Anatomy of Revenge

I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. That’s what people say isn’t it? When something bad happens to them; anything from an ingrowing toenail to acute and blazing grief, out comes this line with no adjustment for scale:

‘Oooh, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy …!’

Really?

You wouldn’t?

The Motivation: There are five elements which must combine to exact revenge, whether you are a writer crafting a plot - and good luck with that - or an ordinary person who is compelled by this primitive and unsung urge.

Forgiveness is that most Christian of tenets, but I have never acquired a taste for it. Oh, I’ve visited the churches, the temples and the cathedrals, kneeling in the Lady Chapels and begging, at times, for that one virtue I am sorely lacking, but it was never once bestowed.

Perhaps I picked the wrong deity to supplicate. History does not record whether the Virgin Mary forgave Pontius Pilate, after all. Perhaps I should have appealed directly to her son instead.

My motivation is easily understood. It is not petty, not driven by jealously or a bruised ego. The truth is, a man killed my mother when I was fifteen, and it was me, arriving home in the small hours, who came across her slaughtered body in the kitchen. He stabbed her fifteen times with the Sabatier knife we normally used for slicing bread. The police only knew this because I told them it was missing from the block. The knife was not found.

I slipped on her blood and fell heavily to the floor, where my eyes met with the dead stare of my mother. I think I stayed there for some time, realising, as if for the first time, that her eyes were green.

Her killer’s name is Alexander Lloyd, and I remember that he insisted on the full name at all times. No diminutives: no Al, Alex or Xander. He would answer to nothing else but Al-ex-and-er, and I believed then, and still do, that to demand four syllables from everyone you meet, at all times and even in moments of intimacy, is proof of bad character.

My father died when I was a baby, so it was just me and mum, living in a small terraced house. Money was always tight and there were times when my company wasn’t enough for her. I understand that now, but at the time I always resented her boyfriends. It wasn’t just my age, when any competition was unwelcome, but because she had such dreadful taste in them.

Al-ex-and-er was better-looking than most of her strays, but it shortly became clear that he was very controlling. I won’t bore you with the fine details. We all know how men like him behave. They begin with a ripple and end with a tsunami.

And women are in the most danger when they ask the Al-ex-and-ers of this world to get the fuck out of their lives.

They caught up with him trying to board a ferry to France, having somewhere changed his clothes. He was on remand for a year before it came to trial, and all through that time, he denied killing my mother. What was clear though, was that prison didn’t agree with pretty-boy Al-ex-and-er. Those who didn’t like him beat him, and those who did like him? Take a flying guess. Watch Papillon. He aged monstrously in that first year of incarceration. The head space was degraded.

His defence barrister argued that the evidence against him was circumstantial, and it was. A neighbour had seen him at our property that evening, but hadn’t heard anything. The prosecution mooted that he could have crept up from behind and muffled her mouth, perhaps with a cloth, to stifle her screams. They found his DNA on her, (not blood), but he argued that they had spent a pleasant morning together and that would have been where it came from. That was a lie, of course, but plausible - even though she had finished with him by then.

It looked like he might get off, until a string of previous women testified against him. What became clear was that the jury did not like Al-ex-and-er Lloyd any more than the cons did. He had means, motive and opportunity. He had no alibi. His DNA was present at the scene, he had previous form, and he was apprehended at a ferry port with no credible explanation for being there. No accommodation booked, no friends over there, no reason at all beyond the logical desire to escape justice.

He was sentenced to twenty years, which isn’t much for my mother’s life. With good behaviour he would be out in less. In the end, it didn’t even come to that. He was released on appeal, just five years into his sentence.

The Careful Planning: As an orphan, I was sent to live with an aunt who lived twenty miles away in the middle of nowhere, a relict who lived up to the literary cliché with relish, only losing by a whisker to wicked step-mothers. She was one of those stringy religious types, an austere and bitter bitch who forgave herself every evening with her rosary and her prayers. She had two sons who hated her and never visited and I could understand why. Of course, she carried her resentment of me with little artifice, but I think she harboured some idea of a financial settlement when I reached eighteen and inherited a trust fund my father had set up for me, and which his estate had been paying into all those years after his death. I don’t know what had been agreed with the authorities about my keep, and I never did find out. Just before I inherited, she had a stroke and didn’t regain consciousness.

That is when I first believed in the presence of God, although I’m not sure mine was the approved version.

Context is a bore, isn't it? It needs to be added in order for things to make sense, but the timing is problematic. I’m glad I’m a scientist and not a writer, because like badminton, it is much harder than it looks. Anyway, that’s the context for what follows: that I’m a scientist. It explains a few things.

As a child, I was always interested in crime shows, particularly the forensic aspects of detective work. I didn’t want to be a copper, not for the usual reasons, (dead bodies, smelly criminals, being spat on, etc.,) but because I never wanted to tell someone that a loved one had died. All coppers will tell you it’s the worst aspect of the job. No, I wasn’t interested in the living, but the dead. I want to be a forensic pathologist, and although I’m not there yet, I am a biomedical scientist: a pathologist’s assistant, if you like. The Igor to Dr Frankenstein, the Renfield to Dracula, the sinister enabler, boiling flesh from bones, dissecting, liquidising, and blowing up dead pigs to assess the impact of bomb damage on human flesh.

My particular field of expertise is drowning, (both wet and dry drowning) and the algae (know as diatomes) which gather in the lungs and other organs of a drowning victim. I try to determine whether a person was dead when they hit the water, and whether the water they were found in was the same water they first entered. Whether it was suicide, accident or deposition by persons unknown. It’s not everything I do. It just happens to be the one I’m best known for in scientific circles. I am the go-to-girl in the UK for drownings.

Due to this innate scientific curiosity, this calling, when I laid on the kitchen floor staring into my mother’s eyes, it was not the copious outpouring of blood which had stunned me into a transfixed state of inertia, but just the very fact that my beloved mum was dead, and that someone had murdered her. Right there, on that kitchen floor, was the moment my future career was formed. I wanted to nail the bastards who did these things, and I wanted to do it in a white lab coat.

And even then, when I was fifteen, I didn’t entirely trust the police to get it right.

Al-ex-and-er has been out for fifteen years now. He is now sixty and I am thirty-five, the same age my mother was when she was killed. I know where he lives and what he now looks like - which is considerably better than he did in that courtroom and in a subsequent photograph that was plastered all over the papers when he was first released.

When he was inside, one of those strange female-types wrote to him and they formed a relationship. It is hard to believe that women can be attracted to men like this, but she’s as thick as mince, and thought nothing of selling their dubious love story to the papers. Of course, a woman like that was bound to have a Facebook page full of dull crapola, and so she does. I regularly tune in, just lurking, and see them both together, posing for the camera. She looks euphoric. He doesn’t.

She thinks he’s innocent. I know he isn't.

She’s just a roof over his head.

Emotional Impact on your Victim: I suspect that some of you reading this will put two and two together and make five. I am a scientist who dissects dead bodies to give the families of the victims some closure, some indisputable fact in a world otherwise awash with negative emotion. Ergo, I am the perfect person to despatch someone and get away with it. Right?

Wrong. In fact, the more you know, the less likely you are to succeed. There are so many secrets a corpse can reveal. And over time, even a psychotic pathologist will realise that something as small as an eyelash will expose you. Because of the manner of our work, our DNA is on file - not because we are all latent killers just waiting to strike, but because we may inadvertently cross-contaminate a body we are working on.

It is, in fact, quite impossible to walk through this world without shedding evidence of yourself everywhere you go. This is why crime fiction has become such a bore of late. The only people who sometimes get away with it are drive-by shooters, because they have placed distance between themselves and their target. Even thrillers aren’t immune from the modern age. New technology ensures that our every movement can be traced and tracked. Really, that just leaves a good courtroom revenge drama, but where could anyone else go after Agatha Christie wrote Witness for the Prosecution?

So, murdering Al-ex-and-er is off the table. Apart from anything else, I’m not a bad person. I have a well-paid profession, a loving husband and two young and beautiful children. And what would murder achieve anyway? He would simply be dead, and I am inured to dead people.

Most people with any element of refinement would prefer to go down the route of prolonged suffering.

And if there is one thing I know about Al-ex-and-er, it is that he could never survive a second bout of incarceration at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Moral Ambiguity: A liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet. There will be those who disagree with my cold-blooded calculations, and to those people I would say this:

If, God forbid, a child of your blood should end up in my lab due to immersion in water, I am the best person in the country to tell you whether it was misadventure or foul play. If I find for the latter, your comfortable ideals will rock you to the core. You will start to doubt the efficacy of forgiveness and the limits it imposes on both your righteous grief and your sanity. When people announce that they forgive the people who destroyed their lives, they are lying. They might not even know they’re lying .. but they are.

I am not interested in why people do the terrible things they do. I merely demand that they pay for it.

Conclusion: When I eventually climbed up from the kitchen floor, holding the table for support as my feet continued to slide in my mother’s blood and my hands made red stains on the scrubbed surface, I saw the knife.

Al-ex-and-er was clearly not yet accomplished at killing, and had dropped it, presumably in blind panic. I picked the blade up with a tea-towel and placed it in a sealable food bag. Over the years, its new home was eventually upgraded to a clinical forensics evidence bag.

After I called the police, I walked to the gate in the front garden, waiting for their blue lights. It was 3am, and the neighbours’ curtains began twitching.

As I leaned over the gate towards the direction of the sirens, I saw a blue latex glove just beside a neighbour’s privet hedge. It was covered in blood. Again, he had dropped it in his haste to get away. I picked it up carefully, raced back to the house, placed the glove in another baggie and put both items in the bottom of my knapsack. I knew they would take me away from the house, perhaps to the hospital, but I gambled that they wouldn’t check my bag - and I was right. The police simply assumed that the perp had run away with the evidence. Poor policing really, but then again: why on earth would I take it?

The glove would be the star witness in a retrial. It would be my mother’s blood, and hers alone, on the outside. But inside the glove?

Pure Al-ex-and-er.

The arrival of the police ended my shock-induced lucidity; the wits I’d been holding together since finding my mother on the floor. I became hysterical and had to be sedated. I stayed in care until my aunt reluctantly agreed to take me - and it was in her austere home that I began to study for the career I was determined to have.

Why now?

That’s easy.

For twenty years, Al-ex-and-er has been sweating about the whereabouts of the knife and the glove. He has lain awake at night, at first in his cell, and later, on his acquittal, in the strange woman’s pink bedroom. Although he doesn’t look as bad as he did during his prison years, there is still an undeniable sense of tension in his face. He has never known a moment’s peace.

But that isn’t enough for me. I have been quietly waiting for the optimum moment to inflict the maximum harm. I have been waiting for a Facebook post in which he looks happy and relaxed.

And I found it.

They were in the South of Spain on holiday. He was looking handsome, much better-looking than her, whose pudgy features were framed by a bushel of windswept, candy-floss hair. Yes, he really does look very handsome, and perfectly relaxed. The lags are going to love him, just like the last time.

‘Thinking of moving to Spain!!!!’ the caption reads beneath the two lovebirds drinking sangria by a hotel pool.

No. No you’re not.

*****

There has been some disapproval in legal circles about my withholding the evidence all this time - but it is still admissible. I’ve had several interviews with legal council, who are required by law to explore my reasons. I have been as honest as I can be. I told them that at the time I took them, I was a traumatised fifteen-year-old who didn’t trust the police with the evidence. It was a valid argument. This particular force had been criticised many times over their lack of professionalism during the period in question.

I told them that when he was convicted even without the material evidence, I thought that was the end of the matter. And by the time he was acquitted, I was busy with my career. In subsequent years, I have been too busy juggling my career with family. Yada yada.

I also told them that during that very busy time in my life, I thought I had forgiven him.

They seemed satisfied with those replies, and the new evidence stands.

I didn’t tell them the real reason, of how efficiently my fifteen-year-old mind operated in those first moments of horror. I knew that he’d killed my mother, and I also knew how soft the courts were on sentencing. To them, my mother was not a stranger but a lover, with the unspoken implication that she somehow deserved what she got. I think I mentioned that I watched a lot of crime shows at the time. So in those moments before hysteria and breakdown, I vowed to my mother’s green eyes that I would extend that bastard’s suffering for as I long as I could. If I had left the evidence where it was, or even submitted it during his first trial, he would be out by now. He would be living a free life, haunted by his prison experience, but still capable of making something of what was left to him.

I have ensured that he has not known a moment’s peace for twenty years. He has been waiting, watchful and anxious, for the knife and the glove to turn up. All these years of freedom, where he has proclaimed his innocence, where he has told reporters that he was an innocent man, where he pocketed a reimbursement for his ‘wrongful’ conviction, where he basked in the uneasy glow of victimhood.

All these years when I have been waiting until the moment he looked genuinely at ease.

And now? He will have to serve out the remaining fifteen years of his original sentence. I hope he dies inside. Whether that is physically or metaphorically, I really don’t care.