BiteMarks (15 page)

There is a noise in my ears like the passage of trains through a tunnel. On the screen another black man joins in with the 'fun', again his identity is concealed by the angle of the shot, but he is lighter-skinned than the first man, somewhere between him and the girl in tone. Off camera somebody speaks in thick patois, the rapid words running together, only the word 'bitch' is clearly audible to me, and another man laughs a deep bass rumble.

I recall with that weird and unwelcome aptness that the Jamaican word for the sensations associated with orgasm is 'agony'. I start to take in the background now, hardwood rails on the walls and thick carpets, enough detail to tell me where this was filmed. Of course that's the whole point.

I look back at the girl now as the camera completes its circumnavigation and she is made to face its scrutiny whilst men change places behind her. Cristal's face is a stitched and swollen mess still, eyes bulging and bruised, ragged tears healing but visible around her lips and throat. The wet corners of her eyes reflect the bright glare of the lighting, as do the tear trails on her cheeks, and then her head is pulled down and to the side. The lower half of a naked man fills the screen, until he rotates and leans backwards to allow for a better view. The disc comes to a stop, the image frozen with him inside her mouth, blood weeping from tightly stitched wounds, tears leaking from eyes like glass beads, dead and flat.

There are different shades of rage if you care to look closely at such things. Most men of violence display only one of two particular varieties; the first of which is a harsh belligerent terrier yap and snarl which announces their arrival in the room. This is accompanied by cockerel posturing and chameleon roving eyes, independently searching for weak targets to make their point to or with.

The second is punctuated by a snake strike. An outburst of spontaneous violence sometimes preceded a warning rattle, but most often not.

I am seldom afraid of such men. The barkers and the biters are easily recognizable, and I see the repetition and reflexive responses for what they are, predictable and limited. Other men deal with their rage in a different way, circling unseen underneath with shark patience; waiting for the right moment to emerge and consume. I am one of those men. I allow the madness to run its course, able to dissociate enough to rationalize about the physicalities of the initial response. Finding a mirror to see the agitated animation passing through parts of my body, before it loses its heat, settling in place and accepting that it must wait for now beginning to bide its time.

The DVD is interesting because of what it represents. They must be aware on some level of what I am capable of through Jones' previous exchanges with me and through their acquaintance with Marvin, I'm quite sure that he'll have related details of our previous encounter, perhaps even complete with the fangs, blood and violence in Technicolor. This disc could be construed as mockery, a bloody and ugly piece of crude pornography fit for a vampire cop and his tastes. It could also be seen as a challenge. You care about these women – our worthless possessions – that we choose to use however we see fit, but do you care enough to try to save this one?

The movie feels like an enormous fuck you from scary dangerous men who don't want me here, but who evidently don't understand my motives. I don't care about this girl as an individual much more than they do in many respects. I care about her as a symbol of my possible salvation.

I switch off the television to be alone with my thoughts, sitting in the absence of light and sipping the remainder of the Scotch. Rage is now a cold burn in my gut, and my predatory mind circles with bared teeth just beneath the surface.

Chapter 10

“
The neighbors rang it in this morning, said they heard loud screaming in the night and they banged on the ceiling for a while until it stopped. Then this morning they noticed the window from the outside.”

The young officer's voice is laced with breathless excitement. The older officer looks up at the glass, more specifically at the spray of fine red mist covering the inside of the pane. He recognizes it as an arterial spurt, even if he doesn't know the correct terminology for such things.

“
Did they say why they didn't phone it in last night?”

“
Just said that the woman's a crack whore, she's usually either screaming because she's entertaining or because her boyfriend's visiting for his money.”

“
After you then, son.” The older officer gestures towards the rusted metal rungs leading upwards with a sweep of his arm that is fast enough to hide the slight shaking of his hand. He watches the younger man as he enthusiastically bounds up to the door and knocks, then radios in for an ambulance and a scientific support van. He finds himself mesmerized for long moments by the particles of rust and faded wrought iron paint that fall like black snow from the staircase, dislodged by heavy footfalls. He has no desire to see what waits inside the flat but since the lad is still banging on the door and shouting through the letterbox, he mounts the stairs, heartsick with leaden unwilling legs.

“
I'm not getting a response from inside, Gary.”

The younger man takes a quick glance up at his tutor constable, unused to using his Christian name, the word feeling clumsy and unnatural in his mouth.

“
Well then in we go. You remember your section seventeen powers of entry?”

“
Yes.”

Gary holds up a hand before his pupil can start rattling off the lengthy legalities verbatim. Training school drills in the words, but only experience gives them any meaning he'd already said more than once.

“
Just open the door, James, somebody's badly hurt or may be dead in there.”

James tries the handle first, not a completely lost cause then, Gary observes. He'd had others who tried to knock down doors that were completely unlocked before, and one who'd dislocated his shoulder charging a metal safety door.

James gives the door a firm shoulder but it stays rigidly in place, and the more experienced man waves him aside. He moves into position and steadies himself, then drives the hard sole of his boot against the wood just below the lock, splintering the timber at a weak point and forcing the door open.

“
That's considered polite in these parts, it stayed on its hinges.”

The weak joke does little to relieve the tension.

Unable to contain himself any longer, James rushes in, pushing the first of three doors open.

“
Hello, are you okay?”

There is no reply from the empty lounge.

“
Try the bedroom. It'll be the door on the right at the end.” He doesn't complete the thought – the one with the blood spattered window.

Maybe the lad has less sense than he'd been credited with a moment earlier after all, or maybe the ability to think through your actions, to observe yourself from distances with something like detachment, comes with advancing age. Gary, not usually a man prone to introspection, has the sudden strange thought that this detachment might signify his soul pulling gradually away from his mortal body and reaching out for the next life.

Perhaps the growing certainty of your own death is what makes you begin to be afraid again in the face of human carnage as your police career advances towards its end.

The younger officer runs back past him in the narrow hallway, barging him aside with a well-muscled shoulder; hands clasped tightly over his mouth. Gary absorbs the blow, sags against the wall for momentary support and then heads for the bedroom. Somewhere behind him is the heavy wet sound of vomit falling from height onto foliage.

Blood in quantity has a characteristic smell. It is metallic and cloying, lingering on the palate, splintering sharpness in the back of the throat, with a tendency to return later on to remind you of that fragrance. 'Beat' Officer Gary Hankinson has seen a lot of blood spilled in twenty five years of service, glassings, stabbings and horrific suicides where they'd slit their own wrists and throat and then run around the house in a panicked moment of clarity before collapsing. He can't remember seeing this much in one place before though.

The scene is morbidly fascinating, a blood spatter analyst's wet dream; arcing sprays across the walls and high ceiling in dry red-brown bands and thick black gelatinous blobs all over the bare wooden floor. There is a neat bloody hand print on the bedside table like a signature, all my own work it seems to say. The woman's throat is torn wide open, most of the cords ripped through to leave a dark yawning chasm, and she lays in a deep red swamp, naked and smeared in scarlet fluid with sightless eyes.

Gary finally turns away and gags once, composing himself and swallowing back the sour acid tang before walking back out into the daylight. James is still hanging over the rusted railings, spitting the taste of the room from his mouth and wiping his streaming eyes with a wrinkled sleeve.

“
I took the liberty of calling it in for SOCO before we went in, on account of the blood in the window.”

James looks back at him stupidly, before replying in a ragged voice “I've never seen anything like that before … you won't tell people that I was sick will you?”

“
I think maybe their noses will tell them first, but no I won't. Welcome to the real world in all its glory, son.”

Three more years until retirement and the bottle. The Scenes Of Crime Officers, SOCO, are now formally referred to as Crime Scene Investigators, CSI. Rumor has it that baseball caps and hooded jackets will be finding their way into the CSI uniform soon. Since a good number of the department are approaching their more senior years and sporting a little gray on top, there's been both animated humorous discussion and open hostility towards the news. Some are saying that they should welcome the chance to cover up thinning silver hair, but the general consensus is that baseball caps and hoodies are for the kids committing offenses not for those employed to catch them. Maybe that's a problem, maybe that's the problem.

David Barrow, the senior CSI in charge of Central Divisions major inquiries, slips into an extra large 'smurf' suit – one of the white hooded all in ones worn over the clothes when processing a scene to avoid contamination.

'Big Dave' is a giant of a man, with a giant reputation to match his stature. Six feet seven inches tall and three hundred and twenty pounds in weight. He is possessive of an intelligence of expression that advertises his nimble mind and fast tongue. Woe betide anybody who compromises one of his crime scenes.

“
So once you'd finished trampling your size nines all over my evidence and throwing up all over the place, what else did you do?”  Dave addresses the rookie probationer first, expression serious but mischief sparkling in his eyes like stars on calm lakes.

“
How did you .... ?”

“
How did I know that you'd been sick? Easy, you look like a soft lad, the sort who might blow chunks at the sight of a bit of blood. And besides plants don't usually excrete their own bile.” He turns to the woman coming down the hallway. “Sharon, could you arrange to take some prints and hair from officer sick-bag for elimination purposes?”

Watching the giant man squeezing in through the doorway chuckling softly to himself, James dully realizes that the big man was only joking.

The processing of a bad scene is unceremonious, interspersed with coffin humor from the Forensic Examiners, Pathologist, Undertakers and Detectives who see these atrocities more often than anybody should have to. The uninitiated often confuse the jokes at a crime scene with callousness and a general lack of respect for the victim. They couldn't be more wrong, though. Nobody cares more about the dead and abused than the 'smurfs' and 'kidders' – terms of endearment for the CSI and CID, Criminal Investigation Department,  respectively. These are the people who put aside their own emotions, ignoring the need to eat and sleep in order to catch the creatures that maim and kill other peoples loved ones. They pay for their devotion with years lost from the ends of their lives, taking the ones who get away with them to their deathbeds as if they're somehow to blame.  Photographs of the body in situ first.

“
Hold that pose, darling. Right got it, lovely, lovely.”

The Pathologist arriving to certify death, since only a qualified Doctor is legally permitted to declare a person dead, no matter what the condition of the corpse.

“
Any initial thoughts?”

“
Cut herself shaving perhaps, Dave.”

Two old friends sharing familiarities in a room inscribed with all of the pain of life and death. Lifting the body, head, hands and feet bagged to preserve trace evidence.

“
Might suggest this one to the wife.”

“
What?”

“
The blood loss diet, guaranteed to take pounds off in seconds.”

Laughter necessary here, feeling good albeit slightly too loud, the relief required when you spend your days amongst the mutilated and your nights hoping that they don't decide to revisit you.

Outside the old cop and his young pupil are long gone, on to the next incident now, law enforcement makes no allowances for its servants and their feelings. Over the coming hours and days, Gary will deflect the younger man's attention away from the realities of what he has been so eager to witness for himself. The younger man will in turn begin to forget what he has seen, although he will recount the details in Technicolor for friends and family alike, spouting bravado that does not stand up to close scrutiny since that is what is expected of him. On the occasions when the bluster intrudes upon his effectiveness, Gary will quietly and subtly rebuke the behavior; but will forgive the lapses as they were forgiven of him two and a half decades earlier.