Living Among Wasps: The First Case

The Victim

Apparently, Rebecca wasn't in a chatty mood that day. After she handed me the folder with the case files, she dashed off without really saying anything more. We agreed that I would take a look at the evidence before she comes back tomorrow to hear what I've got to say about the case.

Upon inspecting the materials, I noticed that Rebecca had indeed been thorough. Besides the forensics and autopsy reports, she had added the testimonies of all the neighbours living in the building, as well as their dossiers. She had also done a remarkably fine job in photographing the crime scene and the victim. There were around twenty shots of each room in the apartment and about as many of the victim. Not only had she shot the floor, the walls, the furniture and the celling, but she had crawled under the sink and the bed as well as carefully opened each and every drawer. It almost seemed as if she had taken these pictures with intent of showing them to someone who could not be present at the scene. Lastly, she had also included a flashdrive with the security camera footage and the contents of the victim's phone. The prison promised to provide me with a laptop by the end of the day, but they will not grant me the Wi-Fi password so that I can't contact anyone outside. Or wander off watching videos of kittens. That didn't bother me at all since there was no one I would want to contact anyway. My parents have long since stopped talking to me, or even recognizing me as their child, and I don't have anyone I could claim as a friend either. The only person I could contact was Rebecca, but what could I possibly say to her? Without giving much more thought to my private life, I got into my bed and started looking through the files.

The victim, Amanda N., was a woman in her late thirties. A psychiatrist, according to the documents. For the last two and a half years she had been running her own private clinic with modest success. At one point roughly a year ago her business was close to bankruptcy. It survived because of an investment from an offshore company based in Monaco. There was nothing more on this transaction inside the files I had, but I would be genuinely surprised if it had actually slipped through the more secretive agencies of the Interior ministry. This woman, Amanda, certainly has something to hide and she is far from a petty, little citizen.

Her husband, on the other hand, was and upstanding citizen, at least according to the papers. He worked as a chef in a restaurant called "Nightingale" – the place is not particularly posh, but it nevertheless remains as one of the more elegant places to dine in. He has worked there for the last six years. Apart for a couple of speeding tickets and a parking fine, he has not jumped in the eyes of the law.

Judging from the picture of the crime scene, the victim wasn't very tall and slightly out of shape. Her short, brown hair covered her lifeless face that carried a birthmark just under the left nostril. The victim had her right hand on the left collarbone, with the fist oddly clenched – that must have been the hand the husband was holding as the woman took her last breath. The other hand was still, lying by her side, soaked in the blood that covered the whole floor because the rest of her corpse had been ripped apart in the mad frenzy of the attacker. Her clothes were shredded by the stabs, but underneath the body was covered with hideous criss-crossed wounds that stretched from her collarbone to waistline. She wasn't just stabbed, but sadistically mutilated and the ghastly state in which the attacker had left the victim would leave everyone close to throwing up. I could spot some footmarks on the floor, but they were obviously made by the worried husband and the medical team. The oddest thing about the attack was that there wasn't any sign of struggle. The perpetrator had been right in front of her, but there were no bruises on her body which would indicate defence, nor was there, as Rebecca already noted, any other DNA besides her husband's. Even if the spouse was the killer, Amanda would surely have tried to defend herself. The rest of the pictures indicated that there was nothing extraordinary about the place. Nothing seemed to be broken, taken or removed, apart from the kitchen knife which was used as the murder weapon. The drawers were in perfect order from the sock and shirt ones in the bedroom to the cutlery in the kitchen. Furthermore, there wasn't a speck of dust, smudge or blemish in the rest of the flat. Their neatness and order was remarkable!