GROUNDSPEED
A kidnapping with
horrific repercussions

DIRTY BUSINESS
Industrial pollution
 and multiple murder

THE CHINA MOON
A high-flying
espionage tale

GIDEON'S BIBLE
An unconventional
detective hunts
for a UFO

S'END FOR BRADEN
Southend's nicest
private eye

THE GRACE OF GOD
A hit & run, a
blackmailer and a
hungry newsman

EXIT POINT
An autogiro aviator
and a terror plot

THE HOUSESITTER
A human target is lured
to a fatal rendezvous
(coming soon)

STOP LINE
A dangerous genetic
drug must be stopped
(work in progress)

EXCLUSION ZONE
A suitcase bomb on an
underground train
(coming soon)

NINE TENTHS
OF THE LAW
Life on the London
despatch circuit
(coming soon)

Top

THE GRACE OF GOD
                     Some accidents are just waiting to happen ...

Introduction

I was watching a TV news report about a motoring hit & run incident. Someone had been killed, and someone had got away with it. So far. One of the things that struck me was the demonization of the "cowardly, low-life, scumbag" driver who'd fled the scene; the way that he was automatically held totally responsible simply because he hadn't stuck around to face the music.

And there's got to be music, hasn't there? As a culture we tend to absolve the dead from any responsibility for their actions. Instead, we go gunning for the living. The softer target. And then we hammer them, a lot harder than they deserve.

Of course, sometimes the living do deserve everything they get. But the fact is, we all drive badly some of the time, and some of us drive badly pretty much all the the time. I've had my own share of incidents, and have made my contribution to the motoring mayhem we've all become used to. Buy, by the grace of God, and occasionally through the caution and fast reactions of others, I've so far managed not to hurt anyone.

Well, not physically anyway.

The really amazing thing is that we have so few accidents, relatively speaking. We routinely miss each other by seconds, or just fractions of a second. It's normal driving behaviour. Just stand at a busy roundabout and see for yourself.

A second is often all there is between life and death.

But what if an otherwise decent, honourable, reasonable driver happened to take his eyes of the road for just those few vital seconds - meaning the wrong few seconds - and happened to kill a man; a man who, for instance, just happened to be the most accident prone man in his county? And what if the driver recognised, or at least sincerely believed, that no possible good could come from holding his hand up? What if such a man stood to lose more than his standing in the community and his liberty? What if there were others in the firing line who would also suffer? How might such a man handle that situation? How might anyone handle that? And would he be right? And would he be wrong?

I guess I was trying to make some kind of important social point. But I'm not sure that I achieved it. Life is more complicated than that. And "important" fiction is a tricky animal that's hard to hold down.

Anyway, that's where this tale comes from. I threw in some other ingredients and created half a dozen characters, all with their own agendas. I tried to resolve it all without having a "cop-out" ending, and then I sent it to half a dozen or so literary agents and submissions editors.

I can't remember getting a lot of positive feedback on it, but nothing really damning either. It just wasn't what anyone wanted. I might try it again if I come across a literary agent or submissions editor specialising in road traffic accident novels. But the chances are, my characters will live and die on the hard drive of my computer.

Which is a shame, because for a brief spell I thought I had something there. But I've made that mistake many times before, and expect to get it wrong again.

GROUNDSPEED

140,000 words

Plot: It started started as a motoring accident ... that became a hit and run ... that turned into blackmail ... that degenerated into a campaign by a ruthless news editor to generate sales. At all costs. And at anyone's cost ...

Chapter One

When Peter Archer left his home on that otherwise perfectly ordinary, perfectly unremarkable August morning, he had no idea he was going to kill a man.

But at 11.52am that’s exactly what he did.

The man he killed was Clarence Anthony Wisley. It was a sudden, violent, and messy death which, over the next two weeks, would tragically alter the course of many lives.

It could have been so easily avoided.

But ultimately so could everything.

It was now Monday. Day one of that momentous fortnight. As usual, Peter Archer awoke at 6.15am precisely. And, also as usual, he glanced across the bed at his wife who was gazing back at him.

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Ready?’

‘Whenever you are, lover.’

It was a new game with them. A challenge. Could he be dressed and ready for work before she had the breakfast on the table? Last week she’d beaten him four times out of five. But this week it was going to be different. It was going to be a bloodbath.

‘Say the word,’ he said, gripping the edge of the bedcovers and sliding a leg from under the sheet.

‘The word,’ she said, stealing a one-second lead.

They scrambled out of their respective sides; she making a dash for her dressing gown; he making a dash for the shower. Still wearing his pyjamas, he stepped into the cubicle. Turned the water on with one hand. Grabbed the shampoo bottle with the other.

A master stroke.

‘Cheat!’ was the last thing she said as she made for the stairs.

‘Sue me!’ he called back, now washing his hair with one hand whilst undressing with the other. Fifteen seconds later he was naked. Twenty seconds after that he was soap-sudded from head to toe and squirting shaving cream on his face. He reached for his razor. It was cunningly wedged in the curtain rail.

By the time the smell of frying bacon wafted up the stairs, he was finished with the shower, was finished with the shave and was sprinting back into the bedroom. He was still dripping and ahead by a full minute and thirty-one seconds.

She’s good, he told himself as he towelled himself dry. But I’m better. Oh so much better ...

Within two minutes he’d put on underwear, shirt and trousers. The secret with the shirt, he’d worked out just last night, was to fasten only every other button. His tie would cover the rest and he could do the remaining buttons up whilst driving to work.

Master stroke number two.

‘One minute to go, Peter!’

He knew all about her demoralising tactics and ignored her. Instead, he fastened his cufflinks. No strain on the brain. One twist on the wrist ...

He looked for his shoes. Saw they were gone. Seconds later found them under the bed.

‘Bitch,’ he muttered, as he resurrected them.

Still, just wait until she tries to find the coffee jar ...

He was wearing his slip-on shoes this week. That saved at least twenty seconds (he’d timed it during practice on Sunday afternoon). He’d also pre-loaded his jacket pockets the night before with the usual items; fountain pen, wallet, diary, handkerchief, car and factory keys, the bare minimum of loose change and his wafer-thin calculator.

Was there no end to his deviousness?

He hurried over to the mirror and fastened his tie as he checked himself for fresh wrinkles and fluff. Twelve seconds later he was finished (down four seconds from last Friday). He started combing his thick black hair, raking it back and slightly to the left, and as he did he caught a distinct whiff of instant coffee coming up the stairs.

She pre-loaded the bloody cups, he told himself. The sly cow ...

Laughing, he quickly finished with his hair, threw the comb down, grabbed his jacket and hurried to the bedroom door. Then he remembered his watch. The rules were very specific. The breakfast had to be properly made, and he had to be properly dressed.

The watch was on the dresser. He picked it up. But as ever, he was unable to put it on without glancing at the inscription his wife had put there.

With love, it read simply.

Brief and to the point.

Typical.

Smiling, he slipped it on, stepped over the bed, grabbed his suit jacket and made for the stairs.

‘And don’t forget your teeth,’ came a voice from below. ‘I’ll check ...’

He stopped sharply. Cursed. Darted back to the bathroom. He squeezed some toothpaste on his index finger. Wiped it across his teeth. Spat it out. Rinsed. Decided that would fool her.

Six seconds lost.

Half a minute later he was downstairs and walking calmly into the kitchen. He strode over to the cooker. Gave her a toothpaste-fragrant kiss on the mouth and squeezed her left buttock. He saw to his delight that she hadn’t even started on the eggs.

‘Need some help?’ he asked.

‘Bastard,’ she whispered.

Feeling smug he sat down at the table, aware that she was glancing round to see that he really was dressed. He patted his jacket pocket on each side. Fully loaded, his expression said.

She looked away disgusted.

It was 6.44am precisely.

*

Aged thirty-eight, Peter Archer was the proprietor and managing director of a Bradford-based engineering company. The firm specialised in architectural and domestic structures and fabrications; products that included spiral staircases, door handles, letter box flaps and surrounds, door knockers — and pretty much anything else that turned a precious penny in a highly competitive marketplace.

Archer Fabrications had been started in 1947 by Peter’s grandfather. During the second world war, Samuel Archer had been in corvettes — mostly on the North Atlantic runs. But he was an engineer by trade before the shooting started and had decided that when it was over he was going to be one again.

If he survived.

Demobbed in 1946, Samuel Archer saved carefully for two years, borrowed £200 from his father and bought some second hand engineering equipment and rented a workshop in Bradford. The first year he made a small profit. The next year he made a large one. He bought a lease on a larger premises and took on two apprentices.

And so it went from there.

When he died in 1975, the company was formally inherited by Peter’s father, Howard — who had been the de facto head of the firm for five years previously. And in 1997, when Howard Archer collapsed and died of a heart-attack — the company, together with all its successes, problems and responsibilities passed to sons Peter and David.

‘And I don’t bloody-well want it,’ David had said. He was a law student at the time and had his sights set on what he’d once described as more fundamental problems than mashing metal about. ‘All that oil and grease and noise. It’s not for me.’

‘Fine,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll buy you out then.’

‘Buy?’ David, his older brother by almost two years, had shaken his head. ‘It’s yours, little brother. Lock, stock and barrel.’

It was an untypically generous offer. But Peter had nevertheless insisted that he should pay something for the firm and finally it was agreed that Peter would take over the company as sole proprietor, and David would acquire the other assets left by their father which included the old house, his father’s car, some stocks and bonds, and a small sailing yacht kept at Whitby.

At the time it was hard to say who got the better deal. But later they agreed that they both had, albeit for totally different reasons.

Peter and David Archer had perfectly normal, perfectly unremarkable upbringings. The house was a medium sized semi built on the west side of Bradford long before the city became one of the biggest Asian communities in Britain. In the neighbourhood in which the boys grew up, there weren’t any Asian families. It wasn’t until Peter came to London that he learned that coexistence with ‘the wogs’ wasn’t nearly as problematic as his father had sometimes opined.

Their mother, who came from east London, had never been happy in Yorkshire and preferred London. Consequently, the boys had spent almost as much time down south as up north and had picked up some of the best and worst qualities of both regions.

When their mother died in 1986, the maternal family connections, such as they were, dissolved and that side of their lives faded into history.

After college, with brother David studying law at Cambridge, Peter, who had been living in digs in London, had gone straight back to Yorkshire to work for his father. He’d really wanted a career in ... well, in something else. He was never sure what exactly.

Just something a little more exciting.

Dynamic.

He was twenty one at the time of his return. Even so, Peter Archer had started on the factory floor doing fairly menial things. Sweeping up. Cleaning the swarf from the machinery. Carting away the big bins for the scrap van. Making the tea. Sharpening the drills and cutting tools. Occasionally lending an extra pair of hands on some complex fabrication —plus all the other things expected of the cabin boy (as he was called at the time).

As a teenager he’d learned many of the basic engineering skills, but had never really had what his father called ‘an engineer’s feel’ which, like perfect pitch, was apparently something you either had or you hadn’t.

And he hadn’t.

‘You’ll get no special privileges here,’ his father had warned him on the day he officially started. Howard Archer, a bold as brass Yorkshireman who, like his father, ran the company like a naval warship, had never had much regard for namby-pamby colleges and universities—not when a good, honest apprenticeship could teach a boy all he needed to know, and teach him in the real world. A world of men. And sweat. And graft. ‘You’ll start at the bottom and work your way up, son.’

‘Or down,’ interjected a dry-humoured, but (then) good-natured Jack Ramsden, the works' pipe-and-slipper foreman who’d been with the company since it was founded. ‘But it’s good to have you on board anyway, lad.’ He’d smiled and had pointed across the room. ‘There’s the broom. And there’s the kettle. Mine’s the brown mug. See you at eleven, okay?’

Archer Fabrications currently employed eleven staff. Eight on the floor and three in the office—and two in the grave, as the old factory joke ran (a joke that referred to the two preceding captains of the ship whose influence throughout the company was still felt, especially by the older members of the crew).

In its heyday (the late fifties and early sixties) the company had employed forty one men on the floor and eight in the office. But those days were long gone, largely through increasingly aggressive competition from the far east. By the time Peter Archer was at the helm they were taking on plenty of water and weren’t expected to make it to port.

However, against all dire predictions (notably among the older crew members again), Peter had been a fairly shrewd businessman and had made some unpopular, but necessary decisions. He’d sold off or mothballed a lot of the old, ‘tried and trusted’ equipment—the Cincinnatis, the Churchills, the Bridgeports and the Harrisons—and had invested heavily in modern German and Italian plant.

He’d also retired a few old hands whose enthusiasm for the firm had waned to the point where they were, on average, showing up for work only three days in every five and were becoming increasingly creative with the time clock.

Then he’d sacked Brenda in accounts, ostensibly for incompetence, but secretly because he knew—but couldn’t prove—that she’d been operating a few small but ingenious financial scams that couldn’t be overlooked any longer. There weren’t the margins for embezzlement anymore.

Besides, it wasn’t right.

The day after he sacked her, his car was vandalised. Someone took a pair of heavy cutters to the bodywork, punched holes through every body panel and slashed the tyres. Then they’d smashed the offside front window and urinated on the driver’s seat. Knowing exactly where the cowardly attack had come from (but unable to prove it) Archer had promptly sacked Brenda’s boyfriend, Sid, who worked in the welding shop, and had dared Sid to take the matter to the bloody employment tribunal if he wanted. Meanwhile, he would be taking the video film from the outside security camera to the local police and they’d take it from there.

‘That camera’s been fucked for years, ya bastard,’ said Sid, uncertainly.

‘Think so?’ bluffed a nervous Peter (Sid being a big guy with huge, engineer’s hands). ‘Well I had it fixed last week for the insurance company and we can find out in court whether or not I’m lying.’

The matter never went to court, and Peter Archer’s car had been left untouched ever since.

After that episode, much of the hostility—at least the open hostility—dissolved. But it was still there. Simmering. In order to consolidate his authority, Archer knew that he also needed to find contracts. And so he had immediately gone out on the road to visit a few old clients whose files had been gathering dust and cobwebs, and had fortuitously come back four days later with three firm orders; orders enough to keep the factory in work for the next year. He’d taken on another member of staff to replace Sid, and then had taken on a youngster to demonstrate that the company was in a viable condition.

As a confidence booster, it was a shrewd manoeuvre.

Some would say devious.

During his college years, he'd read up heavily on modern business methods and quickly refreshed himself. He sold off a lot of the old steel stock and disposed of various other assets, including three outlying parcels of derelict land and two of the company’s four trucks.

He then implemented a new and fairer wage structure, had taken a cut in his own salary, and had even picked up a broom again and had shown that he was prepared to muck in with the rest of them when necessary.

‘You’re nothing like your father,’ Jack Ramsden had told him one morning when they were stood side by side loading an urgent order onto a waiting artic.

‘Is that good or bad?’ Peter Archer had asked, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead and re-roll his shirtsleeves.

‘I’ll let you know,’ Ramsden had mumbled, looking away.

But nothing had been said since; which, for Ramsden, a Yorkshireman himself with a ready tongue for things that displeased him, was nothing less than outright approval.

Peter Archer made one of his increasingly frequent visits to the bank at around that time and fought hard to have the company loans restructured. He drafted a new (and shrewd) business plan and had shown that the huge debts the firm had accumulated could be turned around in just two fiscals.

‘Well, it all looks good on paper,’ the bank manager had agreed. ‘But it’s not our policy to carry firms who fail to move with the times.’

‘Move production to the far east, you mean?’

It was an old bone of contention. Both his father and grandfather had fought tooth and nail to keep the firm in Bradford even when the accountants advised relocating into more ‘economically appropriate’ labour markets.

‘Not necessarily that far,’ his bank manager had replied, lounging in his chair and wiping his glasses. ‘Poland and the Czech Republic has plenty of surplus capacity, and sooner or later they’ll be in the EEC. It might not be a bad idea to get in now before the Germans get it all.’

Peter had refused.

Archer Fabrications was a Yorkshire firm. A firm that helped keep the local economy alive. Firms like his were important, he believed. Yes, it meant hard times now. But the Asian tiger economies were in trouble, and he wasn’t convinced that the EEC was as ready as it claimed it was to expand membership. True, there were plenty of carrots dangling on the stick. But it was a long stick, and wasn’t getting any shorter. Therefore, he wanted to stay local and, as his father would say, stick to his guns.

‘Well it won’t help anyone if you go bust and leave a gaping bloody hole for any foreigner to plug,’ said his bank manager.

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Archer had insisted. ‘There are always new contracts out there. It’s just a matter of getting the right man to win them.’

‘And that’s yourself, is it?’

‘I think so.’

And so the loans had been restructured and the overdraft increased.

But that was then, and this was now, and at that moment Peter Archer was in his car headed west toward the offices of Thompson, Miller and Stephenson (Engineers) Ltd, an old client based near Sleaford, Lincolnshire. Thompson, Miller and Stephenson had been doing plenty of restructuring of their own over the past five or six years and were only now beginning to emerge from a cloud of grave financial uncertainty.

Peter Archer had telephoned Sarah Parker, his personal secretary, at around 9.15am and explained that he was now in Lincolnshire and would call again after the meeting was over.

There were four messages for him, Sarah said.

The bank wanted him to call by the close of business today.

Check.

The printers had prepared the new letterheads and business cards and would be sending samples for his approval.

Check.

Jack Ramsden said that there was a problem with the surface grinder, which meant the Percival job would be delayed another day.

Check (and shit!).

And the job centre phoned to ask if the vacancy for a trainee had been successfully filled.

No it hadn’t.

‘Anything else?’ he asked, speaking via his hands-free kit and keeping, as ever, within the speed limit.

He knew that he wasn’t a particularly good driver and had long since decided to stay well within his limitations.

‘No, that’s it. Oh yes. Except that you asked me to remind you to pick up something for your wife’s birthday.’

He didn’t need reminding about that. Angela was thirty-five on Thursday. He’d been planning a special meal in an expensive restaurant and was looking for some little gift for her. Something unusual. Imaginative. But simple.

‘Thanks, Sarah,’ he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

Then he’d disconnected.

And presently he went into the meeting at the company’s offices and came away with a definite ‘maybe’.

It was about fifteen minutes after that that he killed the man named Clarence Anthony Wisley.