25. Explanations

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

In his cell, David reminisces about his crimes

When David Rozelle caught a glimpse of a girl from yesteryear as he was led towards the cells his heart flipped. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.

He remembered her as if yesteryear was only yesterday.

He had been nineteen and a student at a training college where school leavers were supposed to be taught how to understand children and he had seen Alice more than once. He had even spent time with her, down what was looked on as the college pub, and they had sat chatting away and all he had wanted to do was kiss her. Or maybe put one arm round her shoulder and whisper things into her ear that only she should hear. Meaningful things that he would never ever whisper to another girl, not ever in his life because he could only possibly mean it to the one. And there could never be any doubt that Alice was that one.

Then he had heard her talking quietly to Sophie Barnet, another pretty girl, but she had a bit of a reputation among the lads at college, of being untouchable. And it was when he heard that whispered conversation between Alice and Sophie that he understood why she was looked upon as she was. It was laid out for him in simple words even though he had to strain to hear many of them. But he had heard enough. The two pretty lasses, the one he’d die for and the untouchable one, were lovers!

It was the most painful thing he had ever heard or had to think about. And not only were the two young women lovers, the wretched Sophie had experienced, with Alice, the very things that haunted his own dreams but never wandered into his reality. Yes, he wanted to kiss Alice. Yes, he wanted to touch her. And more, very much more. He wanted to join with her in a physical union like lovers do in romantic fiction. And the union he wanted to have with Alice would be perfection. He knew that as much as he knew that he would never experience it because Alice would never want it, not in a million years, and neither would he now that he had overheard what amounted to a confession between two lovers. His problem was he was a boy.

And that same night he had sorted out Sophie once and for all. If he couldn’t have Alice then neither would Sophie. And in a fit of blind rage he had sorted Sophie out for good and all. He had taken a blade stolen from the refectory and sliced her up with it. No. Not stolen, but borrowed because he had returned the knife, nice and clean, he’d polished that blade until it had shone, had made absolutely sure that nobody would find a trace of him on it.

They hadn’t, but his cleaning had been a bit wayward because they’d found a smear of Sophie’s DNA and thus proved it had been what had cut the evil wench up. The things she had done, proudly too, with the love of his life, had earned her retribution.

The memories of what weren’t so distant days flooded through him and even made him stumble, an action which the policeman taking him to the cells interpreted as an intention to run for his life, and as a means of stopping him had brought his truncheon down firmly onto him. It was only intended to hurt rather than maim or leave much of a bruise, but he was a serial killer, wasn’t he, and must learn to expect that sort of treatment. Even he knew that.

Once in his cell he waited for the police officers who had escorted him to go to wherever it was lazy policemen went, and burst into tears. Of course he did. He wept for Alice and the lives they might have lived together if she hadn’t been queer. In his head he assumed that no matter how she felt about anyone else in the world she would surely love him, and the lack of that loving made the tears flow.

He had wept when he had taught Sophie a final lesson and, by golly, one day he would teach Alice the same even if he had to wait until the years of punishment that he knew were due to him were over.

Sophie had led to all the rest, he told himself. His parents, good people but old, had all but told him they wanted their lives to end. He had heard their words a hundred times, begging for an ending to their misery. One day you’ll understand, David, one of them had said, and then you’ll understand better when you’re our age, lad the other had said.

They had clearly hated their decrepitude and the way the years had diminished them, and so he had done them a kindness, given them a gift that nobody else would, and taken them to the lake where they had played with him when he’d been a child, and with smiles on their faces, smiles that admittedly turned for a mere moment into horror when they saw the blade in his hand, they had gone to meet what they called their maker.

And talk like that had taken him back to the lovely Alice.

With nobody to clean for him, to cook his meals, he had drifted from the family home and managed to talk his way into the Beachus house.

“I heard you were looking for a lodger to help you pay your bills,” he had said, smiling as warmly as he could, and when they had tut-tutted he had waved a few notes, lowest denomination that he could spare because, being a mere teacher, the authorities didn’t think he was worth very much, and they had weakened at the sight of a few five pound notes.

“Yes, that would be nice,” said a grateful Claire, and “Aye, lad, we could do with a few extra coppers,” Steven had added, and it had been as easy as that. He had moved into their house just like that, had arranged the spare bedroom so that it was comfortable, and had done what he normally did when he went to bed, had resurrected Alice in his mind and spent long hours telling her how he loved her until it all became too much, and he had forced himself to go to sleep, the pressures of his love turned into a dreadful lust first…

The kids had been easy too.

He often fantasised that he and Alice, joyously married, had a little family of their own, but their kids wouldn’t be anything like some of the thickies he had to pretend to like at school.

First Amanda Clitheroe and then Shaun Taylor… they had so managed to get up his nose that he only had one option. Show them the way to the Almighty before life sullied them more than it already had. Yes, he believed in an almighty, all right, did David.

But sending them on their separate ways had been his downfall.

It was Claire who had spotted it, the blood stains on his clothing, and had jokingly asked whose it was and did the kids need so much thrashing these days, like they once had, when she was a nipper.

“Little sods,” she had grinned, “need correcting, don’t they?”

That was what had ensured she would spend eternity, or the first little bit of it, in the woman next door’s wheelie bin, and he chose the green one for recycling, a black thought in his head turning her death into a prophesy. She would be recycled and returned to her husband as an angel…

But Steven Beachus had seen what he’d done to his wife and although his better and stronger years were behind him he had started making a fuss.

And it had all sprung from the kind of blade with whish he had sliced the revolting Sophie.

The lollipop man followed on because he might have seen the old Beachus man being rolled down the slope on the field, and if he had he would tell because everyone knew the teacher of the backward kids went to school that way…

By the time he had decided to seek help in the local church because maybe he realised that his killing was going out of control tt was too late for any help because he had accidentally knifed the vicar, and, by all accounts, killed him.

So God wouldn’t help him. Maybe he’d have better luck with human justice, but it was a crying shame that they’d found the two little knife scabbards carefully stitched on the inside of his socks…`