DEATH IN THE LIBRARY

When love and death combine....

“He didn’t seem capable of keeping his hands off me, and I’d had a rotten night,” said Janie as she sat in the interview room and fidgeted with her fingers whilst trying not to catch the female police inspector’s eye. She knew full well that this woman sitting in front of her might well understand what was going through her mind, but there was always a chance that she wouldn’t.

There was always the chance that she was a nymphomaniac or some sort of sex-obsessed lonely creature who would do anything to have a man as physical as Joshua had been, lying in bed with her and … and touching her when all she wanted to do was get another hour’s sleep in order to feel vaguely human.

Because that’s how it had been that morning.

Joshua had been touching her, here there and everywhere, whispering truths about loving her … she knew he loved her, he told her several times every day and she knew he wasn’t lying, not once in all the years they’d been together.

And she loved him.

They were the perfect couple. Everyone said so. They even finished each other’s sentences automatically because they thought the same things at the same rime. If ever two people were in tune with each other they were.

“You say you’d had a rotten night,” encouraged Inspector Lillian Rothbury. She’d had her share of rotten nights in the past and new all about them. There had been some during which she’d not even got a wink of sleep as this or that piece of flotsam made whirligigs in her mind, and wouldn’t go away. Even last night when she’d been sure she’d been on what she fondly called “a promise” and a-quiver with expectation, bottle of red breathing, glasses gleaming and she in her best sheer silk dressing-gown waiting, but Jeanette had been forced to cancel at the last moment, citing the need for working the night as a reason. Lillian knew all about unexpected orders to work unsociable hours, but couldn’t see how they applied to a library assistant, and the problem had wound itself into a dreadful knot inside her head all night as she had lain in bed on her own.

“All I wanted was another hour’s asleep, and there were his hands touching me, brushing against my you-know where and his whispers telling for the zillionth time how much he loves me. It was more than I could take...”

“So you told him to lay off?” asked Lillian sympathetically. She wouldn’t have been able to take anything of the sort first thing in the morning even if she was wide awake and raring to enter a brand new day. Not from a man, anyway, and she’d seen the deceased. He was a man all right, unshaven in the fashionable way that was supposed to make men look handsome, but she couldn’t see it, not with the whiskers turning grey in a hideous mottled sort of way with little more than a hint of ginger adding a soupçon of colour to the mix. Yes, he’d been a man, and now he was a dead man, which didn’t help her when it came to finding some sympathy for him. The woman had killed him and he’d probably deserved it. She’d seen enough battered wives in her time to know what most men are capable of.

“I just needed a bit more rest, and I know he understood … but his wandering hands didn’t,” replied Janie, wiping a tear from the corner of an eye where it had suddenly appeared. “He loved me too much, I suppose. And that’s how I felt about him. We’ve been married a long time … more than forty years, believe it or not, and we’ve always been like that. Affectionate, loving, caring for each other. But last night … I don’t know what it was but I just couldn’t sleep, and this dream kept on coming along even when I was awake, or thought I was...”

“Was he a bully? Did he strike you once too often?” asked Lillian eagerly. She wanted to help this woman, this poor distressed woman, she wanted to see a reasonable cause that had led to the still and cold body she’d seen at the seen, in the woman’s bed, with the curtains still drawn and the shaded light on.

Janie looked her straight in the face this time. “What? Joshua? Him hit me? He would no more dream of hitting me than he was capable of flying to the moon!” she exclaimed. “Who could think such a thing?”

“I’ve got to find a reason,” said Inspector Rothbury slowly, “I’ve got to find a motive for what you did.”

“I thought I’d told you,” mumbled Janie, “I thought I made it quite plain.”

“No,” sighed the police inspector, feeling more than slightly confused. Why couldn’t people be straight forward? Why were people so complicated?

“It’s why I had such a rotten night,” almost wept Janie, “I suppose it was a dream I had, really, nothing more than that. Joshua told me he was leaving me, that he had a blond with a perfect body and young like I’m not … it was so real, that dream, and when I finally woke from the little sleep I managed to get and found him reaching towards me and touching me where he knows I love being touched, then for a few minutes the dream and the real half-dark morning world kind of merged together.”

“That doesn’t explain much,” said Lillian, frowning. And of course it didn’t. No more than Jeanette saying she was working overtime instead of calling on her for a lovely supper ... she’d done a salmon dish specially �" and maybe a romantic film on the television, a DVD maybe, with girlie love in it, not sex, she couldn’t take that on a full stomach, all false and filmed and surrounded by a leering movie crew, but she did like romance.

She did like stories of love. They both did.

“It explains everything!” almost shouted Janie, “for a few minutes I really believed he was going to leave me, and there he was groping me as if nothing had happened...”

“But nothing had happened,” growled Lillian impatiently. “You’d had a dream, that’s all. It wasn’t real and the fact that he was lying there next to you must have suggested that!”

“I was half way,” sighed Janie.

“Half-way?” asked Lillian, needing a brutal explanation of male loathing and violence, not this namby-pamby lovey-dovey non-explanation for a nasty murder.

“Between the dream world and the real one, and I couldn’t let him,” sniffled Janie, “I couldn’t let him go, I couldn’t let any other woman have him … because I love him so much, so very much, and have for years and years and years, so I grabbed a pillow and pushed and pushed and pushed ...”

The door opened. Lillian scowled at the uniformed officer standing nervously in its entrance.

“Ma’am, there’s been an arson or terrorist attack. Ma’am, it’s the library … burnt it is, burnt to the ground but the staff saved the books, thank goodness. They worked all night in smoke and fighting the smouldering embers when the fire brigade said it was safe, and saved the books. I’m afraid, ma’am, there was one death...”

“That’s why I did it,” whispered Janie, “because I love him more than I love myself...”

© Peter Rogerson 22.01.17

Reviews

[KatyOfficial]

Your a really good writer!! I want to read more!

[Peter Rogerson]

Thank you so much! I do write quite a lot of pieces that I post on this site.