Excerpt: The Clock Strikes Twelve

It was getting colder. The wind was arctic like. Dawn stamped her feet to keep warm and blew on her gloveless hands.

“Somehow ironic, isn’t it?” Vince said, breaking into her thoughts.

“What is?”

“Us freezing our knackers off out here at the back of the Iceland store!”

No matter how she was feeling, Vince always brought a smile to her face. He had been her partner at the station for the past ten years and one of the only people she trusted with her life. Literally. “Enough of the jokes. What do you make of it all, Vince? Could it be him? Prince Charming?”

Vince chewed on his bottom lip. “Possibly, but it doesn’t explain why he went quiet for the past thirty odd years, does it?”

“Maybe he hasn’t been caught yet. There are plenty of unsolved murders up and down the country.”

Vince dug his hands deep in his trousers pocket and jangled some coins. “Or maybe he’s been inside.”

She had thought of that. “Well, if he has been inside all this time it would have to be for another murder or murders for that length of time.”

“There’s also another possibility of course, he may have been living abroad. It might be an idea if we contact Interpol to see if there are any other murderers, maybe on the continent with the same modus operandi.”

“Guv,” Vince turned to see one of the uniformed bobbies standing behind him with a scruffy looking fella in a bright yellow vest. “This is Bill Davies. He’s the one who found the body.”

Dawn looked at the man, whose skin looked as putrid as she felt. She sidled over towards him. “I’m going to need to take some info from you, Mr Davies.” The man nodded. “It can’t have been an easy morning for you.”

“You can say that again.”

She pulled out her note pad and pen. “So, what happened?”

The man briefly closed his eyes as if trying to envisage the scene in front of him and then opened them again. “We were emptying the bins at the back here at about 10.15. We didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until I put my hand in that bin her and found it…I mean her?” He pointed to the body on the floor that was now being zipped by scenes of crime in a black body bag.

Dawn’s upper lip felt frozen to her face, she quickly ran her tongue over it, at this rate they would be getting frost bite. “And why did you happen to have your hand in the bin in the first place?”

“It was Mal, over there?” He pointed to his workmate standing in the corner. “He thought he found a dummy in the bin and wanted me to pull it out so we could have some fun with it. You know tease the guys at work, that kind of thing. All sounds a bit daft now…” His voice trailed off.

“Not all, Mr Davies,” Vince butted into the conversation. “There are plenty down the station, I can tell you,” he winked at Dawn, “who would have got the same idea.”

Bill Davies straightened himself up, as if he were proud of himself now, for finding the body, although of course it was Mal who had got the original idea.

“We’re going to need for you to come into the station at some point to make a statement about this,” Dawn said.

Mal was now standing at Bill’s side. “We can come in as soon as you like, officers.” There were obviously no flies on him. It was probably a good excuse to get an hour or so off work, not just from them now having to leave their bin duties to go to the police station, but no doubt they would get a couple of hours, or maybe the rest of the day off for the shock of finding the body in the first place. Nowadays, people were such a lily-livered lot. Not like her Dad, who had fought in the Falklands War. Death was common place to someone like him.

Dawn took Vince to one side, so that they were out of earshot? “So, what now?”

“Well, we need to establish who this female is. She looks quite young, doesn’t she? Maybe nineteen or twenty. Someone must be missing their daughter from home around here.”

Dawn nodded. “Probably. Or maybe she lives alone. We haven’t had any mispers reported over the weekend.” A Misper was well known police jargon for Missing Person. In Dawn’s experience, most of them turned up safe and well, either their actions had been entirely thoughtless and they’d forgotten to inform whoever it was that they were elsewhere, or it was more serious in the case of a depressed person who might do themselves arm, in all her years in the force, she had only come across one other case where the misper turned out to be murdered in the town.

Dawn strode towards the two refuse collectors. “Right you pair, meet us at the station in half hour. Grab yourselves a cuppa with plenty of sugar, you’ve had a nasty shock.”

Dawn knew only too well what that was like as the shrouded body was loaded into an awaiting van, her mind drifted back to the moment she found out that Jen’s body had been discovered. She was in school on lunch break. Some of the girls at Cyfarthfa High School, which was in actually a school inside the castle, were wondering around the grounds, heading towards the Cabin as it was called. A small snack shop in the park for a beef pasty and one or two of them to buy some Woodbine singles. Ruth Jones, the teacher’s pet, came rushing up behind the small gathering.

It was almost as though things were happening in slow motion. Dawn knew as she turned, before Ruth even uttered a word, that it was something about Jen, and not good news. Of all the people in the town, Ruth was the last person she needed to hear it from. She relished all the gossip and was a well known stirrer.

“Girls,” she bellowed, with a sadistic gleam in her eyes. “You’ll never guess what. It’s just been on the radio. Jennifer Johnson is dead.”

The gang crowded around her. So this had been Ruth Jones’s fifteen minutes of fame. For once, she was highly popular with the girls as they hung on to her every word. Who? Where? What? How? In some sad way, it would not have looked out of place if she had sold tickets for the event.

All Dawn heard her say was, “The body was found at the back of a disused factory at Dowlais top. Isn’t it exciting?”

Yes. If you liked that kind of thing. But to Dawn, Jen was not a body, she had been a living, breathing person and the best friend she ever had.

She walked away from the gang in a daze, unable to comprehend it. The first thing she did was to ring her mother from the telephone box on Brecon Road, hardly caring she would be late back for the first lesson that afternoon. Indeed why should she bother going back at all? Her mother confirmed her worst fears, offering to send a taxi to pick her up from the school.

But she’d refused and instead of going back to school, she wandered across Brecon Road, taking the quickest route to town via the British Tip. There she got on the first bus she saw, it was headed for Cardiff. She sat on the bus not caring where she was going, just knowing that for now, she needed to escape, school and home. The tears came and she cried on and off for the entire journey. She was glad that the bus was half empty and she was sitting in the back seat, so that nobody would have noticed, except perhaps the driver in his mirror.

What she did in Cardiff, she hardly remembered, just wandering around looking aimlessly in shops. She realised with panic when she finally returned to Merthyr that it was late and she should have let someone know, especially after what had happened to Jen, but in hindsight she could see that she was in shock back then.

When she got inside the house, she fell into her mother’s arms. “Oh Dawn, thank goodness you are back, cariad. We’ve been worried about you.”

Dawn noticed for the first time that there were two police officers sitting on the settee. She feared they might tell her off, but she needn’t have worried. The lady officer told her mother to make tea for everyone and they very gently asked Dawn about Jen for the second time and warned her not to go off like that again...