Nigel looked through his Grandfather's things and wondered what it said about his life. Not much to show for 85 years of dashing around the world like a playboy and screwing a thousand women.
As he looked through the belongings of the old spooky house Nigel wondered if there was any money left? He had only agreed to plough through these dusty things in the old country house because they all remembered the legend of their Grandfather's almost magical knack of making money from nothing.
Sure he had gone bust several times and left a string of broken marriages and screaming wives behind him. But he had also built up a legendary image of a man driving the best cars, in the most fabulous villas, in the most glamorous locations on the planet. Nothing was too much for Granddad.
So where was the money now?
Nigel knew the lawyers could not find it, after several boring meetings at the London offices. Now he was in the heart of the Stamford countryside, in the most selective part of the English county scene. Of horse riding and four by fours, and proud looking, long-legged women.
Sadly there were no beautiful women left in the house, just a pile of old magazines. Mostly The Farmers Weekly and Country Living, but as Nigel dug into the dusty pile, he found something which really caught his eye.
They were soft porn magazines.
Mostly from the 1970s and 80s. Granddad's era. The story was, that he knew several of the more glamorous girls, and even helped them with their careers. Getting them out of porn and introducing them to his millionaire friends. For which they were very grateful.
All gone now.
But not forgotten in the pages of these magazines. As they were not shy in exposing their most intimate sexual parts for all to see. How Granddad must have enjoyed himself exploring those young bodies?
Well, there were no young bodies for Nigel now, as he faced bankruptcy if he did not come up with some hard cash, and pretty soon.
He was just about to throw the old porn magazines on the fire when something caught his eye. It was a strange drawing scribbled with a biro next to one of the nude pictures. It might have been seen as just another silly scrawl, but for the mention of the lottery.
Now, Granddad had always boasted that he was on the verge of finding a magical way of winning the lottery, but he usually said it with a drink in his hand. So no one took it seriously.
Nigel certainly did not believe it at first, but as he picked up another soft porn magazine, a handful of old lottery tickets fell out. All filled in, with numbers ringed. The lottery was for something called Canadian 6/49 draw. Nigel had never heard of it. Clearly, it was something from the early 80s, and Granddad was very engaged in it. He had lists of numbers written on the pages where long-legged beauties flaunted their breasts.
As the sun set over the English countryside, Nigel put on the lights of the large study and pulled every magazine out he could find. In the early hours, as the owls hooted outside, he had built up a pattern of numbers and tickets, laid out across the carpet. And as the sun rose over the lush garden, Nigel began to see a pattern.
The numbers on the pages of the porn magazines were the numbers for the lottery draws. The tickets had been filled in, with the results written in the magazine for the next month. At first, Nigel thought that the old man was just guessing, but as he checked the monthly bank statements from the filing cabinet, he stared in disbelief at the results.
He had won the lottery.
Not just once, but on a regular basis.
Sure, they were not for huge amounts; tens of thousands. But he had done it.
The paper trail could not lie, and there before him on the dusty carpet, was the evidence. Nigel began to put together a plan. So how did he do it?
There were no clues as to how he came by the numbers, just notes about the girls in the photos. What was more, Nigel found a trunk full of photos from the cobweb-filled attic, that showed Granddad with the girls from the magazines. Standing by swimming pools and driving sports cars. All smiling and all spending money. So how?
Nigel was on the verge of giving up when he happened to spot a box of old tarot cards. They were the Swiss 1JJ deck, and as Nigel looked through them, he realized that he had seen notes corresponding to each card, written in the magazines.
How could this be?
What did it all mean?
And how did each card relate to the numbers on the lottery papers?
He thought that maybe he could work backwards and trace each card to each corresponding win, but he soon gave up on this, as Nigel found the numbers changed.
One day the Ace of Swords would mean the number 10, next it meant 25, and Nigel was just as confused as before. What he needed was a translation of the code. A sort of chart, showing each corresponding number against each card. A coded sequence.
No matter how hard he tried, Nigel could not crack the code and was on the verge of giving up, when he saw an address written in one of the magazines. Who could that girl be?
Nigel tried to trace the address online but to no avail. So he contacted a friend in the tax office, who would trace someone (for a fee) and never failed. It was minimum 2 years inside if you got caught, so Nigel was sure to tread softly.
The only name he could come up with was a girl called Kathy. That was the name she went by on the pages of the porn magazine, but there was a Kathy Hawkins working at a Vegetarian and Ethically sourced whole food store. The trouble was, that the day Nigel turned up, looked like the day they were going bust.
There was a group of screaming women standing in the shop entrance, as the men took away the equipment from the shop.
"You'll burn in hell!" shouted one woman.
"This is typical of the capitalist pig regime!" screamed another.
Clearly, Nigel had come on a bad day.
The most vocal of the group was organising the protest as the van full of repossession officers were driving away.
"We might be down, but we are not beaten yet, sisters!" She beat the air with her fist, as the van drove off.
Nigel had a bad feeling that this was the women he had come to see? What would she make of his idea?
"Here comes another one! Don't let him get anything sisters!" The woman looked at Nigel with fire and hate in her eyes.
"Would you name be Kathy Hawkins by any chance?" Nigel wondered how she would respond?
"You from the courts? Come to take the last of our shop? This is a political act."
"No. My Grandfather knew your Grandmother, and I have an idea that could make you money? What do you say?"
Over the next few hours, Kathy listened to Nigel's idea and his outrageous thoughts on making money. With anyone else, the meeting might have gone badly, but Nigel and Kathy were meeting in an office above the shop. Not just any office, for it, was the room where Kathy dabbled in her other hobby of Tarot reading. She had thought it might be an interesting sideline to the food shop, but as the money dried up, it was her only source of income.
"And you think these wank mags' hold the answer to your dirty old Grandpa and how he swindled money out of these vulnerable girls?" Clearly, Kathy was not impressed as she stood before him gulping a large glass of wine.
"I think it's all crap too, but the fact is, that this dirty old man made money. Don't ask me how, but he did it." Nigel waited for her reply.
"Clearly he couldn't do it without my Grandmother." Kathy was coming round to the idea.
"He came up with the idea, yes, but I can't figure out how they matched the tarot cards to the lottery numbers." He showed her the magazines again. "Look. If you follow the winning numbers, they match the names of the tarot cards, but they change every time the same numbers come up. So how did they pick them?"
"They cycle every time," Kathy said it more to herself, than to him. "So they must have felt the need for the right card at the right time? So what was the right time, and how did they bring it about?"
