To Skin the Cat

Glynis read the morning papers with a cynical detachment. It seemed Parliament had passed The Murder Act at last, abolishing capital punishment for murder – but not treason, espionage, piracy with violence… That one flummoxed Glynis. Did non-violent pirates exist? Or any pirates for that matter in 1965? If so, she thought she might dearly like to meet one if only to say she had.

Her thoughts digressed.

She wondered, had there been a sitting Parliament when state-sanctioned killings began, if that bill would have been called The Murder Act, too, and laughed aloud at the notion. Her hilarity caused James to glance at her from the stove where he stood preparing breakfast. His lovely face puckered in a smile.

“Reading the comics?”

“No,” Glynis informed him, “the latest from Parliament.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Most days, likely not.”

“Blackberry jam or just butter on your toast today?”

“Is that mum’s jam from last summer?”

“Aye.”

“Then the jam please.”

She turned back to the papers and tried to refocus, but a familiar roiling nausea overcame her attention. Laying the papers aside, she pushed away from the table and waved off James’ look of concern.

“Be right back, love.”

He grunted acknowledgement, and she slipped from the room before he could probe. In the library they shared, she pulled a slim, silk-bound journal from behind the American classics section. She knew James would never look there. The volume in hand, she eyed the blotter on the desk. James’ Montblanc lay shiny and alone, awaiting use.

The ink flowed fluid and without skips, rendering the blank page as damning as the ones preceding it. May, 1994. James, Glynis: d. Automotive accident. There. Done. She resisted the temptation to put teeth marks in James’ pen, tossing it to the desk blotter before she succumbed and snapping the journal closed.

“Darling? Where’d you go? Breakfast is on the table.”

Sniffing, she pressed a finger beneath her nose and crammed the journal behind Hardy and Fitzgerald, guardians of her secrets. Glynis knew well the degrees of execution, as her prescience had just signed her husband’s death warrant. And her own.

“Coming,” she whispered, pulling the door to the library closed behind her.