Chain of Vengeance: Chapter Four - Part Eight

Jack’s perception of the room took a sideways step. He became acutely aware of random items of sensory information while other things became cloudy and vague. If the fourth dimension was time, it was as though he had shifted his perspective so that he saw a fresh set of dimensions. Time disappeared from his scope. There was suddenly no sense that it was passing at all. One of the physical dimensions seemed to have gone too, leaving the space around him flat. At the same time, his senses opened to two new dimensions. Everything was imbued by light and clarity. It felt like he had stepped out of the world into one of his own paintings.

In the frozen moment, the lawyer’s words remained motionless in his ear, rattling his eardrum almost to the point where the sense became meaningless – a perpetual droning hum.

You… are an incredibly rich man.

For a moment Jack felt himself standing on the railings of the suspension bridge again, about to leap forward: poised; frozen.

He looked at Dominic then at the solicitor. Both men were motionless for a moment, then everything started to move again with a lurch as if the timeline had been jump-started. The physical dimensions became crisper, losing their temporary effervescence. The input from his senses pumped, swelling, as they returned to normal. Dominic and the lawyer moved free from their frozen positions. They were watching him with expressions of concern. Dominic’s hand was suddenly on Jack’s arm. He realised that time hadn’t stopped anywhere except in his mind. These men had been talking to him and he’d zoned out, staring into space. They had asked him a question and he hadn’t even heard them speak.

“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “What did you say?”

“Would you like a moment to collect your thoughts Mr Catholic,” asked Miles.

“A moment? Yeah. I think I would.”

Miles gestured toward a pair of French windows Jack hadn’t noticed over to the right. “I have a little balcony. Perhaps some fresh air might help?”

Jack got to his feet. “Yeah. Thanks. That would be perfect.”

He opened the door and went out, realising only then how warm the office had been compared to the cool afternoon air. The day had a refreshing chill to it. Down below and at the other side of the road he had a clear view into the secret garden he’d seen earlier, fenced right round the edge with a gate to allow only residents and the occasional vagrant access. Inside the fence was a high hedge, interspersed thickly with trees until the only clear view into the interior was from above.

An old man was sitting on a bench in the shade of a weeping willow while two of his grand children played nearby with a pair of delicate rackets and a shuttle cock. It was a common enough scene and one that Jack might have inserted himself into in his imagination in the past, seeing himself in his later years taking his own grandchildren to a park like this to play. But now his imagination couldn’t settle on an image like that without a dirty sense of ironic loss. He was a murderer. Ordinary pleasures like this, of an ordinary life, were lost to him.

Or were they?

An incredibly rich man.

With the kind of money they were talking about he could go anywhere, start a new life, away from the ruin his former path had become. But it wasn’t this thought that had stunned him in there, that some kind of artificial financial redemption could be bought, it was the strident certainty that had come over him, linked to the odd counsel of the man who gave him a ride from Somerset.

He had survived that plummet from the bridge and spent a night being carried unconscious downstream, defying all probability in doing so. He had survived miraculously when every fact he knew told him he should have died. And now, the very next day, he had inherited a fortune from an uncle he didn’t even know.

He couldn’t help but think…

A lifetime in the real world had conditioned him, as it did everybody, to think in real terms. It was an arrogance to believe the thoughts coming to him now, something fashioned from pride and a refusal to give up, but all the same…

What if some higher power…? What if God had kept him alive for a reason? What if there was some purpose he didn’t understand that he was being manipulated towards?

He had been kept alive when by rights he should have died and now a vast sum of wealth was about to be set in his lap. He had never been closed to the possibilities but neither had he possessed a convicted belief in anything spiritual or majestic. He wasn’t a natural church-goer and doubted he ever would be. But these things had happened, things that broke the natural law… There had to be a purpose to them; a reason that this greater power had chosen to save him from death.

When Lucy had died he was convinced that his destiny had been stripped away.

Now though… Now he was sure – absolutely sure suddenly – that he had been wrong. He had been kept alive for a reason. He was being given this money for a reason too. 

All he had to do now was determine what that reason was.