JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE

“I hate him now. I should have never started it,” growled the stout man with a bushy moustache as he tore off a page from the yellow medical notebook, crushed it and threw it across the spacious Swiss hotel suite.

The fat man was hunched at his desk furiously chewing the end of his quill while various tomes of history, medicine, chemistry and anatomy lay about open on the ancient mahogany table. An old lady wrapped up mummy-like sat on a couch near the blazing fireplace impervious to the man’s exasperated expressions.

“I can’t concentrate on anything serious. My brilliant political ideas are ignored and I have to do only this” the man swore aloud pacing the floor; stomping on the crumpled up pages strewn on the blood red cashmere carpet.

“Well it keeps the home fires burning and has made you as famous as the Queen of England,” the old lady rebuked her pompous son. He was no good as a doctor and passed his time pontificating about political problems at home and abroad.

“He takes my mind from better things and burns me out.” the failed doctor was frustrated. He knew that he was cut out for much more than this juvenile stuff.

“Ha, everyone loves the clever child except the father” the old matriarch sneered.

“I’m weary of it all. My best is not known. I deserve better,” the vain medical practitioner turned wordsmith had his own notions of respectability and fame.

“You’re a fool and a flop when it comes to making money,” the aged mother was wiser than her wayward son who had even tried his hand at whaling and nearly got drowned.

“I find it unbelievable that The Strand is ready to cough up a thousand quid for a dozen more. I thought that I would be free of him by hiking my rates” the frustrated writer was caught in his own web.

“Well I hear that the London lads are queuing up at the tabloid’s office waiting for his next,” the proud mother fondly recalled the fans frenzy.

Indeed this public hysteria had made the doctor author flee to the mountain chalet in Switzerland in search of some peace and a plan to escape his Frankenstein.

“I’m going to kill him. He will meet his nemesis in the Professor who will free us both of him,” the doctor was determined.

Finally the writer’s block was broken and he could see light at the end of the tunnel.          The solution was right before his eyes. He smiled serenely as he stood staring out of the tall French casement from the Park Hotel du Sauvage which had a clear view of the Reichenbach Falls cascading down the craggy alpine cliffs.

“The time is now. The consulting detective must die or no one will ever appreciate my higher literary feats,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proclaimed before sitting down to write the ending to The Final Problem.

 

 

About the author – Suraj Sriwastav is a full-time English teacher and high school Principal based 35 kilometres from Kolkata, India. His hobby is creative writing. He has published short stories in the Champak magazine and The Statesman newspaper.