Exhibit

by Noir, Stella

  “What have you got?”

  “Well, not very much I’m afraid”, Rebecca confessed. “He’s definitely our man. He described exactly what he did to those girls, and I corroborated it with the autopsy report. He’s one sick fucker. I nearly punched him when he told me as well.”

  “Aye, we know he’s guilty now. I didn’t fucking see it before, but it’s clear.”

  “I know why too. Carter told me.”

  “Aye. Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Marsh went to the kitchen, took two glasses from the draining board, a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard, and returned to the table. He poured a generous amount into each glass, and then drained almost half of his in one massive series of gulps.

  “When did you know?” Rebecca asked him.

  “When I saw him. I knew who he was when I saw him. Philip Prensall was Peter Holden back then. All that fucking time ago.”

  Marsh took another series of gulps, and finished his drink. Rebecca had never seen anything like it. She’d barely sipped at the fire-water in her glass, and Marsh had already downed nearly half a pint of it. He filled up his glass.

  “Is it true?”

  “Of course it’s fucking true. Peter and I used to work together in Chicago before I came over here. He’s fucking changed a bit now, I wasn’t sure at first if it was him or not. I fucked his wife and I put a little baby boy inside her, and they’d both still be alive today if she hadn’t fucked topped herself.”

  “Why did she kill herself?”

  “Because she was fucking stupid. I don’t fucking know. Why does anyone fucking kill themselves? She had problems. She was a beautiful girl but she had problems. She hated Peter and she wanted me. She kept talking about running the fuck away to Scotland and living in a castle like it was a fucking fairytale. She wanted me to leave my wife for her”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No, of course I fucking didn’t. Alice Holden was a bit on the side. We fucked each other because we were bored. At least that’s what I always thought it was. That’s not what she put in the suicide note she left with her body for Peter to find. That fucking cunt blamed me for her death. That’s why he’s doing this to me. He’s trying to make me feel guilty.”

  “Do you?”

  “What kind of a fucking question is that?”

  “It’s a question.”

  “Where is she?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Fucking cunt.”

  “He did say something else though.”

  “What?”

  “He said she’s pregnant.”

  “Aye, he would.”

  Rebecca sipped at her drink, and it burned as it went down her throat.

  “Is she?”

  “It doesn’t matter if she is or not.”

  “Are you alright, Detective?”

  “There’s going to be a media shitstorm about this tomorrow. How much do they know?”

  “They know that you were romantically linked to each of the girls”, Rebecca put inverted commas around the romantically linked part of the sentence. “And they know there is another girl missing. Prensall has told the press that he has given you forty eight hours to save the life of the missing girl, and has given you a series of clues throughout the investigation, that a Junior Detective would have no problems in solving. He says he expects that a man with your intellect will be able to find the girl before the story breaks.”

  “What is the station saying?”

  “They will release a statement saying that you have been taken off the case for personal reasons. Investigations are being continued by the department’s best officers.”

  “Tweedledum and Tweedledee? For fuck sake.”

  “They are going to release a personal statement from you, apologizing for your misjudgments and lack of perspective. That you have been going through a messy separation and haven’t been coping well. The usual things. Would you like me to read it to you?”

  “No. Is that it?”

  “Almost.”

  Rebecca sipped her drink again. Marsh watched her eagerly.

  “Prensall told me to tell you something. He said it was vitally important.”

  “Go on.”

  “He said, when you look into Elisa’s dead gray eyes, you’ll understand. You’ll understand what loss is. You’ve done so much wrong, and hurt so many people, not even God will forgive you. See you in hell, Detective.”

  “Right. Well that’s fucking helpful isn’t it?”

  “Do you love her?”

  “What are you asking me, Tan?”

  “I’m asking if you care what happens to her.”

  “I can’t fucking love anything, look at me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Aye, believe what you fucking want.”

  “Why didn’t he take your wife or your daughter?”

  “Is that all, Sergeant Tan?”

  “Why didn’t he take your wife and your daughter?”

  “Is that fucking all?”

  “She’s not yours, is she?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “You don’t care about her because she’s not yours. It wouldn’t have mattered. Either of them.”

  “Smart fucking girl. Drink up, you’ll make a Detective yet.”

  “Why are you still with your wife?”

  “Because guilt is a cunt and for some reason she loves me. No-one has ever done that before, Tan. No-one has loved me like she does, the stupid fucking woman. Now stop fucking asking me questions.”

  Marsh topped his glass up again. There was a sheen across his eyes that could have been from the alcohol or from tears forming. It could have just been the way the light reflected.

  “Is she dead already?”

  “I don’t know. Aye, probably. Let’s find her, and find the fuck out.”

  Chapter 8

  The bottle was empty. The information had been passed over, and it was time for Rebecca Tan to leave. Marsh swayed a little as he walked her to the door, using the wall, the table, or anything else that came easily to hand to keep him propped up.

  “You don’t have to go you know”, Marsh whispered to her at the door.

  “I have to go”, Rebecca said, unconvincingly.

  Marsh leaned into her. He was already standing quite close, but now he had his head rested on her shoulder, his mouth close to her ear. He could feel her heart beating rapidly through the thin cotton of her top, which he lifted up now with his hand.

  Rebecca opened the door, but it was an action as if of performance, and not one that she looked like she ever intended to complete. Marsh pushed the door shut again, just as soon as she had taken her hand from it. He put his hand back under her top, and smoothed the skin towards her breasts. Tan tried to push him away, but despite being drunk, Marsh was firm.

  “Why are you playing games with me, huh?” Marsh whispered into her ear. “You like playing games don’t you, Tan? Oh I remember what you like and what you don’t like.”

  He had his hand on her breast now, squeezing her skin firmly and pulling on her nipple. It was painful, but Rebecca responded to pain like a dog to a bouncing ball. She chased after it with every single ounce of energy she had. She tried to push herself away from Marsh, but her movement lacked desire. Marsh flattened her against the wall, holding her hands tightly against her side. Rebecca tried to struggle free but the more she fought, the tighter Marsh’s embrace became. Pressed up against her, she could feel his cock pushing into her thigh.

  They were face to face, so close their noses were touching. She could feel his breath against her lips, and taste the bitterness that contaminated his smell like rust on oxidizing metal. He kissed her and she let him. He smiled, a bitter warped smile that a mad man might display on his day of condemnation, and then spun her around violently. Marsh wasn’t a big man, but he was strong. His body was covered in wiry muscle like wet twisted cloth over metal posts, and whe
n he wanted something, it was difficult for people to resist. Rebecca knew this performance well. Despite his force however, she could have left if she wanted to. Rebecca was no shrinking violet herself and she’d dealt with her fair share of hungry men both in work and out of it. Rebecca was twisted around and pushed against the wall because she let Marsh do it. He had the power to drink a bottle of whiskey and twist her, it was true, but it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t wanted it to.

  Marsh worked at her hurriedly, urgent now to force himself inside her. He was like a bloodhound who’d just got a whiff of a scent that had driven him mad his whole hunting career.

  Marsh tore at her top, snapping a button off in the process. He ripped off her bra and pulled again at her tits, working the nipples erect between his thumbs and forefingers, slapping them with an open palm if they didn’t respond. He paused momentarily to run his fingers across the bobbled scars on her back, remnants of a night of pleasure and pain in a bdsm dungeon with a whip wielding master, but described to Marsh, for fear of provoking jealousy, as wounds suffered during a car crash, none of which she could remember.

  Marsh didn’t give a fuck that she’d lied to him. He’d lied to enough people throughout his life, and it didn’t matter anyway if the end result was the same. He fucked her that night. He added a few more to her criss-cross display with a leather belt, and the truth didn’t change a goddamn thing. Marsh pulled angrily at her jeans, remembering that night of passion. There were two things in the world he couldn’t control about himself. If he wanted a drink, or he wanted to fuck, he couldn’t ever stop himself. It was hard for others too.

  Her jeans came down in one mighty downward jerk of his hands, that carried her panties with it too. Rebecca spread her hands against the wall and her legs wide, as though she was preparing herself to be frisked. Next came his own jeans. He wrestled them down with one hand, never taking the other one from the back of Rebecca’s neck, where it was leaving red marks she’d have to cover up in the morning. Marsh held her like a bagged rabbit he was getting ready to skin. His cock hung behind her like a knife, sharpened and prone.

  His hand went to her pussy, and a finger disappeared up inside her, before she had a chance to brace herself. This was foreplay from a rutting brain-dead caveman, but it was what turned Rebecca on. Immediately her pussy responded, sending flashes of panic to her brain, that were then converted into silky threads of pleasure as they took the journey back down to her cunt. Marsh leaned into her as he fingered her, ramming his closed fist up against her sensitive lips.

  “What the fuck have you been fucking?”

  “Men”, Rebecca said. “Men bigger and dirtier than you are.”

  Marsh tightened the grip he had around her neck.

  “Oh, is that right?” He banged her harder and harder with his finger, until Rebecca could feel nothing but softness, that in her minds eye looked like vanilla ice cream.

  “You stink of cock you fucking wedge”, Marsh said. He had two fingers inside her now, working her pussy open.

  “You going to tickle me all night, or are you going to fuck me?” Rebecca countered, pushing back against his fingers, and encouraging him to fill her more.

  Marsh took his hand out of her cunt and slapped her across the ass. He slapped her again and again with his sticky wet fingers until her cheeks rose in mottled red clouds like marbling on bad meat. When he was satisfied, and Rebecca was whimpering, calling for him to stop, he guided her from the inner porch to the table they had been sat at only moments before, and bent her over the dirty wood.

  He guided his swollen cock to her pussy hole, and pushed it inside her with all the mercy of a butcher skewering a lump of chicken, for a charcoal grilled kebab. He rammed himself inside her just to feel himself doing so, enjoying immensely the tearing feeling at the ridge of his cock. He fucked her until his balls slapped joyfully against her pussy lips, and until Rebecca was nothing but a mess of tears and resolution, crumpled across the table in front of him. When she was close to coming, and he could tell when Rebecca was about to come, because she made a noise like a kids cuddly toy with a bust squeaker that infuriated him because of it’s cloying patheticness, just to deny her the pleasure, he pulled himself out of her, leaving her for an unsure moment, while he went to the kitchen and took a bottle of mayonnaise from the fridge door.

  He moved in behind Rebecca again, squeezed a decent helping of mayonnaise over her asshole, and repositioned his cock. He pulled Rebecca a little closer to him until he found the right angle, and then he guided his cock to her creamy hole, and pushed hard until he disappeared inside her.

  Rebecca felt debased. It wasn’t often that she felt this way, but it wasn’t often that she needed to either. Devizes Marsh was a man she could count on to make her feel debased when she needed to. He could make a pot of gold feel like a piece of shit just by looking at it the way only he knew how. It was what made him a good Detective, and what made him an even better lay. He was lousy at being a partner, awful at being a husband, but great at pushing the buttons that just sometimes, once in a while, needed to be pushed.

  Rebecca came hard with his cock deep in her ass. She didn’t often come without vaginal or clitoral stimulation too, but when she did, the orgasms were out of this world. She screamed and Marsh hit her across the back with his leather belt until she’d stopped. He left gashes, and red patches of soreness that would take weeks to heal. It would be the same amount of time before Tan felt normal again.

  Fucking Marsh in this way was like a traumatic experience - the body needed time to recover, heal, scar over. Someone told her once, that after an emotional, traumatic experience, the brain and the heart scar in the same way that skin would if the trauma was physical. She thought that Marsh’s brain must have looked like a cauliflower covered by a fishing net, his heart a lump of toughened stone.

  He pressed her into the table, squashing her tits and her right cheek against the wood.

  “Fucking dirty”, Marsh shouted.

  He buried himself as deep as he could inside her, and then let himself go. Rebecca felt an overwhelming sense of relief. She had needed it, she had enjoyed it, but she was glad that it was over. Marsh folded himself over her, exhausted with his exertions, until reality brushed alongside him, like a storm-cloud about to clear the world with rain. He let his already softened cock flop out, and with it came a thick slurry of his come.

  Marsh stumbled backwards, and the couch caught his fall. Rebecca waited a moment more before collecting herself. She dressed with her back to him, and without a word, went towards the door.

  Just before she opened it, she hesitated, contemplating turning around. Instead, she opened the door and left without looking back. Sat on the couch, in the creeping darkness of the room, Marsh looked like a gargoyle fallen from the roof of a condemned church. Little by little, a slow trickle of piss left his cock, until the seat underneath him was sodden, and the stinky yellow liquid was swimming out across the living room floor like a sea of gold.

  Chapter 9

  On a cold, frost edged morning, seven hours after the deadline had passed and Philip Prensall had revealed, as promised, the details of the location of his last victim, a nineteen year old girl was pulled out of a storm drain, cold, gray and dead. Rebecca Tan passed Detective Marsh the news he already knew. It was Elisa Baker. She had, up until only two hours before the police arrived to her location, been alive. Water from the rain that had spread across the county that weekend, had slowly killed her. She had been trapped, held upside down for almost three days according to the coroners report, with nothing else to do but await her fate. She had been, according to the report that Marsh read of the murder, a promising, bright young girl, a talented musician, and a great and sad loss to the world.

  Over the coming weeks, the full story was drip fed to the papers in sensationalist style. Marsh was dragged over the coals for his involvement in the seedy affair, and blamed by a number of people for her eventual death, not least by some of his
own colleagues. He was suspended indefinitely until a proper investigation was conducted over his involvement, and transferred first to Chicago, later to a small police force in Kentucky and eventually back home to his native Scotland when the results were inconclusive. He didn’t give a fuck.

  He had tried, but failed to find Elisa. He chased up every thread he had but each one lead to already exhausted dead ends. He was no nearer to finding her than he had been the killer at the start of the investigation, and for that he was also blamed, as though it was information he was choosing not to share rather than something he couldn’t for the life of him work out.

  When Tan left that night, he didn’t sleep. He sat up drinking and thinking and trying to work out where the fuck Prensall would have put her. He didn’t even know if she was still alive at that point. He had nothing to go on, except the scraps of a former life of his he had spent years trying to forget about.

  He knew little about Elisa, nothing much more than how he felt about her and how he tried to deny it to himself. He worked with Tan asking questions. There was little he could do and he knew it. He was broken and defeated by Prensall. The girl was never meant to be found. Prensall didn’t give a fuck about her or him. He just wanted to see him burn. He asked questions and got answers back that meant nothing. It was futile. The police knew nothing either. They bumped their heads and scratched their asses and ran around like headless fucking chicken with an impossible task. There weren’t any heroes to be made. There never are.

  She was dead already, and he knew it. Even though the water didn’t seep into her lungs for forty eight hours, there was no way she could have been saved.