Red Mist

by Jan Swick

  He rolled up his sleeve, took his pen and wrote on his inner forearm: 1 - witnesses?

  A hand clamped on his arm, and he turned to look at Danny.

  "The police have already been here," Danny said, and his tone was almost sympathetic, as if he thought Matt was wasting his time. But his eyes were warm with understanding. Tough army boy Matt was on the trail after all, which pleased him. If only because it proved Matt cared.

  "Just give me a few minutes," Matt said, and turned his mind back to the task at hand.

  "Are you looking for clues, is that it?" Danny said. Matt ignored him.

  To the south, the road curved away to the east, away from the pimp's zone, which was over to the west, beyond the shops, so anyone coming here from there would most likely arrive from the junction up north. There was nothing here for anyone except the business park. Business parks were erected in such areas, out of the way, with little traffic for delivery trucks to worry about. A killer with a car, who knew the area, could arrive from the north, dump a body here with no worry, and follow the street south, then away to the east. The killer would have had to drive past at least forty shops and ten business park offices. There could be a lot of CCTV footage that captured the vehicle, although the cameras would be pointed forward and down, to cover the car parks and the backs of the shops. Maybe not the road. Definitely not the wasteground. If the road was covered, then a car driving south would be caught on CCTV on the north side of the wasteground and then again on the south side just seconds later. Unless it stopped at the wasteground.

  He wrote: 2 - cars seen this side then other side after long delay? Or returning north?

  Danny put his hand on Matt's shoulder. "Bro, let me help. What are you thinking?"

  Matt ignored him. He thought, Why the wasteground? The rotten back yards of the shops were open to the street. There was the hedge that ran the full length of the business park except for where it broke to allow the road to branch into car parks. There were dark little alleyways between the shops. There were a hundred shielded places where a body could be concealed, yet Karen's corpse had been put in the single biggest open spot here. Beyond a fence that was driven into the ground and had a locked gate. If you wanted to hide a body here, you hid it. If you wanted it out in the open to make a statement, you left it in a car park or right in the street. It didn't make sense.

  3 - why wasteground?

  He went to the fence. Danny followed. He let Matt do his thing. Matt took out the laminate article. There was no avoiding looking at the photo now, but he tried his best to focus intently on the area of ground around Karen's dead body, instead of the body itself. There was no fence in the photo, so the photographer had gotten up close, pressed his camera to one of the holes. Matt put his face to the fence, closed his left eye. Right eye close enough that he couldn't see the fence, just the wasteground beyond. He moved to the right. Pulled away to check the photo periodically. Shifted his feet again. Small movements, minor adjustments, using tufts of weeds and specific cracks in the concrete as a reference. Eventually he stopped. Here. This was where the photographer had stood with his camera phone. Matt had the same angle, looking slightly right and down. He saw where the body had laid.

  His eyes found the photo again. This time he couldn't help but stare at her corpse. Karen was on her back, hips twisted at a right angle, right leg laid over the left, short skirt riding high up to expose her knickers. She wore a fluffy white coat that was smeared with dirt. It was high-waisted and he could see her pale white belly. One arm was straight down by her side, while the other was bent and raised towards her head, hand near the ear, as if she were answering the phone. Thankfully her head was pointed away from the fence and the white coat was plumped up at her breasts, which meant her face was mostly obscured from the angle the photo had been taken. He was glad he couldn't see the bruising on her neck, or the look of horror and pain that must have been in her eyes.

  He put the photo away, thinking. The exact location of the body was wrong, all wrong. He went to the gate in the north side of the fence. It was locked. And the lock was new. Of course: the cops would have broken the original in order to get inside, then arranged for it to be locked again afterwards. If it had been locked at all. Maybe the landowner had decided to add a lock after the crime scene was processed. The gate could have been wide open when the killer arrived with the body. But both scenarios presented problems.

  If the gate had been locked when the body was dumped, then the body had gone over the fence. Not thrown over because it was fifteen feet from the fence. So lifted over. But the fence was taller than a man, and to get the dead weight of a woman from this side to that would require more than one set of hands. If not Superman and the Incredible Hulk working together, then at least four normal men: two passing the body over the top of the fence and into the hands of two awaiting it on the other side. But that seemed very far-fetched. Such action would take time, and there was the risk of witnesses happening along.

  So the gate must have been open. Problem: if the gate had been open, then the body's position was all wrong. Thirty feet from the gate. Why take it so far inside? Not to present the body like some exhibit, because surely such an artist of death would lay the body in the very centre of the wasteground, and it was nowhere near the centre. If exact placement didn't matter, then why take the body any distance at all into the wasteground? Dump it two feet inside and run. Hell, drop it outside the gate and run.

  Again, it made no sense. Something about that very spot where the body lay bothered him.

  4 – gate, fingerprints? Body position?

  "Matt, don't shut me out."

  Danny was right behind him again. He was about to turn and tell him to go away when he saw it. There was a manhole cover close to the body. That was it! The killer had been going for the manhole cover, planning to dump the body in the sewers below. Maybe he couldn't get the cover up, or had been disturbed by a passing car. So he had left the body and escaped.

  5 – manhole - prints?

  He thought he had it, then he didn't. He was basing all these theories on the notion that Karen had been killed elsewhere and brought here. Seeking a specific reason why she had been placed exactly where found. But what if she had already been here? Could have been in that wasteground for whatever reason when she was attacked. Maybe her killer had wanted to have sex outdoors and chose this remote place because he knew what he was going to do afterwards. Maybe she was awaiting a regular punter when some lunatic passing by spotted her.

  A hand on his shoulder. He turned. Danny, a little angry, said, "Matt, I'm not some weak little girl. Tell me what you know. She was my sister as well."

  He was getting a headache. Too many theories. And he was looking at a naked crime scene long after professionals had been and processed it. The police would have a better understanding of what might have happened. Matt resigned himself to the fact that he was going to learn nothing by himself. The Liaison Officer and what she could tell him, that was his only next step.

  Up the street, the taxi's horn beeped. "I told him to read something," he called to Danny. "Tell him again. Tell him if his horn goes a second time, it'll go a third with his head."

  Danny held up a couple of fingers to the driver, indicating they'd be two minutes. He continued to watch Matt.

  But Matt was done. Drunk, tired, hungry, cold. He headed back to the taxi and Danny followed. The driver sneered at them in his rear-view mirror, even though he was still on the meter. Matt sneered right back and the guy looked away and put the car in gear and drove. He looked at Danny, but Danny was staring out the window. Clearly annoyed. Matt wasn't sure why.

  When they got home, Mum met them at the door with an angry face. Both brothers were clearly drunk, swaying, reeking of alcohol. And late.

  "Where have you been? Are you two drunk? The Liaison Officer is here."

  "Good," Matt slurred as he slipped by her. "I have questions."

  Matt woke and felt as if his head were in a
vice.

  He was on his back, looking up at the night sky. Confusion: four moons high above him. Realisation: he was in his old room. The ceiling was painted to look like out space, with the moons and stars and a spaceship and a comet with its fiery tail to give authenticity to his sci-fi fantasies. God, Dad had painted that for him when he was eight. Matt used to sit on his bed and pretend it was a space buggy, his bedroom floor the surface of an alien planet. So many years ago and that ceiling, although faded, was still the same. He'd thought it embarrassing when he returned from the army, twenty-six years of age, but right now he thought it was cool again.

  The ceiling was the same, but that was it. The carpet was different, the green wallpaper now a boring cream. The space buggy had been swapped for a cheap foldaway bed that was closed up and leaning against a wall. His old dresser had gone, and with it the rhymes he had scratched into the wood with a needle. The room was now a storage area for his mother's embroidery addiction, as promised. There was a low table overflowing with yarns. Long rolls of material, dozens of them, were leaning against the walls, while others were balanced horizontally across their tops. Matt didn't know how he got here, but he knew how those rolls had gotten on top of the others. Vague memory: moving loose rolls off the floor last night, to create space.

  He looked around from a kneeling position. The black bag of dirt and dust from the old train station was here, next to a blank sheet of A4 paper laid on the floor. Now he remembered something. He'd gotten real drunk after the Liaison Officer had left. He remembered her, too. Louise Tark, tall forties, slim, sexy, but with an annoying wispy voice. A woman paid to talk to people, with a voice like that. And an annoying sympathetic nodding habit. But a nice nose, curved like a ski-jump.

  His head was killing him.

  Questions for Ms Tark. A sort of drunken interrogation. He remembered wanting to get drunk because he feared he might upset her and his family with his bullish questioning, but it hadn't been like that. Danny, Mum and Dad had sat and listened intently, perhaps because he had been asking things they hadn't had the foresight or guts to ask themselves. And Ms Tark had been almost pleasantly surprised to find him so eager to learn the details, she told him later, because she was so used to bereaved families closing their minds to the specifics of a horrible end to the life of one of their own. What, she was upset that grieving people didn't want the juicy details?

  Danny had gone home in a taxi soon after Ms Tark left, and Matt had gone upstairs to sleep. So he told his parents. But he waited for them to hit the sack themselves, then he went back downstairs. Got the black bag and folded rug from his car and a handful of whiskey miniatures from the cupboard and went back to his room to work. He had a sort of direction to go now because the Liaison Officer had given him something approximating good news. Karen's body had been moved after death, according to the Coroner's preliminary report. It gave Matt some hope. His initial theory had been correct. On all other fronts so far, not much. Nothing any witness offered had turned to gold. No CCTV footage had shed any light, although there were still people and vehicles to chase up. The autopsy had revealed no injuries other than those associated with beating around the head and neck, and of course strangulation. To counter this influx of negative news, the Liaison Officer tried to console the family by blowing out those crime shows that claim the police don't solve crimes unless it's in the first forty-eight hours. These things can take time, unfortunately.

  But Matt wasn't upset. He had something to go with. Body moved after death. Killed elsewhere.

  A memory came to him. He was here in this room, and his mother was in the doorway, talking to him. Telling him about her day, same as she'd done when he was a baby. Never one for fanciful bedtime stories, she had settled him for sleep at night with an overview of her day, of the things he'd done to impress her, like taking a step, using his first word. Funny things children did, naughty things children did, and her plans and hopes for his future. Last night she had performed in much the same way. Maybe his drunken state, the slurry words and staggered walking, had reverted him to baby-mode, reminding her of those years way back. Or maybe she just missed those years. It made him feel both embarrassed and sad. Was she missing things from her life? Now that one of her children had been snatched from her, was she simply grabbing with both hands the opportunity to be close to one that remained?

  He remembered more about last night. After Mum had gone, after both parents had gone to bed, he had set his mind on the task at hand, the reason he was here, which wasn't to rekindle a family bond, at least not that alone. He had closed his bedroom door and downed a miniature of whiskey and put a sheet of paper on the carpet. Lay on his stomach in front of it, grabbed a handful of crap from the bag and spread it on the sheet. He sifted through it. Anything intriguing he put aside, on another sheet of paper. The worthless stuff went into another bin liner, to be thrown. The larger items, bottles and packets and such, were examined for blood, then discarded. There might have been prints on the larger items, but he couldn't analyse prints without scientific help that he wasn't going to enlist.

  He looked at the sheet of paper. Clear, empty, blank.

  Later he worked on the rug. Cleaned the vacuum cleaner so that nothing would contaminate his evidence, then used the nozzle to suck at the dense fibres. The noise wasn't too bad. A pint of dust and dirt he got up. That got analysed, too.

  He ended up with a good amount of intriguing items. Then he spent an hour finding fault with each, whittling them down. A lot of fingernail ends, all discarded in the end because he decided their edges were too smooth: clipped or neatly bitten off, but not torn. Not ripped off in a struggle. Some used bandages, whittled to one that was rolled into a tube, as if it had been around a finger - maybe it had come off a hand that was around Karen's neck. Or maybe not. Unsure, he eventually tossed it into the bag. Hairs, lots of them, but they got thrown because he couldn't analyse hairs.

  He looked at the sheet of paper. Clear, empty, blank.

  In the end he had discarded everything because he just didn't know. Nothing was evidence and all of it was evidence. He had no way of knowing. The police and their forensic scientists would know, but that wasn't an option. He remembered getting angrier the more often he found some clue that might not be, the more often he found himself over-analysing the crap he found. Every time he cast something aside because it wasn't a clear piece of evidence, he felt he might be wrong and that he'd just let the killer get one more step further away.

  Now, Matt crawled to the blank sheet of paper where he'd chosen to store the good stuff – but had stored nothing. And he saw that it wasn't clear/empty/blank at all. There was a single item there, a tiny blip in a sea of white. It was a sliver of black plastic. He picked it up. He didn't remember finding it. The whisky miniatures had gone down a treat, fast, and the tail end of his night was blurry, like an object slowly sinking through water, into darkness. The last part was gone. He was on his front, sifting, and then he was on his back and it was morning and he was staring at the ceiling.

  But at some point during the dark part of the night he had found this sliver of plastic and kept it. The only thing he had kept from all that detritus. Why? A clue, obviously, but how? What had a drunken man seen in it that a sober one now couldn't?

  Matt tossed it aside. Nothing, that's what. Fantasy. Maybe he had felt he had to keep at least one thing, just so the whole long night behind him wouldn't be a total washout.

  Only it had.

  Mum cooked him noodles and mushy peas for breakfast - a combination he'd loved as a teenager. The mixture didn't look appetising to Matt the adult, but his taste buds proved his eyes wrong. Cheap packet of instant noodles, cheap tin of mushy peas. Under 30p for the meal, but it went down a treat. He splashed out, had two lots.

  He was on the sofa, watching TV. Dad was in the bath, Mum in the kitchen. His head still hurt, but a pint of water had helped. He sat and felt relaxed and had just decided he was going to have a couch potato day and set his r
acing mind into neutral when his phone beeped in his pocket. The low battery beep. Nearly dead. He had no charger here. Idiot. It was back in the bedsit in Scotland.

  Mum entered with a cup of tea. He took it, said cheers, and she ruffled his hair, like he was still a teenager. Last time he'd sat here with a hangover, he had been.

  Matt took the phone from his pocket, planning to turn it off, save the battery. He touched the ON button to light up the screen. The screen showed a big icon of an envelope. Text message. Across the envelope there was a number. Not a name. The message was from someone whose name was not in his phonebook.

  Suddenly he recognised the number. He was good at remembering numbers, especially ones that mattered to him. And seven years ago this one had mattered to him. Christ, he was surprised she still had the same number after so long.

  He opened the text message. The battery icon was red, nearly dead, so he read quickly. The text message simply said: RADIO CAMERA. PAY UP!

  Puzzled, Matt got into his text message storage. He usually kept a clean inbox but was sloppy about cleaning up the outbox. Over forty messages there, some months old, all to people in his phonebook. All to a name. Except one. One sent message was to a number, not a name. The same number, her number.

  The received message was time-stamped 06.07. His sent message was stamped 03.44. Another late night for him. Clearly he'd sent it during his dark time, drunk, because he didn't remember doing so, and she'd replied seven minutes after waking. He remembered that about her: woke at six in the morning, like clockwork. Still the same after all these years. The message had arrived while he was sleeping and he might not have seen it for days if not for the low battery beep.