PEEL-BEHIND THEIR EYES. Book 1 (Complete)

Chapter 20. Seventy Eight

Robert dropped the boxes he had retrieved from the attic down beside the desk with a hefty grunt of pain, and another grunt as he straightened up his back feeling his spine snap back into shape. The boxes hadn't been that heavy he knew, but he was, his weight and age had increased at a faster rate the last few years and he knew that it wasn't due to the passage of time, it was the lack of a healthy lifestyle and his overuse of vices that he told himself he needed to get through the day. Robert wasn't a fool to anybody except himself, and he knew that too. Hearing the click of the boiled kettle Robert made himself a black coffee and settle tiredly down at the desk and flipped open the diary marked 'Personnel-1978'

Personnel-1978

Scathor hospital was the quintessential Victorian hospital, a red brick workhouse like building, stained from the turn of the century coal smoke. Its interior walls were covered in pale green and white tiles, the floors were quarry red. Rising from behind was the hospital's tall castle like clock tower, it struck loudly announcing that 7pm had arrived. Above the sky was dark and overcast with a light drizzle, making everything and everyone uncomfortably damp. A gray suited man stood at the corner leaning against the wall with one knee bent and a foot propped against its opposing shin. His jacket was worn but not threadbare, his trouser creased from days of hard work walking the many streets of Grimsby searching for clues. The ash from his cigarette fell onto the raincoat hanging over his arm, and he immediately shook it clean. Looking up at the clock tower with red-rimmed eyes he noted either his watch or the clock was ten minutes late and thought "not that it mattered any"

Having just come from the mortuary Edward didn't feel up to seeing the girl. Unlike the clinical hopefulness of the surgery room that both the girl and her father had not long spent time in, her mother was in the starker and hopeless morgue. Edward had felt the need to visit the mother first to show his respects and to see the results of his failed labors, he had never apologized to a corpse before.

Taking the last puff of his cigarette to steady himself he discarded the dead butt into the gutter. Straightening his lopsided trilby hat DCI Edward Peel entered the hospital through the heavy set door and headed for the nearest nurse's station and asked to see the young girl, Julia.

Edward Peel had been beside himself with worry, he and his squad had spent weeks painstakingly tracking down any evidence to help catch the murderer, the one the papers had nicknamed 'The Grimsby Gouger'. They had desperately combed each murder scene, chased tenuous clues, but to no avail. The latest crime scene, the latest family targeted by the serial killer had been discovered just in time to save what was left of the Barringer family, the father barely breathing, the daughter mutilated but alive, the mother dead. They had missed the murderer by mere minutes; he knew that if the murderer struck again it would be on their, his shoulders.

But there had been clues and Edward knew it, small unnoticeable clues that only the right person would see, Edward was that person. To begin with, he had chalked them up to coincidence, just like the first mother was his local shop assistant the second being his milk lady. He reasoned that anybody within half a mile radius of his home had the same relationship with them as he did, but other little things began to crop up as they investigated, such as his name 'Peel' scrawled in dust on the bookshelf and the initials DCI spelled out on the spines of the encyclopaedia Britannica, each book having been pulled out a little on the shelf above. He had wiped the dusty shelf clean and pushed back the books, he did not understand why but he knew he had to. Edward turned a blind eye to them, convinced that it was his mind over thinking things.

"Maybe I'm losing it, maybe I'm going crazy and putting 2 and 2 together and making 100. Extraordinary coincidences with ordinary explanations, that's what it was. Well maybe I am mad, but I can't deal with that right now".