In the chemistry lab, first-year pupil Mike Davenport watched his teacher, Mr Winsley, thrashing one of his classmates with the rubber hose from a bunsen burner, and noted just how ingenious he was in his punishments. He liked to think he was equally ingenious in the way he was going to kill him.
His classmate sniffled, trying to suppress his tears after the beating.
‘What’s the matter with you, boy?’ said Winsley unsympathetically. There was a hint of a South African accent in his voice: the teacher had spent some years in Pretoria when he was a young man. ‘The kaffirs could take it. They never cried out. Maybe because,’ he grinned at the two black boarders in the class, ‘you’ve got such thick, black skins.’
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For an entire term, Mike and his classmates had been subjected to Winsley’s colourful cruelties. The teacher had boasted he could lift a boy off the ground by his sideburns. Mike had never seen him do it; however he had pulled Mike down by his sideburn, so he was almost on the ground, and then belted him across the face back up into a seated position.
Another of his favourites was to make boys clench their fist and then hit them hard with a blackboard duster. If they opened their fists, they’d get twice the punishment. But, like the Chinese burns he regularly gave boys, it hardly justified murdering him.
However, grabbing Mike by the lapels, slamming him against a wall and then throwing him over a desk and taking a run-up to beat him to the ground with endless strokes of the slipper in front of the whole class, was rather different.
Mike was a first-year boarder at a secondary school near Reading. After the ‘slippering’, unrecorded in any punishment book, Mike walked out of the school grounds, went to a public phone box and phoned his army father to complain. His dad told him to wait by the phone box; he’d be right there to sort things out. Overjoyed that his dad was going to rescue him, he looked forward to seeing Winsley get what he so richly deserved. His dad was a boxer and had a temper on him. He would knock the living daylights out of the teacher.
An hour later, his father sped up in his car, jumped out and knocked hell out of his son instead. Mike had broken the golden rule still in force in the seventies: he had told. ‘Don’t you ever tell tales again,’ he warned his sobbing son, and drove off.
That was the final straw. Mike had read The Spanker since he was seven, and loved The Caning Commando. The institutional cruelty of the school in Lower Belting Bottom was so much like the institutional cruelty of his own school. He enjoyed seeing the Germans being thrashed by Grabham, because he knew just how painful and humiliating it was. Although Mike’s boarding school was no college for the elite, like the Golden Hind Academy. Rather, it was a dumping ground for kids whose parents were in the forces.
He read the episode about the Arsenripper and made a careful note of the poison the Commando used to kill Von Vroom and where to buy it. It was just what he was looking for.
Having the deadly poison ready and waiting in a phial in his satchel, his opportunity arose when Winsley carried out another of his sadistic punishments. The teacher ordered two boys, who had failed to carry out their lab experiments correctly, to drink hydrochloric acid. They knew it was heavily diluted and therefore safe, but they still couldn’t face it. Winsley insisted and threatened he’d force them to drink it.
One of the boys was so scared, he burst into tears; the other tried the acid and spewed it out. The class was close to rebellion in support of their traumatised classmates, and so Winsley told them he would show them just what gutless cowards they all were by drinking it himself. While everyone was milling around, comforting Winsley’s victims, no one looked in Mike’s direction as he added the colourless, tasteless and odourless poison to the beaker.
Winsley began by giving the class a little lecture about how our stomachs also contain hydrochloric acid and therefore it was safe to drink in a suitably diluted form. Then, with a triumphant grin, he swigged the HCI.
He took three days to die.
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.