Dead Like You

Another rack of blue and red crates containing syringes, swabs and vials, all sealed in sterile wrappers. A pink chair. Weighing scales. A basin with a moisturizer dispenser on one side and sterile handwash on the other. A telephone sitting on a bare white work-surface like some unused lifeline in a television quiz game. A foldaway screen on castors.
    Tears welled in her eyes. She wished Dermot was here. She wished, in her addled mind, that she hadn’t been unfaithful to him, hadn’t had this crazy thing with Iannis.
    Then suddenly she blurted out, ‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’
    ‘Why do you think that, Roxy?’ the SOLO asked, jotting down her words in the log she was keeping in her notepad. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself at all. That’s not right.’
    But the woman lapsed back into silence.
    ‘OK, my love. Don’t worry. You don’t have to say anything to me. We don’t have to talk today if you don’t want to, but what I do need to do is obtain forensic evidence from you, to help us try to catch the man who did this to you. Is that all right with you?’
    After some moments, Roxy said, ‘I feel dirty. I want to take a shower. Can I do that?’
    ‘Of course, Roxy,’ the Forensic Medical Examiner said. ‘But not just yet. We don’t want to wash away any evidence, do we?’ She had a slightly bossy tone, Claire Westmore thought, a little too officious for the victim’s fragile state.
    Silence again. Roxy’s mind went off on a tangent. She had taken out two of Dermot’s best bottles. Left them somewhere. One open on the kitchen table, the other in the fridge. She would have to buy a bottle somewhere to replace the opened one, and go to the house before Dermot came back and replace them in the cellar. He’d go loopy otherwise.
    The FME snapped on a pair of latex gloves, walked over to the plastic crates and removed the first item from its sterile wrapping. A small, sharp implement for taking scrapings from underneath fingernails. It was possible the woman had scratched her attacker and that crucial skin cells containing his DNA might be trapped beneath her nails.
    This was just the start of a long ordeal for Roxy Pearce in this room. Before she would be permitted to take a shower, the FME would have to take swabs from every part of her body where contact with her assailant might have occurred, looking for saliva, semen and skin cells. She would comb her pubic hair, take her blood alcohol and a urine sample for toxicology tests, and sketch in the Medical Examination Book any damage to the genital area.
    As the FME worked her way through each of the woman’s nails, bagging the scrapings separately, the SOLO tried to reassure Roxy.
    ‘We’re going to get this man, Roxy. That’s why we’re doing this. With your cooperation, we’ll be able to stop him from doing this to anyone else. I know it must be hard for you, but try to hold on to that.’
    ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ Roxy suddenly said. ‘Only 4 percent of rapists ever get convicted. Right?’
    Claire Westmore hesitated. She’d heard that nationwide it was actually only 2 percent, because just 6 percent of rapes were ever reported. But she didn’t want to make things worse for the poor woman.
    ‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ she answered. ‘But the figures are low, yes. That’s because so few victims have your guts, Roxy. They don’t have the courage to come forward like you are doing.’
    ‘Guts?’ she retorted bitterly. ‘I don’t have guts .’
    ‘Yes, you do. You really do have guts.’
    Roxy Pearce shook her head bleakly. ‘It’s my fault. If I’d had guts, I’d have stopped him. Everyone’ll think I must have wanted him to do this, that I must have encouraged him somehow. Anyone else might have managed to stop him, knee him in the nuts or something, but I didn’t, did I? I just lay there.’

35
    Friday 9 January
    Darren Spicer’s morning was getting better. He’d recovered his things from Terry Biglow and now he had a place to store them, a tall, cream metal locker with a key of his own at St Patrick’s night shelter. And he hoped, in a few weeks, he’d get a MiPod there.
    The big Neo-Norman church at the end of a quiet residential street in Hove had adapted to the changing world. With its shrinking congregation, much of St Patrick’s cavernous interior had been partitioned off and placed in the hands of a charity for the homeless. Part of it was a fourteen-bed dormitory where people