall I could see into my partner’s office. Russ, looking harassed, was beavering away at his desk, something he had not done for years, his head down and concentrating hard on some papers in front of him. It must have been ten years since he had appeared in the office before midday, and I couldn’t believe his appearance: he was in shirtsleeves, and I could see that his shirt was not clean. He had a fag drooping out of his mouth and the ash was falling on his shirt and trousers. Russ didn’t smoke! His hair was all over the place, instead of his normal perfect style, and it was dirty blonde instead of dark brown.

Then I noticed the date on the electronic date/time readout on the wall over Lisa’s head and did a double-take: Tuesday 19th April – last Tuesday!

It had to be a dream! Had to be!

I pinched my ear hard enough to hurt, and it bloody well did.

No dream then.

I moseyed on through to my own office and plonked my backside down on the black leather executive chair, expecting the usual cup of coffee to arrive on the double.

It didn’t, and I poked my head out of the door and asked Mrs Phillips, ‘Where’s Lisa?’

She looked puzzled, ‘Are you all right, Mr Blake?’

I was puzzled, ‘Fine, Mrs Phillips.’

‘Who is this Lisa you’re talking about?’

‘The office junior; you know – coffee.’

‘We do not have an office junior, Mr Blake. You always make your own.’ She peered closer at me, ‘Are you sure you are all right?’

I managed a weak laugh and told her, ‘Of course. Sorry. I’ve had this idea for a book in my head, and in it the office junior is called Lisa. Mixed up thoughts, Mrs Phillips.’

She looked even more puzzled, ‘You’re writing a book, Mr Blake?’

I shrugged, ‘No, probably not; it just came to me in a dream.’ I was digging myself in deeper and deeper. It was time to stop it. I tried a different line.

‘Has Mr Cable been in long? No golf today?’

Ooops! I could see immediately from her reaction that I was way off the beam with that one.

‘As you well know, Mr Blake, Mr Cable is always in the office by seven o’clock, and to the best of my knowledge he has never once in his life picked up a golf club.’

Time to change the subject to one that couldn’t be wrong, ‘What is he working on?’

‘The merger with Bensons.’

I nearly blurted out, ‘What fucking merger?’, which would have burned her ears, I knew. Like Anita, Mrs Phillips hated swearing. Bensons had made several offers over the last couple of years and we had always turned them down flat. Russ and I both agreed that we did not want to be associated with their doubtful business practices, and in any case we liked the firm as it