No one knows what happened to the king of Stratford-Ward's Private Academy.
His mutilated body is weeks after his disappearance, barely alive, in the cottage basement of his best friend's house. His acid-soaked eyes were impaled by two of the most...
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The Police Station reeks of mouldy paper and rusting cabinetry. Papers litter every desk in an open office area, separated in cubicles with low walls, where most of the officers reside or hide. A coffee machine bubbles in the break corner, accompanied by a plain row of mugs and a small bar fridge below the plywood table. The walls are washed in white paint, stained brown at the corner of every hallway entrance where people's crusty elbows, in unwashed jackets masked with sprays and musk, scraped against the wall, slowly eroding away the plaster into side-lying arches.
Officers and law enforcers restlessly pace in the main corridor of the station, the sparsely lit white artery that leads to an array of interrogation rooms and at the end, holding cells behind a doorway. Albe stands outside a tinted window that overlooks the first interrogation room of the hallway. A woosh of wind passes him as one of the officers march behind him with someone in cuffs, making him even more skittish than he already is. Albe does not feel comfortable in the house of criminals being as affluent as he is.
Quietly stood next to him, is Eugenia Berkeley, George Berkeley's dinky, voiceless wife. The same wife who could not even comfort her own son from seeing the remnants of his best friend because she was too focused on her lack of balance on expensive heels. Today, she seems a bit more together. Her hair is tied in a neat braid behind her head, whilst her body is wrapped up in a long, double breasted coat. Her lips are covered in a bright red lipstick as if she's trying to make a statement that half of her lipstick is not snogged off by the rim of a glass.
The hallway outside the glass pane is like a spectator's room—small speakers sit on the side of the glass panes, fastened to the wall by screws. A long nook sits below the glass pane like a windowsill, holding onto a cup of cold filter coffee. Beyond the tinted glass pane, is a small, dark room, with walls covered in black foam like it is wallpaper. In the middle of the room, a wide glass table sits, unstained by fingerprints. On one side of the table, a restless teenage boy sits, staring out before him. Albeit the boy's irregularly burly size from copious amounts of sports and fitness training, and good genes, the anxiety of sitting in an interrogation room is turning him into a small lad again. To his side, a scrawny lawyer sits, muttering words to a child a child should not understand. The boy fiddles with his fingers, one of his knees bopping up and down like a basketball.
"Please be gentle with the boy, Kels." A hushed voice begs at the foot of the hallway. Albe looks over his shoulder, seeing Detective Brighton and a female detective pacing towards him. Brighton is a strong, tall man, but the woman Albe presumes is Kels, is about as burley as he is. She is cladded in a navy pantsuit and a soft, frilly blouse to feminize her masculine frame. In one hand, she has two bottles of water clutched by the caps and in the other, a plastic file. "He has a lot of trauma."
"Every person has some level of trauma," the woman says. She looks at the boy's mom, staring at her with big eyes. The small woman has not said a single word since the discovery of Albe's critical son and dead ex-wife in her cottage. Not even during her own interrogation. "Lucky for you, I enjoy interviewing moody, antsy teenagers." She closes the door behind her.
