THE TWO DEATHS

I guess we'd all be wise to ignore gossip in caase it has unexpected consequences...

Lindsey loved her job. It filled her life with other people and their own lives, their various loves and sometimes even their painful problems. She knew she would feel like that until she retired from the town library where she worked, but that wouldn be in the far distant future And then, out of the blue, she met Nigel from Yorkshire who wanted to renew a book that he hadn’t finished. He was a dour and thoughtful man in his middle years and he was married to Bethany who died twice.

Her first death was, frankly, fictitious and never explained to anyone properly. Bethany was fed up to her back teeth with Nigel and his self-serving ways. It seemed to her that his every instinct was to preserve himself so that he could shamble around the town amongst the inhabitants, some of whom were neighbours, shedding the grimoire of his misery onto shoulders that probably bore enough weight of their own anyway. So she let it be known that she was dead. Nigel would never have known because his self aggrandisement didn’t actually admit that she was anything more than a sex-slave when he felt he needed one, which was possibly every three months.

So after a bit of giggling between Bethany and the woman next door, Audrey, that cooperative neighbour, with no evidence to support her words, that Bethany’s funeral would be next week, and he was invited.

“You mean, my Bethany?” he asked, not really horrified though he tried to look concerned because if he didn’t it might be suspicious and people might suspect that she’d died at his hands.

“Aye, of course,” Audrey replied, lying like an expert at fiction, probably because she was fond of serial dramas on the television.

“But what did she die of?” he asked.

“The lurgi,” she replied, “it’s going round. You might have caught it, I suppose, it’s one of those things that are caught by lovers in bed…”

Lindsey was horrified when he explained this to her whilst renewing his book.

“You like murder stories then?” she asked in search of a neat entry into conversation.

“Not particularly,” he told her, “but with my wife as dead as a dodo I need something to cheer me up, and the thought of all those nice murders going on up and down the land might just do that.”

“Why,” she asked, mischievously, “was your wife murdered?

He shuddered. “I damned well hope not!” he retorted, “because if she was they might think I had a hand in it, and I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest…” she twittered, allowing her voice to fade away from its usualu excessive volume, and she stamped his book with an old fashioned date stamp and watched him as he shambled off.

“I reckon he killed his misses,” she told the next reader in line, and that brief and seemingly insignificant exchange led to a comment which the man third in the queue heard and decided to act on.

“And he’s not been arrested for it?” the man having his book stamped asked.

“He was here, wasn’t he?” she said, making the words sound as if she waa giggling.

So to the third man in the queue who was privy to the conversation.

He was a retired detective. For the last quarter of his life in the police force he had been a Detective Inspector with an excellent reputation for both honesty and diligence.

“Who was that man you say killed his wife?” he asked Lindsey.

“Ph, you mean, let me look at the sheet yes, you mean Nigel Rumpus?” she asked, recognising him as a serious man and possibly even an architect or a professor.

“That must be him,” said the detective, his inquisitive nerves piqued, “I’ll look and into it and see.”

“You do that, sir,” smiled Lindsey, “and is this your favourite read, sir? Light romance? Chick lit?”

“It’s for my bed-ridden wife,” he almost snarled back.

“He’s got a temper to him” Lindsey thought.

When he’d left the library behind the retired detective Inspector made his way to his old place of work, the Brumpton police station where a good buddy of his was on the enquiries desk.

“Does the name Nigel Rumpus mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Why, buddy, do you know something we don’t?” asked the desk sergeant.

“I might do, chummy, I might well. Just you look into it, will you? Get someone from upstairs to consider the name and ask the bloke if you can see his wife. And if he says he can’t it might be worth trying to find out why…” He yapped his nose mysteriously and went back into the street whilst the desk sergeant scribbled a note and passed it to Inspector Blenkinsop when he sauntered in moments later.

“The retired D.I reckons this might lead to something interesting,” he told him,

All of which led Inspector Blenkinsop to decide it might do his career good if he solved a crime that didn’t yet exist, so he went towards the carpark behind the police station, calling in at the borough library on his way as he did.

“I need something juicy,” he said to Lindsey who was at her usual position at the desk where books got to be stamped.

“Over there,” she pointed towards the crime section, “try Poirot.”

“I’ve read all those and seen them all on the telly,” he muttered, “can’t you think of something even more juicy?”

“You mean, a touchy feely romance?” she suggested, and winked.

“Now you understand me,” he grinned.

He found just the book he’d been looking for, got it stamped and tucked it into his brief case to be examined later.

It didn’t take long for him to find an address for a Mr Rumpus because there was only one in the town, and half an hour later he was knocking on the door of our particular Nigel.

“I want a word with your wife,” he said to the man after he’d introduced himself and flashed his warrant card indecently close to the man’s eyes.

Nigel swallowed. “She’d dead,” he said, “the woman next door told me.”

“And did you kill her, sir?” the Detective Inspector Blenkinsop asked.

Nigel decided it was time for him to come clean. “I don’t have much to do with her and no, of course I didn’t kill her!” he snapped.

“Don’t have much to do with her, sir?” asked the D.I. suggestively, “how can a man be married to a woman and not have much to do with her? I mean, doesn’t the marriage bed seem a bit on the lonely side if you don’t have much to do with her?”

“It’s how I like it,” Nigel said as if that was reason enough to be on his own, especially at night.

“Then I’d like you to come to the station with me, sir,” crowed Detective Insector Blenkinsop, “we need to have a little talk, you and I.”

“About how a lonely bed can be good for a man’s health?” suggested Nigel, which obliged the D.I to produce some handcuffs and render him embarrassed as the neighbour Audrey walked by, and she chuckled when she noticed the handcuffs.

“Wait till I tell his missus,” she thought to herself.

Later that afternoon Audrey went to the library because she enjoyed a good gossip with Lindsey because Lindsey knew almost everything that was going on in the town but she probably didn’t yet know about Mf Rumpus in handcuffs.

“I knew there was something wrong when he came in here,” she said when Audrey had distributed the meat of her gossip, and Lindsey looked suitably shocked.

“I knew there was something wrong,” she repeated in her usual voice, the one with the same number as octaves in it as she usually scowled and shushed at when made by a reader.

Sn interesting coincidence was that the very next person waiting to have her book stamped was Vera Metcalfe, a junior reporter at the Brumpton Echo and badly in need of a good story to help her in her climb up the journalistic ladder. And she paid particular attention to the gossip in front of her because this was where she gathered details of most of her stories, and by the sound of it this one would make the front page and she might even be approached by one of the right wing nationals who were out to provide background to the Prime Minister who wanted an excuse to impose a murder tax on the population because he had overspent public funds on personal deodorant for himself.

“Why? How did he seem to you?” asked Audrey.

“He said that his wife had been killed,” Lindsey shook her head, “and, you know, but I’ve always been wary of him. I can judge people by the books they read, and he takes out dirty romances with too much you-know what in them!”

Next day’s Brumpton Echo led with the headline BRUMPTON MAN GUILTY OF MURDERING HIS WIFE… with a picture of him they’d found somewhere.

It was when she read all about it that Nigel’s wife Bethany died for the second time.

© Peter Rogerson 04.04.23

Reviews

[AYVID N]

Poor Bethany! I guess she was just unfortunate to have such a husband. I really liked the character of Nigel. He was really funny and so was the story. Enjoyed so much.