I, The Accused

I,

The Accused

by

John Gardner

Copyright John Gardner 2021

Published by John Gardner 2021

License Notes

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Also published by John Gardner:

The Stress belief Paradox

The Money Virus

Geoffrey Bolting, Conspiracy of Fire

Geoffrey Bolting, Conspiracy of War

The Lefirt Diaries (Diary One)

The Conversation

Stress -The Profit Killer

Open Your Eyes

Pleasure Mounds

The Lord, The Manor and The Murders

Bedtime Stories

The Bizznis

Shorties

Why 64 million Frenchmen are wrong!

The life of young Alford Morrison, an accountant with a reputable firm, was swinging along just fine till he was charged with conspiracy to defraud the Revenue. Al was the sort of man who was forever being accused of things but was always innocent. Almost always. His problems were compounded by a drunken admission of his wife Chloe, which put his marriage in the blender. His life, through no fault of his own, had left the tracks and spiraled into a nightmare making him a fugitive from the forces of law and order who, once again, wished to see him behind bars – if they could manage it. But Al had a plan and The Body was his willing accomplice.

Table of contents

Chapter 1 The short history of a ruin

Chapter 2 In vino veritas

Chapter 3 Revelations two

Chapter 4 Gone

Chapter 5 An inspector calls

Chapter 6 Bottom of the barrel

Chapter 7 Bracelets day

Chapter 8 Enter the white knight

Chapter 9 Ginny Kitchen comes and goes

Chapter 10 The Body revealed

Chapter 11 Lovers’ dreams

Chapter 12 Cold bracelets on warm wrists

Chapter 13 I, the accused

Chapter 14 The great escape

Chapter 15 My Hilary

Chapter 1

The short history of a ruin

I live in a ruin. But it did not start out that way. In the beginning it was a wonderful place with lots of rooms. There were rooms for joy; happiness; trust; wonder; mystery; excitement and sharing, which, as it turned out, was a tad ironic. But, one by one they became cold then damp and finally the door to each room closed and the rot set in. Bit by bit the rooms crumbled until it was all gone and I was left standing in a ruin. My marriage.

Hi, I’m Alford Morrison, (Alford? I know, I’ll explain that later.) and this is my story. It took years to develop and evolve to get me where I am now. I’m not going to tell you precisely where I am now, I’ll leave that little treat for the end. Anyway, finally, after navigating all the slings and arrows the outrageous fortune of life could chuck at me, I am still standing and that’s the important thing. I am stronger, better equipped to deal with the world and raring to go.

Let me start at the beginning of what is really a very sorry tale but it has a twist. They say love is blind, in my case my eyes were gouged out and it was this blindness, and my face, that led to the worst period of my life. So far. I should also mention I have a face everyone in authority wants to slap. Don’t ask me why a cheery face should so upset people but it does. Anyway let me lead you into my story and I’ll start with someone who absolutely bugs the holy bejesus out of me.

‘Okay Morrison! Where’s my fucking report?’

Meet my boss, Sylvia Reynolds a tall, slim woman with spectacular hills and valleys in all the right places. She is a looker, but this bitch is a distant relation to Vlad the Impaler. She got promoted three months ago but she wasn't the best candidate, not by a long chalk, but she got the job. Why? Who can say? Maybe she has what it takes, you know that certain thing some people have. In her case that thing is called a great body. As I said, she’s a looker. And all the senior managers are men. It’s just nature at work and that force of nature robbed a well-qualified member of staff of a job that should have been his. Not me, I’m the new boy but Sam Heyman, he was right for it and he knew it. Threw his hat in the ring straight away with that air of confidence rich people have. He comes from money, lots of money. The type of person who speaks with a slight slur out of the side of their mouth, but he’s not a bad bloke. The job should have been his but he doesn’t have tits.

That’s what happens to us isn’t it? You know how that feels. Riding the merry-go-round one day, next day you’re face down in the mud feeling the high heels of a bitch walking across your back. It’s just life and life treated Sylvia Reynolds, held aloft on six inch spikes, well. I know, I know unkind and jealous. Not really. I was never on the list for promotion. Not been here long enough and besides, all those thrusting, young male managers wanted to have a woman at their beck and call. Made them feel like real men: bossing an attractive young woman around. Mind you, the visual choice was pathetic. Dowdy Francine Muller from Switzerland with spots and a roundish, misshapen body like she’d been in the process of being squeezed through a donought machine and someone had switched it off and she had a personality like dirty dish water. Sarah McDonald, totally flat chested and way too serious to be taken seriously or, Christine Downey, aka Jabba The Hut. Good accountant but, as you can guess, she has personal issues. That left, The Body. A one horse race. She’ll probably end up suing them for sexual harassment – and she’ll win. And now here she is giving me a hard time because I have not yet given her the totally unnecessary report she asked for.

‘Sylvia, I said you would have it today. Please check the time,’ I said looking at my watch. ‘It is, if I am not mistaken, two fifteen. The day is young!’

‘Cut the sarcasm Morrison! Just make sure it’s on my desk within the hour or I’ll be kicking you into touch, mister!’ she growled while pointing a finger at me.

Kicked into touch! Who the fuck says that anymore? All those stupid, macho sports metaphors about holes in one, crossing the line, being kicked into touch. And people think I lack creativity!

Threat delivered she marched off on those red, six inch spikes. She liked the public school routine of only referring to people by their last name. She would have done well in the army. The SS corps. Although she is undeniably good-looking, the best view of Sylvia Reynolds is when she’s walking away. Okay the legs and bum are great but the attitude is pure cunt. I’m told I shouldn’t use that word, women don’t like it, but it was Maggie from new business accounts who called her that. So I figure what is good for the goose…

Time I introduced myself properly. My name, as you know, is Alford Morrison. Alford. Who in their right mind calls their kid Alford? My mother, that’s who. A pretentious woman who never tired of telling my father he should be doing better. He should leave that awful bloody company that had employed him for the past fifteen years and do better! He was an electrician for a local, and very well-respected electrical installations firm. His protestations that he liked the company, liked the work, liked his work colleagues, could walk to work and was decently well paid cut no ice with his wife. She wanted him to move up. Up to where none of us quite understood but, up! We were all to find out the meaning of that when I was ten.

Three weeks after my tenth birthday she sprinted out the door with her wheelie cases and leapt into the milk van of our milkman, one Gerald Uplington. That’s a little bit of poetic license. His family own the dairy and she leapt into his Mercedes but she did literally run off and was never seen again. She had been working in their office as a part-time book keeper for nearly two years but her hours meant she was always back home for when the kids, my sister and I, got in from school, something our father insisted on. My sister’s called, Charlise, can you believe she named her daughter Charlise? Neither could she. She has since changed her name to Cheryl. Anyway, she’s two years older than me and we get on fine. It was Cheryl who spotted the rift in the marital bed. We used to huddle in the cupboard under the stairs and discuss which parent we would go with if they split up. Dad, no contest.

I heard our mother talk with my dad about being bored. Needing something to do apart from clean up after us lot. It was not exactly comforting to an eight-year-old to hear yourself referred to as, ‘that lot’. When I told Cheryl, it was the first time I heard her swear. Dad wasn’t very happy about her working but she started work anyway and every day after that all we ever heard over the dinner table was how this or that happened in her day. She dominated the conversation while dad just nodded his head and said, ‘Yeah,’ at the appropriate places until a mysterious silence fell on her about eighteen months after she had started working there. My dad noticed it and he said, yeah, less often. We could hear them arguing sometimes and we didn’t really understand what they were talking about until wheelie-case day.

The Uplingtons owned the local dairy that supplied all the shops over a pretty large area and still did home deliveries. Their business model was a marvel of customer satisfaction. They also owned a well-respected chain of bakeries that supplied sandwiches, pies and cakes to all the local businesses and small shops. Their six shops were raking it in. This was Gerry’s inheritance, which he was about to own as sole proprietor after his father’s sudden seizure. He was certainly going up! Mother came back for her things when father was at work and my sister and I were at school. She didn’t even leave a note - something to hate her by.

My mother’s departure was, naturally, a bit of a shock to us all and my father took it badly at first but despite this obvious set-back in his life he maintained a happy disposition with us kids. We’ll muddle through, he used to say, as he mashed the potatoes with a bit more vigour than was absolutely necessary. After a couple of months we, my sister and I, learned he was being consoled by a work colleague, one Hilary Nesbitt, a charming blonde with a great sense of fun. She was not as pretty as our mum but she had a large bust and she made us laugh, something mum never did. I figured my old man was not that distraught. She moved in after a few months and, strange as it may seem, we were all happy. She was a decent cook, very thoughtful to us kids and clearly kept my dad happy and as the years drifted by in a series of school dramas, like when my sister punched a girl out for calling our mother a whore, life was pretty well okay. Ordinary.

Of course we kids had all the usual anxiety around growing up like when Cheryl got her first period, big drama! And then there were the school fights and being forced to study for meaningless exams like algebra. Let’s face it, who in their daily life uses algebra? Name one person. Exactly! But we had to be good little clones for the money machine, as my father called it. Educated just enough to keep it turning and make faceless people mega rich. I liked the sound of those words, mega rich and, for reasons that still remain obscured by my working-class roots, I decided to become an accountant. There are no accountants in the family, never have been, plenty of engineers but that life did not appeal to a teenager who thought accountancy would pave the way to mega riches. I studied hard, graduated, only the second person in our entire family history with a university education, and set out to make my fortune by launching myself into the world of accountancy - and mega riches. But there was a flaw in my reasoning. I came from a working-class Protestant background, which made the task easier said than done.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying all good accountancy firms are run by Jews but a lot of doors closed in my face when they discovered I was a Proddy. My father was Scottish and insisted only a Protestant education was good enough for his children, which was great as an ideal but in practice I needed a touch of Jew about me to get into one of the really good accountancy firms. That touch came when I remembered my paternal granny, now dead, was Jewish. I never really knew her, my mother’s doing, and had forgotten about her but I remember she was a real card, full of sayings and proverbs, none of which I remember, but it was Manna from heaven to me. All I had to do was give myself a double barrel so instead of being plain old Proddy, Alford Morrison, I became quasi Jew, Alford Wiseman-Morrison. A stroke of pure luck that opened the necessary door and I was hired by Levy,