Written In Blood

by Alex R Carver

  “Maybe – maybe if I’d been able to make her see how obsessed Oliver, that fucking asshole,” he snarled, “is with her, she would – would’ve been alright.”

  Mitchell saw the accusation implicit in the teen’s words, and knew he would have to ask more questions before he could move on. “What is it, exactly, that makes you think Oliver might have had something to do with Georgina’s disappearance, and how she was found?”

  “Come on, you can’t tell you don’t know about his obsession with Georgie,” Kieran said. “He acts like she’s his girlfriend, not his cousin. He texts and calls her all the time, has her at his house cleaning up after him and his friends, running errands; he’s always touching her as well, like he wants her; you know what I mean?”

  Mitchell didn’t need to be a genius to understand what Kieran was trying to say, even if he didn’t believe it, so he nodded.

  “I think that’s what happened,” Kieran said. “He forgot Georgie’s his cousin, not his girlfriend – I mean, he gets aggro whenever she starts seeing someone – tried it on with her, and then snapped when she threatened to tell her parents what he’d done.”

  “It’s certainly a theory we’ll have to look into,” Mitchell promised. “There’s something else I need to ask you about.”

  “What?” Kieran didn’t even try to conceal his frustration. “Dad’ll be home for lunch any time, he’ll want his food ready, and he won’t want to see this mess.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll be as quick as I can,” Mitchell said. “Did you see Lucy Goulding yesterday afternoon? Specifically, at any point from lunchtime onwards.”

  Kieran nodded. “Sure, I saw her yesterday,” he said without hesitation. “Is she in trouble?”

  “No, but we are concerned about her. As far as we’ve been able to tell, nobody has seen Lucy since she got on the bus in town yesterday lunchtime to come back to the village. She would have made it back here a bit before one; did you see her after that time?”

  “Yeah, I saw her, must have been about two, something like that.”

  “Where?” Mitchell asked, hoping that he was about to hear something that would advance his investigation.

  “Just down the road actually. I was heading out to get some stuff done after a late lunch when my bloody car conked out again. I was trying to get it going again when I saw Lucy, she was at the old Henshaw cottage, being let in by that new guy, I forget his name, the one Emily’s been helping with his gardens.”

  “Zack Wild?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

  Mitchell could not believe it had been as easy as that to get confirmation of what he and Melissa suspected. “Thank you, Kieran; I’ve got just one last question for you, then I’ll be out of your hair.” He could see that the teen was frustrated to the point of swearing, so he got straight on with it. “Do you know how long Lucy was with Mr Wild for?”

  “No.” Kieran shook his head. “But it was a while. I was fifteen, twenty minutes fixing my car, and she hadn’t come back out by the time I was done. Mind you, I’m not surprised, given what she was wearing.”

  “What was that?”

  “The shortest skirt I’ve ever seen her wearing. It was so short I didn’t think it was a skirt at first – she had a hell of a lot of leg on show.” A smile played about his lips at the memory. “If I was that guy, Wild, I’d’ve wanted to keep her there for as long as possible, if only for the view.”

  “I’ll leave you and the girls to get things ready for your dad,” Mitchell said. “Thanks for your help.” He left then, collecting Melissa from the living room on the way out of the house.

  13

  Mitchell left Melissa to secure Oliver Ryder in one of the station’s two cells while he responded to his superior’s summons.

  “How’s the investigation going?” Stevens asked once Mitchell was seated. “Have you made any progress?”

  “If you mean with what happened to Georgina, then no; all I’ve got on that front so far is the theory that Oliver got confused about whether Georgina was his cousin or his girlfriend, and killed her when she rejected him after he made a move on her,” Mitchell answered.

  “Is that why you brought Oliver in?”

  Mitchell shook his head. “No. He’s here for assault and resisting arrest. He attacked Kieran Wright, and Melissa caught a wallop while trying to break the two of them up; she’s going to have a lovely bruise come morning, thankfully, that’s all she suffered.”

  “Okay, so you’ve got nothing on Georgina’s murder so far, beyond a theory that doesn’t have anything to back it up. What about Lucy’s apparent disappearance? Have you got anything on that?”

  “I still don’t know where she is,” Mitchell admitted. “But I have discovered that she came back to the village yesterday afternoon to meet someone. I don’t yet have proof of who the someone she was meeting is, but I’ve got reason to think it’s Zack Wild…”

  “The gentleman who found Georgina’s body this morning?” Stevens asked, surprised. “Why would Lucy have wanted to see him?”

  “Because, according to what I’ve discovered, she wants to become an author, and she wants whatever help he can give her.” Mitchell allowed that to sink in. “Lucy’s best friend, Kelly Hunter, told us about her desire to be an author, and we found evidence of that when we searched her room; we also found that after she returned home yesterday afternoon, and before she left again, she visited Mr Wild’s website, she also took a number of books written by Mr Wild with her when she left the house.”

  “That’s all well and good, Lewis, but have you got any proof that Lucy actually visited Mr Wild? Have you asked him about it?”

  “He wasn’t home when Melissa and I went to speak to him, we’re going to try again later. We do have confirmation that Lucy went to Mr Wild’s house, though, and that she went inside, she was seen being let in yesterday afternoon around two.”

  “Did she leave again?”

  “No idea on that score. Kieran, he’s the one who saw Lucy go in, was down the road, fixing his car for about twenty minutes and didn’t see her leave.”

  “So Mr Wild is the last person to have seen Lucy?”

  “As far as I know right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to confirm that when I catch up with Mr Wild.”

  Inspector Stevens contemplated Mitchell for a short while. “Do you think Mr Wild could be involved in Georgina’s murder and Lucy’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to leap to conclusions based on what may just be a coincidence, but he found Georgina’s body in an out of the way place, where almost no-one goes, and he’s currently the last person known to have seen Lucy. He’s also the person in the village we know the least about. Again, I don’t want to leap to any conclusions,” Mitchell said, before doing exactly that, “but I can’t imagine anyone else from the village being a killer; we know them, if that was the sort of person they were, we’d have discovered it by now.” He ground his teeth in frustration. “This would be a lot easier if we knew anything about Zack Wild beyond what he’s told us, which isn’t much. I know he’s definitely an author, but we don’t know anything other than that for sure.”

  “In that case, this might help.” Stevens slid a file across the desk to his subordinate. “It’s only a summary of Mr Wild’s service record with the Southampton police, but it’s bound to give you some idea of the sort of person he is. The full file is being couriered over, it should be here later this afternoon. I’ve added whatever other information I’ve been able to find out so far, it’s not a huge amount, but it might help.” He watched Mitchell pick up the file and flip open the cover. “You’re due a break, why don’t you have a read of that while you take it, then you can take John Ryder into town to identify Georgina.”

  “Here, I thought you could do with a fresh coffee,” Melissa said, putting the mug she had brought down in front of Mitchell, after moving the old, cold coffee out of the way.

  “Thanks,” Mitchell said absently, without looking
up from the file he was reading.

  “Is there anything good or interesting in there?” she asked, curious to know what had been discovered about Zack Wild. She had time to sip about a quarter of her own coffee before she got a response.

  “Haven’t you read it?” Mitchell asked, and then immediately answered his own question. “No, of course you haven’t. Here, have a look.” He passed the folder over. “It makes for interesting reading,” he said. His attention no longer on the file, he lifted the mug so he could sip his coffee.

  It was interesting, Melissa thought as she read, but also very brief. It took her barely a minute to get through the file, which only made her more curious about the author who had so recently moved to the village, and become mixed up in the first murder there had been in more than a decade.

  “It makes Mr Wild seem a viable suspect, doesn’t it,” Mitchell said. “Multiple violent incidents, several against women; it’s not proof-positive, but it definitely looks like he could be our murderer to me. Don’t you agree?” he asked of his partner.

  “Not really,” Melissa disagreed with a shake of her head. “We’ve got nothing but a few coincidences and some incomplete information. The coincidences mean nothing right now, and we don’t know enough about the supposed violent incidents to tell if they have any relevance; for all we know, he could have been justified in the things he did. If you’re going to make Mr Wild a suspect on that basis, you’ve got to make Oliver one as well, he’s definitely violent, and he’s connected to both Georgina and Lucy – one’s his cousin and the other’s his girlfriend, if that’s the right word to describe their relationship.”

  “Surely you think Zack Wild’s a better suspect than Oliver,” Mitchell said, speaking with a mouth so full of sandwich it was almost impossible to make out what he was saying. “We know Oliver, we don’t know Zack Wild.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Melissa protested. “We still don’t know there’s a connection between what happened to Georgina and Lucy’s disappearance; we still don’t know that Lucy has disappeared, she could be anywhere, doing anything. Even if Lucy has disappeared, and there is a connection, we don’t have a clue what it is or who’s responsible, because we don’t have a clue what happened to Georgina before she was found this morning. For all we know, it could be just about anyone in the village who’s responsible.”

  “Oh, come on, Melissa, you can’t believe that someone we know could have done what we saw this morning.”

  Melissa didn’t respond to that, instead she took a chocolate bar from her pocket, tore open the wrapper, and stuffed half of it into her mouth to keep her from saying what she was thinking.

  14

  “Can I help you?”

  “Sergeant Mitchell from Oakhurst; we’re here about Georgina Ryder.”

  The morgue attendant looked from the sergeant to the two with him. “I’ll get someone to help you,” he said before disappearing through the double-doors behind the counter. He returned almost immediately with another attendant, who took charge.

  Silent and solemn, Mitchell, Melissa and John Ryder followed the attendant along the passage, past several doors, and through a set of double doors at the far end. The room they entered was the storage area, with three of the walls made up of cabinets, which held the bodies of the recently dead.

  “It’s Georgina Ryder you’re here for, isn’t it,” the attendant said. “Came in this morning?”

  “That’s right,” Mitchell said with a quick nod.

  “Okay, she’s in thirty-eight,” the attendant said after checking a list on the desk in the corner of the room. “If you’ll sign in, I’ll show you her.”

  Mitchell, Melissa and John Ryder all filled out the sheet on the clipboard they were given, and with that formality taken care of the attendant led them over to the appropriate cabinet.

  “I assume you’re here to make an identification,” the attendant said.

  John Ryder nodded, unable to bring himself to speak, though he did gasp when he caught his first sight of the girl believed to be his daughter, and the damage done to her face.

  “Is that Georgina?” Mitchell asked in a low and compassionate voice.

  It was a minute and more before John recovered sufficiently from his shock to react to the sight before him. “My baby, oh my poor baby; who could have done this to you?” With a wail of grief, he threw himself, weeping, on the body.

  Melissa turned away, embarrassed by the obvious and painful display of grief. It was not that she was heartless, but John Ryder’s reaction was hard to watch.

  Mitchell was shocked by his friend’s reaction, which seemed excessive. “Come on, John, you’ve got to get control of yourself,” he said, placing a comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Georgina wouldn’t want you acting like this, and Verity’s going to need your support, she’s barely managing as it is. If you collapse, who’s going to help her through this.”

  “You-you’re right, Verity needs me to be strong,” John said as he fought back his tears. “It’s just…” He sniffed. “How could anyone have done this to my baby, my Georgie? Who did it? D’you know?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mitchell admitted. “We’ve barely begun investigating. It’s liable to take us some time to figure out what happened, and who’s responsible. We’re doing everything we can, though,” he assured him, “and we do have a suspect we’re looking at. As soon as we have proof, we’ll arrest him.”

  “Who is it?” John asked desperately as he grasped at the front of Mitchell’s uniform. “Please, Lewis, you have to tell me, who did this to my beautiful baby girl? She never did anything to anyone, she was an angel; how could anyone hurt her like this?” He reached out to stroke Georgina’s face, in doing so he dislodged the sheet covering her body. It was only the timely reactions of the morgue attendant that kept him from seeing the full extent of his daughter’s injuries. What he saw was enough to break the thin veneer of control he had in place over his emotions and make him collapse again. “Oh god, oh god, oh my poor baby.”

  Melissa guessed that the suspect Mitchell had referred to was Zack Wild, and that made her uncomfortable, for in her mind they had nothing to justify making him a suspect. Even if Wild was guilty of the assaults listed in the file she had read, and that was not certain, it did not follow that he had committed murder. It seemed to her, and she did not like the thought, that her superior had latched onto Zack Wild as a suspect because he did not want the murderer to be someone he knew, someone he was friends with; she could understand him thinking like that, but didn’t agree with it because of the chance that the real suspect might get away.

  She said nothing of her misgivings, however, sure that Mitchell wouldn’t want to hear them.

  “Are you certain it’s Georgina back there, John?” Mitchell asked, a hand on her friend’s shoulder as he steered him gently but firmly away from the sight that had caused him such distress. “I’ll understand if you’re not positive, it’s hard to make an identification under such circumstances,” he said, making it sound as though he had attended dozens. “There are other ways to be certain whether it’s Georgina – dental records and the like.”

  John Ryder shook his head. “No. No, I’m sure, it’s Georgie.” Now that he could no longer see his daughter’s brutalised body he was much calmer, though no less grief-stricken. “I’d recognise her anywhere, even after what – what - what was done to her.” He sobbed a couple of times before managing to finish what he was saying. “Even if I couldn’t, she’s wearing the earrings Verity and I gave her last Christmas.” Silent tears ran down his cheeks as he allowed himself to be guided along the passage.

  “How - how did she die?” John asked as they approached the double-doors at the end of the passage.

  Mitchell hesitated before answering, and Melissa was sure he was trying to decide how best to answer the question, without adding to his friend’s distress.

  “I’m afraid we don’t know at the moment,” Mitchell said, hoping h
e sounded believable. “We won’t know the answer to that until the post-mortem; when is that happening?” he asked of the morgue attendant who was escorting them out.

  “Not sure it’s been scheduled yet,” the attendant said. “It’ll probably be Monday sometime, though, depending on how busy the pathologist is. If you want to know a definite time, you’ll have to ring up Monday morning.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Mitchell hoped the post-mortem would provide him with something that might prove who had killed Georgina. He suspected it was Zack Wild, but without proof, suspicion was all he had.

  “Was, was…” John couldn’t bring himself to finish the question, instead he closed his mouth with a snap and continued out of the building.

  15

  While she waited for the kettle to boil, Melissa paid a visit to Oliver Ryder in his cell.

  “I hear you’ve been behaving yourself,” she said as she peered through the small viewing window in the door of the cell. “What’s wrong? You ill?”

  When more than half a minute passed without a response from the normally loudly vocal Oliver, Melissa changed tacks. “Do you want something to drink?”

  Another half a minute ticked by before Oliver finally spoke, “Stella.”

  It didn’t surprise Melissa that Oliver would ask for something like that, it was in his nature to be a pain. She sighed, and resisted the urge to swear. “You know I can’t get you that, you can’t have alcohol in here. I can do you a cup of tea or coffee, or water – I think there might be a can of coke in the fridge, if you’d rather have that.”

  Oliver was tempted to tell Melissa where to go, and to hell with her offer of a drink. He didn’t, because he knew if he did it would be hours before he was offered anything else to drink, and since he was already a little thirsty, he preferred not to give Melissa, or any of the other cops, a reason to leave him without refreshment.