MURDER IN THE DANCE HALL

Borrowing and altering a title from a Sophie Ellis Baxter song...

It was July 1957 and Collette Davies was looking forwards to the dance that evening. So, mid afternoon when her boyfriend was waiting downstairs in the front room watching the grainy monochrome image on the television her parents had bought recently, she took a nice hot bath, and that involved making the water hot enough for to enjoy, which also meant having a fire in the front room where the television was so that the back boiler could make its contribution to her bath.

Garry Teddicott was that boyfriend and more than anything else in the Universe, which is truly ginormous thing, he loved Collette. Who wouldn’t? She had a peaches and cream face even without make-up, which she barely used, and her hair cascaded down past her shoulders in glorious waves of gold. But those wonders were just what she looked like. It was the girl inside the body that really appealed to him because she was everything he loved in people. She was straight forward, honest and often very funny. He knew that he could trust her with anything, and often did. But above all, he knew just how lucky he was because she liked him. Dared he think loved? Maybe.

That night’s dance was going to be special because his very best friend (not another girl but a lad he had shared his life with since his birth because Tony was his brother), that true friend was playing his guitar in a skiffle group called The Bobbies at the dance. And Garry knew the group was great. Of course they were! He’d heard Tony practising a whole host of tunes, and Mick who was drummer as well as Ross who was bass player on a real full sized bass both turned up at his home and practised in the garage, which was reasonably sound proof and thus didn’t upset too many people. And usually where they were was Garry, pretending to be the band’s manager but in reality a brother keeping an eye open for his buddy..

Though, unknown to them, the very sounds of skiffle and its vibrant rhythms really did upset Mr Daniel Wells who lived across the road and who was possessed of really sensitive hearing (according to him) as well as a foul temper.

But Mr Wells was unlikely to attend the dance because it was at the village hall and he was well into his seventies, an age which back in those far off days was sufficient for its owner to pour scorn on modern music and say such things weren’t anyway near as good as they used to be, and really mean it.

But to Collette things were a great deal better than they’d ever been.

She climbed out of the bath as it slowly cooled down and wrapped a huge bath rowel round herself before making her way down stairs. She wasn’t afraid of Garry seeing her with wet skin and a towel round her as long as she kept her modesty reasonably intact! They were special friends, and anyway she rather liked the way he seemed to devour her with his eyes. As long as her parents didn’t return before she got dressed! But they were at the shops, both of them, though at different shops because she worked on the electrical counter in Woolworths where she sold torch batteries and lengths of bell wire to small boys who thought they were inventors, and he at the gents’ hairdressers. It was the best in town and the one where Garry bought the odd packet of three condoms every time he had a trim!

So her dad must have guessed one thing about their relationship, but she was eighteen and intelligent enough not to do anything stupid and Garry was a good customer. So dad let it pass without comment.

“Dry my back, Gaz,” she asked, and he carefully rubbed her back until it was drier than dry while she made a game of drying the rest of her.

“It’s a good thing you’re not your brother or I’d have to warn you not to wear your guitar hands out on my back or The Bobbies will be looking for a new guitarist for tonight’s show,” she teased.

“Then I’d best dry your front as well,” he grinned.

“Don’t let my dad hear you say things like that or you’ll be for it,” she grinned.

“Who do you think sells me my rubbers?” he asked with a laugh.

“I hope he thinks you’re buying them for your dad,” she smiled.

“He might, though my dad’s been dead for a decade,” he replied, more seriously because his dad had been murdered by a hoodlum on the look out for fun, and found it when the hangman separated his heart from his sense of humour. That had been all well and good, but it left Garry without a dad. And he still felt how rotten it had been, for his mum and him to have to go through the world with eyes on them from anyone who thought they knew their story.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Collette, “I didn’t think.”

“I know you didn’t, so it’s all right,” he told her, because she could do no wrong, so it was, of course, all right.

“What skirt would you like me to wear tonight?” she asked him.

“I love you in that yellow one, like pale lemons, and with loads of white layers peeping out of it,” he said with a grin.

“I was hoping you would say that, so I got it out already,” she smiled, and kissed him with the sort of lingering kiss that sent his heart into a spiral. “I’ll get ready, then. What are you going to wear?”

“That’s easy. We’ve got a sort of uniform, the lads in the band and me as their manager,” he told her, “so I’ll be wearing that!”

“Then I’ll go and beautify myself,” she said with another smile, “do you want to wait down here for me?”

“It’s darned hot in here, but I better had, just in case your folks get home unexpectedly.”

He was decent like that, was Garry.

When it came time to go to the village hall (which was hardly any distance away at all) he, this time in the maroon outfit of the skiffle trio because he claimed to be their manager, The Bobbies, in their rather old van (which was needed because most of their instruments were far too bulky to carry down the road), and she in her lemon outfit which seemed to enhance everything that was natural about her and even matched her beautiful hair that seemed to have gained an added lustre of its own.

The dance hall, as the village hall became when there was a dance on, was quiet when they arrived there, the boys arriving not long before Collette. They set up their instruments on a small stage, hardly big enough for the trio, and waited for the youngsters of the neighbourhood to make their way in. And they did: boys in their drainpipe trousers and girls in their floaty skirts.

And behind them all, like the figure of the grim reaper himself, came a shambling figure. It was the seventy-six year old Mr Daniel Wells, and he was carrying a shining blade in front of him, waving it like it was casting its wild judgements on sinners, searching for the worst of the lot.

And when it found its sinner it plunged wildly, but controlled, a dozen youngsters ready to jive screamed, and Collette fell to the floor, a wash of blood rushing from her, while Mr Wells snarled at Garry’d brother on his stage with the rest of The Bobbies, “that’ll learn you, that will! Think you can get the better of me, do you, with your tunes from the Devil and this w***e from hell!”

The police were called, and came, Daniel Wells was carted off, amd Collette pronounced dead.

He was obviously going to hang for doing it, everyone knew that except him, who had been told by his doctor that the chances were he wouldn’t see the summer out so he had deliberately made his vicious point while he still lived.

© Peter Rogerson 06.04.23

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Reviews

[AYVID N]

What a nasty,vindictive and vicious old monster. I hope they hang him in the most painful way. How could he? Again, a heart-rending twist at the end and I was left stunned. Loved it.