HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

Red blood that never dries or wipes away, shades of Lady Macbeth...

Julian Gaunt had got away with murder for all of his adult life.

It had all happened fifty and more years earlier, and it had been over a girl.

Now, all these years later, he cast his mind back as he carefully rubbed at a huge scab with an old blood-stained sponge.

Her name had been Patsy Malone and there had been no doubt about it. He'd loved her like he would love no other even if he lived to be a thousand. He knew that much and his subsequent life, even though it had been nothing like a thousand years, proved it.

Back then it wasn't so easy being young because you couldn't drop your pants and have sex at the drop of a hat, not like the youngsters in this so-called more enlightened age seem to do all the time. It was a serious business, was having sex. You had to take quite expensive precautions. There were possibilities and consequences that had to be borne in mind, and outcomes that might not be wanted. So Patsy and he had been careful and, thank the Heavens, she hadn't got herself pregnant.

Funny how I say “got herself” when it would have been more than half down to me and my libido if she had, he thought with a wry grin. I'll bet my semen was powerful stuff back then...

Then Dave Smith came along. Dopey Dave was what he was called, for pretty obvious reasons bearing in mind that lop-sided grin and speech impediment. And Dave had tried to muscle in on Julian's treasured love affair.

And Patsy had let him!

She had more than let him, she had offered him what she and Julian had never had, not properly, not without the whole business becoming messy and unromantic, which it hadn't.

And he, Julian Gaunt, had caught them at it!

He had wandered into Patsy's bed-sit like he often did, no knocking of doors or nonsense like that because he knew he was always welcome, and there they were, in the height of passion and without a stitch of clothing between them and Dave with a rampant what's-it plunging towards her thingamajig.

He had seen red! Of course he had seen red!

His recollection of the rest of what happened in a few frantic moments was that rare combination, something between being a blur and being in sharp mental focus, but it had ended in blood. So much blood it was hard to believe one person could have so much blood in veins that wouldn't stop bleeding!

And he was left with a body on his hands.

The body was lifeless, naked, scarred with an unbelievable number of stab-wounds and he had stood gazing in horror at what he had done, and dropped the scissors he'd used onto the floor.

It was right for him to have done it. It was what any man would have done, being betrayed like that.

He loved Patsy Malone, but he'd been forced to kill her. It had been his only option after what she'd done. After she had betrayed him like that. Betrayal: that's the right word for it, that's what it had been. All the talking they'd done, all the heart-to-heart debating, all the putting off until tomorrow what his hormones raged should be done today, and she'd let Dopey Dave into her knickers and what's more she'd been shrieking in ecstasy at what he'd been doing to her as that oversized and over-engorged penis had plunged unmercifully into her.

The first thing he thought of now was the first thing he always thought of when his mind wandered to those distant years and the beauty that had been Patsy Malone. It was her hair. Who else had ever had hair like that? Dark as a raven's wing, it roamed past her shoulders and down her back like something infinitely more precious than mere keratin. It flicked as it flowed and waved as she spoke, tinkling words in a voice crafted by the angels themselves, and the aroma that wafted from it was unbelievable. And those eyes: they looked back at him like they had so long ago, beautiful, brown, trusting, loving...

But they'd been dead eyes when he last saw them.

Dead eyes that had betrayed him.

You've killed her, shouted Dopey Dave, what did you want to do that for! And the fool had flung himself onto the body that was already cooling, weeping and eyes filled with grief.

“You're scum,” he had ground back, and all he wanted to do was strike out at the lad as well, weeping there in the altogether, his deflated organ sad, his clothes lying on the floor covered in blood. Everything was covered in blood. Even Julian was splattered with the stuff.

It would wash off when he got back home, wouldn't it?

So he went back home, to his own flat, and scrubbed himself clean.

And, like Lady Macbeth, he couldn't. It wouldn't wash away no matter how hard he rubbed.

He'd spent years working on that blood, knowing exactly where it had spattered and unable to shift its last grim traces from his flesh. He'd married another girl a few years later, not a patch on Patsy but she was a woman and he needed sex, and tried to get her to scrub him clean, but the blood wouldn't shift. Not a single drop of it. Not Patsy's precious life-fluid. His new wife was puzzled, but scrubbed unquestioning for a while.

Even when Dopey Dave was sentenced to life for the murder of Patsy Malone, as he read the report in the paper about jealousy and how the deceased was carrying the killer's baby and that said it all about a disgusting morality, why, she had been pregnant for months, he nodded at the words of the judge, agreed with every last syllable, not noticing the bit about the baby, never hearing it in the radio coverage even though newsreaders revelled in reading it, almost salivating over the disgraceful morality of illicit sex.

No, he didn't hear the baby bit because there was, after all, work to be done, for there was still blood deep in his skin and it must go. That blood was staining him. Discolouring his heart. It wouldn't even fade, mosit and red and Patsy's.

His new wife gave up after a while, called him a loony and walked out. He divorced her, of course. There was too much bright red blood flowing towards a woman who couldn't understand. She scrubbed him until he actually bled and sorrowfully said enough was enough, and left him to his patchwork of scabs.

He didn't care.

But it was all so many years ago, and that wench, too, was long dead. He hoped she hadn't bled, too.

They all died, the women he loved or thought he loved. Died or left him " what was the difference?

But somewhere, in his heart or in his mind or in his hell Patsy Malone bled on.

And he scrubbed himself, rubbed away with a scouring pad, but the blood of life still stained Julian Grant, who'd got away with murder.