15. A Sacred Kiss

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Even clergymen deserve a break sometimes

Mr David Rozelle didn’t like the boy Shaun Taylor. He couldn’t have put jhs finger on why when he was thinking of the boy, just that the child never seemed to retain one thing he was supposed to remember, not even after having important stuff bellowed into his ears until he thought they might bleed because of all the decibels they were being subjected to.

So far, so good, until Mr Taylor, Shaun’s caring father, turned up at school with a gun in his hand and waved it under the teacher’s suddenly scared stiff nose and explained in simple words the meaning of the term autism.

Dealing with Shaun had been a hurried job because he was frightened that the father and his gun might put in another appearance, so he manufactured a kidnapping. That wasn’t difficult beause what Mr Rozelle had surplus of was imagination and the ability to be convincing when telling whoppers. So the so-called fact (which was far from being anything remotely factual) went around that the poor boy had willingly gone off with a well known pervert who had taken a liking to the boy’s short grey trousers.

And the way Mr Rozelle manufactured the account, the little details that others unwittingly had added to it when he nudged them, so that the whole yarn was distanced from him before Inspector Glumpy got to hear about it, was a tribute to his intelligence.

And all the while dedicated officers, male and female, were searching for the boy whilst he was slowly starting to decompose in the teacher’s blue wheelie bin. It was even moved from one house (where his parents, bless them, had lived before their departure from the world) to another where it joined two bins that should rightfully be where they were, and it even had the house number altered to match its new environment. And all the time Shaun rested inside it. He didn’t like to lift the lid and look, though. The sight of a small boy lying dead always made him cry uncontrollably

Eventually, though Mr Rozelle realised he wouldn’t get away with it for ever, and so, weeping profusely, he dug a grave in the garden, a grave that the blasted young woman from next door noticed him digging. Fortunately her own house flickered to silent darkness soon after midnight and the job of transferring Shaun Taylor into the splendidly deep grave he had battled to create was accomplished with remarkable ease. Just tip the bin over, let its contents fall out, and weep your heart out whilst filling it in.

Poor boy, he thought, poor beautiful boy…And he burst into tears at the memory of what he had done.

Not that he was a particularly beautiful boy. Not by the time he ended up the best part of four feet down. Mr Rozelle would have liked it to have been six feet and he even measured his hole with a tape measure belonging to the woman who he’d convinced was his landlady, but it hit rock at four feet, and no amount of digging with his spade would make it any deeper.

Now, he thought in his highly educated way, to sow the seeds of my alibi.

And he knew the place to do it. There was a church not so far from his school, and he made his way towards it. He would go into that sacred building and seek help and advice from the Reverend Reverend Harold Haddock who sha somehow managed to escape a thunderbolt from the heavens after it turned out that he had enjoyed carnal pleasure with the widow who cleaned for him on an almost daily basis.

So he took himself to the church, pausing past the red-painted sign that bore the legend SOULS SAVED HERE.

“So that’s it,” he reasoned, “if I have a damaged soul on account of the handful of people I’ve helped on their way out of this life, then this must be the place for me to come…”

The church smelt of age and the dust of time. The pews were still there like they must have been for centuries, the little board that held the numbers of hymns that would be sung next time there was a congregation looked newer, the pulpit with nobody in it truly ancient, the lectern at which the Reverend Harold (Harry) Haddock might read biblical texts more modern, but everything had about it what he could only called a holy feel.

And then he heard something that wasn’t quite so holy. He heard a squelching sound followed by a gasping sound, or rather the sounds of two people gasping at the same time as the noise that caused it with an unholy squelch.

He walked as quietly as he could down the central aisle of the church until, about half way towards the front, he came upon the squelch generator.

It was a man, the vicar no doubt, because he did have a clerical collar, shiny and white and plastic. Slipping to one side and he was horizontal on top of a woman who was gasping as her mouth and his squelched together. And other, more carnal, things were suggested by the disarray of clothing., both his and hers.

This was not good. Not good at all. What in the name of everything a man might hold sacred was a vicar doing sucking the life out of a woman who looked every bit like a cleaning lady, what with her pinafore dress and the duster in one hand.

Punishment was called for! But for once he didn’t have a useful weapon at hand. For once he had failed to tuck a sharp bladed knife into the knee-length sock of his right leg where one usually resided just in case!

So what could he do to reposition justice in a world gone mad? After all, a vicar sucking the breath out of a woman who was no doubt in his employ as a cleaner wasn’t something that could be passed over. And if this place was where souls were saved, then what was going on? From what he could see, souls were most definitely being lost!

He could demand that they stopped what they were doing, but he felt that might be quite the wrong thing for him to do because the vicar was at that moment fumbling the straps of his cleaner’s bra, and that might loosen things considerably he hated to think what that might imply… and he couldn’t help it…