Sweet Oblivion

by Rhiana Ramsey

  The officers made quick progress through the living room, seizing a number of items including Louise’s laptop computer, hard drive and memory sticks. Robert was struck by the austerity of the flat – it felt unlived in. There were no photos on the walls or cabinets, no knickknacks or paintings… the place had no personality. It was purely a functional residence where Louise simply slept and ate – nothing more. It was not a home.

  The officers searching the kitchen looked in the cupboards, behind appliances and in the fridge and freezer. Once they were sure there was nothing of interest in the room, they left the kitchen and moved into the bathroom.

  Robert wandered into the kitchen once the search team had moved out and leant against the kitchen counter. Elizabeth soon returned to the flat and found Robert in the kitchen. Greg was in the bathroom with one half of the search team; Tony was with the other half in the bedroom.

  ‘No one on this floor has seen her. Apparently, she keeps herself to herself rarely has visitors and doesn’t spend a great deal of time here,’ Elizabeth said to Robert, closing her pocket notebook and returning it to her suit jacket pocket.

  ‘You couldn’t have known Elizabeth,’ Robert said.

  ‘What’s that Guv?’

  ‘I said you couldn’t have known you were in the company of a killer. How could you? They don’t walk around with ‘murderer’ tattooed on their foreheads; that would make our job a bit too easy don’t you think?’

  ‘I know what you’re saying Guv, but I just feel that I should have had some indication, some notion of what she was when I met her.’

  Elizabeth sighed, and leant back against the work surface too, her arms across her chest, mirroring her boss’s stance.

  ‘You never really know anyone Elizabeth. You can only go on what they tell you and their observable actions. You weren’t to know. And besides, you did have doubts about her. You researched her on the internet and found her on your spreadsheet, so don’t be so hard on yourself. A part of you knew exactly what she was,’ Robert said reassuringly.

  ‘Thanks,’ Elizabeth smiled.

  ‘You know, I think I met her – Louise. I think I saw her leave the club with the third victim, Dan Taylor,’ Robert confessed.

  ‘Seriously? What makes you say that?’ Elizabeth was stunned. She couldn’t imagine that Robert would have missed an opportunity to apprehend the killer.

  ‘Just a feeling – a bit like yours. I didn’t react on it at the time because I doubted myself and because there was absolutely no evidence. And to be honest at the time I was more interested in her looks than I was in interpreting my hunch. It was only afterwards that I became more convinced.’

  ‘The mind does most of its great work at a subconscious level,’ Elizabeth stated, wisely.

  ‘Indeed. But I can’t help but feel guilty. If I had acted then, the third and fourth murders would probably never have happened.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know that the woman you saw was Mina.’

  ‘Well, either way, I feel responsible for the deaths of those two men and that is something I shall have to live with for the rest of my life,’ Robert confided.

  ‘There were four of us in the club that night Guv, so we all missed her. We all failed the victims, not just you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘At least now we can seek some retribution for them by capturing the fucking bitch.’

  Robert smiled at her and she placed a gentle, comforting hand on her boss’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. They both felt as if they had failed; it would take them a long time to get over their self-condemnation.

  They moved out of the kitchen and headed into the bedroom to see how the searching officers were getting on. There wasn’t enough room for all of them in the room so Robert and Elizabeth stood just outside watching the officers. Tony was helping and was searching inside the wardrobe.

  The smell they had noticed upon entering the flat appeared to be stronger in this room and the odour was causing the officers to breathe through their mouths.

  ‘We should be wearing fucking face masks,’ one of the OSU team said before noticing Robert standing in the doorway, ‘sorry Guv.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise, I agree it fucking reeks. I’m guessing the smell is her trophies – rotting.’

  This statement made everyone in the room feel queasy, especially the men. The thought of rotting flesh was abhorrent enough but to think the stench was being caused by rotting male genitalia brought bile into the throat of those with even the sturdiest of dispositions.

  ‘Can’t bloody find where it’s coming from though. And we haven’t found any of the bondage gear,’ another OSU officer said.

  ‘Maybe it’s not kept here?’ Elizabeth suggested.

  The officers tore the bedroom apart, they searched under the bed, in the bedside cabinets, in the bags stored on top of the wardrobe, they pulled back the carpet, they searched through all Louise’s clothes and still nothing.

  Tony sighed disappointedly as his search of the wardrobe also drew a blank. Then he spotted it. There was a discrepancy between the depth of the wardrobe on the outside and the depth of the wardrobe on the inside. The outer wardrobe was at least twenty centimeters deeper. Tony tapped the back of the wardrobe with his knuckles.

  ‘Guys, I think this wardrobe has a false back. Give me something I can get the back off with,’ Tony said, excitedly.

  ‘Can we pull the wardrobe forward?’ one of the OSU team suggested. Tony looked at the inside of the wardrobe, paying more attention to the furniture itself this time as opposed to its contents.

  ‘No, unless you’ve got a screw driver. It’s fastened to the wall.’

  ‘If there’s something behind it, I’m sure she would have an easier way of getting to it. She wouldn’t want to be unscrewing it every time,’ Elizabeth proposed. ‘No hinges or anything Tone? Does it slide?’

  Tony looked again, scanning the back panel for clues of an opening mechanism. At the bottom of the back panel he noticed a small aperture just big enough for a couple of fingers to be inserted.

  Gingerly, not knowing what to expect, Tony slid his forefinger and index fingers into the opening and pulled forwards, he then pushed backwards and then he pulled to the left; this time he felt the panel give a little, so he pulled to the left again, this time a bit harder. He could see now that the back of the wardrobe was on runners and as he pulled it to the left, the panel slid smoothly into the bedroom wall, revealing a further closet space, built into the wall.

  As the panel opened up to reveal the secret cavity space, Tony brought his forearm across his nose, the stench from within causing him to recoil momentarily.

  Various expletives and groans of disgust were muttered by those in the room as the smell reached their olfactory systems, some of the officers covering their noses with their sleeves, others resorting to pinching their nostrils shut.

  The wall cavity was dark and Tony couldn’t see what was lurking within. He carefully and gently ran his hand around the edges of the cavity, feeling for a light switch or pull, his hand finally resting on something that felt like it was designed for that purpose.

  He flicked the switch, a dim, yellow light bulb burst into life, and the wall cavity was bathed in a dirty, yellow glow. Tony took a step back, momentarily startled by a number of people standing in the light with their backs to him, and let out a grunt of surprise. It took him a second to realize that he wasn’t looking at human beings but in fact, a collection of wigs. He moved further into the wardrobe to get a better look.

  ‘Holy mother of God,’ he whispered, as his eyes took in the contents of the concealed wall space. He shook his head in disbelief.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Chapter XXXVI

  The opening behind the back wardrobe panel was just tall enough for a person under six feet tall to stand in and just wide enough to allow that same person to turn fully to their left or right. At six-foot-three, Tony was too tall to stand inside the space and so h
e surveyed the area from just outside it, standing hunched within the closet like some kind of over-sized bogeyman.

  He put a hand across his nose and mouth, trying not to breathe in the odour emanating from within; it was so over-powering Tony had to try very hard not to be sick.

  The inside of the space was raw brick work, rough to the touch and rudimentarily built, and after some initial confusion as to how Louise had even been able to construct the cavity without intruding into somebody else’s property, Greg had worked out that it was actually built into the space underneath the stairs to the first floor. No one had access to this space from the communal corridor because the under stair area had been sealed up many years before by the building management company, tired of people using the space to store bicycles, suitcases and other such belongings, creating a potential fire and vermin hazard. Louise had been able to erect this space freely, knowing that it would not be discovered from outside the flat.

  The wall behind which Louise had chosen to build her secret place was an internal wall and therefore only made of plaster board; it would not have been difficult for her to make a hole through it. Then she had simply built an extra mini-room within the space under the stairs, bought a wardrobe to place in front of it, wedging the piece of furniture several inches into the gap, and then fastened the wardrobe to the wall.

  She had needed to adapt the wardrobe by bringing the existing back panel forward in order to create a runner system and to allow enough room for the wardrobe to actually be pushed into the cavity. It was a simple, yet ingenious, design.

  The wigs that had startled Tony hung on several hooks at eye level at the back of the bricked space, a variety of different colours, hair styles and lengths. They were good quality wigs and would appear natural when worn, which was why Tony had momentarily thought the wigs were actually real hair on actual human heads.

  Below the wigs on another set of hooks hung an array of whips, ranging from small, single-stranded leather ones, to large, multi-stranded, rubber ones. There was also an assortment of thin canes, some of which could be folded for easy transport.

  Underneath the whips, ran three horizontal metal rails, each one supporting a number of shoes, which dangled from the rails by their three-inch heels. Two pairs of thigh-high PVC boots were propped up against the back wall, their shiny surfaces glinting in the light.

  Tony turned his head to the left and saw two wooden shelves. The top shelf contained a variety of make up and contact lenses, and a circular mirror was placed in the centre of the ledge. Tony could almost visualize Mina standing in front of the mirror, checking her reflection and deciding what eye colour she was going to sport that night.

  The second shelf held an assortment of implements, the purpose of which Tony didn’t recognize. They looked like medical instruments that may have been used by surgeons in the early 1900s; not that Tony knew really what those looked like, it was just the impression they gave him. Some looked like pincers and forceps, another was circular with sharp pins around the circumference.

  Next to them lay two four-inch, hand-crafted stakes, fashioned out of metal and honed to an evil looking point. They were solid and weighty, their tips burred and rough. As Tony looked at them, he knew he was looking at the implements Mina used to plunge into her victims’ eyes.

  On the floor beneath the two shelves, was an old-fashioned, wooden trunk, the type one might associate with pirates and hidden treasure. Tony lifted the lid with a gloved hand; inside a quantity of neatly-folded leather, PVC and rubber garments were collected, arranged according to the material they were made from; a couple of corsets lay on top of them. There were a large number of outfits in the chest, enough for many nights of killing.

  Tony turned his head to the right. Again there were two wooden shelves on the right-hand wall but the top shelf was empty. The second shelf contained four small brown cardboard boxes, fourteen by twelve centimetres in length and depth respectively, which were stained at the bottom, dark patches creeping across their surfaces. The boxes also appeared a little wet in places, their sides slightly bowed where moisture had seeped into the cardboard, weakening the structure.

  ‘I think I’ve found the trophies. Can I have another set of gloves please?’ Tony asked, removing his hand briefly from his face so he could speak. He grimaced at the smell anew; it reeked within the cavity.

  A hand promptly appeared over his shoulder handing him a clean set of gloves; Tony removed the gloves he had used to touch the trunk and put on the new ones, placing the dirty ones into the anonymous hand that was still hovering over his shoulder.

  Tony tentatively picked up one of the boxes, carefully handling it so that it didn’t disintegrate with his touch, slowly pulling open the lid. He was finding it hard to breathe in the enclosed space, the stench permeating from the box in his hand overwhelming and obnoxious.

  He looked inside the box and saw a shrivelled piece of meat, black and red in colour, with a greenish hue where a mould-type substance had started to sprout. The process of decay had caused the flesh to cave in on itself in places making it look like a partially-emptied, lumpy sausage skin.

  Tony could see an abundance of skin at the base of the lump of flesh and was appalled to see dark curly hairs.

  He quickly closed the lid on the box and put it back where he had found it. He’d seen enough. He was relieved to step out of the cavity into the bedroom; the air tasted so much sweeter after the pungent odours of that confined space. He bent over at the waist, placing his hands on his knees and breathed, sickened by what he had seen in the box.

  ‘You alright?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll get over it.’

  Tony detailed what he had found, and then said: ‘Think I just need to step outside though and get some air. I can’t get the smell out of my nostrils.’ Robert patted him on the back as he passed, and signalled to the search team to begin collecting the evidence, requesting that they photograph the items in situ first.

  ‘Well we’ve got the evidence, now we just need the suspect,’ Robert said matter-of-factly to Elizabeth and Greg, who had now also joined them in the bedroom.

  ‘We need to try and establish her movements, where was she last seen?’

  ‘She was last seen with me, on Friday night getting drunk,’ Elizabeth said, despondently.

  ‘Ok, so Friday night, we know she was definitely in London and she was drunk, so she probably stayed in this flat or with someone else in town that night.’

  ‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend so she probably stayed here,’ Elizabeth deduced.

  ‘Ok, so we’re looking at Saturday morning or afternoon. That’s the earliest she probably left this place. Or she left in the wee hours of this morning, which I doubt. That bed does not look slept in.’

  They all looked at the bed; the covers were neatly tucked under the mattress and the pillows were plump.

  ‘She didn’t know we were coming, she doesn’t know she’s a suspect, so she may well come back here. Elizabeth, can you call the control room and get them to send a couple of officers to sit in front of the block. Make sure they turn up in plain clothes and use one of the unmarked cars, we don’t want to spook her if she does come back. I’ll authorize the surveillance for now, but we’ll need to get Meadows to approve it once we’re out of here.’

  The search team officers were making slow progress, delicately removing items and carefully packaging them in separate bags and containers, the exhibits stacking up in the corner of the room. They would be there for at least the entire morning and probably into the afternoon as they diligently seized, packaged and itemized each piece of evidence.

  Robert couldn’t wait for them to finish; they had a killer to catch. He ushered Greg and Elizabeth into the living room and tapped on the window to catch Tony’s attention, summonsing him to come back in. Tony still looked pale when he rejoined them in the flat.

  ‘The OSU guys are going to be here for hours sorting this shit out,’ Robert said, ‘so I want y
ou guys to get out of here, go back to the station and partner up. I want everybody out there shaking the trees to see if anything falls out. Visit all of the people she is associated with, friends, family… any address that she is linked to, places she is known to visit. It’s time for some good old-fashioned leg work. Tony could you revisit the boss please? He hasn’t been entirely honest with us and I want to know why. Bring him in for formal questioning if you have to.’

  Tony nodded, pleased to have been tasked with a job that would get him out of the flat.

  ‘I’m going to stay here and oversee the search. Check in with me as you go and I’ll see you all back at the nick later,’ Robert concluded.

  Greg, Elizabeth and Tony left the flat, relieved at being out of the stagnant air and away from the rotting pieces of human flesh.

  ‘I can’t believe she just keeps the trophies in cardboard boxes, without any form of preservative. And how could she live with that fucking smell?’ Greg asked of no one in particular.

  ‘It’s like she’s living two lives,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She’s got to have some sort of split personality disorder.’

  ‘Well you would know,’ Greg teased, cracking the first joke of the day and lightening the mood considerably.

  ‘Funny, Greg, seriously. You’re a comedy genius,’ Elizabeth retorted, inflecting a bored tone into her voice. Greg simply grinned.

  ‘Penises in boxes,’ Tony said, out of the blue. ‘You couldn’t make it up. If I told you I’d been to a crime scene and found four penises in boxes you would never believe me, would you?’

  Despite Tony’s deadpan face and serious tone, Greg and Elizabeth couldn’t help but chuckle, partly because what Tony said sounded so funny and partly because they needed to, just to remind themselves they were human and to temporarily push the awfulness of the discovery from their minds.