An article that looked interesting caught the eye.
100 Ways to Kill People.
Click, and we’re in.
Stabbing, no.
Strangulation, no.
Plastic bag over the head, no.
Shotgun, pistol, rifle, I don’t think so.
Hit over head with a hammer. That would be messy.
Douse with petrol and set alight. Too risky. Too dangerous.
Poison, perhaps, maybe a possibility.
Sabotage brakes on victim’s car. Too technical.
Grind up glass and hide in food. Goes to work on the stomach, causing an excruciating death. The trouble is you wouldn’t be there to see it, to witness it, and that was half the fun.
Take out a light bulb, fill with petrol, refit and wait for victim to turn on the light. Would that work? Not for me.
Cut off head. The less said about that, the better.
Wait for victim to have a bath and lob live electrical appliance into the water. Ouch!
Drowning. Sounds too much like hard work.
Cut off hands. Very messy, and too hands on, or not, as the case might be, and presumably any old limbs would do. Perhaps not.
Run up behind someone with a heart condition and yell Boo! That was getting freaky.
Inject with pig’s blood. Repeat dose if necessary. Yeah right, I just happen to have a pint of porky’s blood in the fridge.
Or inject with thirty different substances, getting weirder the further down the list. Come on!
No, there was nothing there, nothing that leapt out, nothing that shrieked: Use me! Use me! Just have to think of something better, and then out of the blue, inspiration struck. The driver knew precisely how to do number two.
Threw on a coat, went outside and ambled to the paper shop. Bought the local paper, and there it was in the smudged LATE EXTRA. The nationals must have missed the deadline.
A MAN, COLIN RIVERS, aged 46, was knocked down and killed in Chester in the early hours of the morning. Police are appealing for witnesses. He was happily married with two daughters and was believed to be a Lay Preacher.
WELL, OF COURSE HE was.
Happily married? How the hell would they know that?
Took the paper home, cut out the article and pinned it to the cork tiles glued to the spare bedroom wall. Stood back and admired, yet it seemed awfully bare, that wall, one small article, ‘One small step for mankind,’ spoken aloud, a grin, a clicking of the fingers, left the room, closed the door, locked up, for it was time to get ready for work.
KAREN’S ENQUIRIES BORE little fruit. The four spurned Lay Preachers admitted to having been mighty miffed at Colin’s promotion, especially as they were all senior to him, but they were surprised and shocked he had died, killed on the highway, and more than that, each possessed a cast-iron alibi, for they had been sleeping with their partners at home, two men and two women, though not in the combinations Karen had expected.
‘Take a more detailed look at Marian,’ ordered Walter. ‘Dig up everything you can. Something isn’t right. Something stinks.’
Chapter Three
Harry Wilkinson had worked for the Chester Parks and Gardens department for forty-five years, almost exactly the same time he had been married to Bethan Jones. Through the years Harry gained steady promotions until he landed the position he coveted, that of headman looking after all the publicly owned bowling and putting greens within the city boundaries.
After he retired many a creaking sportsman would comment, ‘Ah, the greens are not the same,’ and in due course those lounge carpet surfaces would become known as Harry’s Greens.
Harry met Bethan Jones when they were both twenty in the Dringo Tearooms at Penmaenmawr while he enjoyed a hiking, rambling, easy climbing holiday, which was apt, as Dringo was Welsh for climbing. Bethan was kitted out in a cute black-and-white uniform as she served Welsh cream teas, something that Harry feasted on during the week. He couldn’t keep away from the place and was soon bewitched by her porcelain white Welsh skin, her sparkling blue eyes and easy smile, while Bethan was entranced by his huge bear-like paws. She had never seen hands the like of them before, and his neat English haircut.
She had taken the summer holiday job at Dringo to earn a little money and to get out from under her domineering mother, Phyllis’s, feet, and if a nice young man came along, well, that would be a summer bonus to remember.
The Jones family lived in the hills above Mostyn where they could glare down on the English across the water on their flat Wirral peninsula, conspiring to subjugate Wales, or so they imagined. The Jones’s had been long-time supporters of the Welsh National Party, Plaid Cymru, long before it was trendy and hip to be so, and even more fervent supporters of the Welsh Language Society, insisting that only Welsh was ever spoken in the Jones’ household. Bethan was six before she mastered the masters’ tongue. Fact was, that over the years the extended Jones family did a fair bit of glaring over the estuary whenever there was any anti English sentiment in the media, or round the hilltop villages where they lived, and they would laugh at anyone mentioning the Investiture of the English Prince of Wales.
‘You can’t marry ’im, ee’s English,’ said Phyllis in her sing song voice, forgetting herself and slipping into English, meaning Harry of course, the phrase spilling out almost as if it were one long word, youcan’tmarryimeesenglish, as if it were a Welsh place name belonging on some narrow gauge mountain railway.
Bethan would marry who the heck she darn well pleased, and she did.
Harry was high Church of England, Bethan, Welsh Chapel, where all the hymns and sermons were conducted in Europe’s most ancient language. Seventy-eight people attended the service in the
