The Penn Friends Series Books 5-8: Penn Friends Boxset Read online

  I did learn a lot. Stuff I would carry forward. I’d seen a son reunited with his father––my own such reunion had been shoved onto my horizon by that strange old woman, Meg. I’d seen people change. People grow. I’d seen life in all its brilliance and ugliness. I’d seen in Big G a man pushing aside his own fear and embracing everything, and what a freedom he must have felt.

  I packed my things into the Jeep, gave one last look at the police station as I turned on the ignition, I think for the first time I realised that what I could do was dangerous. I had to be more responsible. It wasn’t harmless, and it wasn’t short-term. I changed people. Even if I undid whatever I gave them, it left a mark. Even if I didn’t, others often got hurt. I had only to think of Michael and Big G to see two examples.

  As I neared London that Sunday night, I was to be shown a whole bunch more people who would be eternally affected by my actions that weekend. Do you remember Mr Road Rage in his TWB Audi? The guy my Friday night started with? Well, my crazy weekend was about to finish with him, too.

  My one confession, however, is this. Had I really targeted the man because of his ignorant and aggressive driving style or because of my own transference? Those letters, you see, TWB. I always shudder when I look at those particular initials. Thomas William Black. TWB. The man who abandoned me.

  Penny pulled her Jeep off the M1 just after eight that Sunday evening. She felt tired. She’d not properly slept since Friday night, though had stopped five hours earlier and taken a two-hour nap. She at least felt a little better for it. A cup of strong black coffee sat in the cup holder next to her.

  She worked her way towards her part of town, slowly backtracking the same route she’d taken on Friday. Thankfully, the traffic was in places non-existent. Then she saw the sign. Yellow and asking for information, it sat next to a junction, a police request for witnesses to what it called an incident that had occurred there on Friday night. It listed the date and time. Penny would have been sound asleep by that point, much further north, too.

  It was the flowers that caught her attention, however. There were dozens of them. Whatever had occurred had clearly been severe. Her interest spiked.

  Home again less than sixty minutes later, she’d almost forgotten entirely about the roadside spot of remembrance, when she turned on her television automatically while scrolling through her phone to see if there was any news from Blackpool. There wasn’t anything. But as she turned away from the phone and looked at the screen, she did a double take. She knew that licence plate.

  The caption at the bottom of the screen which showed a silver Audi at the scene of an accident read; Man Charged With Police Officer’s Murder. As Penny was digesting it all––the face that then flashed on the screen was that of Mr Road Rage from Friday night––the scene changed to what was apparently stock footage they’d captured the previous day, the same junction was shown, as people were laying flowers. The same flowers that Penny had driven past an hour before. The same incident.

  Penny turned the sound up, then returned to her phone once the short piece had finished on the television in search of the full story. It took her less than a minute to find the report.

  On Friday night, Daniel Adams, forty-five and an investment banker from Surrey, had left the Swan’s Head pub. Driving at speeds often more than sixty on roads marked at thirty, he was caught in several police speed traps. He’d gone through four––the twelve accumulated points enough to have already technically lost him his licence––before reaching a police anti-drink driving push. Adams proceeded into a funnel of cars with each driver tested. Despite later claiming he had only had one pint, Adams failed the test and was found to be six times over the legal limit. Asked to leave his vehicle, Adams had instead driven away at speed, leading to a full-scale police pursuit. As part of that chase, Adams is reported to have rammed three further police roadblocks, fatally wounding an officer at the last of these, where Adams’ Audi had blown a tyre and mounted the curb, ramming the officer head-on as a result.

  The officer had been named, photos of his grieving wife and children laying flowers at the scene followed and Penny had read enough.

  She threw her telephone across the room.

  She knew it was her fault, yet again. She’d made this man––an idiot, for sure, and an arrogant son-of-a-bitch most certainly––attract every traffic cop there was. Fuelled by a drink and his own natural road rage, each and every encounter had raised the temperature until he’d snapped.

  An innocent police officer had taken the hit. Yet another man sat in jail. Keith was also in custody at that moment. Penny thought about him. She’d picked him up by the side of the road not far from where Adams would later kill a traffic cop. She’d not liked Keith at first. He seemed odd. Then he’d turned up in Blackpool, and had shown a side to him she didn’t expect. It was, apparently, the fact he was home again which made the difference.

  As eleven pm came round, she wondered what good it had all done him and everyone else involved since? Was he now any better off? Everything about the situation only suggested worse was to come. And Mr Road Rage? He would never drive again––that could just be a good thing. He wouldn’t be cheating, cutting up and annoying any other road users from now on. But why did somebody have to die? And why was Big G on life support? He might die at any moment, and Penny wouldn’t know.

  She had allowed her rage to explode that weekend and it had been releasing. But she was like a black hole. Whoever she came near, whoever had the misfortune of coming into her orbit, risked being sucked in and spat out. She was dangerous. What she could do was dangerous. If nothing, the weekend had shown her that.

  She was a few years from really understanding that, however, by which time it might already be too late. She was still young, still growing and still trying to work out who she was. Others would get hurt along the way, others still who needed teaching a lesson.

  As Penny lay her head back on her pillow that night, sleep would come in seconds. It felt good being home. She had a new perspective on life. Home was home. Her rage was under control, for now. She would sleep soundly. Only in her dreams could she cause no harm to others. Her thoughts were her safe place. Her sleep the one arena she could do others no harm.

  Author Notes

  T H Paul is my pen name. I am in fact a seasoned novelist under my real name of Tim Heath. The titles (which are also links) for the novels I have written follow in the next section and are available on all good online retailers. Plenty to keep you entertained between Penny Black books!

  I hope you are enjoying this series, which, seeing as you are five books in, I trust you are. If you haven’t managed to pick up the second book yet, The Parents of Penny, and are wondering why it isn’t available on Amazon (it will be soon), that is because at the moment it’s a FREE sign up for mailing list subscribers. So, if you want in, click on the link below, enter your email address, and you’ll get a confirmation with all the details for the book.

  Or just wait a couple of months and get the book when it’s back on sale, as it will be.

  Here is the link: http://eepurl.com/c5UlTb

  I trust you’ve spotted that each book has a question that is asked at the beginning (before chapter one) and I hope gets answered by the end. I wanted to mention it here as it doesn’t show up in the contents list and many of you might just start at chapter one and read right through.

  Organic reach for books is no longer enough. Gone are the days when a book was published and, as if by magic, it started selling all by itself, and readers quickly discovered it for themselves as they looked online. The primary way is advertising, which as an author, I will start doing this coming year heavily. You have your part to play too, however. Word of mouth is still fantastic, you sharing your reviews and enjoyment with others also helps. Plus, by putting reviews for each book you’ve enjoyed, it doubly helps my advertising efforts as potential new readers click through to see a book with a growing number of brilliant reviews!

  There
will be eight episodes in season one. I hope you’ve enjoyed this fifth instalment, and are ready for the sixth.

  That should be out in three weeks (assuming you are reading this at time of publication). If not, maybe they already are all out.

  There will be a second series, plus at least one new spin-off where I focus on one of the characters who will feature in this season and take things….well, no spoilers here. But it’ll be awesome. Trust me.

  So stay in touch. Message me on Facebook (fb.me/PennyBlackBooks), connect to the mailing list or Follow my author page on Amazon. Better still, do all three. That way you will not miss a future release.

  Thanks again for following this series. The aim is that each book will be like watching a show on Netflix, small bite-sized episodes that you can complete in a day, maybe one commute, in fact.

  I’ll see you on Facebook soon, I trust!

  The Joy of Penny

  Book 6––Penn Friends series

  How does it feel to be truly known?

  1

  Have you ever noticed how bad weather seems to follow lousy weather? It was hurricane season in the Caribbean. The news filled the UK media with stories about the three successive storms of record proportion battering those beleaguered islands and then the coastline of the USA itself. There seemed no let up.

  My life had been that recently, too. I couldn’t, of course, hold my hands up like those Caribbeans could and say this had nothing to do with me. My situation had everything to do with me. I was both the orchestrator of my storms and the victim at the same time––there was always collateral damage, too, just like with Irma, Maria and whatever other names they had come up with for those hurricanes. Maybe I should have named my storms, also?

  Oh, but they had names as if I could forget. Jack, Abbey, Jenkins, Little Mike and Keith.

  Life wasn’t always entirely crap, only for most of my current existence, it seemed. Just as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti were piecing things back together, rebuilding homes, reestablishing lives, I too would come through this season. The sun was shining on them again after all the storms. For a happy year––the Blackpool trip would happen at some point during that year, but that aside––the sun would shine on me as the clouds lifted, the winds stopped raging around me. There was Joy. Except, it wasn’t a feeling; it was a she.

  The autumn term of her eleventh year at school in many ways had raced by, as the students across all eight classes that made up year eleven prepared for their GCSE exams, which were getting nearer all the time. They would take place the following year, just before summer. Study leave would start at the beginning of May. That meant, there was now less than six months of formal school left for them. It had felt an eternity to come. Now that it was so close, it felt like it was racing towards them far too quickly.

  News of the disappearance of Jack Ferguson dominated September, a boy from 11W who had just not returned for the start of the new school year. It had been local news for weeks, his family eventually closing it all down; they said they needed to deal with it in peace. The general vibe was that they had accepted he was most likely dead. They didn’t believe the story that he had just run away. There were no sightings of him, anyway.

  Penny had only seen Lucy, the older sister of Jack, once since it had all been public knowledge. Penny felt that as things went, Lucy was holding it all together remarkably well. She seemed at peace with her brother’s absence, even. Penny decided not to try and offer any words of comfort. Penny knew they would come across as the fake she knew she was.

  Penny had been questioned, at school and not at a police station, by a special unit that had been set up to hunt for the missing student. At that time it was assumed he had just run away. Nothing was ever said publicly, though Penny wondered all the more whether they knew about Jack’s darker side. Had they been told about the inappropriate material he’d kept hidden at home? Had more been found? They had questioned Penny a little about the nature of their relationship––they apparently wanted to ask about a sexual element––but with her Head Master sitting present, and with it just being a conversation, Penny wasn’t going to mention anything. Not that there was anything to say, in that regard, anyway.

  She could correctly explain where Jack was, or more specifically, what had happened to him, anyway. But she wasn’t going to tell that to anyone, she was sure.

  By October, with the remaining two members of the Ferguson household closing things down, everything public about the case had gone quiet once more. The school would be awash with gossip and innuendo, but by November, it was mostly forgotten. A fresh batch of mock examinations was looming––they would ultimately take their focus from the students in due course. It was only his closest friends and the members of his respective football teams––he played at school and for a local club––who would go on wondering what happened to good old Jack.

  By Christmas, Penny was living alone. She was seventeen-years-old and had the run of the house. Penny had a new car parked in the driveway, though had yet to start driving lessons. She had been continuously mulling over all that had happened and the months had allowed her to process somewhat, but she was at the point of not being able to keep it locked away forever. She knew she needed someone to talk to, someone who could listen, someone who could help her unload the overwhelming weight of all that she was carrying and would offer Penny some wise words of counsel. Someone who could perform the role her absent father might have fulfilled had he not walked out on her four years before, or what her mother might have been able to do had she not been married to the bottle for the majority of Penny’s life. Both had been useless parents, Penny realised. Both negligent in so many ways. Both living for too long with unspoken worries, unvoiced fears.

  Penny had to speak to someone. But who? Who could she talk to that wouldn’t report her? That was the thought on her mind as she woke up on Christmas morning.

  The house was quiet. It was still dark outside as Penny got up, going downstairs in her slippers and dressing gown, she switched on the kettle. She glanced out of the window; there was no snow. Hardly surprising. It was a warmer than average December, and the weather service had been predicting for ages that there would be no white Christmas again that year. Still, she had hoped they were wrong. A cat ran across the lawn, the neighbour’s pet seeming to spend more time in Penny’s garden than it did at home. It probably liked the peace. Penny hadn’t done anything in the garden for months, and it showed. She made a mental note to arrange someone to come and do a clean up before too long. If they knew anything about how to keep away unwanted cats, that would be a bonus. If she let the garden get entirely out of hand, people might start asking questions.

  In the corner of the lounge sat a small, fake, Christmas tree, which Penny had put up last weekend. She determined that her first Christmas alone would be a happy one. She’d not found the decorations that her mum had collected through the years––too many memories in that bag to make it worth searching the attic for––so had purchased just two pieces of tinsel and a new set of twenty-five lights. The tree looked rather bare, even given its smallness. There were also no presents underneath it. Penny decided not to dwell on that fact. Maybe she should have wrapped something up for herself and left it there? The effort seemed pointless, however.

  Penny went back into the kitchen, the kettle now coming to the boil, and she made herself a cup of tea. It was nearly eight, and she heard church bells ringing in the distance. Finishing her tea quicker than Penny would typically do so, she brushed her teeth––there was no time for a shower––and dressed, putting on her coat and trainers and running out of the door. Penny didn’t know why––they had never done so before as a family on Christmas morning––but she wanted to go to church. Christmas Day was a day to spend with others, so at least she would see a few, most likely old people, that day.

  A little over an hour later, the service was over. The church was quite full, a traditional building with candles burning every
where. It suddenly seemed rather Christmassy after all.

  What had struck Penny the most was during his final address, the old vicar had made mention of the parishioners who could not be with them that morning because of illness, especially those who were in the hospital or care homes.

  Penny’s mind raced with ideas. Could she visit such people, people too sick to know any better, people who wouldn’t remember what they discussed? Penny pondered that but realised it wouldn’t help. If they couldn’t remember, then they wouldn’t recognise her each time she came back. She might have to go over everything, and that was the last thing she wanted to do.

  But it planted a seed. Might there be someone, bedridden and otherwise closed-off to the world, with whom Penny could make contact? Someone she could give the gift of wisdom to, someone with whom she could talk? Someone who wouldn’t judge her, and someone who wouldn’t report her to the police?

  As she walked back from church that morning, Penny felt happy. The bells were ringing for another service, one she didn’t know would have been happening; otherwise, she might have gone to that one instead. That would have meant Penny could have eaten breakfast first and had a shower. She was hungry.

  All around her she saw signs of life. Houses covered in lights, families packing into cars as she walked past their homes, heading off no doubt to meet grandparents or cousins or siblings. She saw excited children playing with new toys, beautifully decorated trees that filled windows, and as she took it all in, she felt hope inside for the first time in months. Maybe for the first time in years.

  A new year was nearly upon her. She would make it a great one. It was full of possibilities.

  Lunch was a ready-made pizza Penny had taken from the freezer. She was no cook and hadn’t thought to plan and make something special for Christmas. Going to all that effort just for one seemed a little pointless, too. She might pop out later and see what was open nearby that would offer something seasonal to eat, but hadn’t fully decided on that. She had some money, but not loads. She had been thinking for a while about getting a better paying job. Working at the supermarket was a little dull, and the rush up to Christmas had been hectic. It was hard seeing all the mums coming through with trollies full of every possible treat humanity seemed to think you needed for Christmas. Often these mums, always harassed and stressed, had children in tow who were most often moaning about something, if not glued to a mobile phone.