4th May 2013.
Hello everyone,
This chapter is retrospective, it flips back one day to Saturday, the day before Rose met up with Miles at his flat and it describes the lead up to Max’s overdose. You are also going to find out, finally, who commissioned the photographs and why. You will find this out via Max’s POV, as he reflects on the past eighteen months and writes up the sequence of events leading to him handing the photographs over to Miles.
As with the previous two chapters, I am dedicating this chapter to a Wattpad author whose work I particularly enjoy. This time it is FlorenceBlack, for her book “Never-Man.” The heroine is 25 year old Aria, a high-flying lawyer who at the start of the book has the perfect life which then starts to unravel. She is a really sassy young woman and I have laughed out loud at some of her reflections and dealings with the men in her life. Florence Black hasn’t posted a chapter for a while, but I hope we can persuade her to update soon!
The previous day:
Serge:
Late Friday evening, Serge had got the confirmation he had dreaded. A cctv camera close to the restaurant where he had taken Rose had caught a car going in the direction of the restaurant at 10pm and returning at 11.15pm. The description matched that provided by a neighbour of the restaurant, a credible witness, who, hearing of the incident had offered the information to the police as he had seen a car parked outside his house at the critical hours. He had been suspicious of it because the owner had remained inside for so long and had noted the car details. The police now knew the registered car owner was Irena Kupetsky, Serge’s ex-wife.
Serge had already made some phone calls and found out, eventually, that she had given her family and the medics the slip and entered the UK well over a year ago. In fact, all the time he had been led to believe she had been in Russia under the watchful eyes of her relatives, she had been travelling all over the world. They had done everything to stop him finding out because they were scared he would refuse to pay her divorce settlement. Now that she had that massive amount of money at her disposal she could do anything she wanted and pay for anything she needed - a thought that made Serge break out in a sweat.
The police had tried to locate her but to no avail so far. She had not returned to her rented London flat where the car was registered although there was still a fair amount of her possessions there. One item they had found was a cardboard folder, stuffed away behind a wardrobe, full of newspaper articles and photographs. They had brought them to Serge for him to look at. And it was because of what he saw in the file that he now had a constant nervous, nagging feeling in his gut. The clippings had included ones of him and Rose when they had been going out together, ones of Rose and Miles together and then lots of articles detailing with the split of Miles and Rose. The most recent one was the photo from Pink! of Rose holding Lloyd. To Serge’s surprise, there had been several in there of Irena with Max Whitlock – the poses suggested they had been close, intimate possibly.
Serge knew Irena was calculating and could be pathologically vicious; drug abuse had added to the paranoia she suffered as part of the schizophrenia. She had stalked him in Russia he was certain now that she was doing it again. What bothered him more though was whether she would extend her stalking and paranoiac behaviour to those he loved. His public engagement to Rose must have infuriated her. Would she start harassing Rose? Had she already started following her? Serge wondered if she had engineered, in some way, the split between Rose and Miles with the help of Max. If Max had fallen in with Irena it would explain the substance abuse; Serge would bet that Irena had taken every opportunity to surreptitiously ply Max with drugs in order to get her own way; she had been caught doing the same at a previous rehab clinic in an effort to escape. For those who were not wise to Irena’s deviousness she would come across as entirel plausible, no matter what mischief she was up to.
He knew he must warn Rose and possibly Miles too, but he wasn’t certain what the best way to do it was. The police said they could do very little to protect Rose as no actual threat had been made; as he pondered the best way to go about it he cursed, again, the day he set eyes on his ex-wife.
Max:
Max tapped away at the laptop that had been provided by the clinic. He couldn’t rationalise why he felt such a sense of urgency to get this statement completed but he just did. It had been at the back of his mind for some time that he should formally record everything that he and Irena had done but actually doing it seemed such an effort when he was so sick and physically weak. And also, he knew that by doing it he would have to face up to the devastation he had wreaked on the lives of Miles, Rose and their families and Max had never been good at owning up to failure or dealing with guilt.
But now there just seemed to be some extra kind of momentum compelling him to get on with it.
Helen’s visit yesterday had reinforced this feeling; she had told him that when she had felt low following the death of Alistair, her husband, she had found it helped to keep a diary. In it, she had told him, she had confided all her thoughts, and exactly how she was feeling even in her blackest hours. It had been a cathartic exercise, helping to work through the grief and loneliness she had felt and also, it had given her something to do.
Max didn’t want to dwell on what Helen would think if she knew what it was he was writing down. But she was no fool, when she told Max that Miles had made contact with Rose and Lloyd she had seemingly casually, yet with a sharp and direct look at him, said that she wished she knew what had split them up in the first place.
Helen had, as always, been kind and loving to Max, holding him in her arms for a long time, anxious to be reassured that he was getting the best treatment and that he should look after himself. When he had broken down in tears, she had waited patiently for him to regain some composure and held him tenderly like a mother would for a son. In fact she had always been like a mother to him, her love for him was unconditional. And look at the way he had repaid her, by trying to ruin her son’s life by splitting him up from the woman he loved and almost preventing him from knowing his own baby son.
If something happened to him, then how would the truth ever be known? He wanted to make sure that the truth was recorded for Miles, Rose, Helen, Fran and baby Lloyd too. And, if in the process, he could cause some trouble for that mad cow Irena Kupetsky, then more to the good.
He had always known the extent of the debt he was in and that the interest on it was spiralling every day, but he had been in denial about it for months. Fran had begged him to settle and finally he had started to do so; he’d authorised his accountant to start selling his stocks and bonds and liquidating assets until the amount owed was paid in full. Bill Campbell had recommended a firm of solicitors to handle the payments for him.
The thought of the huge dent this would make in his capital scared and angered him; but part of the treatment at Oaklands, through intensive cognitive therapy, was to encourage him to take responsibility for his own actions. Fran had hinted at prosecution and that had focused his mind; he had no intentions of going to prison especially not for that bitch Irena. He would pay his debts and start afresh and he would do whatever it took to get himself off the hook with Miles and Rose. He had opted out of paying his debts because he felt that they should be paid for him, that Miles owed him, that Setons owed him and was also aggrieved that money promised to him by Irena had not materialised. He was slowly coming to terms with the irrefutable fact that he had been well and truly used by her. Originally he had hoped that Miles would bail him out as soon as he and Francesca were married. Their split had infuriated him and it was that fury that had helped to blind him to Irena’s madness.
So yesterday Max sat down at his desk and forced himself to start writing. First he just put down everything he could remember as soon as he remembered it. The impact of drugs and alcohol had shredded his short term memory and trying to remember the events sequentially was not possible. Once he thought he had remembered almost all the key events he started to edit and move them around into a logical timeline. It took an incredible amount of concentration and energy. This was his second day of non-stop writing and he reckoned he could finish the statement by early evening as long as he didn’t let up. He had already made an appointment to see Dr. Mike Jones at 6pm and he intended to present him with a hard copy of it for safe keeping.
He recorded everything. How he had first met Irena in a clinic similar to Oaklands and enjoyed her company. She was wealthy, witty and beautiful but like himself she had problems with addiction. Unknown to him at that time, she also had very serious mental health issues and was failing to maintain her drug regime for controlling it. As they went about their treatments she told him all about her husband Serge Kupetsky and how he had had her locked up in an institution in Eastern Europe whilst he conducted a series of affairs the latest of which had been to a Rose Pendry.
Irena had hissed out Rose’s name and when she found out that Max not only knew her but that his best friend was engaged to her she clearly thought that the Fates had delivered Max up to her. He had let slip that he had been hoping for a marriage between his sister Francesca and Miles but that as soon as he had met Rose, Miles became completely besotted with her. Irena had eagerly leapt on this and talked about it incessantly, twisting it so that Max himself started to feel a cancerous resentment against Rose for destroying his plan to have Miles bail him out of his debts. Irena tried to persuade Max that he should expose her as a serial adulteress and gold-digger to Miles as an act of kindness.
Max not only became smitten with Irena but became more and more dependent on her too for drugs and alcohol. She maintained a pretence of detoxing but in fact was not only being supplied whilst at the clinic but was herself supplying other patients. Eventually she was found out and asked to leave; she insisted that Max went with her. He wondered now, exactly what drugs she had given him. He was certain she must have been spiking his food and drink as had never been quite this sick in all his previous detoxes and he knew from the medicals he had undertaken at Oaklands that he had done more damage to his liver and other organs in the last eighteen months than on all his previous binges combined.
Once out of the clinic they had lived the high life to an extent that Max had never experienced before; he took longer and longer breaks from work. Irena was as crazy about gambling as he was and boy did they indulge themselves. But there was still one thing that obsessed her above all – Serge. Plotting revenge on him and the women he had betrayed her with, particularly Rose. Max meanwhile became totally addicted to Irena and to their life together. Now that he was able to reflect a little more rationally he could see that he had mistaken possessiveness and paranoia for love. She was a control freak and totally unable to accept the fact that Serge had left her. Off his head with drugs, and intoxicated by her attention and their lifestyle he readily fell in with her plans and believed her vitriol against Rose was justified.
His gambling bills reached astronomical levels and again, now, he realised that he must have been set up by her. She needed him to be completely in her control so that she could execute her plan against Rose. He went through a run of terrible luck and was goaded by her into playing higher and higher stakes and he was certain she had used her contacts in amongst the owners of the casinos to pit him against expert, professional gamblers with whom he would have had no chance.
The casino owners in Vegas knew her money was good; at that point she was not quite divorced but the divorce settlement was going to be huge. She told Max that if he helped her in her plans to expose Rose and set her up so that Miles left her, she would pay off all his gambling debts and as a gesture of goodwill she had written an enormous cheque in advance. He had agreed. She cared only that Rose must suffer; she persuaded Max that if Rose had not come on the scene, Francesca would have married Miles and Max would have been financially secure and would have been able to negotiate for a larger share of Setons.
In his statement he provided the details of their scam; how they had employed someone to work undercover as a maid for Miles and Rose and paid her to steal and photograph clothes, jewellery and shoes belonging to Rose so that copies could be made and the originals returned. The replicas helped make the photographs authentic; the maid had also copied diaries and calendars so that they always knew well in advance, the arrangements for Rose’s business trips so that Max and Irena could organise photo shoots at the exact same destinations and could arrange to accidentally “bump” into her, as Max did in Vegas.
Irena insisted that she would be photographed as Rose. Max had been dubious, he thought this was a lack of judgement and that the whole scam might collapse but as usual he totally underestimated Irena’s attention to detail and her determination to destroy her one time rival. There was a fleeting resemblance between the two women and Max had indeed wondered if Serge consciously or unconsciously sought out women who reminded him of his wife. Irena mysteriously disappeared for two to three weeks and when she returned she was recovering from cosmetic surgery. She looked uncannily like Rose.
He remembered that he did feel vaguely uneasy about this but he was not in a fit mental or physical state himself to properly think through the implications of her behaviour and actions and his role in their scam. Now of course, he knew that Irena was seriously sick and had suffered from schizophrenia most of her life. Then, he did not know that.
They hired models to act in the photographs with Rose and employed some of the best professional photographers they could find; Irena’s attention to detail meant that she would check out at huge length whether the people they employed knew or were likely to have come across Rose and diplomatically sift them out if they did.
Then Max had presented the photographs to Miles. He and Irena had rehearsed for days on end, exactly what he would say to Miles; he had started dropping hints to him about Rose and as soon as he had got Miles completely irritated, he presented him with the evidence, the photographs.
Max could remember clearly, Miles’s face when he saw them. He had turned green and almost swayed. His face was an awful mixture of betrayal, misery and disbelief. For the first time, Max felt a pricking of his conscience; a realisation that this was not just a game to the victims but a life-changer. When he showed Miles the photographs of him and Rose making love they had had a terrible fight. Miles had hit him in the gut, hard and Max, not up to his normal fitness and strength had fallen over, unable to fight back. At one point Miles had had him up against the wall with his hands around his neck and for a short period Max had thought that he was actually going to kill him. Instead he had let go and ordered him out of his office and out of his sight.
As far as Irena was concerned the scam had gone brilliantly. Miles had believed the photographs and Irena had revelled in the scandal. She bought and read every paper and magazine that published details of their split. The more she read about Rose’s unhappiness and Mile’s condemnation of her the happier she felt. But as soon as Rose’s pregnancy was made public there was a subtle change in Irena’s behaviour. Max could tell she was torn between a gloating pleasure that Rose would be a single mother and her child a bastard and a brooding jealousy of the fact that Rose was going to have a baby by the man she loved, something that had been denied Irena when she was married to Serge. She had even started to fantasise that Lloyd was Serge’s child.
It was also around about this time that she had started to become physically and mentally abusive to Max; at first, when the scam had worked she had been almost tender with him; but then it was as if he had played his part and she had done with him. She started to threaten him with all kinds of retribution if he confessed what they had done. And then one day she had just disappeared. He came home one evening and she had gone; all her possessions, her car and no forwarding address or messages. She changed her phone number too.
He heard via the newspapers and gossip that she had got her divorce but he hadn’t seen or heard from her now for months. The money she had promised him never materialised and instead he was left saddling not only his huge gambling bills but ones that she too had run up on his account. He still felt nervous about her even though he had not seen her for a while. Part of the reason he was writing the statement was as a precaution in case something did happen to him. Now that he could see more clearly how sick she really was and how devious, he was worried not only that she might still be pursuing her vendetta against Rose, but that she might also see him as too great a threat and find some way of harming him.
When the statement was finished, he printed it, saved it to a USB stick which he then hid, slid it into the envelope that had been provided by Reception and made his way to Mike Jones’s office.
Once the envelope was safely locked up in the safe belonging to Mike Jones and Max had returned to his room he felt an overwhelming tiredness come over him. The effort of the writing had exhausted him. He rolled into bed and napped and lost track of time. He was woken up once, in the early evening, by the nurse. She had roused him and appeared concerned at his tiredness. She refreshed the water and juice in his room and encouraged him to finish an energy drink she provided him with. She sat next to him whilst he swallowed his daily pills; he was gradually being weaned off the high dosage of prescription pills that he had been popping for the last couple of years. He still felt incredibly dozy and decided to carry on napping for a little while longer before calling for a tray of supper in his room. He was surprised that the nurse remained sitting next to him whilst he dropped off, but in a way it was comforting.
When he next woke up, he was completely disorientated. He thought he could hear somebody in the room but when he tried to sit up he was unable to, his limbs felt so heavy. Dear god, what had happened to him, he suddenly panicked thinking perhaps he had had a stroke. His mouth felt really strange too; he tried to shout and realised that his lips were stuck together, they must have dried out in the heat of the room, he needed water. Quickly he realised that actually his lips were literally stuck together – there was tape over them. A wave of fear passed through him. When he tried to focus, the room went up and down and round and round as if he was on a fairground ride. He could only see everything was in double vision. He started hyperventilating and his heart beat so fast that he thought he would have a heart attack; maybe that was the point, something in his brain warned him. He tried to calm himself, taking slower, deeper breaths and counting his heart beats.
“It was the pills and the drink,” he suddenly thought. He had been drugged, and he instinctively knew he was right. Either the nurse had done it unknowingly and under instructions or she had been paid to do it. He could hear again in his memory, Irena’s laugh when she explained to him that everybody, everybody, has a price. Irena was trying to kill him and there was nothing he could do about it, he was as helpless as a baby. As helpless as baby Lloyd, he suddenly thought. And as he drifted off, he thought of Miles’s son, Helen’s grandson and prayed that he would be kept safe from Irena’s evil. Briefly he came around again and saw an angel watching over him. Was it truly an angel? No, of course, it was Rose. She looked gorgeous. Serene and kind and she was smiling at him. She must have forgiven him. “Rose, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry” he tried to say, but the tape over his mouth stopped him. She smiled kindly at him and held her finger to her lips, encouraging him to stay silent. Gently, she planted a kiss on his forehead as tears streamed down his face. Max fell into a deep sleep. He didn’t feel the tape being removed from his mouth.
Dr Mike Jones:
As a medic, Mike relied on his knowledge, skills and intelligence which were all pretty formidable. But occasionally he was influenced by what in layman’s terms might be referred to as “gut feelings.” When he analysed why it was that he was unable to focus on completing his paperwork late that evening he decided that it was Max Whitlock’s visit that had unsettled him.
He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and went through the details of Max’s visit again. He couldn’t really isolate any one incident that concerned him. Max had brought a sealed envelope to the meeting and asked him to keep it safe for him. He said that if anything should happen to him at the clinic it must be given to Bill Campbell, his sister’s fiancée who was also, he revealed to Mike, the corporate lawyer for Setons.
Mike Jones had appraised Max’s appearance; he had improved since he had first arrived but he looked ill and years older than a man in his mid-thirties. He knew that Max was responding well to the treatment and that the regular contact from his family would be helping that too. Francesca Whitlock had been in constant contact with Max and with the clinic and he knew that Max had received a visitor yesterday; he had seen them walking in the gardens, deep in conversation; a beautiful and charming woman who he had been told was Helen Seton, mother of Miles Seton.
He had also been informed confidentially by Miss Whitlock that she had good reason to suspect that Max may have attracted unpleasant attention due to his gambling debts; she had said they were dealing with it best they could but nevertheless she was keen that the clinic knew that there were security issues. Miss Whitlock said she had made Max aware of what had been happening and was trying to get him to settle his debts.
Mike had had a quiet word with the clinic’s security chief and had been reassured that they would be extra vigilant about Max Whitlock and would also take a closer look at his routine at the clinic to identify where any gaps where security may need to be increased.
Still distracted, Mike checked the staff rota and called the duty nurse, Sheila Roberts.
“Sheila, hi, it’s Mike. I know it’s an unusual request but could you please check on Mr. Max Whitlock. He came to see me this evening and was a little unsettled. I would just like some reassurance that he is ok; please enter his room and confirm that he is comfortable.
“No problem, Dr. Jones. I’ll go do that now.”
Less than ten minutes later Mike received a coded emergency message on his pager and made his way quickly towards Max’s room.