Shredded
Olive
OLIVE MAYFAIR CLOSED HER OFFICE door on the private investigator and turned back to her cluttered desk.
It was after eight o’clock in the evening and even though she had two days before the deadline Jack gave her on the Abbot report, she wanted to get it done so she could get what she’d learned out of her mind and move on.
She could, of course, simply give him the files but that wasn’t Olive’s way of doing things.
Jack was a tremendously busy man, indeed, impossibly busy.
Therefore, even though she knew he would read every single page of the investigator’s file after he read Olive’s synopsis of its contents, she was still going to write her summary.
She sat at her desk and stared at the thick file with distaste.
Then she opened it to the first page, a copy of a divorce decree, which she flipped over and saw the first of many medical reports.
Olive turned to her computer and started typing.
Belle Abbot’s divorce from Calvin Cole had been granted under what amounted to irreconcilable differences.
Olive was not surprised Cole had divorced his very clumsy, accident-prone wife.
Indeed, according to the reports that Olive carefully studied with growing disgust, Belle “slipped” in her kitchen twice, the bathroom four times, in the garden thankfully only once and she’d fallen down the stairs alarmingly often.
During these “accidents,” she’d suffered cuts, contusions, concussions, a sprained wrist and several broken ribs.
Olive thought, sarcastically, that it was abundantly clear that Belle was a danger to herself and Calvin Cole was well quit of her.
Surprisingly, Olive thought with cynicism, Belle Abbot had not visited a hospital even once before her marriage to Cole. In fact, she’d lived a carefree, accident-free, hospital- and doctor-free, albeit active and far wandering life.
She’d even climbed to Machu Picchu with her mother when she was eighteen without managing, in her extreme clumsiness, to tumble down the narrow, treacherous mountain paths.
At a quarter to ten, Olive closed down her computer and walked the short distance from her office to Jack’s carrying the file with her report in, all of it in a large, sealed envelope marked Urgent. Private and Confidential., like it was a piece of putrid rubbish.
She had never met Belle Abbot but Olive liked her all the same. Firstly, she’d selflessly saved the lives of many children and their bus driver. Secondly, she’d not talked to the press about this act of heroism or the recent business with Jack and his brother at all.
Not one word.
Even when she was painted as a somewhat dim bulb manipulated at the hands of the Bennett brothers, she did not speak. Instead, she kept her silence and her considerable (to Olive’s way of thinking) dignity.
Therefore, it rankled even deeper than it would naturally that Belle Abbot had endured a four-year marriage to an abusive husband.
Olive set the report, front and center, on Jack’s desk. He was spending more than his normal amount of time in Cornwall but Gillie would have the file couriered to him the next day.
Considering its contents, Olive would usually hand deliver it to him even in Cornwall.
However, in an uncustomary display of cowardice, Olive wanted to be nowhere near Jack Bennett when he read that report.
She left the report on his desk and flicked off the light, her mind resolutely moving to the very large glass of wine she would consume before going to bed.
Gillie and Deborah
Gillie Matthews saw the large file marked Urgent. Private and Confidential. that Olive put on Jack’s desk sometime in the night.
This was a common occurrence.
It was also common for Olive to put the most important papers front and center on Jack’s desk, indicating they needed his immediate attention.
Therefore, Gillie, preparing a packet of things to be couriered to Jack at his office at The Point in Cornwall, set the file on the floor so she wouldn’t forget it. She started to rifle through his desk to add other papers that needed his attention but her phone rang.
She ran from the room to get the phone and it was Jack, who spent ten minutes giving her a list of directives through which she took careful and copious notes.
While she was doing this, she was meticulously concentrating and thus missed Deborah from the administrative pool who wandered through the outer office and into Jack’s.
It was part of Deborah’s daily tasks to enter Jack’s office and see to any filing and various and sundry other things that were slightly less important than Gillie’s responsibilities.
As Jack always did, anything confidential that needed to be shredded he tossed on the floor by his desk.
Deborah found the file, not unusually stamped Urgent. Private and Confidential. She picked it up and took it to the shredder.
Without reading it (something which was not her place in any way), she shredded every last document.
In the meantime, Gillie had spent a goodly amount of her morning seeing to the priority tasks Jack had assigned her.
By the time she re-entered his office to ready his packet for the courier, she’d forgotten all about the file she’d left on the floor.
Mickey
Mickey Dempsey watched the man walk out of the hospital with his wife.
She’d slipped and fallen down the stairs.
Mickey knew this because, even though he wasn’t a qualified doctor, he had a lab coat and more than a dozen different badges proclaiming his right to be in more than a dozen different places, including University College Hospital, London.
Therefore he’d snuck in and read her file.
Mickey looked at the woman whose eye was swollen shut and an ugly shade of purply-blue. She also had a cut on her lip. Furthermore, she was holding her body like it was made of glass.
Mickey had never known anyone who fell down the stairs but unless the woman had fallen down the stairs on her face, he could not imagine how she’d acquired those injuries.
Mickey had known a number of people (including himself, on occasion), who had been in bust-ups at pubs and footy matches. He’d even seen himself in the mirror when a fist had hit his face more than once, looking exactly like the woman who walked out of the hospital.
He’d also seen his own mother looking like her.
Mickey turned his attention to the man with her.
He was lean, tall and handsome, with light-brown hair and blue eyes.
His name, Mickey knew, was Calvin Cole.
He was once, Mickey knew, married to Belle Abbot, The Tiny Dynamo.
Mickey, who was a freelance investigative journalist putting together an article for whoever would buy it, knew Cole had abused his first wife rather viciously for four years.
Mickey, whose own mother suffered at the hands of Mickey’s father in much the same way, knew Cole would pay for what he did to the women in his life.
The public would eat him alive at the very thought of his lifting his hand to Belle “The Tiny Dynamo” Abbot.
Much less him doing it repeatedly for four years.
And no woman in her right mind would ever get near him again.
Mickey would make absolutely certain of that.
This thought made Mickey smile to himself as he started his car to follow them.