OPHELIA PYKE BRINGS HIM HOME

A misunderstanding puts Josiah into a furious, thunderous mood.

Ophelia had never seen Josiah quite like this.

He was sitting at a desk in the police station and she had just been led in having been told it that what had happened and what had been supposed was obviously quite an understandable misinterpretation of events and if they hadn’t suspected her husband of the most heinous crime they wouldn’t be doing their duty.

His face told a far angrier story, though. Gone was his usual countenance of sympathetic understanding and his almost constant insistence that the world was a good and holy place, and in its place was thunder.

Black thunder. The sort that precedes, accompanies and follows the worst of storms. The Reverend Josiah Pyke had been shown the face of the devil and he didn’t like it one bit.

“She was my teenage girlfriend,” he said after brief explanations had provided Ophelia with the gist of what had gone on. “Her name was Penny and I may have mentioned her on the odd occasion. But she was long ago in my life, I’ve lived a lot since knowing her and maybe I’d never have thought of her again if I hadn’t suddenly woken from a reverie on the river bank lying next to her murdered body. And instead of the blind and stupid officers...”

“Steady there,” muttered an officer.

“Instead of the blind and stupid officers trying to discover the actual truth of what had happened and why I was lying next to the corpse of a woman I knew ten years or so ago they accuse me of killing her, of actually murdering her, and me with my clerical collar and love of decency almost in tears because her dead body took me back to when I’d known her as a vibrant living being with glorious long hair and teasing eyes...”

“We instinctively know that a body lying next to someone is usually that body lying next to the actual murderer,” growled the officer.

“So they clapped handcuffs on me, on a man of the cloth with a group meeting in Church that very afternoon, and cart me off to their police station where they taunt me with questions I can’t answer and accusations that are so far off the mark it makes the people asking them look stupid!”

“Just a minute,” growled the officer.

“And it’s not till her husband, the real killer, is found covered in her blood and with a belly full of drugs that they discover they might have handcuffed the wrong man whilst the right man could well have got away scot-free once the cocktail of chemicals in his brain had done their bit and lost their grip on him. And there was me, lying next to a bloody corpse on the river bank, and not a spot of blood on me! And there was me, actually reporting the body with its knife sticking out of its chest to the idiots, so obviously innocent that even a moron could have read the truth on my face.” He stared particularly furiously at the officer when he used the word moron.

“I’m sorry about the confusion...” muttered the officer, “but it was an understandable misunderstanding.”

“Now my wife’s here I want to go home,” concluded Josiah, “and if you try to hold me back from my rightful place at the Vicarage in Henstooth for one minute longer than you have to then I’ll sue the pants off you!”

“Really, Josiah,” murmured Ophelia, “the man has said he’s sorry after all.”

“You weren’t the one in handcuffs,” growled Josiah.

“No, I wasn’t,” sighed Ophelia, “that’s one of life’s little treats that I’ve missed out on.”

“You could always try playing at home...” suggested the Officer, trying to add a little humour to a humourless situation.

“You what!” almost roared Josiah, “are you suggesting that our private life needs spicing up with that kind of exercise?”

“It is an idea though,” smiled Ophelia, “come on, Josiah, we’ll catch the bus back to Henstooth. There’s one due any time now.”

“We’ll take you, ma’am,” mumbled the Officer, “it’s our duty, if you like, seeing as we dragged you out here.”

“I never want to see the inside of a police car again!” hissed Josiah, the storm slowly, very slowly, passing and the thunder in his voice gradually rumbling into promised non-existence.

Once outside the police station he found that he could finally relax, and he remained silent as they made their way to the bus station where their bus was already in and, hopefully, waiting for them before starting its circuitous route back to their home village.

“Apparently they lived a dreadful life,” he said suddenly when they were in their seats on the bus and it was on the move, rattling over pot-holes.

“Who?” asked Ophelia, not sure who he was talking about.

“Penny and that moron of a husband of hers,” replied Josiah. “She was my first girl friend and back in my shallow youth I thought we were for-ever, but all we really did was go to the baths for swimming. I was ever so innocent back then.”

“You still are,” suggested Ophelia, “compared to a lot of men, that is. I think that’s why I first noticed you, at the beauty pageant back when my mum slung me out of my home for daring to appear in public half-naked. Maybe I fell in love with your innocence.”

Josiah felt himself blushing. “I think it was her hair,” he sighed, “it was so long she can’t have had it cut, not ever since she was born! And she seemed to like me even though most of the other girls didn’t even notice me. But then, I don’t think I noticed them.”

“So you say she had a dreadful life?” prompted Ophelia, curiously.

“So the policeman said, though I wouldn’t trust anything that lot say! But I did know that she had a boyfriend, or should I say man-friend, when I left home to go to University. She wrote once, said that he was older than her and knew things. Well, they had three children, all boys, eventually got married and he proved himself to be useless. Far from looking after her, far from caring for her, he became a bully.”

“Became? Bullies always are just that, bullies,” put in Ophelia.

“Anyway, she spent more and more time protecting her sons from him, and in the end lost her patience and told him to get out of her life or she’d make sure the police knew all about his evil ways, and that’s when he followed her, doped up with something or other no doubt, and found her on that river bank where we used to go in our teens, where the world’s a quiet place and just about anything can be heard in the tinkling music of the stream … and I was there, too, though he didn’t know me, and I was dozing off as I do, and she sat down next to me, probably meaning to waken me and talk to me, maybe even ask my advice seeing as I was in my collar … she may not have recognised me as the Josiah, or Joe as she called me back then, the lad she had known ten years earlier. And he pounced and pushed that kitchen knife into her while I slept and by ill fortune for her found her heart without really trying.”

“And you reported it?”

He nodded. “It wasn’t so far from where I lived at Tomm’s Playground, and I knew that the tenants there have a phone. So I phoned the police and they came in double-quick time, though it seemed ages whilst I waited with Penny’s poor dead body.”

“And?” asked Ophelia.

“They asked me what had happened and I described it exactly as I just told you, and that’s when one of them jumped to conclusions and accused me of doing the dreadful deed. Of pretending that I’d been sleeping, of having a fit of jealousy over a lost love ... and from then on everything became a nightmare. Once at the station they interviewed me and all the questions and comments were the sort that sounded as if they accepted my guilt and just wanted me to admit it. I could have wept and probably did.”

“My poor Josiah,” murmured Ophelia, “let’s get home, then, and I tell you what...”

“You tell me what?” he asked.

She smiled at him. It was such a sweet smile, so genuine and beautiful, that he thought his heart might burst.

“I think I know where I can put my hands on a pair of pink fluffy handcuffs,” she said, coyly.

© Peter Rogerson 06.04.18