James wished SD would smile, cry,  get angry or show some emotion. He usually stood stock-still staring through impassive eyes that were framed by a motionless face.
 
SD's wife was worse than useless however she kept James' bed warm, ran the house and an E-Mail business. James was a kept man; that is kept to mind SD.



Following the death of a neighbour, his widow had said to SD, "I'm going to live with my with sister in her flat, so I'll not need the gardening stuff. You and my late husband you were such good friends that I know he'd want you to have it." SD jumped at the chance for there was a ride on lawn mower, chain saw, all the gizmos and loads of specialist chemicals.



When the police visited and took James away for questioning those many years ago James had been a young newly married man with prospects and a child on the way. 10 years later and not long out of prison though only 35 he looked haggard and aged.

Why had he taken all the blame? Particularly as he had never wanted to poison his brother and it was SD's wife that had mixed together the different weed killers.

On that fateful day, SD's wife and children were going out to visit friends. The last thing she had said to him was "You spend all that time in the Garden and at Flower Shows and do nothing about the weeds".

SD had taken the bait. The moment he had poured the water into the bucket containing the powders, gas was evolved that should have killed him; however he was not in the shed but in the open air for it was a sunny day.

A neighbour saw him thrashing about in the grass and had phoned for an Ambulance. Sadly it was too late for he was by then no more than a semi-brain dead automaton: to think that he had a PhD in Organic Chemistry.



That was what convinced the Police that an attempt had been made on his life. No self-respecting chemist would have mixed those chemicals by accident. Suicide was ruled out because the method chosen would have been excruciatingly painful. With SD's knowledge he could easily have concocted a lethal but painless hemlock under whose influence he could have just drifted out of this world.

Furthermore James had an MSc also in a chemical discipline.

When a neighbour gave evidence that she had seen James and SD's wife in the shed the night before the attempted murder it was game set and match for the prosecution.

James lamely telling the court that the two were merely having sex finally provided a motive. James changed his plea to guilty but his Barrister's masterful request for clemency resulted in a lenient sentence.

SD's wife took a new identity. Her in-laws had taken the children off her hands but left her to look after SD.  "Tell James to keep away from us, his wife and  child." They had barked. SD's wife had kept herself to herself and after several changes of house she managed to finally slide into anonymity.

Business by E-Mail meant that the she never met her customers and SD's occasional rambles into their gardens had discouraged the neighbours from showing any neighbourliness towards SD or his wife.

So cut off from family or friends, James was her only link with life. She had visited him in prison, and she wrote daily to James. On leaving prison James had been met by SD's wife and she took him home.

She really loved James and SD had been abusing the children! Why had she never told anybody, why did the children never tell anyone even now!

Because they did not know, they had been drugged and remembered nothing but vague bad dreams. He'd used the drug on her but though one had no will, one could remember. She ,unlike the children, knew that it had not been a bad dream.

So it was that this unlikely ménage a trois were going on Holiday, Holiday, Holiday.