Vengeance by Karen Lewis

Chapter
One
     
    The bailiffs
were coming to throw her out on the street. She had no money and
nowhere to go. The thought of pushing a shopping cart and sleeping
in doorways terrified her. Judy Mason didn’t know whether to take
an overdose of sleeping pills, or wreak vengeance on those
responsible.
    She looked
around at the small but comfortable house she’d called home for 30
years. It had been a wedding gift from her parents. They’d been so
delighted to see their only daughter, who was over thirty at the
time, finally marry. Now she’d lost the house due to her ignorance
of legal matters, and her trusting nature. Damn! She should
have stayed single.
    Her ex
husband, Matthew Gillingham, had seemed like a good catch at first.
He owned his own accountancy firm, right around the corner from the
library, where Judy worked. Their looks contrasted flatteringly as
well. He was tall and fair, just like a Viking, while she was a
typical Celt, dark-haired with blue eyes.
    She sighed. If
only she’d stood firm when Matthew asked her to give up her job and
help him run the business, she wouldn’t be stony broke today. She’d
have a government pension. But he’d been persuasive in those days,
and his argument had made sense. He needed to do a lot of
entertaining and travelling and he wanted her to be a full-time
partner in all of that. If they’d had a family, she would have been
a stay at home mom, but that had never happened. Oh well, we would
all be geniuses if hindsight were 20/20, she decided.
    Although the
marriage was happy at first -- or at least she thought it
was -- the flaws in Matthew’s character eventually began to show.
He had a weakness for fine dining and high living. This resulted in
him gaining a ton of weight, and racking up debts on the house.
When Judy discovered his infidelity, which always involved women of
colour, it freaked her out. She just couldn’t understand the
attraction.
    How could you
form a meaningful relationship with someone who did not speak your
language? How would you communicate? The only thing she could
conclude was that the men who sought out such women were misfits in
their own culture, and viewed the Third World woman as a commodity
for sexual purposes.
    The Asian mail
order brides were submissive and extremely accommodating. They had
to be, given the nature of their plight. This shuffling humility,
made those males feel empowered and important. They could do
anything they wanted with these women once they’d bought and paid
for them. Judy wondered how many of them had been murdered? They
were in a strange country, and were totally dependent on this
stranger whom they’d married. He wielded all the power. It was
tailor made for disaster.
    But the women
were so desperate to get out of their Third World ghettoes that
selling their bodies and dignity to some rich white dude --
pathetic mixed up sod though he was -- seemed like a great deal.
Even though he might beat, abuse and kill them. He was their
passport to regular meals, a bed, and indoor plumbing. So at the
end of the day, both parties got what they wanted. It was all so
demeaning, tawdry and sad. At that point, Judy had decided to call
it quits.
    She expected
Matthew to do the decent thing, since she’d worked for him all
those years, and look after her financially. But he hadn’t. He’d
claimed he couldn’t afford to. Although he could afford to buy
another house, and go on holidays abroad with his latest Asian mail
order bride, a drab and greedy migrant named Fang Po Wong.
    When Judy sued
him for maintenance, Juanita Gomez, his disturbingly vicious
lawyer, whose speciality was defending Hispanic gangs, had attacked
on a personal level. She’d suggested that because Judy hadn’t had a
job outside the home, she was nothing but a lazy layabout leeching
off poor Matthew and wasn’t entitled to any support! This evil
varmint, who looked like she’d crawled out of a Brazilian slum, had
also accused her of being a