M.O. Crimes of Practice: The Official CWA Anthology (2008) by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards [Edwards, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE BLOGGING GAME

Yvonne Eve Walus

The next blog I find screams purple text on a black background, a killer on the eyes. I feel no remorse. The owner deserves everything I have in mind for her. Her entry for today is all about rain.

The world is a painting, slowly soaked in water, diluted, blurred. The earthworms are tongues of purple paint squashed out of their earth-tubes. I take a sip of hot chocolate. I rub its silk into my palate. This is not chocolate. This is me. I taste myself on my tongue.

Wow, I love your blog! I write in my comment. You have the soul of a poet.

That’s all that I need to play The Game.

Rule #1: If she bites, she’s mine.

The summer sun beat down on South Africa’s capital city with its life-sucking sizzle. Lieutenant Wilma van Rooyen looked at the documents in front of her, wiped her moist forehead and popped another piece of a melting Cadbury slab into her mouth. The cloying sweetness made the heat even worse.

I really should stop, she thought. Then she broke off another piece and held it in her fingers as she read the crime scene report.

The victim, a thirty-five-year old single woman, was found dead by a guard in her Moreleta Park security village after one of the neighbours reported a suspicious lack of activity on the premises. In the old days, the report would have given the victim’s race, but in today’s post-apartheid era, the race had to be deduced from the name and the photographs. In this case, Nakti Singh. Indian.

There were no signs of a forced entry or assault, which was a welcome change from all the armed break-ins that too often resulted in the death of the robbed residents. Nakti Singh’s body was slumped forward onto the keyboard of her computer, the machine still running. The officer in charge was meticulous enough to include the last web page viewed by the victim: a blog site.

Found clutched in the victim’s left hand was a mirror. An empty used syringe lay on the floor next to the computer stand.

A thorough search of the flat failed to produce anything out of the ordinary: no illegal substances, not even a gun—that traditional item of most South African households.

The post-mortem report came next. Death by an overdose of heroin, a single needle mark. Van Rooyen skipped all the units and numbers. She was hardly interested in the exact weight of the victim’s liver. She looked at the summary: good health, not pregnant, not sexually abused, no suggestion of struggle.

Case closed. There were so many others awaiting her attention. Cases of accidental shootings with one’s own gun. Cases of being killed in your bed for your laptop. Cases of brutal rape followed by even more brutal murder. She should be getting on to them.

And yet, the tidy—almost too tidy—case of Nakti Singh’s death, wouldn’t let Lieutenant van Rooyen be.

She leafed through the papers again (oh, when are they going to enter the 21st century and go electronic).

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