a domestic incident

"I'm buggered if I can think of an interesting introduction to this one," grumbled Mike Oxenham.

He threw his notebook down onto his desk which stood in the corner of the Westing Chronicle newsroom, a room full of computers and coffee mugs, warbling phones and furrowed brows. Mike turned to Theo, a junior reporter who sat at the next desk frantically typing. He was crouched over his keyboard, his face almost touching the keys.

"Fifty years of married life," exclaimed Mike wearily. "And the most exciting thing they ever did was go on a day trip to Morecambe in 1953..."

Theo continued to bang away at his keyboard.

Mike sighed and turned his attention to the confusion of messages and phone numbers on sticky yellow slips of paper that were plastered over his desk among pages torn from his notebook. The pages were scrawled with unreadable shorthand, quotes he would later unsuccessfully attempt to decipher, let alone match to any of the news stories he was supposed to be working on.

"I hate bloody golden weddings," he said. "I've got sixteen stories on the go, no, tell a lie, eighteen. There's some piss boring planning meeting I'm down in the diary for tonight and a cheque presentation to follow up tomorrow morning." Mike sighed again. "There's no way I'm going to have all this crap done by tomorrow. I'll have to ditch some of it."

He picked up a handful of papers from the desk and let them fall. They were blown back and forth by the musty stream of air which - for some mysterious reason known only to the visiting service engineer - happened to be blasting from the air conditioning vent in the ceiling above Mike's desk with the force of a high speed hair drier.

Mike pretended to comb and style his dark, curly hair beneath the air vent, but no-one sitting nearby seemed to either notice his play acting or find it particularly comical, so he turned back to Theo.

"Here, you're the expert at this kind of thing, see what you can make of it," he said. He thrust his notebook between Theo's face and the keyboard, and perched his bulky, grey-trousered haunches on the edge of Theo's desk.

Theo, his concentration finally broken, stopped typing and looked up. He brushed a fringe of fine, mousy hair from his face and pushed his imitation tortoiseshell glasses up his narrow nose.

"What's this?" Theo asked irritably.

"Another bloody golden wedding," explained Mike. "This old couple up at Sunnyside Court. See what you can make of it".

Theo took the notebook, glanced quickly at the scrawled blue biro jottings on the page and passed it back to Mike.

"Well?" asked Mike.

"I can't understand a word of it," said Theo. "What's it supposed to be, some type of Serbo-Croatian shorthand?"

"Yea, very funny," said Mike wearily. " Now see if you can put your shining wit to good use and do something with this crap."

"What's the angle on it?" asked Theo.

"Well that's just the problem," said Mike. "There isn't one. Dull as dishwater both of them. Married fifty bloody years and never done a thing worth writing home about. She crochets tea cosies and he grows tomatoes. Great, hey?"

"How about something to do with the war?" asked Theo. "That's always a good thing to open with. If they've been together for fifty years then they must have been married in 1940 and Mr...what's his name?"

"Mr Burgess, Mr 'Arry Burgess," said Mike in a broad Westingshire accent.

"OK then," continued Theo, "this Mr Burgess must have been in the war. He must have witnessed the liberation of Tripoli or parachuted over Brittany or something."

"No such luck," grumbled Mike. "He never got sent further than Southampton. The silly bugger got his hand caught in a lathe when he was an apprentice engineer. His right hand's mostly stumps."

Mike fired an imaginary gun into the newsroom, then held up his hand, wiggling his fingers like a frantic sea anemone. "No trigger finger," he explained.

"Well, that sounds rather interesting. Surely you could work around that," said Theo.

"Oh yea, thanks, great," said Mike sarcastically. He put on a dramatic voice and - pretending to pluck each word he spoke from the air and place it on a large invisible page in front of him - pronounced majestically:

"Marriage goes gold for two fingered cripple."

Mike snorted like a horse on a cold day. "That's really sentimental," he said. "The subs are just going to love that".

He mimicked the voice of Andrea, a middle aged former English teacher turned sub editor, whose tongue clicked against her teeth when she spoke: "Ohh Mike, Mike mind if I just have a word about the golden wedding, if you don't mind. It's a nicely worded piece, but I wasn't sure about the phrase love struck cripple so I've scribbled that paragraph out and pushed the bit about Mrs Burgess's collection of crocheted tea cosies up to the top. I'll leave it with you for now, but if you could get it back to me by ten that would be a great help. I'm trying to lay out page seventeen, and I think I can just squeeze it in between the Exhaust Centre Ad and Nature Ramble Notice Board."

Theo stifled a yawn. He'd heard the same impersonation a hundred times before and he was beginning to find Mike rather tiresome. However, he obligingly turned the yawn into a smile and continued to grin inanely just for long enough to satisfy Mike's ego. Then he reluctantly picked up the notebook and made a fresh attempt to decipher the clumsily-scribbled pages.

"How about this then," offered Theo. "Popular Sunnyside Court resident, Mr Harry Burgess, this week celebrated a golden opportunity he took over half a century ago. For when Mr Burgess, a retired engineer, met lovely Mildred in an air raid shelter during the second world war he decided she was a chance too good to miss. As the bombs rained down outside he proposed to her and they were married soon afterwards. On Saturday friends and relatives gathered to celebrate fifty years of blah de blah de blah...."

"Hmmm," murmured Mike. "They didn't exactly say it happened like that."

"So?" said Theo. "Honesty and accuracy are hardly the Oxenham trade marks are they!"

"What do you mean by that?" asked Mike.

"Look, sorry Mike," said Theo avoiding Mike's glare by peering studiously at the text on the screen of his computer, "I've got to get this finished. That's the best intro I can come up with right now".

"Sod the intro," said Mike standing up and puffing out his chest like an angry pigeon. "You're way out of line".

"OK, I'm sorry and everything Mike," apologised Theo. "But I've really got to press on with this."

"No way. You can't worm your way out of it that easily," said Mike pulling Theo's hand from the keyboard as he started to type. "What gives you the right to criticise my work? How long have you been doing this job? Less than a year isn't it?"

Theo peered nervously up at him.

"Look Mike, I wasn't trying to..." he began to explain, but Mike interrupted him.

"Just because everyone thinks the sun shines out of your arse doesn't mean you can mouth off reporters who were getting front page by-lines before you'd even learned to spell your own fucking name!"

Mike's simmering anger was fortunately quelled by the sudden appearance of the news editor, Liz Crabtree.

"When you've quite finished tearing each other apart boys, I've got a job for you both," she said. She spoke in her usual sharp, slightly over-officious voice, the voice that - coupled with an aggressive nature, incongruous to her slight build and timid features - had earned her the nickname Crabby.

Her often abrupt and sometimes quite brutish style was excused by the kinder of her colleagues in the news room as an act she put on to compensate for her lack of height and mouselike frailty, an act embittered by the misery of her recent divorce. Others, less understanding, would reflect that, even if her harshness were put on, then she was guilty of over acting, and wondered how her husband had put up with her for as long as he did. Even Mike, her only real friend in the newsroom, referred to her as the A.F.B. - the 'Angry Feminist Bitch' - in phrases such as, 'whose head is the A.F.B. biting off now,' or, 'the A.F.B. will throw a fucking fit if I don't finish this story by lunchtime.' All agreed, Liz Crabtree was not a woman of obvious sensitivity. Indeed, she broke the news of an accidental death as if it were a dry biscuit.

"There's been a fatal on the Carver's Green Estate," she said.

Mike's eyes lit up. He cackled like a hungry crow informed that the carcass of a cat was to be found freshly splattered on the ring road. He thumped his fist triumphantly on the desk.

"What's the score?" he asked "A smash up?"

"No, it was some kind of domestic accident. We had a call two minutes ago from David Perry, down in advertising. His mother lives nearby and she rang in to tell him about it. David seemed to think it was quite messy".

Theo grimaced.

"How many dead?" asked Mike.

"I think it was just one man."

"Local?" asked Mike, his excitement growing.

"Yes I think so," said Liz. "David said his mother had known the man for years."

"Bloody great. I'll get down there straight away then."

Mike pulled his jacket off the back of the chair and started to put it on as he made his way to the door.

"Mike," snapped Crabby. "Mike!" she hollered.

Mike paused as he opened the door to the corridor outside the newsroom. He looked back over his shoulder. "Yea?" he shouted.

"Try and get a word with as many neighbours and relatives as you can," she said firmly. "But don't get carried away."

"Hey, you know me," said Mike. He grinned then disappeared through the door.

"And take Theo with you," she called after him.

Mike reappeared. "Bloody hell," he said, his face creasing with impatience. "Come on then," he called to Theo.

"Go on, get going," echoed Crabby.

"Shall I check the address with Dave downstairs?" asked Theo.

"Just get on with it," snapped Crabby. "This isn't a vicarage tea party you're going to."

Theo began to mumble, "But what if we can't...." Crabby interrupted him.

"When you get to the green just look for the ambulance," she said. "It's a big white van with blue flashing lights on top." The pitch of her voice rose as she shifted from sarcasm to bad temper. "Now get a move on, or I'll send Geoff instead."

"I'm gone," said Theo grabbing his jacket and jogging across the office, knocking a third-full polystyrene cup of coffee over Theresa of 'Talk to Theresa - a problem aired is a problem shared' fame, leaving her with a dark brown stain slowly seeping into her wool mix skirt and a mouthful of curses.

Liz Crabtree shook her head.

"I give up," she said. "Mike thinks he's chief reporter at the Daily Muck and Theo - God knows where he thinks he is!"

Theo jogged down the stairs. He jumped the last five carpeted steps and landed heavily in reception beside an old lady in a shabby tartan coat. She was standing by the wall squinting at sepia street scenes of old Westing. The faded photos hung beside a bronze bust of the Chronicle's founder, Westing's most famous son, the sheep breeder and Crimean War hero, Major Hardright-Woolhead. Startled by Theo's sudden arrival, the old lady emitted a little shriek and clutched her alligator skin handbag tightly to her chest.

She looked towards the reception desk where a mechanic in grimy, oil-stained overalls with Westing Garages in stick on letters on the back, was drooling over the morning receptionist Samantha who, as usual, was baring a great deal of her ample, tanned bosom. The mechanic glanced up briefly. He pushed three greasy, black-nailed fingers up the sleeve of his overall and indifferently scratched his arm. As Theo crashed through the doors, the mechanic returned his attention to Samantha's copious cleavage. And from the way she smiled and fluttered her heavily mascarared eyelashes at him, it appeared she didn't mind at all.

The old lady in the scarf and coat looked away muttering to herself and searched through her handbag for a tissue to loudly blow her nose into.

As Theo arrived outside he saw Mike get into his Escort which was in its customary parking space beneath the chestnut tree. The tree grew at the very edge of the lawn bordering the car park. It had been there a lot longer than the Chronicle offices and sometimes protestingly pushed out a gnarled root, rupturing the car park surface, like the finger of a buried monster trying to claw its way out of a tarmac tomb.

With the wild revving of an engine tuned for acceleration rather than economy, Mike reversed the Escort and roared through the car park towards the entrance to the Chronicle building where Theo stood. The Escort screeched to a halt beside Theo, a flared wheel arch narrowly missing his shin. Mike leaned over and opened the passenger door and shouted up at Theo:

"Did you bring my note pad?"

"Your note pad?" queried Theo.

"Shit! You mean you haven't got it?" asked Mike impatiently.

"No," said Theo.

"Well for fuck's sake go back and get it then," said Mike.

"Where is it?" asked Theo.

"How the fuck should I know? You had it last!" Mike snapped. It was only as Theo bounded back up the stairs, watched disapprovingly by the old lady in reception, that it occurred to him that it wasn't really his duty to fetch Mike's note pad. But by then it was too late to return and argue the point.

Although they were both general reporters, Theo had been at the Westing Chronicle for just fourteen months, whereas Mike had been there for over nine years. During those years, Mike had seen many come and go and move on to better things. Although each week Mike threatened to leave, and at least once a month was threatened with the sack for some offensive remark or libellous story, he remained at the Westing Chronicle as immovable as the bronze bust of Major Hardright-Woolhead in reception. More than once he had turned down the opportunity to become chief reporter at the Chronicle and had refused numerous job offers from more prestigious journals. Yet, he never missed an opportunity to bitch about the 'good fortune' and 'lucky breaks' of former Chronicle reporters when he saw them on local TV or read their reports in the national press.

As they drove up through the town, Theo maintained a tight grip on the arm rest of the door. He had cause to shut his eyes on five separate occasions: twice when Mike jumped red lights; thirdly when he overtook a car trying to reverse into a parking space and narrowly missed an oncoming van; fourthly when he sped beneath the narrow archway of the clock tower without slowing; and lastly when Mike had to swerve round a shopping trolley which a little old lady had pushed out on to the High Street in front of her as she peered between two parked cars to see what was coming.

Theo reopened his eyes as the Escort careered down the hill past the park. It was an unusually warm day for April and children were gathered round an ice cream van parked on the concrete by the pond. Sunlight danced on the murky water as it rippled in the wake of a lone duck's swimming.

From the road, Theo could see the grass in the park was littered with brightly coloured crisp packets and sweet wrappers. It must be impossible for litter pickers to keep up with the vast quantities of rubbish dropped by kids over a hot half term, thought Theo, that was if the council still employed such staff after the recent cutbacks. They had probably contracted the work out to a private firm of litter pickers, no doubt calling themselves Recreational Environment Control Consultants, or something similar.

A while back, Theo had written a feature about a firm called Graffiti Busters that every so often came down from Swindon to clean the walls of Westing. And it wasn't just walls they needed to clean either. Last time Theo had strolled through the park, the plastic seats on the swings, the slide, the spotted red and white roof of the giant mushroom-shaped play den were all covered with strange signatures in black marker pen, the same ones over and over again. It was the kind of thing that filled the Chronicle's letters page; the vandals' mothers writing in to blame the council for the disgraceful state of the play areas.

They turned into the Carver's Green Estate, and drove along the horseshoe-shaped road, slowing down as they passed each side road to look for the tell-tale police cars and gaggle of worried neighbours. Theo spotted them down Brixham Way. Mike slammed his brakes on to make the sharp left hand turn into the cul-de-sac of small brick bungalows. They were quiet homes - mainly lived in by retired couples - with uncluttered rectangular gardens dominated by neatly cut lawns out front and polished cars on the drive; Japanese saloons and German hatchbacks. Mike stopped the Escort opposite number 12 - three doors down from where the accident had happened. Theo jotted down in his notebook: 17 Brixham Way, 2 police, one ambulance (Westing District Hospital).

As he got out of the car Theo felt the nearness of death. It shrouded the street in a putrid vapour, invading his body. It rushed into his throat and lungs, then settled in the pit of his stomach with a heavy, sickening sensation that made him almost choke.

Once rats had got under the floorboards of the house in London Road, near the old grammar school on the eastern edge of Westing, where Theo's family had lived during the summer of seventy-six. He was only nine years old at the time, but he could still remember the ghostly scratching and scurrying beneath the dining room floor and in the wall spaces those long, hot nights. He remembered how his dad had lifted the floor boards with a claw hammer and laid down handfuls of poison pellets for the rats with a murmur of bon appetite.

"What does bonapity mean?" he'd asked his mum.

"It's just your father being stupid," she'd said (Theo's dad was often, and sometimes quite spectacularly, stupid).

A week or so later Theo's mum complained that there was a nasty smell in the house. She poured two litres of concentrated bleach down the loo and down the sink and down the plug hole in the bath, but the smell just got worst. Theo's dad reluctantly bought a large drain-cleaning brush with a long flexible handle that fitted together in one metre lengths like that of a chimney sweep. He dug up the turf above the rusty man hole cover in the back garden, forced it open with a crow bar and pushed the big brush through the drains.

His dad managed to cover his clothes with so much sludge, his mum had to disinfect the laundry bowl and washing machine with Dettol. But it was no good. The disgusting smell beneath the house just wouldn't go away.

One evening, Theo and his mum and dad and his older sister Lucy and his younger brother Graham had sat down to dinner. The stench was so bad it made Graham physically sick. He puked on his chicken casserole, and his mum threw her plate against the wall, breaking it in two and splattering little gravied pieces of leek and carrot and chicken over the rest of the family. His dad left the room rolling up his sleeves as he went. He returned a few moments later with his claw-headed hammer and a scowl of fierce intent.

Theo feared that he was going to smash his mum's skull in with the hammer. Instead, his dad pulled back the carpet and began to yank up the floor boards one by one. The family gathered behind him in a huddle, peering over his shoulder. Beneath the fourth board in from the wall was the decomposing body of a huge rat. Theo's dad prodded the carcass with the handle of the hammer. The remains of the rat promptly collapsed spilling out a wriggling pool of maggots and a death stench so overpowering Theo could taste it on his tongue.

Fourteen years later - as Theo stood shielded behind the door of Mike's Escort - he experienced that taste once more. It was as if he had bitten into a rotten fruit, a badly stored apple - slushy, maggoty brown and spotted with white mould. He tried to spit the taste away, but it persisted on the tip of his tongue.

Theo and Mike watched and waited. The ambulancemen were talking to a policewoman, who made notes and gestured up at the roof and then down at a blanket-covered body that lay on the tarmac drive. Beneath the body was a dark liquid stain that looked as if it might have been left by oil dripped from the leaky sump of a parked car or an evaporated puddle of rainwater. After a while, another man in a check jacket arrived. He talked briefly with the police woman, then she and two ambulancemen and an ambulancewoman gingerly lifted the body onto a stretcher.

Theo glanced at his watch then scribbled in his notebook: Three ambulance persons remove body - 10.17 a.m.. Elderly neighbours (No. 15) stood anxiously by fence. One (with glasses and pale blue knitted shawl) cried into large handkerchief, comforted by relative or friend ??? Interview to confirm - see if eye witness.

"Relax," said Mike. "We'll go and have a word with them once that lot have got the body shifted."

Theo sat down on the corner of the Escort's front passenger seat, with his right leg inside the car and his left leg dangling out. The corrugated plastic sole of his right shoe pushed into the bobbly, ash and fag-end covered rubber floor mat on the car floor, whilst the scuffed toe of his left shoe made patterns in the loose gravel at the edge of the road.

"How do you think it happened?" asked Theo.

"Some kind of stupid accident," said Mike.

"How can you tell?" asked Theo.

"Oh, these old fuddie duddies are always doing bloody stupid things. Remember a couple of years back when that old granny burned down three houses on Gloucester Road?"

"Oh...yea," said Theo vaguely.

"Remember how she did it?" Mike asked, roughly pulling a cigarette from the red and white box of Rothmans perched on the dashboard.

Theo shook his head. Mike told him, violently emphasising each syllable.

"She put a bloody three-bar heater in the bed to warm the fucking blankets up and.....WOOOOOSSSSHHH!!" he shouted, throwing his hands into the air. He half-smirked, half-sneered as Theo flinched from the sudden violence of the gesture. "One dry roasted pensioner and two homeless families, just like that."

Mike took from his pocket a disposable lighter of translucent red plastic, flicked it aflame and lit up his fag. He wound the window down and blew out a slow, steady stream of smoke.

"Just look at that lot," said Mike, gesturing at the group of elderly neighbours gathered anxiously at the edge of the dead man's garden. "Bloody senile the lot of them."

The ambulance began to slowly drive off. As it passed them they grew silent.

"Poor bastard" said Mike softly.

After the ambulance had gone. Mike craned his neck to check his appearance in the rear view mirror, straightened his tie and wiped a speck of stray ash from his moustache.

"Right then," he said, raising his eyebrows expectantly at Theo, and enthusiastically clasping his hands together with a hollow clap. "Let's go and find out how the silly bugger did it."

It turned out that Mr Eric Piggot, a sixty-eight-year-old pensioner with an artificial hip, had fallen from the roof of his bungalow whilst attempting to adjust the position of his satellite dish. He had fallen onto a home-made screwdriver holder, which he had carelessly left on the tarmac at the foot of his stepladder.

The holder was of an unfortunate design - a block of wood with holes of various shapes and sizes hollowed into it, each hole housing a different screwdriver handle, a row of sharp metal shafts pointing upwards. A seven inch Phillips had skewered Mr Piggot's right ventricle like it was a cube of lamb breast on a kebab. Three shorter screwdrivers had embedded themselves in his lungs.

"Just Like a pin cushion," the neighbour with the shawl told Theo and Mike. She had heard Mr Piggot shout as he slipped on the aluminium step, the dull thump as his body hit the tarmac, the shrill scream and then the silence. "I thought, oh, it sounds like Eric's dropped something, then I heard him shout, and then there was nothing."

Theo had been surprised at how calmly she'd spoken, as if she were describing the plot of a horror film she'd recently viewed on video, rather than any real-life tragedy.

"I went outside to see what was going on. I wasn't meaning to pry or anything. I was just concerned about how quiet it was all of a sudden. He was just lying there and I said to myself 'Oh Christ Ivy, whatever has Eric gone and done?' So I popped across the lawn and I called out 'Mr Piggot are you all right love?' He just lay there, still as you like. But I never realised he was, well, you know, I just thought he'd had a bang on the head. I knelt down and shook his shoulder and then Mr Winthrop from number 14 across the way there came out with a bucket of water to wash his Polo. He saw what had happened, and he come rushing over. He turned Eric over and the handles were sticking out of him, yellow and red plastic, like pins in a pin cushion they were. And ohhhh." She squealed dramatically and grabbed the sleeve of Theo's dog-tooth jacket, her eyeballs seeming suddenly to bulge at the drama of it all. "I've never seen so much blood! All over his jersey it were and dribbling out of his mouth and all down his chin, just like my Denise's littlun', Nathan, with his mug of squash." She dabbed at her eyes. "Poor old Brenda. She's next door now, just sitting there, she is, just sitting there. It's a terrible, terrible thing."

Then, of course, Mike had to barge into number nineteen where the bereaved Mrs Brenda Piggot was being comforted by her immediate neighbours the Beresfords. Mrs Piggot had been batch-baking miniature quiches for the Town's Woman's Guild's antiques afternoon. She had run out of eggs and so had popped up to the shop on Carver's Green. She returned with a dozen size four free-range, a small tub of Flora and a carton of semi-skimmed milk to discover her husband skewered to death on the drive.

Mr Beresford, to his credit, did try to stop Mike entering his house. Although he was not a weak man he was no match for Mike who lived up to his boast that 'once he'd got a foot in the door nothing got in his way.' He shoved Mr Beresford to one side, quite roughly, and headed inside. Mr Beresford followed Mike, half-heartedly attempting to grab him. Theo trailed uncertainly behind them.

Mike strode muddily down the Axminster in the hall. He peered into each room he passed like a Gestapo officer hunting for hidden Jews, until he discovered Mrs Piggot and Mrs Beresford sitting together on one of twin beds in the master bedroom. It was immediately obvious which one of them was Mrs Piggot. She was the one whose eyes were not rimmed red with tears, who did not tremble jellylike with sadness, who did not in anguish stab her finger nails into her palm through the folds of a sodden handkerchief, who did not even look up as Mike strode into the room, but just sat and stared at the rose bud pattern on the wall.

"Mrs Piggot?" said Mike.

She slowly swivelled her head toward him, and looked up with dull zombiefied eyes. Mike grinned. He always got his best quotes from the recently shocked.

As it turned out, Mike was forbidden to use any of Mrs Piggot's comments in his report on the accident. Liz Crabtree promised Mr Beresford's solicitor that she would scrap the 'unfortunate interview' - or 'malicious interrogation' as the solicitor put it - on the condition that Mr Beresford would drop the assault charges he had threatened to make against Mike.

As a result, Theo had to visit Mr Piggot's younger brother, Malcolm, a partner in Piggot and Skinner Concrete, for a quote.

Theo feared that Malcolm Piggot might have been informed by Mr Beresford of the Chronicle's lack of respect to his recently bereaved sister-in-law. So, it was with some trepidation that he stood between the bulbous pillars that supported the porch of Malcolm Piggot's self-built, six-bedroomed, triple-garaged, mock-Georgian residence.

Rather nervously Theo knocked on the heavy oak door of the house with the polished mane of a bronze lion's head, cast in mid-roar. At the sound of someone stirring within in, he steeled himself for the possibility of verbal abuse or even physical violence. He glanced back over his shoulder across the concrete patio, past the ornamental fountain (a concrete cherub pissing into the mouth of a concrete dolphin) and beyond the entrance gate (inevitably flanked by a pair of prostrated concrete lions) to where his rusty Renault five was parked.

After a few moments, the door was opened by a tall, thick-limbed man. The greyness of the man's slicked-back hair suggested he was in his fifties, but he looked in very good shape for his years, with all the acquired strength of three decades spent lifting sacks of concrete.

"What can I do you for then squire," said the man brusquely as he towered above Theo. Theo wished that he had left the gate open, and wondered how easy it would be to scale the wall, as he timidly revealed to the hulking giant before him that he was from the Westing Chronicle.

To Theo's great relief, however, Mr Piggot showed him no animosity. In fact, he appeared positively pleased to see him. Malcolm Piggot spent almost an hour telling Theo what a terrible women his brother's wife was. As he ranted on, his own wife - a plumpish, tanned blonde, nearer Theo's age than her husband's - kept them supplied with tea and assorted biscuits. The young wife's ears, neck, wrists and fingers jangled with gold trinkets. She wore jeans so tight that Theo could not help but notice the way they bit into the crease of her crotch. Whenever his wife entered the room Mr Piggot fell sad and silent, only continuing with his condemnation of his sister-in-law when she went out again, closing the door behind her.

"She should never have made him go up the bloody ladder, the silly bitch," said Malcolm Piggot rubbing his huge hands violently together as if he had his sister-in-law's neck between them. "That cow nagged him to his death," he said vehemently, looking Theo unswervingly in the eye. "You know what I mean son? She was one of those old bitches who thinks she's running the show the whole bloody time. She acted like she were bloody royalty. Eric, God bless him, he didn't know how the hell to handle her." He added fiercely "You're not writing this down I hope mate. This is strictly between you and me." As he spoke, Mr Piggot firmly tapped his own chest with a blunt forefinger, and then pointed it menacingly at Theo. "Got it?"

"Yea, yea. Got it" mumbled Theo, nodding. He hurriedly stopped his pretence of making notes. "That's probably just about everything anyway, thank you very much."

The mini tape recorder that Mike had made him conceal in his jacket pocket suddenly seemed to increase in weight. Theo felt the recorder whir against his chest, and he wished that he had never let Mike talk him into using it. He prayed that it would not suddenly click off in the uncomfortable silence.

"Well if there's nothing else..." said Mr Piggot standing up.

"Urrmmm, I wondered if....?" Theo began to ask.

"Yea?" asked Mr Piggot, raising his eyebrows enquiringly.

"Well, the thing is, we like to include a photograph with the obituaries," mumbled Theo. "When it's for a popular member of the community like Eric, you know, as a gesture, if you like, to his memory for all the friends and relatives who will obviously see the paper, so I wondered if it might be possible to...."

"OK, OK mate. I'll see what I can do," said Malcolm Piggot. "I've got nothing of him by himself mind, but I think I've got a snapshot of all four of us taken a couple of months back, me and Trisha with him and Brenda, all together. I don't know if that'll be any good to you".

"That would be great. Thank you very much," said Theo with a sincere smile. "We can easily make an enlargement of your late brother from the photo. And we can let you have the picture back without causing any damage to the image of him or of you and Mrs Piggot...."

Mike Oxenham sat at his desk in the deserted newsroom. He switched off the tape recording of Theo's interview with Malcolm Piggot and took the headphones from his ears. 'Most of it was off the record,' Theo had cautioned Mike as he'd reluctantly handed the tape over before going home. 'I've written down the quotes we can use in my notebook. Liz said you might as well just tag them on the end of what you've written already.'

"Off the record, huh?" Mike muttered to himself. "Sorry mate. Mike Oxenham don't work that way."

What had been said had been said. It was all there on the tape. If that precocious wimp was too chicken to make something of the interview, that was up to him, but Mike was damned if he was going to waste quotes like those. With a little imagination he could work Malcolm Piggot's 'off-the-record' diatribe into quite a story. A wicked grin twitched briefly across Mike's face. Hell, some of the tabloids might even be interested in the story, if he faxed it through to them before he went home. With the photo and everything he might even earn himself a little extra beer money. All he needed was a decent angle on it, something nice n'spicy.

Mike got comfortable on his chair in front of the computer. He opened a new file. He looked at the blank screen for a moment, then tapped the Caps Lock key on his keyboard. He swigged the dregs of his coffee, wiped the back of his hand across his moustache and typed in the headline:

SHE NAGGED OUR ERIC TO DEATH.

He released the caps key, paused briefly, and then continued to type: Grief Stricken Brother Slams Henpecking Wife After Plastic-Hipped Pensioner Is Skewered By Screwdrivers.

Mike picked up the snapshot of the late Mr Piggot, his brother-in-law and the two wives. He held the photo gingerly between thumb and forefinger, narrowed his eyes and scrutinised it long and hard. If I can somehow get the young blonde into the story, he thought, it's got to be a winner. He put the photo down and began to type again: Accident Victim's Heartbroken Brother Finds Comfort in Sexy Young Bride.

Grinning widely Mike saved what he'd written and then took his diary from the drawer of his desk. He flipped through to the back pages where he kept a list of his contacts at the national papers. He choose a number, picked up the phone and dialled.

"Hello there, its Mike Oxenham. Can you put me through to Terry in the newsroom please. Cheers love...Hi Terry. How are you? It's Mike...No, Mike from the Westing Chronicle...Yea that's right, the gay jockey with AIDS story...Look Terry, I've turned up another little story here you might like to take a butchers at...Yea, sure...A man skewered to death on screwdrivers...Yea, that's right, screwdrivers...His brother-in-law's blaming the wife...No, she didn't exactly murder him. More kind of nagged him to death...Yea, yea. I've got bags of quotes from her and the brother-in-law...Also, he's got a really tasty wife...Yea, she's at least 25 years younger than him...I've got a photo of her here right now...Yes she is blonde...Oh absolutely - like melons...Thought you'd be interested...Of course...Look Terry, give me ten minutes and I'll fax a draft through to you. If you like the look of it I'll organise a courier for the tape and the photo...No I've not offered it to anyone else, not yet... OK then, ten minutes...Yea, speak to you later. Cheers mate."

Mike swivelled back to face the computer. He retrieved the story and began to bang away at the keyboard like a man possessed.