He was a lot of things, but brave enough to take his own life on his darkest days, no, he couldn’t even do that.
Thirty
Morgan dragged the cushions off the chair onto the floor, then she opened the file she’d brought home with her. It crossed her mind that she probably shouldn’t have brought it home with her. But then again, she’d been the one to spend the best part of an hour in a pigeon-shit-filled attic searching for it. It was hers for the time being. She was in charge of looking into this case so who was going to shout at her? She had a large glass of wine and a bag of chilli Doritos, perfect supper. She also had a notebook and pen. Taking the small packet of photographs out first, she began to flick through them. They were bad, worse than the Potters’ crime scene. The house looked a lot different, old-fashioned despite it being a relatively new build.
She’d done a search and found that it had been built in the early seventies. The previous house had been a tiny stone cottage that was falling to pieces. The O’Briens had bought the land, demolished the original and built their much bigger property in its place. She sipped the wine, as she studied each photo. Since her early teenage years she’d wanted to be a cop, well a detective, and had loved the US TV shows that used to play. When she’d applied to be an officer, she’d been told it would be a long, hard slog to make a detective. She hadn’t even completed her first week and here she was up to her neck in violent murders and trying to solve cold cases.
She laid the photographs into what she assumed was the order they’d been taken in. A shot of the house from outside, nothing out of the ordinary, just a nice house in a peaceful part of England. Inside the entrance hall again it looked normal, no tell-tale sign of what the photographer was about to uncover. The stairs had dark streaks on the walls, though, that went all the way to the top. There was a picture of the hallway, where the first body lay. Then a close-up of that body. It had a piece of heavily bloodstained cloth covering the face. She sat up straight, her spine rigid and stared at the photograph. The cloth looked almost identical to the ones used to cover the Potters’ faces. Whoever killed the Potters knew about the O’Briens’ murders and was copying their crime scene. She knew this body was a man by the striped, button-down pyjamas. One leather moccasin slipper was on the right foot; the left foot was bare, with drops of blood on it. There was a trail of blood along the wall here, as if whoever had done this had put their hands in it and smeared it along the pristine, white walls for effect. She scribbled in her notebook: dramatic scene, blood handprints all along the white walls. Why?
The next photograph was of a bedroom. It was painted a pale yellow and on first glance it looked as if the walls had been speckled with a dark red paint. She held the picture closer; it wasn’t paint. It was blood. The next one showed the bodies of two children on the floor, their heads caved in. The same cloths covered their faces. Morgan let out a small gasp. They looked so small and helpless; what an awful way to die. She stared in horror at the images that were forever burned into her mind. How did you get used to this? she wondered, and if you did, what kind of a person did that make you? Forcing herself to put the picture down, she put that one to the side, just out of view.
The rest of the upstairs was normal or as normal as it could be considering an entire family had been murdered in cold blood. Had Jason O’Brien died trying to defend his daughters, she wondered or did the killer let him see them lying there smashed to pieces before killing him? She shuddered; it was too horrid to contemplate. More photos of the downstairs: the lounge, dining room, an office were all intact, until it got to the kitchen which was another total bloodbath. This must be Jennifer, wife and mother. Again her head was severely beaten and there was a large pool of blood on the