Dead at First Sight

32 Tuesday 2 October

To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the dead have no more fears.

Johnny Fordwater kept returning to that quote he’d heard, years back, trying to recall the source.

Death, as it had for the past week, felt like the best solution. Suicide.

Any other option meant complete loss of face.

In front of him lay his neat and elaborately written notes to his three children and eight grandchildren. In them, he apologized for being unable to leave them the bequests he had always planned for them. He told them the reason, perhaps too much information, but so what? Maybe it would serve as a warning to them to never do what he had done. However desperate their lives might have become.

He walked over to the safe in his study, entered the six-digit code and swung open the heavy door. Inside lay his old service revolver, which he should have handed in years ago, when he’d left the army. But no one had actually requested it so he’d just thought ‘sod it’ and kept the weapon. Next to it lay several rounds of ammunition. With a steady hand he filled each of the six chambers, in turn, with a live round. An old army chum who suffered from depression had told him that he occasionally toyed with shooting himself with his service revolver, and each time he changed his mind at the last minute it felt better.

It felt to Johnny that the only way out of his financial ruin was to do the honourable thing. When he pulled the trigger it wouldn’t matter which chamber ended up in front of the firing pin. The relief of death was a certainty. He completed the task, then put the gun in his mouth, pointing upwards, and with his right index finger found first the trigger guard, then the trigger itself.

Staring out through the window at the afternoon sun low over the calm water of the English Channel, he saw a container ship sitting up high on the horizon and, closer to shore, a paddleboarder. He squeezed the trigger, gently at first, then steadily increased the pressure.