Tess perched on the edge of the chair and put a shaking hand to her mouth.
‘Vicky.’
‘And you’re sure there’s no one else inside the flat, apart from Vicky?’
Tess frowned.
‘I don’t think so… I only went into the living room. The bedroom is in the back,’ she said.
‘Okay. Can you wait here? I promise I’ll come back, I just need to look inside.’
Tess nodded. Erika always kept latex gloves in her pocket, a habit from entering crime scenes, and she pulled on a pair and went to the door to the flat.
The metallic smell of blood hit her nose when she stepped inside. The front door opened out into a tiny, narrow hallway with a low ceiling. There was a clean, modern-looking white tiled bathroom directly to the right. It was empty.
The living room and kitchen were combined as one. On a small sofa bed, which was opened out, lay the body of a young woman, face down in a large patch of blood. Her arms were bound behind her back. As Erika moved around she saw that the woman’s head was facing the door. She reached out and placed her fingers on her neck. Her skin was firm and cold, like putty, and there was no pulse. The sheer amount of blood on the sheets, and the fact her body lay at a strange angle, made it obvious this had been a violent attack.
Erika put her arm over her mouth, as the smell was overpowering, and skirted around the living room and the kitchen units, trying to avoid blood spots on the pale carpet. In the back corner was a closed door. She listened but couldn’t hear anything. She knew she should wait for backup, but Erika, being Erika, was impatient. She saw a wooden rolling pin sitting next to a block of knives lying on its side, and grabbed it.
Bracing herself, she opened the door, expecting to see a small bedroom with a bed, but the tiny room was completely dark inside. There was a loud crash from inside the darkness.
‘What’s happening?’ shouted Tess from the hall outside, her voice rising with panic.
Erika hesitated. Silence. She reached inside and found the light switch, and lifted the rolling pin. Fluorescent lights flickered on, illuminating a small room which looked like a recording studio. There was an empty desk with just an expensive iMac computer, and two office chairs on wheels. On the wall behind the desk was a large laminated map of Greater London, and it was covered with coloured drawing pins. There were also newspaper articles stuck up around the map. Next to the door a tall metal microphone stand lay on its side. She must have knocked it over when she opened the door.
There was a window in the corner, but it was blocked off with a giant square of polystyrene. At the opposite end of the room the walls were lined with what looked like hundreds of opened-out egg boxes. In this part of the room there was a small two-seater sofa and another microphone stand, with a professional-looking microphone. A thick black curtain was pulled back, and looked like it could be pulled across, to partition off this small recording booth.
‘Hello? What’s happening?’ came Tess’s voice.
‘It’s okay. I knocked something over. There’s no one here,’ shouted Erika.
She didn’t have much time to think why the bedroom had been turned into a recording studio, only acknowledge that the room was empty. The flat was small, and the woman’s furniture outside the recording studio all looked very cheap.
She turned back to the living room and moved closer to the body lying on the sofa bed. It was difficult to tell the victim’s age. The woman had long dark hair, but it hung over her shoulders and the side of her face, and large patches were matted with dried congealed blood. Half of her face was badly battered and her left eye was swollen shut. Her neck hung at an odd angle, it looked like it could be broken.
Erika slowly moved around the body. The curtains in the room were closed, and there was no sign that anyone had broken down the door, but a chair was turned over and there were magazines and a few items strewn across the floor; a candle in a glass holder, a pot of pens, and, bizarrely, a Scrabble box which had been knocked open, discharging the tiled letters across the carpet.
There’d been a brutal struggle, but no sign of a break-in. Did she know her attacker?
3
Erika checked to make sure she hadn’t disturbed anything in the crime scene, and she came back to the front door. Tess was standing outside.
‘What was the noise?’ she asked. The terror of what she’d seen still clung to her face.
‘I knocked something over. Please, you need to sit down.’ Erika led her back to the sofa and then called into Lewisham Row police station for police backup and forensics to attend the scene.