"Tell me Mister Challiner," I looked into those eyes, those steel hard, blue eyes, set in that smiling face, the face that told me that she thought she had me right where she wanted me. "Tell me," She was making this a personal question not one for the Judge, not one for the jury, this was between myself and her. "On the night of the 23rd of August, where exactly were you?"
The she who was making life uncomfortable for me was my attorney Judith P. Slattery. The 'P' she would never admit, stood for Petunia, and anything less like a flower at this moment would be hard to imagine. And why was she making life uncomfortable for me when a normal Defence Attorney would be coddling me through my evidence? It was part of a strategy to show that I didn't have enough anger in me to murder my wife.
"On the 23rd of August, let me see," I was stretching. I wanted to keep those eyes focused on mine. I knew that I could hold the stare longer than just about anyone and this was becoming a competition between myself and her, a competition that I just had to win. "The 23rd, Oh yes, I didn't get home that night until 1:30 in the morning. Up until then I had been with a friend. We had dinner together until around 11:00 and then I took her home, to her place."
"You were dining until 11:00 and then you took her home, is this correct?"
"Yes."
"Yet you didn't arrive back at your house until 1:30 in the morning? What were you doing between 11:00 and 1:30 Mister Challiner?" Again the stare.
"I was saying good-night to her."
"For two hours?"
"For two hours."
"And this friend, she will verify this," there was a deliberate pause, "under oath?"
"Yes she will."
"You seem confident of that, Mister Challiner?"
"She will swear it under oath, even if in doing this she will lose a great deal of money."
"How so, Mister Challiner?"
"Because my friend and I have been having an affair for some time and if her husband, when her husband, finds out about it he will divorce her and, under the terms of their pre-nuptial agreement she will stand to lose a considerable amount of money."
"And yet, knowing this, she is prepared to support you, to risk a large sum of money, to provide you with an alibi that will clear you of this charge of murder?"
"Yes, she will?"
"And what have you promised her in return?"
"My love, I have promised her that I will love her, and that when this is over I will marry her."
"How nice for her." The smile was in her eyes only.
My mind was immediately transported back to that day, several months ago.
There I was, seated in the waiting area of a lawyer's office, tossing over in my mind what is was that I needed to say. She, a vision in pinstripe, appeared before me. "Good morning Mister Challiner, would you come this way."
Her voice said it all, it was low pitched almost husky, the accent was somewhere mid-Atlantic but I suspected that it originated in England. While her voice said it all, her walk and the way that her hips swayed from side to side with each step filled the gaps in the commentary. She wore black stockings and black shoes with a three inch heel that tightened her calf muscles and transformed her legs into the most beautiful that I had ever seen.
The view from the front was equally spectacular, especially when she leaned forward, which she seemed to do often, particularly when talking to me, she had this habit of leaning on her forearms which allowed me a clear view of her cleavage which was made more spectacular because her arms pressed against the sides of her breasts and pushed them together.
It took a great deal of effort to maintain my concentration and she was very much aware of the effect that she had over me, so much so that I came to the conclusion that this was a normal tactic that she used. It took some effort on my part to get through the interview and find out what I needed to know and somehow, I managed to survive. I thanked her and left, thinking that this would be the last time that I would ever see her. How wrong I was.
I was just shutting up shop and preparing to go home, not that I was looking forward to going home, particularly after yet another talk with my Bank Manager, when I heard the front door open and there she was, again.
"I was on my way home and saw a car parked out front so I thought that I'd drop in and see what it is that you actually do. I hope you don't mind?"
"Not at all." Not at all? Are you kidding me? If there was anything that could brighten up my day it was this. But then, was she genuinely interested in what I did, or was this just an excuse to see me, dare I hope?
"Actually that's not true, I am more interested in you than what you do. From your demeanour this morning, there is more bothering you than you were revealing, so I did a little checking around and find that your financial situation isn't all that healthy and it's not due to your business or your extravagance, it has something to do with your wife. It would appear that all the charges against your personal credit card have been made by her. Am I right?"
"If it's any business of yours."
"It will be if you allow it to be. I can help you."
"And how can you do that?"
"I can advise you on how you can limit your wife's spending. Now the card companies are not going to tell you about this because they have a vested interest in allowing a maximum spend, hoping that you won't be able to meet your full repayment at the end of the month, so that they can charge exorbitant interest. They don't make money if you pay on time."
We sat and talked for some time, during all of which I had a feeling that she had something else on her mind.
"Can I get you something to drink, coffee maybe, or would you prefer something a little stronger?"
"Coffee will be fine, I don't usually drink anything stronger until dinner. Speaking of which, allow me to invite you to have dinner with me."
"I really should be getting home, my wife has a meeting to attend and I should go, home, to her, or something." I was confused, here was this beautiful woman inviting me to dinner, why?
"Why don't you ring her and tell her that you have an urgent business meeting with a client who is in town only until the morning, and the only time he can see you is this evening."
"You seem experienced at this sort of thing." I said it, but for some reason I took her advice and called. The lack of interest that came from the other end of the phone steeled my resolve. Fuck it, why shouldn't I go to dinner.
I think the meal was great. The company I was with held my attention to the extent that I remembered little of what happened. What happened after that is indelibly etched on my frontal lobe.
There was a hotel room. There was a large bed. There was a beautiful woman. There was a beautiful naked woman extending an invitation to me to join her on that bed, naked, her, bed, woman, sex, breasts, pussy, oh what the hell.
I learnt more about the art of lovemaking that night than I had managed to glean from several years of marriage, many books on the subject, and several hopelessly inadequate porn videos. I learnt that you don't have to bang away like a shithouse door in a gale to get satisfaction, more can be gained by a subtle approach. I learnt that a position that works fine for one party may not necessarily work for the other and that the essence of successful enjoyment lies in experimentation.
By the end of the night my teacher gave me an A+ for effort and enthusiasm but a failing grade for technique. She proposed that further lessons would be required if I was to gain a passing grade in all subjects and, seeing as this was to be extra-curricular, an after hours appointment was arranged for the following week.
Try as I might, I never seemed to manage that passing grade. My teacher, my lover, always found some small area of criticism. A month after we had begun our lessons she informed me that I would never get that passing grade because she was in love with me and I would continue to fail because she did not want to stop.
"I think that it is time that we stopped this charade. You say that you love me and I certainly love you. We don't need to pretend, to play act any longer, we can achieve the same results by being ourselves." So we became ourselves and it was better than either of us had expected.
Being ourselves also involved opening up to each other, telling each other our deepest, darkest secrets, mine being that for some time I had been having thoughts of divorcing my wife, not only because she was spending more money than I earned, but that I suspected that she was having an affair, and had been for some time. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite here, getting all upset at her affair while having one of my own, it's just that I view the fact that hers began long before mine as a signal from her that the marriage was over, but divorce was not an option at that time because she had no valid reason, our differences were not irreconcilable, just that she wanted no part of any reconciliation.
I was not the only one with an unsatisfactory marriage. I was regaled with a tale of affairs and betrayal on a grand scale, of visits to sleazy bars, liaisons with pole dancers and strippers, of the humiliation of having these episodes flung in her face, of constant attempts by her husband to denigrate her in front of her friends, of the continual boasting to his friends how he treated her, the physical abuse and humiliation of having to appear at functions and at her work with the marks of his abuse obvious. She had applied for an AVO but he had enough clout with the judiciary that these applications never succeeded and she had been threatened with being charged as a 'contentious litigant' if she should continue with these applications.
A stalemate existed between the two and she needed a way out. Fleeing to another part of the country was out of the question because his influence was widespread, leaving her with no place to hide. She could not flee overseas because he held her passport under lock and key in a safe to which she had no access. He would not file for divorce because to do so, he stood to lose a very large sum of money, as did she if she filed. He was, not to put too fine a point to it, a sadist.
I think that both of us were thinking more and more about divorce, looking for the best solution.
"Mister Challiner, Would you come with us please." It was a polite request delivered in a less than polite manner, which, combined with the person making the request being, unmistakably, a policeman as it turned out, I had little choice but to comply. I was placed in the back of a police car and driven to an apartment building on the other side of town.
"Do you mind telling me what this is all about?"
"All in good time, would you follow me please." Obviously I followed.
There was crime scene tape everywhere and he held it up so that I could enter the door of an apartment. He didn't prepare me for what I was to see next. A body sprawled face down on the bed. There was blood all over the place and the person had obviously been shot through the head from close range. Detective Bentley grabbed the hair of the deceased person and raised the head, "Do you recognise this person?"
"Bloody Hell!" I was looking at what was left of the face of my wife, my dead wife. "That's my wife." I sat down in a chair that was in the corner.
"Mister Challiner, what was your wife doing here?"
