Jesus is leaving the chat

Vincent Cooper committed his first murder when he was zero days old. He left his mother's womb at twenty-seven minutes past two in the afternoon to find himself in Mrs. Halwart's caring hands. Losing physical ties with his birth mother, Vincent gained his long-awaited freedom but was not placed on Mrs. Cooper's bosom so that she - exhausted but happy - could bury her lips in his moist hair and trace down the newborn's small flat nose with her index finger as Mrs. Cooper was about to release her second child to the world. A few minutes later, the attending doctor began to get nervous. After some time, the medics managed to free Mrs. Cooper's womb from the second fetus who turned out dark blue all over. Having unwound the umbilical cord that was wrapped around the wrinkled neck of Vincent's brother, the doctors launched into a resuscitation procedure trying to bring the baby boy back to life. But all their efforts were in vain. The umbilical cord, wrapped around the second twin's neck, belonged to his older brother. He was eighty-three days old when Mrs. Cooper first took his only son in her arms.

Vincent was thirteen months old when his mother took him in her arms for the last time. The inconsolable mother of the stillborn baby touched her living son's forehead with her chapped lips and settled herself in the back seat of a car, whose windows were decorated with steel mesh from the inside. Vincent's father, whose name was Clarence Augustus the 3rd, handed his son over to a nanny and took three steps towards the retreating car. Mr. Cooper waved and waved with a leather-gloved hand for a long time but Mrs. Cooper never looked back.

Clarence Augustus the 3rd gave warm thanks to Professor Dunleavy (an old friend of the family, who pledged "not to wash dirty linen" at Mr. Cooper's estate) and shook his skinny palm. Professor Dunleavy promised to Clarence Augustus the 3rd that his adored wife would get the best care, smiled awkwardly, sat behind the steering wheel of his café-au-lait Aston Martin DB5 and glancing up at the boy with a warmth in his brown eyes. For several months following Mrs. Cooper's departure this glance came to Vincent in his dreams. At that time, this man of science might have already known that the woman would never get better.

That evening Mrs. Fines (the boy's nanny) sang to him a very sad lullaby.

That night, the Coopers' estate did not hear blood-curdling woman's screams for the first time in three hundred and eighty days.

Mrs. Cooper passed away one and a half years later. Before the end of her short life, she weighed a little more than eighty pounds and had to be force-fed, which seems to be necessary in such cases.

At the funeral, Vincent stood next to his father holding his hand. They both did not weep: a boy - because he did not know the woman lying in the coffin; the man - because his mind was enveloped in an anger of treacherous betrayal. In spite of his promises, Professor Dunleavy did share the Coopers secrets with his associates. A hundred years ago, the confrontation between the two men would have ended with a call to a duel and subsequent death of one of them from gangrene. But Clarence Augustus the 3rd only tinkered with the Professor's car applying a penknife to produce a scratch on the car's body that was not less than seven feet long. As for the doctor, he broke with an angry tirade against the inconsolable widower (mostly blaming Mr. Cooper for bestial exploitation of animals by abusing them sexually; perhaps here is the age-long prejudice to the effect that most Scots preferred sheep hairy asses to feminine charms). Those words made all the high-society matrons blush, and Reverend Kerry who conducted the after-the-funeral ceremony crossed himself three times, nearly scraping his forehead with his forefinger fingernail, and asked the Creator for a personal favor to prevent an act of physical violence on the sacred land under his control. No fighting took place and that same evening Reverend Kerry thanked the Lord for directing his gaze towards the sinful earth and giving an ear to prayers from time to time. It remains to mention that Mr. Cooper was Scottish only by one quarter of his parentage.