The Hand of Chance

The Hand of Chance

by John Saxby

Published by Amolibros at Smashwords 2012

Copyright © John Saxby 2012

Published in ebook format by Amolibros 2012 | Amolibros, Loundshay Manor Cottage, Preston Bowyer, Milverton, Somerset, TA4 1QF

http://www.amolibros.com | amolibros@aol.com

The right of John Saxby to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely imaginary

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data | A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book production has been managed by Amolibros

About this book

David and Jonathan Horton were born as separate identical twins. Growing up ‘best buddies’ in a blue-collar Liverpool suburb, they squabble in their late teens when they fall for the same girl: Marilyn Cresby. But they both drop her and go their separate ways, Jonathan to university for a science degree and David into the paparazzi world of photography and money.

Several years later, David foolishly takes up with Marilyn again, and her macho husband plans to kill him. An ambush is set up at night in a hotel car-park, but the wrong twin is shot. The bullet leaves Jonathan quadriplegic. David knows the accident is his fault and drowns his guilt in a drunken binge, but chokes and is left brain dead. Eventually, Jonathan rehabilitates and, now permanently in a wheelchair, returns to his university research post, leaving David hospitalised in a coma from which he is not expected to wake.

Later, when Jonathan’s health fails, he needs a kidney transplant, but his handicap makes him ineligible for one. When his liver also fails, his surgeon suggests removing poison wastes from Jonathan’s blood by cross-circulating it through his comatose twin, David.

It isn’t long before the surgeon has an even better idea…

This is a gripping story from debut novelist John Saxby, who under his real name is a distinguished doctor himself, and an internationally recognised clinical microbiologist.

Prologue

‘How the hell are we supposed to rescue a stranded porpoise, or whatever, in a bloody gale? Should be the coastguard traipsing about on a filthy night like this, not us,’ PC Jones grumbled. ‘We ’aven’t even got a bloody boat.’

‘Them or else one of the Animal Rescue mobs,’ his fellow patrol officer, Rhys Evans, agreed.

The call to check on a ‘porpoise-like’ object drifting in with the storm tide had come over the radio as dusk was falling. The area of the sighting – two miles east of the town − was an almost inaccessible strip of stony beach which backed on to an impenetrable tangle of wind-clipped briar.

‘We’ll not be able to get closer than the old lighthouse. From there on, we’ll have to hoof it along the shoreline.’ Rhys sounded resigned as he eased the Range Rover between lank, rain-soaked hedgerows that slapped noisily against the windscreen, making the two men duck. ‘Christ knows how we’ll pull out of this if there’s no place to turn.’

They were in the lee of the sand hills, sheltered from the worst of the storm, when Rhys cut the motor. ‘This’ll have to do, boyo… any further and she’ll sink to the axles.’

‘Must still be a quarter mile to the sea and the wind back here’s enough to blow you arse over tit, not that I’m complaining, mind.’ Constable Jones, a born pessimist, tried to hide his obvious annoyance as gusts rocked the heavy patrol car. ‘But chasing after a bloody log or some other lump of floating shit in the dark isn’t my idea of fun.’

‘Who said being a cop was fun?’ Rhys retorted. ‘We agreed to pick up the call, so let’s get on with it.’

‘We didn’t agree, you did. That sexy angel voice on the radio suckered you in again.’

The two men had worked together for eight years since joining the North Wales Police. Rhys usually drove and made most of the decisions, while his pessimistic partner acted as spotter and forecaster of doom and gloom in line with his nickname, ‘Jonah’ Jones. Their personalities were different, but each brought something special by way of balance to the team: Rhys was a cheerful, outgoing family man with an understanding wife who came from a police family. As for Jonah, his home life did nothing to help him cope with the stress of policing and, after years futilely trying to patch up a failed relationship, he was planning a fresh start with a new partner at the station.

‘So I landed us with a rotten job,’ Rhys conceded. ‘Sorry about that, but give over, boyo, an’ stop moaning.’ Jonah’s grumbling was starting to annoy him. ‘You lock up an’ I’ll fetch the spotlight from the back.’

Torches switched on, they made towards the sea, heads sunk in upturned collars against the driving sand that streamed into the beams of light at every step. After some minutes following a barely visible track twisting between sand dunes capped with wind-flattened grasses, they heard the pounding of waves on shingle.

It was hard to judge the distance of sound carried by the wind, but Rhys guessed they were close to the beach. ‘Not far now,’ he shouted through cupped hands as Jonah caught up with him, but an extra fierce gust whisked the words away. He shouted again, ‘Not far.’ An answering thumbs-up showed the other understood, and they pushed on, leaning into the blast. With every step the sand hills were lower and less sheltering until they melted away on the shoreline, leaving the two men buffeted by the full force of the storm.

It was almost dark; visibility was down to a few yards, but the churning line of foam washing the beach was strangely luminescent as it spread rhythmically over the sand before sucking back, hissing, into the breakers. Ragged stacks of brine-soaked flotsam were piled high along the high-water mark, where the retreating tide had dumped its load of tangled rubbish.

‘I’ll check the water,’ Rhys signalled. ‘You search up top.’ He indicated the mounds of debris merging into the gloom on either side. ‘Find anything, flash.’ Rhys tapped his radio handset, which was crackling with static almost as loudly as the storm itself. ‘Kaput, buggered.’ He waved his torch again. ‘Flash?’

A grudging shrug showed Jonah had not changed his mind about the futility of searching in the dark for God knows what under heaps of wet garbage; it was a rotten job, which deserved short shrift. Before striding off, he signalled ‘Back in ten minutes’ and pointed to the mark his heel had gouged in the shingle.

Left alone, Rhys made his way to the water’s edge, where the breakers were flatter than he expected, as the knife of the wind cut their crests and hurled spindrift far up the beach. It was impossible to penetrate the clouds of scudding spray with the spotlight, and he settled for a search of weed-encrusted breakwaters and storm channels, but apart from debris there was nothing untoward and, after a miserable quarter hour lashed by wind and rain, he retraced his steps.

From the foot of the sand hills he could make out the dim glow of Jonah’s torch, which appeared to be a surprisingly long way off. ‘Either that, or the battery’s flat,’ he growled, as he tried vainly to shield himself against the flying sand, which was worse above high-water mark where the beach was drying. After a short wait, impatience got the better of him and he flashed the spotlight along the shoreline. Ten minutes passed, but still no response and Rhys’s impatience turned to annoyance. He flashed again, this time more urgently: still no answer.

‘Stupid bugger!’ He swore angrily, dumped the heavy lamp where Jonah had marked the shingle, and set off, grumbling, to have it out with his partner.

He pushed along the landward side of the line of flotsam, eyes squinting into the wind. To his surprise, he quickly came up with the light; it was Jonah’s torch, half-buried in the sand.

‘Jonah! Where you got to, boyo?’ The shout was lost in the gale.

‘I’ll be…’ Rhys made out two lines of footprints. One leading away showed his partner had searched further down the shoreline, and the other that he had come rushing back, kicking up sand as he ran in what, to Rhys’s trained eye, looked like a hell of a panic.

From where Jonah had dropped his torch, the scrambling return tracks led away from the beach into the shadow of the dunes, and Rhys, turning his back to the wind, followed.

He had gone only a few yards when he was stopped by an impenetrable wall of matted blackthorn, where, wedged deep in the razor-wire-like tangle, was his partner.

Jonah must have charged blindly into the thicket and tried to crash through, which anyone in their right mind would know was near impossible. The wood was the stuff of Celtic war clubs and near unbreakable. Dozens of barbs, some inches long, held him fast. His clothes were in tatters and his lacerated face unrecognisable.

‘What the hell!’ Rhys’s voice triggered renewed panic and Jonah, seemingly oblivious to pain, forced himself deeper into the bed of thorns which closed behind him to complete the trap.

‘Boyo, it’s me. Look, damn you!’ Rhys shone his torch on himself.

If this was meant to calm his struggling partner, it had the opposite effect. Jonah raised a bloodied hand as though shielding his eyes from something terrifying, and redoubled his efforts to force a way through the barrier and escape.

‘For Chris’ sake man, hold still, and I’ll get help to cut you out of there.’

There was no doubt in Rhys’s mind that his team-mate, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in many a tight spot in the past, had cracked.

With his static-choked handset near useless, any call for backup would have to go over the patrol car radio, but whatever had scared Jonah witless might still lurk in the shadows of this godforsaken place, and Rhys could not leave him, injured and alone, without knowing what it was.

A body, rotted and foul after weeks in the sea, would be revolting, but no threat. Rhys and his partner were not inured to death; it was hard to take, but it went with the job and finding a corpse would be no reason to flee.

‘It has to be something else that’s spooked him crazy,’ Rhys told himself. ‘Perhaps something living …’ But there were no marks in the loose sand to suggest he was being chased. No, Jonah appeared to have fled of his own volition, but why?

By following Jonah’s footprints back to where he turned and ran, Rhys hoped to find out. He had no difficulty tracing the tracks along the shoreline to where they stopped beside an extra large stack of flotsam piled high against a breakwater.

Cautiously, Rhys circled the jumbled mass, directing his torch first into one crevice and then another, only to draw a blank when there was nothing unusual; but as he turned to leave, a length of frayed rope, running under the flotsam from where it had snagged on the breakwater, caught his eye.

In the light of the torch, the rope appeared to slacken and then draw tight. He flicked the light-beam to one side and quickly brought it back; again the rope fell loose, then tightened. The wind must be playing tricks, he thought, and gave the cord a casual pull. He jumped back in surprise when there was a distinct answering tug.

‘Bloody hell!’ Rhys dropped the tattered strands as if they were red hot. His gut reaction was to get the hell out of it, but concern for Jonah stopped him. Warily, he crouched down for a better look at the spot where the rope disappeared under the driftwood, and was surprised to see a shallow scrape in the sand, the wetness of the spoil showing it had been recently dug. To follow the rope into the stack of flotsam, much of which was half-buried and too heavy to shift, he would have to do what his partner had probably done – worm his way along the scrape on his belly.

Taking a resolute breath, he flopped down and inched under the canopy of debris. The torch beam showed the rope disappeared from sight after a short distance, when it twisted round a discarded oil drum. To see more he would have to crawl forward and look behind the obstruction.

The thought of facing something unknown, wedged in such a claustrophobic space, caused him to sweat with anxiety, and again he had to stifle the urge to beat a hasty retreat. For a moment he lay still, trying to calm his nerves. The clamour of the wind was less deafening under the mass of debris, but now there was something else, a choking sound, and it was close, very close.

Involuntarily, Rhys called, ‘Anyone there?’ No answer, but the rope tightened and again came the sound of choking, this time more agonised and chilling. Using the pocket knife with which he’d been enlarging the scrape, Rhys slashed at the rotting strands, but before he could grasp the cut end, the rope jerked out of reach and was about to disappear. He struggled after it with an added sense of urgency.

Drawing level with the drum blocking his view, he peered behind it. Staring at him, within arm’s reach, was a face, the bearded face of a half-drowned man.

Blinking dazedly in the light, the man let go the rope, which had been clamped between his teeth, and his lips silently framed the word ‘Help’.

Rhys’s reaction was a mixture of shock and relief; shock because he had not known what to expect, and relief because he had not crawled into a chamber of horrors. This unkempt, drenched figure, trapped under the flotsam, was something tangible he could deal with, an adequate explanation for the ‘porpoise-like’ object reported drifting in with the tide. The important thing now was to organise a rescue and to get help for Jonah, who had behaved so strangely.

‘Is this stuff pressing on you?’ Rhys asked. ‘Can you breathe OK?’

No answer, only a grimace that might have meant anything.

‘The tide’s turned. You’re safe for now.’

Again no answer.

‘Can you speak?’

A look of despair crossed the bedraggled face.

‘Can you move? Are you hurt? Wriggle your fingers.’

There was no response, but the eyes brimmed with emotion, showing the man had heard.

Rhys pointed to the entombing debris. ‘If I try shifting this stuff off you it might collapse. I’ll have to get help.’ He knew delay could be fatal if the heavy mass settled spontaneously as water drained off the beach. A few solid-looking objects were jammed under the roof and hopefully it would hold up, at least for a while.

‘I won’t be long, I’ll leave the lighted torch.’

What needed an urgent explanation was Jonah’s desperate attempt to flee the beach in panic. True, crawling under a stack of storm-soaked driftwood in the dark to reach someone trapped was not an everyday event, but neither was it all that hair-raising. It crossed Rhys’s mind that he must have missed something, when the sound of choking came again, not agonised as before, but more of a cough. He shone the torch for a last look at the bearded face and, to his surprise, the man’s mouth was tightly closed even though his body shook violently with every cough.

‘Bloody odd,’ Rhys muttered. To find out more, he would have to struggle closer for a better look.

Squeezing past the oil drum, he saw scratch marks indicating Jonah must have had the same idea. Seconds later, he was sure, when he found sand had been scraped away from under the trapped man’s neck. At first he could not see into the shadowy hole, but after a contortion or two, he managed a better view.

‘CHRIST!’ He was looking at a second face. A face with eyes bulging sightlessly, lips and cheeks swollen to bursting, and a bloodied stump of tongue, bitten through in an agony of choking. It was the tortured face of a man slowly garrotted, and looped around his neck was a rope.

Instinctively, Rhys reached out to free the cord. It was then that he encountered the impossible; something that years of training to deal with the unexpected and often grisly results of violence had not prepared him for: the man had two heads!

Like Jonah, Rhys came close to psychological meltdown. Jonah’s frantic retreat had pointed to something extraordinary and frightening, but Rhys had no idea how mind-bending it would be and in seconds his own self-control snapped.

The impulse to distance himself from this outlandish thing overwhelmed him. Abandoning caution, he kicked and clawed his way in a flurry of sand and debris down the scrape and out into the night air.

‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .’ The words were a confused litany, part prayer, part profanity, as Rhys stumbled back along the beach to where the comforting beam of the spotlight probed the dark. Snatching it up, he continued his dash to the patrol car with its radio lifeline.

The rush of the chasing wind and the shifting shadows on the dunes as clouds slipped across the moon fuelled his headlong flight. At each twist and turn of the track, he expected a ghoulish figure to block the path, and when he finally burst through the hedge into Lighthouse Lane, he was shaking too much to unlock the car. Without hesitation, he kicked in a window and grabbed the mike.

His wild calls for an ambulance and rescue gear were interspersed with snatches of gibberish. To the operator, they sounded like the ravings of a man out of his mind, especially when Rhys would not calm down enough to say clearly why backup was needed.

But such wild pleas for help from the normally unflappable Constable Evans set alarm bells ringing, and in minutes, support units were racing to the old lighthouse.

Half an hour later, the beach was alive with lights and searchers. Shortly afterwards, an ambulance, accompanied by a police escort, left with two stretchers, one completely hidden under a thermal blanket.

On arrival at the North Wales Regional Hospital, the ambulance bypassed the very public Emergency Room to stop at an inconspicuous side door, where plainclothes officers waited to guide the stretchers into the isolation wing and secure the entrance.

Despite officialdom putting the beach rescue under wraps, rumours began to circulate and newshawks of every description homed in on the holiday towns along the North Wales coast. But the secret was well-kept and those in the know were not telling. The official police line was: No comment; and, as usual, they closed ranks to protect their own.

Constable Jonah Jones was physically and emotionally traumatised by the beach encounter to the extent he was graded permanently unfit for duty and retired early.

Rhys Evans was more fortunate. Jonah’s panic had warned him of something horrific lurking on the beach, and he did not have to face the situation totally unprepared. The resulting post-traumatic stress was proportionately less for him and the counsellor appointed to help him come to terms with events made good progress. But Rhys’s time in the Force led him to suspect that the counsellor knew a damn sight more about the circumstances leading up to the beach rescue than he was prepared to admit.

The entry in the station log for the night of the storm was terse and deceptively mundane. It read:

22.00 hours: Old Lighthouse Beach Rescue. Officers: Constables Rhys Evans and John Jones. Subject: David/Jonathan Horton aged 32 years. Disposition: Medical care.

But for the Chief Constable, North Wales Constabulary, whose duty it was to write a report for the Home Secretary, the bizarre events leading up to the beach rescue were certainly not mundane. They highlighted legal, ethical and social issues that could split society wide open. There were also unprecedented technical problems relating to charges against David/Jonathan and others for murder, attempted rape, unlawful detention and grievous bodily harm, not to mention a number of covert interventions by security agencies that were highly questionable.

The Chief Constable’s report went back thirty-two years to chronicle the lives of the Horton family and the birth of their identical twin sons. He found it was a story of joy and jealousy, of tragedy and intrigue, opportunism and revenge. A story of love, hate and murder, but above all, a story of chance, which shaped two individuals into one.

The circumstances were unprecedented and even before the final drama was played out, the authorities, acting on the Chief Constable’s advice, rated the saga:

Top Secret: To be kept under wraps indefinitely

Chapter One

David and Jonathan

The entry of the Horton twins into the world via Liverpool, on a damp spring morning in 1978, did not rate a mention in the news columns of the local papers.

But for the twins’ family, the long-awaited arrival of David and Jonathan was the highlight of the decade, especially since the not-so-young parents had, until then, been childless.

No one could have guessed that thirty-two years on, the editors of these same newspapers, together with the rest of the press and international news media, would walk on coals of fire or pay six-figure sums on the off chance the Horton twins, or, to be more precise, what was left of them, would grant an interview.

A day or so after the births, the chatty ward sister remarked that two healthy male infants being delivered early by caesarean section within a few minutes of each other was not an everyday event, but then again, not that unusual either. ‘You know, sort of in-between, course not real worrying, like delivering Siamese twins or such.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ Barbara Horton was dismayed by the idea of conjoined twins. ‘Don’t know what I’d have done if they’d been anything less than normal.’

Little did she know that her fertilized egg had divided nine days from conception to give two identical twins within a single amniotic membrane. If chance had delayed the division for another three days the result might well have been the birth of Siamese twins.

Her husband, Arnold, gave her a comforting hug. ‘Well, they’ve got all the bits ’n’ pieces in the right places, love – just like their handsome dad, so stop fussing and enjoy them. They’re here, safe and sound. And what’s more, if there are no hitches, I can take you all home at the weekend. But,’ Arnold held up a warning finger, ‘you’ve got to promise to take it easy.’

For the last few months, they had known there were going to be twins. But in the seventies ultrasound equipment was not always smart enough to detect a pair of tiny tassels among a tangle of limbs and umbilical cords. Only when two obviously male infants were delivered by caesarean section from a single amniotic sac, followed by one grotesque blob of a placenta, did they know for certain that months earlier, a single fertilised egg had split into the beginning of two identical human beings.

Genetically they were clones, matched chromosome for chromosome and gene for gene. To what extent nearly nine months’ gestation within the embrace of a single amniotic sac might leave its imprint on their personalities and their attitude to one another was a question time alone would answer and chance would put to the test.

The birth was not without risk, since the mortality of foetuses sharing a single amniotic sac and one placenta is unusually high. But the pregnancy was well monitored and, as a precaution, Barbara had been admitted to the maternity ward for an early c-section almost a month before she would normally have been due.

On the appointed day after the birth, Arnold and Barbara left the hospital, each carrying one of the twins. They would long remember that wonderful journey home to a new life with their precious pair of bleary-eyed babes.

Almost too soon, the taxi pulled into the kerb at Number 8, Fisher Street, a neat semi in a featureless outer suburb.

Barely had the car stopped when a face peeped from behind a lace curtain and the front door was flung open, followed by a rush of excited welcomers.

In the busy days that followed, the Hortons lost no time in preparing for the christening. Between breaks in household chores, Barbara made plans and thanked her lucky stars the twins woke, fed and slept with the same rhythm.

Barbara was a handsome woman, with striking slate-black hair falling below her shoulders and a natural high colour, suggesting forebears who might have hailed from Southern Europe. Since delivering, Barbara was, as she tactfully put it, ‘on the plump side of slim’ and acted hurt when the irrepressible Arnold hummed snatches of the old Liverpool sea shanty, ‘Maggie May’.

She had a figure fine

Like a warship of the line

‘You be glad I have, Arnold Horton, or we’d be spending a pretty penny on formula feeds for these hungry mites.’ She looked down tenderly at the twins, who had finished feeding and lay contentedly in her arms, sleepily blowing milk bubbles.

During that first year, the pace of life seemed to accelerate for the Hortons. ‘Like going into space drive,’ Barbara remarked, as she put the finishing touches to a cake with one candle on it.

Arnold, a Star Trek fan, corrected her. ‘You