THE MURDER

The child is only five when two significant things happen in his life

The year 1971 marked two very memorable events in Oliver’s little life.

Firstly, it was the year he started school and learned that although he may have been the brightest star in his mother’s sky he wasn’t that for anyone else. There were bigger boys at that school, and they mostly came from an estate that had been built immediately after the Hitler war and was already getting to look dowdy. It happens in a society when more than half the people feel let down by the other half for just about all the time.

There might have been that dreadful war, there might have been bombing on an unprecedented scale, millions might have died as a consequence of this or that atrocity, but now it was all over the rich were still rich and the poor were still poor and had to respect their betters. And to make matters worse, the poor were often punished for being poor whilst the rich were held aloft as icons of human perfection for being rich.

And one unexpected consequence of this social discontent was a rise in bullying amongst five year olds. Or if it wasn’t a nationwide consequence it happened in Oliver’s little world and the actual truth of his perception lay in the fact that one of his teachers was the biggest bully of them all. That was a Mr Martin who taught a class of ten year-olds but who enjoyed taking swipes at the infants heads just for the fun of it whenever he thought they did or didn’t deserve it.

The second memorable event in 1971 for Oliver was the disappearance of his father and his eventual and macabre return if not to the bosom of his family, to its kitchen door. He’d been there one day, shouting as per normal at his mother about nothing and everything, and gone the next. And nobody did Oliver the courtesy of explaining where he’d gone until months later (or so �" it might have even been the following year, he was very vague about time when he was at the infant’s school) when a policeman almost moved into the house where he and his mummy (and occasionally Uncle Terry now that daddy was nowhere to be seen) lived, and started doing a great deal of poking around.

That policeman intrigued the young child by doing a weird selection of things, like ripping up the floorboards of the coal house where it was very black and very dusty. Why, Oliver asked himself, would anyone want to do that? What might there be remotely significant about the floor boards in the coal house?

“Why you doing that, mister?” he asked when curiosity all but overcame him.

“Run away, sonny,” grunted the coal-dust encrusted policeman, using his surliest voice.

But Oliver didn’t run away, or if he did he ran very little distance indeed. His was the age of curiosity, and the only way that curiosity could be satisfied was by actual observation.

“Is it coal, mister?” he asked from his new distance.

“Is what coal, sonny?” growled the policeman, who had very little experience with anyone under the age of twenty-one, and showed it.

“What you’re looking for, mister,” suggested Oliver, “under them boards, mebbe in the cellar down there.”

“There’s a cellar?” asked the policeman, and Oliver’s reply was silently positive, but the policeman wasn’t looking and didn’t notice the vigorous nodding of the small boy’s head.

“I asked, is there a cellar?” he barked, and Oliver nodded vigorously again, and fortunately this time the policeman was staring straight at him.

“I didn’t see any door, and if there’s a cellar there’d have to be a door so as you could get to it,” mumbled the policeman, wiping black dust from beads of moisture on his forehead and smearing rivers of it as a sort of charcoal paste across his face.

“They put bricks and made a wall,” said Oliver helpfully.

“They did, did they?” growled the policeman. “Bricks, you say? A wall?”

Oliver nodded again, and the policeman was looking at him, so the positive acknowledgement got through.

“Who did?” asked the policeman, “I said, who did, sonny?”

“Uncle Terry,” replied Oliver, who didn’t like being questioned quite so ferociously. “And mummy...” he added.

“Ah. Now you must run off, sonny,” ordered the policeman.

“It’s my house….” protested Oliver, still too curious to be anywhere else.

“It might be your house, sonny, but if you don’t do what you’re told I’ll have you locked up in prison for a very long time, and maybe even the key thrown away.” The policeman was getting angry and Oliver saw the sense of going away, maybe into the kitchen where his mummy was baking or the back garden where Uncle Terry was mowing the grass. So he backed away, then turned and ran...

… And lived to regret it…

Things in the coal shed were getting to be far too interesting to miss. Much more interesting than plain old coal dust and a black-faced policeman. And there were other things, too.

A van-load of other policemen turned up, all big and strong and rugged, and with them they carried tools that looked heavy enough to knock a mountain down. Mummy was marched away (for her safety, they said, though why she and Uncle Terry would need to be handcuffed separately Oliver never understood) and pushed rather heavily into the police-car parked in front of the new van.

Then there was a great deal of crashing and banging in the kitchen, and dust started billowing out of the back door, and men were shouting odd things to each other like, “bash that bit there”, and “harder!” and then, after a pause, “is there a light switch” and “good gawd, what’s that?”

Then the words became quieter, almost as quiet as Mr Martin at school when he was in a bad mood in assembly and wanted everyone to shiver and shake just in case he was going to administer corporal punishment on some innocent backside with his size twelve slipper.

“Is it a body?”

“What is it … a bloke?”

“Is he…?”

“Dead?”

And he or it must have been, whoever he or it was because they sent for a stretcher after a man in a very clean white coat had examined whatever it was they had found in the cellar, and it was carted with a great degree of solemnity out of the ragged broken brick wall in the kitchen and out into the fresh air of a day too sweet and nice for death.

“I know who that is,” volunteered Oliver, pointing at an arm that had somehow started to hang from the stretcher.

“Who, sonny?” asked the original policeman, still smeared with black and rightly looking as if he’d been strenuously busy.

“That watch on that arm. It’s my daddy’s,” said Oliver still pointing and quite quietly now that something or other, he wasn’t quite sure what, had sunk into his head with a very macabre thump.

© Peter Rogerson 14.12.16