In both her punctuality and persistency Carter better resembled an alarm clock. Distantly from my half slumber half wakening state I could hear her banging on my door. I groaned and buried my head under my pillow, the drinks from last night were still very present in my mind and the light from my skylight felt like someone was holding a torch pressed against my closed eyelids.
"Dawson! Come on get up!" I briefly considered pretending I wasn't home but as I did I remember that she was in fact a world class detective and probably already knew with absolute certainty that I was inside. I pulled on my shirt and lit a cigarette from the packet on the box beside my bed and headed for the door yanking it open.
"Good morning Carter," I said as sweetly as I could muster. Immediately I was struck by anomalies in her usually pristine appearance. Her hat was slightly higher on her head than normal and I could tell she hadn't had time to apply the usual soot to her jaw to procure the essence of masculinity she so often exuded. Whatever was going on she had clearly been in a hurry.
"What's going on?" I asked opening the door wider to let her inside and exhaling my lungful of smoke into the hallway behind her.
"There's been another one," the glint in her eye was back with a vengeance.
"Another what?" Remember folks, I am not the detective in this report.
"Another murder!" she exclaimed, clearly incredulous that that had not been obvious from the moment she walked in the door.
The fog that was slowly consuming and muffling my brain was rudely expelled in a second as I processed those words. From a reporting point of view this was great, but from a me point of view I didn't gain any particular amount of joy from the 'm word.' It was also slightly unsettling that I had been a reporter for over a year and had covered exactly zero murders until this year. Despite the slogans in the papers and the stories that surrounded me, the 20's were clearly not my year. Luckily, I wasn't disinclined to accept fame and preferable fortune at other peoples' misfortune. However unfortunate the circumstances were for the subjects of my articles if they brought me recognition then at least they died for a good cause.
Carter coughed pointedly, breaking my spinning thread of thought and snapping it back to the room and her face. Her eyebrows were raised and waiting for my reaction which had obviously been somewhat lacklustre.
"Wow, I mean, is this good for us?" I rested my hand on my chin and waited for her to fill me in.
"I've not seen the body yet but I was on my way to Scotland Yard to see what's going on, I thought you might want to come?" She went to stand, indicating in every jerky movement of her body that time was of the essence. I sat there for a moment, part of me was wanting nothing more than to go back to bed and not have to look at more corpses but the other part of me – however small – was secretly touched that she'd thought to come and get me. It felt, for the first time, like we were a team.
"Alright then Carter," I stood up, grabbed my camera and jacket and held the door open for her as we left, "lead the way then."
"We've got a consultant this time." Carter, walking half a pace in front of me as she always did, glanced down slightly to relay the information. I'd had enough experience with Scotland Yard's so called consultant help to be less than filled with excitement by this realisation.
In the circus the performers and clowns are equipped with raised boots, they have thick soles and bouncy leather allowing them to appear taller than they actually are. I was beginning to feel a little out of breath keeping up with Carter and for the umpteenth time in the last month I considered acquiring a pair of those boots simply to be able to look her in the eye. Then again there was plenty of times where the least desirable thing to do would be to have to meet her eyes and it was at times like that where I was thankful for my height or lack there of. We reached the gates of the Yard and Carter stiffened her stride, I was used to the little changes she employed to erect her cover, adding just slightly more shoulder and arm movement when she walked and lowering her head slightly already brought out the silhouette I had been used to when we first met. It had seemed foolish when I had uncovered Carter's true identity to have been afraid of her at all but every time she brought out this persona I was reminded that she imposed a sense of authority even when she did not possess the upper hand. I dropped back to her shoulder letting her lead the way silently praying that the officer I'd altercated with the night before wasn't on duty this early.
We sat in the library and waited, in private the two of us could talk reasonably civilly but in public it felt as though there was a sheet of liquid glass rippling between us. Carter didn't say anything while we waited and I didn't know what to say to break the tangible silence. Rocking back on my chair with little caution I peered into the hall and saw a man coming towards us through the gap in the door. As he entered I rocked back onto all four legs and nodded to him as Carter got up and shook his hand. He was possibly in his forties I deduced by his hair that was speckled with grey but when he shook Carter's hand and took off his jacket his grip still seemed strong and his hands had a light tan. Whilst I was still trying to develop an opinion of him he held out his hand to me and I shook it feeling the tension in his knuckles as I did so.
"Thank you for agreeing to work with me on this case," Carter got straight to business as usual but the elimination of the word us was not lost on me and I sank a little lower in my seat.
"It's no trouble," the man nodded to her sitting down across the table from us. "I wasn't given a lot of choice in the matter." I laughed a little but one glance at his face showed that he had not been joking, I tried to disguise it as a cough but I doubted that it fooled anyone. The officer gave me a scathing look that I felt right through to my bones.
Carter's wasn't thrown at all, I supposed that after all the trouble she'd gone to for her career comments like that must not bother her at all. She ploughed on without as much as an acknowledgement. "Well you're here so we might as well get started anyway," she rested her arms on the table and stared across at him. "I was told there had been another murder, what do you know about that?"
"I'm Dawson," I said, hardly able to comprehend that I was having to be the one who brought the civility. I gestured across to my companion, "and that's Carter, and you are?"
The officer looked back at me for the first time since he came in with a lack of interest. "I'm Percival," he said finally, "it'll be easier for you to remember than Taylor-Evans."
"Alright," I honestly felt like I knew less about the guy than before I even asked. "It's good to meet you, what can you tell us?"
"That's what I was just getting to before you interrupted to ask me my name," it was said dryly but he reached into a pocket in his jacket and brought out a new file for us. Carter was staring at it like a starving man who had never seen food, if I unfocused my eyes slightly I could see her drooling.
He laid it on the table in front of us and opened it up, a photograph fell out and I picked it up and turned it over – I wish I hadn't. Although everything does look better on the other side of a camera this was still nasty but beyond the gruesome side of the image something else struck me – familiarity. The abrasions on the sides of the neck and face where the skin had split open and the coursing blue veins protruding from the chest had been ingrained into my brain from the first case; when I closed my eyes at night I saw them.
"He hung himself," said Percival turning the file towards Carter who stared at it for a few moments before shrugging and flipping it shut.
"Or else someone hung him, I don't have enough information yet."
I mentally checked off the injuries against the report I'd written up for the previous case. Just as before the victims mouth hung open and the familiar patterning of bruising over his collarbones and neck but most distinct was that patterning of blue wiry veins running from the mouth to the heart. Whoever had strangled our first John Doe had, with no doubt in my mind, come back for more. Despite Carter solving the cause of death for the first murder neither she nor I had any clue or leads further than that. It seemed now that whether we liked it or not we would have to see this thing all the way through.