Prologue
Not only was the house in total darkness when he arrived, he found that none of the light switches worked, so the mains must've been shut off or fused at the box in the basement. Using the meagre light from his mobile phone he bounded up the stairs to the master bedroom. He found his wife's ravaged body lying spread-eagled on the bed. She felt cold to the touch as he tried to locate the carotid artery with trembling fingertips. Nothing, he could feel no discernible pulse. He keyed in 999 on his mobile phone and placed it on the bed. He lifted her chin to open up her airway, placed his interlocked hands on the centre of her breastbone and started to apply rhythmic pressure.
The phone asked in answer to his call with a comfortingly efficient female voice, "Which service do you require?"
"Ambulance and police, my wife has suffered a frenzied attack by a number of persons unknown within our home and is not breathing, no trace of pulse and she is cold to the touch. I am applying CPR. My name is Timothy Smith; address 191 Carson Drive, Halifax. Please hurry, she's seven and a half months' pregnant."
The voice at the end of the line was calm and comforting; she continued to both ask questions and supply information, assuring him that the emergency services he'd requested were on their way. He answered all her questions automatically, keeping up the heart massage and occasionally checking unsatisfactorily for breathing and pulse. The voice droned on keeping their tenuous contact going.
He could smell the overwhelming odours of sex, urine, blood and defecation, which filled the room until they were stifling to his senses. He could smell his own fear too; almost taste its metallic taint in his hot, dry mouth.
In the dim light from the upturned mobile phone he could see that the bed was covered in stains and blood and was awash with the overwhelming pungency of urine. His poor wife's heavily pregnant body was covered in bruises and bite marks. His eyes were filling up with moisture and it was difficult for him to focus. His tears dripped off his cheeks and splashed onto the backs of his rhythmically working hands, pumping air in and out of her lungs and, hopefully, into her bloodstream, keeping her alive ... and their baby.
While he worked methodically awaiting the ambulance he thought back to the call he received on his mobile only minutes earlier, the possibly disguised, certainly unrecognisable, voice urging him to get home to his bedroom, informing him his wife was in mortal danger. He had been on his way home from work anyway with the intention of collecting a Chinese takeaway and bag of chips from her favourite chippie for her, an Indian curry for him. Once he had received the call, he headed home directly, which was normally just five or six minutes away, he made it in less than three.
He just hoped he was on time, she ... they, his wife and baby now ... were his whole life.
~~~
I could feel as if I was floating on foam, silently suspended, gently buoyed, cushioned. Otherwise I felt nothing, but at least I was warm rather than cold. I could hear nothing at first but, listening again carefully, I could make out something distant yet so close, like a song vibrating through my being.
The foam around and beneath me had surged back and forth ferociously like waves threatening by the increase in choppiness to overwhelm me, a weight pressing down on my chest giving me waves of nausea and pain. I wanted to breath but was afraid of drowning. I had felt fear for the first time, a fear so tangible that I think I screamed.
The song became louder but it was non-threatening, calming and comforting presence, penetrating though the foam waves that boiled around me. So I relaxed. The song spoke to me, not through language or words, but through the emotion of unrelenting generous love, binding me to the singer as if we were one and the same, and always would be.
Whatever I was floating on became becalmed, like in a harbour, the motion of whatever threatened to engulf me was distant, held at bay by a force which was both all-consuming yet benign. I settled, relaxed, into the foam allowing only pleasant dreams of the gentle rocking rhythm of the song to invade my growing awareness.
The singer encouraged me to embrace my feelings, though reassuring me that I was protected. I felt the singer was close, around me and encompassing yet also within me. Not a separate being at all, not an It, but a She, a Mother, my Mother. The sound of words formed in my head, Mother and Charlotte, Mummy and Charley, by preference, Mum or Lottie maybe later, at a pinch.
She was Mummy and I was Charley, maybe I can live with that?
Yes, on reflection, I can live with that and yes, I can live, I will live.
It is all going to be all right, sang the voice of Mummy reassuringly. Daddy's here now, he's here for us and Daddy will always be here.
Chapter 1 - Smith meets Jones
Timothy Charles Smith's story, or the part that interests us, started about two and a half years earlier when his relationship with the Jones family began. Smith and Jones; yes, it sounds corny but that's simply the way things worked out.
Tim was sitting in his sales office at Monroe's Motors on a slow Monday morning, where he had been catching up with the paperwork for the weekend vehicle sales, when he noticed this gorgeous woman climbing into one of the shiny new sporty Jaguar motorcars on the showroom floor.
Mondays was always a quiet day at Monroe's, following the intensity of the weekend, so half the sales force were absent for the first two days of the week. Therefore he thought he had better get out there and deal with this potential customer, irrespective of how beautiful or otherwise she looked.
As he walked across the showroom floor, she was just climbing out of the low, hard-top sports car, giving Tim a perfect view of her lovely long legs, the hem of her thin summer dress hitched halfway up her smooth shapely thighs. She was tall for a woman, a good three inches taller than Tim's five-foot-six, and slender, with wavy multi-shade blond hair flowing down to her shoulders. The height of tall women had never worried Tim; he had been surrounded by tall girls and women throughout his childhood and was extremely comfortable in such company. She had her back to him as she slowly ran a slender long-fingered hand over the sensuous lines of the sporty motorcar. She half-turned as she heard his crisp footsteps approach across the tiled floor of the showroom, showing off her hourglass figure and beautiful face, which opened up into a glorious smile in answer to Tim's own charmingly welcoming one. Tim guessed she was about his age or possibly a few years older; say late thirties to early forties? Stunning, barely began to do justice in describing the effect she gave him.
"Good morning, madam," he opened, "I'm Timothy Smith, the sales manager. She's beautiful isn't she?"
The lovely vision nodded in agreement with him and partly turned back towards the car and ran her hand along the smooth gleaming paintwork again.
"Mmm, beautiful, yes," she turned back towards him, "Oh, I'm Jenny Jones by the way." Her voice was like liquid honey, a cultured but local soft middle class Yorkshire accent rather than haughty Home Counties.
He held out a large hand towards her and she put her warm dry slender fingers in his momentarily and smiled once more. It was a smile that could have launched a thousand ships onto an Aegean sea, Tim thought, so he was not surprised at the effect it was having on him and the rigidity of his knee joints. She turned back away from him and stroked that gleaming car once more. Tim swore he had never been so jealous of any inanimate object before.
"Were you particularly looking for a sports car?" he managed to say, his professional attitude kicking in being his saving grace, "This one is a hard-top but it can easily become a convertible with a soft-top kit."
He didn't actually say it, of course, but he knew to a T that she would look better than simply good in that car with the soft-top down, hair blowing in the sunshine of a coastal road or cresting a hill in the nearby moors.
She turned her attention back towards Tim and looked him over, appraising him, checking him out, actually making him feel a little uncomfortable and he was normally very confident about himself and his appearance. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he had left his flies undone, mentally checking back through his recent movements, his last visit to the men's room and steeling himself from physically checking the front of his trousers with tentative exploratory fingertips. However, she had clearly now completed her examination of him and was looking Tim in the eye; smiling as if she was enjoying a secret joke. This made him more rather than less nervous about the condition of his attire.
She was a classical beauty. As well as being tall, slim and shapely, she was blessed with a long graceful neck, a narrow face, clear complexion and the brightest blue eyes that clearly demanded your complete attention. She was casually dressed in a light silk or cotton skirt and blouse; it was a hot summer day, ideal for going out shopping for an open-topped sports car. She looked cool, in every sense of the word, yet at the same time hot, oh yes, devilishly hot. Tim had donned his suit jacket as he walked out of his office and he felt hot and sticky and totally uncool in her impressive presence.
"I'm looking for a car for my daughter, actually."
"A sports car like this or something a little more sedate?"
She laughed at that. It was a laugh that made the hairs on his arms stand on end, sending electrical pulses up and down his body.
"She wants to stand out in a sports car ... while her father wants something safe and I ... well, I was ready to be persuaded either way or even go for something in between. In fact, since seeing you, Mr Smith, I am quite prepared to put myself completely in your hands."
Her smile included those sparkling blue eyes and she looked enchanting. The double entendre of placing herself completely in his hands did not escape him, as she no doubt intended, which had the effect of making him even warmer under his tight collar.
I will have to take off my jacket at the first opportunity, he said to himself. She referred to her daughter's father, which gave him food for thought; did she mean precisely that, as a hint to her current unattachment, or did she ambiguously mean her husband? His eyes were focused on her sparkling eyes, eyes that held his gaze in rapture and he had no wish to break that contact for the moment; so he made a mental note to check her ring finger when the opportunity eventually presented itself. That offhand expression "Milf" just didn't do this beautiful woman justice, she was Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary and Cinderella, all rolled up into one honey-coated fairy-tale package.
"Call me Tim, please. We are all on first names here, we really don't bite," he smiled as if he was totally at ease in her presence, although he was anything but.
"I'm Jenny, in that case," the vision smiled sweetly, "But then I better warn you, I am known to bite!" She giggled as she delivered that line and Tim's palpitating knees felt even wobblier for an instance.
"Well, this sports car would definitely fit the bill if your daughter wants to stand out from the crowd but there are a wide range of other possibilities available here," he said, trying his damned hardest to maintain his cool under fire, "We have a number of smaller cars on the lot that would be better suited for the young lady running about town, attending college or wanting something comfortable for touring. The insurance on a monster like this, though, would be crippling until she was over 25."
"Yes, I believe so," she breathed, her secret smile and laughing, sparkling eyes much in evidence.
"Also," Tim steeled himself to continue, "this thoroughbred would be quite a handful for a driver with, I presume, limited driving experience. Better to start with something smaller and less powerful for a couple or so, even as much as half a dozen years before considering anything as powerful as this." Tim tried to disarm or deflect his observations with a smile as he joined the lovely woman in stroking the gorgeous car. "I hope I'm not talking myself out of a sale...."
