What Lies in the Dark

Anita Gardner is eight years old and she is afraid. She is afraid of the thing that lives under the bed. Mummy says it doesn’t exist, but she knows it does. She can hear it moving in the darkness, scratching and growling, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. Anita is afraid of the big boys at school, the ones who are already ten and so much bigger than her. She has seen them picking on Mary Taylor. Anita spends her break times hiding in corners of the playground, hoping that they don’t come for her. Anita is afraid of maths tests and the big girls’ homework her sister brings home. Anita is afraid of dogs, and wasps, and spiders. She is afraid of the forest that she is walking through right now. She doesn’t usually walk this way but the big boys are around and she needs to avoid them. Even though she now has to walk along the edge of the forest on her own, to get home.

Anita is going to cry. She can hear the sound of twigs breaking around her, strange shrieks and other animal calls closing in. A wasp buzzes past scaring her so badly she breaks into a run, her pudgy legs moving as fast as her little body can go, not quite realising what direction she is running in, just wanting to get home. Faster and faster she runs, her heart beating so loudly she can no longer hear the monsters moving.

Of course she is going to trip, no one can run in a forest when they have strayed from the path. There are always roots and branches for a foot to trip on, and when she does finally fall, she lies shaking, not realising that her leg is bleeding or that she has torn her school skirt. When she finally gets home her mother is going to be very angry but for now she is shaking and crying, just waiting for the monsters, the ogres, to leap out of the woods ready to grab her.

Nothing moves, she holds her breath, warm tears splash down her chubby cheeks. Her heart pounds, thudding
in her ears, waiting for a claw to grab her legs, hands, shoulders. For jaws to chomp down on her flesh. Slowly but heroically she will summon enough courage to stand up and limp unsteadily home. In a few years’ time she will even look back on this and laugh at her childish ways, never again will she fear the woods or the dark. She will never ever know that she fell onto the grave of Victim Number Eight.

Anita Gardner knows Victim Number Eight. Anita knows her as a very nice lady called Joanna Reagan. Joanna started her teacher training at Anita’s school. Anita likes the pretty lady who smiles at everything. Anita has made Miss Reagan a very nice picture and is waiting eagerly to give it to her. No one knows yet that Joanna is missing. The school presumes that Joanna has given up and gone home, they are disappointed that she didn’t tell them that she was leaving but it happens all the time. Her family at home thinks she is too busy to contact them. They haven’t heard from her since Easter and are starting to worry. “This isn’t like her,” her mother mutters. It will be a good few weeks before Joanna is reported missing, before her mother will appeal in the local newspapers for Joanna just to contact her,
no matter what has happened, please just come home.
It will be two years before people realise that there is a serial killer on the loose, and Joanna will always be missing, never found.

They call the occupant of that house, Old Man Krill or The Krill. It is a house close to a park and every day shrill voices speculate on its owner, the local bogeyman. The Krill sits by the door waiting for a child to wander into the back garden and then it’s lunchtime! This would be acted out, the storyteller grabbing a foolish listener, always good for a scream or two. The adults talk about this house too, in more hushed voices and serious tones.

“Don’t go near that house, Sweetie, a bad bad man lives in that house. I want you to promise never to go near that house,” is the cliché on every mother’s lips.

“They say Old Krill found his girlfriend with another man and he chopped them both into little pieces and then he
ate them! Not even the cops will go near that place.”

Rumours are spreading, everyone talks of Old Krill, they know so many different stories; it is a drug house, a brothel which receives no clients, an abortionist clinic for Daddy’s little secret. In tamer stories, it houses a greasy geek intent on world domination, a meth lab or sometimes a sarcastic voice talks of an old lady with nine cats.

“I dare you to … push the doorbell on The Krill’s place.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What are you? Chicken? Cluck cluck cluck.”

“Does little Chicken want his mummy?”

Joanna Reagan’s mother is crying on television and pleading for her daughter to come home. The Christmas after Joanna disappeared is too painful to even mention. Her mother has answered the phone to what seems like a million well-wishers, pranksters and relatives. Joanna still has not come home. Joanna’s younger sister has pierced her nose, dyed her hair six different colours and had nine temper tantrums on the stairs, in small desperate attempts to make her mother notice her. None of the relatives, well-wishers or reporters ever asks about her whilst Joanna is idolised and memorialised. Even Joanna’s room, the bigger one, the one which her sister had been promised when Joanna left for university, remains a shrine to Joanna.

Joanna is just a memory. She is not recognisable as Joanna anymore, even the number 8, so painstakingly carved into her right hand has decayed away. After a year only her mother is still hopeful that she will come home.

Whilst rumours of Joanna Reagan grow cold, The Krill rumours become more sinister and creepy, the spider waiting in the dark.

It’s going to be an unusually nice spring day. Fran Lizzie is lying in a near perfect spot. She is positioned in front of a fence, spread out on luscious green grass, which is lightly tickling her unblemished skin. Fran Lizzie is a pretty girl, very photogenic. She is dressed in a blue shirt with denim jeans with splashes of red. She is staring up at a beautiful clear blue sky, as birds chirp in tune with the burbling and gurgling of a river. Nature is happily beginning the day with no respect for the dead.

Fran Lizzie would have been quite comfortable, if her leg had not been trapped on the merciless iron fence, firmly wedged between the bars, giving her fallen body a slightly twisted effect. But that is nothing, a sting compared to the deep gouge that is spread across her neck, still staining the ground with drips of red. She has been alone for a while, unnoticed, no one really pays attention around here anymore. Fran Lizzie’s sightless eyes cannot see the sun rise nor will she hear the first scream of the new day.

A man passes, walking his dog, at first seeing just a blur of a girl, he is not really looking, doesn’t stop to think how a girl could have got over that iron fence. He doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to be involved with broken rules. His dog strains at the lead, whining. He tries to pull the dog forward, anxious to go home and get ready for work. The dog is stubborn, refusing to move, as he turns to get a tighter grip on the leash and perhaps share an embarrassed look with the girl on the grass. He finally looks, a startled pause, then he loosens his grip, his arms falling limp as blood gushes toward his heart. He catches a better view of the mutilated lady lying in the lake of red.

“What the fuck …” he whispers.

The police arrive, closely followed by an unnecessary ambulance. Their first task is to get over the iron fence, a
fence designed to keep people out, a fence that had been resurrected to stop anyone from playing in the dirty river. The key to the iron gate cannot be located, so the first responders have no choice but to climb over the fence, trying so hard not to contaminate the crime scene, careful not to step into the red pond. But hoping, despite everything, for a sign of life.

She is photographed from every angle, hundreds of digital photographs documenting her final violation. Particular attention is paid to the crude cuts in her hand. Then Jane Doe is officially pronounced dead and cautiously removed. The crime scene investigators start the long meticulous task of clearing the scene. Sealing nine shrivelled condoms, twelve cigarettes butts and six crushed beer cans carefully into paper bags to be sent to the back-locked lab. They spend hours sweating into their plastic protective suits as the small crowd of onlookers grows. Working patiently, ignoring the cat calls and photographs of the media, as the stench of the algae river wafts by, while flies nosedive around their heads. The area has never looked cleaner when they finish, if you ignore the pool of the congealed blood, soon to be washed away.

Word is spreading while they work, that a body … no, two bodies! Have been found, mutilated! Their eyes missing! High schools are filling with hushed whispers, they have found a young woman, no, man! Suspicions and worries are cast on every absent student, small children are in tears, provoked by cruel lies, ringing home frantically just to check … mobiles ring and ring and ring.

Someone has even tried phoning Fran Lizzie, who cannot answer her phone right now. Even though she is late for work, two hours and ten minutes late and her boss is counting. Fran Lizzie’s phone briefly rang, until the last of Fran Lizzie’s battery died, buried behind the dissolving mints in Fran Lizzie’s sinking purse. The purse is submerged in the contaminated river water, caught on a rusty shopping trolley, downstream from where the officers are dragging. He threw it in the river just for fun, after taking a trophy. He will laugh
to himself later as he sits, listening to people complain about what the hell they might have caught at the riverbank.

Detective Sergeant Aaron Fletcher and his senior partner, Bullface, have been assigned to this case. Victoria Bullrush, Victoria never Vicky ‘Don’t Call Me Bullface’ Bullrush. Bullface is the kind of cop who could never work under cover. Everything about her just squeals cop, her stance, her clothing and her attitude. Everything down to the permanently embedded frown. In her twenty years of service she has played by every rule and will tolerate no breaking or bending of the law. Even her husband will carefully obey speed limits when she is in the car.

Fletcher and Bullface are in front of the open cast iron fence, gazing down on the cleared grass.

“She was killed here, facing the fence. Most of the spatter is on the grass. Then she was thrown over the fence, as yet no ID. I have a team dragging the river at the moment, Michaels is going through
Missings
… body has no defensive wounds, no sign of sexual assault as yet.”

Bullface looks down at the splattered drops of blood. She, Jane Doe, was facing the river, he was behind her, probably pointing to something across the river,
Look what’s that?
There would be minimal blood splatter on him, mostly likely on his sleeve, staining as he drew the knife across her throat. Possibly they might find his clothing fibres on the back of Jane Doe’s clothes … possibly. It is something to start with. She gazes down on the impression Jane Doe had left on the grass, Jane Doe had been killed and then discarded with little regard. It was dubious that this had been a personal kill. Bullface surveys the once quiet street, only a few reporters remain now, photographing whatever looks shocking, still held at bay by scintillating yellow police tape. Jane Doe’s death will not make global or even national news just yet. The images of the empty street, of the iron fence and its enclosed darkness, contrasting against the sharp yellow tape will just make local news. The images will be slapped on to the third page of tomorrow’s newspaper alongside a small
head shot of what used to be Fran Lizzie Taylor.

There are no houses nearby, this street is just an isolated short cut home for many anonymous people. Fletcher, in a mad moment of twisted philosophy, wonders. If a girl screams in the middle of the street and no one is around to hear it, how do we know she screamed? The bubble is beginning to boil in the pit of his stomach, the dark dried stain amalgamated in his head.

Bullface is thinking more professionally. Fran Lizzie was probably very light, like a doll, says an unwanted thought. Skimpy thing, lack of defensive wounds means that she probably didn’t put up much of a fight, might not even have known what was happening. An easy kill in other words. The bastard must have been very strong, strong enough to lift her over a five foot fence. Tall, dark, strong and handsome, all the traits of a bastard. It could have been two bastards though, that would have made the throwing easier, but lack of sexual assault, lack of defensive, the way Fran Lizzie’s foot had been caught on the fence, suggesting he hadn’t quite made the toss. These things all said that there was just one. The unwanted questions begin to pile in her mind. Did he choose a girl he knew he could lift? This site felt too planned to be accidental. He must know this area well, must have planned this … had he planned it to be her? Did she mean something to him? The way she had been discarded suggested not, but there was still a possibility. Why leave her here? She was found so easily, like he was challenging them, look at me, look at me, you can’t catch me … an unwelcome shiver runs down Bullface’s spine. A planned dumpsite, a planned open kill, a kill that seems too planned to be a first kill. A rational killer who knows what he is doing. Then there were also the crude cuts to consider. The killer must have been very confident to take the time to make those, confident no one would disturb and then there was what he had carved … her thoughts are interrupted by two triumphant shouts, echoing across the muddy water, one part of the team eagerly pulls out a brief case, the other part of the team, a women’s purse, both stolen, both oozing grunge, neither actually belonging to Fran Lizzie.