One of the Finest Treatment Centres in the World

Mr and Mrs Martin-Smith have it all; the houses, the cars, the personal equity plans, Sky+, private health insurance policies, a yacht in the harbour and a house on the seafront.
David retired from his plumbing empire at forty-six. He built it up from nothing in the 70’s.
Diane, the wife clever enough to change his name from plain old David Martin Smith to the more upmarket David Martin-Smith at the time of their marriage (no fee for a name-change if requested with a marriage-licence), became head of their thriving bedsit/flat-letting empire, a dream she hatched with her army of Barbies sat around the dollhouse at only seven.
She set up in the 80’s when David went bankrupt in order to set up a new, more discreet plumbing company under her maiden name, Walsh.
It all started from one old Edwardian seafront bed-and-breakfast.
They snapped it up for a song from a clumsy alcoholic proprietor who went to the trouble of starving and drugging a resting actor-in-residence before killing himself in one of the many baths of the establishment.
The state were most obliging to the Martin-Smiths, the only people in Bournemouth to make a move on the place, and offered good incentive to re-open as a low-rent establishment.
It was perfect for David. The structure was fine, as was the decoration. The only real work he needed to do was update the plumbing system, which came in handy for book-cooking in the new business.
They installed second-hand coin-operated electric heaters, the ones that cost a fortune to run and are extremely bad for the health, in each of the rooms.
For the accompanying kitchenette, squeezed into the most convenient corner of each room, they installed individual water-heaters, a pair of electric-hobs with grill, a sink, a sickly-coloured strip of work-surface and two nearly new cupboards.
The baths were kept (David liked them too much to throw them away) but he decided to install new individual electric water-heaters for them. The toilets were replaced with industrial ones. The residents’ own electricity bill, paid in the main by the council, was high enough as it was, but the profit they made from electricity alone was enough to pay their tax-bill each year. Diane hid all profits and bumped up costs, a truly shining product of the eighties.
Soon enough, the rooms were filled with the town’s young addicts and mentally ill.
Early in the nineties, the Martin-Smiths purchased a large, dilapidated Victorian terraced house around the corner from Marblehead House, the name they gave to the old B&B.
It was perfect timing for David, who had become bored after completing the rejuvenation of Marblehead.
He gutted, re-jigged the layout, plumbed, plastered and painted the entire building with the aid of two Marblehead addicts who used to be builders, and turned it into a series of one and two bedroomed flats.
With these, they rented as part-furnished on assured shorthold tenancy agreements to the usual suspects who paid in cash, and couples on the dole. The annual maintenance-charges of the two buildings saw the advent of their first and only full-time employee, Dave Smythe.
Dave was a happy-go-lucky type with lots of baggage. He’d been everywhere and done everything, only he had nothing to show for it, apart from a twenty-year old daughter he’d fathered form a wife who left him for a banker nineteen years ago, upon whom he doted. Although she’d turned to prostitution to feed her already chronic heroin addiction, he loved her all the same. In fact, he loved her more now than ever before. She’d been his only reason to live when he tried to kill himself five years ago, so he saw it as only right to look after her as best he could, now that she, too, found herself gently rocked between the jaws of death.
Dave worked hard for his cash-in-hand salary, paid weekly, minus his rent and electricity at Marblehead, for which the Martin-Smiths claimed from the council, fabricating a false name for an unemployed tenant. They knew by now that the council never checked up on them.
Dave drank religiously at the Manor Inn and saw his daughter at her hovel every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon.
One day, the Martin-Smiths called him to Diane’s office at Marblehead. It was a matter of ‘some urgency’, she’d put on his pager.
He wondered what it might be about, having never stolen so much as a pen from them in his four years of service. They’d pulled him up on some of his decorating and his carpentry left a lot to be desired, but Dave worked to the best of his abilities and they knew it.
Like everyone else who was no one in their eyes, the Martin-Smiths treated Dave as if he had not an ounce of feeling in his body. They’d never once raised their voices to him, but it was with quiet contempt that they ruled over his life. Their way was to appease him, to use him for all he was worth. In order to get what was necessary with the least amount of fuss, they felt it their right to treat him like a complete baffoon.
They knew Dave had to be sweetened from time to time. Finding an honest slave of British origin had been an ordeal in itself, but the thought of having to replace him was never discussed. Dave was theirs, and that was that.
His meeting with Diane was a short one.
As it was coming to the end of his fourth year, she had decided to give him a rent-free month (but continued to claim) and promised that he’d have his own flat over at Dorado Mansions in no time if he tried just that little bit harder.
This was thrilling news for Dave, who rose to the challenge by relieving the window-cleaner of his duties by working every other Saturday till lunchtime. Diane also made him work late on Thursdays to relieve the cleaner from her duties in the toilets and bathrooms.
As time passed, the Martin-Smiths took a month off to holiday in Spain with their only friends, the Rhys-Jones’. They showed him how to run the place without them and he revelled in the responsibility, sure that their return would be the turning point in his life.
In his own flat, he would have ample space for his daughter to live with him. Maybe he could help her find a place in treatment for her addiction, in time.
When they got back, though, they acted as if they’d forgotten about the flat altogether. They began to tease him in covert ways, like semi-disguised smaning as he left the office and piling more work on him unduly at the end of each day.
Diane especially enjoyed watching him wait for a sign. He had become a hilarious caricature of stalwart tolerance for her to use and abuse at will. She revelled in his subordinacy. It made her feel almost royal, owning his every action as he hovered for a tiny particle of respect.
Then, the day came, and Diane told him that she would like to see him that evening in the office.
Strange as it may seem, Dave had completely forgotten that he joined Marblehead five years ago to the day. It only dawned on him as he approached the office, and a whoop of joy made his face red as he entered.
This must surely be the day they tell me I can move in to a flat at the Dorado! he thought, biting his lip as he sat down.
‘Dave?’
‘Yes, Mrs Martin-Smith.’
‘You know what day it is today, don’t you?’ She coughed theatrically as David shuffled some papers around next to her.
‘Yes, I think so,’ replied Dave, worried already that the proceedings were taking on exact same tone as they had for well over a year.
‘Well, it’s a very special day for you, Dave.’ He smiled solemnly and looked down at his boots. ‘Today marks five years of service with us. Did you know that, Dave?’ Dave nodded like a numbskull. ‘David and I are so thrilled to have you with us. You’ve been,’ she searched for the words with a tight grimace, ‘you’ve been the best worker we’ve ever had.’
David managed to stifle a titter, turning at right-angles to her while crossing his legs. Diane sat forward.
‘Thank you, Mrs Martin-Smith. It’s been a great pleasure for me to work here. You’ve both been a great help to me,’ said Dave, leaning forward slightly. He’d always been humble, at least ever since he was diagnosed to have deeply repressed psychotic tendencies as a teenager after setting fire to part of Brighton Pier.
‘Dave?’ said Diane. Dave leant further towards her. ‘David and I have thought very seriously about moving you into a little flat over at Dorado Mansions and, well, we think it’s about time.’ She smiled at him and breathed deeply. ‘Would you like that, Dave?’
‘Oh yes, Mrs Martin-Smith. That’d be fantastic. Best news I could wish for,’ he replied, hands clasped tightly at his crotch like a schoolboy in the head’s office. ‘Oh, thank you, Mr and Mrs Martin-Smith. Thank you so much!’
David interjected. ‘It’s just a matter of time now, Dave.’ Diane stifled a sman by passing it off as a quickly contained sneeze, then David continued. ‘That damned nuisance, Geraint. He told us he’d be moving out three months ago and he’s not been paying rent ever since. We’d planned it so you could have your own place by our working anniversary,’ (Diane beats back another titter), ‘and now this. I’m sorry, Dave, but until we can get him evicted you’ll just have to stay here at Marblehead.’
Dave’s face had the look of a man in complete emotional freefall. His dream of making a home for himself and his daughter suddenly seemed as distant as yesterday. He didn’t know what to say. Diane squirmed noisily in her leather swivel-chair, revelling in ecstacy as he sunk into his in front of her.
David, too close to a full-blown fit of uncontrollable laughter, continued. ‘It won’t be long before he’s gone, Dave, and the moment he is, the flat’s yours, OK?’
Dave nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I can wait a few more weeks.’
‘A few MORE weeks?’ cried Diane, visibly horrified by his tone. ‘What’s that supposed to mean, Dave?’
If he’d just left out the more word, his response would have been wholly acceptable. But no. She’d gladly pounced on another opportunity to belittle him.
Dave nodded sideways.
‘That’s gratitude for you, isn’t it, David?’ she said, swivelling dramatically towards her husband for reassurance. He said nothing, too busy trying to think of something serious to stem the sheer joy of laughter. They were loving every minute of it. ‘Well, I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
‘Well,’ started Dave. ‘You did say that I’d be able to have a flat at the beginning of my fourth year, Mrs Martin-Smith.’
‘I don’t remember any mention of a flat before today. Do you, David?’ David knew nothing. As his lower lip crept up towards his hairy nostrils, a tiny emission of laughter came from Diane’s direction. Dave was sure it had come from her. It was laughter, and this was the first time he’d been absolutely positive of it. They were laughing at him. He was their puppet, their slave and goldfish.
What could he do, though? Speak up and lose his job and home, or wait a few months and find a new job and rent a proper flat for himself and his daughter? He had his savings, after all.
‘I’m sorry to have said what I did. I probably just dreamt it up from somewhere. Stupid of me.’ Dave looked down at his boots again. They seemed cleaner now. The air was cleaner, too.
‘Well, Dave,’ replied Diane with a mini squirmaround. ‘We’ll let that go. But, don’t forget, we’ve put our whole lives into Marblehead and we don’t take kindly to people telling us what we did and did not say in the past. We’ll get you in to that flat as soon as we can, OK?’
‘Yes, Mrs Martin-Smith. Yes, sir. Thank you, both of you.’ He excused himself with tight lips and hands clasped almost to the point of seizure at his stomach. His heart was beating so fast he didn’t hear them cackle after shutting the door.
When he got to the Manor Inn, he ordered his usual double Bells with water.
‘Mr and Mrs Whatsisname brought this in for you. Said you’d been with them five years now. Well done, Dave,’ said George, the landlord. He was pointing to an optic above him. There it was, a two-litre bottle of duty-free Bells. It had a red bow hanging off it. He recognised the material, having gone halfway across Bournemouth trying to find it for Mrs Martin-Smith late last Friday. She didn’t even thank him for going to so much trouble. Typical, he thought.
‘Nice one!’ he said. ‘I’ll ‘ave some of that, then!’
George chuckled, raising Dave’s glass up to the optic. ‘Large one?’
‘Make it a quadruple!’ he replied. ‘And have one for yourself.’
But something very wrong had happened to Dave’s head since leaving the office that evening.
For instance, voices he hadn’t heard for years had started talking to him again. Not since his father left home in his infancy had he heard those voices.
A stock reply like ‘Nice one! I’ll ‘ave some of that, then!’ was interpreted as ‘Bastards! I’ll kill ‘em!’ by Dave, and he couldn’t work out whether he’d actually said the former or the latter. He needed to buy some time, start talking to the voices, get to know them again, and find out what they wanted.
He left hurriedly without indulging. George poured it back into the bottle for next time. He knew Dave had his quirks.
The next few weeks turned into months. Dave’s daughter became pregnant again, only this time she wanted to keep it, having been told by her doctor that this was probably her last chance of conceiving. The baby also meant she could skip the queue and get a comfortable two-bedroom council flat in no time.
Tempers were fraying all around him at work, but Dave just plodded on in hope, having talked to the voices and found out what they were after.
He started frequenting the Ship Inn next to the chip-shop, where Geraint the fruit-machine addict made his ugly side-earner selling pot to locals. He’d thought of asking him about the flat a hundred times, but it was too risky. The voices were back, and he couldn’t afford the aggro. All they needed was one unsavoury argument and they’d be over him like a rash. No. He would wait. And be humble. And everything would go to plan.
At the end of every week, David and Diane would ask him if he’d liked his whisky and tell him how Geraint was the only person in his way. ‘We’re doing all we can, Dave,’ they exclaimed. ‘But he just won’t budge.’
In the seventh week of waiting, Dave saw Geraint at the Ship and confronted him. It was a Friday evening and Mr Martin-Smith had just done the waiting-game schpeel on him.
‘Geraint?’
‘Oh, hello, Dave. Didn’t see you there. How are ya’?’
‘I’m a tad peaved actually, mate.’
‘Oh yeah, why’s that then?’
‘See, the landlord promised your flat to me and they said you won’t leave.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.’ He turned and started talking to a pal.
‘You haven’t paid your rent for months, Geraint. They want you out!’ His voice rose only at the end, when he said the word ‘out!’
If he’d said it in a vaguely respectful way, Geraint might have told him the truth, that he had paid his rent and that the Martin-Smiths had said nothing to him about moving out.
Geraint turned back to Dave. ‘Move away from me,’ was all he said, like a bouncer to a pisshead.
Dave crept away and sat where his drink was. Had he said ‘You’re going to die’ or was it ‘Move away’?

Early next day, Dave called the Martin-Smiths at their five-bedroom seafront home in Poole.
He had a story.
‘I know it’s a first, but can I come and see you? It won’t take long, honestly. I was robbed in the street last night and I don’t have enough money for the ladder-rental. You know, to clean the windows. I’ll only be needing a fiver.’
David knew, or at least he thought he knew, that Dave didn’t have a bank account and, besides, he’d never called unless he absolutely needed to.
‘Alright, then. I’ll leave it on the table inside the front door. No need to disturb us, Dave. Just shut it when you leave, OK?’ He hung up, skipped down to place the fiver on the table down by the door and went back up to bed. Diane didn’t even stir. She’d never wanted kids.
When Dave got there, he went directly upstairs and took care of them without fuss. A few speculative murmurs came from the blows administered to the heads of David and Diane, but it all went swimmingly. His first blows had been mere taps compared to the second and third. He slit their wrists and went down to the car he’d arrived in.
It was so easy. All he’d done was pick up David’s brother’s widow at her home in Bournemouth, where he’d made the telephone call half an hour earlier, chuck her in the boot of her own Passat, and drive her to the Martin-Smith’s house. She put up a bit of a fight getting out of the boot and into the bedroom, but when she saw them lying there with blood everywhere, she became wholly compliant, shaking with joy.
‘Did you do this?’ she asked, as if he’d just shown her a wonderful painting.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘You did.’
With the smalltalk out of the way, he asked her to tense and stretch her own arm-muscles, contorting her body. Then, he took her in his arms and helped her get the long, thin and extremely sharp knife right in there, waited for her to stop juddering, left it in her hand and went downstairs without delay, swiping the fiver on his way out, leaving the Passat in the drive.
Unconcerned as to whether anyone had seen him in the oversized parka he’d purchased in London last weekend, Dave took the bus back to Marblehead and changed into his work clothes. Then he drove in his own car down to Tony’s scrapyard, careful to make a mess of starting it up so the neighbours could hear him leave. At Tony’s, he picked up the ladder and returned to Marblehead to clean the windows like clockwork.
At ten-thirty, Jeff the paranoid schizophrenic from room 6 at Marblehead went out for his promenade walk as usual. Cloaked in his trademark oversized parka, he poked an eye out from its hood and looked up at Dave.
‘Alright, Dave.’
Dave said hello back and carried on cleaning Jeff’s windows, as normal.
Moments later, a pair of police officers said hello to Jeff and asked him where he’d been that morning.
‘Sleeping isn’t good enough for us, Jeffrey. Let’s go down the station and have a nice cup of tea, shall we?’ they’d said.
‘Where we goin’, then? ’ he’d replied, giggling.
Jeff actually thought that ‘the station’ meant the train station and that these nice people wanted to take him on an away-day return somewhere exciting.
They took him in and questioned him, got his parents to section him and held him in solitary confinement on suspicion of killing the Martin-Smiths and Mrs Armitage.
As the evidence was gathered, Jeff quickly became prime candidate. He’d hated his landlords for umpteen years. He’d seen how they were, the way they walked and talked, the way they treated people. Jeff had also written many thrilling crime-stories based on the Martin-Smiths, all very dark and psychotic. They lay there on his desk, covered in cigarette ash, greased with chip-fat, unpublished, but certainly retrievable. The short story about the triple killing would be of particular interest, thought Dave when he had read it slyly last Wednesday.
Mrs Armitage was a suspect for a while but evidence suggested she would never have been able to plunge the knife so deeply inside her own heart.
The bus-driver confirmed that Jeff had been on the bus and the dotty old boy in the retirement home next to Marblehead had seen him walking into Marblehead way before Jeff said that he woke up.
Were they so sure as to testify in a court of law? The driver was, but the old boy was hard to swing, his wife having been slain six years ago by a lonesome drifter. He did snap, though, when the officer in charge, eager to sweep this story under Jeff’s carpet as quickly as possible, beckoned for justice, asking the old boy whether he thought it was what his wife would have wanted.
When the Martin-Smiths’ will was read out, Dave wasn’t surprised to be the sole beneficiary.
The voices had told him three things; that they had no friends, they had no known living relatives (they hated his brother’s widow), and the exact contents of the will (the voices had told him where to look for the code to the safe).
The Martin-Smiths had a heart, after all, and he had warm thoughts for them whilst reading it. Although he was not entirely surprised to see that he was sole benefactor, it spurned him on to kill them.
Three months later, just before noon, Dave strolled towards the Manor Inn for only the second time since his bottle of Bell’s had been placed there. He felt a surge of all-inclusive joy race around his spindly body, a surge he’d never felt before in his life.
‘Hello, Dave. Long time, no see.’
Dave nodded hello and looked at the carpet.
George, the landlord was happy to see him back, but quickly changed his tone threatrically, half drunk already.
‘Sorry to hear about the Martin-Smiths.’
‘Yes, dreadful shame,’ replied Dave. Then, with a wryly reserved grin, he looked up at him. ‘I think I’ll have a large Bell’s, George. And one for yourself.’
Suddenly, George clicked. He hurried through his mind to decipher what he was thinking. ‘I think I will,’ he replied, with more than a whisper of a smile. He hated the Martin-Smiths as much as Dave. They drank to their own health.
As he poured some water into his glass, the voices said goodbye and left him contented.
Dave had used Jeff in a cruel way, but it was with good intention that the voices had come to him and spoken.
In fact, Jeff had never been happier. He’d always wanted to be famous and now he was. Tucked up out of harm’s way at Broadmoor, he set up his own website and wrote dark, sinister accounts of his own story along with other fiction for people to read and download.
Without Jeff, Dave would never have filled his full potential by completing what he perceived to be the wishes his own particular god, which he readily described as air to anyone who asked.
‘Air has no religion, doesn’t judge, asks nothing from us and allows us to live,’ he’d say.
Four years down the line and Dave’s business is thriving.
Having set up a drink/drug/gambling/sex addiction centre at Marblehead using the basic principles founded by Alcoholics Anonymous, old George from the Manor Inn had entered a dead man and left four and a half months later smelling of roses. Bored of the pub-life, he decided to go into business with Dave and renovated the Manor to turn it into the female-patient house, so that Marblehead could be a men-only house.
Dave’s daughter, who was on the brink of death at the time of the killings, gave birth to a delightful pair of twins and managed to kick her heroin habit after a nine-month bout of treatment.
‘Airy Fairy’, the name Dave and George gave to their company, went on to become one of the finest treatment centres in the world.