Concrete Evidence by Conrad Jones Page B

and then dance and wiggle for another. Such are the attributes of women and dogs and Satan himself.’” She paused and scoffed. “This is from a satanic website although it could have been written by my ex-husband.”
                  “And a couple of my ex-boyfriends,” a sergeant called Sue Carrol agreed with a smile. “Can you round them all up as suspects and arrest them?”
                  “No problem,” Gwen laughed. “Just the bitter and twisted ones?”
                  “You had better take a bus then,” Google said clumsily. Annie and Gwen looked at each other open mouthed and almost offended. “No offence,” he looked from one to the other. “According to my missus, all ex-boyfriends are bitter and twisted.”
                  “You rescued yourself there,” Gwen frowned. Google looked confused. “You were nearly in so much shit then.”
    “What did I say?” he said frowning.
    “Forget it,” Gwen sighed. He had no sense of social skills. She shook her head and turned back to Annie. “I agree with Google that the killer is accusing the victim. I think he daubed the pentangle on the wall to tell us that Jackie Webb was a demon to him.” She shrugged. “Maybe using the ‘witches’ script’ is his way of telling us that she was ‘evil’. This is not a satanic murder, Guv although it is ritual in my opinion. Our killer has a warped sense of good and evil.”
    “You said that the language was Slavic. Are we looking for someone from that region?”
    “Not necessarily,” Google shrugged. “This language is used by religious academics, historians and orthodox Catholics across the world. There’s no knowing.”
    Annie held her chin between finger and thumb and nodded. “Good work,” she said to the team. “I want everything you can translate and your theories as soon as possible okay.”
    “Guv.”
    She was about to turn and leave when the mirrors at the second scene sprang to mind. “Have you come across anything that says, ‘when you look in the mirror, what looks back at you?’” the team had blank faces. “It was written in blood on the mirrors at the second scene.”
    “No, Guv but we’ll keep a look out for it.” Gwen said returning to her screen. “Despite the amount of text here, he hasn’t repeated himself once so it could be somewhere that we haven’t reached yet.” 
    “Good work.” Annie felt pleased with the results so far. The translation of the script had opened a window into the mind of the killer. He was angry with a woman or women plural. She thought back to Tibbs, the man who had gouged out her eye with his solicitor’s pen. He had anger issues and when they spilled over, he took her face and her confidence forever. Her life would never be the same but she had lived to tell the tale. Jayne Windsor and Jackie Webb had not. Were they his first victims? She doubted it. Had he targeted them for something that they had done or just because they were female? Annie didn’t really care what the answer to the question was. Either way he was a violent killer. Working out his motive would simply help her to catch him.
    “Guv,” Stirling shouted her from his desk. “Traffic have found footage of the BMW in the city centre on Saturday night.”
    “Where?” Annie asked excitedly. The department went silent. All ears were listening to the breakthrough. 
    “They have it pulling in and parking on the multi-storey on Mount Pleasant at nine o’clock.”
    “What about leaving?”
    “Nothing yet,” he shook his head. “They’re working on the footage from later on that night.”
    “We need that urgently,” Annie felt butterflies in her stomach. “We could have the killer returning to the BMW with them.” She bit her bottom lip and walked to the bank of screens to her right. She looked at a digital map of the city centre and found Mount Pleasant. “Alert uniform to concentrate their efforts on the nightclubs