Forensics, more than any other department in the police, was somewhat of a circus. After the photographer and the sampling expert had performed their duties, a wide array of people would flood in and begin to check, analyse, and scrutinise everything. From preserving and protecting the crime scene, to capturingfingerprint evidence, DNA samples, and collecting traces, it was all a pandemonic flurry of silent and carefully enacted activity.
For a detective, there was not a whole lot to do other than provide moral support for the forensics team and see if you could find some kind of task that made you look somewhat important. For me, it was bringing the coffee. The only problem I had been grappling with on this particular task was whether to say the coffees were my treat, or to very politely tell each specialist my account code and sort number and ask them to transfer me the required £3.50. I wanted to seem like the cool police detective, but I wasn’t made of money. Frankly, being a detective wasn’t all that lucrative. I sometimes wondered if I should have followed my dad’s advice and joined the navy – better pension, too.
I braced myself, steadied my gurgling stomach, and left the car, snatching up the coffees as I did so. I could see the neighbours congregating in their gardens, moaning about the sudden increased police presence on the street. But I knew that deep down, they all loved that this was happening. I imagined it was the most drama that had occurred in the neighbourhood since some old grandad had put the wrong bin out on rubbish day in 2006. The curtain creepers were murmuring exclamations to themselves in their front gardens while people walking their dogs purposefully slowed down to try and peer inside the house. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before; as soon as the white tent went up outside someone’s house, it was like the bat symbol to the nosy neighbour brigade.
I walked across Mr O’Neill’s front lawn, yanked up the tape, and entered the small tent that had been set up as a base of operations. There was a long, neat row of small transporter cases, where evidence was being hastily packaged and thrown in. The doors to the swab safe were constantly being yanked open and closed as countless samples were tossed inside in ascene of pure organised chaos. Cis, now on her laptop, reviewing footage that her team had recorded earlier in the day, was seated squarely within the madness. I knew better than to disturb her when she was in the focus zone, so I plucked up her latte from the cardboard holder and placed it silently next to her.
‘Ahh, Detective, thank you very much,’ a specialist said as they trotted over to me and yanked a coffee from the holder without changing their pace. They jerked off their face mask and strolled away, guzzling the drink furiously before I could even open my mouth about the possibility of them paying me back. It was a domineering attempt on their part that had ended any conversation before it had even begun. Lord above, what a power move.
‘Ah, Gareth, my darling,’ Cis said, finally breaking out of her focus mode, closing the laptop, and standing up to give me a hug. Enveloped in her giant nylon marshmallow, I prayed she wouldn’t hug me too hard and cause a devastating accident with the coffee. ‘Good morning, nice of you to finally join us.’
‘Ah well, I thought it was good for me to show up and make sure that you’re not wasting too much time doing whatever forensics do,’ I said, gently pulling myself away from her iron grip. ‘How is it all going? Found anything?’
Cis looked over each of her shoulders. The tent was still a flurry of activity, so she gestured for me to take a walk down the street with her. Before leaving, she pulled herself out of her disposable white suit to her rather casual gym base-layer as I placed the remaining coffees on the table. As we walked away, I watched out of the corner of my eye as the white-clothed vultures begin to pounce on the coffees I had left behind. That was £24.50 down the drain.
‘So, we’ve been looking a lot at the bedroom, which we’ve established as the focal point of this whole crime scene,’ Cisexplained, hands tucked into her armpits as she quickly scanned around the houses to make sure no neighbours could overhear.
‘And?’
‘Aisha noticed that there had been a recent change to the carpet’s texture. When we sent it back to the girls in the lab, they instantly found traces of blood, milk, and some kind of carpet cleaner. We think we also found traces of bicarbonate of soda.’
‘Strange,’ I remarked, wondering if I was being a hypochondriac or if I could feel a sudden bout of clamminess beginning to emanate from my palms.
‘Right,’ Cis affirmed. ‘So, looking more at the sample analysis, all three of those texture changes happened in the last week or so, which, of course, would place it right at the same time that Mr O’Neill disappeared. Meaning, naturally…’
‘Foul play, surely?’ I said. ‘Blood was spilt. Someone cleaned it up, and it seems awfully convenient for it to be at the same time he goes mysteriously missing without a trace.’
‘Also, judging by the stain and clean-up patterns, there was a lot of it. Alotlot. At least a litre. This wasn’t a simple nick on the neck while shaving. You were right on this one, Gareth, I have to hand it to you,’ she said, sounding half impressed, and half slightly vexed. Cis did always like to be right.
Part of me did feel vindicated. So, it was a murder. But I couldn’t also shake this nauseous, guilty feeling, as if I was never meant to have this sense of satisfaction – that, in fact, I was delving deeper into a rabbit hole I wasn’t meant to go down.
Or then again, maybe it was the kebab.
‘But you’ll love this,’ Cis said, with a wry smile.
Cis passed me her phone. I stopped walking to take a clearer look at the image. A piece of scrappy A4 paper, encased in a plastic pocket. The writing was sketchy and hard to read, but I could just about make it out:
I’ll kill you.
‘I think you’re missing the bit above,’ Cis remarked as she extended her fingers to zoom in on the phone screen. Sure enough, above the bolded ‘I’ll kill you’ there was some fainter writing.
Stay away from her or…
‘Well, did O’Neill write this to send to someone, or was someone sending it to him?’ I asked.
‘We haven’t found any other handwriting from him yet, so we’re looking into it, but it’s weird, right?’
Most of the crimes I had been assigned to already had a culprit attached. The hit-and-run had been a joyriding teenager. The petrol station incident had been an unhinged husband who’d finally snapped. As the cliché goes: if you are going to be murdered, you more than likely already know who’s going to kill you. But Mr O’Neill didn’t seem to have still been in touch with anyone.
‘Nothing was taken, so it wasn’t a burglary attempt,’ I said, trying to make sense of it all by speaking aloud. ‘The whole thing feels like a…’ I tried to articulate a way to explain it. ‘Like a spontaneous act of violence. Like someone just walked in one day and decided they were going to kill poor old Mr O’Neill. Almost like it was some kind of impulse killing.’
I took a glance at Cis, who was currently in a mid–deep inhale.
‘What do you think about all of this?’ I asked.
‘I think it was personal,’ Cis said rather bluntly.
We stood there for a bit longer, both processing everything, when a message pinged through on my phone.
