He had been more than a little in awe of Carl; had admired his curly bronze hair and his friendly smile, his perfectly straight white teeth. Had marvelled at the fact he came from such a posh family, but wasn't stuck up at all. He had loved just how much Carl seemed to know about the kinds of things that he could only dream about doing. Like visiting the great pyramids of Egypt, or scuba diving among the coral reefs off of the Great Barrier Reef. And Carl, in his turn, had equally respected him, his daring and his chutzpah; at least he had done at first.
Then it had happened. Carl's sister had found out where he lived, after asking him in the yard one lunch time.
“And where do you live then?”
She’d given him an enquiring but not entirely unfriendly smile, as he had leant against the wood of a picnic bench in the schoolyard, Carl beside him, their heels lazily scuffing in the mud.
“Uhh near the big Asda off of Maynards way,” he said, hoping maybe he could avoid giving her a direct answer.
“Maynards? Near the council estate?”
“N…no,” he fumbled weakly.
“No?” She slanted an eyebrow, “so near the other end then, the posh end?”
What could he say? He knew he couldn’t outright lie to her, he’d only get caught out.
“Go on, you can tell me, it’s alright, I won’t tell anyone” she said, gently encouraging him.
“It is the council estate you live on isn’t it?”
“Y…yes,” he nodded at her reluctantly, his cheeks burning as he stared at his feet. She smiled a funny little smile at that, turning away from him. Somehow he’d known in that moment that he’d made a mistake telling her the truth.
She must have told Carl's parents, because soon after that the cold shoulder treatment occurred, and he learnt one of his first and cruellest lessons about human nature.
The two of them would usually meet up by the chocolate machine to walk to their form room together, but that morning Carl wasn't waiting for him. He waited patiently hanging by the machine, for what seemed like an age, until he finally saw him in the corridor. He was walking and chatting, with Andrew Baxter, of all people. He called out to him, but instead of his friend’s usual friendly greeting, he received a thin blank stare as if Carl were looking right through him.
Confused, he waved at him but his friend turned his head away, back to Andrew Baxter. Baxter must have said something amusing, because the two broke out in to fits of laughter, before sprinting off down the corridor away. Bewildered and hurt, by lunchtime he realised what was going on. Trying to get Carl's attention again, in the dinner queue for chips and hot jam roll with custard, his friend had just ignored him, pretending not to hear.
As he sat at one of the canteen’s plastic topped tables on his own, nibbling at his chips, Carl had come past. Smiling, he had lifted his head, still daring to hope, as their eyes locked for a moment. But then Carl had simply sailed past, without saying a word, to join Andrew and John and Fiona at their table, although he did have the good grace to look a little uncomfortable this time at least.
It dawned on him with a sick feeling then that he'd been jettisoned. Dumped. On finding out who their son had befriended, Carl's parents had warned him away, told him to avoid the poor little deprived council estate boy in the mismatched blazer, with his free school dinner tickets. He' been ditched for Andrew bloody Baxter of all people. Baxter, who lived in the most exclusive part of Surrey, in an expensive house with a swimming pool attached, courtesy of his diplomat father.
The ketchup congealed in a pool at the side of his plate, as his appetite left him totally. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t Carl's fault, not really. His parents had probably threatened to cut off his sizeable allowance if he hadn't stayed away from him. Still if he had really wanted to speak to him he would have found a way wouldn't he?
The familiar feeling that had haunted him throughout his childhood, the sense that he didn’t fit in somehow, returned to him then as he watched the four of them together at the table. Chattering and laughing, sharing jokes together, while he sat alone miserably picking at his food. The gippo, the outcast kid. On the outside, looking in once again.
***
How old had he been when he first realised that he couldn't feel most normal emotions, like everyone else seemed to? He didn’t know but perhaps the lack of feeling was inevitable after all, given what had happened. Vaguely, he recalled some pop psychology expert he’d seen on a television program, saying that people who experienced traumatic childhoods often had problems processing their emotions. But surely the psych wasn’t referring to a complete absence of feeling?
Literally that was how it was for the most part, an abyss, a void. It wasn't that anyone close to him had died. More the fact that the slow, cruel trickle of his human experience had gradually eroded whatever empathy he originally had, to the point where it just didn't exist anymore. Sometimes he wondered whether he had ever had any in the first place.
When he thought of his upbringing he thought of a kind of chaos. His parents arguing all the time, his mother turning on him, dragging him into their rows.
“You little brat what are you bloody staring at?” His mother’s voice, accusing him of something he hadn’t done again. Sitting there on the chair in the living room, he shoved his fingers in his ears, wishing she’d go away, as he squeezed his eyes shut tightly.
“Don’t pretend you’re all affected, you bloody little drama queen.”
“Leave the kid out of it Helena.” His father, calling out from his usual position on the sofa, still staring at the television while his mother raged about something or other. He cringed, this would only make it worse, he knew her.
She wheeled around.
“You can shut the hell up, I’m the one who’s had to listen to that bloody teacher telling me I’m a bad parent because I can’t afford to pay for a new bloody blazer. What happened to the last one I paid for?” She turned back to him, venom in her eyes now.
“I..I dunno Mum…”
“Helena,” his father piped up again, attempting to intervene.
“You shut up I told you, just go back to watching the box you bloody waste of space.”
“See what you’ve done now, you devious little shit, causing trouble between us again. Don’t come the innocent act with me,” she spat, staring at him accusingly, her face hard. Why couldn’t she just stop screaming at him?
“So where is it then? That was a perfectly good blazer. I spent bloody money on that.”
“I’m sorry Mum. I lost it…I didn’t mean to.”
She rolled her eyes.
“It’s always you though isn’t it? Always you, causing trouble. Your brother never does this, why can’t you be more like him? You’re just like your father you are, a bloody waste of space.”
Tears threatened to fall from his eyes but he held on to them tightly. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing him cry.
“Well? Why can’t you be more like him instead of causing trouble you little shit?”
It generally went like that, him getting the blame for something just so she could vent her anger. Sometimes, he'd even get thrashed for it, and then he'd run up to his room and bury his face in his mattress, pulling the quilt firmly over his head, ugly welts forming on the tops of his thighs from the leather belt his mother would use to hit him with.
His father, was a Scotsman, short, rough, and dark haired, a scaffolder by trade. At least he had been before he’d injured his back. In later years he had turned to medicating his pain and subsequent inertia with hard drugs. His mother was blonde, willowy and beautiful, clever, with a brilliant, mathematical brain. At the time she met his father she had just been accepted on to an advanced mathematics course at Cambridge University.
A middle class girl with an urge to rebel, she had been used to a comfortable and relatively sheltered life, so the glamour of rough and ready men, with all their unpredictable allure, naturally appealed to her sensibilities. It had been
the reason she had been attracted to his father in the first place. They’d met by chance, when his father had been working on restoring the outside wall of her parent’s Surrey manor house. Catching sight of her he’d fallen instantly in love with the stunning blonde beauty, eventually persuading her to ditch her university place, and elope with him to get married instead.
His mother’s parents had disowned her after that, cutting off her allowance and refusing to give her any help when her twin babies had been born, unable to accept the relatively ordinary life their beautiful, clever daughter had chosen.
Absenting himself from most of the day to day running of family life, his father had preferred instead to spend his time self-medicating with various substances. His drug of choice of course was heroin, and sometimes when he would creep in to the lounge late at night, he would find his father passed out in a trance in front of the television. All the lights in the room would be turned off, the only source of illumination coming from the TV set. In the darkness he would spy his father's glazed eyes, staring unseeing, while the lurid tube projected eerie, mocking shadows up the wall.
Turning tail he would flee, running up the stairs quickly and diving in to his safe place beneath the sheets where he would hug himself to sleep, imagining he had a normal family. A family like Gary’s or Phillip’s, who's fathers would ruffle their hair and take them sledding in the winter when it snowed, and whose mothers would smile benignly at their offspring as if they couldn't ever do anything wrong. Not his mother though. She had seemed to hate him almost from the start. He couldn’t ever do anything right in her eyes. Not like his brother.
It got worse sometimes, usually when she was in a particularly foul mood. Then she would provoke his father into getting angry at him, poking and jabbing until eventually he snapped. Disturbed from his position on the sofa, his father would come roaring after him then, giving him a sore thrashing with the belt when he caught up with him, while tears of humiliation and anger stung his cheeks.
The lack of any real love made him feel distinctly separate from the other kids, who seemed to have it so easy with their normal, nice, safe homes. He remembered it had always been there in his consciousness somehow, that otherness, that sense of being different, emotionally apart from the rest.
It was almost like the other kids could sense it too. Almost like they knew he wasn't like them, wasn't part of what they were part of. He had some friends, those who were too blind to take notice that he wasn't really there at all, or those who were too uncool to care they were hanging out with the weird kid.
He wasn’t bullied exactly; they mostly just kept away from him. He hadn’t really cared. After Carl he’d never found anyone he’d been able to make any real kind of connection with. There was no one to whom he wanted to belong.
Until he’d met her. Sally.
CHAPTER FIVE - DEACON
Deacon stared at the page, not quite able to believe his eyes. He'd known there was something familiar about the case, and, after 25 years in the force, he’d learnt to trust his instincts. And there it was, the very link he’d been looking for, concealed in one of the first murder cases he’d ever worked on, back when he had been a young Sergeant working for the Surrey Police Force. The brutal murder of sixteen year old Sally Brooks, a crime committed 17 years ago.
He remembered being called to the scene to assist Chief Inspector Frader, who had been lead investigator at the time of the murder. Balking when he’d first seen the body, displayed in that awful pose, the neck exposed to reveal the bloody gash at the throat, legs splayed, the torso twisted to the side slightly. One hand extended, as if it were reaching out, amid a mass of blonde hair.
It certainly wasn't the first time he'd seen a corpse but it was the first time he'd seen one so young. Someone who should have been so full of life, but instead was lying there dead, her throat cut, her body cold, motionless. He’d wondered to himself at the time what kind of monster could do such a thing to a young woman, what kind of person could want to? Sitting there like that, he wondered it again now.
He remembered too, the inventory of the victim’s possessions he’d been instructed to take down at the time. Frader had given him the responsibility of photographing and noting everything Sally Brooks had been carrying when she was murdered, and the photographs had been scanned into the forces records when the new computer system was installed.
It was this photographic inventory that he stared at now or at least, one item in particular.
The small red velvet box, containing the little gold chain set with pearl, had been found in the girl's satchel, and he gazed at the two pictures he’d taken of it. The first was a close up of the necklace, its design similar to the ones that had been found around the necks of latest seven victims. The second photograph showed the box’s underside; the little insignia of the jeweller’s that it had been bought from embossed in gold lettering.
He navigated to the notes he’d made about each item at the side of the page, noting that nothing much had been written down, apart from the fact the necklace had been bought locally from Goldsmiths, the local jewellers shop. Eyeing the scant information, he cursed himself, how could he have missed the possible significance of the item at the time?
Could this be the vital clue? The one that if they’d spotted it before, could have prevented seven young women being cut down in their prime? Shivering, he tried to block the thought out of his mind. Another thought came to mind then, and minimizing the case file screen window, he hurriedly typed something in to Google.
Pearl is birthstone for month? Several web links flashed up with the answer, some contradicting each other, but mostly all proclaiming the same. June. June? Wasn't that the month Sally had been born in? He went back to the case file screen window and checked, yes there it was. Sally had been born on the 10th of June 1979, and she would have been 33 years old now if she were alive today, the same age as his partner Doyle.
Looking at the clock on his computer, he saw it was only 6 am; no-one would be in the incident room yet. He knew he needed to find out how to contact Mary Brooks, Sally's mother. He had to ask her if she knew something else they didn’t already know about the necklace. Something that might prove to be significant. Checking over the personal details in the case file on Sally, he looked for it, there it was, her mother's date of birth along with her social security number.
Heart racing, he ran the information through the police database, waiting, hoping, that she wasn't dead, that it wasn't too late to possibly find out the truth. Sighing with relief, he saw that Mary Brooks appeared to be alive and well. She also appeared to still be living in the Surrey area; in fact she still lived at the same address she’d resided in when her daughter had been murdered.
Opening the top drawer of the desk, he grabbed a yellow lined notepad, taking a ballpoint pen from the pot on the desktop, and jotting down the address and telephone number. Ripping the sheet from the pad, he tucked it into the pocket of his navy towelling dressing gown. He would go and shower, get ready for work, and call her as soon as he got into the office.
As he lathered his body under the hot spray of the showerhead, he allowed himself to wonder what this new development could mean; hardly daring to hope it might lead anywhere.
CHAPTER SIX - BIRTHSTONE
She was startlingly beautiful. He first noticed her in geography class, her large, blue doe eyes and oval face perfectly framed by a pale golden curtain of hair that fell past her shoulders. He remembered being both dazzled and intimidated by this new, strange, and wonderful creature.
He'd never found the subject particularly interesting before, but suddenly he found himself excited to go to geography, as it meant he had the chance to sit and stare at Sally. Gazing across the aisle at her with surreptitious sideways glances, he would find himself lost in the pleasantest of daydreams, while absent minded old Miss Moore droned on about igneous rock formations.
They didn't share any other classes together apart from geography, but he st
ill couldn't quite believe that somehow she had slipped past him, unnoticed for all this time, this golden haired, innocent faced angel.
He must have watched her from afar for the best part of a term before he finally got to actually talk to her. The opportunity took him completely by surprise one day, as he came ambling out of the school gates toward the bus stop, to wait for the number 37 that would take him back to the small terraced house on the council estate that was his home. He saw her there, waiting, apparently for a bus, and his breath caught in his throat.
Surely she was far too extraordinary to be just catching the ordinary old bus? He almost expected her to disappear mysteriously into the plush interior of a limousine after school, or some such scenario of comparable grandeur. But no, here she was, waiting for the bus just like he was, and his brain was desperately racking itself for a way to try and strike up some sort of conversation with her, when she did it for him.
"Hey," she grinned, flashing perfect teeth at him, her blue eyes full of amusement.
"Seen you in geography haven't I?" She raised an eyebrow as she looked at him, an amused smile playing over her lips. The question seemed loaded somehow, though he wasn't quite sure why.
"Uh…uhh…yeah," he stammered weakly, his tongue suddenly feeling too big for his mouth. All at once he seemed to be incapable of sentient speech.
;"Mmmhmm,” she smiled slyly, “seen you watching me from across the aisle all term too. Like what you see huh?"
A bright, red, flush crept over his cheeks, he felt ridiculously exposed by her directness. It was all too true though, he had been watching her, and he had more than merely liked what he had seen he had been somewhat spellbound by it.
"Uh…umm," he reached, fumbling wildly for some sort of reply, one that hopefully wouldn’t make him look like a total idiot.
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