In a small and untidy office belonging to the Metropolitan Police, Detective Inspector James Mason was rubbing his tired eyes, hooking the thin wire frames of his spectacles up from the bridge of his nose with one finger. He should have been home hours ago, but that was the nature of the beast. Unscheduled over time. A sharp knock made him sit up and sigh wearily.
‘Come.’
Detective Sergeant Paul Rose eased his considerable bulk through the office door and sat himself down on the blue plastic chair on the other side of Mason’s desk. He flung a beige file down on top of the papers that lay scattered about. He rested the second file he carried on top of his knees after hitching up his grey polyester trousers. The grey shirt he wore, that probably was white once, strained against the considerable expanse of his belly.
‘Got the DNA results back on the bite mark, Guv. An out-of-townie,’ he said, his greying moustache twitching beneath his pig-like nose. Mason leant across the desk to pick up the file and flip it open. He looked, bewildered, at the mug shot of a skinny thirteen year old girl who was staring obstinately down the lens of the camera, her eyes guarded and her long hair falling about her white face in wild tangles. Rose caught the raised eyebrows of the Inspector. ‘It’s an old photo, Guv. The only one we’ve got on the computer. I’ve checked PNC. Eutopia Midnite.’ He jabbed a short, stubby finger at the printed details beneath the photograph.
‘Strange name. And is she?’
‘Is she what, Guv?’
‘A lady of the night?’
‘A prozzie, you mean?’ The delicate Inspector flinched at the crude term. He was younger than his boorish Sergeant by at least fifteen years and quite clearly bred from a different kettle of fish, so to speak. He’d made it as high as he had at a surprisingly young age through his sheer commitment to the job, which of course had led to vicious jokes about how he’d slept his way to the top. There were rumours that the pretty-boy, with his immaculate suits, pastel coloured shirts and designer haircuts batted for the other side, but Rose had never really given it much thought. He grinned, showing stumpy teeth yellowed by years of tobacco abuse. ‘No, Guv. There isn’t any record of her having been arrested for it, anyway. Mother seems to have been a hippy-tupe.’ Rose pointed to the long list of offences that covered the next two pages of A4. ‘Look, she’s a petty criminal, a thief. These here, all shoplifting spanning from 2001 ‘til ’03. This photo is from the last recorded offence in July ’03, in Surrey. Unlucky bugger got caught on her birthday.’
‘Did she get a custodial sentence?’ Mason asked, flicking through the file to see if any young offenders unit was mentioned.
‘Not that I could see, Guv... there was a plea made for admission to a secure unit, but the little chick ran away from the foster home she was placed with until the hearing.’ He sat back in the chair, causing the plastic to creak unstably beneath his weight. Rose stretched his arms out, popping his shoulders before linking his hands behind his balding head, revealing the copious sweat patches that stained his armpits. ‘Same old story, I guess, seen it too many times. Kid gets abused, put into care, gets abused, runs away then begs borrows or steals her way to an early death snowed out on crack, or gets locked behind bars for going crazy on her pimp after one beating too many.’
‘You know what too many assumptions do, Sergeant Rose?’ Mason asked, his hazel eyes hard.
‘Make an ass of you and me, Guv,’ Rose replied, confidently, grinning slightly at the irritation on the Inspectors face.
‘Exactly. So, let’s stick to the cold hard facts. We have two dead men. One victim has a human bite mark on his hand that matches the DNA of a known thief from out of the area. There are no known reports of this girl ever having been arrested for assault or battery?’ he asked, glancing down at the file to check for himself. ‘No. So, the questions we need to answer now are what happened, and why? I take it the CCTV footage came up blank?’
‘Only images we have are from the Three Feathers, Guv.’
‘Which is the pub where the men were drinking?’
‘Yes, Guv. Only interesting point is that three of them leave together, talking to each other. We have a bit of footage from outside the pub which shows two of the men leaving after they all have a fag, David and another bloke, which leaves Ashley alone. Unfortunately the angle of the camera doesn’t cover the road, so we can’t see what happened when he crossed the street. And the image isn’t good enough to get a clear picture of the other bloke, so we have no clue who he is. And the witnesses spoken to from the pub had never seen any of the three men before that night.’
‘So that’s from the pub CCTV, but what about the street cameras?’ but Rose was shaking his head even before the question was finished.
‘No good, Guv. Some technical fault or something. All cameras within a four mile radius of Short Street were down from about 5pm that evening until about the same time the next day, but by then we were all over the scene like flies on sh...’
‘Yes, thank you, Sergeant, I get the picture,’ Mason interrupted, slipping a hand beneath the wire rim of his glasses to rub his eyes again. Rose folded back the front cover of the file he still held, revealing the grim photograph of Ashley Jones, one of the grisly murder victims. It wasn’t a crime scene photo, it was a mug shot similar to the girls though much more recent. The icy blue eyes were nonchalant, blank, as they stared ahead; pale hair so blonde and short it appeared almost absent. Rose waggled his overgrown eyebrows, giving the impression of two shaggy caterpillars wriggling across his forehead as his muddy brown eyes creased in amusement at his trump card. ‘Jones. Ashley Jones, Guv. One of the victims.’ The Inspector leaned forward in his chair as his interest was sparked again. He twitched the file towards him, turning it round the right way so he could read the text.
‘No one mentioned any previous,’ Mason said, feeling a little bit irritated. ‘Two counts of rape and one of false imprisonment,’ he confirmed, speed reading through the information. ‘Both victims dropped all the charges.’ He looked thoughtful, one finger drumming absently on top of the file as he nodded at Rose. ‘So, you think this confirms your theory?’
‘Not confirms, exactly Guv, we don’t want to make any assumptions. I just think it might explain a little bit, or at least give us a starting point. We could ask around the known places in the area, bring in a few of the regular girls and see if they knew him,’ he nodded at the photo in a contemptuous manner. If there was one thing Rose was infamous for at the station, it was his hate for pimps. He had a daughter himself with his ex-wife. Hannah. She was twenty three now and lived in Manchester with a friend she’d met at Uni, much to Rose’s dismay. He knew what the city life could be like for girls like her, vulnerable and impressionable. God help anyone who tried to lead her down the wrong path. ‘Might be that he was already or attempting to pimp out girls. Maybe stepped on another guys toes?’ He shrugged his rounded shoulders, ‘Or tried to set up the wrong chicky, maybe, who knows?’ They both slipped into thoughtful silence for a moment.
‘This girl,’ Rose finally said, shuffling the files so that Ashley’s slid aside and the young girl was visible again. ‘We have a previous address for her. The last recorded one from when this picture was taken. It’s somewhere in Surrey, Guildford I think.’ The Inspector glanced at the file again to double check and nodded in silent confirmation. ‘I was thinking it might be worth dropping in, speak to the family if they still live there, see if the girl keeps in contact with them.’
‘Yes, good idea. The post mortem report should be finalised and written up soon, we might know a little bit more then.’
Rose nodded, though he doubted the report would be able to say much more than was obvious. One man had bled to death from a knife wound to his throat; the other had had an argument with the front of his own car and lost. But hey, he was just a Sergeant, what did he know?
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Eutopia (First version)
Fantasy'You knew, all this time, you knew and you never told me.' 'Yes,' he bowed his dark head, black hair dishevelled as it fell into his eyes that were beginning to shed their own tears. 'I wanted to protect you. I thought if you never knew then this co...
