Draft

Chapter 1- The discovery. Max

"Max!" My name echoed through the trees from the mouth of my twin sister. "What the fuck is tha'?" I looked in the direction that her dainty finger was pointing.

"Shit, sis, is that..."

"A fucking body" She screamed before I'd even had chance to finished my sentence. I stared at Lisa, not daring to look in the shallow river. It was Halloween, it must be a joke, I thought.

Before I had time to stop her, Lisa ran towards the edge of the water and violently flipped the limp body over to show the face.

"Darren!" her voice rang through the woods once more. Neither of us were expecting it to be Darren. Not Darren fucking Wayne. He was the rich, nerdy kid who happily did everyone's homework just for fun. He seemed to be innocent, happy; he was just Darren. The mystery was how did he end up lying face down in the river behind our house?

"Max, call the fucking police, ambulance, fire brigade. Something!" I was tugged away from my thoughts, instantly dialled 999 and told them what we'd found. The dispatcher told us someone was on the way and asked us not to leave the site before we'd been questioned.

It was going to be a long night.

*********************

The sun had just started to set as the police arrived. The paramedics had gotten there first, their torches casting shadows around trees and the heavy boots snapping twigs as they ran towards the river. When they arrived they formally confirmed that Darren was 'deceased', carried him away and loaded his body into an ambulance to take him to the morgue to find cause of death and for him to be officially identified. We were given strict instructions not to tell anyone what we had seen until they were sure it was Darren; but we knew it was.

Now the police had a much harder job; they had to deal with a panic stricken Lisa. If I had to use one word to describe my twin, calm would not be that word. In fact, on a normal day, Lisa's stress levels were ten times that of an average person. That's a lot of stress for a five foot, three, seventeen year old girl.

"Lisa, Lisa, you're going to have to calm down." Sgt Openshaw whispered into my sister's pale ear. "They're not going to hurt you, they just want to know what you saw."

"I know what I saw. I told them what I saw. I saw Darren fucking Wayne in the river, right there." She thrust her hand over to where Darren's body had been just a short ten minutes ago. I sighed at the interaction, there was no point in telling them what we saw, they knew who it was and where he had been, they were just in denial about it. No one wanted to believe that the body really was Darren. He was the brightest kid in school, everyone had such high expectations of him, but even the police in this town didn't want to admit that the shining star of Greater Hulbrooke to be gone. We were a tight knit community, everyone knew each other in the small space we had to live. Even the geeks that would be off the social scale in other towns were accepted as one of us. If I knew anything about Darren on that night, it was that he would be missed by everyone.