The Chosen

CONCLUSION: FRAGMENT V

The inspector who is standing in the street outside the apartment block where a man and his children have been murdered is wishing that the weather was different. Because right now everything is so horrific that a fresh snowstorm is the last thing he needs.

But the weather is not his biggest worry.

It is the woman who has lost her family; he doesn’t know what to do with her.

Resolutely she turns her back on him and walks away. He calls her name, once, twice. She doesn’t answer, doesn’t turn around. She just walks. And he lets her go. Decisively he signals to his colleagues to follow her, on foot or by car. They do both. He watches her disappear in the snow, sensing the thoughts whirling around in her head.

Feeling frustrated, he goes back to the apartment. He cannot stay out here in the street.

The CSIs look up when he walks in.

‘Worst I’ve ever seen,’ one of them says.

The inspector does not respond. He thinks that he has probably seen worse, but nothing more incomprehensible. He even thinks that he will never be able to learn to live with this. They lowered their guard for just a few hours, and this is what happened.

There is a wedding photograph on the chest of drawers. It hurts the inspector’s eyes to look at it, and he moves away.

He wonders if the deceased knew the killer. If so, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out who he or she is.

But there are no guarantees. If the perpetrator has got away with it up to now, there is a risk that they will never find the person in question.

‘Where did they die?’ he asks.

‘We think the man died instantaneously when he was shot in the hallway. It seems likely that the children were attacked in here; they were probably already in bed.’

The words go round and round inside the inspector’s head. He cannot process what he is hearing, cannot take it in.

His mobile rings.

‘We’ve lost her,’ says his colleague. ‘She was walking along the pavement, and then she was gone. It was as if the snow just swallowed her up.’