A murder.
What are the chances of that? Inside he was spinning with giddy excitement, these swift developments overshadowing the shitty start to this day with the gleefully masochistic power player to his right.
This is it. First day, and first murder. Now to put my skills to good use.
Externally, his demeanour didn’t betray his inner joy. He wouldn’t give Gavin the satisfaction of batting that down. That was his to keep.
Baxted continued ‘
Young girl, between 18 and 25 years of age. No ID as yet. In some waste land a bit back from the main road and fairly near a residential area. Definitely suspicious circumstances and the local patrol are standing by waiting for us.
We want to act fast, and catch this bastard. He’s done some pretty nasty things to the girl from what I’ve been told, and we don’t want the public getting panicky.
At the moment it’s on the low down, but we won’t have that luxury for long.
You three - I want to take these street maps and go door knocking, see if anyone saw or heard anything. You four, go to the scene. I’ll be along in twenty, I’ve got to brief the Super first! CHOP CHOP PEOPLE!’.
Shouting done, she turned and re-entered her office, slamming the door.
Lentus heart skipped a beat. He was one of the four she had just pointed at. He was going to a murder scene!
‘Come with me, Muppet, and keep shtum, alright?’ Shanks barked to Lentus. ‘You’re just shadowing for now, to see what we do. When you’re a big boy, you can get involved, but for now, watch and learn. LET’S GO!’
With that Gavin grabbed a handful of large Filofax and marched away with what he no doubt believed to be a righteous and resolute look on his face. Lentus followed a few steps behind, holding his briefcase under his arm as he straightened his tie.
‘ We gotta moider to solve’ he muttered under his breath, again in his bad fake New York accent, and caught up with DI Shanks. Adrenaline pumping, heart beating like a trip hammer, Detective Constable Lentus trotted to the car parked in bay 3.
He tapped twice on the roof and climbed in, then with a squeal of tires he was on his way to his destiny.
Chapter 14
Polly switched the automatic door switch to ‘lock’ and turned the key. She was relieved that the day was finally over. Nutters and freaks. Dirt bags. Every day. But today’s guy was beyond that. He started off looking so normal, yet just went crazy so quickly.
In a wine fuelled conversation with her female friends she would have admitted that she was attracted to him at first. That on a purely superficial basis, in a world with zero repercussions or rules, she’d go straight to bed with him.
But this wasn’t that world. This was the real world, one within which you took responsibilities for your actions.
Yes, of course she knew she’d been a bit rude to him. OK, very rude to him, but he just happened to be the final straw in a string of similar guys saying similar things. AND she caught him looking up her skirt. Pervert.
She was used to the attention, God only knew that. Ever since she hit her teenage years she was aware of a change in how boys, men, generally all straight males looked at her. Treated her. At first she enjoyed the attention, but when it never stopped, each day endlessly throwing out idiots that tried it on, pushed it and thought they were all original….
…well today she had snapped.
She finished off the closing up checklist she’d put together herself, to eliminate the doubt of whether she had fully performed all procedures. After having to return one night at about 2am, losing sleep over whether she’d done everything, and having to check if she’d properly locked up, it seemed the prudent thing to do. She had done loads of the checklists over the years to help her brother deal with his very obvious obsessive compulsive issues.
…Bless him…
She smiled at the thought of her brother.
Now THERE was a weirdo. A lovable one, but god was he weird….
He’d looked after her as well though, made her world a safer place when it needed to be. She really should call him, see how he’s doing. In his real world. Often in life, you keep meaning to ring your nearest and dearest, and hours turn to days and before you know it days have turned to weeks. She would ring him tomorrow, properly catch up.
As she walked away from the front of the garage, her resolutions and plans of normal future things were interrupted when she felt the presence behind her before she heard them. Then a sharp pain as something metallic hit her across the back of her head. Bright light. Stars. Then darkness seeped in from the edge of her sight until she lost consciousness and fell into the arms of her attacker, catching her before she could hit the surface of the forecourt.
Chapter 15
She was such a pretty little thing. It would have been better to have fucked her than fucking kill her. But that was not to my style. Rude, RUDE bitch, though. Even the finest beauty can be tainted by ugly actions. Conversely, there can be beauty in the ugly when defined by their comportments. A please and thank you can mask many a horror, let me tell you.
It’s was her own fault then. She was her own jury and she set her own sentence by her deeds. Actions speak louder than words, and actions are what we are judged by.
….PRETTY POLLY. Ha. Soon you were pretty DEAD Polly…
Inhaling her last breath, the one she managed to breathe past the obstacles in her mouth. Now THAT was a sublime thing to do. More addictive than drugs.
Her deep dark eyes, locked in on mine as mine locked in on hers in her very last moments alive on this planet, watching the light extinguished..…delicious!
Chapter 16
When she regained consciousness, Polly was being dragged across some kind of bumpy terrain, each little rut and furrow jarring the pain in her head to the extent that she could feel the growing lump there without using her hands.
Not that she could have even if she had wanted to. Her hands and her feet were both secured each end of her body, and judging from the unforgiving nature of those bonds, they were likely plastic garden ties, digging into her wrists as she was dragged by the strong hands gripping them.
She wanted to scream, but she was gagged. She tried to struggle, to dig her heels in, but the rate she was being pulled along in the dark was fierce and unrelenting. She could not gain purchase.
And then all was still.
WHERE THE HELL AM I? She thought.
Just as she was summoning all her strength to wriggle, fight, to try to escape she felt herself pinned to the ground somehow by the ties at her wrists. Within a couple of seconds, with two metallic clangs the same happened at her feet.
It was all she could do to stay conscious. As she swam in and out of reality she could make out muttering
…Pretty Polly. PRETTY POLLY I’VE CLIPPED YOUR WINGS..
Doing her best to ignore the pain in her head, she summoned all her strength and put everything into lifting her hands and her feet away from the ground.
‘I am NOT going out like this. No way’. Thinking. Not aloud, she wanted to use the element of surprise.
It was no good, though. She was lithe, and she was physically fit; but her centre of gravity was too low, the metal pegs holding her down were too well anchored. Her head threatened to explode with the increase in blood pressure and the sobbing she now realised was coming from her, was wracking her body and weakening her efforts.
Laughter. Wicked sounding laughter.
She realised her skirt was up around her waist, the breeze she could feel telling her that her underwear was on display, possibly even that had moved about so that even more of her could be seen. She felt utterly helpless and much more naked than her clothed demeanour dictated.
‘Fucker!’ She screamed as much as she could against the gag. Polly wet herself. It was part fear, and she convinced herself it was partly because if she was going to get raped she’d make it as unpleasant as she could for this wanker. When this was over, at least she’d have that sm
all victory.
‘I DIDN’T HEAR YOU POLLY!’. The voice in the dark.
And then she knew. She knew who it was that was about to do whatever they intended to do to her.
She was crying. Her warm piss had turned cool even in the summer’s night heat. Her head pounded and she felt helpless. Useless. Weak. Her eyes were now used to the dark, and although there were no lights where they were, there were obviously some nearby enough to give an orange tinge to the area on the peripheral parts of the wasteland that they seemed to be in.
Against that orange hue she saw the silhouette of her assailant walk towards her, she saw him upside down as she leaned her head back. She saw the guy that she’d been rude to earlier. He was dressed all in black, but she knew it. She knew it was him.
‘I’m SO SORRY’ Just noises, muffled protestations against the gag. Again, she screamed; silenced by the bunched material that had been stuffed in her mouth.
‘Ssshh, ssshh. It’s too late for that now, Polly. You had your chance earlier to be nice, to show that you had some manners’.
Her sobbing against the rag increased. She was weak with fear. Tears ran, snot bubbles blew and burst, spattered out and were sucked back in with her terrified breathing, isolated to her only open orifice; her nose.
‘You were very rude, Polly. And now I shall have to teach you a lesson. Clip your wings. People like you make me SO VERY angry’. He had started to shout, and then brought it back to a stage whisper.
‘The world is a better place when people are courteous to each other, Polly. Don’t you agree? It doesn’t hurt to display some good old fashioned manners’.
He was speaking in such a reasonable tone. Were it not for the setting, a passer-by could be forgiven for mistaking it as a friendly conversation. But there were no passers-by, it was a disused bit of land, fairly close to houses but rarely set foot upon after dark due to the rubble of the derelict building that had been there being a hazard, and the lack of light. A few small trees and bushes only added to its impenetrable nature in the absence of daylight. The two could have been in the middle of nowhere, away from civilisation, and would have had as much chance of being stumbled upon.
Polly felt pressure on her wrists, then the full weight of her assailant as he stood on them. Faint with the realisation that this was only going one way, she gathered everything she had and struggled, bucking her body and trying her hardest to loosen her feet, shake off her attacker.
SHIT. I’M GOING TO DIE TONIGHT!
Then she saw eyes looking into hers, his face upside down as he looked down upon her. They burned with hatred and inhumanity. Momentarily she wondered if she’d been wrong about who it was, he seemed so different; he was so different. Then her survival instinct kicked in, discarding that unhelpful string of thoughts to be replaced with how to escape. Could she escape?
‘Ssssh, now Polly. It’s time to fly’.
And with that, and an all-consuming horror and mortal realisation of her impending demise that she could never have imagined a human could take; she sensed his weight shift as he turned around and sat on her chest. He then placed a knee either side of her head, took the large knife in his hands
‘Ssssssh now, Pretty Polly…’
And then began to stab into her forearms.
Pain exploded within her, worse than anything she could have imagined as the point of the knife gouged and pierced her wrists. Her fight or flight instincts kicked in and adrenaline brought her strength. She thrashed her body, screamed against the gag, shook her head from side to side, but it did nothing to shake him or his resolve, nothing to stop the stabbing.
He had overcome her, and she could do nothing. She again screamed against the gag, choking on her protestations and crying. Tears for what she should have done. Tears for her only remaining family, her brother. Tears as she knew this was it. But most of all, tears for the phenomenal levels of agony she was enduring.
PLEEEEASE
Her brain tried to cut off the pain, she fought and fought but could not keep it up. Too much damage was being done to too much that was essential. Weakness crept in as blood ran out.
Stabbing and cutting, the knife was slashing through veins, arteries and sinew, the blood ebbing from her and pooling around her restrained hands.
NOOOOO.
Muffled. Useless.
She was still trying to struggle, weakly. Her consciousness pulsed and began to wane entirely as her life force bled out, and then mercifully she lost her grip on the world; her final thoughts fading as she felt him cut off her fingers somewhere in another world.
Laughing, he looked her in the eye as he stuffed the eight fingers and two thumbs into her mouth and whispered;
‘It’s rude to point, Polly’
Chapter 17
Gavin brought the Astra containing himself and George Lentus to a sharp halt after being let through the barriers, parking behind the other vehicles assembled by an opening in some fencing. There were two uniformed policemen looking grim stood by an ambulance, holding Styrofoam cups. An unmarked but obviously official Ford Transit in dark blue had a dour looking individual stood alongside it, and there was a Vauxhall Cavalier with full police livery sat behind that.
A few uniformed and non-uniformed people were assembled by a perimeter consisting of traffic cones and plastic barriers. The uniformed quietly explaining to the ununiformed that they could not get through, and no, they didn’t know what was going on, and that there was nothing to see there. Further down the road, towards the main, busier street and garage; a few people were watching from the windows of their houses.
Lentus looked around and surveyed the scene. The officials and the grimly fascinated onlookers. His excitement was mounting, mixing with the nerves that had already been bubbling away. This was it.
The journey had been one consisting of the conversations you only have when meeting a colleague for the first time. Small talk, power displays and the more senior member establishing the hierarchy. Lentus was glad it was over, for now.
The second car from the yard containing the two that he’d not even met yet pulled in behind their car. Two men, one obviously part Asian, tall and well dressed, the other one squat, chunky, white and in a suit that had seen better days.
‘The Gov’ll be here in a few minutes, she said we should just crack on, but document everything’. It was the Asian one, striding toward them confidently. The other just nodded to them both, frowning. His demeanour and his size made Lentus think of a bulldog.
‘No shit, Sherlock’. Gavin, regaining power. ‘Mark, Martin, this is….’
….
‘George Lentus’ Lentus piped in when Gavin stopped mid-sentence, making no attempt to disguise the fact he’d forgotten Lentus’ name. Forgotten, or pretending to forget, Lentus thought to himself. Either way, total wanker. He managed to keep the smirk to himself.
They shook hands. Mark (Asian) had a firm grip. Martin (bulldog) gripped so tightly it was like he was trying to crush to prove how manly he was. He still hadn’t spoken.
‘Right, tossers,’ Gavin, of course; ‘shall we do this?’
With that, they walked towards the hole in the fence, through which they could plainly see the incident tent that had been erected to shield the murder scene from prying eyes. As they walked towards it, the two uniformed policemen walked over from where they had been stood by the ambulance.
They converged by the opening. The policemen looked at them morosely.
‘Prepare yourselves, boys. It’s not pretty through there. Follow me.’ the older of the two said. With that, they stepped through the gap.
The nerves that Lentus felt were to be expected. The sense of unease, of foreboding, that’s what confused him. He supposed that would go as he got used to it. It would all become just part of the job.
Right. Nowt ventured, Nowt gained. He thought to himself. It had taken some time to train himself to hide the Yorkshire accent from everyone in London, but his inner monologue always stayed tru
e to his Northern roots.
Chapter 18
I put the Travelodge coffee in the Travelodge cup, switched the tiny white kettle on and sat on the edge of the bed.
I feel…..
AMAZING
…confused. Fresh, incredibly energetic, but very confused. Did I get pissed up last night? I’ve got a total blank.
My mouth doesn’t have the tell-tale furry scum. My fingers smell clean, no giveaway remnants, hints of junk food ravenously consumed on the way home. So what the hell happened?
Manners Cost Everything (Manners Trilogy Book 1) Page 4