A Victim's Diary

12

Alistair hated that he didn't know about the DNA results until he had made his way over to the morgue. He was curious and he wanted to know what was going on, but the drive to the morgue was taking longer than he had expected, mostly because he had somehow managed to get stuck in rush hour traffic which made everything take so much longer than usual and which made the wait much more frustrating.

But he finally made it to the morgue when the sun was already starting to set. Alistair hated when his days got so long, but it was just something that came with the job. And he loved his job more than he hated the long days, so he just put up with it and tried to take some time off every now and then, usually after he solved a case, just to reward himself and get rid of some of his accrued overtime.

Either way, he never managed to get rid of all his overtime. Sometimes he wondered whether he could just collect so much overtime that he could retire sooner than he usually would. But he was sure that there would be administrative issues of some sort if he tried to take years of accrued overtime all at once. They'd find some way to keep him working for as long as humanly possible, he was sure of that.

He didn't even know if he would mind it. He had developed some sort of love-hate relationship to his job. He enjoyed solving crime, finding out the intricacies of how something had happened simply from evidence they discovered on the scene. He loved it when he had a gut feeling about one of the suspects and it proved to be true. At the same time the amount of unsolved crimes was utterly frustrating. He hated when he had to put another file on a pile of unsolved cases, because there just wasn't much evidence. And it happened much more often than most people would have thought. Getting away with crime was fairly easy, as long as it wasn't a highly personal murder case like this one seemed to be.

In Alistair's head there was always one prominent fear about his retirement – what if he retired and he would be incredibly and utterly bored? If he didn't have his work, he wouldn't know what to do with himself. Work rarely left him any time for hobbies, so he wasn't sure what he'd even like to do when he retired. Either way, he still had a good few years in him before it was time for that. He'd figure things out.

When he arrived at the morgue the first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. He knew that Frances usually liked to listen to music while she was working, but it was almost eerily quiet today. This usually only happened when there were some bad news or when Frances was really upset about something. It always made Alistair nervous when there was no music playing, because it meant that he was about to hear something incredibly fucked up. Something he definitely wasn't going to like.

Alistair could see the big pile of hair from far away already. Frances was sitting at her desk, softly bopping her head back and forth to some melody that was probably only in her head. She didn't seem very enthusiastic about it either way. When he got closer, Alistair could see that her desk was in a strange state of chaos. Now, Frances' desk was usually in a somewhat chaotic state, but there were stages to it, almost a bit like the stages of grief. Right now it seemed like she was in the worst stage.

Nothing was sorted according to colour, there were books lying around haphazardly, papers were all over the place and Alistair counted at least three empty cups of coffee. Frances was looking down at something, probably reading a book or some scientific article, so she didn't even hear him approaching her. Alistair wasn't quite sure how to make her aware that he was there, so he just cleared his throat.

Frances startled and let out a quiet yelp. It seemed she had been so deep in thought that she hadn't even heard him approaching, almost like she hadn't really noticed anything that was going on around her. She got like that from time to time, either when she was working on something very intensely, when she had been pulling an all-nighter or when she was incredibly upset about something.