Hot Bath.

There isn’t much that a hot bath won’t cure.

It washes away your cares and woe and, with a little scrubbing, it will wash away traces of the arsehole that you killed.

Killing him was not my first choice.

On a list of one to one hundred, I’m not sure where it would come, but it certainly wasn’t first.

He cornered me in the supply cupboard.

He’d been giving me ‘that look’ for about a month and I knew that sooner or later it would be my turn.

I liked this job even though the person I was working for was an unpleasant individual. Sooner or later he would have moved on to another department or I would have been reassigned; it was only a matter of time and all I had to do was stay out of his way.

Until the afternoon of the fifteenth [that’s what it has become known as around here, ‘the afternoon of the fifteenth’] he had not turned his nasty little attentions in my direction. He did a lot of leering, but that I could handle.

The supply cupboard was his favourite haunt.

It went like this; he would send some poor soul in there to perform a task that would take an hour or more. After about forty minutes or so, he would appear and have his wicked way with whomever he had sent in there.

The big boss had an inkling; but because no one ever put in an official complaint, he couldn’t be bothered doing anything about it.

There was a rumour that one of the girls who left suddenly had done away with herself, but something like that is difficult to prove unless they leave a note. She didn’t. She simply stepped off the roof of the building across the street from us some four days after she disappeared from our midst.

On ‘the afternoon of the fifteenth’ I was sorting out the things he had asked me to sort out and I’d nearly finished taking notes when the door opened and he appeared behind me.

I won’t bore you with the lurid details, but suffice to say that he gave me little choice and made it very clear what he wanted and how he wanted it.

In the end, his explicit instructions helped me evade capture.

Some blood did splatter in my direction, but the rags that were stored in the supply cupboard were sufficient to remove the blood from my naked body. My clothes, which I had neatly folded in the far corner of the room were not soiled. I dressed and walked out of the room and pretended, as best I could, that nothing had happened.

No one saw me come out of the supply room and no one recalled me going in there, and I have no idea why. Sometimes the universe just wants you to get away with it, I guess.

I thought that the quill pen sticking out of his eye might present a problem but I managed to explain it way.

The police asked a lot of questions but they did not search any of us, which was just as well as I’m sure they would have noticed the blood smears.

My honour is intact and I feel strangely peaceful.

I won’t be going to the funeral and I’m going to have to get a new pen, but it is a small price to pay.

I’m not sure if my reprehensible boss landed in Hell but I know that this warm bath is just like Heaven.

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