Cherry Ghost

Three

Four years ago an anonymous package had arrived at the station addressed personally to DI Adrian Gore in immaculate italic script. It was wrapped in a couple of faded newspaper sheets dated Tuesday 8th February 1977 and held together with yellowed and brittle Cello tape. He could still recall the revulsion that swept over him at the horror of the photograph that was revealed. A vicious spike of mental stimuli; a black and white image that had become scarred into his memory forever. An image that like a splinter left too long in a finger, nagged away at a subconscious level, its septic infection spreading slowly inside like the slow drip, drip, drip of a leaky tap in an otherwise silent room.

Illuminated by a single bulb suspended from a dirty wire were two children. Barely clothed, their bodies covered in wheals and ugly scars, they stared blankly towards the camera with listless eyes. Also captured in the picture was an old wooden chair and a small side table on which was an untidy pile of faded newspapers. A battered photograph of an ancient church hung on the wall behind, sloping to the left at such an angle that it had taken a few minutes to discern exactly what it was. Its clock face forever stuck at 10.15.

The girl appeared to be about 12 years of age. She was barefoot and had a chain fastened around an ankle with sufficient length to allow her to climb on top of a narrow metal framed bed. She wore a pair of ill-fitting corduroy dungarees that failed to hide her distended stomach.

On the bed, along with a mattress partially covered by a patchwork bedspread was a boy who could have been a couple of years older than her. He was chained via a collar to the wall behind the bed where a ring was embedded into the exposed brickwork. Thin lank hair fell to his jagged collar bones, and with his emaciated skin stretched tight over protruding ribs, he could easily have passed as a survivor in one of the photographs taken after the liberation of Auschwitz, Chelmno or the other Nazi death camps.

The arrival of the package had been kept from the public eye whilst a team had been set up to look into the possibility of discovering who the subjects were, if it was a genuine case that warranted further investigation and most importantly if there was any chance of finding any perpetrator/s and bringing them to justice. Extensive investigations, many fruitless man hours and a vast proportion of the available budget had revealed nothing and with no further clues forthcoming, the case had been set to one side, left open but not actively worked and apart from the occasional flash back in the minds of those initially involved, it had become largely forgotten.