Tarot Tales: 7 of Swords & Death

The 10 second Crimewatch video was going viral, and my well-meaning nephew had managed to send it to me on email. He thought I should know the full truth.  Robbie, in his black leather jacket was seen running down the road.  He had just bolted out of a shop, and His hair was greasy, and long. I had been trying to get him to cut it ever since he left school. I had told him over and over, that he would never get a job if he didn’t get a haircut.

Illuminated Tarot
7 of Swords

He’d had beautiful black hair which fell in waves around his rosy cheeks when he was a child. I used to be so proud of him. He was so kind and thoughtful.  He would bring you a cup of tea when you were feeling a little blue. He would run errands without complaining. He would go to this shop, this local shop, to pick up the milk. He knew the family who ran it by name. I could never remember their names, they were so difficult to get your tongue around, so Robbie used to call the lad Manny. 

If not friends, they at least knew each other quite well, and had respect for each other.

And now this. Manny had given the police a video of our Robbie.  It was standard procedure, he said, for the police to visit all the local stores after a suspicious death, and grab as much footage as they could, in order to piece together what happened. And this video from Manny clearly showed my dear, sweet Robbie leaving the shop, As the door closed behind him, my dear sweet Robbie just bolted after Mrs Holden, and shoved her hard. So hard she’d fallen down. 

She’d received a broken wrist as a result of that fall, and at her age it wouldn’t heal very quickly, if at all. 

And how would she cook her meals?  Simple acts such as just chopping onions would be impossible.  And she must be in so much pain now. Well, maybe I could offer to go and cook for her. It might help both of us.  Help take my mind off the pain that was left by what Robbie had done. But how would Mrs Holden feel about me?  Perhaps she wouldn’t want to see me, Robbie’s mother.  Perhaps it would stir painful memories of what had happened.  Perhaps it was too soon, but Mrs Holden needed help now. And Robbie would never have wanted to see her suffer. 

Poor Robbie.  What a waste. He was still so young.  

He’d just broken up with his girlfriend, who had been beautiful, and just as sweet and kind as Robbie.  I’d even started to picture their children, my grandchildren.  They’d have had his beautiful hair, and her blue eyes. They would have been spectacular. But three months ago she’d moved away to university, and the relationship hadn’t lasted after that.  

Illuminated Tarot <br/> XIII Death

Robbie, it would appear, had sunk into the wrong sort of life after she left. His friends had taken himout clubbing to cheer him up, but it had the opposite effect. He’d got hooked on those stupid drugs, and they’d just got him down the whole time.  Why couldn’t he see that?  If he wasn’t taking the drugs in the first place, he wouldn’t have had the downer that drove him to such desperate measure to get high again. 

Yes. My dear own son had shamed himself.

He had robbed poor Mrs Holden and left her in the hospital. Later that night he had been taken to the same hospital himself, where he had died of a heart attack. The police were saying it had been a bad batch.  Robbie was the third kid to have been admitted to the General this week.  But he had been the first to die as a result of it.  

So now the police had stepped up their hunt for the dealers; apparently now the crime had escalated from drug dealing to manslaughter. They had taken all the video footage from the moment Robbie left the shop, and traced him to the house his friends shared, where it seemed they had been cooking this lethal cocktail in their kitchen.

Oh Robbie.  Such a waste of a life.

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Gemma Cross

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