Knight & Culverhouse Box Set - Books 7-9

Chapter 8

8

Benjamin Newell fumbled with his mobile phone to try and silence the alarm. He should’ve turned it off earlier: he’d been awake for the past three hours anyway.

He’d had a lot to think about. Today was to be a huge turning point in his life. The day he would finally put his past behind him and be able to focus on his new future as a married man.

Lisa had changed him — there was no doubt about that. She’d been good to him. She’d known about his past and had been forgiving enough to stick with him, to give him the chance to prove that he’d changed. She certainly wasn’t the sort of woman who’d put up with having a husband embroiled in a life of crime. She couldn’t risk that.

As a school teacher, she’d already been required to respond to a government questionnaire on whether she or anyone living in her house had a criminal record. If she’d lied, she would’ve been fired on the spot. If she’d answered truthfully, she knew she’d be suspended immediately while they investigated the circumstances. Even if someone living in your house — a parent, partner or friend — had once got into a drunken brawl thirty years earlier, it made no difference if you’d since become a priest or even a monk. You were a danger to the children, according to the Department for Education. The children you’d never meet because you weren’t actually a teacher yourself — you just had the misfortune to live in the same house as one. Because, of course, it’s a well-known fact that you can catch The Criminal Disease by breathing the same air as someone who once got done for having a punch up in a pub.

What had made Benjamin love Lisa even more was that she’d never even considered lying on the questionnaire. She knew she’d be up before the board of governors and would have to answer for herself — whatever the hell that meant — when it was revealed that her husband-to-be had a less than angelic background. But she didn’t care. She was honest, upstanding and did things by the book. He’d just hoped she wouldn’t suffer because of it. As it was, things all blew over very quickly and she was allowed to continue teaching. Probably something to do with the same government’s policies and treatment of teachers resulting in an all-time record low number of new teachers coming through, causing a national shortage. Ironically, it probably wouldn’t be long before they’d have to consider recruiting ex-cons just to get the kids through their school years.

He’d been lying in bed for the past three hours, staring at the ceiling. He knew every crack, every tiny fissure in the plaster. It was as if the spare bedroom was his, even though he’d never set foot in it before he’d come to his best man Cameron Morley’s house last night.

It was now a few minutes past eight. He’d have to get up and get ready, make himself look presentable for his big day. And what a huge day it was.

He’d always wanted to get married, settle down and have kids. Alright, so the latter was unlikely to happen now, but you never knew. Lisa already had Aiden and Caitlin from her previous marriage, and she’d intimated that she wasn’t exactly keen to start again — not now that Caitlin, the youngest, had turned nine only a couple of months earlier. But still, all he’d ever wanted was that stability — the loving family unit he’d never had when he was younger. He didn’t care that the kids weren’t his; he was going to love them all the same.

His parents had never been married. He’d thought that was a shame. It was also a f*****g pain the arse, as the other kids at school would use it as a way of getting at him. The bullying had only lasted a couple of years, though, until he’d managed to pick up a set of skills and a reputation at the school which meant he was no longer the target of bullies. After all, if you were the one who was able to pick open the lockers and go through other kids’ stuff whenever you wanted, people tended to be nice to you.

Those early lock-picking days were a revelation to Benjamin. It had given his life a purpose. It had made him someone. He was the guy who picked locks. He’d spend his evenings and weekends trying different techniques to get into a variety of increasingly difficult locks (anything to get away from the noise of his parents arguing and smacking seven shades of s**t out of each other) until he was breaking into cars and, eventually, safes.

At that point, this wasn’t just a fun hobby or a harmless prank he’d play. It had become serious criminality. And the saddest thing was he didn’t know where he’d crossed the line. It had sort of blurred, until one day he’d woken up and realised he’d become a major criminal. It was something he’d fallen into without even knowing about it. It was a familiar story — that much he knew from his time inside.

Unlikely many other people he knew at that time, he’d only needed to be caught once. That was the wakeup call that told him he needed to change his ways, needed a new focus. And since meeting Lisa he’d had purpose in his life. He had something to live for. It was no longer a case of following the path of incidental self-destruction. He had ambitions and targets.

If he was true to himself, being caught hadn’t been the wakeup call. That had come only a short while earlier, when the gunshot had rung out and he knew instantly that his life had changed forever, that there was no way back. Because there was never any coming back from that, whether you got caught or not. It was something that would live with you forever.

But, c’est la vie, he’d been caught and he’d done his time. No-one could argue with that. Sure, there were people who believed that a leopard never changes its spots, but one thing Benjamin had learnt was that there was always a gobby cunt with an opinion. Prison was there to reform and rehabilitate, and it had certainly worked as far as he was concerned.

He got up out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. Today, he was going to make Lisa proud. He was going to show her just how right she’d been to stick with him after finding out about his past. He was going to repay her faith in spades. She would never have to want for anything again.

Tucking the crisp white shirt into the grey trousers, he did up the top button on his collar and tied the cravat in the way he’d seen done on the YouTube tutorials. Oh yes. A bit of gel in his hair and he’d look just the ticket. The husband. The step-father. The good man.

This was the first day of the rest of his life. And he was going to make it count.