A Victim's Diary

1

It was late at night when Alistair Finch was called in for work. He almost would have missed the call if his wife hadn't woken up from it and had in turn woken him up. Alistair hated getting calls in the middle of the night, mostly because he was glad whenever he got a good night's sleep and he hated that being interrupted and also because it meant that something awful must have happened that required him to get to the scene of the crime. Of course he knew that he had signed up for calls in the middle of the night when he had taken this job as a detective. He had been well used to the night shifts as a police officer before he got his promotion. Still, having unexpected calls in the middle of the night was almost worse than a scheduled night shift, because he couldn't prepare himself for them.

He hadn't even gotten much information from the call. Only that there was a dead body found in the river, female, approximately in her late 20s to early 30s. There didn't seem to be much else in terms of evidence – no name, no documents, no handbag that might give any indication who she was.

The cause of death wasn't quite known yet, but everyone suspected that she drowned. It wasn't sure whether it was an accident or suicide or murder, really. They'd have to wait for the coroner's report on that. But since it was early on a Sunday morning and it was a young woman that seemed to be dressed up nicely and since she was floating in the river, it seemed likely that it was an accident. Alistair had seen often enough that alcohol and large bodies of water didn't exactly mix well.

Still, he had to be called to the scene, as it was the normal procedure. It seemed like no one had reported the young woman missing just yet, but apparently it also looked like she hadn't been in the river for a long time. Alistair was grateful for that, because corpses that had been in the water for a long time were usually not a nice sight. No corpse was a nice sight for that matter, but the ones with the bloated skin and the weirdly distorted faces were some of the worst ones to see. They'd give Alistair nightmares.

Then again, he had already seen so much that nightmares were a constant feature for him. The nightmares he got were one of the many reasons he was so glad when he could manage to get a good night's sleep – it was rare for him to sleep throughout the entire night instead of waking up drenched in sweat and terrified. He had his regular counselling appointments, of course, but he didn't really feel like it did anything for him. Maybe that was because he went there seeing it as a mere requirement for his job, but he didn't really have the time and energy to see it as anything else.

He had been thinking about giving up this line of work for a while. It wasn't like he and his wife really needed the money. They had no children because they never wanted any. The mortgage on the house was going to take another 10 years to pay off, but the repayments were fixed and they weren't that high. Plus, Alistair's wife was working part-time as well, mostly because she wanted something to do.

He could get a simpler job somewhere closer to home. He could work for a lower salary, but finally be done with the late nights, the calls in the middle of the night, the terrible crime scenes he had to deal with, the amount of cases that either went unsolved or where the perpetrator got away incredibly lightly. Alistair sometimes liked to think of that, but he knew that he wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

Sure, he didn't seem all too happy now, but there was something about doing this job that felt like it gave him a purpose, like it gave him some meaning in life. He would absolutely understand if no one else wanted to do that job, but someone had to do it and he was doing it well. And the rare case that was solved and where the perpetrator got a justified sentence felt incredibly good. It seemed worth all the frustration.

It took him about half an hour to drive down to the city centre where they had found the body. Normally it would take him much longer, but there was no traffic at this time of the night, so it cut down his commute by a lot. It was the one thing he actually enjoyed about the night shifts as a young policeman. That, and the awful coffee from the corner store that was open 24/7 and that everyone in the police force guzzled down anyway, because the entire department was suffering from a crippling caffeine addiction.