ALL AROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH

CHAPTER 1

THE DOCKS AREA, BELFAST

Killing her was much easier then expected.  Why he had worried about it all, he now didn’t know.  The iron bar had caught her in the back of the neck rather than squarely on the skull as he had planned, but he didn’t mind too much about that.  The thing was an effective weapon alright, bit it was just a bit too heavy to swing with much force.  Regardless of this, she was drunk, and this facilitated things.  Her awkward, staggering legs made her easy to knock over.  She was confused, and didn’t put up too much of a fight.

The first blow felled her.  She sunk to her knees in the dirt.

“Hey!  What are ya doin’?”  Her speech was slurred and she mumbled weakly.  His second  blow caught her on the side of her face, knocking her sideways.  She moaned in pain, an odd, deep, damply guttural sound which gurgled up from her lungs, through the blood gathering at the back of her throat.  Her teeth had pierced her lower lip and one of them was broken.  Another blow was delivered to her head as she struggled to crawl away.  Too weak to scream, she was losing a lot of blood.  There was just that nauseating moaning.  Her movements were laboured and clumsy.  Her burgundy fingernails broke as she scrambled in the earth still weakly trying to escape.  Yet another blow hit the pressure points in the neck and may have shattered or dislodged a bone or two.  The killer had hoped to see her neck break, but it didn’t seem to hang limply or oddly, which was a little disappointing.

Whatever went on inside her body, she hit the ground again.  Getting up seemed not to be an option this time, though she tried.  She lay spreadeagled, her face in the dirt.  He watched her for a few seconds and her moaning gradually stopped.  The final blows to her head were meant to make sure she was really dead.  The dead don’t tell tales.

The sound of the blows had been nothing like in the movies, nothing like the dull hammer on coconut shell sound or whatever it was that they used in simulations.  Bone shattered, fluid and blood spread out on the waste ground soaking into the soil.  The damp dust absorbed it like blotting paper, but didn’t completely hide the tell-tale signs of her death.  Her body, dragged to the river’s edge to dump in, was heavier than he’d estimated.  Dead weight!  He’d heard it said that the dead weigh more than the living!