Initial

by S Thomas Thompson

  In some crimes, the field is incredibly narrow already, but in this case, they pretty much had the whole male population to contend with at that point in time.

  Lou had seen it all before. He had worked for the police for longer than anyone else in the station. There were no records going back that far, so he could pretty much tell people that he had worked there for any length of time longer than 40 years, so he often settled on the figure 45, as it seemed to sound right. He had lost count himself. With the police falling in line with other professions and being unable to dismiss anyone just because they reached retirement age, Lou could stay as long as he was able to carry out the job to the satisfaction of his superiors. The fact that he could interject when others were getting carried away and bring an investigation to a real, functional level meant that Augustine and Marie were more than satisfied with his work.

  Lou had nothing else to do. His wife had died of cancer a few years ago. This was the only time had had spent away from the police. He had looked after her himself day and night for the final 18 months of her illness. As she weakened to the point where all daily tasks were beyond her, he looked to the state for some help to maintain her dignity. She didn’t want him to see her wasting away to nothing for the last of her days. She didn’t want him to have to bathe her, change her underwear and all the other tasks associated with a cancerous bladder. For his part, Lou would have happily done whatever was needed to keep her happy and comfortable. But the lack of dignity is something that can never be undone. Once she allowed him to put himself in that position she felt she had nothing to live for. If he still saw her for that beautiful young girl she was back when they met, and what she wanted to feel like now, then there was a reason for her to fight. Not a fight that would end with an absolute victory, but the small victory of a few more extra days, maybe weeks with her darling husband. He found someone to help and it gave him the better side of the equation. The help dealt with the pain and embarrassment she went through, while he got to spend time making her laugh, talking about the past and distracting her from the time bomb ticking in her body.

  Before that, Lou was one of those characters that just wanted to help. He experienced just about every department in the police and from this viewpoint he had a lot to offer. Now he still had the same experience, but only applied it in shorter bursts. Whether it was age or the passing of his wife, he didn’t seem to be able to summon up the same consistency of help as he had in the past. But in a world where far too few people help each other, this was more than enough for the rest of the team. Lou was five feet eight with a little flash of grey hair around the temples and behind the ears. Apart from that there was the odd wisp of hair, but it was barely noticeable unless there was a strong wind blowing that pushing it out of place. The rest of the time he looked bald across most of his head to the untrained eye. Lou spent most of his time in the office. It wasn’t that he had lost mobility or appetite to be out in the field, but that he did his best work sat in front of a desk. His recall was outstanding and if there were any cases that reminded him of the one they were working on, he could tell the name of the victim and the year straight away. This gave him or someone else in the team the starting point to look deeper into those similarities. Maybe it was a killer that had stopped for a few years and then started up again. Sometimes it might be a clue that ties together past crimes with one they had a prime suspect for now. On other occasions it came to nothing. But in all cases, this recall proved invaluable to rule people in or out, make links to past crimes or keep the current one separate. Lou was one of the first people asked when any serious crime happened in the force. He could give the investigating team a start. They were all thankful for it. He was glad to still be of use. In his mind, he had some thoughts of trying to keep doing the job until he went the same way as his wife. But at other times he just wanted it all to be over so he could sit at home and relax. But he felt deep down that he was never destined for that life. Another of the team with no children, he had little in retirement to look forward to as far as he was concerned. When he was growing up, Lou hung around with some of the seedier characters in his neighbourhood. They were into petty crime, and called themselves the Bravo Gang. Lou was never involved in what they did, but they never kept secrets from him. But when he started to move towards a career with the police, he lost contact with all the friends he had. Add to this the fact that he had no family apart from his wife, and a brother that lived in New Zealand, then Lou ended up pretty lonely outside of his work. He didn’t have any hobbies or interests that would fill his life. He saw a retirement as punishment and couldn’t see how he fitted into it. Lou was present at the crime scene earlier that morning because of his recall of previous crimes. He was told that his experience was going to be vital to Augustine and the rest of the team. But he hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was a brutal killing, the type of which didn’t happen when Lou started with the force. He was looking at the different angles though, when Augustine and Electra walked back into the office within a couple of minutes of each other. When he saw Electra first, he didn’t stop what he was doing. He knew that they would all be briefed together by her. But when Augustine walked through the doors a few minutes later he knew that they would be called together soon. He wrapped up the two theories he was working on. He hadn’t developed either to his satisfaction and would work on them later before discussing with anyone else. As Lou deleted the browsing history on his computer and looked out of the window to see what the weather was doing, he heard a call. It was the unmistakeable voice of Augustine Boyle, “time for a chat, guys. We’ve got a lot to discuss.” Lou looked at the rest of the team and jumped up as not to be last into the room. He didn’t want the others to think he was holding them back in any way. The brightness of the room was reaching the early afternoon peak and Lou wanted this to pass so they had a calmer conversation than what had gone before, but he couldn’t see it with the characters assembled. He liked and respected Augustine, but thought he had assembled a group of parts rather than a functioning team.

  6

  The discussions of the team lasted for a full half an hour. Each had looked at the forensic report on their own, as Lou had suggested. The only ones that were a little behind in this were Electra and Augustine, but they were soon brought up to speed. Augustine had heard a preliminary report before he had even got to the station the first time that morning and the tests carried out in the meantime hadn’t really added anything to the information he had at his fingertips. The rest of the team had scoured the report and, although they didn’t know it at that time, the only one with anything to go on was Lou. He was looking at two lines of enquiry that might or might not go anywhere fast, if at all. Lou was working firstly on the assumption that the killer had been organised and was enacting some sport of ritual on the victim. Although midsummers night and all the rituals that were associated with it had passed a few weeks earlier, he knew that the police presence and monitoring on those with pagan leanings were tight at that time. If one of them also knew that they were being watched then they may leave their rituals, including sacrifice, to a later date when they are far more likely to get away with it. The fact that the victim was left with her head removed from her shoulders may have been accidental, as the perpetrator might have looked to cut her neck and watch the blood flow. Or so Lou understood the way that they did these things.

  Across the world, it was incredibly rare that human sacrifice was used for any ritual of any belief or any religion, but it was something that Lou remembered reading about it in India when he was on holiday there with his wife some years back. A young woman had been found with her throat cut and blood everywhere at the site associated with historic sacrifice in the South of the country. Lou had been on holiday in Goa and read in the local English language newspaper the details. The police had a great deal to go on. The three people that sacrificed her had ‘bathed’ in her blood to honour whoever it was they decided wanted them to kill another human. They were
not caught before Lou had returned home, but they were not the brightest criminals in history and were locked up for life a brief time later. Even the fact that they were all men of a high caste, and the victim was a woman of a lower caste didn’t save them from the judge and jury. This was one occasion that Indian justice was blind to money and status. That fact that it had been claimed to happen in the 20th Century in a country that was starting out attracting the tourist trade had shocked Lou and he carried out some research on it when he got home. It appeared there were a few crimes reported annually that might have been attributed to human sacrifice, but mainly in the East. He stored it with the rest of the information in his brain and hadn’t had cause to access it until when he was considering what had happened to the girl in the alley. He wasn’t sure, but he hadn’t seen enough to rule it out.

  The second idea mulling around in his head was one that he didn’t want to think about. The woman had no identity at that moment. She had nothing on her that gave away who she was. The DNA taken from her at the scene didn’t match anything that they had on the centralised computer database that all forces in the country had access to. It consists of the DNA taken from suspects and victims of investigations across the nation, and was growing at that point by around 30,000 samples every month. The amount of crime in the country was reported to be falling by the politicians. But with dwindling resources and a feel for what was actually happening on the ground, Lou, Augustine Boyle and all the other cops knew differently. The fact that the central DNA database was growing at such an alarming rate was testament to the soaring crime rate, much of it fuelled by drugs. At this point it contained the profiles of well over 6 million people - but not a match for the victim they had in the alley. Also, she didn’t match any of the profiles given as missing people over the previous six months. When people go missing one of two things generally happen. They either turn up, dead or alive, within the first few days or they are never seen again. Going back six months was a precautionary measure, but Lou suspected that if she was noticed missing then she would have been reported as such within the last few days. No luck.

  The fact that there was nothing to identify this girl usually meant one of two things - she was someone from outside the country that had entered illegally or she was a worker in the sex trade. The number of people that enter the UK without the proper authority frightened Lou. He had worked in the police for long enough to see a massive rise in these cases as time had gone on. They were found working for little or no money under the ‘employ’ of gangs of men who had smuggled them into the country. Then they were seen as a commodity, sometimes sold to the highest bidder as a housemaid, farm worker or worse. Many of them ended up in the sex trade, which is where Lou thought this girl might had been from. It was quite easy for someone who knew their way around prostitutes in the city to get one to visit an alley with him. Then he had her captive. From there he could do whatever he wanted. This was the only other way Lou thought this could have gone at the time, but he hadn’t gathered enough evidence either way at that time to be confident enough to voice these theories out loud. He liked a lot more meat on the bones than he presently had to speak up to the rest of the team about his thoughts. But when Electra started to speak about what she found at the post mortem, Lou felt that one line of enquiry was stronger than the other. He looked as his colleague spoke. Her shock of hair never seemed to move. Lou wished he had enough hair to have the same hairstyle as Electra, in fact any hairstyle would do him.

  “I watched intently as the pathologist worked his way around the body. Apart from the fact that she had her head removed from her shoulders, there was nothing the separate her from any other normal human being walking the streets. That was until he got to inspect her down below,” Electra blushed slightly when she spoke. She didn’t know why, but she had always felt a tinge of embarrassment talking about female genitalia, even with her sexual partners. She was brought up to pretend it didn’t exist. “At this point I could see from his face that something unusual was present. He looked more intently at this area than any other part of the body.”

  “Don’t we all, lads?” said Gary from the back of the room. He always tried to lighten the mood but it never had the desired effect. Somehow, he always ramped up the tension.

  “Fuck off Gary,” snarled Electra. She was embarrassed enough without any comments from the clown.

  “Gary, shut up. We don’t need your special brand of humour today. Electra, continue,” interjected Augustine. He would deal with Gary later. Now was the time for the information. Then they could all get on with their work.

  Electra had sat down when Gary made his remark. She wasn’t comfortable anyway, and the way he spoke had made her want to leave the room and compose herself before starting again. Her cheeks flushed redder and she felt the well of her stomach fill with fluid. But after Augustine had spoken, she was confident enough to stand up again and resume.

  “She hadn’t suffered any injuries as part of the attack, but she had been incredibly sexually active. There were some old injuries from a few years back. And he removed a coil from her. We don’t have the full details yet, but it certainly isn’t one that is used in the UK. It looks European, he told me, possibly from Poland. I should have that detail later in the day.”

  Lou looked up at Electra with a strange smile on his face. If she didn’t know him, she could easily have thought that he was gaining some sick pleasure from the description she had been giving. But she looked down at Lou and reciprocated. She knew he was working on a theory. She could see the hands moving as though in some kind of nervous spasm across his portly belly and realised he was adding her experience to a theory.

  A few years earlier there had been a spate of murders of girls on the sex trade. A man had taken it upon himself to kill women because of a rejection he had been dealt by a partner that he thought would be with him forever. When she left, he didn’t feel specific resentment to her, but a general hatred of all females. At first, he started to frequent prostitutes and take out his anger with rough sex. But this didn’t fully satisfy his anger and he moved on to killing them. He had killed seven before the police finally caught up with him. Lou could immediately see similarities here with that case. He would look further into it and see if there was a link to the letter ‘A’ that had been left on her chest. Maybe it wasn’t the start of a message, but a coding system to classify his victims based on the sins he deemed them to commit or what type of woman they were. Lou feared that this wouldn’t become clear until they had a few victims, but wanted to be ready to act of they got any opportunity to find the killer. He worked for the rest of the day on this. The others in the team went back to tie up any loose ends relating to the cases they were already working on. Augustine wanted their case load as clear as possible so they could divert resources to this as soon as possible. It might be a while before there was anything else to go on, but he needed his team to be completely ready to deal with whatever would come next. All the team went back to their old cases immediately after the meeting. All that is except for Gary. Augustine told him to remain in the office.

  7

  “I’ve told you before, Boyle, that I am trying to help. It is a serious subject and I thought a small crack would ease things for Electra, kind of take the pressure off her. It’s not my fault she is so damn sensitive,” Gary tried to explain in a passive-aggressive manner that typified the way he went about his business. His full name was Gary Hole, but others in the force referred to him as Gars - Gars Hole was an approximation of what most people thought of Gary when they had spent a little time with him. He didn’t make friends easily and he really didn’t give a shit whether he did or not. He saw his career as him against everyone else, and was willing to push others down to get himself up. Gary thought this was the way life had to be lived - that you only got on by seeing others suffer. Augustine didn’t want him on his team, he didn’t want him near any of his cases and he didn’t want Gary to call him Boyle. But he didn’t always get
what he wanted. Gary was a short man with a complex about anyone and everything. He didn’t like to be told what to do and had a reflex reaction of running his hands through his light hair one by one every time he thought he was being told off. His bright blue eyes completed a look that could have been Arian from the neck up.

  “You need to be a part of the team. We are all relying on you to help us get these cases through. We are low on players as it is, without one person in the boat rowing in the opposite direction to the rest of us. I can see this case being a breakthrough for all of us. It might lead to promotions all round. Surely you want some of that?” asked Augustine. He prayed that this little pep talk would have a positive effect on Gary. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “Boyle, some of us are going to the top whether this case gets solved or not. I’ve been in the force half the time as you and I’m only one step behind you. Can you feel my breath on your neck?” Gary said with a sinister tone. As his boss, Augustine had made a personal rule to never call him Gars Hole but was about as close as he ever could be to breaking that rule. The anger in Gary’s face was close to breaking out into an eruption. Augustine imagined his head as a volcano. The only way to deal with an eruption in nature was to get out of the way.