The Death of Terrance Godwin

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Terrance Godwin was the richest man in town. In-fact, he owned the most of it. And not only was he considered the richest man in town, but one of the richest men in the country and the world.

To the world at-large, he was a construction magnate and philanthropist. He owned real estate all over town and he owned big shopping centres, hotels and penthouse apartment buildings in pretty much any major city you can name.

The construction elevator rattled its way up the cold temporary shaft to the eighth floor of his latest project. A new office building that breezed its way through the planning permission process the same way that the cold wind blew through the windowless floor. All put through with a smiling face as he visited sick children in the local hospital, shook hands with the elderly in the nursing homes and proclaimed how many local jobs were going to be created.

All a damn facade.

He had to open the waist-high gates of the elevator himself as he stepped out and looked around at the grey concrete and drywall garnished with dangling temporary electrical cables. "It's coming along well, isn't it?" he said, resting a hand against a metal support pillar.

"I wouldn't know," I replied. "I wouldn't know anything to do with construction in-fact."

"The same way I don't know anything about what you must've put in this little note you sent to my office," he replied, taking the envelope and all from the inside of his grey suit jacket. Opened with a neat cut from a letter opener by the looks of things.

"I'm pretty sure you know exactly what that letter was talking about, Mr Godwin."

"I'm not even sure if either of us are entirely acquainted with each-other, Ms...?"

He put out a greasy palm to offer a handshake. I declined and he soon withdraw his offer as I said: "Well that's for me to know. I wouldn't expect you to know anyway. Even if you did know me, all you'd know me as would be as a number. One of the many, many people you've screwed over all these years."

"I'm a very famous, influential and busy person, my friend," he shrugged back at me. "It's kind of my job to know all kinds of people. And it's hard to know so many people without accidentally 'screwing them over' over the course of the years as you say."

"But this is a bit different from not holding a door open for somebody or snubbing somebody at a party. It's making people bankrupt, making people homeless."

I handed him a photograph of a young man who had his arm across my shoulder. The both of us smiling happily. Neither of us were smiling in such a way anymore.

"That photo was taken of us six months ago, after he proposed to me. We were due to get married next spring - maybe even have children, we were thinking. But no, you ruined him. You ruined him and you poisoned his mind."

He didn't even react as I spoke.

"It was only a month later that I found him; hanging from the ceiling by a bit of rope. He hanged himself, you know?"

"That...is rather unfortunate, I must say. But I struggle to see how this has anything to do with me?"

There was a lump in my throat and my skin was cold, but I kept going: "You were the reason he killed himself, Mr Godwin. You – or whatever crony you delegated it to – put the cost of his rent, and everybody else's, through the roof for the, what, fifth time that year? He couldn't afford to pay, and we were both going to be thrown out on the street. I came home on the day I found him to the 'note' you sent him. Showing how in-debt he was. To the point where he wouldn't be able to pay it back.

"Yes, that's right Mr Godwin, I know who you really are. You're not just some sleazy businessman in a suit," I looked him up and down with a stink eye "You're a crook. A loan shark."

With the mentioning of those two words, his face turned like sour milk. "Yes, that's right. I know precisely who you are, Mr Godwin. A loan shark. You didn't make your money the way it says it in your so-called 'autobiography', you made it ripping off innocent people under a different name. Your real name, Mr Richard Clemont. The only reason you get so much good publicity and get almost everything you plan put through is because you probably have dirt on all the politicians in the world."

"Yes," he said. "I could blackmail the president himself into dancing naked on the steps of the Capitol, you know? A guy who had his blackmail to a Slovakian hooker paid off by a 'loan-shark' who has mafia funds wouldn't look very good come the midterms now, would it?"

"I'm sure my fiancé's life probably isn't the only one you've managed to take then through debt or homelessness. In-fact, I'm sure there's probably hundreds, no, thousands like him you've managed to kill."

"I'm sure there are," he replied with a shark-like grin. "Although I stopped counting once I got past ten...Though I do wonder, what are you going to do now, then? Take me to trial? Darling, I'm a celebrity. It wouldn't look good for a judge to send a man down who's only just donated a spare $10 million to the Saint Nicholas Children's Hospice now, would it? Or the police to arrest and press charges on the same man."

"I know," I replied "that's why I intend to do the job for them."

Without thinking, I lifted the small saw that was sitting in an otherwise-empty toolbox and ran at him. It crunched as it made contact with his skull and splattered blood across my face. I hit again and again and again and again until he stopped moving and stopped breathing.

It was over.

That evil man's grip on people around the world.

It was all over.

* * *

The following day...

"And this just in," read Tom, the newscaster "we have just received word that local property mogul and philanthropist, Mr Terrance Godwin's body has just been discovered on the eighth floor of his most recent construction project. We're going over now to Catherine, who's on the scene. Catherine?"

"Thanks Tom," I said.