No Stranger

We spent our last night together in that chamber above the main room of the inn. Downstairs we could hear all the others drinking, singing, carousing and having a good time. Up here, though, in a room lit only by a few small candles and the fire in the stone fireplace, we knew we only had these few hours together. Jenny knew that come the dawn I would be gone.

So we kissed and held each other. Neither of us wanted to say anything that would break the spell of our last hours. She held me close afterwards, lying on my chest, her hand wrapped around me and her leg thrown over mine, almost as though she was trying to hold me there. I could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against my chest as she tried to stay awake, even though both of us knew we needed the sleep; sleep that would not come for either of us.

But, eventually, in the end, we both must have fallen asleep at some point, because I did not see Jenny again for around 200 years.

I woke up again lost deep in some woods, not knowing where I was or when it was. Time had slipped by, that was all I knew. Eventually, using those tricks we all have to learn if we are to survive in this kind of life I managed to find some clothes I found I was back in the old country too, for once. But I still had no idea when it was. From the look of the clothes, I guessed sometime around the 17th century.

I walked out of the trees in the thick wood into a clearing. There was a merchant’s caravan there, stopped to camp for the night as the summer evening slowly turned into a warm summer night.

I walked up to the first camp fire. It had a pot of stew simmering over it and the smell of cooking meat and vegetables drifting towards me on the evening breeze.

‘Could you spare some food for a stranger,’ I asked the figure bent over the pot.

Jenny looked up at me and smiled. ‘You are no stranger,’ she said.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Mystery of the Stick

‘Well?’

‘I….’

She put the object down on the desk between us.

I stared. I’d wondered what had happened to it. ‘What’s that?’

‘You know what that is.’ She folded her arms, standing up straighter behind her desk. She was still shorter than me, despite the heels and the power dressing.

I could see she took my tallness personally. ‘No, is it some sort of stick?’

‘No.’

‘It looks like a stick to me. Where did you get it?’

‘It was found….’

‘What, by the stick-finder general?’ I almost laughed at my own joke.

‘This is not funny.’

‘Well, as humorous sticks go, I can see it lacks a certain risible quality.’

‘We don’t like smart-arses here,’ she said it with conviction.

I reached out as casually as I could and poked my wand with my forefinger, trying not to react at the now-familiar surge of power. I could pick it up, one quick gesture and Maureen would be a newt…. I was so tempted. ‘It’s just a stick. So, what?’

‘It is a magician’s wand.’

I turned my shock into mocking laughter. I studied Maureen as carefully as I could while pretending scorn. ‘Does Paul Daniels know? If he’s lost it, there could be a reward.’

‘It is yours.’

‘What would I want with a stick, especially some conjurer’s toy?’

‘It was found in your desk.’

‘I… what?’

‘Hidden.’

‘Who’s been searching my desk, you have no right…!’

‘It is not your desk. It belongs to MalTech. We can search our property if we want, when we want.’

‘I didn’t put it there, it is not mine.’

‘Then you won’t mind if we dispose of it then?’

I shook my head as the rest of my body began to tremble. Molcur was right; the wand did now feel like part of me, a very intimate part of me.

‘Come on, then.’ Maureen snatched up my wand from her desk. I saw the look of distaste on her face as the magic reacted to her hostility.

‘Where are we going?’ I followed her to her office door.

‘To the incinerator.’

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Not About Her

This is not about that day. It isn’t about her either. It has nothing to do with that morning when I woke up next to her and thought about all the days we’d spent together and all the nights.

These days I hardly ever think of the way I crept out of the bed while she still slept and gathered my belongings together in the curtained gloom of an early morning. This has nothing to do with how the seasons were changing and the summer was beginning its long slow fall into autumn. I can remember the way I shivered as I gathered my belongings from around her room, not trying to look at her as she slept.

I knew I had to go and I knew if I turned to watch her sleeping that, within moments, I would be undressing to get back in bed beside her again.

All through that morning as the dawn became the day, I did not think of her and how good it would to be back in the bed beside her. I did not want to take her in my arms as she surfaced out of sleep and….

I left the house and did not look back. I know better than to look back. I know better than to think about her and those days we had together. I do not think about those times, not ever.

Most of all, though, I never think about Natalie, nor how stupid I was for leaving her behind... and I never think of her name.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Looking for Her

She was small, dark-haired and her eyes were in constant movement, watching everything and everyone around us. Her skin was a dark-brown, like finely polished wood. Later, when she undressed for me, I saw she had no tan lines. She’d never hidden any part of her body from the sun.

She led me away from the crowd, out beyond the edges of the town, out past the fields and back towards the woods.

‘I don’t want to be in the town,’ she said. An explanation that hid more than it revealed. As we walked away, she kept glancing back over her shoulder, watching for something. It was not until we left the last of the buildings and fields behind, and were inside the wood, that she relaxed.

‘Is someone looking for you?’ I asked.

She just laughed and looked back over her shoulder once more. She turned to face me. ‘Everybody is looking for me. You were looking for me.’

‘I found you.’

‘Did you?’ She laughed again and led me to a place at the side of the road. There was a break in the undergrowth. I would not have given it a second glance if I’d been riding through the woods. Beyond the road, behind the undergrowth there was a hidden path.

She tuned a few strides along the path and I saw a knife glint in the sunlight that found its way through the high trees. ‘This path is a secret.’

I nodded, my eyes fixed on the knife. ‘I know about secrets,’ I said. ‘I have too many of my own.’

She stared at me for a while and then put away her knife. She stepped towards me. I could smell something earthy, something wild about her as strong as the smell of wood smoke in her tangled hair. She grinned at me. ‘Come on then. Come with me and tell me all you secrets and I will show you mine.’

So I did… and later she did too.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Swordsman

‘So,’ she said.

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘Is that it?’

‘Er… it must be the weather. It has been a bit cold.’

‘What has that got to do with it?’

He looked down at his sword. ‘It is a well-known fact that metal shrinks in cold weather.’

‘Really?’

He didn’t like the way she was looking at him. He shifted his feet and put his sword away. ‘I’ll be getting a bigger one soon,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes?’ She leant back against the low stone wall behind her, half-sitting on it and raised her leg to push herself onto the top of the wall. She sat on the wall with one foot resting up on it, her hands over her knee and her chin resting on the backs of her hands. ‘Do you wish you had a bigger one?’

‘Well,’ he could feel the heat in his neck spreading upwards. She was not looking at the size of his scabbard. He stopped himself turning away from her, or clasping his hands over his groin. ‘I have no complaints.’

‘But you do want a bigger one… need a bigger one?’

‘I….’ He looked around for some way out of this.

She laughed. ‘You’re new to the city aren’t you?’

‘Y… yes…. Is it that obvious?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’ She smiled, warmly this time and shifted her position, signalling for him to sit on the wall beside her.

He sat.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Just some village… days away.’

‘Oh, what was it called?’

‘What?’

‘Your village… what is its name?’

‘I don’t know… it was just home… the village. None of us ever thought of giving it a name.’ He sighed. ‘It was the only place I knew. I was happy there.’

‘So why did you leave?’

‘The foreigners… the invaders…. They came one day… and… well… the village is no longer there.’

She looked at him. ‘Come on,’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘I have a home… not much of one, but I’ll take you there.’

‘Why?’

She looked at him, head cocked to one side. ‘Let’s just say every sword needs a scabbard, shall we?’

Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

In the Rain

Moments came and went. They fell out of the ordinary time, falling like rain from a passing cloud. Sometimes it was unwelcome rain, like a cold winter day when the hard wind blew the icy rain into her face. Clara could only put her head down and plough on into it, hoping it would soon pass and she would be back in the warm again.

Other times, those moments fell like the rain after a long dry, hot spell and there was nothing sweeter than standing out in that moment and letting it all wash over her.

Clara was there, in such a dry place, a long hot dry spell in her life. She felt each day as an endless trudge through a desert of possibility. Everywhere she looked, the same featureless expanse of emptiness surrounded her. Every step Clara took, left her no closer to anything she could recognise as some way out of her current predicament.

Her job was dull and poorly paid. Her friends were all growing away from her, falling into new lives that left Clara behind. All doing things she could not do, going to places she could not afford, meeting people she did not want to like. She hadn't had much luck with men and couldn’t see that changing.

She needed some rain to pour down on her desert life and bring it into bloom, fill up her dry cracked river beds with fresh flowing water again. But all she could see was the same nothingness ahead as she’d already trudged through.

Then, one morning, a morning much like any other, she was stumbling to work down a dull quiet street when her foot struck something hard. She looked down and saw a book, kicked open, with its pages fluttering in the slight breeze. Bending down she looked at the book.

Looking closer, she saw her own name on a few of the pages fluttering past. She looked around, seeing no-one and picked up the book.

As she glanced at the pages, flicking through them, she noticed slowly at first drops of rain falling on the pages.

She looked up to see a solitary cloud in the blue sky, the first rain for weeks.

Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Seasons of Forever

It takes the time we share and twists it into something new. There was a time when this was a summer lasting for as long as we could see. It was a summer stretching beyond our beach to where the sea reaches out to meet the sky. We never thought our summer could ever feel these colder winds of autumn. We never thought the trees up on the climbing headland would ever fade from green to these browns, reds and golds of our darkening narrower days.

Now we turn away from that sea that stretched away before us. We turn back from this beach, towards the forests and fields that lie between our fading summer and the winter that waits for us deep inland. The time of coldness is coming and we can feel it in the winds that blow around us.

You turn away in the night, chasing your dreams across a bed suddenly grown big. A space I cannot reach across to close, even if I wanted to, even if I knew how.

Outside, the nights grow ever longer. The wind blows and the rain falls like those tears you cry whenever you think I cannot see or know.

Our summer has been too long though. I know the sound of your tears and I know nothing remains here for either of us. Except the slow journey from this summer we thought would never end back inland to our endless winter.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Short Story: An Undulation of a Shadow’s Edge

FREE Short Story

An Undulation of a Shadow’s Edge

Available FREEfor the Kindle here(UK) or here(US) for the next 5 days.

Short story: 7,500 words (approx)

Dark creatures writhe in the city’s shadows, Claire has seen them and seen their hungry eyes watching her… and waiting.

Claire avoids the darkness and the shadows of the city’s nights because she knows what lurks there.

That was until the night she saw Henry, standing in the darkest shadows watching her, wanting her as much as she wants him. But he is as unwilling to leave the dark as Claire is to enter it.

Will Claire save Henry before the shadows and darkness consume him and he is lost to the darkness forever?

Available FREEfor the Kindle here(UK) or here(US) for the next 5 days.

Dreams Are This Fragile

Dreams Are This Fragile

Dreams are this fragile

insubstantial as a thought

drop the moments when those times

become like a cold reality

and those delicate dreams tear

like tissues to fall

as paper snowflakes

across a dark green carpet.

These are your dreams

something precious to hold

like a rare delicate butterfly

or some other living beating thing

with a soft tremulous heartbeat

so soft, like a thicker warm moment

pulsing under your fingertips.

Something precious that can take hold

of the insubstantial air to take wing

across these endless skies

to take your dream soaring

to some high safe mountain

Where your tumbling tears

will not wash these dreams away.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

The Torture Chamber

‘No! Not the accordion!’

But it was too late, even though the man bound to the chair writhed and screamed there was no escape for him, not this time.

The man hidden in the shadows watched in silence, not moving as the accordionist went about his dastardly work.

Eventually the man bound to the chair could take no more, chewing his own head off from the inside rather than undergo any more torture from the deadly accordion.

When the man in the shadows was sure the accordion was silent, he pulled off his ear defenders. Then he stepped into the pool of light around the now headless, but rather bloody, remains of the man still bound to the chair. The man from the shadows sighed. ‘I thought he’d talk once we brought out the castanets,’ he said watching the torturer make the accordion safe before returning it to its music-proof cage.

The Musician-Torturer nodded as he cleaned his earplugs and placed them each in its own place in his velvet box, the box that had belonged to his father and his grandfather when they too were Musician-Torturers to the Emperor.

The man from the shadows, a shadow himself, dressed in black placed his thin white hand on the shoulder of the corpse, almost affectionately. ‘At least, he spared himself the bagpipes.’

‘He did talk though,' the Musician-Torturer said.

‘Yes,’ the man in black agreed. ‘But they all do… in the end.’

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

When the Empress Danced

It is said, still after all these years, by those who knew her, that she was the most beautiful woman they'd ever met. Even allowing for the way time alters perceptions so we only remember the golden times, it is still something remarkable.

Of course, history has a way of choosing who it wants to remember and who it wants to forget. History has decided to keep Empress Shilah as one of its own, while her husband is left for the dust of time to cover over.

This suits me.

Even back then, I merged into the background, becoming the forgotten Emperor, while Shilah became the symbol and the beloved of the empire.

Of course, that was not the whole story. As my wise old teacher, the philosopher Hedden, said to me once, 'while everyone is watching the dancer, no-one sees what goes on in the shadows.'

I liked to live, and – yes – rule, in those shadows, letting Shilah dance for everyone. She liked the attention, she liked the gold, the rich fabrics, the obsequious attendants, servants and slaves. She loved the fawning ambassadors and the politicians all eager to lick the dust from her feet, if her whim so commanded it.

They all thought that winning her favour would aid them in whatever way they thought would further their desires. Little did they know that while they plotted and schemed behind their smiles, while they manoeuvred and plotted to gain her favour or merely lusted after her, I was there in the shadows behind them listening and learning.

Of course, the stories and tales tell of all her lovers and her desires. But Shilah was not like that. Like all beautiful women who spurn men's – and women's – advances the stories grew more lewd and lurid the more of them she turned down and turned away from. She always, every night, came to my bed to listen to the stories I told her of what I'd learnt from the shadows while the court danced its attention on her.

She had no other lovers.

Except for that lover that crept out of the darkness of the East, out of the shadows where even I feared to tread. The lover that came from the plague- scarred lands and stole her from me with his fatal kiss.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Nothing Left to Offer

I remember the first time.

We met down by the shore and walked along the beach together. She said she knew me, knew my work. Back then I was still a writer, still entranced by the dance of words and how I could get them to shift and turn upon the page to make a doorway open into some new way of seeing this world turn.

She took my hand as we walked, as though I connected her to something she could not otherwise reach.

I told her I had nothing left to offer, but she said, reaching up to kiss me on the lips, that none of that mattered.

Later, as the wind and the rain returned, blowing the waves into a storm, she came back with me to the cottage behind the dunes.

I sat in my chair in front of the fireplace, looking at the ashes of the fire that had burned there the night before, seeing in the cold remains some sort of metaphor I would once have grown into a story.

I looked up to see her stepping out of the last of her clothes. Pale green knickers easing down her thighs while she balanced on one leg, resting her one hand on the mantelpiece.

She turned to me when she was naked and took a couple of steps forward until she was standing between my open thighs. She leant down and kissed me again.

Then she sat down on the floor between my legs, curling herself up like a cat in front of a warm fire. Then, resting her head on my crotch, so her long red hair spread like flames across my thighs, she closed her eyes and sighed.

I rested my hand on her head, feeling the flow of her hair beneath my palm.

‘It is all right,’ she said, her eyes still closed.

And then I knew she was right, so I closed my eyes too.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

All These Twisting Roads

I built this tower with the room at the top for her. I set her down in that room with only one window to look through where she could see a world out beyond the tower. I created a door for her to learn how to open.

Beyond the door were twisting corridors, long involved staircases and rooms beyond rooms that would – eventually – allow her out into the world beyond the tower. In some of those rooms, I’d hidden clothes she could use to dress herself, food to feed herself, tools she could use and maps she could follow to lead her out through that final door into this waiting world.

Out beyond the tower, I’d made a whole world for her to search through. A landscape for her to find the paths, tracks and roads that led her away from the tower and deeper into this maze of a world.

I knew she would – eventually - find her way through this world, follow the cunning paths I had made for her with their many wrong turnings and twists, dead ends and false trails. I knew that she would not give up until; she knew she’d escaped from that tower and all her imprisonment implied.

She thought she was escaping, running to be free. She thought she was fleeing the tower and whatever nameless being had incarcerated her there. What she did not know was that I’d contrived this whole world, so that in running away from me she would be running to me.

Then, one day – at the end of the last twisting road – I would be waiting there to save her.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Not Today

This is what comes from the moment; this is what turns back from the open sky and away from the sea of possibilities that laps against the shore of the now. We have walked these beaches so often before. Each time, your eyes turn towards the distant horizon where the sky meets the sea. You long to be back there, riding the waves and diving deeper than I have ever known into a world I cannot touch. Meanwhile, I trap you here on the dry land, hoping the memories of your water-born freedom will fade, until you know longer know how to dive deep into the seas that lie forever beyond my reach.

I have woken alone in the night to see you silhouetted against the moonlit window, watching the waves flickering in the moonlight. Longing for your home, until I call your land name and you return to our bed with one last lingering glance over your shoulder to what was once the only life you knew.

Then, each morning, I turn first to make sure you remain here on my dry land. I know one morning I will wake to find you gone. I will never know if you could ever return to such a dry life once you have dived deep again and swum out across that moonlight sea into a far freedom beyond the reach of land. Lost far beyond any horizon I could ever see from where I stand.

I know now that one morning I must take you down to the beach, to the edge of your sea and then let you go. I just hope, each morning, as I turn to you in our bed, that today is not that day.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Day We Met

I saw her as she came through the door into the café. I was sitting at my usual table, back near the far wall. There, I could sit with my back against the wall and watch everyone who came in, yet be far enough away from the counter so that I wasn’t bothered by people passing by me on their way to get served. I watched her for a few moments; liking what I saw, liking the way she moved. She had that special grace about her that fascinates me. I always like watching a woman who moves through the world with a lightness of step, a delicacy, but at the same time an ease and a confidence.

I could have watched her for a while. I had the feeling she would be someone who made a ceremony out of her coffee break. Someone who would sit, sip and appreciate, take delicate bites from her sandwich or cake, take an interest in the world around her. Me, though, I was too busy. I had something to write. For once I had something I felt I ought to write, not the usual half-baked musings on the inconsequential I’d been passing - wasting – my time on lately. That morning I’d woken up with a thought nagging my mind and now it had grown, matured, and was now something I felt I could use.

A shadow passed across my table and stopped.

I looked up.

She stood there, coffee and a cake, one in each hand. ‘May I?’ she said.

‘Yes, sure. Of course.’ I made a show of moving my laptop so she could put down her cup and plate. She sidled across the seat, knees together.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ she said, looking at me with an intensity that made me lower the lid on my laptop.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m more or less done… for the moment.’ I resigned myself to never finishing that idea, of it fading away and disappearing like a rain puddle on a hot day.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.

I looked at her. ‘No.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then we must not have met yet… and I’m just in time.’

‘In time for what?’ I laughed.

‘To save your life,’ she said.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Each Word is Less Than a Moment

All these words that fall across the page like snowflakes settling, like rain falling, like the tears that stain the page when there are no words left and still far too much to say. The words themselves shy away from the page, away from permanence, wanting only to be fleeting moments, there, then lost on the breezes that blow all the possibilities from now away into the unreachable past.

Each word is less than a moment, waiting, heaping up beyond the reach of the hand that could take those waiting words and pin them to the moment. Then spreading them out on this page to say all that needs to be said, before the moment is lost, before the time is gone, before there is nothing left to say.

She sits at the table, pen in hand, watching the tears fall onto the blank page. Next to her unmoving hand are the crumpled balls of discarded pages that didn’t get close to anything she wanted to say. A heap of words that danced around across her mind and over the page, none of them getting close to what she wanted to say, like dancers dancing apart and alone, her thoughts and the words never joined hands, never danced together across the page, creating something new out of all she wanted to say.

Now, there is only silence; a silence and the blank page that waits for her words. Now she knows the page will stay blank because there are far too many words and she had far too much to say for a piece of paper to hold.

So she stands, walks out leaves the empty desk and the blank page and the pen behind as she closes the door on them and dries her tears before walking away.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Where the Shadows Belong

It comes slow and careful through the darkness. It feels at home in the dark, light reveals too much. The shadows and dark places are a home. It can feel the prey as it moves oblivious through the darkness.

There was a time long ago, many prey lifetimes ago, when it would haunt the dark woods, waiting for the prey to come into the deep night of the forest. It would wait high in trees, or low in the undergrowth, for the prey to blunder into its reach. Then it would stretch, grab and devour, leaving only a memory for the prey’s kin to mourn.

Then, though, it moved, made its home in the prey’s cavernous cities. There were more shadows, more dark places and much more prey. The creature could sit up high on the roofs and watch. It could wait for the choicest prey to pass by. The creature could hide in the deep, almost solid, darkness in the cellars and basements for the prey to come by, sometimes oblivious, sometimes wary. But, all too often, wary of other dangers than the creature waiting to rip their lives away.

The creature knew this world belonged to it, and not to the prey, and it liked it that way.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Archaeology

Archaeology

And here is something newly found.
It sits here, waiting on the palm,
in one cupped hand, and makes its shape
from limits it can then transcend.

It's more beyond itself enclosed,
contains the distances of time
and history within itself.

Its turning form can speak to us
of ages long ago and gone,
to times before the modern now,
when other lost unknowable
wise hands then grew and shaped its form.

But still it will remain right here,
becoming this new meaning taken
by every hand that holds it tight.

Each making new connections back
along that trodden path of time.
We listen now to sounds, echoes
of times, ages long past and gone.

Always we have long history
behind us, somehow reassuring
when walking down these twisting paths
in these now fading footsteps taken here
by earlier, forgotten, generations.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

The Other

Eyes?

The eyes opened, blinking rapidly, then slower as they grew accustomed to the light level. It was dim. The eyes couldn’t see much, just a ceiling made of metal with a low-powered light in the centre of it.

There were hands, and they could move.

A body. A breast, two breasts and a stomach and lower… the body was female.

There was a mouth too and it smiled.

Female was always good, better than a male.

The prey was always less suspicious of the female. The males wanted to protect, or if not protect, then damage. Always feeling they had the advantage whichever they were going to do. The females… well, they felt less threatened by another female, less wary of what the other could do.

The other?

The mouth smiled again. That was a good name, it… she liked that. She liked being the other.

The body sat up and she looked down at herself.

She liked this body. It was young and strong – even for a body of the prey – which were usually weak and easily broken – that was why they were the prey, after all.

Once she’d lived in this body for a while it would no longer be the body of the prey, it would become – in time – the other.

She hoped it would not be too long, not this time. She was already feeling hungry.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Political Probity

It didn’t happen exactly like that, of course. Although, for a time, it convinced several of the more excitable tabloids that both the politician and the lady of marketable intimacy were both found naked together in the bath filled with strawberry Angel Delight at the party conference.

However, as the Minister for Intimate Probing of the Wrong Sort did later issue a statement to the press. In it, he claimed that it is part of his remit to explore other forms of crime prevention, hence the use of the handcuffs and the whip in that Angel Delight filled bathtub. As he said at the time as well, his wife was standing beside him at this difficult time, much to his obvious relief. Especially when it seemed during in obligatory tear-stained TV interview she would much rather be standing behind him holding her personal favourite from her selection of high-quality kitchen knives in her hand.

The lady of marketable intimacy, of course, sold her story to the highest bidder. Originally, she claimed she was from Eastern Europe (which she later amended to Liverpool) and was trafficked into this country with the promise of becoming a reality TV star. However, later investigation by a rival tabloid discovered she’d turned to prostitution when disappointed by her failure in a TV talent show audition. Consequently, she turned to her current career as one with more potential for personal enrichment than that of being some pop Svengali’s latest paparazzi target.

Still, in the end though the politician was forced out of public life which meant there was one less of them out there wasting taxpayer’s money, if only for a while.

So, in the end, some good did come of it all.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]