Richard Cazaly, stood amongst the yellow blossom covered trees at the foot of the bleak Scottish mountains, pondering how to respond to the terrible bloody events he had allowed himself to become embroiled in.
The sweet chattering of the newly arrived sparrows, returning from the hot African plains, zipping playfully around the grey skies above him, did nothing to ease his twisted mind.
Only days before, when he was busy cutting an elderly lady's garden, his world had been shattered for the second time in a week, when the police had come to take him away for questioning about a bestial act that will affect me for the rest of my life.
They had expressed hatred for him, spat in his face, but in the end they were forced by a judge to free him.
After a few days he could take no more of the anguish that was building like water behind a closed valve, so he had fled to his homeland, to the town-less quiet of the wilds where the flatlands and the highlands meet. The vastness, the lack of visible housing, the sheep, the quietness, had seemed to offer him a freedom that he could no longer have. That he no longer wanted.
Richard held in his hands the means of his deliverance, a small white bottle of sleeping pills that he had obtained whilst cleaning a pensioner's house. The cold biting wind whipped up as he struggled to open the bottle, which he recognised as an omen confirming that this was his means of extrication from his unending internal misery. He filled his mouth several times with this means of escape, washing them down with a bottle of Evian mineral water he had purchased from a middle aged lady, with soft soothing accent, in a small shop in the last hamlet he had driven through.
Once finished, he sat down, leaning against a thin damp tree and he smiled, the smile of someone who knows their private deeds will haunt them no more.
In front of him in the distance was his blue escort, parked carefully at the side of an old muddy track. A sheep walked up to him eating the moss and grass close to his feet, making him feel close to a living creature again. When it spotted him motionless, it bleated and ran off. The tepid sun broke through the clouds and shined on his face for one last time. He thought of me lying dying on the floor, stab wound in my neck, little Joseph screaming only yards away. That was the first shattering thing that had happened to him, the start of his miserable end.
What the police, my husband, my well wishers do not know, is that he loved me. That what he was doing was not the deed of a guilty man, but the actions of someone heart broken, someone helpless, someone who knew he would never be able to help or have me in his life.

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