Little Fingers!

Little
Fingers!

by

Tim
Roux

Published by
Night Publishing, Smashwords edition

Copyright 2007,
Tim Roux

ISBN
978-1-4581-0754-1

Thank you for
downloading this e-book. You are welcome to share it with your
friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for
non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete
original form.

All characters
are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is
accidental.

To discover
other books by Tim Roux, please go to
http://www.nightpublishing.com/id13.html.

Chapter
1

“
I know you
know the answer. I am absolutely bloody convinced of it. I can
taste it.”

You leant
forward towards me over your beer, Inspector, and your brown
alcohol fumes plumed around my nose. Ten years earlier, you would
have been smoking. You used to smoke forty a day, you told
me.

You were
looking sad and troubled, and defiant, as usual. Determined in the
face of habitual defeat. In your world, no outcome is ever good,
but you are driven to get there by the shortest route anyway. That
is what makes you a policeman. You have the mind of a drill
bit.

“
You don't
know you know the answer, Julia, not yet. You may have a lurking
suspicion. You may even have it all worked out subconsciously. We
have to unlock your brain to solve this mystery. There is a serial
killer out there. He is living in that brain of yours as an
unrecognised memory, a shadowy computation, and he must be stopped.
You can stop him. You have to concentrate, but on something else,
to get there. These repressed truths have to be approached
obliquely. What do you do to relax?”

Your voice
sounded earnest and professional, but your thoughts were sliding up
my thighs. They went all the way. I always know what you are
thinking. A few hours in the sack with me, and you might have both
a climax and a result. I wasn't prepared to try it then. It was not
that I wanted to deny you, only that I could not face losing Mary.
She is so fragile, and so honest. I cannot hurt her.

Do you
remember the first time we met, when you arrested me for Tom
Willows' murder? You came to my front door and knocked. My first
glimpse of you was as a frosted shadow through the glass door
panelling, swaying slightly. I opened the door, and you turned to
me, a grey, pock-marked face, grey eyes, grey hair curling greasily
and untidily - someone I would normally not have noticed with any
sense of appreciation.

“
Are you Miss
Julia Blackburn?”

“
Yes, I
am.”

“
May I come
in?”

“
You may have
to say who you are first.”

“
Apologies,
Miss Blackburn.” You showed your police identity. It could have
been almost any piece of identity, except for the stock exchange
security badge, which I would have recognised. “Police.”

“
Police?”

“
Yes, Miss
Blackburn. I would like to have a word with you, if I
may.”

I was thinking
“Police? Police? Driving offence? Dog licence? Being a nuisance to
the neighbours, but I am as quiet as a ghost. Why the
police?”

You
instinctively seemed to know where the sitting room was (left into
the hallway, and left again). Or perhaps you already knew the
house.

“
Please sit
down, Officer.”

“
Inspector,”
you corrected me. I do not know the difference between an officer
and an inspector. Isn't an inspector an officer? It seemed to
matter to you.

“
Inspector
John Frampton.”

“
Pleased to
meet you, Inspector.” I know that it is always wise to be polite to
the police.

“
Miss
Blackburn……………….”

“
Yes.”

“
I have just
come from Tom Willows' house on the green. I believe that you know
Tom Willows.”

It was less
than a loaded question.

“
Indeed, I
have just come from there myself. Well, an hour ago. Maybe two.
One-and-a-half.”

“
You saw Mr.
Willows this afternoon?”

What was this?
When I had left Tom, he was lazily dissolving into a satiated
sleep.

“
Were you at
Tom Willows' house around two hours ago?” you repeated. Beyond
those nondescript grey eyes I could detect a killer instinct
lurking. Well, it was nothing to do with me. I was innocent in
relation to this line of questioning.

“
Yes.”

“
You are
sure.”

“
I am
absolutely sure.”

“
In that
case, Miss Blackburn, I must ask you to accompany me to the police
station and warn you that anything you say may be taken down, and
may be used as evidence at your trial.”

“
Inspector, I
do not have a fucking clue what you are talking about.” The use of
the swear word startled you momentarily.

“
I arrest you
for the murder of Tom Willows this afternoon.”

I
fainted.

When I came
to, I was still in my house, lying on the sofa with you, Inspector
John, and two uniformed policemen hovering over me.

You said
something, but I could not immediately lock into your speech
patterns. Then you were helping me to sit up against a pile of my
red super-sized, soft cushions, and you had placed a mug of
sweetened tea into my hands. I assume that you were doing this by
First Aid numbers. When a suspect faints, lay her out flat, and
make sure that all the air passages are clear. Monitor her pulse.
When she comes to, encourage her to drink a cup of warm sugared
tea, except that you made it a mug. In my limited experience of the
police, everything is done by numbers and according to procedure.
How can you live that way? Does it make you feel re-assured to be
free from any degree of discretion, other than to shock me into a
head-crunching faint with the starkly-delivered news that the man I
had left in great contentment two hours beforehand was dead, and
that I was to be charged with his murder?

I noticed some
fluff on the carpet, and traces of peanut shells. A larger ball of
fluff, and a smaller trailing one, crumbs of white outer-shell
interspersed with red speckles. Why does it take the presence of
strangers to make me to want to clean the house?

You did not
apologise for your clumsiness. You stood there patiently for me to
become sufficiently compos mentis to be driven down to the police
station. Gargoyle threw his small sausage body on top of me, and
lay looking at me from the comfort of my stomach.

I heard one
policeman say to the other “That must be the ugliest dog I have
ever seen.” The man passing this judgment was several barrels of
beer overweight, and otherwise undersized and sweaty. I laughed.
Gargoyle looked round to scrutinise him, and turned back towards
me.

In your mind,
Inspector, I could hear many thoughts churning and fluttering,
declaring that you were no longer sure of yourself. You had walked
through the door with a betting certainty, and now the evidence was
sifting away. You were watching my every move and expression, and I
was watching your grey, dead eyes. You were like a fish staring
into an aquarium. I was a human being drowning inside it. We were
both fighting for breath.

After about
ten minutes, you led me to the car. There were several bystanders
loitering in asymmetrical groups. I did not know any, except by
sight. “What shall we do about your dog?” you asked me.

“
You can come
and feed him here, morning and night,” I replied.

“
I do not
believe that we offer a dog sitting service in this police force,”
you remarked sardonically.

“
You don't
offer much of a police service, either,” I responded. “If you were
doing your job properly, I would not need a dog sitter.” I had
given up on being polite to the police.

“
Don't you
have a neighbour you could ask?”

“
If you had
given me more notice, quite possibly. Should I wander around the
village asking some friends?”

“
OK, we will
deal with it.”

“
I hope that
you will put more effort into it than that. Gargoyle is a very good
friend, and does not deserve to be worried. He must be given the
impression that all is well.”

It is strange
how, even in the most adverse circumstances, even when every gun in
the room is trained upon you, you can take control. I was so angry
with you, that I was determined to make your life hell.

I attacked you
all that evening, and over the next day, until you were convinced
of my innocence. I was not afraid of you. I wanted to rip your
throat out. One might have assumed that this insight into my
aggressive nature could have reinforced your belief in my guilt.
After all, you had arrested me for murder, and who more likely to
have committed that murder than a hot-tempered person who had left
the victim's house only minutes before he was killed? Instead, it
convinced you of my innocence. You work at an emotional logical
level, not at a rational one. Truly intelligent people
do.

So, after
twenty hours, alternately inquisitioned and abandoned in that bare,
tatty, third-world police station, I was released back to my home.
I did not reach for the whisky bottle. I drank warm, sweet tea, and
reflected on why police stations are so scary. I decided that it is
because they are so devoid of care and attention that you get the
terrifying impression that if that is the way they treat their
environment, how will they treat you?

* *
*

Over the
months, we became not quite friends, but at least regular
acquaintances and conspirators. Mary no more comes to the pub with
me than she does with Frank, and I like lunchtime pubs, at least
once a week. So, we sat down together as apparent outsiders to the
village, and we talked, and watched the indigenous of Hanburgh
discussing us.

I became an
insider to your thoughts, more so than you ever realised, because I
can hear so much of what you are thinking.

Frankly, we
were both lost. Events were unravelling around us, and we could not
individuate the causes. We knew whom we liked and disliked. We
loathed Mary Knightly and her father, Dr. Berringer. We loved Mary
(Maloney) of course, and Brenda behind the bar. We suspected George
Knightly, and were devastated when he died, and our only hunch was
blown apart. Tony James was a contender, but we never really
believed in him.

One day, you
placed your empty pint glass carefully onto the beer mat, leant
back in your chair with your hands up around the back of your head,
arms out like wings, and declared “The way things are going, Julia,
it is either you or me. And it isn't me.”

“
And it isn't
me.”

That is when
you leant forward towards me and said “Julia, I know you know the
answer. I am absolutely bloody convinced of it. I can taste
it.”

* *
*

Following your
hunch, you consulted a psychologist to find out how best I could be
helped to surface my subconscious understanding of events in the
village. She suggested that I be encouraged to describe these
events in a stream of consciousness. If I could be persuaded to
write a book…………..

So, you asked
me to sit down and write out everything I know about Hanburgh
village from when I first arrived there until after the latest
murder took place. There may have been more by now; we have been
out of reach down here.

I cannot work
out whether you really think that I know the answer, or whether you
were just hoping to spend intimate time with me. I don't know
because you don't know. You are attracted to me, and you are
following a hunch. You are an intuitive man. All the arrows point
in the same direction. That is enough for you.

I hope that
you do not suspect me of having any part in the murders (I don't).
Two of those who died were very special to me. The third was not,
but he was my uncle, I suppose.