Written In Blood

Chapter Twenty-Eight

"Oakhurst Police Station, how can I help you?" Melissa answered the phone. "Hello, is anyone there?" Hello. Hello." She pressed the phone to her ear as she strained to hear anything that would suggest there was someone on the other end of the call. She was about to hang up when she heard something.

"Why are you so fucking nosey?"

Melissa flinched, and quickly pulled the phone away from her ear, though not before she heard the unmistakeable sound of a fist striking flesh.

"Sergeant, I think you should hear this," she called down the passage after covering the mouthpiece of the phone. While she waited for Mitchell, she listened with growing horror to the sound of someone being violently assaulted.

"What is it?" Mitchell asked upon reaching the counter.

Melissa answered the question by putting the call on speaker; at the same time, she silenced the microphone, so she and Mitchell could speak without being heard by whoever was on the other end of the call.

"I want to be wrong," she said, "but that sounds a lot like someone getting beaten up."

Mitchell nodded his agreement. "You're right, the question is, who; who's being attacked, and who's doing the attacking, and where's the attack happening?" He looked at the screen on the phone system in the hope of seeing a number he recognised, but was out of luck. "Do you know the number?" he asked.

Melissa wracked her brain, but had no more luck recognising the number than Mitchell. "No idea," she said with an unhappy shake of her head. "If I've seen it before, I don't remember it." That didn't surprise her, she had a lousy memory for numbers; to be sure it wasn't a number she should know, she took out her phone so she could check it against her phonebook.

The number didn't match any of those in her phonebook, nor those in Mitchell's when he thought to take out his phone to copy her; despite that, both officers were sure that the call was coming from someone in the village.

"What're we going to do?" Melissa asked, afraid that they were listening to the person who had killed Georgina and Lucy as he attacked a third young girl.

Mitchell was quick to answer that. "You're going to stay here and call everybody. I want the inspector here to help you try to figure out who's been attacked, and I want you to send Paul, Michael and Adrian to meet me at Wild's place, and tell them to hurry, I want them there before he can do anything permanent to whoever he's attacking."

"But we don't know that Mr Wild's attacking anyone," Melissa said, not happy that Mitchell was leaping to the conclusion that the author was responsible for what they had heard on the phone. "We've got no reason for thinking that he's attacking, or has attacked, anyone. That voice is familiar, but I'm not sure it's Mr Wild."

"We've got plenty of reason," Mitchell told her, starting down the passage to his office; he returned almost immediately with a file, which he slapped down on the counter in front of Melissa. "Read that. But call everyone before you do." With that he strode around the counter and out of the station so he could get on his way.

With the phoneline still open and on speaker, in case anything was said that could be used to identify either attacker or victim – it would have been good if they had been able to record the phone call for future use, but that was not something they had the technology to do – Melissa used her mobile to make the calls she had to, at the same time, she flipped open the file so she could see what it was Mitchell wanted her to read. She saw straight away that it was Zack Wild's personnel file from Southampton police, the full file, not the summary they had received before.

It took only a short while for Melissa to see what had caused Mitchell to react the way he had; the file presented the image of a man who was prone to violence, including violence against women, but by the time she got to the end of it, she realised that Mitchell had only taken what he wanted to from the file.

The confusion she had already been feeling with regard to Zack Wild and Sergeant Mitchell, and the latter's certainty regarding the former's guilt, was deepened by reading the file. She couldn't deny that Zack Wild had control issues when it came to violence, but the reports detailing each of the incidents in which he had been accused of violence, made it clear that the incidents were either self-defence, the result of provocation, or, in the case of the allegations made by two young women, which were most likely the incidents on which Mitchell was basing his presumption of guilt, false.

She was relieved when Inspector Stevens agreed with her – it took her a short while to summon the courage to say what she was thinking, following her superior's arrival – that Zack Wild couldn't be arrested on what they had, and that if he was arrested, it might jeopardise any case they tried to put together against him in the future. She doubted that Mitchell was going to be very happy with her when he realised what she had done, but she found that she didn't care; the only thing that mattered to her just then was figuring out who they had heard being attacked, and who was doing the attacking, neither of which was easy since beyond the 'nosey bitch' phrase, which suggested the victim was female, and the number the call came from, they had no clues.