Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

The water cascading over my head was cold as the ice in my veins. Only my tears were warm.

I did not deserve the comfort of hot water.

With what I had done.

I scrubbed at my shivering body until my skin hurt. I needed to make myself clean. I deserved pain.

With what I had done.

I was still dirty when I eventually switched off the flow from the shower. Of course I was. Filthy. I doubted I would ever be clean again. Not really.

My right shoulder hurt at the top.

I reached to touch it. My fingers came away stained with my own blood. I had rubbed myself raw.

The sight of the blood turned my stomach. I reached the lavatory just in time. I fell to my knees retching and was sick into the bowl again and again and again. It was as if my body were purging itself. I stood up and stared into the mirror above the basin.

In order to survive, I had to regain control of myself.

The eyes staring back at me were rimmed red because of my tears.

Were they frightening eyes?

They seemed to be expressionless. After all, I was now a frightening man. I had committed an act of pure evil. For the first time? I wasn’t even sure of that.

I hadn’t meant to, of course. Or had I?

I barely knew myself any more.

The girl had been reported missing by her mother at 2 a.m. when she’d failed to return home. Her body was found three and a half hours later, in the heart of Bristol’s red light district by refuse collectors on the early shift picking up the rubbish put out by the bars and clubs and restaurants.

It was jammed into a boarded-up doorway, behind two wheelie bins towards the top end of Stone Lane, a cobbled cul-de-sac leading from West Street to a row of commercial warehouses and goods depots, all of which would have been empty of people after daytime hours.

There were CCTV cameras protecting the commercial premises and more outside a pair of incongruous, run-down, Edwardian villas set back to the left; but none covering the stretch of cobbled street where the dead girl lay and where she had almost certainly met her death.

There could be no doubt that she had been murdered. Detective Inspector Vogel wondered if the perpetrator had known where the CCTV cameras were positioned and had calculatedly avoided his violent crime being recorded.

Little attempt had been made at concealment. The wheelie bins provided only a partial screen. It was reasonable to assume that the body could not have remained unnoticed, had she lain there during daylight hours the previous day.

The girl had almost certainly been strangled. That seemed clear enough to Vogel before even a preliminary medical examination had been conducted.

The Detective Inspector stood looking down at the skinny little body lying before him. She was the same age as his own daughter. He already knew that she was fourteen.

Her tongue protruded from blackened lips showing the vestiges of vermillion lipstick. Her face was swollen and her neck bruised. Her unseeing eyes were wide open, their dead emptiness emphasised by the dark eyeliner that encircled them and the black fringe of lashes heavy with mascara.

There was dried blood on her face, spattered on her clothes, exposed flesh, on the raised step beneath her and over part of the cobbled street.

She looked only tragic now. And so very young. Vogel tried to imagine how she had been the previous evening. She would have appeared considerably older than her years, he thought, which no doubt had been her intention. She’d been wearing a sparkly black top over a denim micro-skirt, black lacy tights and silver shoes with platform soles and very high heels.

Vogel imagined her teetering off on those heels, excited, perhaps just a bit nervous, embarking on what was to be her last adventure.

Her mother had thought she was visiting a school friend for a homework-sharing evening. As time passed and her daughter did not return home, the anxious mother had telephoned the school friend, who’d confessed that she hadn’t seen the girl at all.

The girl surely wasn’t wearing the sort of clothes she would have chosen for an evening at home with a chum. She’d had some other plan. An arranged meeting more than likely. Perhaps with someone she had met on the internet, some pervert who had groomed her and persuaded her to meet him.

Vogel couldn’t know that, of course. He was already aware that no computer had been found at her home. Neither her mother nor her husband, the girl’s stepfather were computer people, apparently. That meant they might not be fully aware of the dangers vulnerable, young people faced from the internet, and the ease with which they could be tempted into high-risk and often out-of-character behaviour. The girl had a laptop, the mother had said, but she’d taken it with her, in the little, pink ruck sack that served as her schoolbag.

Now the rucksack lay on the ground a few feet away from her body. It had her name stencilled on it, at the centre of an elaborate doodle of vibrant, multicoloured butterflies. Mel Cooke. Short for Melanie. That was how the preliminary identification had been made so quickly.

Vogel glanced at his watch. It was 7.05 a.m. on an unseasonably cool, mid-May day. The second Friday of the month. He shivered in the chilly, early-morning air; though the heartbreaking sight of the dead body was probably the cause of that every bit as much as the cold.

His nose was beginning to run and he feared he might be about to have a sneezing fit; something to be avoided at a crime scene. After taking a couple of steps away from the body, he pulled down the zipper of his Tyvek suit (worn to protect the integrity of the scene) and reached into the pocket of his inadequate, corduroy jacket in search of a handkerchief. His fingers brushed against the envelope he had been carrying around with him for over a week. Even now, being reminded of its presence unsettled him. He couldn’t just ignore it, but neither could he think about it at such a moment.

He turned his attention back to the dead girl. Even in the condition she was in he could see that she must have been exceptionally pretty. Her hair was only gently wavy but very black and her skin just dark enough to indicate that she was probably of mixed race.

He wondered if she would have been allowed to go out on a school night if it had not been for her homework sharing story. A lot of parents didn’t insist on that sort of thing any more, of course. But as she had bothered to lie, the indication was that she might otherwise have been kept at home. Not for the first time Vogel reflected on the fine thread from which all human life was suspended.

He stepped carefully towards the pink rucksack. He thought the butterfly drawing was rather well done. Assuming that Mel Cooke herself was responsible for it, maybe she would have grown to be an artist of some kind, like Bristol’s own Banksy, or another Tracey Emin. Banksy’s influence was ever present in Bristol, where those seeking to emulate him plastered the city with graffiti, including on the walls of Stone Lane.

When confronted by murder victims, Vogel could rarely stop himself wondering about their lost lives. What the future may have held for them. What they may have become.