24
Mrs Green stood in the near-bare room that had been rather haphazardly painted ‘Devil Red’.
She peeled off her all-in-one painting overall and screwed it up, then placed it in a plastic bag and looked around the room and smiled, proud of her accomplishment. She had painted the room in just a couple of hours, that’s a good pace of work for anybody, although the quality of her work was sloppy, very poor even.
Red paint had dripped and ran onto the carpet from the roller, and from when too much had been applied to the surfaces in one go. The white coving had been painted, where she hadn’t missed bits, and the white ceiling had been rolled red as well, which had clearly proven difficult, as the quality of finish could have been better from a blind person with shaky hands.
She had obviously been frustrated at one point, as the paint covered computer equipment had been pushed from the desk and was now smashed and broken on the floor. But still, at that very moment, she was happy.
Mrs Green took the bag with the overalls and dumped them beside the kitchen bin. She hadn’t finished all she had planned for the day in her ‘red room’ but had some time before the paint would dry so decided to have another glass of wine.
The open bottle sat on the table, but she couldn’t see her glass, she’d forgotten that she threw it out into the garden earlier on, that unfair act of violence towards an animal just doing as it was genetically programmed to do, exploring the outdoors and marking its territory.
She didn’t see the correlation between the cat being a cat, and the advice she had recently given to her son.
‘This is who you are, Ben, it is in your blood.’
There were no clean glasses in the cupboard. She looked in the dishwasher and found them all there, the big and the small, all dirty, so grabbed one out at random, slammed the door shut and started the machine without adding any cleaning product.
She sat at the table, placed her filthy glass down and poured, filled it to the top with her preferred red wine, then gulped it down.
Mrs Green leant across the table and flicked on the radio, it was tuned in as always to the local news channel. As with all smaller radio stations, it relied on advertising for funding, and at the time was going through its usual five minutes of advertisements. Annoyed, she cursed under her breath at this unfortunate timing, ‘fucking adverts.’
Also on the table was a cardboard box, filled with newspaper cut-outs and photo frames, some of which she’d salvaged from the clearing out of Mr Green’s office. She carefully lifted them out of the box, one by one, and gently placed them to the side. If she had taken this much care with the painting, the end result would have been entirely different in the red room. After the last of the frames were resting on the table, she lifted out the newspaper clippings. She sifted through the pictures and stories, all of which were relevant to The Phantom killings.
Mrs Green’s ears pricked up and a smile ever so slightly crept onto her face as finally, the advertisements finished and the radio presenter said they were cutting to a statement being made by a Detective Inspector Summers, the latest officer in charge of The Phantom case.
The press were going quite hard on Summers, who had just announced that the police believed the killings of teenagers Ricky Robinson and Alexia White were down to The Phantom.
A few members of the press were quick to state that, if this was The Phantom, this was the first time he had killed two victims at the same time, and also that the frequency of the murders was increasing. What was her planned course of action? What were the police going to do in order to protect the public?
For all her brightness, Summers didn’t have the answers they wanted to hear.
She wished it was Watts fielding the questions; although she knew he’d never put himself in the line of fire. Or even Kite, if he could transfer his interviewing skills into the media room, then he could give the press a run for their money. She made a mental note of this for next time.
A cocky journalist stood, working for a national tabloid, and asked a question that Summers knew would arise at some point, and had even practised a cool, calm response to.
‘Can you honestly say, after the tragedy of The Phantom murdering your father, that you are the best person to lead this investigation?’ asked the reporter. ‘Can you remain professional, when this case has an obvious personal involvement for you?’ he continued.
In her practised response, Summers had coolly played down her personal involvement in the case. Her father’s death was a tragedy, a good man lost at the hands of pure evil. That she was going to put this criminal behind bars, not just for him, but for the families and friends of all the victims, and also to protect the innocent public from further atrocities.
But she didn’t react like that.
The loss for words at the previous questions, the disagreement with her boss about the person responsible for the latest killings, her personal involvement, they all came into play. Suddenly, she doubted herself. And when she opened her mouth to give a reply, not one word came out. An incredibly awkward silence, for what felt like days to Summers, hung in the air until she turned away from the crowd and walked out of the media room, leaving the press buzzing amongst themselves.
The radio presenter came back on air, clearly shocked by what had just happened at police headquarters, and added his two pence worth of opinion, branding the decision to give this case to a victim’s relative shambolic, and further bad management by the authorities in charge of solving these crimes and finding The Phantom.
Mrs Green chuckled, and stared into the newspaper cut-out she now held in her hands. Dated six years earlier, the headline read, ‘Detective Summers murdered, Phantom strikes again.’
25
Summers strode into her office, slammed the door closed behind her and sat down heavily behind her desk. She took a minute to work on her breathing exercises, as recommended to her from an old friend from back in her medical days, to help calm down.
‘Oh, sod this,’ she said, as she gave up on the breathing and pulled out her hip-flask.
Half-way through her second gulp, the door to her office burst open and in walked Watts, closing the door behind him and sitting down in the chair the other side of her desk. He raised his eyebrows at her as she screwed the lid back onto the hip-flask and put it into a drawer. She wiped her mouth then gave him her attention, waiting for the inevitable disciplining she was about to receive.
Surprisingly, it didn’t arrive. At least, not in the way that would have been completely justified.
‘We always knew this was going to be hard. We discussed this. You told me this was the case you wanted, the reason you joined the force. Now, I’m going to ask you one last time, and that will be the end of it,’ said Watts. ‘Your personal involvement in this case is not necessarily a problem to me, you know that. But tell me, are your feelings being a hindrance? Or are you going to catch this guy and put him behind bars?’
Summers sat up in her chair, took a deep breath and looked straight into the eyes of her superior.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, ‘I will bring The Phantom to justice. For my father, for the other victims, for…’
‘Stop,’ Watts interjected. ‘Why you do it is not my concern,’ he said as he stood. ‘Just get it done.’
Summers gave a nod. She understood.
Trying to give the case such a detailed reason as to why she wanted it solved wasn’t the point. If anything, someone so close to the case emotionally should be hiding their feelings, and not give any reason at all. She was a professional, this was her job. That was reason enough.
Watts opened the door but stopped himself before leaving the room, turning back to Summers.
‘One last thing,’ he said, ‘you are not your father, and that’s the last time I want to catch you drinking on duty.’
He paused for a moment, the wheels of thought in motion inside his head.
‘And maybe we’ll keep you away from the press for the time being. If need be, send your man Kite to do the talking,’ he said, ‘but you prepare any statements beforehand. Let them feed on him. Keep your head straight and
