Remember that guy I worked with? The one who murdered his daughter? It was back when I was living in Hatfield. My shifts were mostly 2-10, and when I finished clearing those daily cages of pies and pasties and was upstairs in the locker room collecting my belongings, he was usually getting ready to start. He worked the night shift, you see. Carl Wheatley was his name. Google it. You’ll see his photo and those of his daughter before he battered her to death with his own two hands. One night when he wasn’t working, he came in shopping with her not long before I moved back to my hometown after Brittany and I separated. Her name was Alex. She was about four or five with nice eyes and a cheeky smile and a headful of curly, golden locks. As she skipped up and down the yoghurt aisle, he came up to me and moaned about the lack of stock on the shelves. He wasn’t creepy or sinister, but he was a little odd. But then that’s what most people say about me. He had approached me once before when I was doing a rare early shift and complained that someone had stolen his coat. I offered my sympathy and told him there were some mean people out there, but he didn’t seem interested, just kept going on about how his gloves were in the pockets and it was too cold for him to walk home without them on. You know that not long after, they found nearly seventy individual bruises on her lifeless body and evidence that he had smashed out her baby teeth before trying to superglue them back in? That over the course of two weeks, he had reigned down blow after blow until her little body couldn’t carry on any longer? To think of the years I wished so much to have been given a chance to raise Bethany, and this punk had the chance with such a sweet daughter of his own, and he had pissed all over it. But that’s how it goes, isn’t it? For a few months, we rubbed shoulders, exchanged a word here and there, and then we went about life our separate ways. Providing no one bashes in his brains behind bars, he’ll be out in just under twenty years. He may be a filthy child killer, and yet in many ways, he’s just like the rest of us because no matter how hard we try, we too will never be able to escape the consequences of our actions.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
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