THE DEATH CELL

A condmened murderess is waiting to die.

There can’t be much time. That’s what Indigo Barnaby thought a minute or two before she died. And she thought that because there wasn’t.

She shouldn’t ever have been dragged to this prison cell where she’d been ordered to wile the remainder of her life away. Twelve Years, the judge had ordered, and she’d as good as told him, shrieked at him inside her head across the courtroom, that she didn’t have that long. She knew it because a parade of doctors had nodded their joint heads in professional agreement and told her six months was all she could expect before the cancer did its worst.

And that six months was up. Had been before her sentence had begun.

And I shouldn’t even be here…

Of course she shouldn’t. It wasn’t her fault that Ralph had died. She hadn’t laid a finger as such on him. She hadn’t even breathed his way that time when he laughed in her face and told her he’d outlive her so there was no chance she’d inherit from him.

“I’m fit as a fiddle,” he’d said in that superior voice of his, the one he used every time there was someone to con out of something. That was what he did: make a living by fleecing the gullible from whatever he could fleece them from. He’d got quite a reputation in the field of alternative medicines, and he never let out how alternative his concoctions were.

Only recently he’d fleeced old Mrs Grimshaw out of her life savings. She’d come to him, all pathetic and weeping, and told him about her back and the way it absolutely always hurt and how the doctor had said there was nothing she could do bar take pain killers.

“And those pain killers,” she had said, “are a living death… constipation all the time, that’s what I have to live with.”

And Ralph had perved up to her, placed a greasy (well, it looked greasy) hand on the back of hers and said he knew all about pain, had suffered more than most over the years, and he knew a thing or two about relieving it, but like all good things it cost…

“But that’s too much…” wept Mrs Grimshaw when he mentioned how mush that good thing cost, “I don’t have that much…”

But she had, he’d taken it and the tablets he gave her in exchange for her life savings were nothing but insoluble chalk.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Indigo told him when poor Mrs Grimshaw died of a stomach blockage caused by chalk ingestion.

“The old biddy was dying anyway,” he had laughed as he waved a fistful of ten pound notes in front of her, “and we’ve got this!”

Sickened by his callous, criminal attitude, she had taken to her bed out of grief and anxiety mixed with anger and combined with a pain that had growing inside her for some time, until he worried that there might be something genuinely wrong with her and him having to cook his own dinners, and called a doctor, who examined her and frowned deeply.

“It looks bad to me,” he had said, “I need to arrange some tests.”

So she’d had some tests at the hospital which wasn’t local enough to be a comfortable bus ride for a woman in pain, and that’s when the pronouncement and the six months prognosis had appeared to blight her life.

Ralph was no comfort, either. In fact, Ralph was, in her opinion, the cause of all her grief. He lived a life that was careless of the pain he caused to others. She’d heard him more than once: Mrs Grimshaw had been just one of many.

“I reckon I know something that will make you better,” he said, “and because you’re my wife I’ll let you have it at cost…”

“Don’t you try that trick on me!” she’d snapped in reply, and poured herself a sweet sherry, the only thing on planet Earth that seemed to relieve her endless parade of symptoms. Then she’d returned to her bed and tried to sleep.

“He’s treating me like the conman he is when he cons everyone who’s desperate enough into parting with their hard earned cash,” the thought, “and he’s even trying to get me to part with mine! Talk about a rotten husband!”

That offer by him, that con he profited from when others came to him and were fooled into chewing or swallowing or sipping, he had a variety of so-called remedies, all of them rubbish, was the last straw.

“I’ll show him!” she snapped in the silence of her head, and she climbed out of bed when the pain returned, because that pain was the one thing that spurred her into action.

Being a bed-ridden invalid she’d had plenty of time to plan and create his death, and she was helped by the fact that she’d been married to him this past thirty-seven years and had seen his every revolting mood, and stored the whole lot up in her head.

It was his whisky that she spiked because she knew full well that he couldn’t live without drinking it. And she spiked it with rat poison, a compound she’d bought years back and that she knew contained a great deal of stuff that would upset his own vile stomach.

At the time she wasn’t thinking of killing him, just making his every day a misery of pain and sickness if he had a glass or two of his bottle of Scotch.

It was, she thought, when he was being sick that she might have the strength to do something more final than merely poisoning him. Maybe with the long, sharp screwdriver she’d placed behind the books on their bookcase. She’d carefully put it there as a last resort should he turn nasty on a rainy day, or something like that, because in their marriage there had been many rainy days.

“Pour me a drink, ducky,” he asked, as if ducky was her name and she his slave.

Usually she would say something like who do you think I am, a servant?

And he’d laugh and tell her it was only a drink he wanted, not the contents of her underwear, and she’d retort that was something he was never going to have again. The badinage would carry on until he got his own drink. It was always the same.

Until this time, when in order to see what would happen she did exactly what he had asked and poured him a drink of whisky. From the bottle she’d secretly modified with decades-old rat poison.

“What’s this, then?” he grinned, “you done summat to my drink, seeing you’re so keen as that to do what I ask and pour it without any of your cheek?”

“I’m tired of it all,” she replied, hating that he’d partly guessed the truth.

“Then you drink it!” he ordered, holding his glass, untouched by him, for her to take, “you show me that you quite like my little drink!”

“Now Ralph Barnaby, you know I’m not allowed strong drink, not with my tablets,” she protested, knowing the drink would do her no good and probably quite a lot of bad.

“Drink it!” he ordered, not caring whether she lived or died, but then, he never had.

“Sod it!” she thought, “I’d be better off dead anyway, rather than live with this pig!”

So, “If you don’t want it,” she said, and went to sip the whisky. It tasted vile, but then it always did to her.

“All right, that’s enough, I believe you my little cherub!” he had grinned, and snatched it back off her before swallowing it himself in one go.

But that little scene had added humiliation to her anger and she wasn’t going to let him get away with it. So she scowled at him, spat the drop out that she’d sipped, and watched him as his face contorted, then almost exploded when he realised that his first instinct had been right and she’d doctored his drink.

And he’d been caught by the same trick he used when he doctored the rubbish he sold to the sick and needy.

But she wasn’t happy to leave it at that. Oh no. There was the long screwdriver behind a row of books on the book case (books he never touched because, well, reading was one of those things that was beneath him).

And that screwdriver ended up being driven, by her, deep into his chest while he was blinking and gasping because of his drink, and hopefully dying, and she pushed it as deep and as far as it would go.

And all the time he was turning a strange colour and being sick.

And two months later when the police had done their bit the judge had sentenced her to twelve years in prison. Her problem was, she supposed, there was nobody to explain what an evil b*****d Ralph had always been and that of all the people under the sky he deserved death. And Ralph had been the only one who could have said to that judge something like m’lord, twelve years? She ain’t got that long, she’s dying…

But she wasn’t going to say anything. It would have been weakness if she had.

And indigo Barnaby died knowing that if there were such places as Heaven and Hell he’d be in one while she’d bask in glory in the other, happy for the first time ever, and out of her dingy cell.

© Peter Rogerson 07.04.22

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