There are occasions when you overhear a bit of someone else's conversation and wish that you'd been eavesdropping properly. I was in Starbucks on the off-chance of a free muffin (I said muffin) that never appeared. I was sitting next to a couple of women, one slightly hippy one of around about my age and an older American woman. I was reading my paper and not really paying any attention until I heard the American ask her companion, "Do you want to find yourself on the front page of the News of the World?"
This piqued my interest. Not unreasonably I concluded that the hippy woman was probably having sex with a government minister or footballer or soap star and I thought that I might be able to get some vicarious sexual thrill from listening in to the details. Plus if they revealed enough I might be able to sell the story to the News of the World and make literally hundreds of pounds.
But I could see from the nervous look on the hippy woman's face that this wasn't going to be a story of salacious sleaze (more's the pity), it became clear that she was feeling vaguely threatened by some strange man in her block of flats (possibly her landlord). "Let's just say I wouldn't go down into the cellar with him," said the younger woman. Though I am not sure there are that many people that I would willingly go down into the cellar with, especially if they said, "Will you come down with me into the cellar?" and had now really good reason for wanting me to go down there.
The American woman was enjoying the discomfort and fear of her younger friend, "Really you have to be careful. Have you heard of the Son of Sam?"
The hippy woman was still talking about something else, so the American had to wait and repeat her question, "Have you heard of the Son of Sam?"
"Yes," said the hippy fearfully, but the American woman not to be spared her own vicarious enjoyment started to tell her the story anyway. With friends like these who needs a serial killing landlord whose best idea on how to trap you is to ask you to come and look at the cellar with him.
But it struck me that if I wanted to kill a woman or series of women (which regular readers will be sure that I definitely don't), then this could be a way to achieve that evil goal. Or at least to write a Hitchcockian film about.
If I followed that woman home and then pretended to be a workman come to mend her cellar in some way and asked her to come down to hold my torch, then I could kill her and everyone would blame the creepy landlord that she had complained of so often. No-one would link me to the crime at all. I would have no connection to the victim whatsoever and in any case we all know that the police's response to any murder is to arrest the strangest crazy man who lives in the vicinity and then not really worry too much about evidence or anything like that. As long as he's got a collection of knives. It would be the perfect crime.
And I reckon if I hung around in Starbucks long enough I would find other women talking about their fears regarding similar strange men and I could try the same trick again. And again no-one would suspect the "jovial, chubby Oxford University chum" (The Telegraph), Richard Herring. They'd just arrest another strange man who lived upstairs from the victim and had lots of diaries about how he loved her and maybe some kind of peep-hole arrangement into her bathroom.
This would have the twin effects of causing loads of strange men (some of whom would probably kill a woman at some point) to be locked up out of temptations way, plus getting rid of some of the whorish women who tempt such men with their polite smiles and their insistence on living in the general vicinity of their houses. With both the thing that tempts these men to kill and the men themselves out of the way, the world would be a lot safer place for the women who remained. As long as they didn't discuss any other strange men they knew whilst sitting in Starbucks next to jovial comedians eating Frankingstein muffins.
You lot wouldn't dob me in would you? I wouldn't be allowed to write Warming Up in prison.
The only problem is that thanks to this webpage I would very soon be rounded up as one of the strange men in the area who might do such a thing and be imprisoned myself for a crime that I did actually commit, but which it looked like I didn't commit.
