The ordinary

By Christopher Ritchie

2015 IndieFab Book Awards Silver Winner, Horror

Born from humanity - destined to destroy it

Allegory-laden horror-satire in which Stanley, one of the 'ordinary', is so evil his touch alone freezes girls’ minds with fear; caught up in porn, in their teens, he captures and keeps them

• Language: English
• Publisher: GB Publishing Org
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993163982

Christopher Ritchie

2015 BOOK AWARD WINNER 2013 BOOK AWARD FINALIST Christopher Ritchie: "I've always been a writer, as long as I can remember. Writing short stories as a child, irritating my teachers with overly long descriptive passages, and attempting to translate my talent for mischief onto the page. Thirty or so years later, I wrote a book, and then another one. Now I'm the kind of person who gets taken away by things - by TV shows, movies, books, videogames... I get lost in these worlds. I love getting lost in them. They fuel my imagination, they inform my dreams, and they open my mind to infinite possibilities. And so my debut offering, House of Pigs, is genuinely the product of two dreams, one a nightmare. I woke up and started writing. Thirty eight years of influences, experiences and ideas came together. Light in the darkness. Redemption. Horror. The unknown. The things that scare me in my nightmares are now committed to paper and binary code. A little while after that, I wrote the award-winning (IndieFab Book of the Year Silver Award for Horror) The ordinary. It's a dark satire that explores the global spread of fear via a rampant media. Gallows humour, epic scale, and - well, read the reviews for yourself. I hope you enjoy my work. These books were immensely fun to write. Slowly I am creating a world for other people to lose themselves in and, hopefully, get a little bit scared just as I did. My next novel, Nuclear Rock, should be out some time in 2017. Thanks for reading."

Book preview

One – Cowboys and angels

Piotr swung his legs out of bed, his feet clunking down on the unforgiving wood. He felt drained. His head ached. His teeth felt loose and tender.

Shrugging to iron out the creases in his shoulders, his head hung. His stare fixed on his feet. He rocked forward and stood up with a grimace. He accidentally kicked an empty, crumpled can which the night before had contained a strong shot of thick, heavy hooch, and walked over to the only window in the room.

Pulling the curtain to one side, a blast of bright sunlight smashed into his retinas. He let the curtain go and blinked a few times, shaking his head as if to dissipate the liquid light from his frazzled skull.

The noise that had awakened Piotr came back – a rumble like a motor, thrumming in the walls or somewhere beyond. It was the same noise his own taps made. A motor chugging away, doing its best not to send an irritatingly pathetic flow of hot water in the basin. It was the same noise, he expected, that woke up everyone in the block when their neighbours turned the taps on.

A quick flash of the dream he’d been having prior to this rude interruption struck him still. His eyes closed gently, easing the sting further. He was back at home, another sunny day in the suburbs of Wroclaw. His sister, Halina, skipped over a rope in the front garden. The short lawn, worn grass in patches of yellow and brown with only a few splashes of green, stopped abruptly at the concrete pavement, itself sloping down to the roadside.

It had never been the busiest of roads but in this dream, there was no traffic. Halina called over to Piotr. He walked out of the porch and down to her as she held out her hand and smiled. He took her hand, a comforting warmth spreading into his, as she dropped the skipping rope to the ground. It landed with a reverberating thump, shocking Piotr back to the real world.

He shook his head again, trying to clear the cloud of a hangover, and walked to the basin on the opposite wall. He caught his reflection in the mirror, an unclean and awkwardly hung piece that did no one any favours. He hung his head again, his hands resting on the sink edge.

As his head fell his eyes followed, the colour of his vision streaming back into his personal eyelid cinema. Halina led him towards the road. He tried to pull back, his real hand instinctively pulling off the sink and onto his stomach. His dream hand stayed firmly in Halina’s.

Her voice was slow, dull and muffled. ‘Piotr.’

He tried to speak as they reached the pavement. Nothing came out. A sinking feeling began in his gut as Halina reached the road.

A voice came from behind him, this time not as slow but louder. ‘Piotr!’

He turned to see his mother waving and then back to Halina. Her grip on him loosened. Again, from behind, ‘Piotr!’

He turned again. His mother came running down the stairs, her arms raised and waving. He tried to swivel around back to Halina but some unseen force stopped him. He pushed against it but could only turn his head a little. It wouldn’t let him see her.

His mother ran past him, now screaming. ‘Halina! Halina!’

The wall gave way and Piotr turned all the way round.

˜ ˜ ˜

‘How many?’

‘Just two this time.’

‘That’s not enough, man. That’s only three grand.’

‘I know. Nothing to do with me.’

‘Bollocks. It’s all to do with you.’

‘Fuck off! We’re delivering tonight anyway. Two’ll have to be enough.’

‘Okay, whatever. I’m coming round now.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Bleach put the phone down. He looked over at the bedroom door and yawned, clicking his jaw from side to side. The apartment reeked of death. Bleach had become not exactly used to the smell but it had been over a day since he had accidentally over-medicated the girl. It was her fault anyway. She had been far too lively. Far too unpredictable. He’d had a nice time with her at least, before she came to. If she’d not come round, he wouldn’t have had to deliver the fatal shot. Yeah, it was her fault.

He stood up, turning away from the bedroom and towards the kitchen and second bedroom. He reached the sink and grabbed the kettle from the draining board. He filled the kettle and set it on the worktop, flicking a switch down. The indicator lit up orange.

Bleach felt in his pocket and pulled out a small lighter, then in his other pocket for his cigarettes. The smoke helped to conceal the smell of the dead girl, he thought. He would have smoked it anyway. It burned like a miniature bonfire as he drew sharply. The smoke barrelled down into his lungs and up into his nostrils at the same time, an inhalation technique he felt always gave him the full experience.

He walked casually over to the first bedroom and stopped by the door, pressing his ear up against it to listen. Of course she was dead. He had stamped on her head five times, maybe six, to make sure. He had decided to keep the door shut as he didn’t really want to see the mess – a sight he was dreading. It was inevitable though. Jock was almost certainly going to smell her, and it would be impossible to stop him opening the door if he wanted to.

Explaining to Jock why they were fifteen-hundred short would be the real kicker, though. Jock was not going to like that at all. Bleach considered for a few seconds the possibility of disposing of the girl before Jock got there, but he probably only had five or ten minutes. Or he could just kill Jock.

Bleach took another long drag on his cigarette, comically blowing it forcefully out in front of him. He choked a little and let out a chuckle. Over on the table he saw his pipe. There was a wrap of cellophane next to it, slightly exposing the brown chunk inside. He felt hungry all of a sudden and picked the pipe up in one hand, crushing the cigarette into an ashtray with the other.

He fell back into the chair, clicking his lighter to shoot a thin plume of fire into the bulb of the pipe, sucking it down onto the brown powder. It was an entirely different feeling to cigarette smoke, like gaseous glass slipping down the throat; like oysters but with a taste that didn’t make him gag.

Although he was as steadily stoned as ever, Bleach felt the extra layer land in his brain. His eyes closed and ears listened as the kettle did its job.

˜ ˜ ˜

Piotr looked back into the mirror, his eyes red and dark. He closed them again, frantic to get back to the house in Wroclaw, back to his sister. Colour streamed back in easily but he was facing an open road. He ran to the pavement, looking left and right.

She was nowhere to be seen. A voice came from behind him. ‘Piotr.’ It was her voice. Slow, lifeless again.

‘Piotr.’

He turned to see his sister, laid out across the grass, her arms red as if burned. The skin on her face was flayed in patches to reveal the flesh beneath. Her head craned around to face him. She tried to speak again but as her mouth opened, a red river flowed from it, thick as treacle. It seeped down over her chin and into the folds of her neck before pooling under her head.

Halina’s mouth opened wider and the red river stopped; cut off. She began to choke. Piotr moved to her and knelt down, cradling her head in his right hand. Her blood dripped from his fingers. His expression was a mixture of confusion and expectation. The croak turned to a gurgle. He leaned in further and saw she had no tongue. A stub poked out of her throat, a fleshy slug emerging from a dark, wet pipe.

The red river had pooled as a lake in her throat, and as he watched its waves gently lapping up against her gums, her teeth like centuries-old rocks creating currents, he felt himself drawn in towards it. His sister’s hands grabbed at his shirt and pulled him in, deeper, for the grimmest swim of his life.

˜ ˜ ˜

Thump. Thump.

Bleach’s eyes opened into a blurry room.

Thump.

His eyes sharpened and he slunk forwards, pushing his hands into the desk to prop himself up.

Thump. Thump.

‘All right! I’m coming!’

As he approached the door, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the bedroom door was not shut as he had left it. As he thought he’d left it. A rush of anxiety slammed into his stomach and he skipped over to the door, grabbing its handle and pulling it shut with a slam.

Bleach rounded the corner into the alcove housing the front door. He opened it and nodded at Jock, who looked angry and impatient.

‘Took your fuckin’ time,’ Jock said.

‘I was napping.’

‘Whatever. We don’t have much time. Pick-up’s in two hours.’

Jock led Bleach towards the kitchen. ‘Where’s my cuppa then?’ He stopped at the first bedroom, nudging the door open.

Bleach made the tea, pouring another for himself and emptying the last few shots of whiskey from a barely one-day-old bottle into it. He hoped that Jock didn’t see.

‘What’s that fuckin’ smell, man?’ Jock joined Bleach in the kitchen. ‘You killed a dog in here or something?’

Bleach angled his head a little towards his ‘business partner’ and raised a pathetic shrug. ‘Nah. It’s this gear mate. It’s foul.’ His thin lips widened, showing off a smile that made Jock shudder a little.

‘Your teeth are disgusting, mate. See a dentist after the next drop, eh?’

Years of drug and alcohol abuse and a rather laid-back attitude to oral hygiene had indeed taken their toll on Bleach’s mouth – a festering pit of disease, a graveyard in itself.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bleach offered. He wasn’t the sort to look in the mirror anyway. His opinion of other people’s opinions had become far less important after he first tasted the great crystals and never looked back. As long as he had a regular supply and enough money to keep it regular, life was good. He was living the dream.

‘Let’s get ’em ready then.’ Jock moved back to the bedroom. He opened the door fully this time, met with the familiar vision of chaos. It was, he knew, partly his fault. They always kept the girls in Bleach’s flat simply because he didn’t want them in his. He enjoyed having real girls to stay too. They probably wouldn’t take to the idea of sharing the bedroom with a couple of tied-up, half-dead teenagers.

Jock walked to the nearest bed and nudged the first body bag. It shook pathetically. The girl was fourteen. Her clothes and small selection of earthly possessions – what she’d had on her when Bleach entered her life – sat in a holdall at the foot of the bed. The black, shiny cocoon covered her entirely. Two small air holes in front of her head provided enough oxygen. Inside, she was bound and gagged.

It was never a pretty sight taking one of these girls out of their bag. This was, Jock acknowledged internally, the worst part of the job. Seducing the girls outside school, or picking them up at a roadside or wherever, and then having some one-sided fun with them – these were the perks. The thrill of the hunt. Playing detectives, tracking down the criminally young and beautiful, handcuffing them and putting them in the holding cells before they could be processed.

Unzipping the bags was horrible. The smell hitting the air like a car hitting a cow – a malodorous slap in the face, the excrement pooled at the bottom of the bag around the girl’s feet while some had usually dried and caked around the holes from whence they came. Still, right now they just had to load the bags into the van – by far the easiest part.

Bleach joined Jock in the room, sipping at his hot tea. ‘See – nice and tidy this time?’

Jock snorted. ‘For once. Yeah, nice surprise. Cheers. Seriously, man, what the fuck is that smell? That ain’t gear.’

Bleach felt another surge of anxiety rising from his stomach and settling harshly in his throat. Jock nudged the second sack and once satisfied that the flesh within was breathing, he went back out to get his tea. He picked it up and walked over to the sofa. It was covered with a couple of blankets and a pillow at one end.

‘Why’re you sleeping out here?’

Bleach joined him. ‘Fell asleep watching the box.’

‘And the magic bed fairy brought you a blanket and pillow?’

Bleach was about to answer but Jock continued: ‘What’s in your room then? Let me guess – the other girl.’

Bleach shifted, his hand shaking and spilling hot tea down the side of his mug. ‘It’s… look, I was gonna tell you.’

‘For fuck’s sake, mate.’ Jock slammed his mug down on the table, tea spraying upwards like a miniature caffeinated volcano. ‘This again? I knew I shouldn’t let you do this alone.’

The previous day, Jock had cried off at the last minute simply because he’d had a better offer. If Shawna hadn’t called him at just the right time, he would have scouted the schools with Bleach. He was mildly impressed that his moronic partner could manage to harvest more than one girl at a time anyway, but this was not the first time he’d gone too far and taken more than he could handle.

‘So you’ve killed her?’

‘Yeah… I had to mate. Sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

‘You’ll have to get rid of her, mate. Have you scrubbed her up yet?’

‘No… no, I was waiting. Let’s get the others out first. I’ll sort this out later. Sorry.’

Jock winced. ‘Stop saying sorry. I can tell you’re sorry. So unabashedly apologetic for murdering another little girl. Sorry, sorry. Whoops, there goes another. Sorry, everyone. It was an accident. She walked right in front of my foot and I accidentally kicked her to death. There was no way around it. Sorry.’

Bleach chuckled.

‘Oh, this is funny? You know, I don’t think it is. What we do is provide a service. It’s supply and demand. What you’ve done is over-supply and not meet demand. That’s a fucking waste of time and resources, and now you’ve got to dump a dead girl somewhere and hope no one finds her. Well done, mate. Really, well done.’

‘Sorry.’

Jock walked over to the second bedroom and opened the door. ‘You’ve got to be joking! What’s this?’

Bleach stumbled over to join Jock in the doorway. On the carpet in front of them was a large pool of blood, a selection of broken teeth giving it the look of some kind of sea creature yawning. A few feet further away was a small brown hill of excrement, the source of the smell Jock could now pinpoint.

‘Where’s the fuckin’ girl?’

Two – Obliterations

‘We got a name?’

‘Don’t know. I’ll check.’

Mathers flicked his thumb up the screen of his PDA. Text scrolled down. He stopped it and scrolled down a little further.

‘No. She’s in bad shape. Unrecognisable, so it’s going to be dental.’

‘Brilliant. More blind alleys. So what’s the point of going?’

‘Hang a right, just up there.’

Danson did as he was told, turning into a small cobbled patch and stopping short of a set of bollards that blocked access. A small group of people waited, huddled under umbrellas and the canopy of the building behind them.

He stepped out and into a light puddle, a few dirty spurts splashing up onto his trousers. They were only a week old but already looked well worn. He pulled his jacket collar up close around his neck and ducked under the yellow rope.

Mathers was right behind, but he had had the good sense to bring an umbrella. He ducked under the rope, scraping the tip of the umbrella through a shallow puddle, grinding against the wet concrete.

A uniformed officer put his hands up to the gathering. ‘I’m sorry. We’re working as fast as we can.’

A lady with a newspaper folded over her head responded angrily. ‘I’m late for work. My boss is an arsehole and if I get fired for this…’

‘Madam. The whole area is closed until we’re finished, and possibly longer. I suggest you…’

Before he could finish, the lady turned and disappeared around the building towards the main road.

Mathers sidled up to a familiar face, jokily knocking her shoulder with his. ‘Mack. How’s it going?’

Mackenzie knocked him back, a little harder. ‘It’s grim. Hope you haven’t just had breakfast. You won’t want lunch, anyway.’

Danson acknowledged Mackenzie and walked through, arriving at the scene. ‘E118’ in chalky paint was daubed large on black wood panels. A small window was mostly opaque with dust on both sides. The door, another black panel, was propped open by a metal rod. He leaned around to see who was inside.

‘Ah, Mike. Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Morning, Dave. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ Danson felt a little inward poke at his insensitivity but the thought was replaced with the knowledge that he could always show his sensitive side later.

‘It’s not pretty.’ Dave Wilson, forensic detective extraordinaire, was somehow always first at the scene, or so it seemed to his colleagues.

Danson stepped in. Wilson and his assistant, Ed Sharpe, had set up a small lighting rig in one corner of the shack, up on a thin tripod and casting light over to the far wall and everything in between. Ordinarily a scene like this would have an assortment of yellow flags on toothpicks, marking out points of interest.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Early days, but no. My guess is the body was dumped here.’ Wilson pointed over at the corpse, bathed in its own spotlight.

Danson stepped towards it, careful to watch his feet. He reached the body and squatted down, pulling gloves from his pocket and putting them on.

Mathers came in behind him. ‘Hi, Dave.’

Wilson smiled and nodded. ‘Hi, Pete. We’ll move her in a bit. Don’t think this was the scene.’

Mathers nodded and stepped carefully over to join his partner. He put his gloves on too and reached into his pocket, taking his PDA out. ‘Mind out, Mike.’

Danson stood up. Mathers framed his shot not too studiously and thumbed the screen. A flash hit the room like a sharp bolt of lightning.

‘Bollocks.’

‘Turn the flash off, twerp.’

Mathers tried again. This time the shot was true – an eerie glow surrounding the dead girl. ‘Another one for the scrapbook.’ He looked at Danson and shook his head. Danson raised his eyebrows and offered a shrug.

‘What’ve we got then?’

Mathers hunched down a couple of feet from the body. He recalled what Mack had told him outside. ‘Body found in-situ by kids. Door was open, they came in, playing pirates or… something. Victim is female, teenage. Face obliterated.’

Danson winced in agreement. Obliterated was a good description.

Mathers continued: ‘Punctures on the arms. Hands and feet bound. Lesions around the waist. Your turn.’

He stood and backed away, moving behind the arc of the light. Danson took his place. He lifted the girl’s chin slightly, cocked his head down and to the side and nodded. ‘Heavy bruising.’ Resting the chin back, the light flickered, momentarily dancing over the area where the victim’s mouth and nose had been replaced by a red, speckled mess. The eye sockets had become almost one, a large indentation – a crater perhaps – in place of her features.

‘The binding’s wet, Pete.’

Mathers nodded at Wilson. ‘It’s raining. Get the snapper in. We’ll meet the body at Villiers.’

‘Cheers Pete. We’ll have to hold off a bit. UV sweep first.’

Danson and Mathers exited the shack, regrouping with Mackenzie.

‘Coffee?’

‘Very funny, Mike.’

‘I’m not joking.’ Danson smiled and elbowed his partner.

‘Let’s get on with it then.’

˜ ˜ ˜

Piotr blinked hard. Between short bouts of poor quality sleep he’d been hard at his research and now his eyes were stinging. Reclining on his bed, his head painfully propped against the metal rod across the headboard, his laptop computer was hot on his legs.

His discomfort complemented the uncomfortable task of jumping into the rabbit hole. Page after page of naked men and women, their orifices on show and usually open. As he scrolled down the two-hundred-and-twelfth page on PornTap, one scene caught his eye. He touched his finger to the trackpad, moved it over and clicked the image.

He tapped through until the girl came into view. She was barely clothed – a short camisole hanging loosely off her small breasts and stopping just above her waist line. She was pretty but, on closer inspection, not the girl he was looking for.

This grim daily event hooked Piotr. He remembered when he would do this for fun – for personal sexual satisfaction. Now there was no sex; just brutality. Hundreds of thousands of images of debased flesh had filled his mind. Images of girls showing more than any girl had ever shown him. Men standing proud over them with hungry cocks and shaven balls and tattoos and facial hair. Old women with too much make-up, their legs spread for young bucks and their thin penises to conquer.

The film continued and switched its focus on the girl’s fingers to hover over her face. Piotr tapped the pad and stopped it, framing her pretty visage. Her eyes were hollow, almost lifeless, yet something was there – hope, perhaps. He leaned in closer, his neck clicking. Her skin was dry and blotchy. Maybe she had been pretty, once. Now she was a rag doll.

˜ ˜ ˜

‘Peter!’ Mary Mackenzie called from the far end of the corridor that joined the equipment room with the rear section of the front desk of Villiers, the listed historic building that had been home to Malton District Police for over sixty years.

Mathers turned towards her and shrugged, as if to say what?

Mack beckoned him to an open doorway. He joined her there, readying himself for whatever lay within. Having seen the body slumped in the shack was one thing, but viewing it in the cool light of the station would be more shocking: each cut, bruise and sign of trauma telling its own chapter in a horror story, laid bare and clinical.

‘Where’s Mike?’

‘He’ll be along. Probably shaving his balls or something.’

Mack shot him a look. She counted herself as having a good sense of humour but she frequently struggled to appreciate her colleagues’ vulgarity.

Danson appeared behind them. ‘Right then, ladies. Let’s get this done.’

Mack moved to let Danson through. He approached the corpse, which was covered by a thin blue sheet. He pulled the sheet back carefully and looked back to Mathers. ‘Okay, Pete. I did the last one. All yours.’

‘No chance!’ Mathers smiled. ‘You touched her last.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Mack was, and looked, frazzled. ‘Just toss a coin?’

The men nodded. ‘Ah, okay then. I’ll do this one. Your turn next time.’

Mathers looked grateful. Danson turned back to the body. He reached up to the large module hanging from the ceiling and switched the UV light on, then pressed a large red button. A camera lens appeared from the underside of the unit and made a faint whirring sound.

‘Mike Danson, examining unknown.’ He looked up again at a small monitor. ‘Victim is female, five-eight. Slim build. A hundred and twenty pounds roughly. Appears mid-teenage.’

Mathers and Mack left the room.

‘Puncture wounds indicate recent intravenous drug use – but short term. The face is obliterated.’ He tried to separate the jaw. ‘Few teeth intact.’ Releasing the jaw, the face stayed as it was – like a deflated football taking its time to return to form. The UV light gave the blood an eerie purple hue.

Danson flipped the body to get a good view of its back. ‘There’s a smudge here.’ He reached up to the console and depressed a small blue button. A timer counted down. ‘Capture. Mark for Wilson. Mark for Sharpe.’ The camera whirred and an audible cue, which most users of the system had come to call a ‘tick’, told Danson it was done.

‘Mike.’

Danson turned around. ‘Ah, Dave. Just got up?’

Wilson sneered.

Danson continued: ‘Just done some prelims. You should have a pic.’

‘Yeah. It just buzzed.’ Wilson pulled out his PDA. A thumbnail of the dead girl’s back sat in the middle of the screen. He put it back in his pocket. ‘Let’s have a look then.’

‘UV give you anything?’

Wilson approached the corpse. ‘Not a lot. I’d say she’s been dead for a few days. Looks like she crawled in there. We found some footprints. No blood at the scene either.’

‘I’m gonna be a while here. I’ll shoot you if anything comes up.’

‘Cheers.’

Danson left the room. He looked down the corridor towards the front desk and saw his partner leaning against the wall, flirting with the desk sergeant, Liz. He turned back towards the exam room and walked to the men’s toilet door, pushing it open. He entered the middle cubicle and sat down.

Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a small packet. He pulled the ends apart, revealing a small white tablet. He sat still, staring almost through the pill. As always in this situation, his mind offered conflicting advice.

He heard the door swing open.

‘Mike? You in here?’

Danson snapped out of his haze. ‘Yeah. Hold on mate.’ He closed the packet back around the tablet and stuffed it into his pocket before standing, flushing the toilet and exiting the cubicle. He felt dishonest. Wasting water and energy and putting himself through the same turmoil, over and over.

‘What’s up?’

‘We’ve got something.’

‘That was quick, Pete. They’ll promote you to chief scrotum soon.’

‘Fingers crossed.’ The partners grinned. Mathers had no idea that just behind Danson’s grin was a bitter twist of desperation.

‘Let’s grab Dave.’

They exited the washroom and turned straight into the exam room. Wilson was scraping something off the dead girl’s foot.

‘What’s up, Dave?’

Wilson turned around, holding aloft a scalpel covered in a dark brown substance. ‘Happily, that smudge is a tattoo, and it is pretty unusual.’ He’d spotted something beneath the dirty smudge and peeled back a layer or three of skin to reveal the deeper ink. ‘Eastern Europe, possibly Polish.’

‘You’re so subcutaneous, man.’ Mathers laughed, looking at his partner for encouragement.

Wilson frowned. ‘Okay, okay. I suppose I am. The point is this kind of ink originates in the Eastern Bloc.’ He looked back at the body and the tattoo. ‘I’ve found another something down here. Looks like there used to be another tattoo, right… here.’ He pointed the scalpel back at the foot, where he’d also been scraping. ‘There are some remnants of ink in here too.’ He gestured towards a small cavity. ‘See, you missed this stuff. Hotshot detectives. Kindergarten level.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever, Dave,’ Mathers smiled. ‘You mean Mike missed it. He’s no hotshot. He’s a twat.’

Danson and Mathers joined Wilson at the exam table. ‘So someone went to the trouble of trying to remove these. That’s a bit off. Ruining the artistry.’

‘That’s right, Pete. A real shame. A tragedy. Still, gives us a potential lead, for which we should be thankful. So what’s this other one?’

The three men stared at the tattoo. Although it was difficult to make out any detail, it was circular and about two inches around. Danson grabbed the magnifier arm and placed the lens over the tattoo, angling it. ‘Are those letters? What’s that… looks like PP,’ he said.

Mathers was grateful that the corpse was face-down. He didn’t like looking at what was left of her face. The word ‘obliterated’ seemed to loop around whenever the image leapt into his mind.

‘When’ll your report be up?’ Danson asked.

Wilson didn’t appreciate the impatience – but he was used to it. Thirty-two years in the force and most of those burdened with impatience.

‘Give me a chance!’ He smiled to hide his true feelings. ‘Two, maybe three hours. I’ve got to run bloods, tox and a few others.’

Mathers nodded. ‘Okay then. That gives us time to have a think about this PP thing.’ He turned to his partner.