Shooting in the Dark

on paper, he’d carry them as vague ghosts in his mind. What captured the woman for him were the layers of sweat-rings under her arm. The smell was important, but it was something else. He hadn’t described the smell in his notes because it could have been anything - sour, sweet, musk or a mixture of aromas. But the sweat-rings were exact; they encapsulated the woman’s character.
    He saw a woman with a pram enter the street, but he didn’t see that it was Janet. In the order of his universe Janet was not in his mind. Deep within his unconscious, or subconscious, Janet was at home with Geordie and their baby.
    He checked his watch and noted the time. He was about to write that a woman with a pram had entered the street, but an inner man prompted him to look at her again.
    Janet crossed over the street to Angeles Falco’s house. She walked up the drive and rang the front doorbell. She waited for half a minute before knocking on the door. JD couldn’t think why Janet would be calling on the blind woman. Did they know each other? He couldn’t imagine that they were friends. Two women from different sides of the tracks.
    Janet backed away from the door and peered at the bedroom windows. Then she moved forward again and banged on the door with both fists. She seemed to be calling through the letterbox. She stood back and raised her arms as if she was waving. Then she grabbed Echo’s pram and shoved it ahead of her down the side of the house and around to the rear entrance.
    JD wondered if he should follow her. But it would mean breaking his cover.
     
    She pushed the pram around the side of the house. There was a wooden gate but it wasn’t locked. When she got to the rear of the house there was a movement in the garden, but it must have been a cat or bird, something disappearing at the level of the garden wall.
    The back door was locked, but a patio door stood wide open. She stuck her head inside and called out a friendly ‘hello’.
    No reply.
    Spooky feeling. The silence stretched itself into a taut line. Felt like it would snap.
    She put the brake on the pram and stepped inside. Stood for a moment and listened intently. There was a ticking sound in another room, through towards the front of the house. Not a clock, something else. Heating controls or some kind of alarm system? Apart from that the house was silent.
    Janet took another step inside. There was a small occasional table, which had been overturned. A heavy plant pot was broken; peat and the remains of a Christmas rose were spilled on the carpet.
    There were three chairs but Angeles Falco’s inert body was spread-eagled behind the sofa. Janet fell to her knees by the side of her. She felt her own body go into a convulsion, heard again the same sounds she had heard at the front door, only this time they were coming from her own throat.
    Janet thought there must be something she could do but she was overwhelmed by a plethora of images, one piled on top of the others. Resuscitation. The movement at the back wall, it wasn’t a cat. Ralph doing the moon-walk. Two sisters, both killed. The terrible silence that death leaves behind.
    Another movement. The patio door being opened further and the dark figure of a man silhouetted against the glass. He looked from side to side and moved across the room towards them at speed. Janet tried to scream as he reached out for her, scrambled back against the wall and scurried forward on her hands and knees, must get to her child, must look to Echo and keep her safe.
    ‘Get an ambulance.’
    She stopped at the patio door. She looked back towards the voice. JD was leaning over the quiet body of the blind woman. He had tilted back her head and was giving her mouth-to-mouth, blowing the contents of his lungs into her. He paused momentarily, glanced over at Janet.
    ‘Get an ambulance. Use the phone.’ He’d taken over. He was giving orders.
    He placed both of his hands on Angeles’ chest and pushed down, once, twice. He kept going. The mouth, the chest, the mouth, the chest. Janet rushed through to the hall and dialled for an ambulance. Then she called Sam.
    ‘Is she dead or alive?’ Sam asked down the wire.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought she was dead, but JD’s working on her.’
     

20
     
    There are currently 110,000 men living in England who have been convicted of sexual offences against children. This is not a generally known fact. The Home Office knows it, because it was one of their studies