2. Waiting For Brampton

Kathy held her, rocking slightly. She couldn’t think what to do next. Lay the body down? Keep holding it? Shout for help? Snap out of it!

Still kneeling, she grabbed a pillow from the couch, placed it on the ruined carpet and tenderly lowered the brunette head. Her eyes filled with tears as the finality of the moment sank in, then she stood up, brushed at her red knees, pulled out her phone and called Sandy.

Detective Sergeant Sandy Brampton and Kathy had known each other for 11 years and she had worked with him on a case or two. They were good friends, had occasionally come close to being more, and they had a mutual appreciation. As the phone rang, she rubbed a palm over her wet eyes thinking I’ve made a mess of this. I’ve touched too much. I should know better. She felt both relief and trepidation when he picked up.

“Sandy? It’s Kathy. I’m okay, but somebody here is not. I’m at 27 Marsh Lane, it’s a white cottage behind a cedar hedge. I need you here, and you’d better bring the coroner, but there’s no rush. There’s a woman, she was alive when I found her but she died in my arms.”

Brampton listened patiently, assured her he was on his way and disconnected. Not a good start, he thought. Messy. She knows she’s contaminated the scene. I wonder if she has the murder weapon?”

As he gathered his jacket and keys and walked to his car, he couldn’t help thinking I wonder if she’s free for dinner?

***

Kathy stood silently in the hallway waiting. The dagger lay on a dainty half moon table, painted white with pink cabbage roses. She winced at the red stain beneath the blade and wondered just how much she had contaminated evidence. How could she have known the green stone glinting in the sun was part of a murder weapon?

Her mind wandered to her friendship with Sandy Brampton. He was a homicide detective, she was a journalist – his and her tribes were not famous for having great relationships.

Kathy had enjoyed earning her degree in English Literature but felt aimless in her final year. She thought about teaching. She thought, of course, about writing a novel, but in the end she knew her strengths were research and reporting. Ms. Chatsworth had done stellar work on school newspapers since grade school.

She had an analytic approach to fact gathering and a gift for telling good stories. School newspapers, plus a bit of lucrative ghost writing for lazy but rich kids at school, had honed her natural talents and taught her how to dig and discover, honestly report and imaginatively speculate – and people enjoyed her writing.

The first case she had worked on with Brampton was one she had named A Death in the Country Inn. She smiled in the dim hallway, forgetting for a moment the body in the next room. She gave whimsical titles to even the lousiest news stories but her irreverent headlines rarely appeared in print.

It was a murder at a luxury inn and everything pointed to a hapless waiter – motive, evidence and prejudice. But Kathy had uncovered information that exonerated the boy and led to the real killer. Her involvement in the case had been unofficial, so Brampton got the glory – but she got the story.

“Hello Kathy.” She jumped as Brampton bent his head and squeezed through the 100-year-old doorway. “You’ve stumbled on another one,” he said, giving her shoulder a quick squeeze. He briefly wondered if that was still acceptable but felt her lean into him before he pushed past to the living room.

“I don’t go looking for trouble,” she said to his back. “I’ll tell you everything I know but it’s not much.” The woman’s last words echoed in her mind, but she would save them until Brampton and the coroner had done their work.

“Do you know who she is?” he asked.

“No. I was on my way to work when I saw something shining in the hedge out there.” He was turning slowly to take in every corner of the room. “I picked it up and saw it was some kind of gemstone in the handle of a dagger.”

He turned. “A dagger? You mean a knife?” She shook her head and pointed to the half-moon table. “No, I mean a dagger, like in a horror movie or something, and it had blood on it.” Her breath caught. “I knew something awful had happened, the blood was wet.” She gulped back a sob.

He put his arm around her. “It’s okay Kath, you’ve had a shock. Take a breath. What happened next?”

She pulled air into her lungs and let it out slowly. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a dead body, but it seemed more shocking, somehow obscene, in this pretty little place with roses and brocade and someone bleeding out their life on a peach paisley carpet.

“What happened next? I saw a gap in the hedge, and I came in and found this horrible scene. She was dying Sandy, there was nothing I could do.” She took another big breath. “I went to her and held her, I know that was wrong, but it was instinct, and she died in my arms.”

He reached for her again but she backed away and went to stand in the sunlight on the flagstone path. He stared after her, then wrote everything she had said in his police notebook.