A Pain In The Arts

Chapter 1

DANIEL CROFT DROPS down beside her, presses his palm against the gaping gash in her throat, trying desperately to stem the pulsating, torrent of arterial blood.

He screams, begging for someone, anyone, to call for an ambulance. A young woman, a teenager, barely more a child, someone he would later come to know as Kate, comes tearing around the corner into the alleyway. She stops dead in her tracks and lifts her hand to her mouth, trying to stifle the cry of horror which escapes from her lips.

CALL AN AMBULANCE...QUICKLY Daniel yells.

She whips out a phone from her handbag, punches 000 into the keypad and lifts it to her ear. But Daniel doesn't hear the words she stammers into the mouthpiece.

Sally Croft looks up at her husband with terror in her pale green eyes. Terror at the knowledge of what they both know must be the inevitable outcome. Despite everything, he has tried, the bleeding will not stop. Her life is slipping away, pulsing out of her, pooling on the ground around her, soaking into the fabric of her dress and her husband's business suit.

Her panicked grip on Daniel's hand lessens and the terror in her eyes slowly ebbs. Then her eyes go dim and lifeless, and he knows, even though he refuses to acknowledge it, that she has gone. The ambulance arrives after only eight minutes, but by that time Sally Croft has been dead for six. The Paramedics don't even try to revive her. She has bled to death and there will be no coming back.

Sally is dead. So is their unborn son. Barely four months since conception, there is no hope for him either.

Daniel lifts her tiny, lifeless body into his arms and holds her tight. If only he'd been just one minute earlier. If only he hadn't suggested a night out on the town! If only he hadn't insisted she wait outside the restaurant while he went to fetch the car from the carpark. It was all his fault. Or at least that's how it seemed to Daniel.

Then he feels a gentle hand on his shoulder as one of the paramedics tries to get his attention, and the world begins to spin and everything goes black.

Sally's funeral was a lavish affair. They buried her in a Rosewood coffin decorated with polished brass handles, gleaming copper hinges and a burnished copper plaque on the lid. The plaque was engraved simply with her name, the date of her birth and that of her death. On top of the coffin they placed a mountain of flowers, roses and lilies arranged in a cascading blanket. So many flowers one could barely make out the burnished burgundy timber beneath.

Her brother gave a tear filled eulogy, expounding on the many and varied, wondrous achievements she had already accomplished during her far too brief existence. They sang hymns, prayed, cursed the monster who had taken their friend, their child, their sister, their workmate, and wept bitter tears at the senseless waste. One hundred and fourteen souls packed the chapel and Daniel was one of them.

Or so he'd been told.

One of the nurses at the sanatorium, had bathed him, shaved him, and dressed him in a black suit his brother William had loaned him, and just before ten, William and his wife Sylvia arrived, bundled Daniel and his wheelchair into their Ford, and took him to say his final farewell to his wife of just four years. Daniel didn't remember a second of it, or for that matter, anything from the night of Sally's murder, to the eighteenth of April, eleven weeks later.

The doctors said he'd simply shut down.

Daniel had always considered himself a capable sort of bloke. One who could cope with most of life's many curve balls. But not this one. His mind had snapped and he spent the best part of the next three months staring into space totally unresponsive. He dribbled, shit his pants, and chewed and swallowed automatically whenever someone stuffed food in his mouth. But apart from that, Daniel might as well have been a plastic shop dummy.

His breakdown was the only thing that kept the cops from arresting him on the spot.

It's a sad fact that the vast majority of homicides are committed by the victim's spouse or partner. When the young woman who phoned the ambulance found him, Daniel was kneeling beside his dying wife with a huge, blood soaked knife in his hand. No one else saw or heard her attacker. There were no fingerprints on the murder weapon other than Daniel's. No one had seen a deranged, blood spattered man, clothed from head to toe in black, running from the scene, and a thorough examination of the alleyway by a team of forensic experts turned up nothing of any note, and so, had Daniel not collapsed and then regressed into a semi comatose, vegetative state, the cops would have arrested him and charged him with Sally's murder. They would have also charged him with three others besides. Sally's killer had struck three times before over the previous four months, and the cops didn't have a clue.

But instead of arresting Daniel, a gaggle of Doctors all swore he was in shock. Not something that would have happened if he'd been the one who slashed his wife's throat.

So profound is his shock it has affected his mind, they'd said. Not something that would have happened if he'd been the one who had committed the horrific murder of Mrs Sally Croft and three others.

Everyone who knew Daniel, all said the same thing. Daniel Croft wouldn't hurt a fly. He could never kill anyone.

His recovery happened slowly. The doctors told him later that very little at all occurred for weeks and then late one night, a nurse entered his room to check on him and found he had rolled over onto his side. He was curled up in a ball and was mumbling unintelligibly in his sleep. A few days later Daniel suddenly got up out of his chair and walked across the room. He stopped, facing the wall opposite, and stayed there until someone led him back to his chair. On another occasion he began yelling obscenities and suddenly started crying. And then, on the eighteenth of April, he simply opened his eyes and asked the man in the white coat sitting opposite, where the hell he was.

In the time between his admittance to the hospital and that day, Daniel had sensed nothing. He was lost in an indeterminable void bereft even of emptiness. An eternity where time itself did not exist. No light, yet no darkness. No sound, yet no silence. No warmth, yet no cold.

Then, he explained later, suddenly there was pain, unbearable, unremitting, indescribable pain. Pain which went on forever, and then didn't.

Next there was light, a gradually growing grey where before there hadn't even been black. The grey turned to white, the white to colour, the colour to shades, the shades to patterns, the patterns to shapes. And then the world was reborn.

Or maybe that should be Daniel was reborn. Or remade. Or reawakened. Or whatever the hell his sudden re-emergence into the world of the living was classified as.

The memory of his wife's murder came back even more slowly. There was no blinding revelation, no moment of consciousness, the realisation broke at a glacial pace, as if he was waking from a dreamless sleep and had simply forgotten what had happened. Things came back to him gradually, and then one day he remembered fully.

Daniel's reaction to Sally's death was uncommon, but by no means unique. According to the brain boffins, a complete mental shutdown happens more frequently during times of great stress. For example, a soldier during an extended battle in war time, or some similar situation where a person perceives their own life to be in constant danger, can suffer a similar breakdown. They see no way out, no escape from the terror, so the victim's mind simply shuts down. It sort of re-boots. But it's normally a self preservation mechanism and as Daniel was in no physical danger personally, his psychiatrist judged his case to be a bit special, though by no means unique. Also, more often than not, there is lasting damage. Sometimes the sufferer simply never recovers, at least not fully, but thankfully that had not been the case this time.

Of course, he'd had lots of help. There had been innumerable sessions with grief counsellors and psychiatrists, not to mention many visits to physiotherapists to help with his physical recovery after a lengthy period of inactivity. But now his doctors finally felt he was getting back to normal. At least as normal as one could possibly expect. Daniel's shrink, Dr Norman Chandler, kept suggesting he needed something to focus his mind on. He was worried that fixating on Sally's murder might further affect Daniel's mind.

He was right of course, a boy needs a hobby, doesn't he?

Chapter 2

IN JULY, THEY PULLED another woman out of the Brisbane River. That made five in total. They were all young and pretty. At least they had been when they were alive, and like Sally they'd all been blondes. The cops finally made an arrest two weeks later. The suspects name was Victor Wayne Enfield, he was thirty six and when arrested, happily put his hands up for four of the murders. But he wasn't responsible for the murder of Sally Croft he claimed. He would never kill a pregnant woman he’d said, and Sally was quite obviously pregnant. But the modus operandi was identical in all cases, so the cops didn't believe him.

The day they arrested Enfield, I was at work. Incongruously, I heard the news on the radio.

We were sitting on a massive steel beam, twenty eight stories above the city of Cairns, with sausage rolls, pies, sandwiches and flasks of coffee and tea, hot,