Sir Walter Alistair Remington had a fantasy. It was no small thing; he would have to wait until parliament’s summer recess to fulfil it. In the meantime, he’d try to satiate himself with his usual habit.
Continue reading “Right Honourable Friends by Thomas Lawrance”
He could recall years before, when he was working down south, there had been this exhausted and exhausting expressway, the Togo-Badagry A1. As you curve out of the greater Lagos conurbation you eventually hit the track, a cheerless concrete, four lane highway which if you stayed on long enough took you clear out of Nigeria and would allow you to proceed along the coast road, looking out at the Bite of Benin, to Togo, Ghana and beyond. He remembered one occasion when he got so far as the Benin border, but it was not a good time to travel. He was young, mid 30s, and Nigeria was plagued by bad politicians, bad policies and bad law enforcement. Not a helpful combination if you are a young professional man from upstate, travelling alone.
Some decades ago the bishop of Evona discovered himself to be the victim of what in his opinion was a monstrous deception.
First, the powers-to-be, as Ransom Kegler called city hall and its tight-fingered allies, the politicians and the developers, had squeezed a piece of land out of him and were going to make money on it. They had cut him out of the profits when, post-sale, they had engineered a zoning change. The profits of the change promised to be immense. He had come alert too late, but it was better to come up breathing than not breathing at all.
Now, on top of this damn thievery, he was put on the spot by, of all persons, his youngest grandson Talbot with a barrage of questions, so simple coming and so complex moving on.
Continue reading “The Knock on Ransom Kegler by Tom Sheehan”
Somewhere along the line it all got out of hand. Somebody was robbing graves at Riverside Cemetery, sitting just above the Merrimack River on a flat hilltop. Stealing coins, too, strange as it seems. That’s the kind of thing can jerk a town right off its feet, even if the spread of the cemetery was closing fast on its capacity and a new site required.
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