by JD Nixon
He opened one bag and carefully spilled the contents onto the tarp. Then he did the same with the other bag, until we were left facing a small mountain of ashes. The smell wafting upwards was beyond horrible and I suddenly understood why George Harrison felt the need to complain about the noxious odour.
The Sarge took down a small gardening rake from a nail in the wall where his gardening implements were neatly stored. He knelt down on the tarp and commenced meticulously raking through the ashes, moving any large pieces of rubbish caught by the rake over to one side. A five-centimetre piece of film was swept out and I picked it up carefully by the sides and blew on it gently to dislodge loose ash. I held it up towards the sky. Unfortunately it was not a neat cell, but half of one and half of the next, both with jagged burnt edges. It was difficult to tell what the subject of the film was, although I thought I could see legs in the top cell and arms in the bottom one.
The only other decent-sized fragment was an almost perfect cell. Holding it up to the light showed that the entire frame consisted of a close-up of a woman’s face.
“That’s disappointing, considering the effort it took to get them,” grumbled the Sarge.
“Yeah, I’d hoped we’d find more than this.” I kicked around at the ashes. “We need some kind of a projector so we can see them properly.”
“I have a light table.”
“A what?”
“A light table. It’s used for examining negatives. I dabble in photography now and then.”
“Do you? I didn’t know that.”
“I haven’t had much time for hobbies since I arrived in this place. I seem to spend all my spare time keeping a certain senior constable out of trouble.”
I pulled another gargoyle face at him and knelt down to pick over the ashes once more, fruitlessly hoping to discover an entire reel of unburnt film that had passed unnoticed so far. He watched with bemusement for a moment before giving up on me and returning to the house. I spent another futile minute digging through the ashes before also conceding defeat, following him back inside.
Hands washed clean of the soot, I joined him in the lounge room where he was setting up his light table. I wandered off the kitchen while he did and made us both a cup of tea, taking the time to ring Dad while the kettle boiled. Satisfied that all was well with him, I also tried to ring Jake, but caught his voicemail instead, so left him a message. Tea made, I returned to the lounge room to find the table all set up and the Sarge frowning over the remnant of film with the split frame.
“This isn’t nice,” he warned quietly.
I sat on the arm of his chair and peered over his shoulder at the image. His light table not only illuminated film, but magnified it, so the image was now large enough to see the detail. Only the bottom of the top cell had survived the flames and the image was of legs as I had initially seen. It was a shot taken from the rear of the action and I counted quickly – seven pairs of bare men’s legs surrounded a pair of bare, pale white, thin, blood-streaked female legs, her toes dangling in vain towards the floor. Her legs were spread wide, held apart by ungentle hands and a pair of men’s legs was up close and personal at the front and at the back of her. The anonymous woman was either the recipient of an affectionate twin hug or was being used by two men at the same time, and I wasn’t about to bet what little money I still had on the hug theory.
“That’s nasty,” I commented, before casting my eye over the bottom cell. Only the top half of it had survived. It was the next frame in the scene, except in this shot we could see arms and heads. The woman’s arms were tied together, suspended above her, tied to something that wasn’t in shot. Because it was filmed from the rear, her face was not visible, but the angle of her head and the tenseness in her neck left me in no doubt that she was suffering badly. The man at her rear had a shaved head and a huge tattoo of a devil across his back, which only the uppermost portion could be seen. He had his hands tightly around the woman’s neck. The man at the front of her had his head down, concentrating on what he was doing, his face not seen. The other men standing around were either laughing or had that goofy expression that men have when they’re masturbating. And yes, I knew that from personal experience, because there were certain male members of the public who believed that was an appropriate way to behave in front of a female police officer. And most of them were Bycrafts.
I exhaled noisily, disturbed. “Okay, so we have some kind of rough gangbang happening on this film. What about the other piece?”
Cautiously, he removed that fragment of film and replaced it with the close-up. I recoiled when the face came up in the light, jolting my hand and spilling tea on my legs.
“That’s the other girl! That’s Lucy!” I exclaimed, and then realised what I’d done. I jumped up from the arm of his chair and held my cargo pants out from my legs. “Shit, that’s hot! Ow! Ow! Ow!” I ran to the guestroom and frantically kicked off my boots and pulled off my pants. It wasn’t too bad – just some pinkness on the affected skin. I changed into some clean cargos and hung the others up to dry out, before padding back out to the lounge room in my socks and perching on the arm of his chair, simultaneously doing up my boots and looking at the film.
“You right?” he asked.
“Yep,” I assured, leaning over his shoulder to have a closer look.
It was definitely Lucy. Her long dark hair was damp with sweat, the heavy makeup she wore to cover her bad skin streaked with running mascara. Her face filled the entire shot, twisted in agony, tears pouring down her cheeks, eyes huge, black and filled with anguish, her mouth wrenched open in a silent scream or plea. Part of her neck was visible and a man’s hands encircled her throat, a distinctive chunky gold snake ring with two red gemstone eyes adorning the pinky finger of his left hand. Bruises and red marks on her neck suggested she’d been treated roughly over a long period of time.
“God only knows what they’re doing to her,” said the Sarge grimly.
“It’s very upsetting,” I agreed sadly. “Go back to the first bit of film.” He did. “That guy at the back of her with the devil tattoo. See how he has his hands around her throat? Do you see that gold ring on his pinky finger? I reckon it’s the same as the one as in the face shot.”
“You’re right. Do you think that’s Lucy in the group shot too?”
“Could be. She has long dark hair too.” We looked at each other. “We really need forensics to look at this, Sarge. They can isolate the faces of all the visible men in the group shot and do some work on the tattoo of the man strangling her. They might be able to conclusively match Lucy’s face to the anonymous woman’s body.”
He was somewhat reluctant. “We’ll have to tell the Super then. She won’t be happy with us.”
“What do you think happened to her? Lucy, I mean, not the Super.”
“I don’t know. If she was lucky, they used her and then discarded her. If she wasn’t, then maybe they used her and rid themselves of her permanently.”
“No happy ending for poor Lucy then?”
“There rarely is for girls like Lucy.”
“I guess not.”
We flipped a coin to see who would ring the Super. He lost and unwillingly pulled out his phone. Unfortunately for him, the Super was available to take his call. He launched into an explanation of what we’d been up to, but didn’t get very far before he was interrupted. I could hear her loud, piercing voice from the other side of the room.
His cheeks tinged red and he finished the call and turned to me. “I’ll paraphrase what she said, will I?”
“Probably best.”
“We clueless animal-raping hayseeds should remove our feet from each other’s posteriors and get to Big Town immediately so she can tell us in person what she really thinks about us and our policing skills.”
“Oh dear. She’s not happy with us?”
“She’s not happy with us,” he affirmed.
“I’m now wishing I’d never got out of bed this morning.”
“I’
m now wishing you’d never got out of bed last night with that crazy plan in your head.”
“Poor Sarge. Stuck with a partner like me,” I commiserated. “What on earth did you ever do to deserve that?”
He smiled and patted me on the head. “Died and went to heaven?”
“Oh, you’re smooth, aren’t you, Maguire?” I giggled. “Melissa is a lucky woman.”
“Who?”
My turn to smile. “Melissa. Your fiancee.”
He pretended to think. “I vaguely remember her. A very pretty young woman with long dark hair and big brown eyes? I faintly recall her promising to marry me, but it all seems so long ago now. Perhaps I only dreamed it?”
We gathered our things and headed out the door. “Has she rung you lately?”
“Nope. Not a word. Nothing but an endless stretch of silence from the other side of the world.”
He stowed the light table on the back seat of the patrol car and I put the film remnants, which I’d placed in a ziplock bag, in the glove box. We drove off.
“Why don’t you ring her instead of waiting for her to ring you all the time?”
“I tried many times, but it only made her angry. I always rang at the wrong time – she was asleep, she was having dinner, she was trying to catch a train, she was having sex with another man.”
“Sarge!” I was shocked. “Really?”
“No, Tessie,” he said with a pitying look. “I was just being tongue-in-cheek. I have no idea what she’s doing. How could I?”
“Would you mind? You know . . . if she wasn’t being faithful?”
His face turned stony. “Of course I would. God knows I’m living like a monk waiting for her to come home. I expect Melissa to be faithful because she’s made that promise to me. Otherwise what the hell kind of a marriage will we have? I’d never be able to trust her.”
“That’s a good point, Sarge. I would be devastated to find out that my fiance had been cheating on me.”
“Devastated at the time, sure, but ultimately you’d be glad. Better to find out something like that before you marry.”
“I guess. Anyway, this is a depressing subject. Tell me how you met instead.” We had ninety minutes of driving to kill, after all. When he’d first arrived in town, he’d been very reluctant to share any personal information about himself. He was slightly more willing these days, though there were still many things about him I didn’t know.
“We met on a job, believe it or not,” he smiled at the memory. “She and her flatmates were burgled and my partner and I pulled the job. We couldn’t believe our luck! Four models living together, all of them upset at being robbed and more than glad to have some strong, manly police officers turning up to make them feel safe and solve the crime.”
I snorted with disrespectful laughter. “And did you solve the crime?”
“Of course we didn’t! A common break and enter? How many of those ever get solved? And the women had left a ground floor window wide open – Melissa did actually. The thieves didn’t even have to try on that job. Those lovely ladies weren’t to know that at the time though. They thought we were superheroes.”
“So it was love at first sight? Very romantic.”
“No, not even close. I barely noticed her, to be honest. I’m being kind when I say that they were all models. The other three were, but Melissa is a little too short and a little too rounded to be a successful model. She was more of a wannabe model. She scored a few catalogue jobs for some of the mass market department stores, but that’s about it.”
“So how did you hook up if you didn’t notice her?”
“She rang me later in the day to tell me that she’d remembered something important about the burglary, but she refused to tell me over the phone. So I went back to their place late that afternoon. Nobody was home except for her and I guess she kind of railroaded me into asking her out.”
“Well, she was obviously bowled over by you to go to all those lengths to see you again,” I laughed. “What happened next?”
He smiled modestly. “At the end of that date, she kind of pressured me into asking her out again. And then she sort of forced me to sleep with her, and next thing I knew, we were a couple, she’d moved into my apartment and we were engaged.”
“Oh, she forced you to sleep with her, did she?” I laughed again.
“I probably wanted to,” he conceded.
“What does she do for a living?”
His response was self-conscious. “Um, nothing really. She shops and has lunch with her friends. She buys clothes. And a lot of shoes.”
“What did she study at university?”
“She hasn’t been to uni. School bored her.”
“Oh. So what does she live on?”
“Her parents are reasonably well-off. And she’s the youngest child out of four and the only daughter, so she’s indulged. She receives a small allowance from them. Otherwise, I support her.”
“Oh,” I said again. That explained a lot, but I wondered what it would be like to not have to work. Pretty boring, I decided. “What does she want to do with her life?”
He shrugged. “Be a socialite. Facebook. Lunch. Shop. I don’t know.”
I remained silent. I had nothing to say. These people came from a world I had only ever read about or seen on TV. What he’d said only confirmed the huge gaping chasm between him and me.
“You’re judging her,” he accused.
I looked at him in surprise. “No, I’m not. Why would I? It’s none of my business what someone else does with their life.”
“I almost believe you mean that.”
“I do mean that,” I insisted, then slumped back in my seat, staring out the window at the downpour, my mind roaming back to my own problems. I wondered how long it would take for me to pay back the glass man, even in installments. Why in God’s name had I spent so much on Jake’s birthday? Not that he wasn’t worth it, because he was worth every cent I had. But it was such bad timing to spend up big on him right before I went on an insane rampage against his family.
The Sarge was talking to me, but I didn’t hear him, lost in my own world.
“Tessie?” he asked patiently. “Tess?”
“What? Sorry, Sarge, I was a million miles away.”
“Thinking about what?”
“What else? Money, money, money,” I sighed.
“Any thoughts on earning some extra money?”
“There’s one thing that I think I’m skilled at that I could teach,” I said hesitantly. I’d never mentioned this idea to anybody before, even though I’d thought about it a lot.
“Hmm?”
“Self-defence for young women.” My smile was wry. “I’ve had a lot of personal experience, but also a lot of valuable training. Since I was four-years-old.”
His eyes flicked to me, then back to the treacherous wet road. “That’s a great idea. You’d be perfect for that. Bring that up with the Super because it might be something the Police Department would like to sponsor. The more young women who can look after themselves, the less Red Bycraft assaults we have to solve, right?”
“Right. Thanks, Sarge. I was afraid you’d laugh at me.”
“I know I tease you sometimes, but I hope you can rely on me to support you when it’s really important.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer him, but didn’t need to because at that moment we arrived at the Big Town police station.
Chapter 18
Everyone we met on the way to see the Super warned us that she was in a particularly foul mood. As we approached her office, Bum stumbled out, a hurricane of paperwork and loud cursing flying after him. A glass paperweight missed his head by millimetres, fluttering his hair and wedging itself into the plasterboard wall behind him.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere near her,” he recommended in a fearful whisper, terror filling his eyes. “She’s decided to give up smoking again.”
“Shit!” the Sarge and I said in unison, staring at each other with dread. What a ti
me to be called to her office! When she screamed out his name, Bum literally turned tail and ran down the hallway.
“Let’s go, Sarge,” I urged, grabbing his arm and dragging him back towards the lift. We really didn’t want to deal with her today.
“Teresa Fuller!” came a bellow from inside her office. She must have heard my voice. We froze in place.
“Let’s go! Now!” I insisted in a whisper, pushing him towards the lift.
“You get in here! And I fucking mean now!”
Swallowing in trepidation, I entered the room ahead of the Sarge, seemingly confident and unconcerned.
“Ma’am, you’re looking absolutely radiant today. I love the new haircut,” I said bravely, noting that her normal short spiky thatch of bleach blonde hair was softer and more feminine, styled nicely around her face. The Sarge stood close behind me, as if afraid I would be sucked into an evil, foul-mouthed vortex.
She startled us by performing a complete one-eighty when I said that, smiling kindly. “I have had a haircut, thanks for noticing, Tessie darling,” she cooed, patting her hair. My heart iced over with fear. It was even worse than anybody had warned us. “It was more than my husband did.” Poor Ronnie, I thought. He would have been suffering her rage for days after that unwise neglect. “It sounds as if you and Sergeant Maguire have been busy in that sweet little town that you call home. Tell me all about it.”
And then she did something that made goosebumps push out of the goosebumps already dotting my skin. I had double-goosebumps and I wasn’t sure if that was even physically possible.
She giggled.
I felt faint with fear. To look at her was to witness Satan himself donning a pretty frock, a Goldilocks wig, and a smear of lipstick to appear more likeable.
“We’ve been . . .” I had to stop to swallow in nervousness, the saliva drying up in my mouth. The Sarge patted my arm encouragingly.
“Yes, Tessie?” she prompted with terrifyingly benevolent concern.
I took a deep breath. Her frosty blue eyes were giving me freezer-burn with their intensity. “We’ve been investigating –”
