the Immaculate Deception serialised on The Noise

Fisiani

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The Immaculate Deception




A murder mystery novel



by Dr Patrick McCarthy



Front cover should be a bloodied carving knife within a set of rosary beads.





Chapter 1

At precisely 6.30am as it did so every day, Anna Murdoch’s bedside radio alarm came on, rousing her from a deep sleep.

The radio function of the alarm was playing the upbeat strains of a song by Madonna, where she was ludicrously claiming to the listeners she was ‘a virgin touched for the very first time’. Anna groggily lunged out with her right hand and tried to hit the snooze button on the radio. After two flailing attempts to silence it and clumsily knocking over a few things in the process she eventually managed to connect with the correct button. The music stopped instantly and so Madonna was silenced and touched no more.

‘Please another few minutes more sleep.’

A few minutes later the alarm, insistently went off yet again, but by now Madonna was no longer singing and instead had been replaced on the radio by some half-remembered boy band angelically wondering ‘how deep is your love’. A random thought flashed through Anna’s mind she ‘could not take that radio music anymore’. She had to get up for work now. It was now or never. She was painfully aware if she did not waken and rise immediately, she would probably sleep on for several more hours and be ridiculously late for work.

‘Come on sleepyhead, rise and shine.’ Anna reached out and turned off the musical wonderings of Gary Barlow and Take That, wanting to know the depth of someone’s love and switched on the nearby bedside lamp. She forced her eyes half open and rubbed her forehead back and forth a few times with her right hand. As her hand came back down, she noticed a large patch of dried blood on the palm of her hand. A myriad of questions instantly flashed through her head. ‘What? What the…How did all that blood get there? Am I cut? Where is the blood coming from? Why is there blood on my hand? It doesn’t hurt.’

Anna’s eyes were now wide open, she was fully awake. She saw that blood wasn’t only on her hand. There was dried blood all down the right arm of her nightdress. Lots of blood over the front of her nightdress as well. Blood all over the bed covers, blood everywhere. Anna sat up completely bemused and confused. ‘What the Hell!?’

She looked to her left towards where her sleeping husband lay and let out an ear-piercing scream. For what she saw was a horrendous sight.

Billy her husband, was lying flat on his back with a large carving knife stuck in his chest. His head rolled towards her and mouth slumped wide open.

"Oh my God! Billy! Billy!"

Anna shook his right arm frantically whilst screaming his name. But nothing came back from Billy. Not a word. Not even a flicker.

“Billy, speak to me. Billy!”

Still not a word came back. No response at all from Billy. Anna turned around and picked up the nearby telephone on the bedside cabinet and with shaking hands managed to dial the emergency services number.

A calm female voice soon answered down the line, “What emergency service do you require? Fire, ambulance or police.”

“Ambulance! Ambulance, I need an ambulance for my Billy, he’s in a bad way. Quick. Come quick. There’s been a terrible accident here. Quick. You must come. Please.”

The operator asked for her address but Anna did not hear the operator properly at first.

“What?”

“What is your address? Where do you live?” repeated the operator with her experienced profound calmness in dealing with distraught callers.

(to be continued...)
 
“Sorry….Oh. It’s 162 Karori Road in Karori……Please…. come quick.”

Anna put the phone back down without hearing the operator calling out and asking her to stay on the line. She rose and started moving to the adjoining living room to open the front door. She considered putting on her nearby warm fleecy dressing gown as it was a bit cool at this early hour but did not want to get her lovely pink fluffy dressing gown all covered in the messy blood. She switched on the living room light and took the security chain off the front door and looked out the nearby window by the door desperately hoping to see an approaching flashing light miraculously appearing. She kept looking out the window, frantically listening for the sound of an approaching siren.

It’d often said that time passes slowly when you are impatiently waiting for a kettle to boil, so the incredibly long minutes till the ambulance arrived in view seemed to Anna to last like an absolute eternity. A few minutes later the ambulance came into view. It stopped right outside her door and she flung open the front door and called out to the two ambulance officers as they hurriedly exited their vehicle.

“Thank God you’re here. Please come quick, Billy’s in the bedroom. He’s in a bad way.”

Anna ushered the ambulance crew into the house and over to the adjoining bedroom on the left, not aware of how they were both staring at the heavily blood-stained front of her nightdress. As they approached the bedroom, lit only by the dim light of the bedside lamp, they both stood in the doorway of the bedroom and took one look at Billy’s body with the carving knife handle protruding from his unmoving chest. They could clearly see his ghastly deathly pallor and his glazed eyes and the large pool of dried blood. They knowingly glanced at each other in silent acknowledgement of the obvious gravity and significance of the unexpected situation they could see within the bedroom. The grey-haired and balding senior ambulance officer Pete Dawson, with his head peeking in the doorway of the bedroom, could immediately see he was looking not at a potential patient as he had assumed he would encounter, but instead was looking at a fresh corpse. With his many years of experience in the job as an ambulance officer he could see the dark congealed blood indicating the fatal trauma must have had occurred many hours beforehand. Pete glumly looked back to his colleague Marie and slowly shook his head from side to side. The sort of grim slow shake of his head instantly informed her the person in the bedroom was certainly way beyond any futile attempt at resuscitation or even a check for an absent pulse. Pete rapidly decided in fact not to touch anything in the bedroom or even to take another step forward. He correctly assumed this bedroom would soon become the site of a police homicide enquiry and knew his size 12 footprints unnecessarily clumping through the congealing blood would royally piss off the forensics team and earn him a well-deserved bollocking from them. That had happened to him at another major crime scene many years ago when he, as a newly qualified ambulance driver, had previously made a similar forensic bungle. Pete quietly muttered something to his still stunned and open-mouthed silent colleague regarding “needing to go back to the ambulance to get something”. He was in fact not needing anything from the ambulance other than to use the radio on the dashboard to contact ambulance control and apprise them the details of what they had unexpectedly found at the gory scene. Pete knew the ambulance control officer would, as per standard protocol for suspicious death, immediately contact the police force and pass on the details of the case given the clear evidence of a non-accidental and blatantly homicidal death.

The ambulance woman turned her attention toward Anna and spoke in a friendly way, “Hey there. My name is Marie. Marie Sullivan. Have a seat over here,” and pointed to the nearby settee, “and let me take some notes.”

to be continued
 
why would marie sullivan be takin notes she's a paramedic

so tell me how did you find him

he wiz deid

by deid do you mean ,snuffed it ,pegged it ,hee hawed oot o here ?

just deid

ok but how could you tell

eh,,,,,,big fk off night in his chest an aw the blood

right am takin notes n ur gettin on ma tits ,pete's nodding his heid here

HOW THE FK DID YE KNOW HE WAS DEID

ffs he wisnae breathing

ah,,,,,,i he's deid


''meatloaf bat out of hell played in the background''
 
Was it Professor Plumb in the library and the cause of death severe anal trauma?

Did you perhaps miss the bit where it said “ the carving knife handle protruding from his unmoving chest.”

Unless of course you’re suggesting he was rogered up the Rangers end prior to being stabbed which I suppose is a possibility.

This thread is going to run and run. Cuedos Doc...
 
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