Off The Record

by Luca Veste

  Caitlin was still managing (just) to teach every day since she’d been allowed back to work, but it was a struggle putting on that ‘happy’ face for the kids when so much rubbish was still cluttering up her mind like a radio chattering away in the background. Caitlin attempted to get through the reading and the maths or remember to mark the kid’s homework but her memory was really suffering and the simplest things were forgotten in the static. Parents had started to make rustling noises of discontent.

  Caitlin got out the car and fought against the wind, heaving her bag full of jotters to the house. It was when she pushed open the swollen front door that she saw it lying there on the scuffed parquet floor. A white envelope, handwritten address, not the usual bank statement or electricity bill and as she bent down to pick it up her heart began to pound. She knew straight away who had sent it and she knew what the letter would say. This was not the first she’d received and no doubt it wouldn’t be the last.

  ***

  Katy’s snack still sat on the kitchen counter, the chopping board, butter and knife lying where Mike had left them, crumbs everywhere. She picked up the cloth and seethed quietly as she wiped the surface clean and made the kitchen spotless once more. His laid back attitude to bringing up their daughter drove her crazy. All Mike wanted were the fun parts. When it came to remembering to buy milk and bread or making sure the laundry was done, he wasn’t interested…

  Caitlin knew that when Katy and her dad had left for her karate lesson, laughing and giggling, he would have allowed his six-year-old daughter to sit in the front seat of the car. Mike knew how much anxiety this caused for Caitlin but he just did it anyway saying that she ‘babied’ Katy too much.

  Caitlin gripped the edge of the kitchen worktop, questions popping into her mind.

  Would Mike drive too fast? Would he be there in time to pick Katy up? Would he keep an eye on her when he was talking on his phone?

  ***

  ‘Come back to bed Caitlin.’ Mike patted the white satin sheets, still warm from where they’d been wrapped around each other.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute, I think I maybe heard Katy up…’

  Caitlin made her way down the stairs just to double check that she’d locked the front door.

  ‘She’s fast asleep love. Leave her and come back to me. I need you too you know.’

  Caitlin heard Mike sigh as he lay back on the bed.

  ‘Everything all right love?’

  ‘Yes, Katy’s asleep…I just thought I heard her…’

  ‘I know you did. Come on, come here.’ And Mike held open his arms to take back his fragile, crazy woman.

  ***

  The Hebridean gale was picking up speed and the howling and battering noises that accompanied it had started already and that incessant racket just added to Caitlin’s feelings of dread as she climbed the open wooden staircase that led from the living room up to her tiny bedroom in the eves of the roof; the only room in the house that she could afford to heat with a two bar electric fire. Keeping her coat on she climbed into her lumpy single bed and stuffed the letter into her pocket.

  The feeling of total desolation was getting very familiar and she fell into it with her hand still clutching the envelope. Oblivion would have been a blessing but the same old film started to roll behind her eyelids, long forgotten memories going way back to her childhood. The girls at secondary school shouting names at her, Scraggy, Minger, Scoot. Caitlin was incapable of answering back, their bullying wounding her all over again. Yelling that she’d scar Caitlin for life, her sister held the curling tongs to her face. On and on and on, memories that she’d buried deep, all coming flooding to the surface like a tsunami of raw hurt.

  Caitlin could feel hot tears begin to well up and she wiped them away angrily with the rough cuff of her woollen coat, Katy’s face swimming in front of her. The wind still howled and battered and the rain lashed against the skylight window and, with a sudden click, the power went off.

  Mike’s jeans fell on top of her as Caitlin lay on their bedroom floor, falling from the ceiling, covering her in a heap of blue denim. Katy sang and danced, laughing in the candlelight while Caitlin now pulled endless odd socks from the washing machine, pinning them up around the living room like strange Christmas cards, Mike walking behind her taking each one down and throwing sock after sock around the room, laughing, singing and dancing with Katy.

  In the darkness of the cottage Caitlin screamed, struggling to free her consciousness of the images of Katy and Mike that stalked her day and night. Throwing back the covers she shot downstairs into the kitchen, her eyes darting around looking for anything that would help her take away the agony.

  Coming to a sudden halt, frozen in her tracks by the site of Katy’s old lunchbox sitting on the kitchen table, Caitlin lifted it, hugged it to her chest and stroked the pink ponies on the front.

  Dropping it to the floor, Caitlin jerked open the kitchen cabinet, pulled out the medicine box and ripped open the lid to stare at the boxes of pills inside. Oval white tablets to take away the hurt, smooth life out, swallowed for pointless years while she pretended to cope.

  Caitlin’s hands shook as she began popping each pill out of the packet.

  Remembering the letter stuffed into her pocket, she took it out after arranging the thirty pills into a perfect row on the counter top. Even at this sorry point in her life she couldn’t stop trying to find order. The guilt of not replying made her feel abysmally ashamed.

  The first pill was the hardest to swallow…

  ***

  Sitting in front of the glowing fire, Caitlin sipped from a delicious Rioja, savoring her reward after a busy day in class. The children seemed to be making progress and her prospects were definitely looking up. She sank into the warm brown leather sofa and for once in her life almost felt content.

  Mike and Katy wouldn’t be back from the karate lesson for a while yet so she ran a bath adding the expensive bubbles Mike had bought her for her birthday.

  The wine and the heat of the water must have made her doze off and Caitlin jerked awake with a start as she heard the telephone ringing downstairs.

  Wrapping a towel around herself she ran for the phone. Visions of ambulances and police cars filled her mind, her daughter’s body thrown from the car now lying lifeless on the wet and dark road.

  It was Mike. ‘I can only get red top milk, will that do?’

  ‘What? What?’ She couldn’t take in what he had just said and her hands shook as she clutched onto the phone.

  ‘Milk, I can only get skimmed, will that do?’

  Caitlin sank down onto the rug and sobbed, feeling embarrassed and stupid but also guilty for not ever trusting Mike with Katy. She needed to get a grip, make sure that Mike and Katy knew that they were more important to her than having a tidy kitchen.

  Hurrying off to the bathroom, Caitlin pulled on her clothes. If she was quick enough she could meet up with them both before they left the gym and then maybe they could all go out for a pizza. She just wanted them know how much she loved them and that she’d try to be more trusting, not worry about stupid things all the time and that they could all finally be happy together.

  Rushing towards the gym in her car, Caitlin’s heart was full of hope for the future, a new beginning for all of them.

  She never saw her. Caitlin swore to Mike that she never saw her. She just appeared from nowhere. The first she knew was when there was this enormous bang on the windscreen…

  BIO: McDroll lives in rural Argyll, Scotland, but is an Ayrshire lass at heart having spent her formative years being brought up in the grim urban reality of a small industrial town. She has two published collections of crime stories, Kick It and Kick It Again and has also edited and contributed to The Lost Children, a charity anthology. As F.G. Johnson, she can be found writing romantic fiction in the soon to be published, Peat Smoke and Primroses.

  BE MY BABY

  ‘KILLING FOR COMPANY’

  By

  Cath B
ore

  The boy lay on the hard stone floor of the church in just a pair of shorts and Converse trainers, his skin like mottled marble. I shivered, my fingers itching to warm his rigid limbs with my coat but I pressed my hands flat to the sides of my thighs, stopping myself. Laid out in the middle of the floor on his back, the child stared straight ahead at the metal grey sky above, mouth parted, arms straight, palms and toes pointing upward. This well-nourished boy showed no sign of abuse or neglect prior to death, perfect apart from a black scab hanging off his left knee like a broken hinge; what seemed dark bruises on his limbs were mere smudges of dirt and dust. As the spirit leaves the body its muscles sigh in relief their work over so a peaty smell of the faeces voided from his bowels at the point of death clung in the air. Big bluebottles, the Calliphora vomitoria, sniffed around the boy. One flew into my right cornea swelling the eye up like a hard-boiled egg, so I swatted the fly with my hand and lashed it onto the floor. Lying on its shiny blue back broken legs grabbing empty air the irritant was crushed beneath my shoe.

  We received an early call out to the Bombed Out Church in Liverpool’s city centre. Even as you walked up it seemed a normal place of worship until you got close and noticed a lack of windows or roof, like that since the Second World War. The church was borne as a war wound; as if it proved the city had done its share and sacrificed enough. In the daytime for the last handful of years the church got taken over by the arty farty, screening films no-one wanted to see and holding workshops – whatever that meant. An almost-forest thickened around one side of the building. You couldn’t see a thing from the main road, so of a night time Liverpool’s canny piss heads stumbled in through there to sleep off white cider binges. The homeless sprawled on the front steps in full view, brazen.

  Sergeant Constance Ward strode over. Hair un-brushed, she’d tied her long copper tresses back with an elastic band. Toothpaste smeared the collar of her wrinkled shirt.

  ‘All right.’ The paper mask she held over her nose and mouth muffled her voice. ‘How old is he, do you think? Seven, eight?’

  ‘Around that,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘A sick fucker, whoever’s done this.’

  ‘Yes. A sick fucker.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a cause of death for me?’

  The police rushed me for the reason why someone died, got a weed on if I didn’t hand over an explanation straight away, as if I was hiding it from them. They didn’t seem to get it. These things take time. You had to be precise. Follow each step.

  But with this case, I knew how he died.

  ‘Compression of the neck.’

  Dark lines creased her forehead into a frown. Anger licked my belly. I could’ve made her wait until the post mortem was completed, kept her guessing. Instead I handed an answer over now. Some grace or gratitude from her would have been nice.

  I squatted, shining the light of my pen torch on the boy’s throat.

  ‘If you look closely you can see finger marks. Those red circles.’

  She blinked. ‘How long’s he been here?’

  I shone the torch again to show her the marks like purple paint on the back of his legs and arms.

  ‘There’s maximum blood lividity there, can you see?’ I didn’t touch any flesh, but outlined the pattern with my finger where heavy blood cells had succumbed to gravity after the boy’s heart stilled.

  Sergeant Ward looked, but didn’t bend nearer.

  ‘How long, though?’ she asked.

  The muscles across my forehead squeezed tight at the sharpness of her voice.

  ‘This amount of blood settlement tells me it’s been ten or twelve hours since death.’

  ‘So he’s been pronounced-?’ She waved her hand at the boy.

  ‘Yes. It’s been signed off. This child is dead.’

  ‘That’s what we need to know. He’s all yours now, lads.’ She beckoned over two CSIs in white plastic pyjamas.

  I stepped back. One CSI made a show of marking out the thin streak of bright blood that used to be the fly I flattened. I imagined he mouthed something behind his mask. Some un-politically correct remark, maybe. Coppers and CSIs went on about gallows humour. It stopped them going off their rockers or something, they said; the death of a child upset the balance of things.

  Or it could be this CSI was calling me an arsehole under his breath for adding to the job, messing it up by giving them another thing to bag and tag.

  Theirs for now, the boy would be ignored for a day or more, left under a white tent as they got on their knees and searched in vain for evidence or DNA. DS Ward would find his Mum - and Dad, if one existed. Cue the pair crying at her for them to hold and kiss him awake, take him home or be able to say goodbye only to be told no, he must stay put. They’d recall all those times they rolled their eyes, moaned at getting up in the night to change his nappy when he was a baby, complained at the cost of his toys at Christmas, when they told him to go away and stop annoying them.

  Women loved it when I told them what I did. I sat next to some old girl on the bus once her fingers caressing the pages of the Ruth Rendell she’s been reading, lips wet as I detailed an autopsy for her and emphasised the sharpness of a knife’s blade required to peel away skin from muscle from bone. But a myriad of disgust, admiration and lust coloured a man’s face when he found out about my job. They struggled with it; women got too clingy.

  Sergeant Ward positioned herself with her back to the boy, staring out through the glass-free window at the canopy of green foliage outside.

  ‘I’ve just been on the blower. No kids reported missing as yet,’ she said.

  I clicked my tongue. ‘What sort of family wouldn’t notice-’

  ‘We can’t make judgements.’

  I could. The odds were parents who let their kid hang around a rotting old church on his own wouldn’t even know he was gone. What mother sent a boy out wearing just a pair of shorts, not even a t-shirt to cover his skinny white chest?

  The boy came to me the next day.

  ‘They took their time getting you over here, didn’t they?’ I scanned his face, as pale as pearl, the branding on his neck blooming dark violet under the hard white lights. ‘But you’re here now. I’ll be with you in a minute, mate.’ I stroked the shorn bristles on his head. His parents should’ve let that hair grow, not scalp the lad.

  I checked my instruments, lined them up in a row ten centimetres apart.

  One, two, three, four, five, six…

  ‘You can’t let them touch each other.’ I gestured to the shiny steel blades. ‘Because of cross contamination. We don’t want anything going wrong with you, do we?’

  As if.

  I laughed, humming the tune dancing in my head as I undressed him then carry out my own fingertip search of his skin.

  The door brushed open. I opened my mouth, a barbed reprimand ready. No one came in here when I worked, they all knew that. But I slapped my lips shut at the sight of Constance Ward.

  Her sly eyes flickered around my face. I moved between her and the boy, shielding him.

  I swallowed. ‘You okay, Sarge?’

  ‘Move away from the body.’

  I stared at her, but kept one eye on the boy.

  ‘I said, move away.’

  ‘Why?’ I forced a blank mask of surprised innocence onto my face.

  ‘You know why.’

  Two sets of clodding footsteps stopped either side of me. I could feel damp breath on my neck. It itched.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Behave.’ Constance’s fingers flexed, stretched.

  ‘He shouldn’t have been on his own at that time of night. His parents-’

  ‘You’re blaming them?’ Ward’s eyes glinted black.

  I felt the handcuffs snapping onto my wrists.

  ‘Gail Murphy. I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Lewis Jack. You do not have to say anything but…’

  Lewis. A good name.

  ‘He’s mine.’

  ‘He’s
not.’

  He should have been, didn’t even realise it himself. In the church, he wanted to go home, leave me. How silly of him.

  Allowing Ward to finish her lines, I permitted her to lead me out.

  I paused by the boy as we passed, and mouthed goodbye.

  BIO: Cath Bore is a Merseyside writer of prose and script. She has been shortlisted in several writing competitions including the Festival Of York’s novel competition (2011) and Harrogate Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival’s Dragon Pen (2010). Her debut short film Past Glories was produced by First Take (Liverpool) in 2010; her first full length feature film Big Society – The Musical (First Take) is currently in production, to be released in 2011. Cath’s debut novel The Missing Link – a crime novel featuring Liverpool DS Constance Ward - is nearing completion. She writes for the Liverpool Daily Post and Hello! Magazine blogs as well as penning her own, Liverpool Writer About Town athttp://cathbore.wordpress.com. Cath’s website is www.cathbore.com.

  CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

  By

  Eric Beetner

  The duct tape bound her arms tight to her sides, hands wiggling free just below her hips. Naked underneath, but damn it was hot being outside. San Fernando valley in August – can’t say nobody warned her.

  When this came off – if it came off – she wasn’t worried about the wrapping of tape over her mouth and around the back of her hair. It was her nipples. God, that was gonna suck.

  As it was looking, chances were slim she would ever feel the sharp pain of freshly waxed nipples. And yes, she had already found the irony in her monthly trips to the Vietnamese spa on Ventura to get her pubic hair removed in much the same way.

  ‘Got a good view?’ he said. Sweat dripped off his lip and splashed on the stone pad surrounding the pool. She watched it quickly evaporate. She tried to stare at the hot sandstone instead of at the water even though the pool was so blue and inviting. If she looked there, she might see the moment when the bubbles stopped. That meant Johnnie was dead.