Inseparable Bond (13 page)

‘You’re doing
alright for yourself,’ she informed him. ‘But your problems all
stem from your particular line of work.’

‘My work?’
John replied.

‘Yes,’ she
continued. ‘You are not happy with your work and it is not your
chosen job, it was chosen for you,’ she said.

It felt warm
in the caravan, stuffy with no air getting in and all those candles
burning. Not being a believer of fortune-tellers, he convinced
himself she was using cheap psychology. His accent wasn’t local, he
wore no wedding ring, and his hands were clean with them immersed
in water most of the day. You could tell a lot about someone
through those minor details, he thought.

‘Shouldn’t we
agree on a price first?’ he asked.

‘Why should we
do that dear, I’m not a prostitute am I?’ she replied. He felt his
ears reddening at her answer. ‘And besides, you can afford it, we
both know you can, let’s not let money get in the way dear,’ she
said, confidently.

The small
amount of money John had was borrowed from a waiter at the hotel
and needed paying back on payday at the end of the week, so she was
well off track with his financial status. She held his hand in an
even tighter grip.

‘I get the
feeling you are wondering why you are here,’ she asked John, as she
looked up at him.

‘I know
exactly why I’m here,’ he replied, as he wriggled trying to get
comfortable.

‘I feel you do
not enjoy what you do, you are told to do things and you just wait
for payday,’ she said, looking back at his palm. John just nodded,
he did not answer. The gypsy continued, ‘the money you get is not
enough for you is it? It can never recompense for not being happy
or fulfilled,’ she said, as she sat back and clapped her hands.
‘I’d like to try with the tarot cards, are you game for that?’ she
excitingly asked him. Before John could answer, she started
shuffling the over-sized cards. She asked him to touch the deck
three times and laid out the top three cards.

‘Ah,’ she
said, her fingers caressing the first one. ‘This is the sun,’ she
nodded slowly. ‘Second card, this is the death card.’ John looked
at the picture of a skeleton on the card. ‘Don’t worry, ‘it doesn’t
always portend a death,’ she said.

‘That’s a
relief,’ John replied, with a smile.

‘The final
card is intriguing – the hanged man, it can signify many things,’
she said, as she lifted it up to show him.

‘What do the
three mean all together?’ John asked curiously.

She sat back
and held her hands as if in prayer. ‘I’m not sure dear, an unusual
conjunction to be sure,’ she answered with a puzzled expression, as
she shrugged her shoulders.

He licked his
dry lips and wiped his brow with the overpowering heat in the
caravan.

‘Maybe the
crystal ball could help,’ he suggested. She looked at him, her eyes
reflecting light from the candles.

‘You might be
right, let’s try,’ she said, as she removed the white handkerchief
covering the glass ball between them. She leaned forward, peering
into the glass, giving him a view of her creped cleavage. Her hands
fitted over the ball, not quite touching it. ‘The ball often makes
things clearer,’ she said.

‘What do you
see?’ he asked impatiently.

‘I see a man,
a man who is troubled, a man who has done wrong and who will do
more wrong. A person with few friends and not the friends he has
chosen for himself. This person is you, the crystal ball tells me
you have done wrong to many people, but you could change in time if
you want this for yourself. Your future is under the control of
others, a feeling of confinement.’

He looked up
at her as she continued to gaze into the glass bowl but clearly she
had seen enough and wanted the session to end.

‘That’s all I
can tell you dear, you must give me £50 for your reading,’ she
said, as she stood up nervously.

‘I don’t have
that sort of money,’ he snapped.

‘Alright,
alright, give me what you have and leave,’ she said, as she moved
towards the closed curtain.

John followed
her. ‘What did you see bitch, tell me?’ John said, as he pushed her
towards the wall of the caravan.

‘Please leave
and keep your money,’ she said, as her body trembled against the
wall. ‘If you don’t go now, I will call the police.’ She was
trembling as she watched John put on his thin woollen gloves.

The thought of
any police involvement angered him as he glared at the gypsy woman
and banged his fist against the wall of the caravan. John placed
his covered hands around her neck and squeezed them tightly as he
throttled her. Her screams went unheard, drowned by the sounds of
fairground engines and the screams outside of frightened children
on the waltzes, the big wheel, the ghost train opposite and as they
rapidly descended to the ground of the adjoining roller
coaster.

Her mouth
widened and red veins clouded the whites of her eyes as he slowly
throttled her heavily gold-chained neck. She slowly slumped to the
floor as her black muslin fell over her face as if to cover her
wide opened eyes in respect.

He peered
through the closed beaded curtain in the hope her screams had not
alerted anyone on the outside, but he saw only youngsters fooling
around, eating hamburgers and playing games at the row of
stalls.

He returned to
the table, opened the gypsy’s black leather handbag and took the
money she had untidily stashed into it. Tossing aside the crystal
ball and tarot cards, he dragged the black cloth off the table and
covered her body. He peered through the beaded curtain, took a last
look behind him, walked down the two steps from the caravan and
mingled with the crowds.

His adrenalin
was racing high and his heart pumping rapidly as he quickly walked
over the waste ground and onto the main road which led to the
hostel.

As he entered
the hostel, he hesitated as he adjusted his clothes. Being
desperate to get to the safety of his bedroom, he briskly walked
through to the hall to the staircase when the door opened of the
television room. Dorothy’s head appeared from the slightly opened
door. ‘Hi, John, you’re late, do you want some cocoa?’ she asked
kindly, with a broad smile across her face.

‘No thanks,
I’ll just go to bed,’ he answered, as she closed the door.

Once in his
room he locked the door and closed the curtains. Sitting on his
bed, his heart still pounding and wiping his sweating brow with his
small hand towel, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the
handful of cash. His hands trembled as he counted the £160 of
crumpled notes.

He opened the
drawer of his dressing table and shoved the notes under the stolen
panties, along with his socks and underpants.

He lay in the
darkness of his room, listening to police cars speeding down the
hill with their sirens blaring and blue lights reflecting on his
window as they speedily passed.

He thought
they were most certainly racing to the fairground after an innocent
customer who had walked in unannounced, had discovered the body
probably.

He felt no
remorse for his latest crime, to him it was natural and he felt a
release of inner frustration as he curled up into a ball shape
under his heavy blankets.

The next
morning he left for work early, missing his breakfast.

He walked down
the hill and over to the grocer’s shop to buy his cigarettes and
saw Mahul and his wife standing outside.

As he
approached the shop, Mahul said, ‘Good morning, did you hear, a
woman was killed over there last night,’ as he pointed to the
fairground which was cordoned off with blue and white tape reading
‘CRIME SCENE’, and flanked by police and vehicles.

‘No, I didn’t
hear anything,’ John answered.

His wife
walked in as Mahul remained watching the police activity with his
arms folded.

He purchased
his cigarettes and continued his walk, passing the groups of
policemen dressed in yellow jackets and looking suspiciously at
John as he pushed by.

Once inside
the hotel kitchen, the woman’s death was the main topic of
conversation.

The chefs were
laughing as one of the waiters said, ‘She wasn’t very good at her
job if she couldn’t see her killer coming.’ John went over to his
sink and commenced scrubbing the pans, turning his back on the
staff and ignoring the conversation.

He left work
at 3 o’clock and went straight back to the hostel. There was a
police car in the car park, He entered the hall and was approached
by the warden. ‘Hello, John, can you come in here for a moment
please,’ as he opened his office door. Standing at each side of his
desk were two plain-clothed policemen and a uniformed policewoman.
‘Just sit there, John, these gentlemen need to ask you a couple of
questions.’ John looked around the room; his heart was pumping as
he sat on the small leather chair opposite the warden.

‘Can you tell
us where you were between the hours of 8pm and midnight last
night?’ the smaller of the two asked him.

‘Well I
finished my work about 8pm and came straight back here,’ he
confidently answered.

The larger of
the two bent down, putting his face .close to John’s and breathing
stale tobacco breath into his face and said sternly, ‘Did you go to
the fairground or anywhere near it between those hours?’

‘No, but I had
to walk past it when I left work, it’s on the main road. I couldn’t
avoid it but I didn’t go, I only got paid today and I had no
money,’ he answered as he tried not to wriggle discomfortingly on
his chair.

The officer
looked at the warden and said, ‘We’ve checked with the hotel and
they confirmed this. I think we’d better see Gary Brown again, he’s
the new one isn’t he?’ he asked the warden. ‘O.K. John, you can go
now but we’ll probably want to speak to you again,’ the officer
said to him.

He left the
office and went into the television room. The room was full of
residents, all with frightened expressions on their faces.

‘Have they
seen you, John?’ Elizabeth shouted over.

‘Yes, just
now, they wanted to know what time I left work, that’s all,’ he
answered, as he sat down and picked up the evening paper. The
headlines read ‘Fortune-tellers misfortune’. He did not read the
article and skipped through the pages. As he looked over the top of
the page, he noticed Dorothy staring at him from her high backed
tapestry chair. She had asked him if he wanted cocoa when he
arrived back at 11pm last night. She looked away and left the room
when she noticed him looking back at her.

The atmosphere
was tense, no one spoke, they just looked at each other with
apprehension and suspicion.

Raised voices
could be heard in the hall, it was Gary Brown, their prime suspect.
‘I’ve told you already, I was playing billiards with Peter Scott,
ask him if you don’t believe me, ask everybody, they all saw me,’
he shouted, as he stormed into the room.

Gary looked at
John. ‘The bastards think I killed that woman in the fairground,’
he said, as he glared at him.

‘How can they
think that if all this lot saw you here?’ he answered back to Gary,
as he pointed around the room.

‘Well, I want
those bastards off my back,’ he shouted, as he left the room,
slamming the door behind him.

John went over
to put the television on in an attempt to break the silence, and
moved to a closer seat away from the others to hide his guilt
before it was discovered.

Elizabeth was
sitting on the floor, cradling Dorothy’s head in her lap. Graham
Banks was on the settee, painting his nails with red varnish,
dressed in a pale blue trouser suit.

Violet was
curled up in a chair, stroking Snowy, the hostel cat, and George
Beckwith rocking his lifeless head against the back of the tapestry
chair, gazing at the ceiling.

Although it
was early days of the investigation, the police understandably had
started their enquiries with the inmates of the hostel but could
not find any evidence to link the residents with the crime. Their
search soon intensified, with their interests being concentrated on
the fairground workers.

When John was
at work a few days later, he overheard some staff members talking
about the fairground worker who had been arrested for the murder of
the gypsy. It was confirmed in that night’s evening paper that an
arrest had been made of a showman who worked on a gun stall
opposite the gypsy’s caravan. He had been in constant conflict with
her.

John still
felt no remorse for his crime, yet did feel relief on reading of
the arrested showman. His ill-gotten gains had been used for the
purchase of the clothes he had intended to buy when his wallet had
been stolen the week before.

Alfred
Wallington was sleeping by the electric fire with his tongue stuck
out further than John thought it possible for a tongue to stick
out. He had killed two men by concussion and stabbed their wives
when they stayed at his guest house in Brighton for a two-week
holiday. He was found to be a psychopath and had spent seventeen
years in the hospital wing in a tight security Sussex prison.

His paying
guests had complained about the cold toast they received every
morning with their breakfast, and with the constant pressure and
intimidation he endured by his twenty-five stone wife, he murdered
the couples as they slept in their beds. He immediately walked into
his local police station to admit to the crimes.

He was an
intelligent man and spent most of his day completing crossword
puzzles in the television room. He was only five ft tall, dark hair
but iron grey at the temples with a very dark skin. His neat little
brown hands hung limply by his side as he snored with his mouth
wide open and his head hanging over the chair. His small feet in
pointed, polished shoes elevated on the footstool.