One Decent Thing: A Story of Kidnap, Intrigue and Murder

By Michael E Wills

Scottie, a decadent university administrator with a weakness for drink and women, visits his daughter Tina who is studying in Aberystwyth. She wants nothing to do with him because of the shabby way he has treated his ex-wife. After a heavy drinking session, he murders an injured IRA man he finds on the beach and steals the documents the man was

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael E Wills
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781916392649

Michael E Wills

Michael E Wills was born on the Isle of Wight, UK, and educated at Carisbrooke Grammar and St Peter’s College, Birmingham. After a long career in education, as a teacher, a teacher trainer and textbook writer, in retirement he took up writing historical novels. His first book, Finn’s Fate, was followed by a sequel novel, Three Kings – One Throne. In 2015, he started on a quartet of Viking stories for young readers called, Children of the Chieftain. The first book, Betrayed, was described by the Historical Novel Society reviewer as “An absolutely excellent novel which I could not put down” and long-listed for the Historical Novel Society 2016 Indie Prize. The second book in the quartet, Banished, was published in December 2015 followed in 2017 by the third book, Bounty. Bound For Home completed the series in 2019. His book for younger children, Sven and the Purse of Silver, won bronze medal in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His most recent books are from periods in history with an enormous time span between them. Izar, The Amesbury Archer, (runner-up for indie historical fiction book of the year 2021) is based in the Neolithic period, a Viking story, For the Want of Silver, is based on the message carved on an actual runestone and a series of children’s books called The Children of Clifftop Farm, is about WW2.Though a lot of his spare time is spent with grandchildren, he also has a wide range of interests including researching for future books, writing, playing the guitar, carpentry and electronics.You can find out more about Michael E Wills and the books he has written by visiting his website: www.michaelwills.eu

Book preview

Chapter 1

Saturday 18th October 1975

Scottie turned with his back to the wind, sheltering behind a beach hut, and flicked his lighter. Befuddled by an evening’s drinking, he fumbled impatiently, trying to light his cigarette. He stayed sheltered to enjoy his smoke. The gale blasted in from the sea and in the light of the street lamps he watched sand blow from the beach and whip across the road towards a row of guest houses and small hotels on the promenade. The windows of the beach hut rattled like a snare drum as the wild wind pushed at all before it with unrelenting savagery.

Christ, this is awesome! he said to himself, flicking the butt end on to the pavement and watching the gusts propel it across the road with a shower of sparks. Then he went round the corner of the hut to face the wind. He had convinced himself that if he could get a big enough dose of fresh air he would sober up sufficiently, so that he would not get room-spin when he reached the guest house and collapsed on his bed.

He was not alone on the beach; the promenade lamp posts illuminated groups of inadequately clad students, many very much the worse for drink, larking about on the sands. For this was Aber, and this was Saturday evening, and wild things happened.

Scottie stopped to watch them for a while. As far as he could see, his daughter Tina was not among the revellers. He wondered where she was. Too much to hope that she was at her digs in bed. She never confided in him now. Since the divorce she had been very cold towards him and vicariously fought her mother’s corner. But she was his daughter too, and God knows he was paying enough for the privilege of being her father. Today he had driven six hours from Esher to get to this provincial sin bin, just to say hello and take her out for a meal. And what did she do? He got thirty minutes of her time while she ate a starter with him before rushing off for a date. They had arranged to meet at the Blue Seas, Tina had chosen, she said that she had heard it was the best restaurant in town. Scottie had arrived early to be certain of getting a table and had downed a double gin and tonic or two while waiting for her to arrive.

He noticed the heads turning as she walked around the other diners to reach his table, and he felt so proud. She was undeniably attractive and despite her new status as a university student, with the inherent risk that she might adopt a more bohemian fashion, she was dressed smartly in blue flared trousers and a pink patterned, polo-neck jumper. Her long black hair just reached her shoulders and matched a long necklace of black beads, as did her woollen shoulder bag. Over her arm she carried a black jacket. Scottie approved; he was a stickler for smartness himself and considered that attention to his appearance and wardrobe often compensated for any deficiency in his looks and had literally opened doors for him. This evening he was wearing a dark grey suit, a white shirt and his old university tie, the latter seeming appropriate on this occasion.

He had stood to kiss her, but was embarrassed in front of many onlookers when she turned her face away. When they had sat down, he had tried to change the mood by sliding a cheque for fifty pounds across the table. Here, I expect that you are getting a bit short of cash by now. She had presented him with the briefest of smiles and quickly put the cheque into her bag. It was shortly after this that, among other things, she accused him of slurring his speech and of being nicotine and alcohol dependent. When the waitress came to take their order, she broke the news that she was in a hurry and would just have a starter. While they had waited for the food to come they exchanged what, in other circumstances, might have been called pleasantries, but to his mind he was the only one being pleasant. Their meal together lasted as long as it took to eat a plate of whitebait, after which she had stood up, thanked him for the food, put on her jacket and made for the exit.

Then he found himself eating alone, surrounded by middle-aged couples dining with their more dutiful student progeny. For this was part of the rite of passage of going to university. In the first year, and especially in the first term, parents came visiting and treated their student child to an expensive dinner on Saturday evening. By the second year, parental enthusiasm tailed off, and visits seldom happened. But conversely, by the second year the students would have liked to have seen more of their parents, as long as they brought their cheque books of course.

Did she really have a date or was she just punishing him? She sounded much like her mother complaining he had had too many gin and tonics before dinner. She had even accused him of speaking too loudly, just like Jean used to do when they went to one of her twee restaurants. What the hell? After a good bottle of red, the brandy rounded things off nicely.

He recognised he was reaching that morose phase of drunkenness, the stage where he started to have regrets and sometimes got aggressive, Bloody hell, I’ve got to stop persuading myself that I dislike Jean. I loved her and still do in a sort of way, everything is my own bloody fault, he thought.

He knew this was a situation of his own making. He was weak, weak, weak. He could not resist any temptation, be it in a bottle or a skirt. His work as marketing officer for the university had often taken him abroad. It was becoming more and more important for cash-strapped universities to recruit high fee-paying students from overseas. Alcohol was part of the arsenal of his profession, bonhomie his stock in trade. Good personal relations with client agents who recruited higher-education students in their own countries were vital, and building those relations was usually rendered easier by being generous at the bar. And then as most of the agents were women, sometimes, not often – but then Jean would have thought that once was too often – a look, a touch, or a wink betrayed that his client was willing, or even keen, to make the meeting very personal. He was not particularly handsome, and certainly not the athletic type that some women fall for, but he had charm. He knew it and he used it.

Jean had accepted the occasional transgression, at least the ones she discovered. She usually sulked for a few days after finding him out. He was betrayed by lipstick on his dirty shirts or the smell of a different perfume on his clothes. Scottie’s marital relationship recovery technique involved observing the degree of Jean’s sulk and then, when he detected it would be effective, presenting her with some treat. These ranged from a weekend away, to a bunch of flowers. If he got the timing right, things quickly changed for the better.

Treats did not help the last time. The situation was somewhat more serious than previously, and it seemed to have added to an accumulation which tried Jean’s tolerance to breaking point. Things had really come to a head when he started to get persistent phone calls on the home phone from a Brazilian woman who had seriously fallen for him. This particular conquest had not understood the rules of the game and became a nuisance. The frequency of the phone calls caused Jean to look at the contents of his briefcase. He always kept it locked at home but she had taken a chance when he was having a bath, retrieving the keys from his jacket pocket and unlocking the briefcase. Inside she had found a jumble of papers and two A4 files. The file which indicted him was labelled Telexes. It did not take much reading for it to become patently obvious that he was being unfaithful on an even more comprehensive scale than she had feared.

It really shocked him when she said she wanted a divorce. He tried sob stories, stress at work, trouble with his nerves; he even offered to go on an alcoholics’ rehab course. He begged sympathy for the anguish he felt when his brother had been injured by an IRA bomb. Nothing helped. She accused him of being unprincipled (possibly true), unfaithful (not to be denied at this stage), not worthy of respect (a bit harsh, he did have a good job), a serial philanderer (there was something of a compliment about that), not fit to be a husband or a father (that was hurtful), and so on and so forth.

Jean was uncharacteristically assertive and candid, but then he soon realised that her resolve had been strengthened by Tina. Young female militant that she was, Tina had bolstered Jean’s determination. There was no point in contesting the divorce. She got the house, or the part of it they owned. The bank had been reasonable about the loan, Jean’s income as a senior social worker sufficed to service the mortgage. He got the car, a five-year-old Rover, and the promise of a few thousand pounds – his share of their savings. What a deal!

He had left the house long before the divorce came through. The irony was that by the nature of the affairs he had conducted in England – very short and very much understood by both parties that nothing long term was envisaged – he did not have a mistress to go and live with. He had initially moved into a room at the university student hostel. That was when it really hit him that he was middle aged. The parties, continuous pop music, the amorous noises through the night, the queuing for the bathroom and using a kitchen in which every piece of porcelain from every cupboard seemed to reside permanently in the sink, made him long for his previous orderly domestic existence.

Scottie had escaped from the student hostel the only way he knew how. Ellen was a lecturer in the language department, a bit frumpish, but what did that matter? He was looking for a bed, and she had a semi-detached house in Esher. He had noticed for years that she fancied him but never considered her to be in his league; that was, until he was homeless.

It was easy, an after work drink followed the next day by dinner together and he was off to the hostel to pack his suitcase. Living with a man was clearly something she had fantasised about. A gin and tonic would always be ready when he got out of the shower, slippers by the fire and newspaper on the armchair. She fawned on him, in fact to an almost overwhelming extent. She cooked reasonably well and gingerly added his underwear and shirts to her wash, but the demands she made in return were just too wearing. Sex at bedtime, from time to time, was fair dues for the rent and upkeep, but being woken in the middle of the night for the same purpose was beyond fair reason. They began to row after a week or so, but in the interests of comfort and in recognition of the fact that he was not badly off in the Esher pad, he was conciliatory, and so the relationship endured. Although she would have liked to boast to her colleagues about it, she had agreed their relationship should be kept discreet; not good for work relationships within the department, he had persuaded her. In fact, he wanted to keep his options open.

As he strolled along the dark beach he vented his spleen by kicking the sand castles, products of the weekend grockels. He wondered how long it would be before Ellen got suspicious about what he did on his days off. He had quite a few days leave, compensation for the time spent travelling abroad. He had met a girl in a pub in Esher – Annie, a single mum – and she had both her children in nursery on Wednesday afternoons. He got excited when he thought about it. Several Wednesday afternoons she had provided a welcome alternative to Ellen. He laughed to himself – Annie thought that it was his house.

He carried on walking towards the darker, rocky end of the beach. He was deliberately delaying his return to the guest house. It was only ten o’clock, ridiculously early, but he knew what to expect whatever time he got back. The landlady, Mrs Griffiths, would be pretending to busy about, clearing and cleaning while she noted the time her guests returned from their evening out, the state they were in and, perish the thought that the singles did not return with a companion of the opposite or even the same sex. She tested the guests’ level of inebriation by making small talk and then observing the difficulty they had in ascending the steep stairs. At breakfast, errant guests could expect comments such as, Are we well this morning? I dare say you’ll be the better for a walk along the prom.

With his arms folded to retain such warmth as his thin coat provided, Scottie continued along the beach. The street lights grew more widely spaced so there was very little illumination when he reached the far end of the cul-de-sac promenade, where sand gave way to rocks. Quite frequently, however, cars reaching the end of the road lit up the beach and sea as they turned on the roundabout to retrace their route. Tonight, headlights caught the white foam crashing on to the forbidding shore.

As Scottie took a last look at the advancing waves he saw a flash of light in the turbulent sea. It was only a flash, but then he saw it a second time. A car rounded the end of the road and momentarily its headlamps lit up an object being thrown about by the wild sea. It was heading towards the shore at speed, propelled by wind and wave. Despite the crashing of the foam he made out the sound of a shout carried on the wind. With the clumsiness of one who has had too much to drink, Scottie attempted to climb over the slippery seaweed-covered rocks to where it seemed the object would make landfall. The lights of a car picked out a large rigid inflatable boat, a RIB, cartwheeling out of the foam and onto the rocks in front of him.

Chapter 2

Jump Declan! For Christ’s sake, jump, screamed a voice with a thick Belfast accent.

The RIB’s hull crashed down in front of Scottie with the engine still running. It smashed on the rock and the impact killed the motor. He could see from the dull light of the street lamps that the black rubber hull was upside down.

Then, there was only the sound of the sea crashing on the beach and howl of the wind. Another car slowly negotiated the roundabout, its headlights momentarily illuminating the figure of a man in a wet suit. He seemed to be wearing a balaclava, lying in the spume, half under the upturned RIB. Scottie glanced round and saw a second figure, similarly clad, attempting to scramble over the rocks up the beach. The man turned and shouted, For God’s sake, Declan, hurry! The Coast Guard will have seen us for sure.

An incongruous sound intruded on Scottie’s slow brain as he looked down at the figure at his feet. The Conga! As another car went around the turning, looking towards the chanting some distance away, he saw a long chain of half-dressed students snaking down the beach towards him.

The figure at his feet was starting to move and the man tried to push himself out from under the boat. The balaclava-covered head twisted up slightly and, despite his injuries, with a surprisingly loud shout he called out to his departing friend. He repeated several times, Joe, Joe, Abide with me, abide with me! His accent also betrayed where he had come from.

Then he slumped down and his head and torso, which was protruding from under the RIB, fell forward into a pool of water.

Momentarily, Scottie reflected on the Irishman’s curious use of English, but then his feelings quickly turned to rage. He thought of the sorry state his brother was in after being caught in the blast of an IRA bomb thrown through a London pub window in 1973, two years ago. Even to his befuddled mind it was clear to him who these men were.

My chance for self respect! Scottie reasoned to himself drunkenly, and then shouted, "And