Need You Dead

69 Monday 25 April

‘Oh Jesus!’

In his twelve years of being a police officer, six of them as a detective in Major Crime, Jon Exton had never experienced a crime scene like this one. Standing alongside Guy Batchelor, both of them gowned up in protective paper-suits, gloves and shoes, he was staring, trance-like, at the severed head of Trish Darling. It was lying in a pool of dark crimson blood, on the cream shagpile carpet, framed by her straggly greying hair and still wearing glasses. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head that she looked like one of those Halloween masks you saw in joke shop windows.

Except this was no joke.

One of her severed hands lay in a smaller pool of blood close by. The other lay on the other side of the room, together with segments of both her feet. Her torso had been split open down her midriff; there were blood spatters on every wall, on the carpet, on the bedspread, on the curtains and on the ceiling.

He turned away, struggling not to throw up.

‘Hold it in, Jon,’ Batchelor said. ‘Not all over our crime scene!’

Close to fainting, Exton clung to the DI as if he were a life raft, in a desperate attempt to stay vertical. ‘Sorry — sorry,’ he slurred.

‘It’s OK, mate, happens to us all at times,’ Batchelor sympathized. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

The sight, along with the coppery smell of the dead woman’s blood, was making Guy Batchelor queasy, too. In the room with them were two Crime Scene Investigators, similarly clad to themselves, and the CSI photographer, busy recording everything on video.

Batchelor looked at his watch. It was just coming up to midnight. He yawned. ‘You’re not married, are you, Jon? Girlfriend, right?’

‘Dawn.’

‘Lovely lady — you brought her to the CID dinner last year — she’s an Aussie?’

‘Yep!’

‘Could you imagine chopping her up into bits like this?’

Exton shook his head.

‘Me neither — Lena. I mean, like — bloody hell, you’ve got to be more than a bit pissed off with your wife to do this.’

‘That’s probably the understatement of the year, Guy.’

Batchelor remembered meeting Darling’s wife on Saturday. A total bitch. But no one deserved this. ‘OK, the mortuary team will be here shortly, so there’s not much else we can do. Some shut-eye?’

‘Sounds like a plan.’ Exton looked down at the severed head again, as if drawn to it by a magnet. The woman’s eyes stared right back at him, sending shivers through him. It was as if she was saying, ‘Do something!’

Involuntarily, and almost imperceptibly, he nodded at her. We will, he mouthed silently.