Jack Be Nimble

Chapter 3

3

Even though it was gone midnight, DS Wendy Knight was still wide awake. She’d not really enjoyed a full night’s sleep in a long time. Being a Detective Sergeant attached to the local murder squad wasn’t exactly conducive to a peaceful slumber at the best of times, but recent times had been particularly unkind to Wendy.

Her first serial killer case had not only led to her having to try and clear the name of her then lover, Robert, but also the stark realisation that the murderer had been closer to home than she’d realised.

Get back on the horse, her father had always told her. Bill Knight had been a CID officer himself, and those words of his had echoed around Wendy’s mind in the days and weeks following the closure of her first serial killer case.

Getting back on the horse had been relatively easy. It was falling off again that hurt. First came the discovery that she was pregnant with her dead partner’s baby before suffering a miscarriage after a foot chase with a petty criminal. And all whilst trying to solve a double murder case just weeks after the first.

Sleep hadn’t been the first thing on Wendy’s mind for a long time. Neither had unpacking her belongings and making her new house a home. The house wasn’t strictly new any more — she’d been here a while — but the plethora of cardboard boxes scattered around had kept the illusion alive for longer than usual.

She’d tried to justify her lack of diligence in unpacking on some vague notion that she might decorate a couple of the rooms before long. Deep down, she knew that would never happen and had now resolved to finally stop living out of cardboard boxes.

The kitchen was now almost complete. At least now she’d be able to cook for herself rather than relying on ready meals and takeaways. She’d privately scolded herself for unpacking the microwave before anything else on the day she’d moved in.

Tearing off the parcel tape from one box marked General nicknacks, she paused as she opened the cardboard flaps and saw, sitting at the top, a framed photograph of her and Michael in happier times. The photo had been taken a year or two after their father had died, but whilst their mother was still alive. As Wendy picked the photo up she felt strangely as though she were her mother, who’d taken the photo and stood seeing this exact same image at the moment it was taken. The mother who’d felt that exact same antithesis of motherly protection over him and shame at what he’d become.

Michael’s drug addiction had spiralled since his first forays into experimenting with ecstasy in local nightclubs when he was eighteen. It was clear to both Wendy and her mother that Michael was missing a certain love for life which he was replacing with substances, inevitably resulting in his moving on to heroin and crack cocaine, both of which became dangerous addictions.

He’d tried to kick the habit a number of times, and had succeeded for short periods of time, but Michael was the sort of addict who’d unfortunately always be an addict for one simple reason: he didn’t want to help himself. He’d seen himself as a hopeless cause and had been unable to break the self-fulfilling spiral of depression and substance abuse.

What had turned him to do what he did, though, was still a mystery to Wendy. She knew from her experience as a police officer that doing what he’d done and being a drug addict were far from being connected, but part of her had always wondered whether it had caused some sort of chemical alteration in his brain.

Those long nights when she’d been unable to sleep had often been taken up with her own analyses of what had happened, what had gone wrong. Had there been something lacking in Michael from an early age? Could she recall anything which might have been an early sign that he was going to go on to do what he did? There was nothing that sprung to mind, but then again what would? She knew there was no such thing as the Hollywood early warning sign; no general tendency for would-be evildoers to practice their murderous urges on frogs or mice.

No matter how many nights she lay awake trying to think of one, she could think of no particular event which could have led Michael down that path, which led her to only one worrying conclusion: that it was something inbuilt. And that, alone, worried her. After all, he was her brother. They were genetically similar.

Genetically speaking, Michael was half Bill Knight, the much-admired and much-missed legendary murder detective and half Sue Knight, the dearly missed town councillor and mother who’d done so much for her family and local community. Genetically speaking, he should have been the perfect human being. But something had gone very, very wrong.

The lack of answers and closure had played on Wendy’s mind ever since, but it had had one satisfying resolution: that she was determined to ensure it was the legacies of her parents that lived on; not her brother’s.