Sweet Oblivion

by Rhiana Ramsey

  Louise listened attentively and tried hard not to interrupt, her dismay at what she was hearing evident from the bewildered, confused expression on her face.

  ‘He would take you away for days, sometimes weeks and mum and I wouldn’t see you until he finally brought you back. He used to say you were staying with his parents and having a great time. You always looked well and you weren’t bruised so mum wasn’t too concerned. You have to understand that she was a shell; there was no fight left in her, no fire. She was a broken woman.’

  Michelle began to cry, her tears glinting in the sunlight as they gently rolled down her cheek. Louise was stunned, disbelieving her sister’s words as much as she knew them to be true. She felt something moist land on her hand and only then realized that she too was crying.

  ‘The day we got taken away by social services, mum and I were heading out to do some shopping. We didn’t know where you were as dad had taken you away again. We drove off, but then mum realized she had forgotten her purse so we headed back to the house. Then we saw you. You were naked and covered in blood, and you were running out of the house crying. I don’t know what had happened to you. Mum shouted at me to stay in the car, she ran to you and then carried you into the house. She was gone for what felt like forever and I just remember being so afraid; I didn’t know whether I should go in and look for you both or if I should just stay sitting in the car waiting for you. I waited and I waited and then the police turned up.’

  ‘There were loads of them, they had dogs and guns. A policeman opened the car door and picked me up; I can still remember how strong his arms felt.’

  Michelle crossed her arms across her chest and unconsciously smoothed her hands over her biceps.

  ‘He carried me away from the house, but as I looked over his shoulder I could see mum coming out of the house. She had blood all over her and they were placing her in handcuffs. You were holding onto her legs and wouldn’t let go. You were much cleaner and dressed; mum had cleaned you up.’

  ‘The police tried to take you away from her but you wouldn’t let go. You were screaming and crying and kicking out at the officers. You wouldn’t let anyone touch you. I shouted for you and you heard me. When you saw me you let go of mum and ran over to me. The policeman that was carrying me scooped you up too and put us in his police car. They then drove us to a ‘safe place’ as they called it, which basically meant a hostel where we would be looked after by social services.’

  ‘There were loads of kids there and we stayed there for about three weeks before you were sent to your foster home; I stayed a couple weeks longer before I was also found a foster family. I don’t know why they separated us. I used to cry for you but eventually, I suppose, I just forgot about you. My new family had their own children and they were very good to me, treating me like a full blood sibling.’

  Michelle bent down and picked Kyle up, placing him on her lap so she could cuddle him and derive comfort from him. Louise felt even more isolated by this action.

  ‘It wasn’t until I was much older that my foster parents explained that our father had been murdered by our mother and that she was in prison. Apparently the way our father was killed was so vicious there was no hope of mum ever being released – she never gave a reason to the courts as to why she murdered our father, and I never knew the full details of his murder, nor did I want to know.’

  ‘I went to visit her in prison when I turned twenty-one. I’d had years of counselling and therapy by then, and I finally felt strong enough to go and see her. She looked like a new woman, it was quite surprising. Prison was a better place for her than our old family home. I think she was just so relieved to be free of him and to know that he couldn’t hurt any of us anymore.’

  Michelle fell silent and returned Kyle to the mat; he was getting fidgety and grumpy, his mother had spent too long talking and not enough time giving him the attention he wanted. Louise couldn’t speak, words failing her for the second time that day.

  ‘That’s all I can tell you Lou. It’s all I know.’

  ‘Do you know where he used to take me? Or what he did to me?’ Louise asked, disgusted and appalled by the sad, twisted story Michelle had just recounted.

  ‘No. I don’t think he took you to see relatives though and I can guess what he did to such a pretty child as you.’

  Louise felt sick. The idea of anyone doing that to a child was abhorrent; the idea that a parent could do that to their own flesh and blood was execrable. She stood up and ran over to one of Michelle’s perfect flowerbeds and vomited onto the flowers. Michelle went over to her.

  ‘Lou, I am so sorry. You should never have come here. The past should have been left in the past. I shouldn’t have told you this.’

  ‘Yes you should. I came here looking for answers and that’s what you’ve given me. I needed to know Michelle. I don’t remember any of this so it’s as if you’re talking about someone else.’

  Only she wasn’t. The little girl described in Michelle’s harrowing tale, was her. Louise stood upright; the wave of nausea was passing. She glanced towards Kyle who was looking at her quizzically, and then looked at Michelle who was standing beside her.

  As Louise looked at them she felt herself getting angry; why couldn’t she have this life? The doting husband, the beautiful children, a stable family home? Why did things always go wrong for her?

  Louise wiped the side of her mouth with the palm of her hand and breathed deeply.

  ‘Thank you for telling me the truth Michelle.’

  Michelle simply nodded and walked back over to her son.

  ‘I’ll get out of your way now,’ Louise said quietly, her mind still trying to process what she had just heard.

  ‘That’s probably for the best. You’ve got a lot to take in.’ Michelle picked Kyle up and turned to face Louise. ‘I don’t want to see you again, Lou. I don’t mean to sound cold or hard, but it’s taken me a long time to get my head on straight and to get myself together. I don’t want reminders of the past and I don’t want to go through this again. I hope you understand?’ Michelle said, tears in her eyes. Louise looked at her not knowing what to say or how she should feel.

  ‘I understand. You’ve done well for yourself, you don’t want some woman turning your life upside down, you know in the same way a letter about your mother dying when you thought she was already dead might,’ Louise said matter-of-factly. She was starting to feel angry and resentful again.

  ‘You sent me a bolt out of the blue Michelle and expected me to handle it, so forgive me for coming to see you to get a few answers.’

  ‘Louise, I did what I thought was right.’

  ‘You did it to assuage your conscience,’ Louise spat.

  ‘Did you really stop to think about how that letter might make me feel? How do you think I feel now, knowing all I believed was a lie? That I was an abused kid? Fuck!’

  ‘Don’t swear in front of Kyle!’ Michelle said angrily.

  ‘And now you are telling me that you don’t want to see me! That’s fucking rich! What choice did I have in any of this? What about what I fucking want?’

  ‘Louise please! Calm down. Don’t take this out on me! I did what you asked and told you the truth!’

  ‘You are the same as every other cunt! It’s all about you, isn’t it? Poor little Michelle had it so hard, but at least she didn’t have to worry about daddy’s dick. That was saved as a special treat for her little sister.’ Louise was in a rage.

  ‘Louise, stop!’ Kyle had started crying, the raised voices scaring him.

  ‘No I won’t fucking stop! You’re unbelievable! You send me a letter which shatters my world, you then tell me about our incestuous father, murderous mother and that no one knew any of this, and you expect me to what? Be happy? Just walk away without feeling anything?’

  ‘Get out of my house,’ Michelle said firmly, bouncing Kyle on her hip as she tried to soothe him.

  Louise went quiet and stared at them, her eyes hard and unfeeling. Michelle
unwittingly took a step back; she was afraid by what she saw. The hairs on the back of her neck rose and she felt herself leaning away from her sister. Louise looked evil, her face was different somehow. It was as if she had slipped a see-through plastic mask over her face; her features were in essence the same, but they were distorted.

  ‘Louise, you’re scaring my son. I want you to leave.’

  As Michelle watched, Louise’s face changed again, the lines softened, her pupils dilated and her mouth relaxed. Her voice changed in pitch slightly and her stance became non-threatening. Now she looked like the woman Michelle had been conversing with earlier that afternoon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Louise said softly, shaking her head, ‘I don’t know where that came from. I’ll see myself out.’

  Michelle watched Louise walk away until she reached the front door, then she followed her, Kyle still sobbing in her arms. She went into the living room so she could keep Louise under observation from the window. Louise didn’t look back; she simply got into her car and drove away.

  Once the car was out of sight, Michelle went to the front door and for the first time since she had lived in her house, pulled the security chain across the door. Her encounter with Louise had spooked her; she hoped they would never meet again. She wasn’t a psychiatrist but she had lived through enough depravity to know that there was something terrifying lurking in her sister’s soul.

  ************************************************

  Greg had been watching the CCTV from the car park on Rampton Street for just over an hour and it was making him sleepy; it was difficult enough scouring CCTV when you were well-rested, but doing it whilst sleep deprived was torturous.

  The digital footage he had retrieved from the City of London Police was contained on five DVDs, and each DVD held the footage of about four cameras. The first difficulty Greg was presented with was trying to work out which part of the car park each camera was pointing at because they did not have handy names such as ‘ramp’ or ‘car park level 1’, they were simply numbered ‘Cam1’, ‘Cam 2’ and so on.

  Then Greg had to contend with timing discrepancies, as the times displayed on the monitor for each respective camera were wrong. The time on the camera he was looking at now was three hours and eleven minutes slower than it should have been, reading 20:05hrs, when in fact the time of the recording was 23:16hrs.

  Greg was struggling to find the approximate time of the murder on the footage and so had just decided to watch all the footage at high speed, which was why it was taking him so long. He finally came to the end of ‘Cam 8’, which was the last camera on the second DVD. Nothing. He ejected the disc and inserted the third DVD, yawning widely.

  He opened up the file for ‘Cam 9’ and hit fast forward; then he sat back in his chair and put his feet on the desk, his eyes never leaving the monitor. This camera presented a long-shot of the middle section of one of the car park levels; there were two cars parked close together in the middle of the shot, and a couple of others dotted around the vicinity. To the left of the image Greg could just make out what appeared to be a white line on the floor circling round a pillar, which possibly demarcated a ramp to one of the levels. The multi-story car park had three levels, so Greg wasn’t able to tell which level he was looking at.

  The footage skipped along, cars drove in and out, people came and went, the speed of the footage frames making them look like they were waddling akin to old fashioned movies that were shot at sixteen frames per second instead of the modern day twenty-four.

  Greg yawned again and stretched; the time on the monitor was approaching 23:00hrs. As Greg watched he saw a man walk over to a vehicle, then stand at the driver’s side door; he appeared to be fumbling with something in his hands. The angle of the camera was such that Greg could see the man’s left-hand side and his upper body over boot of the car which was parked at a forty-five degree angle to the camera.

  Suddenly, from nowhere Greg saw a flurry of movement as a dark figure skittered across the screen towards the man. The man then dropped down between the two vehicles; Greg didn’t see where the figure went.

  He twisted in his seat, putting his feet back on the floor and quickly stopped the footage. He rewound it until he could see the man walking towards his car and then he hit playback, the footage now playing at the correct speed.

  The man arrived at the driver’s side door and then from the right-hand corner of the screen, a figure all dressed in black ran towards him. The man’s back was turned to the figure, so the person was in effect running towards the camera and if they hadn’t been shrouded in black, the camera would have picked up their face.

  Greg watched intently at what happened next. The man turned to face the figure and from the motion of his head, it became clear to Greg that the man had been struck in the face. He then fell to the ground and the figure dropped down to his level. Greg couldn’t see what happened at ground level as the car was blocking his view, but he did see a raised hand holding a sharp pointed metal object, striking downwards, repeatedly. For a few minutes there was no movement and then Greg saw the black figure stand up and run off to the right of the screen towards a fire exit.

  ‘Jesus,’ Greg mumbled, glancing around the office. Almost everyone was out following up their various enquiries, but JB was sitting a couple of desks away.

  ‘JB, come check this out! I’ve found it on the CCTV.’

  JB hurried over and stood watching as Greg replayed the footage.

  ‘Holy shit! Have you tried the other cameras yet to get a facial shot?’

  ‘Not yet. The timing is wrong on this camera. What time was the body found?’

  JB scanned the report.

  ‘The call came in at 00:04hrs,’

  Greg skipped forward until the moment when the group of friends found the body. He watched as the women screamed, grabbing hold of their men, the men turning their backs to the corpse. One of the men pulled out a mobile phone, dialed a number and put it to his ear; the time on the monitor read 23:37hrs. The camera was twenty-seven minutes out.

  Greg rewound the footage again and replayed it; he wanted to work out exactly what time Derek Cooper had been murdered. Knowing that the camera was 27 minutes out he was able to work out that Mina had begun that attack at 23:48hrs and had fled the scene at 00:02hrs. She had spent fourteen minutes in total attacking and mutilating the body; she certainly hadn’t wasted any time.

  ‘Greg! Look at that!’ JB suddenly exclaimed, excitedly. ‘Watch the car by the fire exit!’

  They watched the footage again, slowing it down so that they could watch it frame by frame, and saw Mina put a hand onto the boot of grey Ford Focus parked next to the fire escape.

  ‘Fuck me! She touched the car.’

  ‘Yeah and look,’ JB pointed at the screen, ‘she’s not wearing a glove on that hand.’

  The detectives smiled at each other and leapt into action. JB quickly logged onto a computer so he could run a check on the Police National Computer to find out who the car belonged to.

  ‘Give me the VRM,’ he shouted to Greg.

  ‘It’s Romeo 3, 3, Papa, Quebec.’

  ‘PNC shows it as registered to a Mr Ethan Jubozi with an address in Eastham. Let me just do a quick check on that address and see what phone numbers are listed for this guy. Here we go, I’ve got a mobile.’

  ‘Fantastic, give it here.’

  JB read out the number to Greg, who punched it into the desk phone. He gave the thumbs up to indicate to JB that the number was ringing.

  As Greg spoke to the owner of the vehicle and explained that they needed to examine his car as a matter of urgency, JB called the SOCO team and gave them Mr Jubozi’s address, detailing the exact location where Mina had touched the vehicle. Greg hung up the phone at the same time as JB.

  ‘Fucking awesome. He’s only too happy to help and for once we have some good news! He hasn’t driven the car since Friday evening when City of London Police released the crime scene, and it is currently sitting
in his garage. He knew about the murder because, obviously, when he tried to get his car out of the car park on Friday morning, it was cordoned off,’ Greg said happily.

  ‘And SOCO are on their way and should be at his address in an hour. They said there’s a good chance of getting a good print lift from the vehicle because the metallic surface is an excellent material for capturing DNA and prints,’ JB said.

  ‘We need to tell the DI,’ Greg said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Dunno. Probably still talking to Meadows.’

  ‘I’ll call him.’

  ‘No need, I’m here.’ Robert’s voice came from the back of the office as he strolled in. ‘What you got?’

  Greg and JB told Robert what they had seen and the actions they had taken. Robert was overjoyed and applauded them both for their good work. Now they just had to wait to hear back from SOCO to see if they were successful in lifting a print, and then to see if the print was held on the national database. They were finally on the killer’s tail and they were close. As long as those prints came back with a match, they would know the identity of their killer within the next 24 hours.

  Chapter XXXIII

  The evening briefing had been short but highly animated, everyone had been so excited about the potential fingerprint sample on the Focus; even Meadows had cracked a smile. The DI had asked the core investigative team to come back early in the morning, even though it was a Sunday, and to be prepared to attend the suspect’s address to arrest Mina and perform a thorough search of her home.

  He had warned them that it could potentially prove to be a very long day and that they would need to be prepared to work into the night to get the suspect remanded and charged; despite their fatigue, no one complained.