Ahead of his Time by Adrian Cousins (children's books read aloud .txt) 📕

“You fancy a bit of company tonight … y’know … comfort you like, after hearing the sad news about Patrick today?”

Paul looked past her as Barry Holland entered the bar and nodded at him. He pushed past Sandy and headed in Barry’s direction. “Piss off, Sandy,” he muttered.

“Fucking charming,” she threw back, but only in a whisper. She knew getting on the wrong side of Paul would be a huge mistake.

Paul grabbed Barry by the arm and led him to a free table near the window overlooking the car park. “What you got?” he hissed, still holding his arm tightly.

“You gonna get me a drink?” asked Barry, as he looked at Paul’s hand, which gripped his elbow. He realised he might be pushing his luck as Paul appeared not to be in the friendliest of moods tonight – not that he often was.

Paul leant towards his face and tightened his grip on his arm, digging his fingers into Barry’s skin. Barry winced.

“You can have your face rearranged if you want?”

Barry pulled his face away. “You’re hurting my arm.”

Paul yanked him back close. “What you got?”

Barry retrieved a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his black leather biker jacket and held it between his middle and index fingers as he offered it to Paul. Paul looked at the paper between his fingers and then back at Barry, arching his eyebrows.

“Couple of the guys have pulled a list together of owners of yellow MK3 Cortina’s in and around Fairfield. They’ve also narrowed it down to male owners between the ages of eighteen and sixty.”

Paul took the paper without taking his eyes off Barry and slipped it into his pocket. “Good, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” He pulled a ‘twenty’ out of his wallet and shoved it in the top zip pocket of Barry’s jacket. “Get me a pint while you’re at it and set them up.”

Barry moved off towards the bar, stopping only to tell two blokes to leave the pool table. The blokes told him to fuck off but, when Barry pointed in Paul’s direction, they calmly put their pool cues back in the rack and left the table with their game half-finished.

Paul grinned as he watched the two blokes move away from the pool table, then reviewed the piece of paper that detailed the addresses of twenty-eight yellow Cortina’s in Fairfield. “For fuck sake,” he muttered. Why did it have to be a popular car? This would have to be a scouting job for Andy. He’d have to miss school for a couple of days to scoot around this lot and check them out.

He made his way over to the pool table, feeling buoyed that he was making progress on the hunt for David’s killer. If he could pinpoint the bloke who did it, he would then become Ma’s favourite son.

“Sandy, don’t leave until I’m ready … it’s your lucky night, girl,” he called out to the table where Sandy was sitting with three other girls. All the girls looked up then giggled.

He picked up a queue off the rack and plucked up one of the blue chalks that were dotted around the edge of the table. He carefully chalked the end of the cue whilst Barry reset the balls. Sending the cue ball hurtling into the pack of balls, they scattered, and two spots and one stripe dropped into the pockets. The eight-ball bounced off two cushions and slowly made its way to one of the middle pockets. It teetered on the edge then dropped.

Paul booted the table, causing it to nudge a few inches. No one looked around as Paul took his frustration out as he smashed the cue into an empty pint glass. Everyone knew making eye contact with Paul at that precise moment would be an unhealthy mistake.

27

Uber

27th January 1977

As the week wore on, it panned out to be a vast improvement on the previous week. Martin had blown my world apart on that Sunday. Now I seemed to have reached the start of the rebuilding stage of my life after clearing away the debris of the fall-out of his arrival. My life was following a similar sequence of the events of the Bell Pub. The site had been cleared and made safe following the bombing, and now plans were in place to rebuild an even better one.

For most of my life, I’d followed the black and white rule, nothing in the middle, no grey areas. As far as I was concerned, everything had to have a slot to fit into, just like the school's office pigeon holes. Jenny had a clearer vision than me. I thought that perhaps she had some sixth sense which John claimed Frances possessed, and if she did, something was telling her to believe my stories of time-travel.

What I did know – even though Martin had those tattoos along with the bombing knowledge – it still wasn’t enough for most right-minded people to believe the unbelievable. I settled on that she did, in fact, have that sixth sense which told her to believe. Anyway, whatever it was, I could have kissed it, as my perfect life started to return to me.

The one issue that wasn’t improving was the situation with Jess. However, although she wasn’t my daughter, I would treat her as if she was and help her as much as I possibly could. I did venture into the Broxworth Estate on Tuesday evening. Jess said she’d seen the doctor, and they advised her the baby was fine but to be more careful and ensure she didn’t fall on the stairs again. Clearly, she was sticking to her decision not to tell anyone she’d been raped and had created a fall-on-the-stairs story. She was much brighter that evening, and although I wasn’t happy that she’d decided not to report the rape, I had to respect it. Knowing how the police viewed the Broxworth Estate’s residence, I could easily see