Woodpecker

Chapter 13/ John 3 / 2 x 3 x 5 Days Left

The little girl, eight years old, sits in the wooden chair in the corner of Geering's office, framed by a towering tropical houseplant arching over her head. It's early and in the morning light he can see her wearing the same nighty, washed to off white, that she always wears. The nighty looks like something from a Dickens story. Thick cotton with lace around the neckline. Her expression is accusatory, disappointed in him, an expression like the one his father would sometimes cast upon him. Her skin is surprisingly pink, made more so by her thick black hair and her eyebrows standing flexed and in tension. Flushed and rosy her complexion isn't at all what you would expect of a ghost. If that is what she is.

John knew the girl well. He had become accustomed to her visits, and they no longer frightened him. She had been haunting him for nearly thirty years now. She didn't just haunt him in his dreams, though she regularly appeared in the most beautiful of slumbers to jolt him awake, she also on occasion appeared in his waking hours too. She never says anything or makes a noise, not even a gentle puff of breath. She just looks at him with the same expression fixed on her face, the only movement a transitory blink of the eyes.

She is real enough that he can't look through her. The wall behind is entirely obscured by her substance. To him she isn't a ghost or phantom nor some creation of his mind, but a mark left on his soul. A tattoo, beautiful in its tragedy.

"Sorry. I tried my best," he says across to her smiling his warm smile.

The girl's name is Fiona Scott. She's eight years old. Twenty-eight years ago, she was found strangled in her bed by her mother. They had only gone out for an hour to a pub on the corner of their street. They had left their children, a son, and a daughter, sleeping peacefully. It was something that they had done many times before. If they woke, the kids knew that their parents were not far away, and never for long.

On that night though someone broke in through a door leading from the kitchen to the small courtyard at the back of the house. They must have climbed the wall and then forced the door with a crowbar or similar. The house would have been dark and silent, and the burglar probably thought the place was empty. Nothing was disturbed downstairs, so Geering surmised that he had probably gone straight for the bedrooms looking for jewellery and other valuables.

For some reason, and they never worked out why, the burglar throttled Fiona in her bed, neatly laying her dead body out on top of the blankets still wearing her nighty. The same nighty that she now sits here wearing. He left the brother sleeping or didn't realise he was there, and he only woke up when his mother started screaming.

This was the third murder case John had worked in his career, and the only one he never solved. He'd had other cases go the wrong way at court, but he had always been sure that the person in the dock was the right man. But this one he never got close to figuring out who had committed the crime.

This case had also touched him more than any other case. Not just because he hadn't solved it, or because the girl was so young, but also because of how senseless it was. Normally Geering could have some understanding, sympathy even for the perpetrator. He could see how the darkness had bled out from a chaotic life and led them to his interrogation room. Situations getting out of hand, a temporary suspension of morality, or a belief that they wouldn't be caught. But this burglar, this murderer, upon finding the girl in her bed, could have just quietly turned around. He could have crept back downstairs, out the door, and over the wall. Instead, he took Fiona's life. Such a benign sounding phrase he always thought. To take a life. She would have felt it squeezed slowly from her, suddenly awake, the world coursing with bewildering fear. He had longed to look the killer in the eyes and ask him, why?

The parents had been torn apart and vilified in the newspapers. An injustice on top of so many injustices in John's view. An hour and everything had changed forever. Some thought they were involved, rumours that persisted through the years. But this couldn't have been. They didn't need alibis, even though they had them, watertight. He only had to spend time with them to know with certainty that they were not involved.