Dymphna’s First Love

The first man Dymphna ever cared about was stabbed to death in the shower at his boarding house.

The killer, who was never caught, dragged Larry Simcoe’s body from the shared bathroom back to his room, leaving a trail of water and blood along the corridor, and shoved the body into the bottom of Larry’s own wardrobe, wrapped in an old sheet stripped from the bed. The door to the wardrobe would not close. Blood and water dripped out onto the floor.

The clothes in the wardrobe, his precious suits and ties and bone-white shirts, the clothes he had been so proud of: they were all of them ruined.

The killer fled, slipping and sliding down the corridor and out the front door, and disappeared.

Everyone in the boarding house had been home when Larry was stabbed twenty-eight times and his body shoved into his wardrobe. The bathroom was opposite the dining room. Around seven o’clock at night it had been, and most of them were eating. None of them saw or heard a thing.

Larry Simcoe was a strong man. He would have fought back. He would have screamed.

A neighbour called the police on seeing a man covered with blood, holding a knife, running out of the boarding house.

When the police arrived, Larry hadn’t been dead more than an hour. There was still blood in the corridor. Had the landlord and his residents really seen and heard nothing?

So they insisted.

In the detective’s notebook, scribbled over and over again, were the words saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Larry Simcoe was twenty-two. He was one of Glory’s top standovers. Not as big a man as Jimmy Palmer or Snowy Fullerton, but give him a few more years, and he might get there.

He hadn’t been a good lover. His kisses were too hard and too sloppy, and the whole thing was over too fast. He didn’t make her tingle. But he loved to dance. He was good at it too. They were at the Palais Royale twice a week, dancing and laughing until they barely had the energy to stand up.

Larry also loved to listen, to hear Dymphna’s gossip and her plans, her jokes and observations. They would laugh at Glory and Big Bill together. Dymphna hadn’t known men could be like that: funny and wry and interested in more than sex and killing and drinking. Larry didn’t drink. There were some that held that’s why he was killed: because it wasn’t natural.

Dymphna Campbell loved Larry Simcoe. Though she hadn’t realised that until she heard he was dead.

When they told her, a tear almost slipped from her eye. She and Larry had been together two months.

Her next man, Ray White, was another one of Glory’s. He slotted right into Larry’s place, took over his duties and Dymphna too.

Ray hadn’t liked Larry. There were more than a few to tell Dymphna that, the night of Larry’s death, Ray had celebrated in a little too much detail. As if he’d been there in that shower delivering those twenty-eight blows with that knife, they said, looking at Dymphna knowingly.

Ray White lasted less than a week. Perhaps because Dymphna had intimated to whoever would listen that she would not be sorry if Ray were to have an accident.

He did, and she wasn’t.