Murder On the Mire

By R. Nield Schneider

Murder on the Mire

Detective Inspector, Homicide, Jack Plod would like to sleep. Sleep, no longer filled with the thundering hoof-beats in the nightmares of his past.
The bodies released from the muddy grip of the mire fleer in his face throughout the long nights, to the constant post-punk soundtrack of an awful 1980’s Indie band – when life was easier.
What secret does the redhead hide?
How low can the bucolic go?
How perverse the master and servant?
How many young women must die?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483584478

Book preview

siphon

the unkind hand

it’s late…

it seems it’s always late in the narrow laneways where light pools          or shafts

across the backs of moribund business and empty car-parks

and backyards, and rubbish bins, and the winnowed weeds of paper and cat piss

and spilled seed

and tears

it’s bluestone and brick and asphalt

washed by the rain from a toxic sky and the detritus of disorderly drains spilling

like open wounds from the fag-ends of tall tenements

where life festers and flues the thousand cries of distress          down

the rattling, rusted fire escape ladders and effluvium streaked brick walls          to hang

like a chilling fug above and, below, drip like slime down the unrelenting hours

here          no soft skinned, delicate gaze finds communion, patient and happy

no vaguely caressing touch warms, melting one flesh into another

in a fellowship embrace… the dance!

the dawning belief, rather, that an enemy is to be shot, at a distance

con-strains itself by force of habit and self-preservation          to watch

the loblolly life ooze away, flesh from flesh          drains

the stain of confused compulsions

to get some meaning from the self-seeking ego          and pleasure

from the sensation of nerves and muscles deadened by hopelessness and

the hypodermic prick

to fight off depression and the sense of boredom

of always being afraid

if you were to squint your eyes

you might be forgiven the imagining of an opening credit for some forsaken movie

blinking like a neon

in the scattered roll of an empty can blown by the wind

in the music of a squeaking sign… and soft against the night sky

a forgotten name, an effortless spontaneity remembered          the sudden dawning

of realisation squealing its harmony beside the rival Tom-cat’s dissonant yowl

he arrives

the focus returns to his eyes, the swirling lines begin to unravel, the mist begins to clear…

he arrives

by staying in the shadows rather than coming and going

he arrives

to seek out the straggler, the stray soul…

That it is Your Divine Will, I will…

softly chanted

***

he takes the hand          of a disconsolate

a disillusioned girl caught in the vice-grip of the needle

while dirty water gurgles from the visceral sludge of a sullage pit

blocked by dishwashing liquid and dripping

the dirty water flume around her feet lapping away her coagulating vomit

lapping away her failure and her hope of half sleep, half dream redemption

he takes her hand with a Mengele care

he takes her into the darkness

malevolence          on a still day

very early or very late

the bitter-sweet smell of nightshade

hangs in the wet summer air

Stewart, Jock Stewart

sits at his balcony shrouded in potted Belladonna

his head resting on his tattooed, soil-drabbled arm

his fingers stained purple from shucking

the bitter berry seeds

he stirs

as he does at every movement, every night

for sleep does not come easily, half conscious and half alive…

stirs          opens

his dilated eyes and knows his master’s form in the agile figure

closing the stable door in the half light

catches          a glimpse of stockinged calf

hears          the clack of cheap stiletto fall upon the stone

and the low voice intoning text:

He comes unseen again, un-sensed…

Stewart mumbles a whispered blasphemy

and drips the careful measurement of too many drops into his purple leaf tea

and curses Dr. Crohn again in his dry rasping voice

the tremor in his hand no worse this morning than last

he licks his lips          and wonders

that the unchangeable tea should taste today of ice-cream and cake

as he runs his skeletal fingers over the itching rash around his bonito-flake neck

and tries to squeeze some focus into his bleary, blurry eyes

he croaks, in his arid mouth, and swigs deeply into the cold tea

he calls his son

mudflats

the river belches a methane broken wind

heaves away at bottomless sleep – its impossible imagination          waters muddy holes

leeches decay in this early morning          for the memories procured within

the mud and slush hold themselves like dreams that remember          a childhood

where the days echo          empty as the tear which escapes and rolls down

blushed cheeks in the mudflats          forbidding

as an empty plain glowing a gap-toothed ember haze          shimmering

the derisory laughter of day          again and again, day after day…

And she there          dead!

lolling in the thin trickle of water from open pipes and swirling eddies          ablaze

with the angry sound of decaying screams that seem to punish the flesh of this man with this whip-slash and this burn for his mortality and his living…

there she lies          smashed, battle scarred and weeping

sadness

twisted fingers, the flatted hand decaying bright yellow

the hollow, lifeless eyes, like the begging mouths of the hungry shrunk to dehydrated husks…

how beautiful was the flower in her hand!

The early morning blots          the car lights to the infinity of grey

blunt muffles his voice as he sings along

the tape whirring abstractly, the sound as tinny as his car:

there’s always bitter-sweet refrain

to see me through the long nights

waiting for a train to take me back to you…

he has long since foresworn thinking of she

from whom he flees

deep in his wracked-down dreams:

always someone to provide for me when dark are my days

cold comfort in some weirdo ways

bringing me back to you…

and, right on cue – to the beat, to the thrum –

as if following the cheap film noir detective movie

he endures as the grope of his life

the 6am train blinks its epileptic convulsions

across the rusting viaduct          he smiles

sings along again:

and as this old train rattles on

the richness of the countryside

grates against this heart of mine

forever laughing

as force myself to sing the praises of a lover’s guile

the sweet betrayal of your smile…

he smiles grimly          he hates this place

open graves        mass graves

a solitary daisy          grey around the edges

always grey!          in Sarajevo…

***

Detective Inspector JACK PLOD, Homicide, has smelt it all before…

the grey

sludge threatens          drowns

his gumboot down:

promise me you’ll never love me… he knows the song in his heart

forensic floodlights have already startled the early light…

Plod bristles, blinks against the glare

late again!

reporters flash pictures unwelcome and unbidden

like passers-by come out to stare for want of something better to do

the yielded dead          departed soul

relinquished once more to crude presumption

– he uses policeman language skills –

glutted, they depart still grumbling, this morning’s tabloid guzzle slaked

and she then          draped

like Jean Harlow on a very        bad        day

her restless, perishable beauty, fragrant and insatiable as lust          imprisoned

is captured

in the storm water rubbish catcher tines

dissolved into unspeakable silence on her spikes

she rests alone, tarnished

plastic seaweed

demures her naked breast like hoary hands that hovel comfort

a tattered satin sheet spilt across her hoist rear end

let’s slip emissions of hog-s-wallow debris

snuggled

a dead cat lies cradled beneath her arm

kindnesses…

a cloud of insects awake to the light

dance shadows

in the trashed out waste

in the naked branches, in tins and buckets and bins

a grovelling, wheezing, winded waterfall

broken! falls in a frothing pool

cleanses rancid maggot-brushed open rat-bite wounds

of stale blood          loose flesh

of delicate

lips and cheek and eye and tongue

enjoyed

unrushed

certain it is          a rat

licks its coat clean of mud and gore in distained defiance

out of reach

in the pipe’s shadow

Plod prods Jean Harlow

– an unyielding stick

bellows another rat from within her cavity –

he throws a stone…

nor further interest rising beyond

the whap-clap reckless

thrust

the whirling downward fall

… sifts the veil of stinking slime

from her face, from the outline of her breast

her pointless fingers

protruding from the mud

Detective Inspector Plod is too tired to cry

he covers her nakedness

even infected, rutting beasts

deserve a little kindness

tetrads

the first moon

rises red in the Western sky

surprises

with its blood flowing

bad dreams

she comes wrapped in a brazen conceit

dread as night and darkly veiled          a harlot

bought for a loaf of bread

loose living lips drip honey smoother than oil

her every breath and lying tongue sets the snare to catch hold of him

to tie her kisses to his neck, draw him forward to her bed          spread

with guilty quilts and Egyptian cotton          sprinkled

with perfumed deceptions and unguents and contraptions and toys

promising him the deepest draught of love and abandoned delights

persistent coaxing, seductive purring’s entice him into descent

dishonour consumes his flesh, dazed and confused

as an ox to the slaughter          before the hammer drops and the dagger chops

the fountainhead flows to waste in his sheets

***

the morning train…protests

rattles and clunks behind broken down houses and through the desolation of commerce

over rail lines strewn with shattered glass and scattered rubbish and graffiti

past broken down fences and tall grasses

screeches over the cold hardness of the steel and wire railway bridge across the river

where a sheer stone wall lapses into the pasty pallor of mudflats and tidal streams, dingy grey and lividly anaemic

where tarnished, washed wizen and juggling trickery, each toxic turning waxes a steeping hybrid hectic flush of drowning swales

where each storm water outlet spates a sliming trail

wilts putrid hollows and pooling secretions

drips smutch

over the hanged man’s seed of downcast mandrake and aconite buttercups

where poison thorns on spindly briers and skulking hawthorn brood

barren deformities

that sprout the weeds of the shameful crimes hidden away

in shallow graves still          where

the mephitic mire

glanders

ghosts in its depths          still

where the oddment remains, bestrewn in the broadcast light,

re-gather and drown in the dissipations…

Jean Harlow’s body retrieved          Plod is driving away

his thoughts of Sarajevo:

alone in a street of swimming people

tears rolling          half aloud

I called your name and I saw your face

couched in a frame of purple roses

your eyes ran with a quiet anger

so I hid my shame and laid no blame

and forced my loathsome body

carry my depravity far away

promise me you’ll never love me…

Max nurses righteous thought…

and as a drunk would nurse the last drop of his regret, Max nurses righteous thought, jostled along by the 7am and