The Snake That Bites Its Tail, page 1
Copyright © 2022 Bob Farrand
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is largely a work of fiction although some episodes are based on real events. Names, characters and businesses are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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For Linda
None of what we achieved together
could have happened without you.
And for Jim
No better brother ever walked this earth.
Acknowledgement
Grateful thanks to Glynn Christian, a true friend whose patient encouragement, hours of tutelage and extraordinary good humour throughout the writing of this novel have been a blessing.
‘I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not?’
Thomas Henry Huxley
Contents
Acknowledgement
Part One
One
Two
Three
Part Two
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Part One
One
21st October 1965
There can be few thoughts more disheartening for a nineteen-year-old than the prospect of a life of tedium and financial penury wasted as an insurance clerk. A year ago, a fate this cheerless hung over Robin Farnham like a Stygian cloud, yet today, it is a face brimming with youthful optimism that stares back at him from the mirror on the wardrobe door.
He painstakingly threads a white leather belt through the loops of his dark blue Sta-Prest Levi’s, slips a matching denim jacket on over a black roll neck and quickly buffs his black Cuban heels on the backs of his legs. Happy with what he sees, he grabs a bulging green canvas overnight bag from the foot of his unmade bed and hurries out through the front door of his flat on Lonsdale Road, close to the Thames in south-west London.
Picking his way over uneven paving stones on the path leading to the front gate, he pauses for a moment to admire the shiny dark green 1200cc Ford Cortina parked on the roadside.
Casually tossing the bag into the back of the car, he slides his short, stocky frame into the driver’s seat and fires up the engine. Engaging first gear, he checks the rear-view mirror before seamlessly merging into the stream of rush-hour traffic crawling north towards Hammersmith Bridge on a Thursday evening. He is looking forward to the drive west out of London and the prospect of a long weekend at his parents’ house in Dorset.
Polished paintwork flashes at each passing streetlamp as he cruises past Heathrow Airport into suburban Surrey, its wide, tree-lined roads and high hedgerows shielding elegant homes of the comfortably well-off. The sort Robin is certain he will own, one day.
As the evening light fades, a familiar sadness fills his mind. His pain over the love he lost little more than a year ago, burns more fiercely at the end of each day.
With the darkness comes the emptiness of longing, the aching hollowness of her absence and plaintive hope she may occasionally think of him as she’s making love.
In the blackness of the night, it is her face dominating his every thought, and in the hours before sleep brings paltry relief, his silent plea for the pain to ease by morning will go unheeded. This weekend, he plans to settle the matter once and for all.
His melancholy lingers until the familiar outline of Stonehenge rises above the undulating curves of Salisbury Plain, black-rock solid against the silvery blue remnants of daylight now sinking beneath the western skyline. His journey is nearing its end and angst gives way to the anticipation of a few days in the town he still thinks of as home and showing off his shiny new car to parents and siblings.
Shortly after the rambling village of Chicklade, he swings left onto the A350 and allows the Cortina to gain speed down the incline past Willoughby Hedge. After navigating the narrow bends through the village of East Knoyle, he accelerates along the dark open road towards the foot of Semley Hollow, the twisting, steep hill that marks the final leg of his journey.
From nowhere, a blinding light looms large in his rear-view mirror. A car at speed and with headlights switched to full beam draws close behind, making no attempt to overtake.
Tense hands tighten around the Bakelite steering wheel and he squeezes the throttle to the floor, eager to build space between the two cars. The first of the tight bends on the hill emerges from the darkness and he brakes gently, fearful the car behind is too close. With only inches between them, they corner at speed, and, in the moment he gains speed up a straight stretch leading to the next bend, his headlights pick out a lone figure in the middle of the road.
Later, it surprised him how much detail he absorbed in what seemed like a fraction of a second. The face that flicked up to meet his headlights was ragged and weary, eyes little more than dark incisions over sunken cheeks, brown blotched skin speckled with blood and capped with tangled grey hair.
The man is stooped low, perhaps retrieving something from the road.
The Cortina’s front wheels lock as it judders to a halt and Robin’s body instinctively braces for a violent blow to his spine as the car behind slams into his.
He feels no pain, hears no tortured screech of compressing metal. The only sound breaking the night silence is a persistent clicking as the car’s engine cools.
Fumbling in the darkness, he locates the glove compartment and grabs his torch. Gingerly, he opens the car door, wary of what he is about to see.
Barely daring to breathe, he approaches the front of the vehicle and directs the torch underneath. No old man lies crushed beneath the wheels.
Moving to the rear, he swings the torch to check for damage. He sees nothing, no car crumpled into the Cortina’s boot. No driver, dead or alive.
Leaning against the cold metal of the car for support, he bites his bottom lip to control a trembling jaw. He can make no sense of what happened. Assuming anything did happen.
As he returns to the driver’s door, the thin beam of light from the torch glints off something lying in the road. He bends and picks up a bracelet; it feels heavy and looks as if it might be gold. There is an inscription etched on the inside which in the half-light, he cannot read.
The bracelet feels warm – as if in this moment it has fallen from the wearer’s wrist. The warmth seeps into Robin’s hands and upwards through his arms and shoulders.
He is about to pass out and gently lowers himself onto cold tarmac. In a second, the darkness swallows him.
Two
7th May 1981
As the clock in the living room downstairs chimes seven, Jane Foster hears the ominous click as her bedroom door opens. It is the sound she has dreaded each Thursday this past three years.
Trembling like a puppy in deep snow, she fights the urge to retch at the all-too-familiar stench of her father’s body as it lurches towards her. Leering down at her through half-closed, watery eyes, he unzips his soiled work trousers.
An hour earlier, she had cast her eyes around her bedroom for what she knew would be the last time. In sixteen years, no pop-star poster nor photograph of family or friends had ever lifted the drab bareness of the walls.
It occurred to her she should feel a trace of emotion. The room had served as her special place for thirteen years, her sanctuary, from parents incapable of giving love, and an outside world too consumed with its own problems to understand how a sweet child could so abruptly degenerate into a disruptive, angry teenager.
What no one outside these walls could possibly know was that one evening three years ago, at the age of thirteen, Jane and her sanctuary were defiled in the most appalling way.
On that evening, her childhood was stripped of its innocence in the most brutal way, her self-respect crushed to non-existence. Every Thursday since, the chimes of the clock and click of her bedroom door signalled the same terror and the only escape from the awfulness of life was to bury her emotions so deep, nothing could prick them.
From as far back as she could recall, she knew she was adopted. Too often her parents would remind her, ‘Your real mother didn’t want you, didn’t love you.’ But neither did her adoptive parents; God alone knows why they adopted her in the first place.
She was the child who was never taken on holiday, nor given a birthday party, whose friends were never invited home. In the wake of increasingly disruptive behaviour at school, there wasn’t a mother in the district eager for their daughter to mix with her.
It was around this time the violence at home started. The beatings, with belt or plastic curtain rail or anything else her mother approvingly handed her father.
And then, at the age of thirteen, one further ghastly layer of torment was added to her miserable existence. Every Thursday evening at 7pm, her father would put her through an unimaginable ordeal. Almost defying belief, her mother would, from time to time, sit on the bed and watch. Try getting your head around that one and stay normal.
Earlier this evening, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, she packed her meagre selection of clothing and toiletries into a canvas bag lifted from Woolworth’s at the weekend and, with money saved from her Saturday job cleaning ovens in the local baker’s, she was set to leave Bristol for good. To make her way to London.
Muscular arms still moist with grime and sweat from a day’s toil reach out and hands ingrained with dirt grasp freshly washed hair, forcing the skinny teenager to her knees. On this last evening, even as she trembles, she carefully positions her right foot flat on the floor with the knee bent at a right angle and the toes and ball of her left foot poised to propel upward movement.
Mercifully, her mother has chosen not to watch tonight. She’d gone out and wouldn’t return until after closing time. Jane squeezes her eyes shut in the hope of blanking it out. It never does and she wonders, as she wonders every Thursday evening, if knowing what is about to happen is worse than not knowing.
Sensing the filthy sod is on the verge of his grunting climax, she gently removes her right hand from the instrument of her torture while sustaining the necessary degree of pressure with her left. Her free hand slips beneath the thin blanket on her bed and grasps the shaft of solid iron found on a stretch of waste ground while walking home from school.
The next five seconds play out as a slow-motion movie, four precise movements, each rehearsed a hundred times and more these past three years and each perfectly executed.
Through half-closed eyes, she watches for the moment his eyelids flicker in perverted anticipation. Sharp young teeth then close with savage ferocity and his fingers instantly loosen their grip, as he shrieks like a shagging fox. In a split second, Jane’s left foot thrusts her body upwards and as her father’s hands instinctively reach to his groin, her right arm swings the iron bar smack onto the sweating pervert’s temple.
His head jerks sideways with the impact and a deep red indentation oozes blood towards his eyes. Doubled up in pain, he attempts to raise his arms to ward off further blows but is too slow.
Now gripping the bar with both hands and driven by the potency of her loathing, Jane slams it onto his skull a second and a third time. Silently, he drops to the floor, his flabby white body twitching hideously as a stream of blood lends fresh colour to a tired beige carpet.
Still trembling and close to hyperventilating, she stares down at her tormentor and sees he is still breathing. She resists the urge to finish him off; it makes no sense. Not this time, anyway.
She throws up as always before rinsing her soiled mouth under the tap in the bathroom, then grabs her bag and coat and hurries downstairs. Once out through the front door, she leaps into the back of the black cab waiting to drive her the short distance to Temple Meads station and the 8.20pm to Paddington, London.
As the car turns the corner at the end of her road, she sinks back into cold leather and allows herself the luxury of a thin smile. Her pretty features relax for the first time that day, perhaps in that lifetime.
She doubts her father will report the attack, nor that she is missing, for fear the abuse might be revealed. Neither he nor her appalling mother would, for a single moment regret Jane leaving home. Neither would Jane.
Three
20th October 2020
Lucy Farnham leaves her husband on his own for little more than a couple of hours. Tuesday evenings are her Italian classes, and the company of fellow students is eagerly anticipated. Time away from home is becoming increasingly difficult since Robin’s diagnosis and she needs to stimulate her brain, set herself fresh challenges. The isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting difficulties with the family business seem to have accelerated his decline.
The carers from the local dementia home visit twice a day now. Being so tiny, she finds it difficult helping Robin wash and dress on his bad days, particularly now, with her arthritis and dodgy hip. The early evening carer assured her leaving him for a couple of hours would be fine, as long as outside doors were locked and keys safely hidden.
She returns as normal around 9.30pm, parks her car in the carport and catches sight of him through the living-room window as she approaches the front door. He is sound asleep in his favourite chair, the one she bought him for his seventieth birthday.
Arthritic fingers struggle with the key to the front door; she keeps meaning to call the local locksmith to fit something more user-friendly but can never quite find the time. On hanging her coat in the cloakroom cupboard, she makes her way to the kitchen and puts the kettle on for a bedtime drink. Robin won’t want one, as she had caught sight of the empty wine decanter and glass on the small table beside his chair.
She walks into the living room and looks kindly at her husband. He is slowly disappearing into the darkness they both knew would consume him but still has good days, days his memory can sustain an afternoon of fireside reminiscences. The balmy comfort of nostalgia preceding the bitterness of separation.
Today had been that sort of day. With the easing of lockdown, they had taken a trip to the local farm shop and later, enjoyed a quiet lunch at home. Fresh bread, his three favourite cheeses and a glass each of fine Bordeaux. It looks as if he’s polished off what was left while she was out.
She settles in the chair alongside his and leans in close. His breathing sounds weak, barely audible. She glances at the small table to his right, and an icy chill rips through her at the sight of several empty foil strips of paracetamol. She then notices a half-empty bottle of Armagnac lying flat on the carpet beside his chair.
An envelope propped against the round porcelain base of a table lamp is addressed in her husband’s large but still quite ordered handwriting to ‘My darling Lucy’.
The ambulance is reassuringly quick reaching the village, its flashing lights casting iridescent blue across Robin’s alabaster complexion as it pulls up outside the window.
