Normal Lives

By Duncan Pell

Stephen Powell was enjoying the drama and cruelty of what he was doing and the mental torture he knew he was causing others. He was a bitter, disturbed, and dangerous man who had found a novel way of extorting money from the families of missing teenagers.

Semiretired MI6 officer Andrew Ball gets involved when Mandy Gray introduces him to the parents of a missing boy whose body has just been found in a grave near Southampton.

Ball discovers identical killings have happened in France and Holland. The search for a serial killer begins as he tries to find the connection between the victims families.

But wealthy Andrew Ball has other problems as he discovers Mandy is not quite what she had seemed when he fell in love with her in Greece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496991805

Duncan Pell

Duncan Pell is English and grew up near London. During a long career in business, he lived and worked in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Dubai, and Ukraine. He is now based in Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. There, he concentrates on writing. The Musandam Mystery is his fourth novel. In his spare time, he travels, sails, and plays golf.

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2014 Duncan Pell. 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.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/19/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9706-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9707-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9180-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

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

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

My thanks again to the wonderful team at AuthorHouse for their support, help, and professionalism. Writing is a lonely pleasure, but Joe was always there to give constructive advice and encouragement, and I thank him for taking the time to read the drafts and give valuable feedback.

To my daughters, Mollie and Annie.

You are always in my thoughts.

CHAPTER 1

Andrew Ball looked again at the list of his fellow students and asked himself for the umpteenth time whether he was out of his mind. The next oldest person in the group of eight people was more than twenty years his junior. Five were ladies, and he had calculated their average age to be twenty-five.

As the aircraft started its descent into Chania airport on the Greek island of Crete, he put the list back in his pocket, fastened his seat belt, and tried to relax. Andrew Ball was used to being alone in strange situations in foreign places. He liked a challenge, but this one made him very nervous. One month with a bunch of young people, all strangers brought together with the objective of gaining a certificate of competence – competence to teach English as a foreign language.

As promised, the husband of the course director met Andrew at the airport. Ball was relieved to make contact because he had no idea where he was staying. The program had not provided an address in advance. The man holding the board with Andrew written in clear, large letters introduced himself as Hari. He handed Ball a welcome pack that included a map of the town and a letter from the course director explaining they would meet as a group that evening and have a guided tour of Chania followed by pizza and beer in a local cafe. It was Hari’s job to deliver Ball and his luggage to wherever had been chosen for him to live. At the time of booking the course, Ball had asked for a single room and paid an extra €100 for the privilege.

The drive to the town centre took about twenty minutes. They stopped at the end of a narrow lane. This is as far as we can go with the car, said Hari, but it’s only a short walk from here to the house. You are sharing with two other people, but you have your own room.

Are my housemates also on the course? asked Ball as he struggled to unload twenty-three kilograms of luggage from the boot of the car.

No. One is a writer from New York; the other, a student from Switzerland studying Greek. Both ladies are very nice.

They walked about thirty paces along a narrow passage and stopped in front of a glass front door. The buildings along the street were two and three storeys high, and most had businesses at ground level and apartments above. Some were restaurants, one a clothes shop, and another a travel agency. The lane was no more than five paces wide, and Ball thought it likely the houses were always in shade. He hoped it meant his room would stay cool, because he had been told there was no air conditioning. They rang the doorbell, and a young woman holding a baby answered. She said her name was Maya and that she was the owner of the house. She held open the door and gestured for them to follow her. Unlike most properties in the lane, the downstairs room was a living area and kitchen. As they entered, a middle-aged lady wearing glasses rose from a chair to introduce herself. She had a strong accent that immediately identified her as the woman from New York.

Hi, my name is Gloria, and my friend here is Sylvia. Welcome. I think you’ll fall in love with Chania and Crete. There are many tourists at the moment, but it’s still a wonderful place to be.

Gloria had long, dark hair, a narrow face, and a pointed chin. Her glasses magnified the worried look in her hazel eyes that belied the cheerfulness of her welcome. Sylvia looked little older than a teenager. She was short and slim with fair hair and a pale complexion. She wore tight, cut-off denim shorts and a grey, crumpled vest. She seemed worried, and there was no hint of a smile as she shook hands with Ball. He guessed they were nervous of having a male stranger in the house.

His room was on the first floor. It was dark, and the air was warm and stuffy. Maya walked across the room and opened the window and shutters, letting in both light and fresh air. There was a double bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and two bedside tables. An electric fan stood on one of the tables. Clean sheets and towels were laid on the bed.

I hope you will be comfortable. Smoking is not allowed in the house, and please do not put toilet paper in the lavatory. There’s a bin in the bathroom, said Maya with a strong American accent and a landlady’s firmness. The prospect of putting toilet paper in a bin appalled Ball, but he had read that Greek plumbing could not cope with it and so was not surprised. He confirmed he was satisfied and set about unpacking as soon as she left. Ball wanted to hang his clothes and then explore the town a little before meeting his classmates.

It was three minutes’ walk to the harbour, and as soon as Ball caught his first glimpse of the waterfront, the many restaurants clustered around it, and the calm sea, his spirits lifted. He walked for a few minutes admiring the beauty of the sunlit scene and then picked an outside table at one of the cafes. He ordered a large beer and sipped it, relaxing and taking in his surroundings. The harbour was shaped like a horseshoe with the open part facing west. The sea wall ran from right to left. It protected two-thirds of the top of the shoe, leaving the remaining one-third for boats to leave and enter the protected waters. The left-hand end of the sea wall had an elegant lighthouse marking the entrance to the harbour.

Ball had an hour to kill before the scheduled meeting with the course director and his classmates. He spent it reading a guidebook he had bought in London and enjoying the sea breeze while finishing his beer. He hoped there would be time at weekends to explore Crete, at least to make one of the boat trips that were advertised along the harbour wall.

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Tony Bishop decided to join the course only two days before it started. He was getting bored with travelling for the sake of it. He had been in Spain for a month and before that in Ireland. He’d stayed in hostels in each city he’d visited and had mostly enjoyed the experience, but at thirty-one years old he was beginning to find months of backpacking tiresome. He admitted to himself that the novelty was wearing off. He suspected he was getting too old for a lifestyle he had enjoyed in his early twenties. He was mixing with people ten years younger, usually with no work experience: people in awe of almost everything they saw with an exaggerated, childish enthusiasm for anything foreign. He craved mature company and more purpose to his life and hoped the month in Crete would provide both, as well as a certificate that would enable him to find a teaching job in Asia. He wanted to find work to finance an extended stay away from his home town of Seattle. He planned to find a permanent teaching job and settle for two or three years.

So he emailed the course director, who told him that he was lucky because someone had dropped out that day due to illness. He booked a place and immediately flew to Athens from Barcelona. From the Greek capital, he made the eight-hour journey by ferry to Crete. To save money, he opted to share a room with another student. Their accommodation was a spare room on the top floor of the building that housed the language school. He needed to be careful, but he reckoned he had just enough money to pay the course fees and accommodation charges, buy food and drink for a month, and leave himself enough for a one-way fare to Vietnam, Thailand, or Singapore. He knew he would have to avoid the temptation to eat in restaurants every evening or seek out ladies in Chania’s many nightclubs.

Bishop was an exceptionally clever guy. He’d earned great grades in high school and had a good university degree in behavioural sciences. His professors had regarded him highly and had urged him to stay on and do a masters and PhD. But Tony did not see himself as a career academic or a professor. In fact, he’d never imagined himself following any form of career. Instead, he’d left university and got a job in a bar working from seven in the evening to two in the morning. After a year and with enough money saved, he’d set off on his first backpacking holiday in Europe. He was twenty-two years old at the time with no serious girlfriend and little ambition other than to see the world and meet people of a similar mind-set. This had been the pattern of his life until the moment he decided to enrol on the course in Crete and find an alternative to returning home and working in a bar.

As soon as he got to the language school, he checked his messages using one of the seven computers available to the students in the main study room. There was an email asking him to meet the rest of the group at eight o’clock that evening by the statue in the main square. He had thirty minutes to unpack and change. He was excited about meeting the people he would spend the next month with and hoped they were interesting and likeable. He still had not seen his roommate, although he could tell from the large bag dumped in the centre of the floor that he had arrived. A few minutes later he heard footsteps on the stairs, and a short, thin guy walked in. Hi, my name is Vineet, glad to meet you. I guess you are Tony. Where are you from? Tony stood up, and they shook hands.

Nice to meet you. I’m from Seattle. You?

Washington, DC.

When did you arrive?

Two hours ago. I flew to Athens last night and then took the local service here. I just walked down to the harbour and had something to eat. I was feeling a bit jaded after the flight, but the food has helped give me some energy. Awesome town and loads of places to get cheap food. Plenty of bars as well. I reckon we will have a great time as long as they don’t work us too hard.

Sounds good. I’ll take a quick shower and see you just before eight.

OK. Remember the rule: no paper down the toilets. If you have a shit, in the bin with the paper! said Vineet laughing and shaking his head in disbelief at the inadequacy of the sewage system.

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Steve Powell was making money again and enjoying the process. For too long he had underachieved, struggling to make a living as he enviously watched others he knew ride high in the world. Now he had a mission and a small operational team to carry it out. He enjoyed the drama and cruelty of what he was doing and the mental torture he knew he was causing others. He was a bitter, disturbed, and dangerous man jealous of successful people leading normal lives.

His attitudes were shaped by events earlier in his life. He had found it difficult to adjust to civilian life after leaving the army. He had made it to captain in a seven-year career but no further. He had a good degree in mathematics from University College and was highly intelligent in terms of IQ. But he had not enjoyed school and had hated the unstructured and liberal lifestyle of most of his fellow students at university. He’d found it difficult to mix easily with other undergraduates and was not into the drinking culture that dominated the social life of his peers.

The army suited his character well. He liked the structured routine, and for the first time in his adult life, he enjoyed the company of other people. He admired his fellow officers for their self-assured masculinity and competitive camaraderie. He loved wearing his dress uniform at ceremonial dinners in the mess, and he got a thrill from walking into town in his parade uniform. He thrived on the banter and imitated the style of the born-to-it officers from Westminster, Charterhouse, Eton, and other elite private schools. He learnt to talk about rugby, cricket, and hunting, even though he never participated.

In the end, his senior officers thought he failed to show sufficient leadership qualities to make it to major. At a time of cost-cutting, Steve was encouraged to leave the army. His exit package was good and included enrolment on an MBA programme in one of the top business schools. He had a vague idea about MBAs. He was definitely not interested in business administration, but it offered an all-expenses-paid year of rehabilitation and adjustment. An army careers counsellor persuaded him to take up the option.

Steve found it tough to hand in his uniforms and paraphernalia of his short army career. The other officers gave him a good, drunken send-off, and he left the base the next morning a civilian. Slowly, the loss of identity and purpose sank in, and his self-esteem crumbled. With nowhere else to go, he stayed with his parents for a few weeks before starting business school. His once-successful father, who had so impressed Steve as a teenager, was now a broken man, and the modest terraced house was a far cry from the luxury home Steve had left ten years earlier. Going back to Severton and seeing his defeated parents struggling to pay their bills was a mistake – a mistake that fuelled his anger and deepened his bitterness.

With nothing else to do in those four weeks in Severton, he had walked the streets and visited the places familiar from his childhood – the house where he had grown up, the school with so many unhappy memories, and the pub where the girl he loved had rejected him. He had gone to the house where she had lived and stood below the bedroom window he had climbed through on the night of her parents’ party. He could still feel her in his arms, smell the scent she had worn, hear her giggling, taste her lips, and see the smile of her face. He wondered where she was, what she was doing, and whether she was happy without him. And he thought with anger about her evil friend who had jealously stood between them and mocked him whenever he tried to speak to the girl he worshipped.

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It’s nice talking to you, Andrew. You’re a great listener. I’ve watched you in class. You concentrate and seem to take everything in, said Mandy Gray as they walked back from a bar in Chania Old Town. It was their third night on the course, and people seemed to be settling in and recovering from their early nervousness. Mandy and Andrew were the last to leave after eating from the bar menu and sharing a bottle of red wine of dubious quality. They were the two oldest students and did not have the same money worries that seemed to dominate the conversation of their six younger companions. The whole group had gone to the bar together but had separated when the others had returned to their apartments to cook dinner.

Thank you. Teaching is a really challenging occupation, and teaching adults from other cultures adds an extra dimension. I’m taking this course very seriously, and so far, I’m enjoying it. There is more to it than I expected. We have to deliver well-planned lessons with the correct content for the level of the class, and we are revisiting all the stuff we did at school concerning grammar. We need to know it well enough to teach it. As far as grammar goes, I’m not sure I ever understood the form and function of the twelve tenses.

Yes, laughed Mandy, I don’t think we ever talked about the tenses at school in the way we are now. I’d never thought much about these things. For example, I didn’t realise that to say ‘I am meeting her off the train tonight’ is to use the present continuous to describe a future event.

Yes, there is much to learn and understand so that we can apply it in our lessons. Learning how to understand is an approach I didn’t develop until I was in my late twenties. Up to then I’d learnt how to pass exams, which is different, replied Ball.

What’s the difference?

Well, take a subject like history. To pass an exam you need to remember facts. You also need to reproduce the conventional wisdom about people, an event, or a series of connected incidents. I remember one question from my A levels. It was something about how much the improvements in the economic strength of the Weimar Republic in the years 1923 to 1925 were due to a guy called Gustav Stresemann. I had learnt an answer because the subject was in the syllabus and we had a lesson about him.

So what you are saying is that all you knew was what you were told.

Ball nodded. But what we are doing here is learning methodologies, and then we will practise them and decide what works best. We’ll learn how to teach through trial and interaction. To me that is understanding.

Mandy was in her late thirties, recently separated from her husband. They had delayed having children. Just as she was starting to think it was becoming urgent, she’d learnt of Peter’s mistress. Mandy had been oblivious to the long affair until he had announced it one evening over a Chinese takeaway. In a few cruel words from him about boredom and the lack of enjoyable sex, her hitherto stable world had fallen apart.

Next morning he’d packed and left their home without another word. She had been devastated and, for weeks afterwards, unable to focus on work or basic household chores. It was as if all her energy had been sapped. A doctor had signed her a certificate of absence from work, citing a stress-related disorder. She had stayed at home and just sat and stared into space wondering if he would text or phone. She had hoped and prayed he would come back and say it had been a mistake. She would have forgiven him.

Mandy said, When you introduced yourself to the class, you said you are retired and wanted a new challenge and didn’t want to live in England. You said you’d tried relaxing and enjoying free time but became bored very quickly. Don’t you have a family in England and grandchildren to dote on?

We are nearly home, and that’s a question I’ll answer next time we are relaxing over a glass of wine. I plan to eat out in different bars and restaurants each night as I don’t want to cook with just two electric rings and no oven. The house is too claustrophobic for my liking. If you care to join me some evenings, I’d be delighted.

Thank you. I’ve no intention of cooking either, and I’d rather not eat alone. Right now, after the trauma of the last few months, I need company. A woman eating alone in a holiday resort in September would look very sad, and it’s slightly risky. If you don’t mind, I will join you and pay my own way. I’m not short of money, and I want to make this a vacation as well as a project.

OK. If we get bored with each other, we must be honest and say so. Part of the deal is that I’ll choose and pay for the wine each evening. Please allow me to be that chivalrous.

Mandy had been a geography teacher in a school near Southampton. She had found it an increasingly dissatisfying career and had been thinking of giving up for some time. She had not liked the modern obsession with performance ratings and the way they drove teaching priorities. Her headmaster had been so intent on climbing the tables that she’d felt the pupils’ learning experience was being diminished by an inflexible approach to meeting targets. Having her own children would have been an excuse to quit, but she would have left sooner or later anyway. Separation from her husband had decided the matter for her, and she had resigned while still on sick leave.

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John Richardson stopped typing on his laptop and checked his Blackberry. The red light was flashing to indicate a text message. It was mid-morning, and he was about to take a break and make some coffee. He pushed the phone to one side and stood up slowly. He had been writing for two hours, and his shoulders were stiff from being hunched over the keyboard. He tried to work for six hours each day, but he was finding it tougher and tougher to sit for so long in the same position. He looked round his study and glanced at the line of twelve books in the bookcase that represented fifteen years of work. They provided a very good income and continued to sell long after they were first published. He really had no need to keep writing, but he usually enjoyed it and some days was exhilarated by the process of developing the plot and introducing new characters. There were times when he got into what he called the ‘zone’ and produced two or three thousand words without a break.

Whenever he felt bored or stale, he would remind himself of what he had achieved and pick up his first book and read a few pages, cringing sometimes at the immature style. He would think back to the excitement the whole family had shared when, to his great surprise, it had quickly become a commercial success. He had no idea where the ideas, plots, and characters came from. But when he sat at a keyboard and started to develop his thoughts, words would gradually fill the screen, and the story would unfold as if under its own momentum. David’s disappearance had distracted him for several weeks, but he was beginning to get back in control and was able to discipline himself to concentrate again for five or six hours.

His study was on the first floor and looked out over the rear garden. The room had plenty of natural light from tall and wide windows. The weather was warm enough to have them open, and he leaned out to breathe in the fresh, late-summer air and admired the colourful garden that his wife loved to work in at weekends. He needed to go downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee. His wife forbade him having drinks of any kind in his study on the grounds that to go up and down the stairs was a break from his sitting position and provided limited but worthwhile exercise. He picked up his phone and took it with him.

As the coffee machine did its job, he read the newly arrived text message: If you want to know where David is buried, it will cost $200,000. Reply yes or no.

He tried to call the number, but the phone was off. Richardson put down the device, his hands shaking and a sick feeling rising in his stomach. It had been six weeks since his son had disappeared. Six terrible, miserable, stressful weeks. His wife, Julie, was struggling to cope with worry, expectation, and anticipation. Every phone call, email, or knock on the front door triggered hope that David would communicate or return home. Now this. A sick joke he wondered. Or something real and frightening? He needed advice.

Thankfully, his wife was out meeting a friend for lunch in Winchester. It meant he could talk privately to the police before he told her about the text. He called an officer he knew well from his golf club and described what had happened. The stress he was feeling must have sounded in his voice.

OK, John, stay calm. I understand it’s very upsetting. This is the strangest thing I have ever come across. We need to talk and think. Would you mind coming to my office at the police station in about an hour? We will then discuss what to do, but in the meantime I need to get some advice. Obviously, bring your phone. I’ll do some research on whether anything like this has happened before in the country. Come to the station desk, and I will leave instructions for the duty sergeant to bring you straight up. Do you feel all right to drive? Otherwise I’ll come to you.

Yes, don’t worry about me driving. It’ll take my mind off this nightmare for a few minutes.

Inspector Sam Wright played golf with John Richardson on his days off and liked the guy but did not pretend to know him well. As a bestselling author of science fiction novels, Richardson was a celebrity at the club and in the town but did not allow people too near; he didn’t have many close friends. Despite his success, there was nothing showy about Richardson. He drove a