A Thousand Cuts

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Lucia parked in a different space. She did not have to; her usual spot was empty. But she parked nearer the entrance, in the only section of the car park that was not covered by the building. She parked and she got out and she made it as far as the stairwell before she turned around and unlocked the car and restarted the engine. She reversed and straightened up and then pressed the accelerator too hard so that as she shot forwards the tyres slipped on the tarmac and yelped. There was no one around but Lucia flushed, feeling foolish, and eased off so much that the car almost stalled. She passed the line of police units and then swung the Volkswagen out wide. With her left arm wrapped around the passenger seat, she backed into the space the entire station thought of as hers.

Fuck it, she told herself. Fuck him.

The stairwell was dark and Lucia hesitated. But only for a moment. She climbed the stairs and she climbed slowly, daring her fears to manifest themselves and God help them if they did. In the lobby she swiped in and nodded at the blokes on the desk. They nodded back. Ahead of her were the double doors that opened into the part of the station that only policemen and prisoners and kids on school visits ever saw. She tapped a code into the keypad below the handle and pulled when the buzzer buzzed. She passed through. There was only one lift in the station. Today it was working and it was waiting for Lucia so she took it.

She was the first of the day shift to arrive. She had planned it that way without admitting to herself that she had. But as she passed Walter’s desk, she saw there was a mug next to the keyboard, a coat on the back of the chair. She paused, glanced around, until she realised the mug was one the cleaner had missed, the coat part of the department’s soft furnishings. She walked on, wary in spite of herself. She poured herself coffee from the pot left over by the night shift. At her desk she clutched her mug in both palms. She sipped. The coffee was burnt but she was not drinking it for the taste. She took another sip and waited for the day to descend.

Cole arrived next, then Charlie, then Rob. Cole said a gruff good morning; Charlie and Rob just nodded at Lucia when they noticed her. At one minute to nine Walter arrived reading the back page of the Mirror. He held up a palm without looking at anyone, set the polystyrene cup he had been holding on his desk, tucked his newspaper under his arm and disappeared into the men’s room. Harry was late. He said, sorry I’m late, and was still panting and wiping at his forehead several minutes after he had taken his seat. When he saw Lucia he said, hey Lucia, and she said, hey Harry, how’s it going? Harry said, what happened to you yesterday, and Lucia said, stomach bug. Then the phones began to ring and the board began to fill up and, for all the possibilities that Lucia had imagined for it, the day looked like turning into any other.

Until the call came in.

Lucia answered so it was Lucia’s case. That was how it worked. Unless there was some obvious reason to defer to Cole, that was how it had always worked.

‘Charlie can take it. I’m giving it to Charlie.’

‘Charlie’s busy. Charlie’s got two missing kids.’

Cole looked at Charlie. Charlie shrugged.

‘What about you, Walter? You look like you’ve got a few calories you could do with expending.’

‘Love to, Guv, mainly because Lulu here seems to want it so bad. But I’ve got court again, remember? This fucking thing’s gonna drag on all week.’

Cole exhaled. He looked around him. ‘Where the fuck is Harry? And Rob. Where the fuck is Rob?’

‘I saw them twenty minutes ago,’ Walter said, grinning now. ‘They were holding hands and heading for trap three in the men’s room. Harry had a hard-on.’

Charlie laughed. Cole swore. He flicked a hand towards Walter. ‘Get your goddamn feet off that desk.’

Lucia was moving and Cole spotted her. ‘You. Where are you going?’

Lucia picked up her phone, her keys, her notepad. She reached for her mouse and shut down her email. ‘There’s no one else, Guv. Who else is there?’

Cole held up a finger. ‘I’m warning you, Lucia.’

‘What?’

‘You know what. Don’t pretend you don’t know what.’

‘What?’ Lucia said again. ‘It could be anyone. How do you know it’s not just anyone?’

‘What’s the address?’

Lucia flicked through her notepad.

‘What’s the address, Lucia?’

Lucia shut the pad. ‘Sycamore Drive. It’s Sycamore Drive.’

‘That’s right around the corner from the school. It’s not just anyone. I mean it Lucia, I don’t want you—’

‘Gotta go, Guv. Taxi’s waiting.’

She rode to Sycamore Drive in the back of a squad car. There was no air conditioning in the rear and the windows did not open either, which meant there was no respite from the heat or from the stench of simulated pine. Lucia allowed her lips to part and did her best to breathe in through her mouth. One of the two uniforms up front, the passenger, was talking to her across his shoulder. His voice was overwhelmed by the siren so Lucia just nodded occasionally, raised and dropped her eyebrows. She stared at the city passing by, at the abundance of people on the streets even after nine o’clock on a work day, all rushing it seemed, drained of patience by the heat and the crowds and the sheer effort involved in completing a simple task, a trip, a transaction.

A dead body. A surname. That was all but it was enough.

They drove past the school. There were children in the playground, shouting, screeching, standing in groups around mobile phones, sitting on steps and sharing headphones, others playing video games by the look of them, with friends craning over their shoulders for a glimpse of animated pixels. One group, at one end of the yard, was kicking a ball. They still do that then, Lucia thought and immediately recoiled from her sourness. She was thirty-two. Just thirty-two and yet she felt obsolete, alienated from the generation to which, until recently, she had assumed she still belonged. She had an iPod but she could not use it. She was aware of Facebook but she had heard about it first on Radio 4. Children, when she came into contact with them, referred to her as a woman, as in, why’s that woman dressed like a policeman, Mummy? Parents, what was worse, called her a lady: mind the lady, darling, be careful. She had laughed, the first time. The second time she had panicked. When had that happened? When had the world decided – decided and not informed her – that the girl she thought she was had been displaced, disabused, disinvented? When had her peers handed the future to these children who could so readily shrug off violence, who were so inured to hate and brutality that they could laugh and joke and play on ground still stained by blood? And all while a boy of their age, whom they knew and had sat with and had spoken to and had laughed with, some of them, suffered and wept and bled himself.

No. It was a common enough surname. It might not be him. She did not know for certain that it would be him. Not for certain.

They turned into a side street. The driver cancelled the siren but left the lights flashing. A car moved as though to pull out from the kerb in front of them and the policeman at the wheel of the squad car hammered the horn and swerved though he did not really need to. Lucia turned her head as they passed. She saw a woman’s face, her expression teetering between shock and fury. The policeman up front switched the siren back on.

They arrived. They were the first. The car stopped and the siren stopped but Lucia heard its echo. An ambulance, four blocks away perhaps. She got out. The uniforms followed, placing their caps on their heads and trailing Lucia up the path.

The front door was ajar. Lucia rang the bell, knocked, rang the bell again. Without waiting for a reply, she pushed the door wide.

‘Mr Samson?’

Immediately she heard sobbing. A woman, upstairs.

‘Mrs Samson?’ Lucia spoke louder, almost shouting. She said her name. She said, ‘It’s the police, Mrs Samson. The ambulance is right behind us.’ She led the way towards the staircase.

She did not recognise anything and though she could not have expected to, this gave her hope. In the hallway was a coat rack straining with coats and just about clinging to the wall. There were shoes, some placed neatly in a line along the skirting board, others discarded with their laces still tied. There was a child’s bike, too small for him, she thought, almost certainly too small for him. They passed the living room and Lucia saw remnants on the coffee table of a breakfast interrupted: toast buttered but naked of jam, juice half drunk from glasses perspiring in the heat. The weather girl on the television grinned and caught Lucia’s eye but Lucia’s gaze did not settle. She looked for bookcases. In his house she expected bookcases. There were none in the living room and this was a relief, until she saw a set of shelves in the hallway beyond the stairs and another just inside the kitchen door.

She climbed the stairs quickly. Her feet scuffed against the wooden steps but the sound was soon masked by the stomping boots of the uniforms behind her, the crackle of their radios, their open-mouthed breathing at her ear. At the top Lucia hesitated and she sensed the men behind her collide. The sobbing had stopped. The door ahead of her was shut and there was no obvious movement further along the landing. She called aloud once more.

‘Here. In here.’

A man’s voice: quiet, defeated. It was a voice Lucia recognised. She hurried on, tensing her stomach to catch her falling heart.

She reached the doorway to the bedroom. The door was open, obscuring the main portion of the room. Ahead of her, slumped against a wardrobe, was Elliot’s father. His head was bowed. His hands were crimson.

Lucia stepped inside. She watched Elliot’s father as she moved. She knew she should turn her head, refocus her eyes but her body no longer felt under her control. Even her feet seemed to be carrying her against her will. She knew what was waiting inside and she did not want to see it. She wanted to back away, to turn, to leave the house. She wanted to rewind and tell Cole, give it to Charlie, give it to Walter even, because then at least she would not have to see it. But the uniforms crowded behind her and her feet kept moving and before she could resist she was in the room.

Elliot’s mother was cradling her son’s body. The blood was everywhere: in black puddles on the sand-coloured carpet, in Elliot’s hair, on his mother’s face and up her arms, on the bed sheets that were still entangled around Elliot’s legs, soaking through the strips of linen that were wrapped and knotted about Elliot’s wrists. With the blood, the colour had left Elliot’s skin. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted backwards and the fingers of his left hand were crumpled against the floor. Beneath the hair that covered her face, Elliot’s mother was sobbing still but silently. Her shoulders trembled. Her hands shook. She clung to her son as though willing the warmth of her body to diffuse into his.

Lucia took another step and reached with a hand and all of a sudden she was on her knees, the carpet damp and cold through the fabric of her trousers. She reached again but her hand hovered in the air and fell away. She looked behind her, up at her colleagues. They were staring at the boy. It was all they could do. It was the most that any one of them could do.