Chapter 7 – Alice
Part-time police station administrator Alice was putting on her sensible navy coat as it was time to go home. She and her husband shared their car as he worked mostly from home. It was one o’clock and she knew Mike had an important meeting in town that afternoon and needed the car.
As she passed the front desk, the duty officer called over. “Hey, Alice! You couldn’t post this could you? Someone left it. Too tight to pay for the postage, I suppose. Just take the money out of petty cash.”
“Ok. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning, though,” she said, studying the parcel. It was about the size of a couple of bags of sugar wrapped in brown paper. The address was somewhere in France, written in black marker pen. The duty officer, seeing her concerned look said, “It’s ok. The security boys have scanned it. It’s not going to blow up. Shouldn’t think it’s anything urgent so tomorrow will do. See you in the morning.”
When she got to her car, Alice placed the parcel on the back seat and wondered what was in it.
Later, as she parked in the drive of their little semi, she decided the parcel could just stay where it was until the morning when she could pop into the local post office before work. Mike, with a face like a grumpy teenager, was waiting impatiently for her when she opened the door. He’s so tetchy these days, she thought.
“It must be a high-powered meeting,” she remarked, trying to ignore the waves of disapproval. “You look very smart.” She didn’t mention that the powerful aftershave was making her eyes water.
“Thanks,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek. “Don’t know what time I’ll be back so don’t bother making me dinner.”
Mike did have a ‘meeting’ to go to but it certainly wasn’t of the business variety. He’d been meeting Veronica, his latest lady friend, for about six months. Where his wife Alice was small and quiet with short dark hair, Veronica was tall, vivacious and blonde. Mike, in his mid forties, had always had trouble staying interested in his women. Basically, he got bored with them and Alice was no exception.
As a businesswoman in her own right, Veronica had no trouble organising ‘meetings’ with Mike. She ran a marketing company with six staff. She’d wave an elegantly manicured hand, say she had a new client to impress, and waft out on a cloud of Chanel.
“Bye, guys. Ring me if anything urgent comes up. See you all in the morning.”
Mike and Veronica usually drove to a nearby town where no one would recognise them – at least didn’t recognise Mike. Veronica couldn’t care less. They would sneak into a discreet, little hotel for the afternoon which was a bit pointless as all the staff recognised them now and knew exactly what was going on. For Veronica, who was divorced, it was a bit of fun and excitement with a good-looking man. Mike, on the other hand, was convinced that he was, yet again, in love with the woman of his dreams.
He parked in the road a little way past where she worked and a few minutes later, Veronica, fair hair bobbing as she marched along in her high heels, arrived at his, what he considered to be embarrassingly modest, car.
“Hello, darling.” She kissed him on the lips and smiled her beautiful smile. Mike was totally smitten.
They ordered what Veronica considered to be embarrassingly cheap champagne from room service and then spent a passionate afternoon together. It was already dark when Mike said, “I have to go now. Alice will start ringing her mates at the police station soon to report me missing.”
In the hotel car park, Veronica opened the back door of the car and threw her coat and designer bag on the back seat, not noticing the parcel. They drove back to her flat and, after a lingering kiss, she got out, opened the back door and retrieved her bag and coat.
“Text me soon, darling”. She blew him a kiss and was gone.
Mike drove back to his house, breaking all the speed limits. He parked carefully in the drive, checked in the mirror for lipstick marks on his face and then checked the back seat to see that Veronica hadn’t left anything incriminating behind. To his horror, he saw a brown paper-wrapped parcel, addressed to someone in France.
“Shit!” What was he supposed to do with that? He couldn’t leave it in the car. Alice would find it in the morning.
Panic stricken, he broke out in a sweat. “Think! Think!”
His next-door neighbours were in the process of gutting and renovating their attic. He knew that on the street outside their house was a dirty, green skip full of old bits of carpet, rotted flooring, dilapidated furniture, all topped by a filthy mattress. Mike got out of the car, looked around furtively and saw no one. It was a cold dark night. All the nearby windows the curtains were closed with the lights on behind. Everyone, Mike assumed, was either watching television or eating dinner.
Fervently hoping that Alice hadn’t heard him arrive, he slowly and quietly opened the car’s back door and gently took out the parcel. He tiptoed down his drive and along the pavement to the skip. Lifting a corner of an old carpet, he dropped the parcel into the cavernous darkness. Then, he went back to the car, slammed the back door, marched up to his house, wiping the sweat from his brow with his jacket sleeve and unlocked the front door.
***