“No, you have made yourself perfectly clear. I will do as you ask, just don’t hurt anyone — please, please don’t. There is no need.”
“Excellent Alan, that’s just fine. I am glad that we had this little chat.” Roger stood. “You can keep these photographs as a reminder of our agreement, I have plenty of copies. Oh, and another thing. I am afraid that you won’t be seeing your young lady on Wednesday mornings anymore.”
Roger pulled an envelope from his inside pocket and dropped it casually onto the table.
“Such a sweet girl, and so talented — but you know that already. Here’s her invoice. She’ll be expecting payment as specified by the end of next week.”
“Why are you doing this?” Alan pleaded.
For a moment Roger stared unblinkingly, as if he was wracked with some internal conflict; finally he shrugged and closed his eyes.
“For the same reason you are. I don’t want to get hurt — or worse. There are people out there who do these things for a living, bad people, the sort of people you do not want to meet. There are some very dangerous people out there, Alan. They have you on a hook now and that’s a hook that you can never get off.”
He paused, looking down at the photographs with genuine sadness in his eyes.
“You may not believe me, but for what it is worth, I am truly sorry.”
“It won’t help you,” Alan said defiantly.
“What won’t?”
“All of this,” he said waving his hand at the photographs, “All of this won’t help you. I am just one vote — you need a majority to get the planning application passed.”
Roger sighed and put his hand on Alan’s shoulder.
“It will pass. We have a majority now. Your vote was the last one we needed. Just do what I have asked, and everything will be all right. Goodbye, Alan.”
Roger gave Alan’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Until the next time,” he added in a chilling postscript as he left.
Alan sat alone in the booth, stared at the pictures and cried quietly, until it was time for him to leave for the planning meeting.
Stone curiously studied the envelope before him. As people sometimes do, he found himself trying to guess the contents without opening the flap. He knew Charles’s distinctive handwriting from the cards he always sent for Christmas and on Eric’s birthday in July, but it was too early for the first event and too late for the second. The envelope obviously contained a greetings card of some sort and the postmark clearly showed that the envelope was posted on the day of Charles’s suicide. Stone rested his forearms on the steering wheel and held the envelope in his fingertips so that it was at eye level. He felt unwilling to open the flap, realizing that it probably contained the last words that Charles wrote, just minutes before he committed suicide. Cold dread squeezed his heart as he anticipated the contents; perhaps it was a personal suicide note, or instructions for Charles’s funeral. Stone pursed his lips and drew a deep breath. With a deft flick of his finger, he ripped open the envelope and extracted the contents.
It was a simple birthday card. On the front was a picture of a classic car, a red Jaguar ‘E’ type, and the words, ‘Best wishes on your birthday’. Inside Charles had written, ‘Happy birthday — you old fart!’ — The exact words that he had written on an identical card back in July. However, this time there was also a small slip of yellow paper, folded twice, with ‘Phone me — now!’ written in the same handwriting but with a different ink.
“God, I wish I could!” Stone whispered.
He wondered if the note was a desperate plea from a suicidal mind sickened and twisted by cancer, but he quickly decided that it was not. Around a month earlier, Charles had told Eric that he would be out of touch for a while as he was working on some important new project. Yet, just four days ago he had still found the time to phone Eric to send on his best wishes to three of the karate club’s students who were about to take their black belt grading. The call was short, but Charles was his usual effervescent and humorous self.
The more Eric thought about Charles’s death and the weeks leading up to it, the more questions he found he wanted to ask. Where had he been for the last month? What was the new project that suddenly seemed more important than Charles’s beloved True Democracy? Exactly when did Charles discover that he had cancer? Why had he decided to keep the diagnosis a secret, even from his best friend? Why did he deliberately copy the original birthday card so exactly, but then send it on the wrong day? Moreover, perhaps the most important question was — why would Charles ask Eric to phone him when they both knew that Charles never took incoming calls. Although he always had the latest model smart phone, Charles despised receiving calls in public and kept the phone permanently on silent mode, preferring to use his cell for email, texts, and banking — so Charles always called Eric.
Stone was still contemplating the significance of this message from beyond the grave, when he felt a small bump within the folds of the note. He carefully unfolded the paper and discovered that on the rear there was a short strip of clear tape covering what appeared to be a small oblong of thin black plastic. Confused, he used his fingernail to unpick the tape and pry the plastic oblong free for closer inspection. In the dulled light within his car, Stone had to squint to overcome his mild short-sightedness. Slightly smaller than his little fingernail and as thin as a business card, the little oblong of plastic weighed almost nothing.
Although three sides of the plastic oblong were perfectly square to each other, Stone could see that it was slightly wider at one edge and the bottom had a slight saw-toothed look with a step in the center. There was also a slight ridge on the left edge, just high enough to trap with a thumbnail. On the surface, printed in light grey, there was a seemingly unreadable stylized logo and a small arrow pointing to the right. Examining the other side, he could just make out eight gold irregular strips around a tenth of an inch long, and three lines of writing too small to read without a magnifying glass. However, if Eric’s suspicions were right, two readable letters would help solve this evolving riddle. The letters were ‘CE’. Often seen but seldom noticed, the ‘CE’ mark is a key indicator of a product’s compliance with European Union legislation — and it is a common mark on most electrical items.
Stone quickly stuffed the mail into his pocket and carefully folded the plastic card back into the sheet of paper, before climbing out of his car and jogging back to his house. Once inside he went directly to a drawer in his kitchen where he kept those items that even the most house-proud man finds difficult to discard. He sorted through batteries of indeterminate age, instruction manuals for products long since discarded, and several miscellaneous electrical leads, until he found the magnifying glass he was looking for. With the aid of the natural sunlight shining through the kitchen window and the magnifying glass, he was able to study the tiny plastic oblong more closely.
He quickly deciphered the logo as the word ‘Micro’ curved around the letters ‘SD’ and just to the right ‘64’ was printed over ‘GB’. Stone was not particularly tech savvy and so it took a moment before he realized that ‘GB’ did not stand for Great Britain, as he would have expected, but in this case, it meant Gigabyte. He was holding a micro SD card for a cell phone. The message ‘Phone Me — now!’ was not a request to make contact, but a direction to put the SD card into a smart phone.
Although he had acquired a 3G smart phone as a free upgrade when he had last renewed his cell phone contract, like many people of his age, Stone had little knowledge of the internal workings of his device. Apart from sending the occasional text messages and using a couple of pre-installed Apps to check on his emails, or play music while he was out running, he really only used his phone to make calls. Consequently, it took him a little while just to get the back cover off the device, and several more minutes to locate the correct slot for the SD card, but after that, things got a little easier. Although he had never noticed it before, right in the center of the screen was a familiar icon marked ‘My Files’ which, after several attempts, allowed him to view the contents of the SD card.