Oisin
gone but not forgotten
NATURAL JUSTICE
This was his first exhibition and it had been unbelievable successful. Nearly all his work had been sold, making him quite a tidy little sum. It was a watershed. Who would have thought only eighteen months ago this now successful painter had been shinning up poles in all sorts of weather to connect broken power lines. This new life was well worth celebrating in the company of his friends.
Besides the copious amount of beer he had supped at all through the evening, Andrew drank a good measure of the wine served with the duck l’orange. He had then followed up with a couple of brandies over his coffee.
Jenny looked on anxiously as, with Robert struggling to keep up with him, Andrew slowly got drunker and drunker. Eventually, Jenny raised the matter of how they should get home. Full of Dutch courage, Andrew scorned her suggestion of taking a taxi, instead insisting that they should take a room for the night. That, he suggested would finish off the evening perfectly.
Jenny wasn’t so sure. ‘I hate it when you get like this! Come on, Andy, I think you’ve had enough now. Why don’t you call it a night and we’ll get a cab?’
But he was full of bravado in front of his celebrity guest Sian Morgan. ‘Look, you do what you want to do but I’m staying here.’
Jenny rose to her feet. Andrew watched the way she wriggled to straighten her dress, which had ridden well up on her thighs. It was that little green number which he had once observed; ‘… clung to her ‘like Castrol GTX’.
‘Well, if that’s your last word, I’ll take myself home,’ she snarled, snatching up her handbag. Then after nodding a vague ‘good night’ to the others at the table, she slung her bag onto her shoulder and stormed off.
Emma’s eyes blazed at her brother. ‘Do you have to be so bloody obnoxious? We’ve all had a good day. Everything was going fine then you have to go and do something like that. I really wonder about you at times, Andy!’
Andrew shot a quick glance at his sister's husband as a desperate appeal for support. It was no good. Robert was having none of it. He merely gave a slow shake of his head and gazed briefly at the ceiling.
* * *
Jenny had to catch a bus along Hagley Road into the city centre, where she changed onto a number sixteen. With the intention of taking a short cut through the gully, which ran close to the river Tame, she got off at the stop between the Beaufort and the Garden Gate.
Although it was the middle of summer, the night was late enough for it to be extremely dark, especially along that narrow pathway which relied on the indirect street lighting for illumination. She was where the Bluebell Woods were on her right and an area of wasteland on her left, when she was suddenly grabbed from behind.
Thrashing, kicking and struggling, she was dragged through an opening in the fence onto the wasteland. All her efforts to free herself were in vain. Her assailant was much too strong. And while he held her around the neck with one hand, he repeatedly punched her with the other. But she was determined not to make it easy for him by squirming and struggling as much as her depleting energy would allow.
In the ensuing melee the contents of her handbag were strewn all around when it flew from her shoulder as she was hurled backwards onto the hard clay ground. In a split second he was on top of her, straddling her body with his knees.
While one arm pressed against her throat, she could feel the roughness of his other hand groping under her dress, wrenching at her underwear. Although his face was close enough for her to smell his body odour and alcohol tainted breath, she could not make out any defining features.
Fighting to stay conscious she frantically gasped for air while her hands clawed desperately at the surrounding soil until, quite by accident, she sensed the hard steel of the hairdressing scissors that had spilled from her handbag. By inching them gradually bit-by-bit with the extreme tips of her fingernails, she eventually edged them into the palm of her hand. Immediately she had them firmly in her grasp she lashed out with them. She didn’t pick a target; anywhere would do so long as it distracted him from suffocating her.
The arc of her swing came to a violent halt with a dull thud as the blades of the scissors dug deep into some part of the assailant’s anatomy. Because there was no immediate reaction from him, she yanked at the loops, with the intention of freeing them to deliver a follow-up thrust that might have more effect, but they were jammed solid. In an act of frustration he landed one last blow to the side of her face before reeling backwards onto her feet clasping at his head with both hands.
As soon as she had managed to wriggle clear of his writhing body she watched him clamber to his feet. The last she saw of him was a grotesque vision of his lurching figure, silhouetted by a distant street lamp, with the scissors protruding from his head.
Shuffling backwards on her bottom, she leaned her aching body against the narrow trunk of a small tree and sat sobbing while she sucked enough air into her lungs to gather sufficient composure to drag herself up onto her trembling, grazed legs.
* * *
What Jenny had been through on that patch of wasteland was hard enough to cope with but coupled to the trauma of giving a statement to the police and being subjected to an humiliating medical examination at the hospital, it became unbearable.
Besides all the pain and indignity, her face looked like it had been run over by a bus: She had grazes down both cheeks; her right eye was almost closed and blackened; there was a small cut above her left eyebrow. There didn’t seem to be a square centimetre of facial tissue that wasn’t affected to the degree that merely sipping drinks through her battered lips proved an extremely painful ordeal. And, although the X-rays had proved negative, she found it hard to believe that her badly swollen nose wasn’t actually broken.
Numerous scrapes and bruises disfigured her legs. Other, more intimate parts, of her anatomy were also affected, but at least she could keep them covered.
She was absolutely exhausted and, being in the condition she was, she could have well done without the grilling her parents were intent on subjected her to the following morning. She realised it was only their way of expressing their concern but that didn’t help much.
The questioning was fast and furious:
Who did it? Could it have been someone who had followed her from the hotel? Did she see anyone acting suspiciously on the bus? How come she didn’t get a better look at him? Where was Andrew? Could it have been him? Why had she been silly enough to come home on her own? Why was she so reluctant to tell the police the full story? And then, to cap it all, when she learned the details, Rachael - her own sister - inferred that she had only herself to blame for not taking Andrew up on his offer to treat her to a night at ‘The Castle’.
‘You must be daft. I would have jumped at the opportunity.’
‘Well you’re bloody welcome to him! You’d get on well – two selfish sods together.’
Her father had gone off on a different tack. He had put two and two together and come up with Andrew. To him it was all so simple: They had quarrelled. Andrew, bent on vengeance and knowing her regular route home, had tracked and attacked her.
‘Well, we’ll soon know for sure,’ Rachael interjected, ‘Whoever it is will be easily spotted with a pair of scissors sticking out of his head.’
It materialised that, although Rachael had been talking tongue-in-cheek, her prophecy was not far off the mark. A man’s body was found by early Sunday lunchtime drinkers, half slumped in bushes at the rear of the Beaufort’s car park. A later post mortem confirmed he had died of blood loss caused by a severe head wound. Apparently he had managed to remove the scissors and that was the worst thing he could have done as it allowed the haemorrhage to flow.
THE END
