Winner of Hampshire Chronicle-sponsored short story competition announced

Pat Morgan, 70, who lives in Southampton, secured the award with her entry, Best of Three, based on the theme Murder in Mind.

It follows gangster Mr Red, who kidnaps his enemies and executes them depending on their answer to the question –— ‘what will happen to me when I am dead?’ Ms Morgan, who lives in Woolston, said: “I’m just over the moon.

“I don’t really know where the inspiration came from, I was just sitting in one Sunday morning and started writing this really hard murder story.

“I took up a creative writing course at the Open University when I was 66 and I got a distinction, and I’ve had some poetry put forward before for a prize, but I don’t usually go in for these competitions.

“But it was free and I thought, ‘Why not?’"

Competition judge Dr Gary Farnell, senior English lecturer at the University of Winchester, said: “This is a razor-sharp story. Truly outstanding.

“The sharpness in the writing is a reflection of the nature of the subject matter, and is reminiscent of Martin Amis’s very slick writing about the criminal underworld.”

Although Ms Morgan won a place at the upcoming 33rd conference, which starts on Friday (June 21), she is unable to attend because of a family trip to Weymouth.

See below for the winning entry.

Best of Three

The large room was built of stone. It had one high window. Three men stood in a row, facing a glass desk.

The evening sun slanted across the glass. The men stood like creatures just caught from the ocean. Their eyes round as shark’s.

The man on the left and furthest away from the window was the tallest. None of the men was short.

Neither were the six who had ushered them in and now stood behind them.

All three men wore, if not black, then dark clothes, as if they were spawned in the night and had stayed there.

They stood very still and listened to the men breathing behind them. The evening sunlight had moved almost all the way across the desk since they had first been brought to the stone room.

It came closer and closer. Slightly shorter by about a finger-width, the middle man, a term which might also apply to his position in the company, was bald, but not old.

He held his hands clenched behind his waist, creasing his jacket. Clenched in his hand, cutting into the skin, was a gold crucifix.

The sun made stars on the edge of the table. He blinked and tried to swallow but couldn’t.

Closest to the window, the third man shimmered, His suit was cat-black silk. He hoped he would be able to hold himself together until this was over.

He had been in this room twice before but had left afterwards. Glad to be gone. He stared at the scrubbed-clean stones and didn’t whimper.

Sun dropped from the table and slanted like the blade of a guillotine inches away from their polished black shoes.

Behind them, the door through which they had entered, opened. Feet struck the stone ground like flints.

The men didn’t turn, they weren’t allowed to. That same feeling which kept them frozen, the blood stuttering round their bodies, forbade it.

The steps cracked closer, beating hard like their hearts. All three looked down and held their hands tight behind their backs.

The man stopped and faced them across the desk. They all smelled jasmine and thick, sweet honey. 

He said. ‘Well?’ Simultaneously they raised their heads and looked at the man.

His face was slant. One half put indifferently against the other. The unwholesome whole cut down the middle by a long nose whose nostrils had been pulled upward to show themselves and the unholy breaths they took.

His uneven eyes were small and high-set, grey and black. They didn’t shine as bright as his smooth hair. He wore an habitual blood-coloured suit and shoes with silver soles.

All three pressed their knees together.

His mouth slitted open, they watched his red tongue lick his top lip.

‘I will ask each of you this.’ He stared at the cat-black man.

‘I’ve been betrayed. My life has been sold. If the impossible happens and I am killed . . . what will happen to me when I’m dead?'

Cat-black didn’t notice the blade of sun move above his knees and flash across his chest.

He wanted to say, it wasn’t me. But knew it would be taken as an unacceptable contradiction.

His mind died of fear. All he heard was his Grandmother’s voice as she tucked him up in bed.

If you are a bad man, you will meet Saint Peter at the gates of heaven and he will send you down to hell where you will burn for ever. Don’t, my lovely boy, be a bad man.

‘You will burn in hell,’ blurted cat-black.

The man with the skewiff face nodded ever so slightly. Two men flowed like demons from the shadows behind cat-black and grabbed him beneath the arm-pits.

One slid a stiletto across the back of his knees. One stuck a blade beneath his ribs. His heart stopped almost immediately. But he left some blood on the stone floor before he was hauled from the room.

The open nostrils sucked at the smell of blood and turned towards the bald man who couldn’t stop juddering and he wasn’t sure whether his tongue would work. The sun struck his head and made it shine.

‘If you answer me truthfully, I will not kill you, even though you have betrayed me. What will happen to me after I die?’

Bald couldn’t speak, he tried to gather spit from his inside his cheeks. His throat was so dry.

‘Give the fool some water.’ Water was given. It dribbled from the slot of Bald’s mouth and down his shirt, making dark rivers. He spluttered.

‘Well?’

‘Noway endupinhell the saints are allforgiving you will be shrivenedinheaven all things aremadenew,’ he managed to speak all his words in one breath, no way he wanted to lose momentum. Or lose his footing on the stone floor.

‘Liar.’ Two men moved like black ghosts. One drove a spike through the top of his skull, the other sliced his ankles. His legs and arms jerked like a wooden dancing doll for three neverending seconds.

Even though his scream would not be heard, they shoved a white handkerchief down his throat.

‘No, said the red-dressed man behind the desk, ‘let me hear.’ They pulled the cloth out, stained crimson. But his soul had fled the body.

If only the murdered man could speak the truth now; the moment his link to life broke and he touched death.

The sun hit the ceiling above the tallest man and went out.

‘Your turn.’ His face opened and the red tongue flickered like a snake tasting air.

Tall, looked the man straight in the eye.

‘Like that is it?’ ‘You will be immortal. I will write about you. You will never die.’ And so it was.

Tall travelled from one end of the city/country/world to the other, gathering tales and writing.

Many books were published which told bloody and fantastic stories about Mr Red and were destined to circulate for hundreds of years.