Little Boy Blue

109

Charlie held her hand to her mouth, sickened by the sight in front of her. It shouldn’t have made a difference to her that their third victim was a woman, but it did. Charlie could see the naked terror frozen on her pretty face, she could feel her desperation to breathe, to live, even as the oxygen in her lungs ran out. Her nostrils were dilated, her mouth wide open – one almost felt she might lurch back into life suddenly with one big breath. But her lifeless eyes, staring monotonously at the low ceiling, gave the lie to that.

She went by the professional name of Angelique, but her real name was Amy Fawcett. The flat was registered in her name and the imprint of her real life could be seen in framed photos hung up in her private space at the back of the flat. She was a musician and performance artist, who paid the bills by her extracurricular work at night. She didn’t appear to be a prostitute – there were no condoms in the flat, no history of arrest – in fact this work appeared to be a sideline, which made her death all the more tragic. There was a photo next to her bed of a young Amy gripping a viola awkwardly under her chin. It had brought tears to Charlie’s eyes when she first saw it, such was the guileless innocence and optimism of the image, and she’d had to absent herself from the team for a few moments. She needed a break – she realized that now – but quite when and how she would get one was another matter.

They were still in the midst of a major investigation with no clear suspect in mind. Charlie had crunched the credit card details and sent them to Helen, but progress was incremental rather than revelatory and Charlie had the uneasy feeling that things were starting to go south. Normally, Helen would have been all over this, stalking the crime scene, bullying the forensics team and coordinating the uniformed officers on the street. But she was notable by her absence this morning. Charlie hadn’t been able to raise her on her landline or mobile. Was she sick? Surely not, Helen was never sick.

She had tried Sanderson, thinking it might be wise to defer to her greater experience, but she couldn’t get hold of her either and was told by one of the girls at the station that the DS was ‘unavailable’ and ‘on operational duties’. What those were Charlie couldn’t fathom – what could be more important than a triple murder?

It fell to Charlie then to marshall the troops. This should have felt exciting – calling the shots at a murder scene was the natural culmination of her career thus far. But the gnawing uncertainty that something bigger was going on, from which she was excluded, was sapping her energy and optimism. Equally debilitating was the sight in front of her – a beautiful and talented spirit whose life had been brutally cut short.