M. Arlidge - Little Boy Blue

The small space was a hive of activity. Meredith Walker, Southampton Central’s Chief Forensics Officer, was already on her hands and knees, diligently searching the floor space. The club’s owners clearly didn’t spend much on cleaning and it was going to be a mammoth job for Meredith and her team to bag all the detritus. The footfall in this room was evidently large – Helen feared it might be easier to work out which of the club’s members hadn’t been in this room than pin down those who had – further complicating the task that lay in front of them.

Helen caught Charlie looking at her and, putting these defeatist thoughts aside, moved cautiously forward. The victim lay in the middle of the room, bound to a metal chair with duct tape and wet sheets. Helen presumed he was a man, given the height, but it was hard to be sure. The victim’s entire head was encased in silver tape, not a strand of hair or patch of skin visible anywhere. The wet sheets clung to him, bolstering Helen’s sense of the paralysing immobility the victim must have felt. It was a horrific way to die.

There had been S &M deaths before of course – auto-eroticism and sex games gone wrong – but this one felt different. A pair of sturdy panic shears lay on the floor next to the body, circled by Meredith’s team and tagged for inspection. Whoever did this then had the means to release their victim, but had chosen not to. Instead, they had left the room, closing the door behind them and walking away without once attracting anyone’s attention. This was no accident then. This was a deliberate, calculated attempt to kill.

The police photographer gave Helen the nod and she now moved forward. Slipping her gloved hand beneath the victim, she raised him from the ground. The chair wobbled a little, then righted itself, settling into position in front of her. The victim’s head lolled downwards, eventually coming to rest on his chest.

‘Could you give us a couple of minutes, guys?’ Helen said quietly, but firmly.

Meredith and her team withdrew, leaving Charlie and Helen alone with the deceased. It was time now to reveal the victim and begin the process of trying to identify him – a task that didn’t require an audience.

Gripping a pair of sterile scissors, Helen snipped through the wet sheets that bound the legs and torso. She was unlikely to be able to ID him from the sight of his feet, but she wanted to release his arms and legs from their constraints. This would allow her a better line of attack on the duct tape that bound him from the chest up. She knew she could ill afford to inflict any post-mortem injuries on him by hacking blindly at the tape, so though every instinct urged her to remove the tape from his eyes, nose and mouth, she resisted for now.

Patiently, Helen cut through the stiff sheets, releasing his body from its purgatory. The sheets fell away, revealing the ribbon that secured his ankles to the chair legs. Helen untied this, bagging it along with the sheets, but the body didn’t respond at all. Rigor mortis was setting in – their victim looked like a man frozen in time.

Pressing on with her unpleasant task, Helen stripped off the upper sheets, passing them to a rather pale-looking Charlie. Now she slipped one scissor blade underneath the tape on his chest, sliding it over the soft leather of his suit without marking the surface. She slowed her progress as she cut upwards towards his neck – every mark, every bruise on his body, might provide them with vital clues and Helen was determined not to stymie their investigation through human error.

The tape covering his throat came away easily – only his head remained covered now. Downing the scissors, Helen decided to finish the last, most delicate stage by hand. Teasing her fingers along the top of his head, she soon found what she was looking for. The end of the tape had been stuck down firmly, but with a bit of coaxing, it came free.

This was the moment of truth then. Grasping the loose end, Helen began to unwind the tape. Slowly at first, then faster and with more confidence, until finally it fell away altogether.

The sight that greeted her took her breath away. Not because she was disgusted by the victim’s waxy, lifeless face, but because she recognized him. This poor wretch was her friend. Her dominator.

It was Jake.

Helen stumbled up the stairs, her hand clamped over her mouth. She could feel the vomit rising in her throat and she needed to be away from this underground hell. The green exit light could be glimpsed up ahead and she took the final steps at speed, barrelling through the exit and out into the night.

Ignoring the startled looks of the uniformed officers on guard, Helen hurried over to the chain link fence that bordered the club and clung on to it. Her breath was short, her heart was racing and the waves of nausea just kept coming. She gulped in huge lungfuls of air, desperate to avoid drawing attention to herself, but to no avail. She vomited now, hard and loud, her stomach cramping over and over again until there was nothing left inside.

Nobody made a move to help her, so Helen remained staring at the ground, empty and drained. It couldn’t be Jake. A small part of her was tempted to return to the crime scene, to prove to herself that she’d made a stupid mistake. But in her heart she knew it was him. His face was distinctive and familiar and, besides, the tattoo on his neck sealed it. The man whose company she’d paid for on numerous occasions over the years, who’d beaten her dark introspection from her many times during their S &M sessions, was dead. Jake was the only person who knew the real Helen, and his sudden death left her feeling disoriented and confused.

The last time she’d seen him he was happy and settled. He was dating a new boyfriend, had relinquished his crush on Helen and seemed to be making a decent fist of his life. What had gone so terribly wrong that he had ended up here, in an after-hours club, falling into the clutches of a brutal and pitiless killer? Helen would have given anything to be able to turn back time, to step into that small room as Jake was being attacked and drag his assailant away.

‘Are you ok?’

Helen looked up to find Charlie standing nearby, framed by the darkness. No one else would have spoken to her so informally or with such affection and it knocked the stuffing out of her now. Normally she would have blustered a response and sent them away, but she and Charlie had been through too much together for her to be dismissed like that. A large part of Helen wanted to blurt out that she knew the victim, that he was a friend. But as she opened her mouth to speak, her tongue refused to obey.

‘What is it, Helen? What’s wrong?’ Charlie persisted.

Still Helen said nothing. To admit that she knew the victim would mean confessing how they met. Instantly she recoiled from this – she didn’t want to offer Jake up to them like this – and, besides, how could she look any of her colleagues in the eye once the details of her private life were laid bare? She’d be a laughing stock, the butt of endless ribald jokes, but more than that they would know . Her sessions with Jake had always been private, discreet and special – a space where she could reveal her historic wounds and confront her feelings of guilt. If she opened herself up like that she’d be exposed, humiliated and in all likelihood taken off the case – and that was something that Helen was not prepared to countenance.

‘I’m fine. It was just a shock,’ Helen replied, straightening up.

‘Not a pretty sight, was he? If you want me to handle this -’

‘It’s ok. I’m good now,’ Helen said quickly. ‘Let’s get it over with, shall we?’