The Stalking of Louise Copperfield Read online

  The Stalking of Louise Copperfield

  A story of love and revenge

  by

  Robert W Fisk

  Graphics from snappa.com

  FOXBURR PUBLISHING

  Mosgiel

  New Zealand

  The Stalking of Louise Copperfield

  Robert W Fisk

  Published by FOXBURR PUBLISHING, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE STALKING OF LOUISE COPPERFIELD

  First edition. January 19, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Robert W Fisk.

  ISBN: 978-1386709664

  Written by Robert W Fisk.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Stalking of Louise Copperfield

  WAHANUI.

  CHAPTER 1.

  CHAPTER 2.

  CHAPTER 3.

  THE PARTY

  CHAPTER 4.

  CHAPTER 5.

  CHAPTER 6.

  CHAPTER 7.

  CHAPTER 8.

  CHAPTER 9.

  THE STALKER

  CHAPTER 10.

  CHAPTER 11.

  CHAPTER 12.

  CHAPTER 13.

  CHAPTER 14.

  CHAPTER 15.

  CHAPTER 16.

  CHAPTER 17.

  CHAPTER 18.

  CHAPTER 19.

  CHAPTER 20.

  CHAPTER 21.

  CHAPTER 22.

  CHAPTER 23.

  CHAPTER 24.

  CHAPTER 25.

  CHAPTER 26.

  CHAPTER 27.

  CHAPTER 28.

  CHAPTER 29.

  CHAPTER 30.

  CHAPTER 31.

  CHAPTER 32.

  CHAPTER 33.

  CHAPTER 34.

  CHAPTER 35.

  CHAPTER 36.

  CHAPTER 37.

  CHAPTER 38.

  CHAPTER 39.

  CHAPTER 40.

  CHAPTER 41.

  CHAPTER 42.

  DOWNHILL

  CHAPTER 43.

  CHAPTER 44.

  CHAPTER 45.

  CHAPTER 46.

  CHAPTER 47.

  CHAPTER 48.

  CHAPTER 49.

  CHAPTER 50.

  THE TIDE TURNS

  CHAPTER 51.

  CHAPTER 52.

  CHAPTER 53.

  CHAPTER 54.

  CHAPTER 55.

  CHAPTER 56.

  CHAPTER 57.

  CHAPTER 58.

  THE STORM GATHERS

  CHAPTER 59.

  CHAPTER 60.

  CHAPTER 61.

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63.

  CHAPTER 64.

  CHAPTER 65.

  CHAPTER 66.

  CHAPTER 67.

  CHAPTER 68.

  CHAPTER 69.

  CHAPTER 70.

  CHAPTER 71.

  CHAPTER 72.

  CHAPTER 73.

  CHAPTER 74.

  CHAPTER 75.

  CHAPTER 76.

  THE DELUGE

  CHAPTER 77.

  CHAPTER 78.

  CHAPTER 79.

  CHAPTER 80.

  CHAPTER 81.

  CHAPTER 82.

  CHAPTER 83.

  CHAPTER 84.

  CHAPTER 85.

  CHAPTER 86.

  CHAPTER 87.

  CHAPTER 88.

  CHAPTER 89.

  CHAPTER 90.

  CHAPTER 91.

  CHAPTER 92.

  CHAPTER 93.

  AFTER THE DELUGE

  CHAPTER 94.

  CHAPTER 95.

  CHAPTER 96.

  CHAPTER 97.

  CHAPTER 98.

  THANK YOU

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  Further Reading: The Fern Valley Conspiracy

  Also By Robert W Fisk

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  For Elaine for standing beside me.

  The two central characters, Louise Copperfield and Charlotte Hoar, are connected by the same man, their high school teacher David Bannister. As adults, they react in different ways to their experience; one with emotional difficulties for which she blames herself and the other with feelings of worthlessness. Louise’s husband Frank wagers Stuart cannot seduce Louise at a company party, while Charlotte seeks vengeance for imagined injustices.

  If the story seems to be about you personally, it is not. The plot and the people and the events are created by me, often based on a real incident read or spoken about in the public domain. If you have had the kind of coercive experiences described in the story, find an organisation similar to Calling Out Monsters. It is never too late to tell your story.

  WAHANUI.

  a small town in New Zealand.

  CHAPTER 1.

  Louise Copperfield always woke early, even after a night of heavy partying such as one the night before. She pushed away a damp cloth over her face. She felt around for Frank but he wasn’t there. The sheets were still warm, with a small damp spot. A man spot. Louise rolled over by lifting one hip and felt with her hand. A wet patch. Damn. She felt herself; her pubic hair was sticky. She was sore. Double damn.

  After the strain of the last few weeks – or was it months, or perhaps years - it was a great relief to go to a party and mix with happy people. Frank and she had been going through a bad spell, like she had with her first husband, who had also been a loser. She didn’t want to go through that again; the rows, the separation, the divorce; they had all been hard on her, and hard on her daughter Kezia too.

  The party five days into the New Year had been a surprise. She still did not know why Frank had taken her. Perhaps to show off his beautiful wife? Especially to his best client, Stuart Larcombe?

  Louise knew Stuart fancied her. Pushing forty two, Louise still had her looks. People couldn’t believe sixteen year old Kezia was her daughter. She knew that Stuart would be there because it was his party but Louise felt that she could mix with people and avoid any advances he might make.

  That was how it had worked out. She had danced and danced, and sung at the top of her voice while Frank sat in a corner with Nigel and Stuart, drinking.

  Who had she been with? Lots of people. She couldn’t remember who she had last been with. Not Frank. Louise knew that much. She had been told that he was absolutely sloshed and had gone to a sunroom to sleep it off. She must have been sloshed too. She could not remember anything after a break in the music in which she had sat down for a rest.

  Stuart Larcombe had sat with her and chatted. She had been on her guard and had watched her drink, Coca Cola by that time of the evening, so that he had no opportunity to doctor it with a double dose of vodka or something. A girl had to be careful in this day and age.

  It was now very early in the morning. Louise was happy that Alexander was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Kezia was at home. If Louise got home quickly, Kezia would never know she had been away all night. Frank she could deal with. He had been in no fit state to know where she had gone.

  Louise looked around her as the light improved. She was alone in a large room with wooden panelling and a wall of books on shelves. Heavy curtains which had not been drawn hung beside the windows, letting in the early morning light. Two doors were set in the wall adjacent to the window. One had a key on the inside of the lock. The other was a built in wardrobe. She eased out of bed and opened the wardrobe door. Inside were racks of men’s clothes and shoes. There were no hairbrushes on the dresser, no sign that a woman shared the r
oom.

  Louise’s clothes were in a heap on the floor. She picked them up and draped them on the bed. She could not find her panties. They were not with the pile of clothes. Had someone taken them? Even though she could remember nothing, she was sure she had had sex so she felt under the covers. Her panties were lying in the bed. So was a used condom. Her searching hand cringed at the touch.

  She pulled back the covers so she could see better in the dim light. She held her underwear up to the dim light from the window. The damp stains showed that he had cleaned himself on them.

  Her bag was on the floor with her mobile phone still inside. Great. She took out the spare panties she always carried ‘just in case’, nearly falling over as she stood on each leg to put them on. She thrust the dirty undies and the condom into her bag. It was early in the morning so Frank wouldn’t be awake yet. If he had made it home, maybe she could just crawl in beside him and pretend she had been there all the time? Did she smell of sex? She thought so. Better take a shower before she got in beside him.

  Louise began to phone for a taxi, then hung up because she didn’t know where she was. In Larcombe’s house somewhere in Cadiz. She knew that for sure but she did not know the address.

  She went down the stairs, through the room to the passage and the front door, and left the house without looking back. She did not want to be seen and did not want her privacy invaded by a stranger asking if she needed help. If she could get away without being seen, the whole shameful scene could be made to disappear.

  She walked down a gravel path that had large concrete squares set in it, beside a pristine lawn and under the branches of the trees that had been pruned to allow easy walking but which shielded the house from the street.

  ‘Someone pays a good gardener,’ she thought. She walked up the sloping street toward the nearest intersection until she was far enough away from the house to call for a taxi to meet her at the corner.

  While she waited she had time to think. She now knew her whereabouts from the street names on the power poles but she was in Cadiz, an area of town that she had not visited, an area for important and rich people, not carpenters’ wives like herself. She was in a street where the nobs, the local nobility, lived in large houses overlooking the sea.

  While she waited for the taxi, a wave of guilt passed through her body. She did not know who she had had sex with. Not Frank, anyway. Was it someone she knew? Nigel Jones, who she had always fancied? No, he was too nice to take advantage. Or Larcombe? Had he managed to spike her drink after all? She doubted it. Nigel had bought the drink at the bar and sent it over to her with Bannister.

  At the thought that Bannister might be the one who had spiked her drink and raped her while she was unconscious, panic flooded her. Her face flushed and her knees weakened so that she almost stumbled as she got into the taxi. As her panic left her, she said to herself that this must never happen again. It had to be her fault. She should have been more careful. Waves of guilt flooded over her making her feel as if she was being knocked off her feet by a huge wave.

  Ever since High School and Bannister, Louise had lived with shame and insecurity. She had difficulty with strangers and strange places, always living with the fear that someone would shame her. Or tell Frank. Or the people at church would shun her as a scarlet woman. Or Kezia would hate her.

  As a result of her constant anxiety she imagined all kinds of disasters and difficulties and worried herself sick over the children. She knew that her insecurity annoyed Frank but whenever he raised the topic or questioned whether her fears were unfounded she flew off the handle and refused to speak to him.

  Louise’s mind drifted back to her concern that Frank was finished with her. Probably the only thing keeping them together now was Alexander, their little son. Was this another of Frank’s cruel tricks? Had he arranged for her to be seduced so that he could claim that she was unfaithful? Had he set her up deliberately so that he could leave her and claim custody of little Alexander?

  Well, she had been unfaithful. If it was her fault, that she had been too drunk to know what she was doing, Frank would know nothing. If Frank had set her up, he would bring it up soon enough. Now she felt guilty that she had harboured such thoughts about Frank. He wasn’t that bad a husband. He was a good provider. It was just that he got so busy he had no time for his wife, and so tired that he was always grumpy.

  It was going to be a tense morning but she would get through it. ‘Live moment by moment, ‘she told herself. ‘Shut out everything but the moment, Louise.’

  CHAPTER 2.

  Stuart Larcombe was in his early fifties. He was slim and tall and distinguished looking, a businessman at the top of his game. He usually dressed in a business suit, even in New Zealand’s summertime. For casual wear he chose a Polo shirt and chinos, especially when he went to a pub for a few drinks. Wearing a suit in a pub gave quite the wrong signals to other customers who saw the pub as a meeting ground for all levels of society and generally dressed down when they joined ‘the boys’ for a beer in the evening or after a game of rugby. Larcombe liked to think that he fitted in at any level but his private school accent marked him out as a well-educated Australian. Consequently people around him treated him with a certain reserve. Larcombe was not married, and spoke as if he never had been.

  It was not so with Frank Copperfield, his companion in the bar. As a consequence of being a very good rugby player in his younger days he was popular and the centre of attention when he drank or partied. He still had an imposing figure and he and his wife Louise made an attractive and popular couple. He had been known in rugby as a ‘hard man’, a term of respect awarded to few. Frank was taller than Stuart Larcombe but heavier, and now sporting a beer belly that he tried to suck in to minimize the bulge. Where Stuart was dark haired and going grey at the edges as he entered his early fifties, Frank was florid and blonde. He kept his hair cut short to give the appearance of a military man but his shoulders were becoming rounded and he tended to hunch.

  Where Larcombe was a financier and property developer used to Board Rooms and meetings around a table, Frank was a builder with calloused hands who met his workers one on one. Both men employed secretaries; Larcombe had offices in a new building in the centre of Wahanui while Frank had rented space in a warehouse cum office block near the harbour. Frank’s secretary had a helper, a salesman who sold new properties for Copperfield Building Limited. Frank largely left the paperwork to Clive the salesman and Pamela the secretary, although he always met his clients and kept in touch with them. He liked to take papers home each night to study them carefully in his office in the garage, which he kept locked when he was not at home. Supervising his carpenters and labourers, keeping in touch with his clients, planning and designing, and checking on sales and accounts kept Frank very busy. He was often tired and drank too much.

  Frank was married to Louise and for him things had not been going well. Louise was anxious about everything to the extent that Frank now excluded her from the details of his work. She was four years younger than Frank’s forty six, still pretty and attractive. Her two children occupied most of her spare time; Kezia at sixteen was becoming a companion for her, and Alexander at seven was her baby.

  Louise was a quiet person, a trained nurse, who could be vivacious but preferred to stay in Frank’s shadow. She did not enjoy being in a bar and did not like rugby but tolerated it for Frank’s sake. She was petite and came across as nervous, as if she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She carried heavy baggage from her high school days, baggage she never talked about and still grieved about even twenty six years later. She tended to clean and tidy excessively, which was perhaps a result of her nursing training or at another level an attempt to clean out the past.

  Louise was liked by everyone but she kept to herself especially as the children went through school. Alexander had meant the normal involvement in baby, toddler and newly at school activities but Louise was thankful those days had passed. The friend she talked t
o and saw most of was Charlotte Hoar.

  Charlotte usually made the running in the friendship. Charlotte was out-going and breezy in contrast to Louise’s quiet pensiveness. She ran a shop selling fashion clothing for women. Being tall herself, she had an eye for elegant clothing for the more statuesque figure. Where Louise was dark haired and blue eyed, Charlotte had fair hair which she kept long enough to fall under her jawline but short enough to be manageable when she rode.

  Her parents Tom and Alice Hoar had run a farm with sheep and pigs and a stud so horses had been part of her life since earliest times. She still went home regularly, enjoying exercising the horses that her parents now looked after when the stud lines were sold and the farm became a stables and riding school. Sometimes Louise wondered why Charlotte with her elegance bothered with her, had stayed with her after high school and Louise’s return after training, and through Louise’s disastrous marriage to Julian Ricciardello, but Charlotte seemed to find an element of stability in the friendship. Charlotte’s descriptions of her many boyfriends kept Louise in stitches and left her wondering if Charlotte was sometimes making things up. Charlotte obviously enjoyed sex even if Louise did not.

  Charlotte’s life had been turbulent as she changed partners frequently. No man seemed to be able to keep her for long, except for Nigel, her current partner.

  Nigel Jones had been brought from Wales with his parents when they immigrated to New Zealand. A little younger than Louise and Charlotte, Nigel had attended primary school with them but when he was thirteen his parents sent him to a private boarding school, a school in Christchurch that his parents referred to as a ‘public school’ in the British way.

  Nigel was at university in Christchurch when his parents decided to travel back to Wales. His mother Myfanwy had always regretted that her daughter had stayed in Wales and wished to visit her to see the two grandchildren while they were still little. The trip became permanent with Dai and Myfanwy staying in Wales while Nigel made a life for himself in New Zealand.

  At school Nigel payed rugby, which was compulsory whether you enjoyed it or not. Saint George’s was a rugby school, attracting student enrolments through the school’s reputation for academic excellence and achievement in rugby. A small youth, Nigel was not suited to the game. Although he was fast on the field and gained standing because of his courage, he was easily singled out for ‘the treatment’ and spent much time off the field with his injuries. He played tennis, where again his lack of height militated against high attainment. He changed to squash racquets, at which he excelled. He won a school blue in Association Football, soccer, but there were no prizes for squash.