My small workshop was quiet for once. I’d recently finished and delivered a large order and was cleaning up when I noticed someone standing in the doorway.

I looked up and saw silhouetted against the later afternoon sun, a very shapely young woman. As I looked at her, she flicked her long hair. For half a second, I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack.

I didn’t so I walked towards this vision of beauty.

“Hello,” I said.

I stood alongside her and seeing her for real was just as beautiful as her silhouette.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” she replied slightly hesitantly.

“My car hit a pothole just up the road and something went bang. Then the car started making all sorts of loud noises. I wonder… Would it be possible for you take a look?”

Then she fluttered her lashes at me and added,

“Please?”

My heart started racing as I saw her and had visions of me being her knight in dirty overalls. Then reality came to the rescue.

“Sure. If you will let me get my flashlight and tools and I’ll gladly take a look.”

She didn’t answer but managed a slight smile.

As we walked the 100yds up the very quiet country lane towards her obviously stricken car I said,

“I’m Mike James by the way.”

She managed another smile.

“I saw that on the sign above your door,” she replied.

Then she added,
“What exactly do you do in your workshop?”

I took this as an alternative to her giving me her name.

“Most of the time, I make custom metalwork mostly gates and the like for large houses. I delivered and installed a large set early this morning so I’m basically clearing up after the work. It was a bit of rush job so I do apologise for the state of the place and of me. I’m not normally this dirty and the place is in a bit of a muddle at the moment.”

“It is nice to see someone who obviously enjoys their work,” she replied with a straight face.

I couldn’t answer that so I just kept walking.

As we neared the car, I could see something hanging down from underneath.

“I’ll take a look underneath the car. It certainly does not look right.”

She didn’t reply. Just being with her had made my day. She was effing gorgeous. On a scale of 1 to 10, she was a 20 without a doubt. Tall, thin if not a tad skinny, legs that went on forever what were accentuated by high but not too high heels. Her porcelain quality makeup with stunning cupid shaped deep red lips and eyes to die for was topped by hair that would not look out of place on the front cover of Vogue.

I quickly shimmied under her car, a high-end red Mercedes Coupe with a white leather interior. The number plate told me that it was six years old but it looked like it had just come straight out of the showroom. Someone obviously cared for the machine but I doubted it would be her. I tried to imagine her in overalls and a … I shuddered and told myself, concentrate on the matters at hand.

The damage was obvious to me. There was a big hole in her exhaust and one section of it had come adrift. It was that what I’d seen hanging down as we’d walked up the road.

I got out from under the car and gave her the news.

“Your exhaust is broken and there is a big hole in one of the silencer boxes.”

And before she could ask,

“It isn’t driveable as it is, but I might be able to patch it up so that you can get to wherever you are going today.”

She managed a proper smile for the first time.

“Let me run back to my shop and get something to protect your seats. Then I’ll drive the car back to my workshop and see what I can do? If I can’t patch it, at least it is off the road.”

She just nodded her head.

I picked up my toolbox and basically legged it back to my workshop and grabbed a couple of clean towels from the rack by my small shower room and headed back towards the car.

After putting the towels over the pristine white leather seat, I slid into the driver’s seat. The car started in an instant. The exhaust was naturally very loud and throaty.

She got in beside me and treated me to a display of even more leg. I quickly put it out of my mind as I gently backed the car down the slight hill towards my workshop. It was an old garage and there was still a full car lift. I used it from time to time to lift gates onto the back of a delivery vehicle. Thanks to finishing the order earlier, it was clear so once she was out of the car, I drove it onto the lift and switched off the engine.

She was obviously not a woman of many words. Just the sight of her beauty and perfume had made my day already.

I found a chair and covered it with more clean towels.

“Please take a seat while I fix the exhaust. It shouldn’t take too long.”

She didn’t reply but sat down and watched everything I did.

An hour later, I lowered the car down from the lift, my patching of her exhaust system was done and dusted. I started the engine and it sounded perfectly normal. At least there were no abnormal sounds coming from the exhaust system.

“There you are, that should see you home but you really do need to get the car to a dealer or to an exhaust specialist to get the exhaust sorted out properly. I’ve patched it, not repaired it. It is only a temporary repair so don’t leave it too long before you get it professional seen to.”

“Thank you so much. What do I owe you?”

I smiled at her.

“How about a promise that you will drop in and say hello the next time you are passing by?”

“But…,” she stuttered.

Then she smiled.

“Very well, I promise. Thank you again,” she said smiling broadly for the first time.

I opened the door to her car and let her get in. As she passed me her delightful perfume filled my nostrils. I savoured every molecule.

As she drove away, I wondered what else the day would have in store for me.

It was more than likely that there would be only bills and my cat ‘Freda’ waiting for me when I got home. Such is life.

Home for me was a small flat above the general store in the next village. It was good enough for Freda and me and was less than a mile away from my workshop. Most days, I’d either walk or cycle to work. Apart from the days when it was raining cats and dogs, that was enough to set me up for the day.

The next evening, I cycled home as usual and dropped into the shop to get some bread. One rather dog-eared copy of a ‘Red Top’ daily newspaper remained on the newsstand. The headline read,

“Millionaire Murdered, Wife Missing!”

There on the bottom right corner of the page was a picture of her.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Is there something wrong Mike?” asked a voice from behind the counter.

“N…No. Thanks Margery,” said haltingly.

“Do you have any of that bread I like left?”

Margery was the manager of the shop smiled back at me.
“I put one aside for you as usual,” she said as she bent down behind the counter and pulled out a loaf of bread.

I quickly grabbed some milk from the chiller cabinet and put some money on the counter and left the shop.

Once inside the relative safety of my flat I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Then I fired up my Laptop and went looking for details of the case.

It didn’t take long to find out that she lived with her now deceased husband about sixteen miles to the south. The Police reports said that the husband was believed to have been murdered at 4:00pm and that they were looking for the wife, one Nancy Blackmore for questioning in relation to the case.

This didn’t make sense to me. She was with me at the time they said her husband had died. It, sort of made sense why she hadn’t volunteered her name to me but if the times were correct then there was no way that she could be the killer.

I sat and thought about what to do next. I could say nothing or call the Police. I didn’t know what to do.

In the end, I decided to call the Police or rather ‘Crime Stoppers’.

I’d just finished my evening meal when there was a heavy thump on my front door. It could only mean one thing the Police were here. I peered outside and there were at least three Police Cars with lights flashing blocking the whole road. I shook my head and went downstairs to open the front door.

I opened it to find what looked like a fairly senior officer standing there.

“Mr James? I hear you have some information for us relating to the incident at Tilling Hall?”

“Yes, that’s me and I do have some information such as it is. Please come in Officer?”

“Detective Inspector Phillip McShane,” he replied as he came inside my front door.

“Please sit down,” I said when we were upstairs.

He didn’t beat about the bush.

“How long have you known Mrs Blackmore?”

“Is that her name? She never told me what it was.”

“When did you first meet her then?”

“Yesterday afternoon. She was driving through the next village when her car hit a pothole. It wasn't far from my workshop so she came into it looking for help. The result was that I was able to repair the damage to her exhaust system.”

“At what time was this?”

“She first appeared around 4:00pm. It was well after 5:00pm, probably closer to 5:30pm by the time I had repaired the damage.”

“And what damage was that?”

“As I said, she’d holed the exhaust and dislodged the pipe to the catalytic converter.”

“And where exactly was this?”

“I have my workshop about a mile up the road that runs from here to Peaslake.”

“What do you do at your workshop?”

“I normally make gates and other architectural ironwork. If you doubt me then a call to your Chief Constable will confirm what I do for a living. I made a set of gates for him last year.”

My mentioning of his big boss threw him somewhat.

“And you had never met her before yesterday?”

“That is correct. I saw a copy of a daily newspaper in the shop downstairs earlier. The murder was front page news. I verified the story on the internet and then called Crime Stoppers. The news reports say that her husband was killed around 4pm. She was with me at that time. I’ll stand up in court if needed and say exactly that.”

He remained expressionless.

“Which way did she go when she left you?”

“She took the route I’d take if I was going to her home. Where she went once she was out of my sight is obviously open to question. I simply don’t know and she didn’t volunteer much information at all and that included her name.”

He finished writing down some notes in his pad. Then he stood up.

“I think that will be all for now Mr James. I or one of my officers may well return to take a formal statement.”

As he stood up, a loud noise came from my bedroom.

The smile disappeared from the Inspectors face in a flash.

“Do you mind if I take a look in there?”

“N… No. It is probably my cat, Freda. Please go ahead and look. I can assure you that I am the only person here apart from your good self that is.”

The Inspector disappeared into my bedroom. A few seconds later, the white ball of fur that was my Freda came dashing out. She raced past the Inspector and his constable and disappeared down the stairs.

The Inspector went red in the face but he still searched my spare room in the hope that ‘she’ was there. Naturally, she wasn’t but while they were turning my spare room upside down, the thought that I’d secreted her to my remote island did cross my mind. It was probably the only way that I managed to keep smiling and not give those bumbling idiots a telling off.

Much to my relief, they left a few minutes later. I wondered why they had to be so officious? It was as if they suspected me to be her accomplice. I didn’t appreciate that in the slightest. I would not have said no to being with her at that moment. The memory of her perfume would stay with me for a long time but there was one thing abundantly clear and that was that she was way, way out of my league.

Life carried on as normal once I’d explained to the villagers that I was not some super criminal and that I was a possible witness to a crime. I didn’t say what crime it was but it seemed to placate my neighbours.

[One month later]

I’d just finished another installation in Stoke Poges which if you don’t know is regarded as the 'posh' end of Slough and was taking a break in a Supermarket Coffee Shop near Woking on my way home when I saw the headlines in the ‘Evening Standard’. It read,

“Man charged with Slinfold Murder.”

I knew exactly what ‘murder’ and I felt very relieved that ‘she’ seemed to be in the clear. I also eager to learn a bit more about her. Until that day, I only knew her name, Nancy Blackmore.

I got hold of a copy of the newspaper and read the article myself. It seemed that this man had been arrested after a fight when he was burgling a house in Oxted in broad daylight. His fingerprints matched those that had been found at the house where ‘she’ lived. He was due to appear in court the following day.

As I walked back to my Land Rover I wondered if I’d be seeing ‘her’ again? Probably not but you can hope, can’t you? According to the newspaper, her former husband had been a high-flying financier or something. He had to be loaded if his wife drove such an expensive car.

I put my brief encounter with ‘her’ behind me and got on with life again. I could not get the words to the old rock song, ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ out of my mind.

[continued in part 2]