Life Less Lived

Tuesday, 5 shopping days to Christmas

Lady Barbara Sands did not actually see the news the previous night, so was completely unaware of Daniel Medcalf's broadcast. However, when she walked down to the village first thing that frosty morning, to collect her newspaper and a few groceries, everyone she met stopped her to talk about it. It wasn't long before she was intimate with all the minute details of the brief transmission.

The villagers were excited by the bid to stop the motorway extension cutting a swath through the woodland to the north of the village. The locals' preferred route was further south, nearer the coast. Local hero Daniel Medcalf throwing his weight behind the alternative scheme got a huge thumbs-up by all the residents of the village.

Lady Barbara had lived in the village now for over three years. She had separated from Sir Philip after the tabloids had reported rumours of a sordid affair that her husband was ill-equipped to deny. She quietly moved out of the family home and her best friend Dr Penny Josephs-Medcalf was able to provide a tiny cottage for her on the farm where she lived with her husband Dan. Barbara had known Penny since their schooldays together and they had always kept up regular correspondence, letters to begin with and emails for the last few years as well as regular meetings between the two friends and their children. Lady Barbara's two children were several years older than Penny's and were already pretty independent at the time of the separation. Lady Barbara really hadn't realised how sick her friend was until she arrived, so Barbara's stay had evolved into a status of semi-permanence.

Once Penny passed away, Barbara seemed to have held hopes that she could help Dan snap out of his malaise and perhaps things might develop between the pair of them from there. But it had been almost two years since Penny died and nothing Barbara tried seemed to help any ambition she had in that direction. Meanwhile Dan had become more reclusive and withdrawn from all his many previous community activities. It eventually transpired that he had been working all this time on a book, using Penny's letters and emails. Now that he was finished and the book self-published, it dawned on Lady Barbara that he really didn't need her at all. As a consequence, Barbara had virtually decided it was time for her to move on in her life. She had read the book in the past week since its publication and it really was quite good, full of emotion and hope. Dan was contributing all the receipts through a charity he had formed to the benefit of Penny's cancer unit at the local hospital.

It looked to Lady Barbara as though Dan had got his life back together without her help, so where did that leave Barbara? She was reluctant to turn her separation into an actual divorce, as she would lose her title, unless of course something better was in the pipeline. Also, as Sir Phillip's wife, she still had shares and access to other assets which her husband had put in her name during the growth of the business and she wanted to hold onto these as bargaining chips as long as possible.

***

Tracey took an early train up to London to stay with her mum and dad, leaving without Marina, as she had already expected her aunt to be working all the way up to Christmas Eve afternoon in the local convenience shop and wouldn't be joining them until later on that evening. In the meantime Marina had decided not to tell Tracey that she no longer had any work to go to. Marina assured her niece that she would talk to Tracey's mother about the pregnancy the very moment she next saw her.

Marina had been lying awake all night thinking over the shocking implications of the murder she was seriously contemplating. As fantastic as this plan was, she was amazed that she could calmly work out the details of what she needed to do and actually make a start on putting her hair-brained scheme into action. It was a bright, frosty day when she set out early in the morning. The mid-winter sun was very bright but imparted little actual warmth, with a wind that was extremely chilly. She wrapped up well with scarf, wooly hat and gloves for her short walk into the nearby shopping district.

Marina visited her bank as soon as the local branch opened and quietly paid her settlement cheque into her current account. As she knew it wouldn't actually clear for a few days, she was aware that she would have to go carefully for the next week or so, taking into account the bank holidays. On her low level of pay and the comparatively high mortgage costs of buying her little flat, money had always been tight. Most of her savings were in the form of ISAs and some long-term bond investments based on Treasury Bills, so had little that she could fall back on in the short term. Normally her monthly salary would have been paid into the bank a day or two prior to Christmas by direct transfer and would therefore have been immediately available to be drawn on. Having her last payment as a cheque denied her this luxury, making her temporarily worse off than she had expected. She did, however, have enough money already in her current account to be able to withdraw a little bit of cash while she was in the branch. Marina now had what she thought was sufficient for her train and bus fares, but her cash certainly wouldn't run to luxuries like cab fares. She did have one credit card which she used for store purchases, but it was already almost limited out with purchases she had made for Christmas presents for all her nieces and nephews. She was owed some rent money from Tracey, but she wasn't due to receive this until the end of the month and was half expecting the rent to be settled by Tracey's mother rather than Tracey herself, when Marina stayed with them over Christmas and Boxing Day.

Armed with what limited resources she could muster, Marina then proceeded to buy a few kitchen utensils from Marks and Spencer, paying with cash, to avoid any possibility of their origins being traced back to her, items which include a large, sharp chef's knife. On her way to the station she collected the other items she felt she needed for her operation and dumped the surplus kitchen utensils in a litter bin, along with the till receipts, so they couldn't be used as incriminating evidence.

From a budget store she added the purchase of a handy compact, clear, full-length raincoat that folded up into a package no bigger than her fist, some black refuse sacks, heavy duty rubber gloves, household sponges, baby wipes, a torch with batteries, a small can of lighter fuel and a box of kitchen matches. She paid for all these items in cash and stuffed them into a generic hessian shopping bag alongside the viscous-looking chef's knife she had bought earlier.

Her plan was, very loosely, to get Medcalf on his own somewhere, while she was wearing her full length waterproof coat, gloves, etc to protect her other clothes. Somehow she had to manage to do the deadly deed against a much larger, no doubt much stronger, foe. Then she had to try and get away with it, by stripping off her outer clothes and burning the evidence, dispose of the knife and get away from the scene of the crime without any witnesses. It was a tall order. That was why she needed to be prepared to relegate tonight to a dummy run if a clear opportunity did not materialise.

Luckily, the weather was very cold and frosty, so no-one commented on her wearing woollen gloves, scarf wrapped around her neck and tucked up over her jaw up to her nose, her hair completely enclosed by a chiffon scarf, topped with a woollen beanie hat and the hood of her quilted jacket pulled over the top. Marina thought that even her niece wouldn't recognise her in this disguise. As she looked around at her fellow shoppers on this raw frosty morning, virtually every other woman in her view was similarly swaddled up against the cold.

Marina had a spare pair of gloves and matching hat, in a contrasting colour to the ones she had on, secreted away in her cavernous leather shoulder bag. She also had a change of trousers and shoes, although these were rather thin and light considering the cold weather. She needed to keep the weight down of what she was carrying. Despite her disguise, Marina couldn't help feeling guilty and was sure she looked extremely shifty and suspicious, looking every inch like one of the shoplifters she once habitually looked out for in the job she used to be so grateful to have at the convenience store.

'What am I doing?' She kept asking herself this same question over and over, even as she planned several different scenarios. This trip was simply planned to survey the possibilities, but she had to be ready to carry out her threat, in case an opportunity presented itself during her reconnaissance. She knew where Daniel Medcalf would be this one time only, tonight. Marina had to admit she actually itched to see him once again. She knew from the broadcast and the information that Tracey had imparted that he was a councillor at a number of different levels and would be on certain committees, some no doubt ending late at night. She had to find these things out, what his schedules were, the venues, how isolated parking at or near those venues might be. With the Christmas holidays, his meetings may be limited until well into the new year, cutting down on her opportunities for research into his movements.

Marina was used to using the rather dated computer at work for simple word processing and spreadsheet tasks but hardly never used computers or the internet for information searches and Tracey had taken her smart new laptop with her back to her Mum's for the holidays. Maybe, Marina thought, she better find one, possibly even buy one for herself to use during the January sales once her cheque had cleared, and learn how to use it properly.

What would she do when she eventually tracked him down in an area where she was presented with an opportunity? What if she found him alone tonight, for instance? She was much smaller and slighter than Daniel, at a clear height and weight disadvantage. Perhaps she could hide behind his car and stab him from behind as he concentrated on unlocking it? Even if an opportunity did present itself, would she even have the strength of conviction to attempt to carry it out?

'There's only one way to find out,' she told herself grimly.

From the railway station in Portsmouth she took the train along the south coast to Worthing. Then she caught a bus from outside the tiny seaside station to take her the four miles or so to the church meeting hall in a tiny rural village north of the small coastal town. By this time it was mid-afternoon and the bus dropped her off in this rural outpost about three hours before the meeting was due to start at 7.45pm.

On the journey she mulled over the reasons for wanting to kill this person. For a start she thought that he really wasn't that much of a person this man. Certainly not the caring campaigner that he pretended on television last night to be. No, he was calculating and evil, and had cowardly rendered her helpless with a drug before sexually assaulting her. That made him even more of a rat than the usual bare-faced arseholes that Marina was well aware of. A rat, a coward, hiding behind a facade of concern and duty.

When she first knew him, Daniel was young, handsome and appeared to be a charming and mature gentleman. Marina had considered him a new friend and would have liked him to have been more than just friendly, however unlikely that appeared to be. No, this Daniel was in reality no kindly friend, he was a sly deceiver, only pretending to be a caring idealist working tirelessly for the benefit of our society. Marina now knew that Daniel had been putting on an act for his own selfish gratification, patiently waiting for his opportunity to prey on some poor impressional young woman.

From what she saw on the TV screen yesterday, Daniel was still putting on his caring persona and no doubt impressing the young lady who was interviewing him. Marina was sure there must be a string of other victims out there, surely she couldn't be the only isolated one. If he got away with this outrageous act against her, surely he would have repeated it again and again and would continue ... until somebody actually stopped him.

Could she be guilty of carrying out this awful capital act purely for her own selfish gratification of revenge, though? She felt she had to answer these questions. Was she seeking to rid the world of this preying mantis before he pounced on another victim? Or was she simply after her own sick notion of revenge? If not just payback for herself but atonement for their dead child? If she was only getting revenge for revenge's sake, did this make her just as evil as Daniel clearly is? Was his absence during the pregnancy a contributory factor in their baby's death? Who knows what might have happened, if her baby had had two caring parents? With the support of a stable extended family, Marina may have had a much less stressful pregnancy and Baby Daniel might have lived.

Marina had not eaten anything all day. Her efforts all day were concentrated on working towards committing and getting away with murder in calculated cold blood, a contemplation which had the effect of taking more than the edge off her appetite. While sitting in the cold bus, she had kept up a continuous internal argument with her conscience.

She could clearly argue that she had been wronged and was entitled to some sense of justice. It was far too late to rely on the judicial system to provide that. Even if an appeal was made to judge Daniel through the courts, however, there were no witnesses that she knew of, in fact she wasn't even a witness herself as she had been completely unconscious at the time of the clear non-consensual violation of her virgin body.

There was no doubt in her mind though, about what had happened to her. The last memory she had of that fateful night was of Daniel kissing her, the pair of them alone in the hotel corridor. It was single goodbye kiss.

She recalled being upset that this was the last time she would see someone who had become at the very least a good friend in the space of a few short weeks. That night, his last night, he had been so popular with everyone else at the hotel that she could hardly get near Daniel to say goodbye. There were too many well-wishers in the way wanting their own final moments with him.

Marina remembered that she had felt herself becoming more emotional as the evening wore on, not that she remembered drinking any more than a couple of long quite diluted drinks. When the tears had finally come upon her, she had sought sanctuary in a quiet corridor of the near guest-free hotel, it being just out of the busy summer holiday season. Daniel had actually come searching for her, bringing her another drink and proposing a toast to their separate futures and a final cuddle and a kiss goodbye. That was the only kiss she could ever remember them exchanging since she had known him.

A kiss between friends that meant one thing to her and something different to the person who planned her attack and rape.

After that kiss everything was blank for Marina until she awoke early next morning. There was no DNA evidence either, as nothing was kept. Marina didn't even know where baby Daniel was buried as he was taken away from her maternity bed at birth. Her father wasn't around any more and he most likely made the funeral arrangements at the time. She could, of course, simply go to the police and make accusations, but it was hardly likely to go to court and no newspaper would dare take up the story from a mad and frustrated old spinster woman like her without at least some documentary evidence. There was no evidence, none at all. Everything she had to bring to do with the case was purely circumstantial and Marina knew that there was no way she could ever get justice through the normal legal channels.

This meant that it was up to Marina to do something about it herself. If she physically attacked him, was caught and charged with assault, she might at least have a chance in court to say something. Without proof, though, she realised, the court would have to strike any statement she made about her rape from the record. The newspapers wouldn't risk printing anything she said in court if it wasn't admissible, so she would be the only person who would suffer from any unsubstantiated accusations. What she didn't want was her family brought into it, and any soft option would drag them into the scandal. What she needed to do was strike a blow strong enough to finish the subject for good. That meant killing Daniel. There was no alternative for her other than forget the whole thing. And she was way beyond forgetting, while forgiving was simply not an option she could consider.

That meant that her act of revenge would be pre-meditated murder, no other word for it. But in the Biblical sense, she argued, it was simply an eye for an eye, the death of her child - their child - against the death of the father who caused the chain of events that led to her child's death. Guilt? When Marina thought about how she would cope with the aftermath of taking a life, she felt that it would definitely affect her, but to sit by and do absolutely nothing about it would also continue to eat away at her and she would feel even worse.

The bus took an hour to make the journey of just four or five miles as the crow flies. It followed a tortuous route through all the suburbs and hamlets several miles off the main road on either side. Throughout her time on the bus, although it stopped at over a dozen places, there was never any more that half a dozen people on it, mainly pensioners with a bag or two of groceries, and the odd mum and toddler encumbered by chunky folding pushchairs which had to be stowed near the front of the bus. With her empty stomach and the winding, twisting route that the vehicle took, she felt light-headed, dizzy and quite sick by the time the bus finally stopped at her stop.

She had reached her destination, pointed out by the kindly bus driver from whom she had elicited help in finding the hamlet. Marina told him that she wanted dropping off in Lindon as a convenient dropping off point near this village hall where she told him she was "due to be picked up by some old friends".

Now she was here, she realised that she needed a loo rather desperately, followed by a hot drink to warm up her chilled bones. Also, now that she had made up her mind regarding her course of action, she decided she also needed something to eat. Her appetite had sneaked up on her without warning during the last leg of the journey.

As she stepped off the bus, her stomach groaned loudly. It was bitterly cold and raining quite hard. She put on her gloves and hat, retied her scarf and pulled up the collar of her coat. The hydraulic door of the bus closed behind her with a whoosh, a noise accentuated by how quiet it was in the darkened village. Looking around she saw the bus move off, taking the small comfort of its dim internal lighting with it. With the light from the bus gone, she realised she was surrounded by almost total blackness. She was a city girl, had been for most of her life and this rural darkness made her slightly uneasy. Marina was accustomed to convoys of brightly-lit and crowded buses passing every few minutes, here the next bus probably wouldn't come by for another hour, maybe two.

She was able to reassure herself that she was in the right place, though. The village hall was there in front of her, two car lengths or so away from the road. The sign on the wall acknowledged its existence, but the building itself was in cloaked in utter darkness, showing as a dark shadow against the rapidly darkening red-tinged western sky.