Gossip...

Related  to the short story "Every Night"...

Jake and Amanda were both sitting drinking coffee in the local village coffee shop. There had been a long period of silence between the two that needed to be broken. They were not good enough friends yet to sit in silence and be comfortable, that comes with time. The quietness needed to be broken, words needed to be said, about anything before it was too late. Peter scanned the room of other people drinking their coffee and chatting, and spotted a Neighbourhood watch card sitting on the top of the desk near the Toffee cakes. It gave him a conversation starter.

“Have you heard about Peter?”, Jake broke the silence with, looking at Amanda with a shocked look on his face as if to stir her curiosity even further.

“No, what?” she replied, interested by the ice breaker and the expression on his face.

“Well apparently he got arrested the other day for all those disappearances that have been happening in Windlesham recently” he replied.

“No, you're joking aren't you? Isn't he the head of the neighbourhood watch or something?” she moved her arms forward and put down her coffee. This was a good sign.

“Yep, he sure is, that's what makes it so strange. Maybe he took things a bit too far on his 'nightly' patrols” retorted Jake.

“I can't believe it” replied Amanda. She didn't know Peter very well, but as a new resident to the village she knew him by reputation. The only time he had met him was the day she had introduced himself to her whilst she was moving in. He had handed her a neighbourhood watch card as she was lifting boxes from the back of her car to take into her new flat. He had seemed quite nice and honest at the time, but then I guess you can never really tell what is under the surface of anybody's persona, especially a serial killer, if true that was.

“Yes, it is a shock” Jake said. He had always hated Peter, his air of arrogance and self belief in himself as an authority figure in the village, all came due to his position as the head of the local neighbourhood watch. It was as if he believed himself to be on the same terms as a police man, one that actually did real sleuthing, Sherlock Holmes style.

He was often seen by people as he walked around the village streets shouting at young kids to stop playing football against the wall of the closed down pub, or making comments about people smoking as he passed them in the road. “Disgusting habit”, he would say in an over exaggerated mutter, ensuring that the people he was commenting on could hear him clearly as he passed. 

He was someone who had obviously tried to join the police force but hadn't been allowed in for some reason. Maybe during his interview he had hidden his psychopathic traits in his replies to questions so well that they thought he wasn't the right type of maniac to join the police force. Or maybe he just didn't have what it took to be a lazy desk sitting, drug raid stealing standard beat cop, someone so lazy they forced potential criminals to do all their work for them by tricking them into not giving “no comment interviews”. Who knew, he just seemed like the standard over bearing, local douche-bag with a power trip, and to be honest, he could well believe that Peter could have committed those horrible murders.

“To be honest I don't really know him Jake” Amanda said, “He seemed okay when I was moving in, but since that one time I've never ever spoke to him. I guess I've always been too busy at work to see him”.

“Yes that's the funny thing about Peter”, Jake replied, “He's never ever worked a real job, not one that I know of. It seems like the neighbourhood watch was his whole life, always walking around the village in circles and telling kids off for having fun. To be honest he was always on a power trip and I think that was what drove him. I can't even imagine him sitting behind a normal desk doing a 9-5 job”. 

It was all too true, Peter had never held down a job for more than half a year, moving from job to job, from Sales to even being an Estate Agent for a while. He even worked as a driver for a building company for a bit. He was one of those people who literally had done "this n that", his entire working life, never staying long at one place for some reason always moving quickly from one employer to another. 

It was as if he could never find a job that suited him, or one that fulfilled his base desires. Desires that could only be satisfied by his extra curricular activities in what looked like being a serial killer fulfilled. When weighing it up and looking at all the known facts, the time after the pub landlord had gone missing and Peter had appeared with a bandaged arm the next day. Something he said was just an accident at home in the kitchen, it all sort of added up.

“You know what”, Amanda said, “Peter's wife, that Sarah, she appeared the day after that pub landlord had gone missing and at the same time Peter had a bandage around his arm, and she had a black eye”, “Really”, Jake jumped in, “Yes I remember seeing her in the local shop and out of concern I asked her what had happened.”, “Yeah”, Jake said leaning forward interested to hear some missing part of the story. “She reckoned that she had walked into a door, but I didn't believe it. That's what every battered spouse says when they get a slap isn't it?”.

“Well”, interrupted Jake, “there had always been a bit of concern about those two's marriage, I'd heard rumours about loud arguments late at night and it wasn't the first time those two had appeared with various injuries and excuses about how they got them”.

It was true, the village gossip about loud arguments, and possible marital abuse, from Peter and Sarah's family home, had been going around for a while now. Nearly the whole village had commented on it at one point or another.

“Maybe Sarah had actually known about Peter's neighbourly killing spree, maybe she had been in on it as well.” said Jake, trying to expand the story, fantasising about a couple like Fred and Rose West. “Maybe there is a load of dead bodies in their garden just waiting to be dug up” he added, his brain on overdrive, thinking about all the mad and wild things that those two could have got up to.

“Oh my God”, cried Amanda, “Just think about it, a serial killer in our own little village, I can't believe it. This place seems so serene and small. You could not believe that....” her sentence stopped in mid pause as her eyes turned to the left of Jakes face. Her jaw slightly dropping in disbelief.

Jake wondered what had caused her to stop her flow of fantasising and turned his head towards the door, only to see Peter standing there, cleanly dressed and shaved, and all alone. The silence in the coffee shop was deafening, as couples at each table stopped talking and it felt like everyone's eyes were pointed towards Peter.

“Hi there”, said Peter in a calm, almost satisfactory manner. He was out of nick, if he ever truly had been in one, and if he had, he hadn't been charged with anything. There was no real proof he had been killing and disposing of people apart from a sole footprint found in the mud behind "The Sun" pub, the night the landlord had gone missing.

Peter started to walk slowly around the coffee shop as all the people stared at him in awe. He came up to Jake and Amanda's table first with a big sleazy smile on his face that he was half trying to hide but nothing could control the mannerism of someone who was very self pleased with himself.

He came up to Amanda and pulled out a neighbourhood watch card. “I don't think we have talked much I believe” he said, thrusting the card out towards the stunned woman. “Amanda isn't it?”, “Yes” she stuttered in reply. “Well I run the local neighbourhood watch group around here, so if you see something odd or suspicious, just give us a call, I'm always around to help.” Amanda took the card from his hand with a shaky hand and in stone cold silence.

“Oh, I'm Peter by the way, I'm sure you've heard about me”, he said with a smile before turning to Jake and smiling. He knew Jake the rat had been slagging him off about something before he came into the shop. It was just his nature to gossip and make stuff up to get at the ladies. “Hi there Jake how's Julie doing oh no sorry Jackie wasn't it, I forget, so many names to remember”. The jibe dug deep and ruined any moment that may have been and Jake just stared back at Peter before he turned away and moved on to another table to hand out more cards.

Amanda was confused. Was Jake just making up gossip for fun or was Peter really a sicko on the lose. Peter just looked at her in stunned silence and shrugged his shoulders. Maybe their gossiping to break the silence of an uncomfortable coffee date had gone a bit too far.

“Well I guess everyone can make mistakes” he said to her and raised his hands up in a statement of confusion. 

Gossip never ever got to the real truth and usually led to wild rumours and stories about people going around the village. Maybe he had been totally wrong about Peter all this time and the stories of his arrest were untrue. He would have to double check, but if Peter was a serial killer surely he would not be standing right here in the local coffee shop, handing out neighbourhood watch cards, with no sign of guilt or shame on his face at all. Maybe he was just that good a liar, a sociopath who could convince God himself he was an angel when he deserved to be in hell roasting on a fire for eternity. Who knew.

Jake looked at Amanda and whispered “Sorry”, and then they fell into another long lull of silence as Peter walked out of the shop. While the rest of the people drinking started talking and gossiping again, Jake was trying hard to think of something else to chat Amanda up with. They say silence is golden, but it certainly isn't when you are on your first date.

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