by Ryan Casey
“I didn’t know that, no.”
Cassy cleared her throat. She avoided eye contact with Brian. “I was silly, really. Got pregnant when I was seventeen. Gave him up for adoption. Really wanted to keep him, but my dad wanted me to go to university and all that, and the kid’s dad wasn’t around to support us. It’s weird. It’s been well over ten years now. Sometimes I think I see him. I dunno.”
Brian tried to catch Cassy’s wandering gaze. Her eyes started to well up. At least the conversation had moved from him to her.
“Just work on building bridges with your wife, Brian. It’ll take time, but don’t give up. You have a son, after all, and I know you don’t like talking about what happened, but if you ever want to talk…”
Brian closed his eyes. “I’m not fit to be a dad. My head, it’s…It belongs in the police. I’ve done some bad things, and I don’t expect her or him to forgive me. But what happened, I’ve gotta live with that.”
Cassy bit her lip and averted her eyes. He knew she was preparing to ask him the question.
“What did happen, Brian?”
Brian smiled and stood up, stuffing his coat under his tender arm. “Maybe another time, okay? I should…We should get an early night. We’ll have forensics calling for us to see the body any day now, and we’ve got to properly investigate the surrounding area of the crime scene. Don’t want to go missing any vital pieces of–”
“Brian.” Cassy shot to her feet. “If you ever want any company, you can always, y’know, sleep on the sofa. It’s not great–in fact, it’s pretty shit–but yeah. Just a thought.” Her cheeks were turning pink.
“Thanks, Cassy. I appreciate that, but I’ll be okay. Now come on–there’s a cab outside with your name on it.”
Brian’s breath frosted as he waved Cassy off. The taxi disappeared down the road in an unhealthy cough of engine fumes. He blew warm air against his fingers and walked into the 24-hour shop a few doors down.
“Mr. McDone,” the Asian man behind the counter said. “The usual?” He reached for a bottle of Bell’s whisky.
“Make it two,” Brian said, and slid a Gillette razor blade over the counter.
The routine was growing all the more familiar: throbbing head, scent of booze, aching arm. The vultures from the press already gathered around the door of the police station made it worse, all wrapped up in wool coats and scarves, not a bit of skin on show. Some held cameras and some held microphones with their thick mittens. Soft bastards.
“Officer, do you have anything to say on the Nicola Watson case?” one of them asked, pointing a microphone towards Brian’s face. He knocked it aside and kept walking.
“Officer, is it true that the police made a massive error of judgement with regards to BetterLives?”
The questions buzzed and buzzed in Brian’s already tender ears. He held his frown, acting as if he hadn’t noticed the press, and hopped up the steps at the entrance, where they followed him like flies on shit.
“DS McDone, is it true that you were responsible for using wrongful methods to arrest not one, but two, suspects? What do you have to say about the decline in policing standards in Preston? Is it because of the cuts?”
That particular journalist’s whiney voice stuck with him. Short. Wearing glasses and a green coat. Somewhat different from the others. Unshaven, student type. He rolled his eyes downwards as McDone looked at him. He thought he recognised him from somewhere.
Then it clicked. David Wallson, the guy who’d written the first piece on Nicola Watson. The guy who’d broken the news of a dead girl before the police had the chance to. “Wrongful methods”. How would he know? Who was providing him with his information? Brian gritted his teeth together and resisted lashing out.
“DS McDone, is it about time you stepped down for good? Got back to fighting for that wife and kid of yours?”
Brian stopped. His heart started thumping. He approached David Wallson and stared right into his eyes. “Would you like to repeat that question?”
David Wallson turned to his notepad and cleared his throat, his cheeks flushing. “It’s just…I heard a report that you’re distracted at work. I heard that…”
Brian clenched his fist. But no–he couldn’t allow himself to react. He couldn’t get the department into any more trouble. He took a breath to calm himself. “I don’t comment on speculation or personal matters. As long as you are all aware that we are trying our very, very best to apprehend the culprit of this awful crime, and we are getting closer. Thank you, that’ll be all.”
He stepped through the door, the weight of having spoken to the media lifting from his shoulders. Since his time off, relations with the press had been strained. Price always liked to be the face of the investigations and kindly asked Brian not to get involved after rumours surrounding his lengthy absence emerged. He always used to deliver press conferences, but now he was just another face in the crowd. A fat face, at that.
In all honesty, he preferred it that way. Media types were the lowest of the low.
As Brian stumbled into the office, Cassy already stood by his desk. “Survive the vultures?”
“Just about.” Brian tossed his lunch bag onto his desk and cleared his beer-throat of phlegm.
“Don’t tell me you have a hangover after just the one pint,” Cassy said, her eyebrows raised. He sensed the sarcasm in her voice. Sensed what she was implying.
“Getting less tolerant nowadays. Didn’t sleep great.”
“Such a lightweight these days,” DC Pennison shouted, a smirk on his face.
“Yeah, I thought I saw you getting dizzy off half a pint of Coke the other day, didn’t I, Pennison?” Brian said.
Pennison laughed and shook his head. It might have been banter, but banter only really happened with friends, and Brian certainly didn’t class many of the good-for-nothings working at this place as friends.
The door opened, and Price walked in with a spring in his step. He clapped his hands together. “Right, morning. DS McDone and Emerson, good news for you. The mad doctor is waiting for you. Finally found a free moment in his hectic schedule to investigate the body of, y’know, only the highest profile murder case in this city for years.”
Brian stepped to his feet, gesturing Cassy to follow him. “We’ll be right down there, Inspector. Constable Carter, any further information from Foster Road?”
Carter shrugged his heavy shoulders, looking as lifeless as ever. “Nothing in particular. We’ve spoken to a bunch of known pimps, but we can’t get anything helpful out of them. And every place ‘round there is either empty for escorts or has an alibi. There are two places locked up that we haven’t had the chance to go to yet.”
“Right. We’ll get down there later. I guess the priority is not to run before we can walk. We need to be steady about this so we don’t overlook anything.”
Price scoffed. “Wise words. If only you’d taken that approach towards your little show on the park yesterday. Do you have any idea how much trouble that’s got us in?”
Brian sighed. “I apologise. DS Emerson, let’s go to forensics. Everyone else, get digging around Nicola’s social media profiles. Any friends, family, or anyone she spent a lot of time with. It’s all we have to go on right now. Then we’ll head back down to Foster Road and try to contact those two no-shows.”
Everyone remained still.
“Well, you heard the man,” Price said.
The officers jumped from their seats and turned towards their computer screens. A chorus of clicking keyboards erupted.
Price handed Cassy and Brian a clear protective jacket each, then winked at Brian before walking away.
“Did you see that?” Cassy slipped her protective jacket over her shoulders.
Brian tried not to face her. “No, I…”
“You did see that. Price winked at you. What went on in his office yesterday, huh? I thought you looked a little…red-faced, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
&
nbsp; He ignored Cassy and attempted to button up his protective jacket. Some of the officers giggled at him as his flabby belly poked between the plastic buttons. He saw Cassy cover her mouth too, trying her best not to laugh.
“This your first?” Brian asked her.
Cassy nodded. “Learn something new every day, eh?”
“Prepare to see the human body in a whole new way,” Brian said as the pair took a left and headed towards the forensics department.
It never got any easier, seeing a dead body on the slab.
It was something Brian tried to believe you could grow a tolerance to over time, but that was just a lie to make it easier for the newbies. That feeling inside that one day, everyone was going to be nothing but a lump of meat filled with broken mechanics lying on a table. Terrifying.
“DS McDone. DS Emerson.”
“Jeeves,” Brian replied, holding out a hand and pulling it away before he got the chance to shake it. “Just a joke Jeeves and I have. Not wanting to touch his…Yeah, you get it.”
Jeeves, the forensic specialist, was a short man with greying hair and a big nose. He wore glasses and a constant frown, like a schoolteacher. His posh voice was as fake as they came. Brian was convinced Jeeves couldn’t possibly be his real name. He’d clearly watched too many crappy detective TV shows and tried to model himself on the creepy pathologists.
He pulled back the cover from Nicola’s body, like a magician revealing his latest contraption. It was weird, how different a body looked when it was on that slab, compared to how it looked at a crime scene. At the scene, there was a sense of detachment, like a re-enactment of a historical event in a waxwork museum or a still from a movie. But right here, nobody could deny the reality of it. This was death, and it was coming for everyone.
Cassy flinched as she looked at Nicola’s eyes. Thick, purple, bloodshot streams ran from her greying pupils.
“As you know,” Jeeves began in his little presentation voice. “Nicola Watson. Aged twenty-two. Cause of death: strangulation.” He pointed towards the thick red and purple marks coiled around her neck.
“Any word on the precise time of death?”
Jeeves sighed. “As was predicted, between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. on 3rd January.”
Brian circled the body. Nicola’s feet were close together, the finely cut toenails just about creeping over the sides of the slab.
“Any semen traces?”
Jeeves licked his lips. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest any forced intercourse. There are a few samples that we’ll have checked out. But the way it looks to me, either it wasn’t sexually motivated, or he cleaned her up very, very well, which is rare but not impossible.”
Brian scratched his forehead. “Anything we don’t already know?”
“Ah,” Jeeves said with a little smile. He enjoyed doing this, probably a bit too much. He always started with the normal things, then followed with an “ah” moment. It was like an absurd cat and mouse game of who could solve the mystery first. “Look at her hand.”
Brian and Cassy crouched down to look at Nicola’s fingers. “Looks like she formed a fist,” Brian said. “Probably the terror. Like when people grit their teeth. A subconscious reaction, right? She knew she was gonna die. Had time to think about it.”
“Ah,” Jeeves said again. Fuck. Another bloody “ah” moment, which meant Brian was wrong. “That’s what I thought. But open the fingers up a little…Actually, I will do that.” He squeezed the fingertips from the hand, their grip as solid as rock. “See it?” Jeeves tapped the fingernails with the end of a pointer.
“What is it?” Cassy asked.
“This, my friends, is paper.”
Brian squinted and finally saw little specks of white under her fingernails. “Why would she…?”
“Because she didn’t want somebody to see something,” Cassy interrupted.
Jeeves shrugged, a suggestive, “That’s for you to find out” look on his face. “Perhaps. But whatever it was, she was holding it very tightly.”
Brian’s arm throbbed with pain, and he felt a slight lightness in his head. He really had drunk a little too much last night. Maybe all this fake alcoholism would turn him into a legitimate alcoholic at some stage. What a twisted turn of events that would be. “So all we have is a black car, which may or may not have been a BetterLives car, an ex-boyfriend who she breaks up with for someone else, and a bit of paper between her fingertips. Jeeves, I’m sorry, but I’ve no idea what to make of it.”
Jeeves tilted his head again. “Ah,” he said. “Ah” number three. “Look closer at the paper. What do you see?”
Brian squinted at the little pieces of paper. What the hell was Jeeves getting at? “It’s, erm, just a bit black, and–”
“It was wet,” Cassy interrupted.
Brian frowned. “Wet? But what does that mean?”
Jeeves edged around the slab towards Brian and Cassy. “I took a closer look at her underwear.” A creepy, elongated smiled worked its way across Jeeves’ face. Weird bastard. He certainly didn’t strike Brian as the sort of man to be trusted with a load of underwear. “Look at this picture. See that?”
Brian narrowed his eyes. It was a close-up of several circular molecules that looked like tiny islands, as green as fresh peas from a pod. He’d seen a picture like it somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite make it out. “Some sort of molecules?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, which I doubt, these are cyanobacteria.”
Brian had no idea what Jeeves was talking about.
Jeeves turned back to the picture and tapped it with his middle finger. “Cyanobacteria, you might know better as blue-green algae. These molecules are very easy to wipe from the skin but stick to clothes like flies to faeces.”
Cassy scratched her head and looked away from Nicola’s cold, pale body on the slab. “What does blue-green algae have to do with anything?”
Jeeves smiled. “Unless Miss Watson decided to go for a fully clothed paddle on a cold January evening, I’d say someone tried to drown her.”
Brian shook his head. “But…if they tried to drown her, then why didn’t they just finish her off there? Leave her wherever they drowned her?”
Jeeves smiled again. “I think the question is, why did your culprit take her to a well-known prostitution hotspot to dry her body off before they killed her?”
Chapter Fourteen
Brian and Cassy sat in the police car. Cassy slurped the last remnants of a thick McDonald’s milkshake, the straw scraping the bottom of the carton. Fifteen minutes had passed since their trip to forensics. Neither of them had spoken much since seeing Nicola Watson’s body again, draped across that slab.
“What d’you make of it?” Cassy dangled the straw between her teeth and blew bubbles of milkshake out of the other end.
Brian flicked his heater up towards his windscreen, waiting for the frozen condensation to recede, and rubbed his purple hands together. His breath clouded.
“I mean, she’s been found in a prostitution den. Price wants us to pursue that lead. Do you think maybe she’s been picked up? Got herself embroiled in something nasty? I dunno.”
Brian wiped his sleeve against the car window, making a hole in the condensation so he could see where he was going.
“But then, the paper in her hands. And then the water. Something doesn’t fit.”
“We go back to Foster Road, and we ask around. Chances are she’s got involved with some bad people, and she’s not the good girl her parents and her work colleagues make her out to be.”
Cassy frowned as Brian revved up the engine which spluttered out exhaust fumes. “You don’t really just think that. What’s getting to you?”
Brian tried to kick start the engine again.
“Come on, man.” She tossed her empty carton to one side. “You don’t have to be dicky with me. I’m your mate, for God’s sake.”
Brian finally got the engine going. “I don’t know. That’s the t
hing. I just…I usually get my head ‘round shit like this. But I just don’t know. My gut tells me that Danny Stocks knows more than he’s letting on to. And then there’s BetterLives, who seem all happy to help when we aren’t accusing one of theirs. And then there’s her family…I don’t think they’re being totally honest with us. Something’s just not adding up.”
He put his foot on the accelerator, and they headed towards Foster Road. “I have a feeling they aren’t being completely honest down at Foster, too. And whatever did happen, we can’t take anything away from the fact that she was killed there. That’s where it happened.”
“What if it didn’t?”
Brian let the thought play out in his head. The water. The paper.
“We find out.” He took a left turn onto Foster Road as a group of hooded kids cycled past, flicking two fingers at them when they thought they were out of sight.
They got out of the car and walked down Absom Road, which ran parallel to Foster Road. It wasn’t quite as much of a shithole, but it still reeked of sewage and sweet, sweat-tarnished perfume. It was a poor excuse of a road, and no decent sized cars could fit down there. But as long as hookers could take their clients somewhere out of sight, it served its seedy purpose.
Brian and Cassy walked up to the first redbrick building on the right. Brian stopped at the door.
“I’ll start at this one. You work your way down. We’ll try to speak to everyone. It doesn’t matter if they’ve already been spoken to–we speak again.”
Brian knocked on the first door as Cassy knocked on the doors on the opposite side.
A little thin-haired man, his balding head peeling like a mistreated potato, came to the door of the first house. He was holding a cat, and his white vest was browning at the armpits.
“I don’t see nothing,” he said. “Now’t bad to see ‘round ‘ere, officer. The young’uns, they ‘ave their stuff to do, but we were all kids, ain’t we?”
Brian held up the picture of Nicola. The man squinted at it.
“Have you ever seen this girl around here before?”