by Ryan Casey
Of course, that particular aftershave reminded him of shit to this day.
“Squeezing your nose works just as well,” Brad said, his voice high pitched as he gripped his nostrils.
Brian took a few steps over the slippy, dusty tiles. He pressed a hand up against the wooden door, pushed it aside.
He wished he could take a few deep breaths to calm himself, to prepare himself before he went in, but it’d only make the smell worse.
The door opened up fully and Brian stepped inside the room.
The room was light. Windows at the other side of it were completely smashed, the sun peeking through the clouds and shining in as the rain continued to plummet down. The floor of this room, whatever it was, was covered with broken glass. Wooden cabinets had been torn away from the walls, smashed to pieces by hooligans who found pleasure in being moronically destructive.
“Watch your feet,” Brian said. “Do some of those ballet moves of yours to dodge the glass.”
Brad laughed. Laughed excitedly. But Brian heard the fear in his laugh. The nervousness. There was always nervousness before a discovery like this. There was always attempted humour, like waiting to go into an exam hall aware of the subject but unaware of what the questions would be like.
As Brian stepped further into the room, he soon got his answer.
“Got a Jonnie Doe alright,” he said, deflated.
Right in the middle of the room, there was a boy. A young boy, couldn’t be much into his teenage years. He was stripped naked, water dripping down from the ceiling onto his almost translucent pale skin. He had a little silver stud mark in his left ear.
“Shit,” Brad said, staggering in behind Brian. “Holy…”
Brian heard him throw up, and he felt like doing the same.
Had to stay cool. Had to stay professional.
He walked closer to the kid, feeling anger burn up inside. Anger at why anyone would do this. Anger at all the sickos in the world he’d arrested, all the sickos he was about to arrest.
The young boy’s sliced intestines were hanging out of his belly. Flies crawled around them. A mouse scurried away into the corner of the room, blood on its little snout.
Brian gulped down a coffee-tasting lump in his throat. Felt his knees go weak as Brad continued to spit out his breakfast, which was uncharacteristic for the usually cool Brad.
He lifted his phone out of his pocket. Dialled in for forensics and the coroner with his shaky hand, his head fuzzy and his vision blurred.
As he listened to the dialling tone, he stepped closer to the boy as the rain carried on lashing down outside.
He stood over him. Tensed his jaw.
“McDone?” DCI Marlow said. “What we got?”
“A Jonnie Doe,” Brian said, his throat dry. “Get… get forensics down here. Right away.”
The rest of the conversation was a blur as Brad walked up to Brian, stood beside him.
Brian stared down at this poor kid and felt a world of pity, a world of anger.
The kid couldn’t stare back up at him because his eyes had been torn out of their sockets.
THREE
Brian couldn’t get the smell of the Jonnie Doe’s decomposing little body out of his nose no matter how much aftershave he sprayed.
He stood in the coroner’s office. Forensics were investigating the scene, but it didn’t look like anything had been left behind. The coroner’s office was windowless and dark, with a sole white beam in the middle of the room lighting up the boy on the table. It made a hum—a hum that was the only sound in this room. A hum of death.
Seeing the boy again, stomach sliced open and eyes torn out of his head, Brian worried he might be the one throwing up this time.
“What you got?” Brian asked.
Jeeves, who was wearing a white coat and black trousers that had a little bit of chewing gum stuck to the front of them, tapped his teeth with a pencil and peered at the boy’s body through his thick-rimmed glasses. “Male, of course. I’d estimate his age at around ten, eleven. Pre-puberty.”
McDone gulped. Pre-puberty. Just like his son, Davey. Just an innocent kid like his son.
“Cause of death?” Brad asked. His voice was much more stable than it was when they’d found the boy. He’d steadied himself. Had his moment of freaking out and now he was stable again. Cops had to be good at doing that—at staying as collected as possible. Sometimes doing so required a few moments of letting the emotion in, of letting the pain take over you and the drive to find the offender fill your body.
Brian was finding it very difficult to switch back to professional mode with the state of the body in front of him.
Jeeves took the bitten-down pencil out from his mouth. Placed it down on a metal table next to the slab where their Jonnie Doe lay, a greenish tint coming off him and making him look like some kind of waxwork model. “The boy died from blood loss. Multiple horizontal incisions were made across the abdominal area. We’ve got severe wounds all across the gastrointestinal tract—the small intestine has been sliced at with a sharp knife, and the large intestines show signs of incisions too, although not as many.”
Brian went dizzy with the information. Felt a tightness in his gut and tried not to look at the boy on the slab, tried not to see him as the person he once was.
Brad looked on, glassy and grey-eyed, the professional of the pair of them. Roles reversed from the discovery stage.
Jeeves reached into the opening in the boy’s stomach and pulled some of the skin and muscle back with a metal rod. Brian looked away.
“What you won’t have seen is that the stomach has been completely severed away too.”
“I guess it goes without saying the boy suffered,” Brad said.
Jeeves lifted his head. Looked at Brian and Brad with the blankest, most morose expression Brian had ever seen on his face. “I don’t like to break professional code like this, but I haven’t ever seen an act of cruelty towards any human being like this in my entire thirty-six year career.”
Great. Just what Brian needed to hear right now.
Jeeves stepped away from the body. Cleared his throat. “The boy’s eyes look to me like they were removed post-mortem. One of them, at least. We can tell from the age of the internal wounds compared to those in the abdomen. It looks like our killer pried them out and then sliced them away by the optic nerve—”
“Fuck,” Brian said. He turned around. Leaned against the grey wall. His head pulsated. Skin tingled.
“Unfortunately the victim does have signs of anal bruising and evidence of anal haemorrhage. And the bruising on his knuckles suggests he put up a fight.”
“Semen traces?” Brian asked, still facing the wall.
“No sign. It looks like the perpetrator used a condom.”
“Course he did,” Brian said. “Which sick fucker would want to be found guilty of this?”
“Any prints?” Brad asked.
Jeeves shook his head. Pulled off his gloves and washed his hands. “No prints yet. And no evidence of tissue under the nails or on the body either. But we’ll see what rears its head over the next few hours.”
“That all?” Brian asked.
Jeeves nodded. “All for now.”
It was strange seeing Jeeves so taken aback, so stunned. He was usually calm and steady even in the sickest of circumstances. Brian always thought he was so controlled that there had to be something weird about him. But today, he wasn’t faking his posh accent that he usually did when he was giving a report. He wasn’t trying to get one up on Brian and Brad.
He was decidedly human.
And that was terrifying.
Brian and Brad left Jeeves’ office in a hurry. Headed down the corridors where officers buzzed by, nodded their heads at Brian. Brian said hi to them in return, but he didn’t know half of their names as it was.
And after what he’d just seen in Jeeves’ office, he knew even fewer.
He did his best to inhale the scents of deodorants and aftershaves and
coffee as he walked through the corridor, did all he could to get the image of the poor kid on the slab out of his mind, but he wasn’t sure he’d be getting rid of that for the rest of his life.
Brad pushed open the double doors leading back to the main offices. Faces blurred by. Voices chattered on, rattling in Brian’s ears as the rain bounced off the upper-floor windows of the Preston Police Station. Outside, it was grey, and due to the torrential rain it was impossible to see the view of Preston but for the lights of cars stuck in traffic jams.
“Need to check on missing persons,” Brad said. “Can’t see a boy that age going missing for a couple of days and no reports being made. Carter, over here.”
Samantha Carter, who’d recently taken the role of Detective Inspector, walked over from her desk with a coffee in hand. She had gorgeous, chocolate brown hair. A little mole above her plump lips that added to her sexiness. She was a brilliant officer, and one that Brian had to admit he’d had an innocent crush on for quite some time. She walked over with her black blazer and trousers on, white shirt unbuttoned at the collar underneath, and she whistled. “Jesus Christ. You two okay? Got Ebola or something?”
“The Jonnie Doe,” Brian said, his throat tight and raw.
Carter’s face dropped into seriousness as she sipped on her coffee. “Ah. I heard about that.”
“You have any missing persons reports over the last few days? Specifically boys aged around ten, eleven?”
Brian and Brad followed Carter back to her desk. Carter leaned over. Her workspace smelled of perfume and was filled with origami swans and bundles of elastic bands. Way too messy for Brian’s liking. He liked a clean desk. He liked to know where everything was.
Sure, he hadn’t quite been that way when he was in a state a few years ago back when his marriage to Vanessa broke down, but times changed.
“A few from the last couple of weeks but nothing abnormal,” Carter said. “And most of them were resolved before the forty-eight hour window slammed shut anyway.”
“Great,” Brian said. “A little Jonnie Doe with no identification. Just what we—”
“Wait, wait—we do have one. Sam Betts. Jean Betts, his mum, she reported him missing two days ago. Went for a walk with his doggie in the evening. Dog showed up on its lead but no sign of Sam.”
“Do we have a picture?”
“Hold on,” Carter said, tapping around on the keyboard. “Yep. School photo from last year, so he might’ve changed a little. Here you go.”
Brian’s stomach tensed when he leaned over to Carter’s screen to take a look. A part of him, a large part of him, begged that he didn’t recognise the kid on the screen. Begged that he’d never find out the identity of the Jonnie Doe, because it just rammed home the reality of the brutality. It rammed home that the kid had a family. Friends.
It made the Jonnie Doe a real person, not just an alias.
But Brian’s stomach dropped when he looked at the screen. Muscles in his arms loosened, like a cold wave had crashed over his body.
“That your boy?” Carter asked.
Brian stared at the picture. Felt more anger, more sickness, growing inside him.
He didn’t recognise the boy from his bright blue eyes. He couldn’t.
But the curly dark hair. The way his thick eyebrows met, just slightly, in the middle. The little silver stud in his left ear.
“That’s him,” Brian said and turned away.
Their Jonnie Doe was a Jonnie Doe no longer.
FOUR
Jean Betts looked outside the window of her cottage on Westhaven Road and twiddled her necklace around in her fingers.
She stared at the hedges, at the cloudy sky that autumn rain pummelled down from. It’d been two days since she’d last seen Sam now. He’d gone out for a walk with Clara. Gone for a walk, like a good lad he always was for taking her for his mum.
And then he’d gone. He hadn’t shown up. Wednesday night was the last time Jean saw her son.
She heard a whimpering. Turned around and saw Clara sat in the middle of the wooden floor of the cottage, looking at Jean and tilting her head to one side.
“I know,” she said. “Your brother, he’ll be back soon. He’ll be back.”
Clara just turned her head some more. Let out another series of little whimpers.
Jean sniffed up, got a whiff of the wood burner drifting down their chimney and through the open fireplace from next door. Her nose was a bit on the stuffy side. Allergic to dogs. Always had been. But it was just something she’d put up with, for Sam. He’d been through a lot already in his short life. Jean had moved him around a lot—moved him away from his dad, then away from Plungington, then in and out of Stan’s life. He needed someone else. Someone to keep him company other than those bloody videogames of his.
Clara, a rescue dog that a client kindly gave her, was the answer.
“He’ll come back,” a voice said from the kitchen.
The voice made Jean’s stomach turn. She knew she shouldn’t have let him stay over. She knew it was a bad idea. It went against her beliefs, her protocol.
But she was lonely. Since Sam had gone missing two nights ago, she was scared.
And he was here. Someone to lean on the shoulder of.
Even if it was costing him his hard earned cash, he was here.
Jean stepped towards the open-door kitchen area. She could see him leaning against one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table. He was dressed in a suit. Slicked back dark hair. Smelled of aftershave that Jean didn’t recognise—borderline perfume. His nails were well cut. Scrubbed.
That’s something Jean always noticed about her clients. Their nails. Their nails told her a lot about the person paying her for sex. About their lives, their attitudes towards themselves.
This man clearly cared about himself.
Jean started walking towards the kitchen, towards this professional, when she caught a glance of herself in the mirror. God, when had she got so old? Her blonde hair looked scruffy. There were wrinkles under her baggy eyes. Spots on her chin.
She used to be beautiful. Just years ago, Jean used to be beautiful.
And sure, she was still only thirty-two, but she wasn’t what she was. Her lifestyle had a way of breaking her down, taking everything good away from her.
And it wasn’t like she lived a particularly wild life for an escort either. She didn’t drink much. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t do any drugs, not since her early twenties. She was a responsible parent. She just did a job that responsible parents didn’t do, and she had to make up for that in every other area of her life.
She stepped away from the mirror and saw the man looking at her.
He had steely green eyes. Eyes that made her stomach quiver; made her smile no matter what mood she was in. Thick black stubble. He looked at her like she mattered. Like he cared.
Like no one ever looked at her.
“I was always running away when I was a boy,” he said. “Ran into the woods and wild-camped there for a couple of days once when my dad wouldn’t buy me a new toy.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. Why do you find that so hard to believe?”
Jean shook her head. “Just you… you seem so clean. Way too clean to be wild-camping.”
He pulled her close. Pressed his lips against her neck and moved his mouth up to her right ear. “You weren’t saying that last night,” he whispered, hot breath covering the side of her face.
She wanted to be with him. She wanted to put all the bad thoughts of Sam, all the bad memories of his disappearance, to the back of her mind again. She felt bad for not looking for Sam more. But he had run off in the past, to be fair. Disappeared for five days once. Turned out he was just giving camping a go, just like her Han Solo spoke of. It just seemed strange that he’d left Clara. That wasn’t like him.
But she’d called the police on Wednesday night. They’d do their jobs.
She pressed against his solid body underneath the man’s white
shirt as he kissed her neck more. Dug her nails into his chest and pushed him back. “I… I can’t. I—”
“That’s okay,” he said. Didn’t even try to fight back. Stepped away, raised his arms.
Jean felt herself liking this guy even more simply for not demanding what he wanted from her.
That was the thing about being an escort. Men thought that by paying you money for a service, they had a God-given right to do whatever they pleased with you. But you wouldn’t go into McDonalds and order a Happy Meal only to demand a Big Mac.
Escorting was the same. It was a business. And all good businesses had rules, regulations.
So far, this man was ticking every box.
He was earning his Happy Meal.
“Would it break professional code to tell me your name?” Jean asked.
He looked at her with those eyes. Smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Like I said. You can call me—”
“Han Solo. I know. But that’s just ridiculous. I refuse to even think of you with that name.”
“Wow. Charming.”
“Sorry. I…”
She saw the car pull up outside the house in the corner of her eyes. Looked around—a black Honda. Two men in decent clothing getting out. One of them was older, slightly chubbier, with dark and thinning hair. The other was younger and skinnier, a black leather jacket over his white shirt, top button undone. Doc Martens on his feet. He was looking right through the window, right at her.
“Expecting visitors?” ‘Han Solo’ asked.
Jean continued to stare at the men as they cleared their throats, walked up to her door, knocked against the wood.
“No, I… I don’t think…”
And then it hit her. She’d seen men like this before. She’d seen them knocking at her door before when she’d been badly abused by a client two years back. They didn’t come in the usual uniform—just smart wear, not like the movies suggested.