Project 45 Chapter One

Chapter One

It all started with a girl, such a simple thing, such a cliché, but so often that’s the case. Like every muse, she was beautiful, ethereal in her very presence, and completely unobtainable. To add to the irony, her name was Angelica. I stuck to Angelica’s side like a parasite for three years, to her credit she never got angry with me, never spelt out the harsh truth. She did turn me down though, many times, and like the beaten dog that has no choice but to follow its master blindly, I kept coming back for more, blindly believing she was the only one I could belong to.
The further we became friends, the further we slipped out of the realms of romantic possibility, I stupidly believed I had more of a chance with her. She used to tell me the things she would tell her girlfriends, all about her latest crush, the bad relationship she had with her absent father and the type of dress she should wear to her latest party. She got drunk and cried on my shoulder countless times, of course I always wished her hugs would get less comfortable, that she wouldn’t push my hand away from her thigh. I wished that she would look me in the eye and finally understand.
Angelica knew exactly what she was doing, I played the fake boyfriend when she saw an ex or when one boy danced a little too close to her. She looked away from me, avoided my attempts to pull her face towards mine. I’m telling you things you don’t need to know, I’m getting lost in the details. As I write I feel like an exasperated gardener, trying to battle with the intricacies of my story is like wrestling with ten foot weeds that keep getting bigger. I need to find a balance.
Yes, I’m still angry about the way Angelica treated me. I’m even angrier now that so many people saw the way I acted around her and took note of my inappropriate behaviour. It didn’t add in my favour when the police settled on me as a suspect. At the time Angelica’s body was found I was the last person to have seen her alive.
When I first met Angelica she was sixteen and I was fifteen. She held me in that power that only seems to affect fifteen year old boys. It’s some mystical spell that girls hold over us. I knew instantly that she was so much better for me than every girl in my class. She was so much more ‘my type,’ as boys often bullshit about beautiful girls. When my mother moved from our home in Middlesbrough to a quite, dead suburb in Kent it felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me. My brother Marc, being ten years older than me, never had to go through the change. He lived with his then girlfriend, and he didn’t go with us. After the divorce my mother wanted to get far away from my father’s side of the family. It seemed at the time she didn’t care about me moving schools or leaving my friends. I sulked for almost a year about the move.
At my first day in St. Johns I forgot my sulk immediately. It was replaced by a longing, a longing for a half Italian, dark haired, brown eyed girl with her skirt hitched halfway up her arse and a lazy smile that made me shiver. All the girls in my class wore braces, and were either lanky or overweight, at the time I had no idea teenage girls could look like that. I stopped brooding over Yasmine Bleeth and Cindy Crawford and began what now feels like a lifelong obsession with Angelica Taylor.
My fifteenth year was spent daydreaming. Running my hands through her thick hair, over her coffee coloured skin, all the while smoking a cigar and drinking a martini. Sometimes all this would happen while I was placing a million on black in Montecarlo or speeding through the Californian countryside in a black Aston Martin.
I first talked to the girl of my dreams at a party for someone lucky enough to have his parents leave for the weekend. We were getting drunk in the only way teenagers can get drunk, downing anything that looks vaguely alcoholic until you throw up. I’ve never been entirely happy with my appearance; I have slightly sunken pale and uninteresting eyes, there is an avalanche of freckles covering my whole body. I have thin, lank hair which I’m told will disappear altogether one day, and a tendency to lose weight more rapidly than I can gain it, which at six foot two doesn’t look too appealing.
I was going through that awkward oddly shaped phase when I first spoke to the mythical Angelica Taylor, after watching her drink a whole bottle of cheap wine by herself I felt the mood was right to make a move. I strolled over to her with confidence, asked her slyly and confidently if she would give me a blow job in the bathroom. This request was unsuccessful, though I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, but I was alone, and I was passed out in the bath. This was after the wave of vomit which destroyed an expensive Egyptian rug.
I was able to apologise later with an air of ‘I do this sort of thing all the time.’ Trying my best to appear the party animal. To my surprise, she went for it, at the time I think it was only because she wanted to get invited to all these parties I was supposed to have been going to. Despite her obvious vanity in having me by her side, she never seemed to give up on me, or give up on the idea that I would understand our relationship was plutonic.
Eventually, of course, I got disillusioned with the whole thing. I discovered there were girls in my league who I could actually go out with. I began to realise that in all the years I had clung to Angelica, I had never listened to a single word she said. I was always too busy trying to look down her shirt to notice that she might actually have a personality. We drifted apart in the sense that I stopped caring about what was down her shirt and that seemed to suit her fine. I found the sea full of less beautiful fish and more or less forgot about Angelica.
It was eight years until I saw her again, I had finally flown the nest and was living in North London. I had a pretty comfortable yet uninteresting job at a P.R firm. I could’ve been happier with my life, but I had been prepared to put up with any level of boredom as long as it provided me with security. On one uneventful Saturday afternoon I caught a glimpse of someone I remembered vaguely getting onto the same tube as me. At first I couldn’t place her, she had cut off all her hair and was now wearing one of those pixie cuts, she was also slightly larger than I remembered at school, or maybe I had just made her more perfect in my memory. She was still beautiful though.
She saw me before I saw her, and I think she purposely got on the same carriage as me. She approached me wearing that wide lazy grin that had turned me into her shadow for three years, and she remembered my name, she seemed genuinely happy to see me again. She sucked me in on sight. I’ve had a chance since school to grow into my shape, and the discovery of Skinny Jeans and beanie hats has helped me significantly. As we talked about the past over coffee I got the feeling I would see her again, that I actually had a chance this time. She even gave me her phone number. I strolled home confidently that night.
Angelica’s body was found approximately two hours after we were seen leaving the coffee bar together. Jagged incisions had been made in several places, the weapon had been dragged into these cuts at about two inches across the skin’s surface on every cut. The incisions went deep into the skin. She had been stripped and dragged across the kitchen floor of her small Battersea flat, where it was estimated the initial cuts had been made. She was dragged through the back door and lay to rest in her small patio garden. There was no blood trail before the entrance to the kitchen, and none after the place her body was found. When she reached the garden, her right hand and most of her lower arm had been removed, again with jagged, imprecise cuts.
Because the cause of death had been blood loss, and apart from the trail there were no other blood splashes at the scene, the police speculated a ritualistic murder. There was a method of blood removal they had come across several years ago. A criminal had designed a mechanical device for such a procedure. The red marks around Angelica’s wounds suggested a similar device had been used here. In London there are more of these types of killings than you would like to imagine. Ritual sacrifice isn’t just for the Mayans, apparently.
Apart from being the last person who saw her alive, the forensics team found that the weapon used to make the wounds had been made from some kind of ivory or bone. It was well known that I had a small ivory dagger on my mantelpiece, it was an antique weapon, a present from my eccentric grandfather who collected such oddities. Things didn’t look too good for me as I squirmed in my hard plastic chair in the police interview room.
A blank faced and monotone police officer spoke to me as though horrible murders were slightly more inconvenient to him than a light shower of rain. They eventually showed me the pictures of Angelica’s naked, torn body. The brown eyes sparkled out even in the black and white. When I think of being in the interview room for those long hours, being accused of harvesting blood, my initial memory is of the tedium.
This sounds cold I know. Of course I was disturbed and saddened, I remember firstly a selfish sadness for myself, for my wasted teenage years. It seems strange to think of this now, but when I first heard that Angelica was dead, the news was so much easier to deal with than the gut wrenching misery I used to feel every time she rejected me. It almost made me laugh bitterly to think that the first time I had seen her in eight years I had ended up in a police station accused of her murder. She was dominating my life again after one cup of coffee.
Anyway, back to the questioning. There’s so much legal interference, so many things they can’t say, facts they can’t state, that the whole operation is really dull. I know now that as I rested back in my creaking chair, both hands firmly on the desk in front of me, the blank, unmoving face of the police officer was reading everything I wasn’t telling him. It did seem for one prickly, heart thumping moment like I was being framed. There were too many people who knew the way I used to act around her, my determined lust.
It was lucky for me that there were several things that just didn’t add up. The specific wounds, the missing hand and the collected blood. These things spelled out psychotic behaviour in letters so bold they were screaming. The facts still pointed to ritual, to religious cults. My ivory dagger was taken and tested, and was apparently not the weapon used. Even though the murder seemed frenzied, it was not frenzied enough to be the work of a jealous obsessive.
There was just one thing about Angelica’s body which could’ve turn me into this psychotic, devil worshipping, cold and purposeful killer. I could’ve been a suit with a dark centre because of four words written carefully in black biro around her left ankle. ‘In death we love.’