When Evil Wins Page 3

  “I know this builder geezer who is always on the lookout for scaffolding and stuff,” Darren said.

  “Where you going to get scaffolding from?” Jason asked, half curious.

  Darren pointed to the scaffold assembled up the side of the house at the end of the road they were now standing at.

  “You serious?” Jason said.

  “Yeah, man. It's easy. Just take some stuff from the top, no one will notice. Look, roll one more and I'll show you.”

  Jason got out his pouch and started rolling once more, finishing it quickly; rolling spliffs was something he could do in his sleep. They took it in turns to finish the joint and the muscles in their legs quivered slightly.

  “Okay, man,” Darren said, and after a long moment of mutual silence between the two pot-heads, he added, “I'll show you.”

  Turning slowly towards the house Darren felt as if his head was somehow catching up with where his mind was now facing.

  They managed to get over the wall that separated the end of Hartington Road from the main thoroughfare.

  “How d'you know no one's home?” Jason asked.

  “There’re no lights on,” Darren replied.

  “Oh yeah,” Jason agreed.

  They were both completely stoned and any old logic would do however flawed it was. They jumped over the second wall at the end of the cul-de-sac and walked unsteadily through the front gate of the house with the scaffolding, and along the path that ran down its side.

  Darren stumbled over the tool box which had been left earlier that day. Jason laughed as his friend fell into, and bounced out of, the sturdy short hedge lining the pathway.

  Darren looked at the box. “Look man, here's the tools I need,” he said.

  “What tools?”

  “The tools to get the pipes,” Darren clarified.

  “Oh,” Jason responded, not that bothered, as he had started listening to the music that was now playing in his head.

  Darren bent over, just about keeping himself from toppling forward on to the path, and opened the box's lid, all the equipment was there. He picked up a spanner and a ratchet from the box.

  “What you going to do now?” Jason said, noticing that Darren had a few things in his hands.

  “I'm going t' climb this ting and loosen some bolts, then you're going t' take the pipes and boards and put them on the ground.”

  Darren started his attempted climb of the scaffolding. Initially he couldn't get a grip, the spanner and ratchet in his hands stopping him. He tried holding both of the tools in his right hand but that didn't help at all. He swapped the tools to his left hand. Again there was no way to get a grip on the scaffold to lift himself up.

  Darren held the tools out in front of him puzzling over what to do. Then he laughed stuffing them into his jacket pockets. Slowly he made his way up the icy scaffolding.

  Once he had reached the penultimate platform before the top he looked down at Jason. “See. It's easy, man,” he called out, and as soon as he had uttered the words the planks he was standing on shifted suddenly. The structure slipped a fraction. Darren grabbed hold of one of the uprights and fortunately the platform stopped moving.

  “Okay. Are you ready?” Darren called to his mate on the ground, totally oblivious to what had just nearly happened.

  “Yeah. Ready when you are,” Jason called back.

  Darren removed the tools from his pocket and started to undo the bolts which held the upper most walkway in place.

  He pulled and tugged at the poles but nothing shifted. Darren moved along the wooden boards trying the same thing again and again on different joints holding the piping fast. Still he could not shift any of the metal tubes from their fixings.

  After Darren had tried the whole tier above him, and with no luck whatsoever, he decided he'd had enough. This was not going to be the way to make some easy money.

  Edging his way slowly back along the platform he made one final attempt at freeing the scaffold's tubing. The fixings seemed to unscrew easily enough but nothing was going to give him what he was after.

  Giving up he started to make his way down. Once on the bottom level he jumped to the ground, throwing the tools he had found into the nearby hedge.

  “Hey Jay,” Darren said, “think I'm going t' have t' find another way to get you the money. You skinning up another?”

  “Yeah,” Jason sighed, “Let’s get out of here first, though.”

  They walked from the base of the scaffolding out of the property's front gate and made their way back over the wall of the cul-de-sac.

  “You git,” said Jason, when they were on the main road. “You said you'd find a way to score.”

  “Jay, don't worry. I'll get enough money to score for this weekend.”

  The friends wandered around aimlessly eventually deciding the seafront would be a good place to go to finish Jason's stash.

  Chapter Five

  It was Saturday morning and Andrzej Malik turned his van into Hartington Road. He had started that much earlier so he could make sure everything would be completed by the end of the day. It was also bloody cold. Andrzej Malik consoled himself with the fact that it would have been much colder in Poland if he’d been out on a job there at this time of year.

  Andrzej mentally cursed his son for not being available. He could really have done with the help and as Janus was not here he was certain that he would need the whole day to complete the job.

  He didn't think that Janus turning up some time around one p.m. would really help at all; he would have finished all the heavy shifting the job required by then.

  Andrzej unloaded his toolbox from the van; he’d kept this particular toolbox since winning his first contract in the UK, it was a totem for him. He dumped the toolbox next to one of the vertical poles of the scaffold.

  Returning to his van he took a ladder from its roof, then carrying it through the gate to his client’s property, he positioned it against the first tier of the wooden and metal structure Regent Scaffolding had installed for him.

  Finally he collected a long rope from the back of the van and tied it to the lid of his toolbox; there was no way that he would be climbing the ladder with a toolbox in hand. He'd learnt from previous experience that this attitude was one for the suicidal, two hands were always better than one when climbing.

  Andrzej climbed the ladder to the first level of the platform, reeling out the rope as he did so. The scaffolding moved a fraction as he climbed, but this had happened on previous occasions and it didn't mean that much, this type of structure had to settle.

  He reached out for one of the poles to rest for a moment thinking that this job should have been his son’s. Touching the galvanized steel briefly he realised how cold it had been the previous night and reaching into his pockets Andrzej retrieved his gloves and put them on.

  He made his way further up the scaffolding, using the short ladders between each lift. Once at the top he took a closer look at the soil pipe, it was severely eroded, as he had suspected when he’d assessed the job the day before.

  Cast iron wasn't the right material for this job and no doubt this pipe was the original one that had been installed when the house had been built. The maintenance the outside had received was almost non-existent. It was no wonder things like the soil pipe needed to be replaced.

  Andrzej threaded the rope around the outside of the ledgers which made up the top tier's guard rail, ready to haul his toolbox to the top.

  Making sure his feet had a good grip on the boards he started to heave, lifting his tools from the ground. It was only when the toolbox was half way between himself and the ground that the previous evening's freezing temperatures and the work of the two pot-heads acted in unison forcing a sudden collapse of the scaffolding.

  The metal guard rail that Andrzej had been using as a pivot slipped down under the weight of the box, pushing one of the main uprights away from the rest of the scaffolding; its movement was eased by the lubricating ice and the lack of torque
in the bolts, which held together the spigots and clips of the scaffold.

  Andrzej let go of the rope but the inertia of the collapse paid no heed to the relief in the extra weight. The ledgers supporting the boards slid down the poles, their braces having been loosened; the platform that Andrzej stood on becoming an icy slope.

  Before he could do anything to stop himself he slipped backwards smashing the back of his head against the wall of the house, his feet shooting out from beneath him.

  As his lower back slid off the front of the short platform he reached up, attempting to grasp the horizontal tube that had made up the guard rail; his gloved hands made a tentative grip on the pole but the weather had done its worst and the ice on the tubing afforded him no hold whatsoever.

  He fell from the scaffolding feet first, the top half of his body being flipped forward as the lower half of his back lost contact with the wooden planks of the upper lift. He plummeted, face first, into the hedge that lined the side of the house below him with the bush's older and tougher branches piercing one of his arms and entering his right lung between the bones of his rib cage.

  The shrub’s sturdy resistance rolled him from its top and he landed on his back with a heavy thud, the metal of one of the scaffold's thick, sharp cornered, metal base plates tore through his jacket, cutting deeply into the bone of his shoulder blade.

  Though almost unconscious he was still aware of the sounds of clanging metal as other pipes of the scaffold fell to the ground around him.

  He opened his eyes afraid to move, not sure of the damage that had been done to his body by the fall. And as he did so, he glimpsed a large piece of piping falling through the air, spear like. The tube hit him, end first, pushing through his abdomen wall, taking out his left kidney as its weight propelled it into the ground beneath him.

  Now unconscious he was oblivious to the final damage the galvanized steel tube inflicted upon his torso.

  As it toppled over, to lie on the ground next to him, the end of the scaffold tube flicked upwards; his kidney and other parts of his innards were left dripping and exposed from the small circle at the end of the oversized pastry cutter as it eventually came to rest.

  Chapter Six

  Janus's alarm went off at seven fifteen, it was Saturday and he had to get ready to go to the spiritualist meeting and after that he would have to meet up with his father for a job in Hartingdon Road by one that afternoon.

  Although the meeting wasn't due to start until ten thirty, he’d set his morning call for seven fifteen to remind him to turn off his mobile phone and put his landline on mute; just to make sure his dad could not try and change his mind. He knew his father was very much against this type of thing.

  Janus arrived at the British Legion Rooms in Northview Drive, Westcliff; it was ten in the morning and he was thirty minutes early.

  This was the first time he’d decided to go to a meeting of this sort, without backing out at the last minute.

  Janus wasn't completely sure why he had so much reticence about going to meetings of this nature, but something had always stopped him in the past. It could be that he didn't want to end up with the thought that it was just a money spinner for con artists to take what they could from people in need. Or whether he would find out that there were other people like him and would have to explain to his dad that his mother had had a gift and he also had the same gift, or whether it was just the thought of upsetting his dad.

  Arriving early meant he would be able to choose his seat and when the hall was full he wouldn't be noticed, or so he thought.

  After handing his entrance ticket to the person on the door he was immediately directed to the room where the meeting was to be held.

  He was surprised; the outside of the building belied the fact that the room was not very large, not large at all in fact; its capacity being only about twenty to thirty people.

  Still, he stuck to his original plan and selected a seat near the back, next to the exit. If he felt this was going to be too much for him he could leave and hopefully not be noticed.

  As soon as he had taken his seat and within a very short few minutes the room gradually began to fill.

  He watched all the participants as they entered, interested in each and every person, and was struck by the fact that they all looked pretty much normal to him; there were the odd one or two who were dressed in what he could only call, an eccentric manner, but apart from that the majority of the attendees wouldn't have stuck out in any crowd.

  Within thirty minutes of his arrival the hall had filled to capacity and a door at the front of the hall opened. John Gill, the organiser and an ordinarily dressed, shortish man, with long and thinly sparsed lank hair entered the room and at that moment a hush descended over the audience.

  John Gill stepped up onto the small podium at the front of the hall, opposite the room’s entrance door at the back.

  “Good morning everyone, and thank you for coming,” John Gill started his address. “I see, yet again, we are full to capacity,” he said looking appreciatively at the crowd. “For those of you who are here for the first time let me say this; we here at 'The Workings of the Spirit' do not believe that one’s spirit and one’s personal belief system are necessarily the same thing.

  “Even without religion it is possible to be spiritual, but the both are also not mutually exclusive. Whichever faith you follow is, in our minds, your choice and separate from the natural spirituality of the self, if you want it to be.

  “We have no rituals and are not directed by any dogma. You believe what you believe, you see what you see and you are what you are. As Nelson Mandela once put it 'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate… but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

  “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?’ and in this vein we in The Workings of the Spirit carry on.

  “Today we have an interesting, to say the least, programme of speakers. We have a publisher whose interest in spiritualism is not unknown; we have a freelance writer who specialises in psychology and will demonstrate in his talk, the reasons why spiritualism should be dismissed.” At this point of John Gill’s introduction there was a collective gasp from the audience.

  “Hold on a minute, people,” John Gill said holding up his hand. “I have not finished. And he will explain the reasons why we should believe in spiritualism. We are not a church and we should welcome all points of view. Let me say one thing, Jim Hapstread has not come to any conclusions, he has been invited to present his work for you to determine its conclusions.” John Gill paused for a moment, letting the audience settle.

  “Finally we have Tony Stockwell who will be performing a short demonstration of mediumship and then, private readings a bit later on.

  “Please remember, in the time we have he can't see everyone, so what I would suggest is that those of you who have not had a reading before, please approach him, for those that have, please allow the people who are here for the first time to get a chance.

  “And now I would like you to show your appreciation as I invite Richard Jameson of Richard Jameson Publishing to the stage.” John Gill waved Richard Jameson onto the podium and the audience clapped. The tall besuited man, almost military in his posture, with greying short cropped brown hair, and serious eyes, took his position on the stage.

  “Thank you, John Gill, and thank you also,” Richard Jameson said indicating the audience. “I think I have been invited here today as an affirmation that not all business people are dismissive of the possibility that there may be something other, something more than the line our mainstream scientists insist upon.

  “My company, R.J. Publishing, has a solid track record in publishing the works of what mainstream scientists would determine as, crazy and misdirected people. But in my experience when I see the scholars that produce these ‘misdirected’ works, and read their outcomes, I am certain that not everyt
hing in this world is adequately explained.

  “Obviously, on occasions, I do come across the odd lunatic, but in the main the papers which are submitted to me to publish have a real grounding in scientific study. And I pride myself on getting this information into the public domain. It is all too often that works of this nature are covered up and dismissed. We all ought to be more open to the fact that science, as we know it, is very young in comparison to man’s existence on this planet.

  “I find it phenomenally hard to believe that healing as it is, we are told, has only come into existence since the late eighteenth century or so. I ask myself; what happened before? How did humankind survive and why are the beliefs that still exist in small pockets of society, in this twenty first century, still pertinent to those communities even now?

  “My answer is simple; they do work. Perhaps not on all occasions, much like today’s medicines, but in the main they have and still do.

  “I say to myself; why is it that today’s corporations want to erase any wisdom that is not of their own making? And to my mind, the answer is clear; it’s pure greed. They can’t accept that there is another way and because another way can’t be proven conclusively by today’s scientific standards, then that is that.

  “But behind this dismissive philosophy, I believe, there is something much more simple; it is a fear of this ‘other way’. It’s becoming abundantly clear that, in this day and age, these dismissive corporations try to curtail this older knowledge by hiding behind science or, even, hiding behind the mainstream religions that have made it their unwritten goal to eradicate anything that does not conform to their scriptures. These companies know that if they don’t do this then they’ll lose out because it’s something they can’t control; there will be no money in it for them, because the other way is prior art and in patent terms this means no revenue.

  “Never do these corporations think that the science they believe in, has not yet attained the level to perform to the degree, what I would call the old science, has achieved over the many millennia it has been in use.