Harry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (part one - Murder Your Darlings)

Chapter 4

"Murder?" queried Myrtle. "But I thought you said that your mother was still alive."

Old Mr. Bitterman was bringing a tray of tea and biscuits to the table.

"Indeed she was, my dear," he said. "Indeed she was. She was made of strong stuff, my mother. Two world wars and the great depression, she lived through, and never once complained. Not like today's moaning Minnies. But..."

He carefully set down the tea tray and lowered himself , easily,  into the second of the two armchairs.

"...but this incident coupled with an unfortunate turn of events at the school dance earlier in the evening had presented me with the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and, by God, I aimed to take it! Three birds, as a matter of fact, and it wasn't a stone I used to kill them but the very same ball-peen hammer that I had just now wrestled from my father."

Taking up his tea, and a simple digestive, he cast his mind back through the welter of intervening years to that dark day in the distant past.

LOVERS SLAIN

The bodies of two murdered teenagers, were discovered by police on a notorious stretch of dirt track dubbed lover's lane by locals. Formal identification could take weeks and not days, said a senior lawman yesterday, owing to the unprecedented savagery of the attacks.

"It was the summer of nineteen-fifty-five," Mr. Bitterman began. "The year rock'n'roll broke, the end of innocence. And I was head over heels in love with a girl named Jeannie McQueen..."

Boys on one side, girls on the other. The end of term dances always started like that. The girls casting coy glances and whispering behind hands. The boys, for their part, over-playing it cool.  But as the night wore on people paired off and the dance floor soon filled up.

Jeannie's girlfriends - more bold if not more beautiful than she - were among the first to find their partners and excitedly take to the floor, leaving the blushful Jeannie to cut a lonesome figure there on the other side. For young Harold, secretly smitten since the start of the school year, it was now or never, and he quickly resolved to make his move. Emboldened by a snifter of illicit Dutch courage he weaved his way across the floor and invited her up to dance. To his great relief she haltingly accepted and before too long they were entwined on the dance floor, swaying and turning, slowly and sweetly, in perfect time to the music. Al Alberts and the Four Aces were singing Love is a Many Splendoured Thing and never before had Harold heard such a beautiful song. It was as though some heavenly entity had divined his deepest feelings and transcribed them down to a tee. When the music soared his spirit soared with it. When it fell his spirit soared higher. It quickened his pulse and lightened his feet and swelled his heart to bursting. He was enraptured by it; and he was enraptured too by the simple, corporeal warmth of Jeannie's cheek on his; by her delicate embrace and the way that she moved; by the wondrous smell of her hair. And as he held her tightly, with his eyes lightly closed, he blissfuly envisioned their life together: she, bathed in bright sunshine as she waved him off to work over the low garden gate of their homestead, her wifely apron - white as her smile - as yet unsullied by the delicious dinner she would lovingly cook for his return; and there were children too - two girls and a boy - in light summer dresses and short trousers, skipping joyously in and around the water sprinkler there on the lawn behind her.

He held her now more tightly than ever, her own hands resting demurely, one on each of his hips, while a third tapped rudely on his shoulder. It was very heaven...wait! What?

A third hand? Tapping rudely on his shoulder? No! Someone was cutting in. Harold turned impatiently to face this interrupter but his once buoyant heart sank like a stone when he came face to smirking face with Billy Bleasdale, cool high school heartthrob and thoroughly bad egg.