What a sick world, Grey thought, sick people with sick minds. She sighed as Doctor Johan Vagen, M.E, approached warily.
“Lieutenant?”
His soft German accent and seemingly frail features looked gentle compared to his steel-cold eyes. He walked with a gentle limp, his mouth pursed in thought.
“Doc.”
“It appears this boy was drowned, but judging from the bluish marks around the ankles and wrists, it looks like he was weighed down, tossed into the Thames. During this process, the ligaments were torn away from the bones, due to it being done so badly. We’ve got an amateur murderer on our hands. Considering the water temperature, slowing decomp, tidal times, the rigor mortis part complete and that the lower body skin is bluish, suggesting post-mortem lividity come and gone, I would say he has been dead for over two days.”
A blinding light appeared behind the golden gates, when my eyes focused, I could see a giant hand, which was gesturing in a ‘come hither’ signal. As if in a trance, I started to descend towards it, I could almost taste the sweet air that seemed to surround the light, hinting of joys of life, I never got to see. The melodies fit for angels swayed me, living a dream. In a flash, the bright skies, turned into angry bellows of thunder, torrential rain poured down, the heavens closed its gates and the hand that was to give me eternal peace and happiness, lurched forward to give me a shove, off the cloud and down, down towards darkness. My thoughts floated skyward, like bubbles in the wind.
Lieutenant Jaime Grey sat with her chin in her hands, contemplating whether to have her sixth cup of coffee; this current case was proving to be a lot more tiring and difficult than it had first appeared. It was concluded that the boy was a homicide case, but not a single piece of trace evidence has been found, fingerprints, fibres, smudges, chemicals, materials, nothing, the boy was clean. To make it all the more complicated, it had just been reported that the weights used to drown him have not been recovered. The victim’s fingerprints and DNA were being run through A.F.I.S, in hope of finding relatives, someone to claim this poor boy. Her phone beeped.
“Grey.”
“Lieutenant, Vagen, autopsy complete, and you will never guess what I found in his stomach…”
I felt as if I had been falling for hours, but now as my eyes fluttered open, I saw flickering lights overhead and somebody’s laboured breathing. I sat up abruptly, but seemed to gargle and choke rather than breathe. Liquid, perhaps salty water was spurted viciously from my body as a hand whacked me on the back.
“It was worse for me, it has taken me forty years to breathe the way I am now, not that we need to!”
As I swivelled around, I fell off the bed I was on and gasped abruptly, for the thing sat in front of me, was no more than a 12 year old, with a slit throat. The blood seemed to have dried as big bubbles, giving her half a neck. The rest of her appearance wasn’t as shocking, with dark purple eyes, enigma’s in the white-light, moon-shaped and unrevealing. Framing the eyes, were semi-circular, scholar glasses, perched meticulously on her pixie-like nose. The starched shirt, underneath the burgundy, checked pinafore, looked white as snow, despite the blood-stained neck. My brain registered shock when I recalled the number of years she had mentioned.
“F-f-f-forty years? You can’t be more than twelve!”
“I have not crossed yet…I can not until someone finds out who murdered me and my mama is at peace.”
“So, you are saying that until they find out who killed me I am stuck here.”
She nodded sincerely.
“He ate a note?”
“Yepp.”
Lieutenant Grey opened her eyes in astonishment; it would never have occurred to her just how intelligent a seven year old could be.
“Spit it out, what did it say?”
“It said…All alone with him…Black…Bread…Caine Taylor.” Vagen repeated systematically, “It was recovered at the bottom of the stomach, along with yeast and iron scrapings.”
A riddle, she could deal with that, Jaime thought.
“Good God, he was one smart boy, Caine Taylor, we know that much. He that he was left alone, and because he was alone, he died. They should not have left him alone like that.”