A Victim's Diary

14

What a wicked game you play, to make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you

Having a day off seemed to do wonders for Alistair and his mental health. He didn't think it would be this easy to just forget about everything he knew about the case, to switch off his work brain and to just enjoy a full free day with Diana. He even wondered whether retirement at some point far in the future might not be too bad. But towards the evening he was already feeling the guilt nagging at his conscience again.

Guilt for just enjoying a full day for himself, for not being productive all the time, for not working on the case, for having someone else (probably Johnson) pick up the work he had left behind for the day. It always made him feel guilty, even if he knew that he wasn't going to be half as productive as he usually was if he didn't take some time off every once in a while. It often made him wonder how people got to this point – the point of feeling guilty for not being productive every hour of every single day.

Either way, his day off was over much sooner than he had expected and on the one hand Alistair regretted not taking more time off, but on the other hand he was glad he could go back to his case. He didn't really feel complete without his murders, after all. It was the one thing he had been focussed on ever since he had left school and joined the police force, putting in extra hours, so they'd send him to college and he could become a detective. He had worked hard to be where he was right now.

Either way, he was finally back to work in his office. He had pushed the whole awful business with Ruby's pregnancy aside for now, so he could focus on the diary again without feeling sick to his stomach. He had already told Johnson to go and schedule another interview with her father, but that wasn't until the next day. Alistair wondered whether Johnson ever felt underappreciated since he was basically acting like a secretary for him. Alistair wasn't quite sure how they had gotten lumped in together, but it seemed like they'd be stuck with each other at least for a while. Either way, as annoying as Johnson could be, he was doing good and reliable work and Alistair was grateful for that.

Johnson's work meant that he could focus purely on the evidence he was gathering instead of having to schedule things and make annoying phone calls and deal with all the stupid paperwork. Maybe he should buy Johnson a coffee or something, because he was basically doing all the work that Alistair didn't want to do... Maybe once this case was done. Maybe he could go for a coffee with Johnson. It would only be positive for his career, after all. Unless Johnson wanted to stay on traffic stops his entire life.

When he sat down at his desk, Alistair could see the diary sitting right in front of him, just where he had left it before he had gone to see Frances the other day. It somehow looked menacing to him, as if it was daring him to dive deeper into the sad and messed up world of Ruby Daniels. The fact that he had no idea what he was going to read next was both scary and exciting. There was a good chance he was going to read something that he didn't want to read about, sure, but there was also a good chance to decipher another layer of Ruby's relationships with others – and there were so many people in her life that seemed to have very ambiguous relationships with her. Her boss, Cora, Marc, her parents...

Alistair wondered whether his fascination with this girl was getting a little macabre. After all, most of this information wasn't really going to be necessary for solving this case and it might even be possible to solve it without the diary, once the technicians would manage to get all the data from her phone. But something about the diary just felt right. It felt like he was investigating this the old-fashioned way and maybe he was romanticising things here, but it felt much more as if he was a detective in one of those detective novels he used to read as a kid and that brought on his fascination with this job.