Forward Slash

by Louise Voss

  ‘In the middle of nowhere?’ Bob said.

  ‘Maybe a spa. Or one of those places where rich Londoners take their kids to commune with nature. Anyway, the project got bogged down in the usual planning-permission hell until it was eventually put on hold, and JWF went bust at the end of 1998, leaving all of its projects in limbo, including Robertson Farm.’

  ‘It was left to rot.’

  ‘Exactly. For over twenty years, including the time when they were planning to turn it into a hotel … so we know that the earliest our woman could have entered the cesspit would be 1990. But I called a local drainage company that specializes in septic tanks and the like, and they said that all of the urine would have evaporated and the excrement would have solidified within a few years of disuse. The skeleton wasn’t submerged at all so she must have gone in there at least three to four years after 1990. But hopefully, Melinda will be able to tell us more.’

  ‘The early nineties,’ Bob sighed wistfully. ‘Good times.’

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t even know you existed.’ Declan went on: ‘JWF’s staff would know about the farm and, presumably, the cesspit. We should check out their staff from back then. See if anything sticks out. But right now, the priority is finding out who she is.’

  ‘Cessna.’

  ‘What?’

  He looked suitably sheepish. ‘That’s what everyone’s calling her.’

  Declan rolled his eyes. ‘Have a bit of respect, Clewley.’

  ‘It could be an awful lot worse. Mike Jarvis suggested calling her Latrina.’

  The phone rang and Declan snatched it up. ‘DI Adams. Ah, hi, Melinda. I’ve been looking forward to your call. Yes, yes … of course, I’ll come over right away.’

  When he put down the phone his heart was beating faster and he had that tingle in his belly, the one that kept him in this job, the fix he lived for.

  He looked up at Bob. ‘Sounds like Melinda has got some interesting info for us. Want to come? Or are you going to go and bronze your bollocks on Fairlight Beach?’

  The woman’s remains were laid out on a bench, the bones looking even sadder in the bright fluorescent light of the lab. In the cesspit, they had appeared muddy brown, but he could see now that the discolouration was more subtle. The bones looked as though they’d been dragged through dirt, the colour of a lifelong cigar-smoker’s teeth.

  Bob had come along, too, Declan was pleased to note, extending his shift despite the lack of overtime and – doubtlessly – absorbing the complaints of his wife like a man well-used to disappointing those he loved. Bob’s flippant manner had changed now they were in the presence of the bones – he was no longer calling her Cessna. Or perhaps it wasn’t the remains that were making him serious and quiet. Maybe it was Melinda Moore.

  Melinda, who was in her mid-thirties, had very long red hair that she wore loose, was so pale she was almost translucent and had blue eyes with heavily hooded lids, like a Pre-Raphaelite muse. She spoke with a soft, melodic voice tinged with irony. And she was tactile, too, laying a warm hand on people as she spoke to them. Declan was sure that if she invited Bob into that storage cupboard over there for fifteen minutes of fun, he would forget the family he adored in an instant. Declan would have been strongly tempted, too.

  ‘She was beautifully preserved,’ Melinda said, addressing Declan as they both looked down at the skeleton laid out like a woman sunbathing in her back garden, her limbs rearranged now.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Oh, yes, definitely a woman. I didn’t need DNA to tell me that. The shape of the pelvis alone tells me this person was female.’ She lightly touched Declan’s shoulder and he observed how Bob swallowed, watching Melinda reverently.

  ‘She’s five foot eight and weighed around nine stone … nine stone two. But from her DNA, I can tell a few other things. She was in her early twenties – I would guess twenty-three – and was Caucasian. She had blue eyes and blonde hair. What else? Yes – there must have been a good amount of moisture down there. The body requires moisture in order to decompose. Some of that moisture would come from the body itself – the flesh – but in a dry atmosphere, you would expect to see some mummification. The cesspit was empty?’

  ‘Yes,’ Declan said. ‘Completely dry. What else can you tell?’

  ‘Well … she was naked. But you knew that. Her left hip and left arm are damaged – I would guess from the drop into the pit, where they struck the ground.’

  ‘So she was dropped into the pit.’

  ‘Or fell,’ said Bob.

  Melinda touched his arm, making him jolt, and said, ‘I really don’t think she fell in. And not just because the cesspit cover was closed behind her.’

  Declan waited for her to continue.

  ‘There were puncture wounds in the thorax area – the ribcage.’

  ‘She was stabbed?’ Bob was horrified. He had clearly been assuming it had been some kind of unfortunate accident.

  Melinda nodded. ‘With great force. It looks like they stabbed her in the heart, with the knife driving down, like this.’ She mimed somebody thrusting downwards with a knife.

  They were all silent for a moment.

  ‘I’ve submitted the DNA to the national database, to see if there’s a match. If we’re very lucky, she was once arrested for shoplifting or something. But it will take a couple of days to get the results.’

  ‘Anything else you can tell us right now?’ Declan asked.

  ‘Yes, actually. She was suffering from mild scoliosis.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Bob asked, his cheeks turning a pale shade of pink as Melinda’s lips curled in his direction.

  ‘Curvature of the spine,’ she replied. Using both hands, she picked up the dead woman’s spine and turned it over, tracing a curved line along it with her forefinger. ‘As you can see, it’s very mild, but it forms a shallow C shape. When she was a young teenager she might have worn a back brace to help correct it. It probably wouldn’t have been noticeable once she was an adult though.’

  Declan felt little bubbles of excitement in his belly. This, surely, would help them identify this person they now knew was a murder victim.

  ‘How common is it?’ he asked.

  Melinda tilted her head from side to side. ‘It’s not my area of expertise …’

  ‘It affects three to four children out of every thousand,’ Bob said.

  Declan and Melinda looked at him with surprise. Bob held up his phone. ‘I just Googled it, didn’t I?’

  ‘OK,’ Declan said. ‘And the NHS will have records of girls who have undergone treatment. We know her rough age, too, and we can assume she comes from around here – so it shouldn’t be too hard to identify her, even if nothing comes back from the DNA database.’ He smiled. ‘Thanks for being so helpful, Melinda.’

  ‘Yeah, cheers, Melinda,’ added Bob.

  Melinda cast a look down at the bones on the bench. ‘I hope you find out who she is. And who did this to her. I’ll let you know if we’ve got a DNA match as soon as I hear.’

  As they were leaving, Melinda called after them. ‘Oh, one more thing I almost forgot to mention.’

  Declan turned back.

  ‘The position she was found in, with one hand positioned on her chest …’ Melinda put her hand on her heart.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s unlikely she landed in that position. I would say she was clutching her wound.’

  Declan felt the cold of the cesspit crawl through his veins. ‘So she wasn’t dead when she hit the ground, despite having been stabbed.’

  Melinda nodded. ‘Yes. She died down there. In the pit.’

  17

  Him

  I was getting bored of waiting. I knew it was sensible to wait while I set everything up but my desire to be with The One was threatening to overwhelm me. I could take her immediately, but there was something thrilling about waiting just a few more days, getting to know her from a distance, finding out all about her. It was good for me to practise patience, to make it all the sw
eeter when I got what I craved. But I needed a little snack, something to tide me over, while I waited for my main course. I hadn’t had the pleasure of dispatching the Slut personally, and I felt as though I had missed out.

  I logged on to Craiglist and browsed through the W4M – women for men – casual-encounters ads, surely one of the best things about being alive in the early twenty-first century. All those desperate women making it so easy for people like me, women who wanted to make their boyfriends mad, who craved a big dick, who didn’t want a boyfriend, just someone to make their pussy wet. Reading their words on the screen made me hard.

  I read through some of the ads until I found one that looked promising. She wanted to give and get head and she only lived a few miles away. The ad had only been posted fifteen minutes before so the chances were she hadn’t been snatched up yet. Using a fake profile, set up with a brand new Gmail account, I sent her a photo, as she asked. The photo was of a guy from a modelling site. I also sent a picture of a fat eight-inch cock from a porn site. She replied almost straight away with her own photo. She was pretty. Not stunning, but good enough. After I’d found out where she lived, using Google Street View to get a good idea of what it was like in her neighbourhood, we arranged to meet at hers.

  I drove over. I was wearing leather trousers and a leather jacket; in a holdall, I had handcuffs, my knives and the black corset I like slutty girls to wear. In my pocket, a can of Mace.

  She lived on a run-down estate, the kind of place where Neighbourhood Watch means watching out for when your neighbours have gone away so you can rob them. I had driven my cheapest car, and I parked as close to her building as I could, sitting in the car for a good long time to scope out the area and find the right time to approach her flat without being noticed. There wasn’t a single passer-by in the hour that I waited, so eventually I deemed it safe to proceed.

  As soon as she opened the door, before she could register that I looked nothing like the model in the photo – I am better looking – I sprayed Mace in her face, barged in and dragged her by her hair into her living room. As she recovered from the chemical blast, she opened her mouth to start screaming, so I gagged her quickly then handcuffed her wrists together and showed her my sharpest, most expensive knife. Her eyes rolled like a cow in an abattoir. She was wearing a micro-skirt that exposed a pair of fat legs. Her toenails were painted pink and she had a tattoo of a dragon on her thigh and two no-doubt-nonsensical Chinese characters on her ankle. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, but was ageing quickly.

  ‘You wanted some fun,’ I said. ‘Now we’re going to have some.’

  I looked around. Everything was cheap, shabby, in need of repair. The kitchen was so like the one in the place where I grew up that it gave me goosebumps.

  There were photos of two young children stuck with magnets to the fridge door. A boy and a girl.

  ‘Nod or shake your head,’ I ordered. ‘The kids. Are they yours?’

  She nodded, tears trickling down the sides of her nose.

  ‘Where are they? With their dad?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Your mum?’

  Yes.

  ‘And are they coming back tonight?’

  She nodded her head vigorously. I didn’t believe her but said, ‘We’d better hurry up then, hadn’t we? You don’t want me still to be here when they get back. Your mum, your kids. I’ll kill them too. If you put up a fight, if you scream or try to hurt me, I’ll wait for them. However long it takes. But if you make this easy for me, I’ll be gone before they get back. As will you.’

  She sobbed silently into her gag.

  ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’

  I turned on the gas hob and pressed the ignition until flames whooshed into life. As the woman on the floor shook with terror, I heated the blade of a knife until it glowed red, and thought about what part of her I might like to take home.

  18

  Amy

  Wednesday, 24 July

  Amy couldn’t sleep. Her head felt as if it were full of crazed bluebottles, suicide-bombing the insides of her skull. She turned from side to side, alternately wrapping the quilt around herself and throwing it off again. It was too hot, stupidly hot, the fan in the corner doing little more than push warm air from one part of the bedroom to another. She pulled off her long T-shirt and flung it across the room.

  She was about to give up and put the light on, maybe catch up with some emails or read a book, when Boris, who was lying on the floor by the window, barked.

  She pushed herself up on one elbow and squinted at him through the half-light. Boris never usually barked in the night.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said, picking up her phone at the same time to look at the clock: 3:17 in the morning.

  The dog barked again, hoisting himself up on his long legs and running back and forth between the window and the bedroom door.

  Feeling vulnerable, Amy retrieved her damp T-shirt from the floor and put it on, then peeked out through the curtains. Her bedroom looked out on the side of the house and across the street. There was a lamppost a few metres from the window that meant it was never fully dark in her room. The street was empty.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, patting Boris’s head. ‘There’s no one there.’

  But she didn’t go back to sleep. Instead, she went into the living room and put the TV on, staring blearily at reruns of game shows until dawn, a knife beside her on the sofa and Boris lying at her feet.

  ‘Won’t be long,’ Amy called out to Gary from the tiny cubbyhole next to the lounge that she used as an office. She had napped during the day and felt a lot better. ‘Make yourself at home.’

  She had left Gary sitting awkwardly on the edge of her sofa with his shins pressed up against her new footstool. Ordered at cost price from one of the designers who sold stuff on her own website, it was a huge custard cream and she adored it. He was looking around with something akin to astonishment at her flat with its quirky décor – well, she thought of it as quirky. The expression on Gary’s face indicated that he might have a different word for it. He was patting Boris’s head and stroking his ears so intently that Boris keeled over at his feet, looking up adoringly at him.

  ‘What do you think about those photographs?’ she added, even though she had already asked him this at least twice. The four photos ‘Becky’ had posted on her profile were of a typical palm-fringed white sandy beach from different angles. She heard Gary’s tut from the next room.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s really playing on my—’

  ‘Mind,’ said Gary. ‘It’s OK, I understand. But I just don’t know. I guess we could try and find out where that beach is, when the photo was taken, that sort of thing. I’ve got a friend at work, Pete, who should know. He’s, like, really into digital photos. Want me to ask him to take a look? He wasn’t in today, off sick, but hopefully, he’ll be back tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  Amy chewed her thumbnail. There was part of her that didn’t want to know – because if there was a way of confirming that the photos really had been taken in the past week and that the beach was in Asia rather than Australia or the Caribbean, then it seemed likely Becky really had gone to Asia. And that therefore, Katherine was probably just on a bender somewhere.

  She looked through the doorway at Gary. Did he think she was insane, obsessed? He didn’t seem as convinced as her that Becky hadn’t posted the pictures – or sent the email, or the mysterious tweets, come to that. Was he just going along with all of this to humour her?

  No, she told herself firmly. You’re not wrong. It’s all been fake. All of it. And Gary does believe me. Why would Becky bother to post photos on Facebook without any captions or comments, or without replying to the surprised and envious comments of her friends? ‘Wow – lucky you, didn’t know you were going on a fab holiday!’ ‘Send us a postcard, Becks, you jammy cow!’ ‘Where’s that lush beach, babes?’

  All unanswered questions – and Becky loved a Facebook c
hat. Somebody else must have posted the photos, just as they had sent the email and tweeted using Becky’s account. But, maddeningly, there was no proof, nothing she could show the police. In fact, the photo on Facebook would make the police even less inclined to believe her.

  The printer churned out sixty sheets of A4, each of whose top half featured a drunken, beaming photo of Becky, taken at her last birthday party, which Amy had scanned in, and, in the bottom half, Katherine’s Facebook-profile photo. She was stroking a giraffe’s nose from some Kenyan safari trip she and Clive had been on at some point. Over the top of the photos, Amy had printed:

  MISSING

  BECKY COLTMAN AND KATHERINE DEVINE

  PLEASE CALL IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON EITHER OF THEM

  Her email address was underneath, and the number of Camberwell police station.

  When they finished printing, Amy shuffled them together and put them into a Manila envelope. She saw that her printer was flashing a warning to tell her that the ink was low, and she tutted. Then she remembered why the ink was low, the grim task at hand, and thought she’d spend her life savings on printer cartridges if it would only get Becky back.

  ‘I’m going to have to tell Mum and Dad soon,’ she said abruptly, going back into the lounge, holding the envelope. ‘They’re going to kill me already, knowing I’ve told the police and not them – but what can they do? I’ll just say I was hoping that she’d come back, and I wouldn’t need to worry them.’

  Gary looked up from scrutinizing the old empty dolls’ house that Amy was now using to store all her knitting wool inside. ‘Silly question, probably, but she couldn’t be with them, could she?’

  Amy shook her head. ‘No, she’s not. I didn’t think she would be, but I rang them yesterday morning to check. Well, they were out playing golf, so I spoke to their housekeeper. Becky definitely isn’t there. Right, I’m ready – shall we go?’