Shop Until You Drop

I decided to investigate the overhead glass walkway in the new Hedonist’s Heaven Retail Therapy Centre to see whether it might be a suitable place for Shannon to fall from.

To my amazement, when I arrived intent on literary research, I found hundreds of shops.
Mentally adding a new method for future murders – to force the victim to shop until they dropped – I began my work.

Two and a half hours later I was eating lunch in the Conspic Consum Café. Gazing up at the glass walkway, I wondered whether it was the thought of Shannon falling to her demise making me so hungry, or the severe emotional trauma I had suffered during the morning.

Young Darren had been rearranging the display just inside a sport shop. He glanced up, a pair of rollerblades dangling from his hand, and looked at me.

Unable to resist the lure of his big brown eyes and his small white T-shirt I feigned an interest in the rollerblades. All was going well until the credit card machine bleeped at me to remove my card.

I looked up, about to suggest to Darren that perhaps we could meet up at the Centre’s rink so that he could teach me some moves.
Darren smiled at me, handed me my purchase, logged off his till and left the shop with a stick insect in a micro-skirt.

There was only one way to recover from that kind of pain and it was to buy myself a pair of leather trousers.
To squeeze myself into them required me either to lose a few pounds, or have part of my stomach chiselled off.

I hadn’t yet decided between those.

As for the combined corkscrew and breathalyser, that purchase was an essential part of the healing process.