ROSIE’S NIGHTMARE

A petty little girl, and murder.

Rosie was born to be beautiful. That’s what both of her parents mother Irene and dad who liked to be known as Copper Denver, said the moment they set eyes on her new-born face, and her grandparents agreed like grandparents invariably do. There could be no doubt about it: she was beautiful.

As a baby she did everything in just about record time. Her smiles, right from the very beginning, were broad and involved all of her face, from a dimple in her chin to the laughter in her eyes. And as for progress into life, she walked before she was one, talked not long after, and by talked I don’t mean simple gurgling but pronouncing a few words besides mama and dada with wonderful clarity.

But it was when she started school that she really shone. By then her hair had grown until it hung down her back in antiseptic ringlets, or wafted over her shoulders to tease the eyes of parents and strangers alike. She was, indeed a beauty, was Rosie, with that ready smile revealing those perfect teeth.

Until one December when she was ten and just arrived home from school.

She’ll never be able to explain to anyone how it happened, not even to herself, but it seemed that she killed her policeman father. Stone dead, it seemed, without intending to. Only seemed, mind you, because she was handling the bloody knife and staring wildly at the scene of a dead father and a handful of discarded cash bags.

Whatever took place was lost inside her mind for all eternity, but her mother came home from the shops carrying a bag of shopping so that she could make a special dinner for the family that evening, it being 11^th December and Rosie’s dad’s birthday.

But when the mother came in, happy that she’d bought everything she needed to make the dinner really special, it was seeing blood almost everywhere and Rosie standing over the inert body of her father, her face white and splashes of crimson blood on her pretty white dress.

“Rosie!” she exclaimed in horror, “what in the name of goodness have you done to your father, and on his birthday too!”

“Nothing, mummy, I did nothing…” stammered Rosie, “I came in here … and there he was, all cut and bleeding. It wasn’t me!”

“Of course it wasn’t, darling,” wept her mother, and after checking that there were no signs of life left in the man she adored, she dialled 999*

The Inspector in plain clothes who came was Detective Inspector Barry Cheeseman and he knew one thing. He knew that children, especially ten year olds, are capable of anything vile and reprehensible, so he didn’t believe that this girl, this Rosie with the lovely hair and pretty eyes, was anything but a potential evil s**t. And what’s more, he knew that she hadn’t knifed her father.

“What happened, nipper?” he asked.

“Her name’s Rosie,” put in mother.

“Rosie, then. Why did you kill him? What had he done to cause you to take a knife to him?”

“I never…” wept Rosie, and despite her default expression which was a sort of smile, real tears ran down her cheeks. The Detective made his own lips curl in a way that indicated that he’d never believe anything this rotten little child said, and muttered.

“Tell me how it happened?” Then, for his own peace of mind, he added “S**t!”

Maybe he shouldn’t have said it, but he did. Out like that. So that Rosie’s mum felt all sorts of emotions battling inside her, emotions she’d never experienced before, and in a a sort of automatic, thoughtless instant, she grabbed the knife from Rosie and tried to plunge it deep into D.I Barry Cheeseman’s flesh.

Fortunately for him he didn’t show any signs of dying there and then, but looked at her in absolute horror and tried to say something along the lines of “like daughter, like mother” before falling to the ground with a trickle of blood oozing from a wound that might have been worse, but wasn’t.

Fortunately for him the original emergency call that the mother had made had sent an ambulance to their address, and the paramedics, having gone through a huge shock at seeing what was apparently a scene of carnage which caused one of them to vomit there and then, ascertained that the D.I wasn’t actually dead, though his eyes were fast shut and he looked dead.

They carted him off before saying there was nothing they could do to Rosie’s father, and blues and twosed it off with their patient, the man who’d emptied his own stomach on the scene of blood and gore tending to his wound, which might have been worse, but wasn’t.

In fact, that paramedic concluded that it really wasn’t much at all, and certainly not enough to cause his vomit to flow so plentifully, at which consideration he chastised himself.

A second senior police officer arrived at the house of blood and gore and stared at the body, then at the white-faced mother and then at the prettiest child he had seen since breakfast, when his own daughter had smiled at him.

“The inspector called her a s**t,” whispered mother, and she let this policeman take the knife from her hands. “I couldn’t help it, with my loving husband dead too.”

There was one thing this replacement officer, Detective Inspector Butterly, knew was that little girls like this Rosie who stood in front of him, crying pretty tears, couldn’t do was stab anyone.

“What happened, darling?” he asked her as if he was actually questioning his daughter Jasmine.

Rosie shook her head. She really had no idea, other than she had come back home from school to find her dad dead and with a knife sticking out of him, a knife she retrieved in an off-chance that the removing it from the dear man’s flesh might bring him back to life.

Inspector Butterly believed her. Of course he did. Who wouldn’t?

Two days later, and the serious crime of murder not solved, Inspector Cheeseman returned to work after having been discharged from hospital with little more than a scratch to show for his suffering.

“Is she in chains yet, Butterly?” he barked.

“I’m sure it wasn’t the woman,” replied his colleague, “she’d only just returned from shopping and found the little lass holding the knife.”

“I meant the s**t… the kid!” snapped Cheeseman.

“She’s had counselling,” assured Butterly, “and she’ll get over the shock.”

“But she knifed her old man! I know she did: I could see it in her eyes and the way she smiled when I asked her.”

“And that’s youre considered opinion, Cheeseman?” asked Butterly, “you give no credence to the theory about the pseudo gas man who had come to rob their meter? You know, the one that’s been doing the rounds of the area for ages, and we’ve not caught him?”

“That’s rubbish! There ain’t any meters with cash in them any more! They’ve replaced them all with shiny smart meters that do everything but the washing up!”

“There are quite a few as you’d know if you were anything but the moron you seem to be, Cheeseman. And it was him. The knife even belonged to the gas company, the sort they use for prying open obstinate meters that have got stuck. And it’s covered with finger prints. Hundreds of them besides the child’s and her mother’s.”

“Bah!”

“So when did you do it, Cheeseman? When did you take up robbing gas meters? And when did you get challenged by a pretty girl’s father? And why did you kill him? Was it because you know he’d recognise you?”

There was nothing that D.I Cheeseman could say to that. Two uniformed officers with large muscles and larger waists took him away and virtually slung him into a cell that he was obliged to share with a pervert who fancied him.

All of which goes to explain why her natural smiles meant very little indeed because she’d loved her father like daughters often do, and he was dead, and one man accused her of killing him, one man who should have known a good deal better than that.

And she wasn’t a s**t, was she?

© Peter Rogerson 17.05.22

*999 is the emergency number in the UK.

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