The Cutting Crew by Steve Mosby Read Free Book Online Page A

and she was squinting against a sun that lit up her face. In this photograph she looked much prettier than she did on the driver's licence, and it was sad.
    Sean always said that when people died all the photographs of them shifted into an emotional minor key. If you put ten prints in front of him, he could pick out the victims. In a way, people in pictures are always dead - because time passes and that particular person gets left behind - but there are still tendrils that attach images of the you in the past to the you in the present, and when people die the tendrils stop humming. Sean really thought he could sense that, and who was I to tell him he was wrong? Looking at the picture of Alison that had been faxed to me, I didn't understand how someone wouldn't know that she was dead.
    The rest of that page was a brief bio, typed in Courier with headings underlined. I scanned it quickly, taking in the pertinent details. Alison was twenty when she disappeared, studying for a degree in Fine Art. There were details of her previous schools, and it said that she'd been arrested for a minor drugs offence in her mid-teens and cautioned, but apart from that her record was clean.
    Just bad luck getting caught, that one. When she disappeared, she didn't even have points on her driver's licence.
    The other pages gave information about the circumstances of her disappearance, but not as much as I'd hoped. From the scant details, I got the impression that Alison had lived a very independent life. She had an address in Turtle, but it seemed that she often stayed over with friends, sleeping on floors and in spare rooms. Her boyfriend situation was generally fluid, but there was some indication - from comments made by friends - that it had settled somewhat in the weeks prior to her disappearance. Some people thought she was seeing another student; some, a lecturer.
    Others said they couldn't be sure that she was seeing anyone, only that she wasn't seeing them as much as she used to. In my experience of murder investigations, girls rarely benefit from having mysterious boyfriends. Despite the confusion, there was enough mention of a boyfriend for it to seem worth pursuing.
    On to her actual disappearance, then. She hadn't been seen for a week and a half by the time she was reported missing. The last person to see her alive was her friend, Keleigh Groves. Alison had left for the library that morning, presumably after an evening of some kind of social debauchery, and she hadn't returned.
    That wasn't unusual, Keleigh was quoted as saying. She'd do that all the time. She had loads of friends she used to stay with. If she turned up, I let her stay and maybe other people would be there and we'd have a party. But I didn't worry if I didn't see her.
    Other people must have felt the same, because nobody had been particularly worried not to hear from Alison for that length of time, and the boyfriend - if there was one - seemed to have disappeared along with her. Nobody heard from her again. Not until some kids were fucking around in Bull and ended up running screaming out of that old, abandoned house. Then, she started speaking to Sean and me in our nightmares with a voice that - until yesterday - had no name. The Missing Persons Report was filed, a few relevant people were interviewed and that was that. People vanish all the time. Many of them because they want to.
    And yet she hadn't vanished. We'd found her.
    I checked through the dates on the sheet and put the chronology together in my head. We found her body around two weeks after she disappeared, and that was a good half week after this report had been filed. We would have picked it up. So why didn't we?
    Certainly not incompetence - a large number of us worked this case very hard, and checking Missing Persons would have been one of the obvious avenues to pursue. The only real answer I could come up with was that someone had picked up the report: picked it up and buried it. Not me. Not Sean.