18. Bilocation

A vicar has his moment of lust cut very short...

Mavis Waldorf was almost completely blind but that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy life despite the darkness of her world. And because he didn’t really know the extent of her poor vision and the way Mavis could barely make out any details at all in the world around her, the Reverend Haddock could see nothing wrong with employing her to dust round the church. He was all heart, was the Reverend Haddock. Few other people would have offered her employment, but he considered himself to be a good Christian soul.

Mavis may have been the blind one but the Reverend Haddock was the unseeing one. Because whereas Mavis was aware that a strange man was standing not so far from where she and her lover were enjoying a few minutes of physical recreation with delicate fingers, and she operated on the principle that if you can’t see your lover at least you can feel him, but she could see a blacker shadow against the normally shadowed inside of the church as she lay with her bra strap in the vicar’s hand. And that abnormal, almost spooky, shadow was man-shaped, or it was insofar as any shadow can actually be man-shaped.

It was, she decided, a ghost as she stared at it with eyes that could barely see, but the owner of that shadow didn’t know the nature of her disability. And the vicar was crooning ever closer to her, nibbling one ear lobe and muttering what sounded very much like obscenities into it. She loved to hear those obscenities and there was nobody better at murmuring them than dear Harry Haddock, Reverend of this parish.

If it was a ghost and because they were in a very precious old church, might the shape of a man etched dimly onto her view of the world actually be what they referred to as the holy ghost?

She sniffed. A great deal of the information that her brain processed was a consequence of her sense of smell, which seemed to have grown in direct proportion to the failing of her eyesight. And she could smell the shadow. It gave off what to her was a pungent aroma that could only possibly be a kind of aftershave. No woman that she knew would allow such a reek to go anywhere near her own flesh, but quite a lot of men did: and she knew this because her late husband had. And so did the window cleaner: he ponged of it because it was rumoured that the undertaker’s wife loved the smell and therefore loved him. Sort of. In an innocent sort of way, no touching or feeling or undressing involved. At least, that’s what people thought if they thought anything, which to be honest most didn’t.

So if it wasn’t the holy ghost it was a man.

She had no idea what David Rozelle (for he standing staring as she caroused with the vicar) was going to do, in fact what he had actually started doing, but his intention in the sacred interior of an ancient church was to extinguish the life from the woman who had seen him. His route through life had to be invisible because if so much as a finger of blame was pointed at him then it would all be over, the lovely judging the worth of others, and he did judge, and the equally lovely killing, because killing was the only sure way of helping his victims to an afterlife in which their sins would be erased. Maybe. Hopefully.

The Reverend Harry Haddock happened to heave himself into a more comfortable and useful position, one that would enable him to take one of her n*****s into his actual reverend mouth and worship it there, when the sharp blade that David always carried with him, stuffed into a small scabbard on the inside of a sock and was being aimed with all his shadowy might towards her heart. Only it wasn’t that heart that received the blow but the Reverend’s back due to it being relocated by the man himself, and such was the force behind it, for David Rozelle was no weakling but a keep-fit sort of fellow who kept himself in shape, that there was no stopping it.

It reached the holy man’s heart and that holy man ceased to live at that very instant. He slumped over and his weight, every sacred ounce of it, crushed down onto his dearest Mavis Waldorf and might have suffocated her but for the way her head almost automatically avoided contact with anything sacred.

David Rozelle was unaware of the details because the interior of the church was far from lit brightly, in fact ir probably meant that inside it his own vision wasn’t much more accurate than that of the intended victim. But he did know what his very sharp knife had done.

It had stilled the heart of a vicar, and that made him burst into sudden tears, to cry and gnash his teeth and weep like he’d never wept before, and then scurry out of the blessed building before someone else came in and saw what he’d done and consequently know that it was he who had done it. And still with tears in his eyes, almost blurring his vision to a distorted and misty nothing, he staggered down the road until his head cleared a bit, and his eyes dried up. And across the road he saw one young woman who most certainly knew or suspected a thing or two about him. She had challenged him with her eyes when he had been preparing a six foot hole. So he kept his eyes on her and decided t stalk her even if it meant stalking her to death.

Meanwhile, inside the church Mavis was worried about the vicar. He had suddenly become very heavy and immobile and the holy ghost seemed to have left the building.

She shoved and heaved and eventually she was free of the weight of a man she decided out must have had some sort of heart attack or stroke, and was certainly no longer of this world. Poor sight she may have had, sight that was reckoned to be well nigh blindness, but she could feel pulses and could tell that the vicar didn’t have one any longer.

This troubled her greatly. She tried massaging where she hoped his heart would be, and nothing happened. Then she tried conversation.

“Harry,” she begged him, “can you wake up? For me? For me to kiss you? So that you can make wonderful love to me?”

But none of the verbal entreaties which she believed might even waken the dead seemed to work and he remained still as a dead man would be expected to remain. She needed help. To get the vicar to a hospital, maybe, where doctors who could work all sorts of magic that would assuredly revive him.

So she fumbled her way to the entrance. It wasn’t an easy thing for her to do though she was aware of a slight lightening of her perception of the world when she pushed the door open and the sun beamed in. But that lightening was only very slight, and didn’t help her at all. Meanwhile, time was of the essence.

So, “help please!” she shouted, at the top of her voice, “the vicar’s gone ill! He won’t move! The Holy Ghost has taken him!”

It was really good fortune tha the Detective Constable Amelia Pincher was close enough to be able to run and see what the fuss might be and whether she could do anything to help.

“The Holy Ghost took him!” wailed a now distraught Mavis Waldorf, I saw him. Black like the night, it was, standing right here!”

“Show me,” demanded Amelia, because a few blood stains on the blind woman’s clothing suggested to her a darker story.

And with lightning efficiency she worked out what must have happened. The killer had struck again, and this time he had murdered a clergyman. The Bishop would have quite a lot to say about that. And thankfully the investigation would almost certainly be taken out of the hands of her silly and inept DI and given to somebody with a brain cell in his or her head.

So she phoned the station and was told by a barking DI that she’d been ordered in and why wasn’t she there? Because, he insisted, the killer was waiting in the very station where he sat, to be interviewed.

And, “That’s clever of the DI,” she said, trying not to sound too triumphal.

“Why?” demanded her boss.

“Because just this minute he killed the local vicar and scared a blind cleaning lady who was there as a witness,” she said. “He’s probably got the gift of bilocation.”

© Peter Rogerson, 06.06.24