If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

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    IF SNOW HADN’T fallen, I might never have seen the woman in black. She might have remained hidden amidst the ink-black of a London December, like a mystery whose time has yet to come around. But the sky grew heavy and turned yellow, it sank some thousands of miles closer to earth, until we could almost feel the weight of it pressing down on us. And then it opened, and crisp, white flakes began to fall. They fell about the woman in black, skimming past her swirling robes, and covered the world around her. Like a negative photograph, like the converse of the popular image of a ghost, the slim figure stood silent and alone. But most undeniably there.
    The night it began, I’d just arrived home from work, was seconds away from locking my car and going indoors. I fully expected it to be a perfectly ordinary Thursday evening and I’d had few enough of those lately.
    Just weeks earlier, so recently the taste of it still hung, bitter and cloying, at the back of my throat, a serial killer had hit London like a demolition ball. For a while, we thought we had a killer who was copycatting the most notorious and vicious murderer the world has ever known – the infamous Jack the Ripper. And then we realized it was a whole lot worse than that. Slick, quick, brutally imaginative, the killer ran rings around the police, rings that grew ever tighter, until it seemed that the only person left in the ever-decreasing circle was me.
    It was over: the killer was caught and brought to justice; but those of us who’d worked the case were learning that when blood flows long and fast enough, the stains it leaves behind aren’t easily washed away. We were all, I think, more than a little shell-shocked. Above all, we were craving normality, and for a few short weeks we had it. Too few, too short.
    Any cars in the vicinity of Larkhill Park, Kennington – reports of disturbance in progress. Urgent assistance requested. Proceed with extreme caution
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    I wasn’t in a marked vehicle – detectives drive their own cars – and, strictly speaking, it was a call for uniform presence, but Larkhill Park is yards away from where I live. Footballs kicked hard in its vicinity have been known to land in my garden and this didn’t feel like something I could ignore.
    I gave my name (or what passes for it these days). Detective Constable Lacey Flint, and told Control I was seconds away and could go and take a look. She told me to be careful, in fact she said it twice – maybe my reputation had gone before me – and that uniform would be with me in approximately five minutes.
    It was late November, but mid-winter cold. The artificial heat that normally clings like mud to London’s buildings was powerless in the face of the cold front that had settled over the city. The air was crisp on faces and dry in mouths. It was cold that discouraged lingering. People spent as little time as possible outdoors, hurrying instead from office to bus, from shop to car, and then home if they were lucky enough to have one.
    At half past six in the evening it was also mid-winter dark. London is never really without light, but the backstreets and alleyways of its southern districts can get pretty close to Stygian blackness.
    As I jogged down the alley that took me to the park entrance, I could smell gunpowder in the air. It was only a couple of weeks after November the fifth, the day when Britain, for reasons no one fully understands, celebrates a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament by lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks. As customs go, it would be daft enough were it confined to just one day, but firework season spreads like butter across a hot-plate, starting in mid October and going on to New Year’s Eve.
    My hope, as I turned the corner and saw the entrance to the park, was that this was an impromptu firework party: that a gang of local teenagers had set fire to a waste-paper bin and were letting off a few fireworks. Maybe there’d be cigarettes and cider. Cannabis if I were unlucky. I’d show my warrant card, tell them the arrival of grumpy uniformed policemen was imminent, and advise them to make themselves scarce. I wasn’t remotely intimidated by gobby teenagers. It wasn’t so very long ago that I’d been one myself.
    Getting closer, I could hear scuffling and low-pitched shouts. Then the sound of footsteps running fast. I turned in their direction and thought I saw a dark figure disappearing in the distance, but couldn’t be