“We’re beautiful, we’re young, we’re sexy and we’re in love,” I said to Patsy, who was lying in bed beside me, relaxing after our lovemaking.
“I should be ecstatically happy, having fallen head over heels for you,” she replied. “My goodness, Matt how do you come to be such a fantastic lover? I knew you were well endowed, but you know exactly how to give a woman exquisite pleasure. How do you do it?”
“Natural talent I suppose. I’ve always been good at sex.”
It was true. Even though I say it myself, I reckon I am some kind of sex god, so many women have told me that I can satisfy them in ways that lesser men can only dream about.
“God, Matt, now you’ve stirred me up like this, I can’t ever imagine being content with anyone else. It’s so terrible to think that we can’t be together, just because I’m married to a rich old man.”
“Sure, it’s a problem,” I agreed, frowning. “Are you sure about that prenuptial agreement you signed? I thought they didn’t work in England.”
“Oh, John has the best lawyers,” she muttered gloomily, winding a tress of my hair around her finger as she kissed me again. “If I divorce him I doubt if I’d get a penny.”
“Hmm.” I swivelled my legs off the bed to the ground and looked at my own body, my perfect muscles, my six-pack, my toned muscular legs and what was between them, that was even now stirring into life after having made love to Patsy three times already. I glanced in the bedside mirror and wondered if other men found it hard to believe how handsome they were, as I often did. One girlfriend had described me as a ‘flawed Adonis’ whatever that means.
“Have you ever had a job, Matthew?” she asked me.
“Well now and then I’ve tried to earn a living,” I admitted. “But I’m more into expressing myself, doing my own thing, you know? Women have always told me that I’m very good at pleasing them, and that can be a full-time job.”
“So you’re a gigolo.” She slapped my shoulder as we got dressed. “I know you’ve been with a lot of women. But that’s going to stop now you’ve met me, isn’t it?”
“Of course, Patsy, of course.”
Lying was easy. I’d had a lifetime’s practice.
She kissed me again, and I felt that glorious stirring sensation and realised that soon we’d be making love again.
“Wait a minute, I’ve just had an idea.” I said afterwards, when both of us were feeling utterly and totally satisfied.
“What?”
“I’ll pretend to kidnap you. We get a huge one-off payment from John and use it to start a new life on the other side of the world.”
“It would never work. John would never fall for it.”
“He would if we made it convincing.” I was warming to the subject. “You forget, I know a lot about police work. We tell him that if he doesn’t pay you’ll be killed, within three days, something like that. You can talk to him on the phone, scream and shout, sound terrified for your life. This will work. I’m sure it’ll work.”
So that’s what we decided to do. Quite a simple idea, but obviously fraught with problems, but I was certain that if we could convince him that Patsy’s life was in deadly danger he’d pay anything. After all, he was a multimillionaire, his family would already be a target for kidnappers. Patsy had been hesitant at first, but once she came round to the idea, she became as excited as I was about it. She practised sounding terrified, begging him not to call the police and to pay all the money at once. Telling her husband that she was being held in terrible conditions, that her captor was threatening to cut off her finger to send to John, if he messed us around.
The problem for a kidnapper is always the difficulty of getting the money. I demanded cash in used notes, random numbers. Insist on several drop-off points that are changed three or more times right up to the point of delivery.
We decided to make him travel to Cornwall, to have the money delivered there, as various drop-off points were relatively easy to find.
And it all worked out fine. I couldn’t believe it was happening, it almost seemed too easy. Sir John Brodrick, Director of Brodrick Pharmaceuticals, had truly believed that his lovely young wife had been captured by criminals, who were threatening to kill her, were already torturing her, and would stop at nothing! Patsy’s screams for mercy almost convinced me that she was in pain, she was that good!
After all the kerfuffle of phone calls from Sir John, using mobile phones I’d left at the two decoy drop-off locations, and giving him instructions of the final drop-off point – an abandoned mineshaft in Cornwall, accessible by only one road, he genuinely believed that if anyone returned to the place after they’d left the case of money, Patsy would have her throat cut.
I went to the mineshaft, climbed down into the mine and collected the case, opened the lid and saw the lovely piles of tightly packed banknotes, before quickly shutting it up and grabbing it and climbing up the steps to the surface.
But as I climbed up, I saw someone coming down. Suddenly I felt giddy and weak, as if my legs were going to give way.
“Who the fuck are you?” I yelled at the man.
But I already knew who it was.
It was him!
I recognised the man who was approaching me as the man I’d often seen on television, Sir John Brodrick himself.
Yet, no, it couldn’t be! He’d promised me that he believed Patsy would be murdered if he came back to the drop-off point.
“Mr Drax?” Sir John said pleasantly. “I suggest you sit down.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I blustered on, but felt my legs wouldn’t hold me up any longer, and I sank down onto the nearest pile of stones. “Patsy’s is going to be killed, I warned you . . .”
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he said calmly, looking at me with disdain. “I never believed a word of it. I know Patsy. Unfortunately, I now know what she’s capable of.”
“God.” I couldn’t think of what to say, what to do.
But Sir John seemed quite calm and casual about everything. “Did you realise that my pharmaceutical company has one of the largest R and D departments in the world? Sadly the facts are that we develop a great many new drugs that we’re never allowed to actually use. A cure for cancer that causes a massive heart attack. An antidepressant that makes you so happy that you’re likely to jump out of a window and believe you can fly. Drugs are wonderful, but they can also be dreadfully harmful. These are obvious extremes but there are a great many other examples of drugs that do a great job, but unfortunately have such bad side effects they can never be used. One example is Roblinco, which is absorbed through the skin, by contact alone, the drug that I soaked into the handle of the bag you were so keen to take away. It’s nominally a truth drug, but as anyone will tell you there’s no such thing. But there are drugs that relax you so much that you can’t be bothered to lie. You’ve absorbed a substantial amount of it already.”
“Fuck.”
“So now you must tell me where my wife is.”
“Get stuffed.” However, as he’d predicted, for some reason I found that I just couldn’t lie, was babbling like a baby, telling him everything. I gave him directions to the nearby hotel where we were staying.
He nodded sadly.
“Dear me. Dear me. Well, what I didn’t tell you, Mr Drax, is that the drug you’ve ingested actually has a number of other rather unfortunate side-effects. It accelerates the aging process. Within a few days your face will develop folds and wrinkles and pouches that will age your features by about 40 years. Your hair will fall out, as will your teeth. Instead of being remarkably handsome as you are now, you will become hideous. Your muscles will lose their strength and in a week’s time you will barely be able to walk at all.”
I couldn’t reply. I tried to swallow, but even making that effort was more than I could manage.
He stood up and began to walk away. “By the way, only the top layer of those banknotes is genuine, the ones underneath are just pieces of paper. It amounts to a few hundred quid. You’ll probably need it to live on, it’s doubtful you’ll ever be able to earn a living.”
“God, what’s going to happen to me?” I asked him. “Will I die?”
“Gracious no, I doubt it. You’ll just become an extremely ugly, repellent old man. A case of what’s inside coming out, eh? Oh and there is one other thing.”
He’d reached the stairway. “Did you know that the drug Viagra is a vasodilator? Means that it opens up the peripheral blood vessels to allow greater blood flow to the penis. Roblinco has the exact opposite effect. It restricts blood flow to the extremities, and its effects are irreversible. From now on you’ll be completely impotent.”
“But, but. . .”
“Goodbye Mr Drax.” He smiled, and his many white teeth made him look like a crocodile. “You’ll never have another erection in your life.”