THE SHADOW

Was his mother a victim of Mr Hunt when she was a schoolgirl, or was it just a tale she told?

The offices of Hunt’s Paper Mill were almost noisy with silence as Oliver crept, trying to be as much like a shadow as his own shadow would permit, to the tiny partitioned-off space at one end of a sprawling office, a fragment of space that Mr Hunt called his own.

Oliver was on a mission. Self-appointed, that much was true, but a mission none-the-less.

It all stemmed from the one and hopefully only meeting he’d recently had with his birth-mother. He thought her as that because she hadn’t been around in his for most of his memory and he found a great deal of the early interactions a mother has with her son to be lost, possibly eradicated by time somewhere in a vacuum inside his head. He had forgotten, either as a result of trauma or as one of the oddities of human memory, just about everything about the first five years of his life.

Though he did remember the day his dad’s body had been found. And the day his head had been injured when Jocelyn (foster-mother supreme) had been murdered. But they had been traumatic days and unlikely to be ever forgotten.

When he thought about it seemed that a great deal of his formative life’d had to do with murder. Maybe that’s why he had forgotten the woman who had ejected him into the world almost eighteen years earrlier. Maybe it was all to do with death.

He’d been working in the Paper Mill offices for almost a year when he’d appointed himself the task of proving, once and for all, that his mother was a truthful woman or, as he preferred to think, a fantasist.

“The odd thing is,” she had told him sadly, “that you’re going to work for Cyril Hunt and he was the very man who should have known better when I was fourteen.”

Something about the way she had said that had sent a chill through him until its icy tip touched his heart. He knew all about the way some young girls can be manipulated by perverse men, he’d read the papers, watched the television news ... he’d even read about how a lovely young girl might be groomed until she believes with all her heart that the man who has insinuated himself into her life really loves her. Until she’s a willing partner in his greed. Until her life is his for the taking, her virginity, more morals, her all.

He hated the thought of it.

And here was his own mother, a proven killer, the woman who had stolen his father from him, implying that she’d been abused like this. Implying that it was that very abuse that had turned her from the sweet and innocent young lass that she’d been before he appeared on the scene into a cynical manipulator. Into, in fact, a murderess quite willing to wipe out a life, even a loved life, if it got in her way.

The two didn’t quite add up in his mind, especially as it transpired (and was this fact or fiction?) that he’d unwittingly and unknowingly taken a job with the very man who had been the cause of all the mayhem in her life. According to her, that is. Why had she mentioned him? Was it all a jailbird’s ploy to earn his trust?

She’d shown him a photograph, and it was certainly of Mr Hunt, a much younger and smiling Mr Hunt but Mr Hunt none-the-less, and his mother with light in her eyes and laughter on her young schoolgirl lips … and a rather large badly-camouflaged spot blooming on chin.

“I was sure I loved him and he loved me,” she whispered on that one occasion when they had met. “Men like Cyril Hunt can make a girl feel like that...”

And later, “It was rowing about him that forced me to do what I did to your father...”

And that was why he was like a shadow in the offices, a silent all-seeing shadow. He was looking for evidence.

He wasn’t sure what the evidence would prove or even consist of, just that he wanted to find it.

So he’d hidden in the toilets until everyone had gone home, remaining motionless in the encroaching dark, and then become the shadow, drifting here and there in search of this or that. A piece of paper here, a scribbled note there, that might tie Mr Hunt and his wretched mother together in her teenage years.

He kew it was likely to be a tall order, but even tall orders sometimes need to be found.

His problem was, he rather liked Mr Hunt. Mr Hunt had given him a job when work was a scarce commodity and unemployment was soaring. True, Mr Hunt was a distant individual who kept himself to himself in his partitioned-off mini-office and rarely interfered with what his employees did as long as they did their work reasonably well, but he could have been a great deal worse. He could have been a predator.

What he didn’t seem to be, so far as Oliver could tell, was anything like the beast his mother had described.. There were women in the office … the girl who wheeled the tea-trolley through the factory came to mind, the one who looked as if she might be pretty with her startling blue eyes if only she did something about herself… he didn’t know what that something should be, just that it must be there to be done. No, Mr Hunt didn’t seem to attract any special attention from anyone, male or female, and Oliver knew that he had some photos on his desk, in an electronic photo-frame that cycled through half a dozen treasured images, of his wife a children.

And that wife was a beauty, even now that she was middle-aged, Oliver had seen the pictures during his successful interview for the job, and it seemed to be beyond belief that a sensible man would risk losing such a woman for the fickle attentions of a fourteen year-old school girl with (he had to admit it), with spots.

Mr Hunt’s office, according to a cursory inspection by the shadow, was immaculately spartan. The desk was clear with the exception of that electronic photo-frame (switched off), there were no pictures on the wall that might add a homely or even a clinical touch, not even a calendar. It was as if the room had never been occupied.

“So what do we have here?” came a voice from the doorway, a sudden sound that completely cowered the shadow. Oliver paused in mid-motion, half way between one step and the next.

It was Mr Hunt, more silent than the shadow, more stealthy, more angry.

“I think you owe me an explanation, Bramwell!” he barked, that voice shattering the last remnants of shadowy silence.

© Peter Rogerson 11.01.17