The Jack and Charlie Story Continues

The Benefactor

The last supper

Created by Author using Microsoft Copilot AI

The Banjo Man led their descent.

The stairwell grudgingly accepted their footsteps as they descended, each step groaning under their weight. Jack’s torch beam jittered across concrete walls slick with condensation.

Halfway down, the air changed — colder, denser, the musty smell of mould.

The Banjo Man slowed, one hand trailing the wall as if following a memory rather than a path.

“Ramsay didn’t build this for cooking,” he muttered.

“What then?” Charlie asked.

The Banjo Man didn’t answer. Not yet.

The stairs ended at a reinforced steel door. Jack pushed it open, hinges shrieking like something protesting their return.

The hidden kitchen lay before them.

It was smaller than the one upstairs, but far more pristine — or had been. Stainless-steel benches lined the walls. A single industrial light hung from the ceiling, its bulb dead. Jack’s torch swept across the room, catching glints of metal, glass, and shadows.

Charlie stepped forward. “This place… it’s like a bunker.”

“It was,” the Banjo Man said. “A bunker. A workshop. A place to make problems disappear.”

Jack turned. “You sound like you’ve been here before.”

The Banjo Man’s jaw tightened. “Not exactly, but I knew someone who was.”

He walked to a bench at the far end. A rusted drain sat beneath it, the grate warped. Beside it, a brown smear had seeped into the concrete — too old to identify, too stubborn to be forgotten.

Lucky hissed softly.

Jack crouched. “It looks like someone died here.”

“Not just someone,” the Banjo Man said. “Tan Wei Ting.”

Charlie straightened. “The entrepreneur?

“Aye.” The Banjo Man’s voice was low, almost reverent. “The one who bankrolled Ramsay’s rise? Fifteen years ago. Tan came here for a dinner — a private one. To talk about money owed. Ramsay was drowning in debt, and Tan wanted answers. But Ramsay… he wanted … freedom.”

Created by Author using Microsoft Copilot AI

Jack’s torch caught something beneath the bench — a sliver of metal. He reached in and pulled out a tarnished money clip, engraved with initials: T.W.T.

Charlie exhaled. “Bloody hell.”

The Banjo Man nodded. “Tan never left this room. Ramsay cooked him a meal, poured him wine, and when the argument started…” He gestured to the drain. “This place was built to hide the aftermath.”

Jack swallowed. “Not another Tan? This can’t be a coincidence — Matt, his sister, now? How do you know all this?”

The Banjo Man hesitated — a rare crack in his usual guardedness. “Because Tan Wei Ting was my friend, and I’ve been chasing the truth ever since.” He added, “And yes, he was also Matt’s father.”

Silence settled over the room, heavy as the air, as Jack let that tick over in his head.

Then Lucky’s ears pricked. A faint sound echoed from deeper in the dark — a soft scrape, like metal on stone.

Charlie whispered, “We’re not alone down here.”

The Banjo Man lifted his banjo by the neck, gripping it like a club.

Jack raised his torch, shining it toward the far corridor.

And the beam caught a shadowy movement.

The Story Continues to Morph

This story has been running for over two years now, probably closing in on three. It has morphed and changed over that time, beginning as a 100-word drabble, then to a double drabble (200 words), before vignettes (up to 300 words) took over.

Well, nothing stays the same for long, and in an attempt not to keep my readers “hanging” and waiting too long for the next episode, I decided to make this chapter 500 words. So, now I can no longer list this under drabbles or vignettes … it has to be short fiction or flash fiction from now on.

2026 © John Hansen: All rights reserved. Australian writer

You can find previous episodes here:

[embed]List: Short Fiction | Curated by John Hansen PAL | Medium Short Fiction · 56 stories on Mediumjodah06.medium.com

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