Find Them Dead

107 Friday 31 May

Five minutes later, as the court was emptied, Meg stumbled out into the corridor in a complete daze, into a scene of utter chaos. She heard the wail of sirens approaching, emergency vehicles were arriving. Someone was crying and someone else was screaming.

She’d just seen a man stabbed, many times, in the chest and the neck. It looked like his throat had been ripped open, an artery severed. It was almost all she could see, those few seconds replaying on an endless loop in her mind.

Her head was throbbing, her body shaking. As she was jostled down the steps, she felt limp, like a rag doll. The look of terror in Gready’s eyes was burned into her brain. Someone bumped into her from behind, unbalancing her and sending her lurching into the back of a bulky man in front of her. A voice behind called out an apology. She was pushed from the side. Left, then right. Someone stood, painfully, on her foot.

Suddenly, to her surprise, she felt a hand gripping hers. A strong, coarse, reassuring, masculine hand. Stealthily pressing something soft and crinkly into her palm. It felt like a banknote.

In an instant, the hand was gone.

Gripping whatever it was tightly, she looked around in astonishment. She saw one of the court ushers she recognized, hemming her in to the right, and a young Chinese guy, who looked like a student, to her left. She turned and behind her stood a tall, tweedy woman. As she caught Meg’s eyes she asked, ‘Do you know what has happened? Why are they clearing the building, is there a terrorist bomb?’

Meg looked away, hunting with her eyes through the melee for the Latino man. Then she thought she saw the top of his head, his dark shiny hair, some distance over to her right. Frantically, she barged her way through, forcing a path, yelling, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me!’

Then finally she was clear of the crowd. She stopped and looked around. He was nowhere to be seen. Panting from the exertion, her heart thumping, she carefully opened up her clenched right hand and looked at what had been pressed into it, as more people swarmed around her.

A small scrap of paper, torn from a ring binder, and folded several times. She opened it out; in neat handwriting in blue ballpoint, were written some words, with a row of digits below.

After all she had been through in the last three weeks, she couldn’t believe what she had just read.