Parallel Lives Chapter 5

By mid afternoon Jack found himself at a loose end. He’d made all the calls he needed to make and was now awaiting call backs from the various companies and agencies he had contacted. As expected, the Health and Safety man had given the go-ahead for the site to be cleared but had requested that Jack visit his office to finalise some details later in the week, leaving his mobile phone number on a business card for Jack.

Contacting the hospital he learned that the injured fitter was still stable, but was expected to be taken to the operating theatre later in the day for more surgery. He also learned that the hospital expected to keep John in for another night, for observation. Taking the opportunity he decided that a drive to John’s place in the daylight would give him a breath of fresh air, as he expected to be working late once the tenders for the contracts started to roll in.

*

Finding the house in daylight proved even easier than Jack expected. The hassle the previous evening seemed to revolve around a single wrong turning a couple of streets away that had been compounded by the dark and dreary weather. Opening the door, Jack was not greeted by the cat immediately, as he had been the night before, mainly because he had closed the internal doors carefully behind him on leaving, trapping the cat in the kitchen. Nevertheless, the cat was reasonably unperturbed by the closed off regions, probably due to the cat flap located in the kitchen entrance. How much of the intervening period the cat had spent in this house Jack was unsure, however it had clearly eaten all of the food left out and was keen to repeat the exercise. After placing the food down, Jack left the cat to it’s feeding and, as the night before, retraced his steps through the living room. He wasn’t sure if it was simply the notebook lying open on the floor where it had fallen that caught his attention, or the particular word that sat about a quarter of the way down the left hand page that made him pick it up.

…again. Today we had a new maintenance manager start, only he wasn’t new to me. I remember him as Jack Whincup, but he introduced himself as Jack Howells. Seems a reasonable bloke, as he used to be when I knew him before, but I don’t think he took on-board all that I said about the boiler house. He promised to look into the safety systems, but I guess this is his first day or so, and it will probably get forgotten. I’ll keep on at him until the system is improved.

The date was the date of Jack’s arrival on the site just over a year ago. But that wasn’t what bothered him. It was the reference to Whincup, the name his mother revealed as being that of his father only four months earlier, that caught his eye and imagination. How could John know that name? Jack doubted if anyone in the firm knew it, he wasn’t local and had made few friends amongst his colleagues. His mother had only mentioned it because she thought she had been dying, and saw it as his right to know who his father was, finally. The odds against anyone guessing the name were too great to contemplate. Scooping up the notebook, Jack resolved to try and find out where John could have obtained that information. Leaving the house secured he drove back to the factory and an evening of phone calls and planning.

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Copyright Ray Sullivan 2011

The characters, places and events described in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, places or events, past or present, is coincidence.  All rights reserved

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