Mirror Mirror

Prologue

One year ago...
Sirens screeched through the cold, starless night, lacerating through the quiet little English country village of Lockwood's Halt. Four police cars pulled up outside a large, tumbledown old house with an overgrown garden strewn with weeds. Dark-clothed figures swarmed in, coming out several minutes later with a body enclosed in a body bag, carried away on a stretcher. The movement jostled it, and a thin arm fell out of the black bag. The long fingers torn and bloody, the fingernails jagged and stained. A few crimson drops of blood trickled from inside the bag, down the arm and fell to the ground, leaving a breadcrumb trail from the abandoned house, across the unkempt lawn...

***

Detective Chief Inspector Norvin Comyna shrugged into his long woollen coat, scowling into the hall mirror opposite, taking in his ruffled grey, receding hair and bloodshot eyes with annoyance. He was not impressed by what he saw. No one likes being woken up at 2am on a Sunday, especially not to go investigate a grisly murder. The sound of soft footfall on the staircase made him turn, and he smiled thinly at his husband, who smiled back, his hair sticking up at odd angles and his dark eyes twinkling. "Off to work at this hour are you?" His broad Scottish accent making that sentence take twice as long as it needed to. "Well I'm not up at the crack of dawn for the fun of it." Norvin snapped. Gaelle laughed, wrapped his dressing gown tighter around his narrow frame and put a hand on Norvin's shoulder. "If it makes you feel any better," Gaelle informed him cheerfully, "while I'm snuggled up in my nice warm bed, I'll think of you out there in the freezing cold, examining corpses and looking for clues." Norvin's scowl deepened "Amazingly, no it really doesn't." Chuckling, Gaelle reached up and gave him a quick kiss before going back up to the bedroom, making a big show of yawning widely. Shaking his head slightly, Norvin grabbed his car keys from the hook beside the door and stepped out into the frozen night...

***

Despite the late - or, technically early, depending on how you look at it - hour, a small crowd of onlookers had gathered around the scene of the crime. Yellow police tape cordoned off the house, and men and women in fluorescent yellow jackets surrounded the perimeter, stopping anyone from getting too close. Not that they were needed, of course. As curious as they may be, the inhabitants of Lockwood's Halt had no desire to enter the house where a body had just been found. The group consisted of about twenty people, almost everyone who lived near the manor-house. They all had an anxious, slightly crumpled look to them, mingled with a morbid kind of curiosity. The police weren't telling them much, only that an as-of-yet unidentified corpse had been removed from the building. The house was old, and hadn't been inhabited for a decade, at least. The old inhabitants had been an elderly couple who had passed peacefully on in the local Retirement Village several years back. They had left the property to their only child, a middle aged woman who hadn't set foot in Lockwood's Halt since she had left to attend an university in London. She had also passed on a while ago, due to heart failure. The house had just sat there, ever since. Growing darker and dirtier with each year that passed, it's gardens becoming more like jungles, the green threatening to swallow the big old house whole. And now, after such a long time, for a corpse to be found in it, well, needless to say, the villagers' curiosity was piqued...

***

Norvin's car rolled to a stop in the driveway - he though he was being generous when he called it that, it was more a grubby patch of cracked bricks congealed into the sodden earth - , headlights sweeping and tires crunching. He got out quickly, wincing at the sound of his bones creaking in complaint as he trudged past the Constable on duty. He nodded to his partner Detective Sargent Taite, who looked just as haggard as he felt. "Night - or should I say morning, Sherae." She nodded gloomily back to him "Morning sir," she inclined her head towards to group of onlookers, her auburn hair shining with a fiery glow in the light of the streetlamp opposite. "You see that big crowd over there? That includes almost everyone who lives near hear. Almost everyone. Want to know whose missing?" She pointed across the street to a big old Gothic-Victorian manor. "Them. The Nightshade family, consisting of mother - Irene (34), father - Robert (35), and children Hershel (14), Esme (15), Ebony and Shay (16). Living right across the street, with a perfect view of the house. And, they are the only people neighbours who haven't shown up. Fishy, don't you think?" During the daytime, the house and it's garden probably looked beautiful, but under the cover of darkness and uncertain lighting, it looked sinister and arcane. All the windows were darkened, apart from the one in the attic. Through that one, Norvin could see the silhouette of a slender girl with long hair. There was something about the way she stood there, looking down as if she knew he was watching her, that sent shivers down his spine...