Crooked Like Me
I think I killed for the first time when I was thirteen years old. It wasn’t a big deal. None of my murders were. It’s not as if any of them were particularly malicious or anything. I mean, I did have my reasons. Of course I did. Everybody has their reasons. Mostly, though, I did it just to fill the time. It’s really not that much of a big deal. Some people get an Xbox or buy a pet or study for exams to fill time. I kill people. It’s as simple as that. If you ask me, the only thing slightly strange thing was that I did it when I was only thirteen years old. And they say that girls mature quicker than boys.
Let me explain what I’m talking about.
I think the first question to get out the way is: how does a thirteen-year-old start thinking about murder? Well, I was always an early developer. The truth is, I was highly intelligent from a very young age, both in a book-ish kind of way and also, as I would find out later, in a serial killer-ish kind of way.
The main reason that I so candidly thought about murder, though, was not my intelligence, but my home life. My mother had died during childbirth, so I guess that I experienced death in my first moments on Earth. I’m not sure how much I was processing having just left the womb, but certainly it seems to have had an effect. I suppose you could say, that was the beginning of it.
A while after my mum passed away, my father turned to alcohol, a hobby he continued up to my thirteenth birthday. The alcoholism bothered my brother, Mike. He was a few years older than me but I was always ahead of him mentally. Mike used to come through to my room at night and find me on my bed, reading a book – Ripley’s Game, or something like that – and say, “Nicholas, are you awake? Dad’s shouting again.”
“I know,” I would snap back, “I have ears too.”
“What should we do?” he would moan.
“Just do something to keep your mind of it,” I’d tell him, “like read or write or something.”
“But I don’t like reading,” Mike would complain, at which point I decided to ignore him.
Seeing my father that way every night – shouting, bawling that he was going to kick our skulls in – it made me tough. Of course I knew that a man so drunk would never have the composure to make it up the stairs, so I was not particularly worried about his threats: I would just read away, happily in another world. Looking back on it, though, it definitely did change me – seeing another human being addicted to the very same thing that was destroying them. I never thought that would happen to me. At the time, though, I really thought very little of it – in the mornings I would step over my father’s sleeping, slobbering body at the bottom of the stairs, collect my school bag and walk straight out the door for school. I even found it amusing to shout, “Bye Dad,” knowing in witty irony that I would never get a response.
Soon, though, Mike began on the drink too. And I wasn’t too fond of that. It was out of principal, you see. By the time I was old enough to understand my Dad’s addiction, he was already beyond rescuing. Mike, on the other hand, I had known when he was a normal person. Mike, I could save. So I thought about it. I had a lot of free time since school didn’t challenge me much and, obviously, there was no strict parent at home. I took a while to get my head around it, but ultimately I realised I had to destroy the thing that was encouraging Mike to drink. My first target, at thirteen years old, became my very own father.
At three am one morning, I snuck out of bed and found my father in his usual position: the bottom of the stairs. I went down to him and tried to drag him up. Being thirteen, this was a strenuous task. After all, my father had a beer belly that weighed the same as the rest of his body put together. So to heave this up each and every stair took a lot out of me. But I managed eventually. I went through to the bathroom, filled a glass with water, brought it back, and splashed it in his face. After a while, the giant awoke.
“Dad! Dad! Get up!” I exclaimed excitably.
As he got to his feet he began shouting slurred speech. He peered around, his eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, a long drip of drool hanging from the edge of his lip. That’s when I gave a little push. It didn’t have to be hard. The alcohol did the rest. He stumbled a bit, and then teetered on the edge of the top stair for what seemed like an eternity. He clawed at the air, like that coyote from the cartoons, before tumbling backwards. I heard his neck make a satisfying crunch with the edge of a stair before his body clambered down to his usual resting point. I went down and felt his pulse, and once I was satisfied that I had been successful, I went back to bed. I woke up with my alarm clock at the usual time, went out my room, slapped my face in pretend shock, and called the police.
It was that simple.
I know what you are thinking. You don’t believe me. You don’t believe a thirteen year old boy is capable of so callously killing a parent, even one as disinterested in parenthood as mine. All I can say to you is that my father’s insistence on killing himself detached me from normal morality, from the normal notion that a life is worth something. Most importantly, though, it had detached me from guilt. I knew that my father didn’t have a conscience. How could he when he was so easily letting alcohol ruin him, leaving his two young boys to fend for themselves? Because of this, I never learned about conscience or guilt.
After the funeral, Mike and I were moved to an orphanage. Adults did not pay much attention to me there, either. There were some really deranged kids – real Tracy Beaker types – screaming to high heaven all the time. The adults had to devote all their time to them. They never had two seconds for the quiet, unassuming boy who sat in the corner and killed people in his spare time.
Shortly after joining the orphanage, I started Secondary School. I made friends with an overweight Indian boy called Kameer. We did not care much for football, like a lot of the other boys did, so we tended to hang out at lunchtimes to talk about more intellectual things, like books or exams. For a long while he was my only friend at school and coincidentally, we were also the two most intelligent boys in the year. The difference was that he had to work for his grades, while I only had to take in the information once. If I had studied, I would have destroyed him. As it happened, we were about equal.
Since I did not need to study, I began to get bored. One day I was sitting on my computer, staring at Google’s search page. I was tired of always researching books and culture; I needed something new and fresh. I thought for a while and then typed: ‘How to kill someone and get away with it.” I chuckled at the simplicity of it, then clicked ‘search’. There were one thousand two hundred and three results. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of reading.
Two and a half hours later, I was an expert serial killer. Now all I needed was a victim.
Johnny Steadman was a big guy, the captain of every sport team the school had, and boyfriend to at least six different girls. He was the alpha male of sixth form and to display his superiority, he picked on the little kids. The little and fat kids, to be specific. So when Kareem was spotted eating his curly wurly in a desolate corner of the playground, he had no chance. To start with, it was not that bad – they just pushed him around a bit and called him names. But as time went on, it got worse, and before long he was being thrown into the local lake on a daily basis. I watched from afar, knowing that at this moment, I could do nothing. Of course, I could have told an adult, like we are told to do every year in our bullying speech, but everyone knows what happens to the kid that grasses on Johnny Steadman. So I bided my time, and planned.
The next stage was stakeout. The people at the orphanage did not notice when I snuck out at nights, mornings, whenever really. As long as I made it back for breakfast, dinner, and cookies and milk at half past nine, they were none the wiser. This meant I was able to follow Johnny around a lot. I watched his movements at home, his family, his entire routine. When I was at the orphanage I thought about the weapons I would use, about security cameras in the area, about every angle of the crime. My breakthrough came in the mornings. I decided it might be wise to check his wake-up time, so I began to spy on Johnny in the early hours. As I went day after day I discovered that the reason Johnny was so muscular was that not only did he go to the gym every day after school, but also went running every morning along the pier. The first few times I watched him do this, there were other people around – a few early risers: dog walkers and fellow joggers – but then one day, a tremendously rainy morning, I saw that Johnny was alone.
So I studied the weather forecast each day and awaited the next early torrential downpour. I planned the other aspects of my crime: my weapon, my alibi, things like that, but as it happened I did not have long to wait for the rain to come (I do live in England, after all). Only a week later the rains were scheduled again, so I set my alarm clock, got up at five o’clock, put on my cagoul and gloves, and headed out. On my way down to the pier I jumped the fence of a scrap yard, careful to avoid the security cameras. I searched around and eventually found what I was looking for. I left and continued to the pier.
When I arrived, I immediately saw Johnny. As usual, he was running in his Chelsea shirt and black shorts. I glanced around and once I was sure it was just the two of us, I followed him.
For the most part, the walkway by the sea is a fairly safe path – even if one were to jump the safety barrier, the drop down to the sea is not a major one. However, at the end of the coast, the path gains height, and here the barrier protects you from a two hundred foot drop down the cliffs. This was where I trapped Johnny.
I went up after him. Johnny’s routine was that he would run to the top of the hill, then come back on himself, back towards his house. It was as he came back down that he saw me going up.
“HELLO!” I shouted over the pelting rain and monstrous sea.
Johnny stopped and said hello himself. He was red-faced, his hands on his knees in exhaustion.
My gloved hands clasped the short crowbar from the scrap yard tightly behind my back.
“LOVELY MORNING ISN’T IT?” I shouted.
He stared back blankly, his entire body drenched in the skimpy outfit.
I crashed my weapon down into his jaw. I watched his jaw slide to the right, cracking horribly as it did. The blow was designed to attack the cranial nerve behind the mandible. Apparently, as soon as the broken bone taps the nerve, it sends a message to the brain to shut down the body. Johnny staggered back at the blow, before falling down into the rough, wet path. His jaw looked like it was hanging off his face.
I rolled the body along to the edge and peered over onto the steep cliff. I heaved Johnny’s body up above the railing and then let it go. It fell, fell, fell, twisting unnaturally as it crashed against the rocks, before splashing into the water. I watched for a while as the water threw the body into the rock again and again. I was satisfied.
I made my way back. I went back to the scrap yard and threw the crowbar into a heap of metal. Then I snuck back into the orphanage, hid my wet clothes in my cupboard, before going to bed. I slept soundly.
Over the next few weeks, there was quite a lot of attention surrounding Johnny. His body was found on the beach a few days after I had murdered him. The media came to my town and lots of people were vocal about the unsafe nature of the safety barrier on the sea walkway. The police even came into my school to talk to the pupils about death and how to deal with it. Fortunately, none of attention centered on me. It was treated as an accident; that Johnny slipped and fell on his run, fell over the barrier and met his demise. It was exactly as I had thought they would think. This made me feel powerful.
After a few weeks, once the shock of Johnny’s death had been registered, there began whisperings around the school that he had been a bit of a bully and that he hadn’t been well liked. These were only whisperings, but they helped justify what I’d done.
It also served a higher purpose. Johnny’s murder showed me was that, deep down, people aren’t too different from me. I saw that humanity’s selfishness makes them impervious to caring about death, unless it is about them or their immediate family. I mean, other than his parents, who actually cared that Johnny died? Of course, people pretend to care. They sit in their living rooms and say, ‘Oh that’s awful’, when they see that someone has died or been murdered. But how often do they think about that person again? Never. That’s what Johnny’s murder made me realise – that to humanity, pretending to care is more important than actually caring. The difference between them and me was that I struggled to pretend. Maybe that was because I was the one doing the killing.
My next target was Mr. Porteous, a middle-aged, divorced history teacher whose flirtation with girls in my class was disgusting. It was easy because he lived in an isolated cabin in the countryside, so after my stakeout and planning, I went to Porteous’ house late at night. I took his hunting rifle from his shed, loaded it, then rung the doorbell. I forced him back into the house and got him to admit all the sinful things he had done over the years – things I did not expect to come out but certainly made the next part that bit easier. I shot him in the stomach, waited for him to die, then cut out his teeth and fingertips. I bandaged over his fingers and mouth to avoid further blood loss and dragged the body out the house and into the darkness. I dumped the body on a coal train headed for Scotland before making my leave back to the orphanage.
The police found the body in Scotland the next day, but without the teeth or the fingerprints, they had no idea who it was. Only once my school reported Porteous missing the following Wednesday did police manage to put the pieces in place. Then they visited his house and before I knew it, my town was the most talked about place in England.
But Porteous was just the beginning.
Before I get into all that, though, I should probably mention a man called Chester Archibald. It was the orphanage manager’s fault. One day after I’d got home he came to me in my room and told me that he was worried. He was concerned about my decreasing school grades and how little he saw of me in the orphanage. For some reason, he insisted that I saw the orphanage’s designated child psychologist, just to make sure I was managing. Of course I tried to convince him that this was unnecessary, but he didn’t listen. A few weeks later, I met Chester.
When I first entered his room, I was blasted in the face with a wave of Christianity. There were at least six holy crosses about the room: decorative pieces around the room as well as cross-shaped jewellery on the man himself. I also noticed the three bibles on his desk: The New International Version, The New Century Version and Young Literal’s Translation. They seemed fairly similar to me.
“My name’s Chester Archibald,” the psychologist said, pressing his glasses to his face, “but you can call me Chester.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to look as miserable as possible.
“Tell me, Nicholas, do you know why you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Cause John doesn’t see me much around the orphanage and is a bit guilty for that. He thinks I need attention but, knowing his hands are full with the young alcoholics and druggies our society so carefully produces, decided that someone like you could give me that gift of attention instead.”
Chester blinked.
“And do you think that would be worthwhile?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“And why is that?”
“Because all you psychologists do is ask questions. I’m perfectly capable of questioning myself. I don’t need to spend fifty quid an hour on questions just to fill the void left in a young man still bitter that he didn’t make the grade for medical school.”
“And why…”
“Look,” I said – and the cockiness that my murdering created was really coming through now, “I admire John’s sentiment to send me here, I really do, but it’s just not going to be useful for me. I’d appreciate it if you just filled in some forms, told everyone that I was getting alone fine, and I wouldn’t have to waste your time again.”
“I understand that you don’t want to be here, Nicholas, I really do. But if you give it a try to answer my questions then you might begin to gain from it. Even enjoy it.”
“I…”
“The boys often enjoy it,” Chester continued, and as he did I caught a glimpse of something in his eye that disturbed me. And I was a difficult boy to disturb. So I responded aggressively.
“I’ve told you what to do and you haven’t done so, which I can understand because you can’t let me go that easily. But please, I assure you, it’s in your best interest to let me go. Seriously.”
Oddly, Chester was not rattled. I suppose at this point it did not occur to him that I could be a killer. So he asked questions for the rest of the hour and I responded as sullenly as possible.
As I mentioned earlier, cockiness was manifesting itself within me. Killing people made me feel like I was better than everyone else, which consequently made me disrespectful to everyone that annoyed me.
For example, when my biology teacher put me on detention for not doing homework, I responded with the typically teenage, “That sucks balls.”
“What did you say?” she demanded.
“Sorry!” I replied, “that sucks testicles.”
“Excuse me Nicholas!”
“What! It’s a medical term!” I said to the glee of the class.
The thing was, whenever anyone wronged me, I would always just think to myself, ‘It doesn’t matter because I’ll just kill you’. I understand that you may think that this is a stupid way to think, but truthfully, kill people is exactly what I did. Starting with that annoying biology teacher.
Then I killed Hayley Rat (for stealing from the cafeteria).
And Paul Weller (he looked at me funny in the corridor).
To finish I killed Devlin Olson (he mispronounced ‘yoghurt’ – in my opinion anyway).
You get the picture.
My town, and indeed the whole of England, went into a state of panic. Every news station in the country was talking about the Maidstone Murderer. It didn’t help that the police were clueless. The only thought they had decided was that it must be someone within the school, since so many murders were related to people who worked or studied there. The cops interviewed many different people in the school, but never me. The closest I got to the police was one lunchtime, where I happened to overhear two policemen talking as they got into their car. They had been interviewed a few teachers at the school looking for clues and as they climbed in their vehicle, I heard the senior official saying that they would ‘pin these murders on whoever fits’. It was obvious that they wished to stop the embarrassment that their police force was having to endure as the days went by and the Maidstone Murderer still went uncaught.
Having overheard the policemen, I began to reconsider my killing ways. It wasn’t because I felt guilty but rather that I did not want to get caught. The increased media spotlight on my town and the police force’s determination the find the killer put my freedom under threat. It’s amazing how things can change, though.
When I got back to the orphanage, I went up to my room and found the door open. I always locked my door - it was in my best interest given the nature of my extra-curricular activities. I pushed the door open and peered round. A man was searching through my room. When he heard the door open he looked up and stopped suddenly, smiling at me. It was Chester Archibald.
“Nicholas!” he said, “I was just…”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was just wanting to see when you were coming back to see me at the clinic.”
“Is that why you were searching my room?”
Chester pushed his glasses to his face, “I wasn’t searching, Nicholas. John let me in, I thought I’d come up, see if I could discern anything regarding your character from your room.”
“I see. Well I’m not actually your patient anymore. I’m not coming back to you. Actually, I’d appreciate it if you left.”
“Okay, okay, okay, I’ll go. Bye then,” and with that, he left the room.
I went to my desk and closed my eyes. I threw my previous plans out the window and decided on one last kill. I made the ambition that I needed to make: Kill Chester Archibald.
Over the next few weeks, my plan began to move forward, but it proved more difficult than I expected. The problem was that as I tried to stake him out, he was doing the exact same thing to me; he seemingly suspected me of the murders, thinking back to our little argument that day in his office. Unfortunately for Chester, though, I was very aware of what he was doing. The thing was that my experience in staking out allowed me to know what to look for when I was the one being watched and as a result, I spotted Chester whenever he was watching me, whether it be in the bushes or from his car or anywhere else. Of course I would pretend not to know he was there as I wanted to dispel some of his suspicion, thus making my kill easier when he had his guard down. I quickly realised that Chester followed me in his spare time, meaning I had to spy on him during his office hours: when I knew for sure he was not on my tail.
Despite my setbacks, I was able to carry out stakeouts with a good amount of detail. There is only so much one can ascertain from spying on somebody in their workplace, but as it turned out, this was all that I needed. Chester’s weakness, I realised, was his work ethic. His perseverance in following me was a testament to that ethic, but it was his hard work during his day job that had me licking my lips. He stayed at his medical center later than even the cleaners, working on letters to medical professionals and going through paperwork for various people. When he left the medical centre, it was usually quite dark, and he was alone. Perfect killing conditions, I forecasted, and planned my murder for the next few weeks. Eventually, I was ready.
I picked a Thursday night because Chester had Fridays off and therefore strived to wrap up all loose ends on the Thursday before the long weekend. I went to the medical centre car park and sure enough, found Chester’s Ford Fiesta. As expected, it was the only vehicle in the car park. Now comes the clever bit. From my bag I took a tennis ball, in which I had earlier made a small hole using a hot screwdriver, heated up having been in the microwave. I pressed the hole in the tennis ball against the lock mechanism on Chester’s car as hard as I could. For a few minutes it did not work at all and then, just as I began to think about giving up, the air pressure created by my force jolted the lock into action, opening the car.
“Thank you, Google,” I muttered as I climbed into the car, pulling the door shut behind me.
I went into the back seat and waited for my prey. I had to wait for about thirty minutes before Chester emerged from the automatic doors of the medical centre. I watched as he tottered through the car park, his bulging bag leaning off his right shoulder. He came over to the car and inserted the key into the lock. I held my breath to avoid detection. The car door clicked open.
Then Chester stopped.
He frowned, his brow furrowed, as if he was concentrating extremely hard. He bent down and seemed to look at the lock mechanism on the door. I cursed silently, knowing that if he did not get into the car, my plan would be impossible. I saw his hand go into his pocket and suddenly expected to see him take his mobile out. Every second that passed made it more likely that he would spot me, crouching down behind the driver’s seat. Finally, he took what he wanted out of his pocket. A handkerchief. He rubbed it against the car door.
“Damn birds,” he mumbled.
I prepared myself as Chester climbed into the drivers seat. He placed his bag in the front passenger seat and just as he clicked his seatbelt into place, I silently lifted my weapon of choice - thick electrical wire - over the back of his seat and then as quickly as I could, pulled back sharply around Chester’s neck.
He struggled immediately. I think he even managed to whisper the name ‘Nicholas’ at one point as he tried to haul the wiring off his neck. But I pulled tight. He did not think to push the car horn. I had read that this would go against basic human instinct to relieve the body of the dangerous stimulus. The mind does not think logically when faced with death, so he did not think to make noise with the horn to attract attention. This meant that his hands clawed only at the wiring, trying hopelessly to free his wind pipe from the intense pressure I exerted. At one point he even clawed back at me in the backseat in an attempt to hurt me. I was wearing a balaclava and gloves at this point, with only a little skin visible between my shirt and my mask, but when Chester grappled at my body he did manage to dig a nail into that skin, scratching me. I ignored it and, as a punishment for the scratch, pulled harder. His body writhed and jolted as his face turned red and blackness began to prevail. And then eventually, he stopped moving.
I rested. I noticed the nail about five minutes after having killed him. As I examined the dead body, I noticed blood – my blood – under his right index finger. It must have happened when he had scratched me! I knew that the police would be able to trace this blood back to me, so I had to come up with a plan. The first option was to wash the finger, but frankly, I knew little about cleaning skin, and I knew that the police’s forensic team would not miss any of my mistakes. The other option was much more realistic. I had to dump the body. Or more specifically, I had to dump the finger.
I retreated back to the orphanage and collected a suitable kitchen knife, before returning to the car as stealthily as I could. I sliced off the finger – no easy task through all that tendon and bone. Under the hurried circumstances I let the blood spill into the car seat, although I kept careful not to let any spill onto me. Once I had the finger, I snuck out the car and shut the door quietly. I ran to pier, trying my best to keep off the main roads in case police were on patrol. Once I made it to the seaside walkway, I stood there for a second, gazing out into the murky waters, hoping that they could keep my secret. I threw the finger as far as I could, thinking that it should never be found and if by some miracle it was, then the seawater would have gotten rid of my blood anyway. I got back to the orphanage and as usual, went straight to bed. I slept badly.
The next day was a Saturday and as soon as I woke up I regretted the previous night. My mind kept replaying the moment when had Chester scratched me. Why had I let him grab back at me so easily? If I had just leant backwards I would have been out of his reach and there would be no problems. And why had I thrown the finger into the sea? The sea was unpredictable. That finger could turn up on a beach any time. I was relying on luck this time, no doubt about it.
At about eleven in the morning, news channels began to report the finding of a dead man found in a car. Later in the day, we were told that a finger had been cut off and that the man was child psychologist Chester Archibald. I did my best ‘oh my goodness’ face to John, the orphanage manager, but he would have thought nothing of my connection with Chester, since he sent a lot of the troubled orphans to him.
On Sunday I sat in my room all day, staring out the window. I could see the main road, and every time a police car drove past I was sure they were coming to get me. But no one ever did.
On Monday I was feeling much better. The investigation into Chester’s death was ongoing, but there was no sign that they even knew who I was, never mind that I had been involved in the killing. Nevertheless, as I went into school I knew that my killing days were behind me. I’ve had my fun, I thought, but it’s best to quit while you’re ahead. Besides, I had a preliminary careers meeting that day with my careers supervisor. I had begun thinking quite a bit about what to say in that interview, about what I would do with the rest of my life. I had decided that I wanted to become a lawyer. I want to defend criminals from the law, I thought, because they’re some of them aren’t really that bad. I know that for a fact.
I was in Maths class that morning, trying to figure out the theorem of Pythagoras. It was boring stuff, but it kept my mind off lots of other things. And then, a rather large man entered the class. He wore mostly black and had a hard hat. Then I saw the words printed across his chest: POLICE.
“Can we speak to someone, please?” the policeman asked my teacher.
“Of course,” the teacher said as if she had the authority to say the opposite.
“Nicholas Wilkinson, please,” the officer said.
I gulped. My time had come.
“Yes?” I said timidly.
“Get up here.”
The aggression in his voice was such that I did what he said without question. He grabbed me as I approached him and spun me round. He handcuffed my hands and snatched me by the back of my shirt. It was all a bit over the top but then again he must have been under impression that had I killed several people in this town. People he had probably known.
“You have the right to remain silent,” he said, and continued to read out the rest of my rights, before adding, “Nicholas Wilkinson, you are arrested on suspicion of murder in the first degree.”
I was yanked out of the room and dragged down the school’s main corridor, then bundled outside and pushed down in the back of a police car. I tried to keep calm, to keep back the tears and to think, above anything else, if there was any way that I could get out of this mess.
Eventually we reached the station and I was sat down in an interrogation room. I was made to wait for about forty minutes before a senior looking goateed policeman, came in.
“Where were you on Saturday night, Mr Wilkinson?” Constable Goatee asked, sparing no room for pleasantries.
“What time?” I asked, already planning my next answer.
“Nine o’clock,” he replied authoratively.
“I think I was at my house. An orphanage, by the way…watching…I think I was watching Britain’s Next Top Model.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny, because that’s not what we think.”
“Oh. And what do you think?”
“We think that you were inside Chester Archibald’s car.”
I said nothing.
“Where you inside his car?”
“Not if I can recall…” I said cheekily.
“Okay. Fine. So could you tell me why Chester Archibald might have thought you were killing people? We found his diary, you see, which contained his views on this town’s little…problem. And he was quite convinced that you were the culprit. Called it his ‘mission’, his ‘redemption’, to uncover you for what you really were. He had gone to the effort of following you around, you know – he even found reasonable motives for you to a number of people he thought you had killed.”
“Oh!” I said, a great grin spreading across my face, “I think I can explain this! I think I rubbed him up the wrong way when I visited his clinic. I wasn’t very interested in his therapy and…”
“I should add that we also found Mr Archibald’s missing finger.”
I examined Constable Goatee’s face.
“Where?” I asked him, suddenly serious.
He hesitated.
“In a bush. A mile off from the car.”
I thought about this for a second, shaking my head.
“That’s…I mean I didn’t…”
He grinned.
“Something worrying you, Nicholas?” he said.
Neither of us spoke.
“It does,” I eventually said, “But only because of how disgusting it is. As I said, I was just watching Britain’s…”
“We found your finger prints all over the finger,” he said hastily.
“My finger prints…”
It didn’t make sense. My whole face was tense as I tried to figure it out. Why was he lying about where they found the finger? And fingerprints? I had worn gloves that whole night. There was no way my finger prints had made it onto Chester’s finger.
Suddenly it came to me.
I became red-faced; embarrassed that it had taken me so long.
“Oh I see,” I said with a knowing smile.
“What do you see?” Constable Goatee asked me, his face full of triumph.
“You’re crooked,” I said with a defeated frown, “Crooked like system. Crooked like the whole of fukcing society.”
We stared at each other before I finished.
“Crooked like me.”
*
Epilogue
So now I write on the edge of my bed, in Cell 399, Block D, of Greater London’s Maximum Security Prison.
I was put away for life, by the way. Wasted talent, I reckon, but most of the world thinks that I’m just another monster, rotting away in the exact place that he deserves.
But don’t I have a right to bemoan my misfortune? Didn’t I lack the parenting and support from society to have a real go at life? With no guidance I was left not knowing what to do with myself: I had to make my own path through life. Later on, it was only natural to fight out against the restrictive powers of law and religion.
The truth is that I feel I’m better than this place. The only positive about prison is that I have re-joined my brother, who was put in here for beating up a homeless man one night when he was drunk. He looks up to me in the joint, just like he did when we was little.
So as I look at my brother and the other young men in here, I realise that is not just me being wasted in here. I curse our luck because we are the lost generation. The generation without the national service, the world war, even the jobs - to give us purpose. We were bored, this lost generation – and that’s why we did what we did. So the last thing I ask you to do is make things better. Do not demand your children to follow every letter of religious of governmental rule, but raise them properly and guide them through life.
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Originally Posted by hillwalker
