Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Richmond Police Station - Raven

The harsh fluorescent light flickered to life, startling me fully awake. For a moment, disorientation clouded my mind as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. The cold concrete walls, the uncomfortable cot beneath me, and the unmistakable smell of disinfectant brought reality crashing back.

I was, unsurprisingly, in a police cell. The night’s events flooded back - discovering Lily's body, being caught at the crime scene, and then darkness... and that nightmare.

I sat up slowly, my head pounding. The remnants of the dream clung to me like cobwebs, refusing to dissipate. The shadowy figure, the caged woman, the sense of impending doom - it all felt too real, too vivid to be a mere product of my stressed mind.

"Get a grip, Raven," I muttered to myself, running a hand through my tangled hair. "It was just a dream."

But even as I said it, doubt gnawed at me. I'd long since learned to trust my instincts, and every fibre of my being was screaming that this was more than a simple nightmare. The man's words echoed in my mind: "You have a part to play... The world is changing."

What if it wasn't just a dream? What if it was a glimpse of something real, something connected to Lily's death and the other victims, however impossible that might be? The thought sent a chill down my spine.

I stood up, pacing the small confines of the cell. My mind raced, trying to piece together the fragments of the dream with what I knew about the murders. Eleven victims before Lily, all branded with alchemical symbols. A killer with a grand, twisted vision. And now, possibly, another woman in danger.

The sound of approaching footsteps snapped me out of my thoughts. Keys jingled, and the cell door swung open. A stern-faced officer stood in the doorway.

“Good, you’re up,” he snapped out, “the nurse thought you were faking, guess not... let’s get you booked in.”

***

They told me I had the right to remain silent, and that's a right I exercised ever since. All they’d got out of me was the name on the ID I'd created when I first came to London. There was an easy out, of course, but I wasn’t going down that route, not if I could help it.

So, other than my stubborn silence I hadn't offered any resistance at all, not when my mate from outside the crime scene held me up in front of the custody sergeant by my cuffed wrists, not when they scanned for my non-existent ID chip, hauled me in front of the facial recognition system, pressed my newly freed fingers down on their scanner, or even when they pushed a couple of DNA swabs up my nose and down my throat. Not in that order thankfully.

My next indignity was to have been, they’d announced, a strip search.

Obviously, they seemed to think I could be hiding an AK47 and a couple of kilos of Semtex inside my skin tight Lycra body suit because it’s not like they’d abuse their position just to get their jollies, now would they. I’d pulled on the Velcro fastenings before either officer could react, exposing myself to the navel.

The custody sergeant turned a lurid purple I hadn't seen outside of Provence before turning a ghastly shade of white. Behind me the guy who’d been hauling me around puked violently.

If they’d been looking to embarrass me, or to get their rocks off, then they were shit out of luck. It’s not like nudity was that big of a deal, and I’d only been doing as they demanded but it turns out that such searches are meant to be performed by at least two officers, of the same sex as the suspect, privately. Who knew?

Might have helped the sergeant’s stress levels if he’d explained that to start with, it would definitely have saved them the clean-up in aisle one, and got me out of a pointless visit from the force medical examiner. OK, not entirely pointless.

The beech tree had left a few reminders of my passage through its branches that had been dutifully recorded, cleaned and dressed. Most of the scars were old though, far older than they probably realised but hell, more were courtesy of police dogs than had been self-inflicted! Not that I would, or could, explain any of that, or why I had keys to the court etched into my skin to them.

Yeah, I could see why they might have been freaked out by the number of scars covering my body, but why they thought I wasn't quite right in the head continued to elude me. Yet, I was the one laying here on some sort of suicide watch. On the plus side, the rubber gloves hadn't even come out, or gone in, in the end!

So here I was, listening to my oh so fashionable white paper body suit rustling with every breath and wondering how much more time I was willing to waste stretched out on a thin blue padded mattress, trapped in an eight by twelve custody cell.

Every ten minutes, or so, someone would come by, drop the little window in the cell door and examine me like I was a prized exhibit at the zoo. I’d catch the odd fragment of their whispered conversations, wondering about my scars, debating whether they’d caught their killer, hoping I hadn’t offed myself. Not that there was much I could do to harm myself in here even if I'd wanted to.

I like to think myself creative when it comes to inflicting pain, on others, but there were no laces or belts to strangle myself with, no glass to break or springs to pull from the bed, from which a blade could be improvised. The stainless steel sink and toilet were bolted to the tiled wall, I suppose I could have tried to break my skull by headbutting something into oblivion, but that wouldn't do anything but show them just how different I was from them.

***

OK, they were definitely running late. I'd counted to eight hundred and seventeen since the window last opened.

"Tea? Toast?" a disembodied voice asked as from behind the door as it swung slowly open. His body filled the entire door as he looked down on me dispassionately.

"I'm sorry it's late, but we're a bit short staffed today." He informed me, "If you can behave, I’ll have one of the WPCs escort you down for a shower, assuming you want one. After you've had your breakfast, you’ll be able to call your legal representative if you have one, otherwise you'll be stuck with a duty solicitor. You'll be called to interview later, around one probably, clear?”

Succinct and professional, everything I needed to know, in the order I needed to know it, this guy could teach the night crew a thing or two.

I glanced up from my cot, and up some more until I finally met his eye, "I'd prefer coffee, had a bath last night, duty solicitor's fine, " it was the most I'd said in hours but there was no need to be an arse to this guy, "and vairs da coffee?" I finished with a horrendous Transylvanian accent.

That got a grin out of him, a small grin but I'd take it. One point to me. "Breakfast, with coffee, will be along in ten minutes. PC Harvin will be bringing it down,” he chortled softly, “try to avoid sucking him dry." Bastard! If I'd been drinking my precious caffeine already it would have gone everywhere. Point to the sergeant.

True to his word, long after breakfast I was escorted to an interview room where I was introduced to the duty solicitor. A fresh faced ingenue out to save the world one detainee at a time. She explained unnecessarily, I was an old hand at this part after all, what would happen next and laid out the crimes the police suspected I was complicit in. Thing was, this time, most of it was true.

"There's one last thing," she looked quite nervous at whatever was to follow, "they claiming that you might have something to do with the Coven Killer, given the circumstances of your arrest, your knife, your scars..."

Oh, not nervous, excited. She’d realised she could have lucked her way into the biggest case of her career. If she’d thought about it, caution might have been more appropriate given that she was locked in a tiny room with a potential killer.

"Nope, not me.” I said, truthfully enough. “Nothing at all to do with me" I finished not quite as truthfully. OK, so sue me, I was sort of related to the last victim – which they already knew. And I had been told to investigate. But that's not what they were implying, and what they didn’t know couldn’t bite me on the arse.

Frowning, disappointed?, she made another note on her legal pad before rising and banging on the door, "Okay, let's get this show on the road, officers you can come in now."

The stern-faced woman from the tent made her way into the room behind my solicitor, followed by a tired looking man in his early twenties. Fresh tape cassettes, luddites, were opened in front of us and put into the recorder and we were, apparently, ready to go.

"I am Detective Inspector Marchant," she started, “with,”

"Detective Constable Hews," he completed the introductions with a sexy Welsh lilt, “and Ms. Russel, duty solicitor.”

"Interviewing Ms Raven Chen," she resumed, "no address given, in connection with criminal damage of police property, arson, obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duties, attempting to pervert the course of justice and," she paused from the script, watching me closely for any reaction, "the murders of twelve, as yet, unidentified individuals. I'll remind you that you remain under caution, anything you say may be given in evidence, do you understand?"