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That was the end of things as far as I was concerned. I soon forgot about the young man who’d killed for no apparent reason and his parents, who seemed so lost without him, and the young woman that didn't seem to fit in the story at all.
I did briefly call it to mind again the following November when a chance remark by a witness to a completely separate crime – a murder, which you can read about if you like in the book CHANGING SCENES OF LIFE – touched on it. It seemed that one of the postgraduate students who had tutored young Stephen Corbridge, had quite deliberately undermined his confidence by telling him that he had no chance of getting the first class degree that he needed to continue with his studies. I had other things to think about at the time, so I didn’t do anything about it. Now I wonder if I ought to have tried to communicate this information to the family.
An even bigger coincidence than that occurred in 2009 when I was shot in the back of the neck. That incident changed my life in many ways. An important one of those was to bring me much closer to Bernie, Peter and the rest of their “family”. I put the word in inverted commas because so few of the members are actually related in the usual way.
If you’ve been following us on the website, you probably already know what I’m going to say, but I’ll spell it out here for completeness. It turns out that Stephen Corbridge, the student suicide, was engaged to be married to Our Bernie when he died. She was the young woman at the inquest whom I couldn’t place. And the parents were Stan and Sylvia, who have been, and still are, in the background keeping the household running despite my best efforts to disrupt it. After Stephen’s death, they took Bernie under their wing and treated her as their own daughter. And after they retired, they moved down from Newcastle to help her with bringing up Lucy.
My Dad would have said that it was all part of God’s plan. I’m not sure that I quite agree, although you have to admit that all the pieces of the jig-saw have fitted together in a quite extraordinary way. And I suppose it’s all a matter of what you mean. I don’t like the idea that God planned for Stephen to kill himself in order to start off a sequence of events culminating in there being a family all lined up to take me on when I needed it; but maybe he did influence what happened afterwards to bring something positive out of that tragedy.
I’d better stop there. Bernie says I put too much philosophy into what I write, so I’ll leave you to think it through for yourself!
There are some full-length novels about Jonah and his colleagues available as e-books from Amazon or Kobo and some short stories, that you can download completely free from the Kobo Store.