A short but sinnister story
It was Saturday and as usual Steve was engrossed in the newspaper which Margie always let him read first because he nagged her about creasing the pages. Then he called her in:
“Blimey! Come and read this lot. Someone has gone to the chair for multiple murder. Capital punishment was abolished in Britain in the sixties. How come this has happened”?
Like most people Margie was on her feet in an instant. She had given up listening to the wireless as she called it because of all the drivel on there but was never sorry to listen to a good scandal or a juicy bit of gossip. Like a flash she was at his side.
“Goodness! How awful”!
“Yes, it was awful. I found the clues, all written in stories. People dying in this way or that, all cleverly disguised by someone making out they are an author. One was meant to have killed her neighbour with a poisoned cake, or was it the milkman? Another killed his girlfriend who had found a book all about him being adopted and finding out from a drunk who told him so he wrote a story about killing his parents. Then there were loads of others. Now I don’t believe in second sight, premonitions and all that drivel so either the author really did these murders or if she didn’t then she knows about them and to me, that makes her mightily suspicious and guilty. Anyway, I’m glad I’m out of the police now. They never banged her to rights like they should have done but I know she is or was withholding evidence or did these murders herself”.
Margie had heard all this before. She always thought that Jane Baxter was rather like Jane Marple whom Agatha Christie created. Just a dotty old woman, obsessed by true crime among other things. When she met her at bingo, she rather liked her but didn’t dare tell Steve they knew one-another. Steve told her time and again that she’d have made a lousy policewoman since she is far too trusting. Margie just told him that he had become too cynical because he saw wickedness everywhere and trusted nobody. She told him he would count the fingers of his hands when people shook hands with him just to see none had been stolen if he hadn’t been taught that your fingers are not detachable in that way and only through an industrial accident or an operation or frost bite in extremely cold climates can you lose them.
Eventually Margie got so sick of his obsession with Jane Baxter especially now he had found out she had come to live near them that she made him go to evening classes so he did. He made all sorts of wonderful objects and started repairing things for people as well, without any charge. He only took money for the parts that were needed. Then Margie was sorry when she heard all the noise from his workshop so she insisted on double glazing which she said was better for the environment anyway. Steve didn’t mind because it kept the house warmer.
It was when he was out walking that he saw Jane in the shopping centre. He walked up to her, saying:
“I know you did it, you know you did it and if there’d been enough evidence you’d be serving a long prison sentence by now instead of strutting round the streets as if you owned them”.
“That, retired copper Briggs is slander as well you know. My stories were all written long before all these unfortunate people died. My computer logged the dates of when they were written and the police have all the evidence as to when the murders took place. Admittedly I’m cast as some sort of seer who has foreknowledge of upcoming events but I can’t help that. It’s a special gift”.
What everyone was wondering was how the characters in Jane’s stories not only had been correctly named and murdered in the way she foresaw long afterwards when they had all had time to be born, grow to adulthood in the circumstances and countries she named and then had all died exactly as her stories predicted they would though she always swore they were all figments of her imagination and not based on real people and actual events. At the time, this was true because they hadn’t but just where did she get her knowledge from? She didn’t seem able to tell people whether they would win the lottery or whether their marriages would be happy or if it seemed wise to move so how on earth could she create people who eventually did grow up either to become victims or murderers? There were outlandish people who thought that just by saying a thing you brought it about but if that were so and not just superstition then wouldn’t we all just tell ourselves we’d win millions or have healthy children, have a happy old age, relatively free of aches and pains and wouldn’t we just wish divorces from horrible marriage partners upon ourselves if it were just a case of voicing and then creating the circumstances and people to fit them? Steve just knew that Jane was evil. Privately she called him: “Stevil”.
“I’ll try some of this bloody nonsense then and see where it gets me”,
Said Steve, to his shaving mirror, that is until he actually decided to follow the maxim that actions indeed do speak louder than words.
His nephew, Stan was working hard in his furniture business when his dotty uncle with his Jane Baxter obsession, came in and offered to help. Despite all the stuff produced on production lines, people loved the craftsman’s work and Stan was getting snowed under because people were sick of having things without much individuality. Eventually he was making really expensive chairs in all sorts of material so was glad of his uncle’s help, that is until one of his chairs killed someone.
Margie felt so proud when she heard of Steve’s creation ending up in a nice shop in the suburbs. She begged him to make a nice suite for her drawing room as she insisted on calling it. He refused on the grounds that home was for relaxing and resting and was a refuge although he had retired from the police earlier than most people retire these days. He hadn’t even told her about his creation because he knew what it would lead to. Instead she found out from a neighbour of Stan’s who didn’t know his uncle had it in him to make such a sleek chair – Just right for the elderly to sit in, complete with buttons to press so you could rise and recline and really put your feet up. Such a work of art was Stan’s thought.
It was most inconvenient to have a caller at lunchtime.
“Hullo Margie, is Stephen in”?
She wondered at the formality of Matthew Strange who had worked with him at the station. Stan had got a bit suspicious when he saw the old boy smiling a rather satisfactory but nasty smile as he was constructing the latest black chair, complete with motor, all ready for some poor sucker to come and sit down in and die in because of how he had wired it up. Stan had reported the matter to the police and strange as it sounded and Strange himself knew only too well of the old fool’s obsession with Jane Baxter. Being a famous author, no doubt she’d be invited to sit in the wretched thing and then breathe her last and fry at the same time. Steve Briggs believed wholeheartedly in the electric chair. He even toured America, visiting the states where “old Sparky” was in use. He thought that people who committed murder should go to the chair and fully intended to exert his own brand of justice on Jane Baxter but just how he was going to fix it so nobody else sat in it first he wasn’t sure until he suggested that there should be a chair opening ceremony and she would no doubt be expected to be the first to sit in the thing. That was another reason for Stan to get in touch with the police. Fetes, schools, hospitals and the like, yes but who on earth had heard of a chair opening ceremony? Well you do get people described as the chair of this or that so why not, was Steve’s thought… Then Jane Baxter, creator of ne’er-do-wells and other assorted weirdos and misfits would happily plonk her unsuspecting self in Steve’s “Old Sparky” and that would be that.
Well, may I say, I haven’t the first idea of how to rig a perfectly ordinary electrically-operated chair that lifts your legs for you and reclines like an aeroplane seat. I just create weirdos and suspicious characters of all sorts and it simply doesn’t matter how realistic all the above happens to be now does it? Was Alice or Peter Pan real? Is there really a guy called James Bond who prefers his martinis shaken, not stirred?
“Mum! Look at this old photo in this junk shop. Don’t you think it looks like Granddad”!
“I’ll tell you about him when you are older, Michael. You’ll love the story. Apparently this dotty old writer created some bloke who thought she had created or committed murders just because her characters were all born much later than her stories were written and did the things in her stories. Granddad was so obsessed with her that he created an electric chair that he hoped she’d sit in but he was caught before she could although it was funny really. She thought of buying herself one of those contraptions and ‘’’ “
The six o’clock news of long ago, together with the clipping found on the floor of the junk shop caught Michael’s mother’s eye. An elderly woman named Jane Baxter, died of fright when a well-meaning shop assistant offered to turn on the power so as to demonstrate an electric chair which can rise you up, lift your feet and recline. She thought her story was coming true and that, just like so many others, whose characters really ended up existing, some poor mentally unbalanced man with an obsession about her really had wrongly wired an ordinary chair so it would electrocute its occupant. She ought to have done something more useful with her life such as learning a language or even playing a computer at card games because, as we all know, life has a way of imitating art. Ah! I’ve just heard my doorbell ring. I wonder if my caller would like a cup of tea and a sit down?