Another English Mystery

The front room was dusty and smelled of something, I couldn’t decide what. Old house, some cooking smells, ashes in the grate perhaps – Nigel had told me it would need a bit of care, but not bad overall. He’d dropped me off at the front gate, then took the Peugeot into the village to shop for me, getting sausages, tomatoes, baking soda, lemons, vinegar, hard soap, a rag mop, and a tin of shortbread.

While he was gone, I walked from room to room, pulling sheets off of worn armchairs, small tables, bookshelves, a fainting couch, a low embroidery rocker and an upright Victorian sofa covered in blue velvet. Most of the house was put away for the season, or for ever, I thought, without sign that anyone had recently left or recently been back.

Until I stepped into the kitchen. This room, which sat at the back of the house with a door leading out into an unkempt vegetable garden,  was in full and current use. Mac n cheese burnt into an aluminum saucepan, dishes stacked high in the sink. No running water, but a large jug of water apparently in use for general washing up. An old army cot with wool blankets and a flat pillow with dirty pillowcase. When I first opened the door into the kitchen, I instinctively backed away when I saw the signs of inhabitance, but realized almost immediately that there was nothing in the room to suggest that someone was in there at the moment. Still, after a quick look round, I closed the door behind me and went outside, where I stood awkwardly in the drive wishing Nigel hadn’t taken the car.

All around me in the yard were the peaceful sounds of a warm summer morning: bees buzzing in the snapdragons, a small white cat with a black spot on her nose passing through, stropping me briefly on her way somewhere else. In the distance, I could hear someone mowing their lawn. From the house, I could not see any of the neighbors, I realised, and thought what a good, safe place it would be for someone who did not want to be seen. I tugged on my skirt and walked down the drive to the gate and opened it, cautiously. It opened without a sound. I had remembered it as a creaking, loud gate that I could never sneak out of at night, and when I looked I found, as I had half expected, that the hinges had been recently cleaned and oiled.

Nigel came back, half an hour later, to find me sitting on a stump in the lane, picking at my cuticles. He’d been thinking about selling the house. I had decided to keep it. I quite understand the kind of situation that would lead a person to hide in an English cottage, and I thought I might know who this person could be.

Inspector Morse and the needlepoint murder

Inspector Morse brushed aside the corn husk and the corn silk that lightly covered the body. Beneath it, and innocent looking it was, lay a brave little embroidery hoop, with a needlepoint sampler half done. “We all wander in this vale of tears. Find happiness in …..” it read. The thread dangled off, an incomplete thought hanging there, expectant.

“No needle,” Morse said, to himself. He felt tired. “Another day, another corpse,” he said under his breath, imagining this cheery motto done nicely on a pillow cover in his Aunt Edna’s parlor. Loved his Aunt Edna, he had. Still missed her cookies. What was that she’d done with marshmallows and chocolate bars? Well, she’d been gone a long time. He shook himself back to the present, where this corpse was sitting quietly in her chair, hand still holding the hoop as if ready to take one more stitch. Eyes open and staring out, or past. Contemplating, those eyes might almost be.

Morse thought he’d have a nice vacation, that had been his intention. That’s what brought him to this quiet old town of aunties, church fundraisers, and bakeries. He’d pictured himself sitting in someone’s front room with a cup of tea in one hand and a plate of jam tarts in the other. But death follows the inspector, he told himself. He brushed the ashes off his suit jacket and damned himself for starting to smoke again. He damned the nice local constable who asked him, just as a matter of courtesy, to come in on this needlepoint death. He considered ways to excuse himself, pointing out the obvious: elderly women die in their sleep, it is 3 in the afternoon on a warm summer day, and she’d obviously nodded off, permanently. He opened his mouth to say so, when the young officer held out his hand and gave Morse the corn husk.

“Way I see it,” he says. “Is she’d about finished with the corn – she made corn dolls and sold them like Indian made for tourists in the states – that’s how she kept a little extra money coming in. Anyway, she’d done with the corn and set it aside to do her needlework.”

“Yes,” Morse said, almost leaving off the question mark. “And then?”

“Well, I guess she must’ve fallen asleep, don’t you?” The young man’s red eyebrows wagged a bit, and he looked at Morse for help. Morse looked again at the quiet body, the corn, the needlework. Why am I here? He asked himself, feeling foolish, feeling automatic. The automatic inspector. His eyes scanned the chair, the hoop, the thread, then up to the woman’s face. Her face was upturned, eyes china blue, her expression pleased, expectant. Her hair was slightly mussed. He thought she might want to reach up and tidy it, just a bit. He leaned over and looked at the back of her head, where the hairpins would ordinarily keep her hair well contained. There, at the base of the neck, he saw it. A small red dot, a shiny metallic point. A needle, neatly inserted into the base of her skull. A murder, here in the quiet village where he’d come to regain his sanity. He sighed, and fingered his pocket for his smokes. Time to step outside and think, for just a moment.

Writing practice, 25 minutes. See the Inspector Morse TV series, or the books, by Colin Dexter, for more on the source of this character.

Kiss

The door of the camo van slid open. A pale man with a slithering walk and drooping posture climbed out. He wore a monocle; he had the vacant look of a man in shackles, ashamed, unarmed, nearly naked. Behind him came a second man, a big gorilla of a man with a grin that said ignorance, villainy, an angry ape shit monkey balls testosterone case kind of man. The kind of man you wouldn’t want to meet on speed-dating night. The kind of man whose inside is bound to be different than his outside; at least that’s what his mama always hoped.

There is a smell to the two of them, the way they move as they leave the van: compact, tightly wound, a conviction of violence even in the automatic whistling of the big man.

It’s odd, giving birth to these two brutes, one in an Italian suit and narrow expensive shoes, the other we assume with heavy brows and a flat broad voice. And yet there they are together, luring us into an underworld darkness, emerging from this panel van with bad intent, flagrant villains. No need for delicate psychic sensibilities to pick up on the reeking desperation of the pale man. He is sweating slightly, dabs at his thin mustache, thinking circular process thoughts: decisioning, coming to a compromise we can all agree upon, agreeing on a way to deny destiny, to bypass the interrogatory moment – here, can’t we all just be friends?

But the truth of the matter is that, no, we can’t all be friends. We can all have this vague feeling at times, so much commonality: we all have furniture, we all have cubicles, we all have moments of twinning with the office mate, the colleague, the incidental intimacies of work pulling us together. As these two had been pulled together. To steal diamonds, to sell guns, to sing the grateful song of the triumphant earthworm, unarmed yet ecstatic static cling bringing them together for crime, for punishment, for watching as their time together draws irresistibly closer to its unnecessary, violent end.

William thinks about butterflies, cranes, loose bright squares of origami paper, striped cotton sheets on a clothesline in his mother’s house when he was 12. Running through the sheets as the wind blows on a warm August day. The only shade in the ratty little yard. Something pushes him, pushes against his back. His future pressing down, so far from Tulsa, where this brute is not friendly, they’ve played cards and killed people, at least on paper, together.

Toby thinks William is German, but he is not; he’s just a skinny blonde guy from someplace Toby’s never been. There’s a lot Toby doesn’t know. Nothing important though. Need to know a few things. How to read a map. How to drive as if invisible. How to deliver the right severance package to the right corporate fuckup. Toby likes peaches, apple pie, remembers his own mother as if she’ll always be 35. She smacked him once in awhile, took the bus to work at the A&P, liked to bake when she had a little extra time. He and William used to talk about their moms, when they were out on the road together, killing time.

William’s achieving a form of buddahood, detaching from this moment, floating weightless away from Toby, from criminal intent, from judgment. He feels light, almost good. Toby takes him to breakfast, nice place, chilled grapefruit, quiet courtyard in a garden café. He eats his omelette, then William’s french toast and spoons the egg from a porcelain cup. They are best of friends at this last meal. Toby picks up the check, “I’ll get it, that’s ok, least I can do,” and they leave. Back into the windowless van and uptown where a final meeting will be held, lists will be made, consensus will be reached. By everyone but William, who will be attending this meeting at least in spirit, but will already have received his last, passionate kiss.

The Wingnut Killer

If I am remembering this correctly – and I think I am – we were driving down a dangerous road, in the early evening. He was trying to pay me a compliment, I think. One of those “you know, I’ll hand it to you people” kind of compliments that tastes like backwash. Something about our capacity for wild and crazy sex. This from a man whose name is practically synonymous with loofahs and Viagra. With sort of an extra icky note about how I’d look in an apricot peignoir – a peignoir, for crying out loud.

I was just waiting for the old standard “you just haven’t had the right one yet” when all of a sudden the road in front of us exploded – lightning, quasars, comets, IEDs, what? – and then ratatatatatted into a series of snappy little firecrackers. I saw the backs of three tow-headed boys running off into the woods just as the car started to tilt off the side of the hill.

“Ho shit,” I hollered. I grabbed my door to open and jump, but saw that Sleazo the clown was frozen mid-leer like he couldn’t let go of his loofah long enough to save his own sorry ass. So I reached over across him, popped the door open and shoved the sonofabitch out. Then I jumped.

Lucky me, I landed soft side down on loose dirt, rolled a ways and then stopped, barely out of breath.  My lounge lizard friend landed head first on a rock, bounced onto the falling car and went up in flames when they landed together in the ravine.

And that’s how I became a murderer.