book club: oneshot

Challenge 2: descriptive

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Finn got off the cab on King's Road and walked the remaining quarter mile to Redesdale street through the cold but busy Chelsea morning. His white, icy breath hung in the air, and, jamming his hands deep into his pockets, he pulled his coat tighter around him. God, he missed Jamaican weather. He supposed he should be glad that it wasn't raining or snowing, though the London sky remained grey and bleak and threatening, but why could it never be sunny?

9 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Couldn't people choose a more convenient time to die? One that preferably won't ruin his holiday mood?

He already knew what this is. With his luck, this case would be just as bizarre as the ones he dealt with before. He only ever got assigned to cases so grotesque and so bizarre no one else wanted to deal with them.

He trudged through biting cold for five minutes, mumbling silent swearwords at the weather and at his luck until he came up on Redesdale. He should've brought something warm. He should've let the cabbie drive him here.

An ambulance looked as inconspicuous there as it would in Belgravia. He grimaced inwardly at the cars he knew he could never afford along the narrow street. He noted several Range Rovers, a Mini, an Audi, a BMW, and--his breath hitched--a Porsche. He would no doubt suffer a crippling sense of poverty if he'd driven here in his 110. Thank God for convenient broken engines.

He made a quick study of the houses and frowned. He could never understand why houses in Chelsea were so expensive. If he had money to own a Porsche, he wouldn't buy a house on Redesdale street.

The houses had four stories, three above ground and one under. The lower two stories were painted stark white, with protruding bay windows and bleak, dark doors--only two of which had Christmas wreaths on them. The upper two stories were ancient bricks which could use some cleaning. Rectangular windows frowned from above, framed in white, some covered with curtains and blinds, some left bare. Voices drifted from one half-opened window somewhere down the road. There were no trees, only dying potted plants protected by wrought iron fences. Someone could get impaled on one of those.

Watson--his name reminiscent of a certain TV show which season five is yet to be released--waved at him from the house with the dark blue door. He didn't smile, and his face looked pale. Only his ash-blonde hair remained on point. He drowned in his own coat. "What happened to your car this time?" he asked, as he descended the front steps of the house.

"Won't start."

The lines on his face deepened. He was twelve years Finn's senior. "You should get a new one, mate."

Finn grinned. "I'll have to rob a bank for that."

"It can't be that bad."

He shrugged. "What are we dealing with?" he asked instead, desperate to stop with small talks and get into the building to get out of the morning air.

Watson made a face. "I don't think you want to know, mate."

"It's my job to know, though."

(He wished it wasn't. Why did he ever decide to be a homicide detective? Why did he ever decide to allow dead bodies to plague his nightmares?)

Watson grimaced. "Let me put it into perspective for you: even I want to throw up just thinking about it."

Finn winced. Watson was the coroner. He'd seen more bodies than anyone Finn knew. He'd seen some really bad ones. Broken, rotten, mutilated. A dead body that could make Watson nauseous would probably kill anyone else. Turn them to stone, like the sight of Medusa.

But he wanted to see. One of the reasons he became a detective was to understand the extent of cruelty people are capable of. He explained this to Watson, who simply crossed his arms and leaned on the ambulance, resigned.

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

Finn entered the house after he covered his hair, his hands and the sole of his boots with plastic. He assumed the building had been empty for years. The room he stepped into was bare, with tall, cold white walls and polished wooden floor. At least he thought the walls were white. Blood had been splashed all over the place. Some had splattered onto the ceiling. There was more blood, he realized, than a human body contained.

Whoever did this brought extra blood with them. Too much blood. For show.

Hopefully animal blood and not human.

He made his way around the thick red pools on the floor, careful not to step into any of them. He noted the lack of bloody foot- or shoe-prints, or any prints at all. He also noted that the blood hadn't dried for long. The only smell in the air was the sharp metallic tang.

He followed down the narrow corridor to the living room, where the SOCOs still worked, marking evidences and taking photos, dressed in plastic. Two spotted him and gave polite nods.

He added the lack of blood in the crime scene itself to his mental note. Aside from the fantastic recoloring of the walls, there were no actual blood near the body, covered in white sheet. There were, again, no furniture in the room.

There weren't many things to mark. Finn always found the lack of yellow markers unsettling. The person who did this brought extra blood for redecorating, left no footprints--at least none that he could see--and not many evidence. And what little evidence they had  seemed to point to the fact that this was not the initial crime scene. It was too clean, too simple, too morbid. Whoever did this came prepared.

He hoped whoever did this hadn't committed, and won't commit, any more murders.

Why can't he get an easy, normal case for once?

He approached the body. "May I?" he asked. He didn't expect to be met with so many curious stares, but the lead SOCO nodded his approval.

Just how bad is this body?

He didn't look right away. He noted that the body was placed dead-on at the center of the room, at least as far as he could tell. He noted from the way the white sheet covered it that the body belonged to a naked female.

"Clothes? Belongings?" he asked.

"Nothing, guv," someone replied.

"Assault? Rape?"

"Not as far as we could tell," the lead SOCO answered.

"You didn't move this, did you?" he asked. They shook their heads.

There were no marks around the body, no yellow placards. Just bare wooden floor.

"Cause of death?"

"Blood loss."

He frowned. "The blood on the walls...?"

"We don't know yet."

He knelt down next to the body and pulled the white sheet back. It took a full ten seconds for his brain to register what he was seeing and for his stomach to react accordingly. He swallowed back the bile in his throat and tried to hold back from swearing. He ended up humming and shaking his head, his stomach gone.

"You all right, guv?" one of them asked.

He nodded and hastily pulled the white sheet back up over the head, as decently as he could without looking. He got up, excused himself, and walked out of the room before the urge to vomit became too strong.

He'd seen a body without eyes. He'd never seen one without a face.