Michelle Kelly - Eyes Wide Open

Kitty. It sounded like exactly the sort of moniker you would expect a prostitute to adopt, but had in fact been the girl’s real name. ‘Just Kitty,’ she had told Rachael defensively, ‘not Katherine or Katrina or Katy. It’s Kitty.’ She had seemed determined to hang onto her real name, and why not? She had lost everything else – not that her fourteen years of life had yielded her much to begin with. Of course, she had put her age down as sixteen on the service user forms, but a little digging from Rachael had unearthed both her name and her background. For the past week Rachael had battled with herself. By law, she had to report any danger to a minor to Children’s Social Services. She had stalled, knowing that to do so would not only break Kitty’s tentative trust in her but also possibly push the girl further along the path she had ‘chosen’. Social Services were often viewed as the Bogeyman to girls like Kitty, and any whiff of their involvement would have caused the girl to bolt.

Now, Rachael wondered if the girl would have still been alive if she had filed the report. The guilt, freshly born, hung over her head, ready to descend with the full force of its crushing weight.

She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, listening to Deirdra’s story as though in a trance, the information coming to her slowly, as if through a fog.

‘… found her under a bin, as if she was rubbish. She was just a kid!’ Deirdra wailed. The full impact hit Rachael then, like a physical blow, and she slid off the bed, her legs boneless. She reached for the bedside lamp and adjusted the dimmer switch, turning it up to full brightness. It had been on, of course; she never slept in the dark. There were too many ghosts.

‘How was she killed?’ Rachael’s voice sounded thick, her tongue feeling too large for her mouth. Vague images from old newspaper stories and documentaries ran through her head. Serial killers, torture, sadistic bastards preying on the most vulnerable of society. Deirdra’s next words were almost a relief.

‘They’re saying a blow to the head, dunno what with. Jacob found the body, or his dog did.’ Rachael’s stomach roiled over at that, even as she wondered who Jacob was, before she caught the change in Deirdra’s tone. Now the woman sounded sharper, at once entirely sober.

‘That’s weird, isn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’ None of this was exactly commonplace. A sudden unbidden image of Kitty the last time she had seen her, giving Rachael that impish wink from under her fringe, sent a stab of grief to her chest. Deirdra continued, her voice urgent.

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a freaky punter or anything, does it? It sounds more like someone she knew.’

A cold hand gripped Rachael’s guts even as her mouth formed the words to tell Deirdra to leave such matters to the police, that she didn’t yet know the full story. Instead, different words emerged, ones that lingered in the air long after she spoke them.

‘What do you know, Deirdra?’

There was a sharp intake of breath from the other woman, then only the incessant hum of the dialling tone. Cursing, Rachael attempted to ring her back, only to be met by Deirdra’s answering-machine message, offering her a personal service in smoky tones. She stood up, phone in hand, and went to the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. The knowledge of Kitty’s death sat like a stone in her stomach, a weight she couldn’t digest; one that might crush her if she tried.

It was personal, of course it was. No matter how hard she tried not to get attached to ‘the girls’ it was always personal. Every overdose, every disappearance, every beating by a rival or a pimp or a frustrated ‘client’ left another scar. After ten years of working in the field, this wasn’t the first time a service user had been murdered. In fact, Rachael’s first year, back when she had been a volunteer and still doing her Open University degree, had coincided with a few local sex workers falling prey to a serial killer. It had been terrifying for all concerned. And over the years there had been others. Retaliation for drug debts, ‘domestics’ at the hands of a boyfriend stroke pimp. Rachael had known when she had chosen this line of work that for every woman she managed to help get out and turn her life around, there would be a hundred she couldn’t. Kitty shouldn’t be any different. Even her young age wasn’t a rarity. This one shouldn’t hurt any more than any of the others.

Rachael walked back into the bedroom and stood by the window, staring out at nothing. Tabs jumped up beside her, gave her spine a leisurely stretch and then joined Rachael in staring out of the window. The street was quiet, was always quiet at this time of night. Usually when she couldn’t sleep, which was more and more often lately, the quiet was a comfort, suspending her in a comforting limbo between the days. Tonight it just felt ominous. As if it was waiting for something. For her.

*****

Matt threw his jacket over the back of the settee and then as good as threw himself onto the cushions. He felt exhausted. The pathologist’s report had been pretty much as expected. Single blow to the head with a heavy, blunt instrument. She had been dead less than twenty-four hours when found. The placement of the body was a puzzle; it would appear the killer was attempting to put her into the communal bin she had been found underneath, but had been interrupted. No witnesses had come forward, and Matt doubted they would. He shook his head, letting his breath out in a dense sigh. He had been doing the job long enough not to be surprised that the world was callous enough to let the broken and dumped body of a teenage girl go unreported, but he personally thought there was a simpler, and very good, reason why the body hadn’t ended up in its intended place.

It had been too heavy. Lifting a dead body up to shoulder height was no mean feat even for a strong, fit guy used to lifting heavy weights.

Contrary to popular opinion, a dead body didn’t become heavier after death, but weighed exactly the same as it did when alive. The loss of any responsiveness on the part of the individual whose life had just been extinguished, however, made them feel a lot heavier than they would when alive; hence the term ‘dead weight’. Another gory but often useful piece of information Matt had acquired during his term as a detective. An experienced killer, of course, would have known this. Which meant he wasn’t looking for an experienced killer, or even a typical thug. Who else would have killed Kitty, if not a pimp or a particularly sick client? One of the other girls, in a fight that had got out of hand? It could be that simple. Lives on the street were often short, deaths futile and without rhyme or reason. There was no need to overcomplicate the death of a street prostitute no one cared about.

No, he thought, turning as he heard a foot on the stair, that wasn’t quite right. Someone had cared enough about her to kill her, with a violent blow that spoke of a very definite intention to silence her.

‘You okay, boss?’

Matt allowed a weak but genuine smile as Ricky appeared in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. His stepson – or former stepson, really – had taken to calling him that recently, a teenage affectation born out of a respect that had been grudging for a long time but was now given freely.

‘It’s been a rough night.’ He filled Ricky in on the details as he watched him move round the kitchen, making coffee. Ricky shook his head in disgust as he handed a cup to Matt and sat opposite him.

‘I’ll ask around at work tomorrow. Someone probably knew her.’

Now nineteen, Ricky worked in the local Youth Centre, just a few streets away from where Kitty had been unceremoniously dumped. After doing a stint there a few years ago as part of his probation terms he had continued to volunteer and then taken on paid work, which complemented the degree he was currently studying for. Matt couldn’t have been more proud. He had come into Ricky’s life nearly five years ago when the lad was a sullen, hostile boy, an ASBO waiting to happen, and seen him develop into a great kid. After an initial bout of defensiveness – no teenage boy wanted to see a man come into his mother’s life, least of all a copper – Ricky had quickly come to see Matt as a father figure. The feeling was reciprocated. Matt loved Ricky like his own, seeing in the boy an almost carbon copy of his own surly teenage self. Now older and with most of his surliness thankfully gone, he was a lot like his mother, Lucy, which pained Matt as much as it warmed him. Lucy was gone.