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Story: My Wife, the Serial Killer
His body slumped to the floor instantly, like a marionette with the strings cut. As the blood began to bubble and flow out from the back of his head, it was only his right foot that had any kind oflife left in it, rappingrepeatedlyagainst the carpeted floorboards.
At a bit of a stretch, it sounded to me like his foot was tapping to the beat of ‘Under Pressure’ or, of course, ‘IceIceBaby’ – if you are an uncultured swine with no taste in good music.
My brain began to fire on all cylinders. You can’t exactly ask Siri where’s the best place to hide a dead body – that would surely have theSWAT teamrammingmy door downin no time.I began to evaluate my options.
Leave the body there.Wait for someone to find it.
No. That was a recipe for disaster. His carer would find his corpse on Monday, call the police immediately, and forensics would not only discover the method of murder but would turn the whole neighbourhood into a CSI episode.
An investigation into our house would be inevitable, alibis would have to be concocted, kitchen knives taken away for analysis.
That would all be one big ball ache, and I desperately needed as much time between murder and investigation as possible.
Move the body from the houseto somewheremore secluded.
There was no way that I, afive-foot-five woman, would be able to carry a heavysetseptuagenarianfrom his house to my car and then to some deserted spot in the woods at three in the afternoon.
Not only would this result in a very strained, if not broken, spine, but realistically, there was no way in hellI wouldbe able to weasel my way out of that one if I got caught in the process.
‘I’m sorry, Officer. I just went to go in and check on my neighbour and thoughthe would love to continue his nap in the back ofmyFord Fiesta. Wait, what do you mean there’s a knife in his head?’
Alkalise his body.
That could work. It would be awfully gruesome, but if I chopped his body into several large chunks and treated it with a strong enough drain cleaner, the sodium hydroxide could break his body down, and I could pour him down the sink like a cup of tea, albeit a little lumpier.
I rushed down the stairs and began flinging open cupboard doors to find where O’Neill kept his cleaning products.
I found a scratched and scuffed bottle of drain cleaner that felt light to the touch.
It was barely half full and certainly not enough to break a whole body down.
We had a few substantial wholesale- sized bottles that we’d bought to clean the bathrooms before we moved in.
That could do the trick, but the football mums across the road would be off to pick up their little star athletes any second.
I would almost certainly be caught running between the two houses and be forced to engage in chit-chat.
Just admit it was me, but change the motive.
I killed him in self-defence. I just came to see if he wanted any help with his shopping, and when I was inside, he throttled my neck like he was squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube?
Nope, the knife lodged in his eye was pretty drastic evidence to the contrary. Not only had I taken the blade from my kitchen, but I had pierced him so perfectly through his eye socket that there was no way it could have been anything other than hot-blooded murder.
I was racking my brains for option numberfive.
I hadn’t realised I was still gripping the knife so tight that my knuckles had turned a pale white against the gold of my wedding ring.
I tried to loosen my grip and instead focus on the carton of semi-skimmed milk leaking from his grocery shopping, dribbling across the carpet and mixing with his blood, forming something that resembled the national flag of Bahrain.
So, I stood there, watching over his corpse, wondering why the hell I had decided to be so spontaneous. I remember Gareth had said that he liked that about me when we’d first met.
‘You’re just so spontaneous,’ he had said to me amidst the ambience of a grotty student bar, as if he had just realised for the first time that there existed people who wouldn’t need an itinerary before taking a casual trip to the local newsagent for a fizzy pop.
I think all I’d done was change my order from a soda and lime to a vodka tonic. Not exactly groundbreaking.
I knew that the longer I dithered, the higher the chance I had of getting caught.
Yet, I found that I couldn’t stop staring at the body with this strange mixture of repulsion and gratification.
The blood and milk concoction that now almost resembled the Japanese flag was dribbling towards O’Neill’s little finger on which that god-awful bronze ring was still wedged.
I just wished that the Zodiac Killer had managed to write a Killing for Dummies before he’d vanished into obscurity.
That would have been extremely helpful around now.
I decided to go with one of Angus’s old adages: ‘Abad plan is better than no plan at all.’ I gently placed my thumb and index finger around the ring still lodged onto O’Neill’s bloated, chubby finger and yanked it off.
I rinsed the viscous, gloopy blood from the metal in the sink of his wet room before rushing back down to the kitchen to grab the stain remover, humming a very particular 90s hip-hop song as I did so.
Well, this was certainly not nearly as easy as the last time.
Table of Contents
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