Unexplained Final

As he descended the stairs, disgruntled that the body had provided nothing in the way of clarification, Morgan felt defeated. All he had was conjecture, rumour and a strong hunch; nothing added up to any kind of coherent scenario.

After telephoning Elias to come and fetch him, he waited in the parking lot. It had been a long and very strange day so he was prepared to admit that perhaps his paranoid suspicion that the coroner’s office was concealing something from the police was just that! Paranoid.

The police car stopped in front of him with Elias in the driver’s seat. Opening the car door, he was assailed by the smell of fresh wood smoke.

“You go see your Gran?” Morgan asked with a grin.

The rueful Elias nodded. “I smell like her house, right? I thought I’d just drop in for a quick bite to eat. I was starving”.

“Your Gran is a real character, isn’t she?” Morgan commented fondly. Grandmother Ndudo always made a fuss of Morgan when she saw him.

Steering the conversation away from his Gran, Elias asked, “What did Ice say about Mrs Palframan’s cause of death?”

“Heart attack”, Morgan responded tersely. He considered telling Elias about his sense of inexplicable unease at the outcome, but decided that encouraging Elias to indulge his superstitions would not be setting a good example.

Elias nodded sagely and held his tongue, not wanting to say anything that would betray his knowledge of the mystical justice that had been meted out at the Palframan house that night.

Morgan broke the silence. “Can you drop me at home? I really need to crash now. I’ve been up since just after one this morning. You should knock off too”, he suggested.

Bidding Elias goodbye outside his house, Morgan stripped and took a long shower before retiring to bed. Lying against the pillows, his thoughts turned back 35 years or so to his pre-school days and his older cousin, Vernon, a cruel and reckless boy that he hadn’t much liked. His mother had dragged Morgan with her to visit Aunt Ava one day and Vernon had spitefully locked him out of the tree house. After a heartbroken Morgan and his mother had gone home, the tree house had burned down with Vernon inside it. The young Morgan’s fear of fire had been born that night.

So it was hardly a surprise that, as he dropped off to sleep, his dreams were filled with the slanted, molten eyes of big black cats as large as leopards that set fire to the grass as their flaming footsteps padded across the veldt.