Need You Dead

15 Wednesday 20 April

As he continued to work his way around the little flat, wiping, wiping, the one thing he knew he had to do was to keep calm, keep thinking. Not miss anything. But, shit, that was hard. His brain felt like a library in an earthquake. All the shelves were vibrating, everything on them shaken loose. Cascading down.

THINK!

She wasn’t dead when he had left, was she? How long had he been gone, outside, pacing around? An hour at least? More? Long enough for someone to have entered after he’d left and –

Kill her?

Her bastard husband?

He stared down, as if the words of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ were lying at his feet.

That was all he needed to do. Keep his head. Just stand. Wait. Oh yes. He knew all about that. Shit happened. If you weren’t living on the edge you were taking up too much space. And if you did live on the edge you got the highs, but it was where the shit hit the hardest. So hard it stung.

You could wash the stuff off, wash the smell away. And if you were of a strong enough mindset, you could wash away the memory. Life breaks all of us, but afterwards some are strong in the broken places. He was trying to remember who had written that, or something like it. That’s what he needed to be right now. Strong in the broken place. He would be. Oh yes.

His mind was jumping all over the place. Focus. Had to focus. Calculate.

Panic made people screw up. Had to get rid of panic. And then just carry on as normal.

There was no other option. Well, not strictly true. Of course there was one.

But.

The other option was unthinkable.