We may all be embarking upon a quest for some third way which will exculpate Jeremy from his tag as mass murderer,something which will exonerate him from that terrible scene of carnage which awaited any entrant into the farm that morning,that personage who had transgressed the rights of five people to continue to live,an elderly couple who had earned their right to a relaxing and contented retirement,their daughter who was coping as best she could with mental illness and her twins who just sought affection from any quarter and whose bleak sombre crayon drawings depicted the atmosphere they felt at the farm as only small children can.
How convenient it would be for all for an intruder to have permeated the property in the early hours of August 6,a thief perhaps with an eye to the main chance,or just looking for items to steal to get his next fix of barbiturates. Indeed it is possible that this is what first crossed the mind of Nevill,the man of the household who had assumed and gloried in this role over decades,as he was frogmarched downstairs by an interloper he possibly thought he could deal with,and who managed to hide his bloodstained watch under the rug in the thought that this burglar would steal items of a similar nature and then depart.
He entered the house the way he had often done,bypassing both main entrances,and if anyone found any traces well,he had used that way only the day before when he was larking about with the twins,and who was to know whether this was true or not. As for not using the normal ingress,well he was a cuckoo in the nest anyhow-how often had he been told this by friend,foe,and relative alike.But Jeremy was no ordinary cuckoo,for he was going to assume full power over the nest,the home which was rightfully his.
Whether Jeremy was facially disguised was a moot point. To all intents and purposes he wore dark clothing possibly with a balaclava,which made it easier as he cycled over the flat moonless terrain towards his birthright. All he need do was to bark one instruction to Nevill to go downstairs,and make a telephone call. The rest would be easy. He would shoot the twins as they slept,emancipating both them from a life dominated by disturbed matriarchs and Colin who would be able to start afresh,unfettered with the issue of his insane sister,whom he would use as subterfuge,so that he too could start a new life away from his ersatz family, away from the tittle tattle of Essex country bumpkins and away from farming. His last recollection of his sick mother would be shooting her right between the eyes as he took aim and recollected all those years of religious zealotry which acted as June’s self-defence mechanism as well as erecting a barrier between any meaningful mutual communication.. No worries if Nevill put up a fight:he would humiliate this man who so often had humiliated him with his jibes of effeminacy,by making him lower his pants and mocking Nevill with the epithet of impotence,before the final four shots,then the poker heated in the Aga to gauge whether this magistrate had finally achieved justice thrust upon him.
As Sheila went to her death like a lamb to the slaughter,ignorant of the fate of her twin sons and hence no tears on that calm,serene,almost blasé facial expression,Jeremy tossed the bible onto the carpet,a symbol that represented everything he despised,the lectures,the sermons,the hymns at Gresham's,the abuse possibly perpetrated by a teacher under the guise of a religious fervour,the Bible lay dormant on the ground along with his mortal sister,a sign that existentialism had triumphed in a soul which may yet one day be redeemed as the decades pass inexorably and materialism becomes no longer all-consuming and the goodness which if latent in some yet existing in all of us, prevails.
