RAZORS, RATS, PARSNIPS AND PEACEMAKERS

The mid week, mid afternoon tranquillity of dead end Maxhip Rd was not disturbed by a jot, because Edzel JohnCrump had the good sense to use a silencer when he shot his wheelchair bound neighbour Evangelisto in the back of the head.

It wasn’t planned or anything, but the chance listening to a radio science programme, an empty bottle of malt whisky, a glimpse of his wife Lucinda’s smiling face in Bill McEwen’s bedroom window and the discovery of the cause of Evangelisto’s paraplegia convinced Edzel the bullet was due.

Evangelisto, as his name would suggest, was a man with religious aptitude. His speciality had been saving women who had strayed. Not necessarily women who’d strayed from the path of righteousness, mainly they’d just strayed into Evangelisto’s field of vision. In all, Evangelisto had rescued four women from the meagre pickings of Maxhip Rd. The longest treatment had been that of Mrs Patterson from Number Nine who stayed with him eighteen months before returning home. She never went outside much after that and according to rumour wept inconsolably for hours on end when a northerly breeze blew. Evangelisto had persuaded the men of Maxhip Rd that his interest in their women was religious, not carnal. He would say it was a sort of retreat, a place for recovery, a place for women who’d had enough. As it turned out of course, that was a lie, Evangelisto tried to find women whom he thought had not had enough. Edzel reckoned the women didn’t have much wrong when they went there, except maybe boredom and when they came back they didn’t ever appear much recovered from anything.

Evangelisto was clever and charming. He could draw people in with his slate blue eyes, his beguiling smile and his amazing Voodoo perfume, a perfume that wafted down through the houses on the north wind. But, as already alluded to, the cause of Evangelisto’s disability, a radio science programme, an empty whisky bottle and Edzel glimpsing his wife in Bill McEwen’s bedroom window had, according to Edzel, put the bullet in the back of Evangelisto's handsome head.

Edzel's garage was piled with car parts and junk and exuded an oily funky smell. On the day of Evangelisto’s demise Edzel had gone into the garage to tinker with a lawnmower. He was reasonably happy tinkering and listening to science programmes on the radio. The incessant churning about why his wife had moved to Evangelisto’s then to Bill McEwen’s diminished as he listened.

It seemed, according to the programme, that there was rapidly expanding evidence of gene sharing on a massive scale. It was now a known fact that humans share genes with rats, parsnips and plankton and so Edzel immediately understood - he was no dullard - that when the study was over it would reveal a shared, base gene, between everything on earth and in space - jellyfish, rats, humans, meteorites, gum trees and even sticky toffee puddings.

Trouble ahead thought Edzel. People with low IQ will emphatically deny gene sharing with vegetables, intellectuals will fume at the idea of being linked to amoeba and chat show hosts and the National Front and Ku Klux Klan will all go out and hang themselves.

But Edzel could feel the kernel of an idea. The science programme had speculated that genes may dictate who we are, what we do and how we behave, they may even explain criminal behaviour. Edzel stopped working on the lawnmower and started fossicking about in an old tin box which held, amongst other things, a .38 calibre Peacemaker handgun with silencer.

Now despite the fact that Edzel’s wife had spent time at Evangelisto’s, Edzel, who was essentially a good bloke, would sometimes pop over to the now disabled Evangelisto’s to see if he needed anything. Mind you, he hadn’t been over for about three weeks since he discovered the cause of the disability.

So on this warm spring afternoon, Edzel put the Peacemaker in his pocket and wandered next door. Evangelisto opened the door but avoided eye contact. The Voodoo aftershave hit Edzel like a hammer.

“Just thought you might like a cup of tea, some company”, said Edzel.

“Yes, yes, come in.”

“So how’s things?” asked Edzel, filling the kettle.

“Pretty lonely actually.”

You’re not the only one, thought Edzel.

“Still, you shouldn’t have to put up with it for long.”

He had to look out the window at his wife Lucinda hanging out Bill McEwen's boxer shorts to stop himself from smiling.

“Oh?”

“Well, you don’t usually have to hang around much before a stray comes along, do you mate?”

They drank their tea in silence for a while.

“It’s different now I’m in the chair, it’d be nice to just be able to get up every now and then.”

Tragically for Evangelisto, the truth about his condition had been leaked from the auxiliary nurse at Number Two. Evangelisto’s little problem it seems, had been caused by an excessive use of that old bedroom booster Viagra. So, when Evangelisto said he’d ‘like to get up every now and then,’ Edzel saw the ambiguity of the statement. Evangelisto’s self perpetuated myth that he was a God assisted saint had, like his erectile dysfunction, gone a bit floppy, he was now perceived as just an old fashioned, chemically assisted womaniser.

It was two o’clock, Bill McEwen was back from his milk deliveries and as Edzel and Evangelisto gazed out across the garden, Bill and Lucinda appeared grinning foolishly in an upstairs bedroom window. Lucinda, half naked, spread her arms wide, looked down briefly at Edzel and Evangelisto, then snapped the curtains shut and that’s when Edzel introduced the bullet to the back of Evangelisto’s seething cerebellum.

Edzel’s next few moves were slightly weird, but such was his faith in his newly discovered science of genomics. He ordered some groceries for Evangelisto, knowing the delivery boy would knock and walk in later that afternoon. He tossed the Peacemaker onto the work bench, and reached for the whisky bottle only to remember he’d run out earlier that week. First time he’d run out in thirty six years. Made him a little niggly, so he just turned up the radio and continued working on the lawnmower.

At precisely eleven minutes after three that afternoon Edzel heard a long ragged cry that could only have come from the throat of an adolescent delivery boy. An hour later Edzel managed to fire up the lawnmower and was standing in a haze of exhaust smoke when two officers of the law appeared at his open garage doors. Edzel walked out of the smoke wiping his hands on a rag.

Maxhip Rd had been closed off and most of the neighbours were huddled on the pavement, glassy eyed from the turmoil of their boundless voyeurism.

“This is Detective Jean Smith and I’m Constable Blunt,” shouted Blunt above the lawnmower.

“We’ve all got a Gene or two in the family”, said Edzel turning off the motor.

Blunt and Smith stared at him suspiciously.

“Heard the commotion outside have you?” asked Blunt.

“Commotion?”

“There’s been a murder.” Blunt and Smith had their guilt detectors on high alert and both leaned forward.

“Oh, thought you said commotion, hearing’s not so good.”

“Commotion and murder”, said Blunt testily.

Edzel tossed the rag onto the bench next to the Peacemaker and stared back at Smith and Blunt.

“Mind if we ask some questions?” said Smith.

“You already have.”

“Can we go inside?” Blunt wasn’t asking.

“I was just off fishing.”

“What, with a lawnmower?”

“No, a handgun”, said Edzel. “What do you think?”

They asked a few more questions but didn’t get anywhere except to establish that Edzel was probably the last to see Evangelisto alive. But Edzel was altogether too lateral for them and Smith could feel a headache coming on, so they left.

“We’ll be back,” said Blunt, pointing his finger in a threatening manner.

Edzel smiled broadly.

Back in the patrol car Smith swallowed a paracetamol. Blunt put his hand on her knee.
“Not today Frank”, she said, pushing his hand away.

Well, thought Edzel, they may be struggling upholders of the complex laws of statute, but neither of them would begin to understand the liberating laws of genetics, especially Frank.

Edzel went fishing at the lake that afternoon but before he settled down to the fishing and his new bottle of whisky, he tied the Peacemaker and silencer onto a cut line and cast it far out into the lake.

Without going into the tedious details, the police found the shape of a handgun in the dust and grease in the tin box and to Edzel’s delight, spent four days diving in the lake before they found the Peacemaker. It all matched and so they arrested Edzel on probably the most overwhelming raft of factual, scientific and circumstantial evidence ever put before a court. Edzel, to their great confusion, pleaded not guilty. He pleaded not guilty because on bullet delivery day he’d run out of whisky. Not guilty because his DNA results showed him to be plagued with a far higher percentage of rat genes than was generally helpful. In fact, he exclaimed, I have such a high percentage of rat genes it’s a wonder I don’t have paws.

“It was the rat, not me,” became his refrain.

He engaged the expert services of geneticist and defence attorney Professor Zooplink - actually Graham, a resting gay actor from Number Six who had the hump with Evangelisto because Evangelisto had told him that gays were an abomination.

Six months later the trial of Edzel John Crump began. The prosecution laid out their compelling evidence - DNA on the tea cup, matching grooves between bullet and barrel, last to have seen the deceased alive, fingerprints everywhere, motive via his wife Lucinda’s excesses and so on and so forth, to all of which Edzel agreed.

Constable Blunt had recently been transferred and so Detective Smith, looking drawn and beginning to bulge, bore witness to Edzel’s weirdness.

Nobody recognised it, but the Judge, the Honourable Mr Andrew Pod, suffered from an Augustinian atavism in that he resembled a certain Mr Gregor Johann Mendel, a famous monk and the father of modern genetic science, and was therefore never likely to challenge the rat gene theory too vigorously.

Professor Zooplink, alias gay Graham (the abomination), eventually took to the stand. He could learn a play in a week so after six months’ pre-trial cramming was an absolute game, set and match for any of the local genetics boffins. He raised the tricky scientific process of Okhams Razor and reduced penetrance, he schmoozed them re the subtlety of variable expressivity. The jury turned white and wide eyed when Zooplink gave them, unabridged, man’s gene sharing relationship with the cold hearted killer rat. He gave a master class in the performance of someone having a near myocardial infarction as he ranted on about worm murdering parsnips and tried to cultivate in the jury a fresh view of pea pods, pumpkins, people and possibilities, all the while dazzling them with his excellent theatrical technique and his pompous, plummy plagiarism.

In a speech of outstanding deception, full of polished gobble-de gook and pure fantasy, delivered in his own genetically inherited baritone, he bowled the jury for a six.

“How could my client, riddled with killer rat genes and aged fifty six, continue to amass the energy, year after year, to fight his systemic urge to kill? Was it Edzel John Crump who walked next door, a mild mannered inventor with strikingly rodential features, or was it his, Edzel John Crump’s, mind and body, momentarily consumed by its appalling killer rat heritage?”

He waved a fist full of blurred and inaccurate medical charts at them.

“We’ve all heard the expression ‘he’s a dirty rat’. I would suggest my client is no such thing. You, the members of the jury, must look at this slightly mad inventor, fisherman and mechanic, and try to imagine him even contemplating such a murderous crime. You must ask yourselves whether a man; struggling with his wife’s infidelities, who took on the pastoral care of her seducer, would sink to such a level. How could Mr Crump make another man a cup of tea then shoot him without thinking about the terrible waste, not only of life, but of tea, milk and sugar? My client, a repairer of lawnmowers and a connoisseur of medicinal malt whisky – yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, medicinal malt whisky - is not a killer. The man standing before you is being accused of a heinous crime when in actual fact Edzel John Crump is as mild mannered as a summer’s day.”

Professor Zooplink now raised the bar by lowering his voice.

“It was truly unfortunate that my client Mr Edzel John Crump, wronged husband and neighbourhood Teasmade, had run out of malt whisky the week of this sad occurrence. It has been proven in our own laboratories time after time that if you give a killer rat enough whisky it becomes a happy and innocuous thing. In fact, after ingesting a pint of cheap whisky, our oldest and most respected, laboratory born, cold hearted killer rat Geoffrey, actually smiled. “

He faced the jury. “My client, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is as innocent as a bread and butter pudding.”

Judge Pod arose and began his summing up and directing of the jury. He thundered at them that they, gene riddled to a man and woman and teetering on the very edge of the abyss of their own genomic destiny, could not in any conceivable way even begin to contemplate convicting Mr Crump.

They, he said of the prosecution, were stuck in a time warp. They obviously didn’t give a toss for the massive weight of modern genetic evidence. They had been sneaky in their reliance on proven legal methodology and had attempted to try poor Edzel purely on the laws of statute, honest fact, blindingly obvious evidence and totally reliable eye witness testimony instead of looking into the binding connectivity of everything in space, earth, fire and water. Where in their testimony was the Zen, the yin, the yan, the beating heart of mankind, that crazy indecent naked ape, full of hope, fear, self loathing and muesli, but also full of love, imagination, riboflavin, raspberry jam and rats. He directed the jury to find Edzel not guilty and to find it in their hearts to make it a condition of his freedom that the local hospital trust prescribe him, free of charge for the rest of his natural life, ad infinitum, and in God’s name, forever and ever amen, malt whisky as a natural suppressant to his killer rat proclivities.

The jury obeyed. Edzel walked free, out of the stuffy courthouse into the sunlight. A car awaited, an old blue Ford. He climbed into the back next to the auxiliary nurse from Number Two, provider of the charts, and was driven home by Professor Zooplink, also known as Graham Crump, Edzel’s son, the embarrassing gay offspring Lucinda could never get over. They swung by a supermarket and picked up a couple of bottles of rat gene suppressant then went home to celebrate in Edzel’s vegetative garden.

About a month after the trial Edzel went fishing at the lake, only to be joined by Judge Pod who took up the cast next to him. They nodded. Pod tied a .45 Waltham short barrel to a cut line, then cast it far out into the water.
Edzel watched with a sort of horrified fascination.

Pod wore a satisfied smile. He turned to Edzel, “Yours was a Peacemaker, wasn’t it?”

Edzel topped up his whisky and poured one for the judge.

“Preferred to call it a Voodoo special.”

“Oh well then, mine must be a Dead Wife Dandy.”

“My God,” said Edzel,” was it the rat?”

“No, not me, I’m riddled with parsnip.”

“Parsnip?” Edzel was amused.

“Yes,” said the judged, “Ever heard of a vegetable forming intent”