Firelight

Chapter 7

Amelia walked into her office and could instantly feel the looks from her co-workers. The whispers of the office gossip echoed in her mind as she walked for what seemed like miles to get to her desk. Even as she sat down, she knew the work experience kid was gazing at her relentlessly. She turned, slowly, deliberately, to stare him down. He went back to his work, but kept glancing at her; he probably thought covertly, though Amelia stopped caring.

She could see her boss coming over to her desk, she knew what he would say. Pushing her unbrushed mane out of her eyes, she smiled at him.

"You don't need to be here, you should take the day off"

Amelia shook her head. It was so surreal, but she needed something to seem normal in her life after all that had happened. Her boss seemed to understand, his watery blue eyes scanned her, before he nodded, and left.

Her red eyes stung as she flicked on the monitor, and booted up her computer. Maybe the day would get better, but she doubted it. Still, she wanted to use her time productively, so she started to look up everything she could about the previous cases.

Hours passed, and the only consistent theme she could find was the Pheonecian runes, drawn in charcoal near where the fire had started. She didn't know anything about Classical literature, so she hit the online forums. There were a few theories – but nothing solid.

Amelia wanted to scream with frustration. She wasn't at her best, but she could normally find any information she needed; it was how she had got to be such a well-paid reporter in such a small firm. It was like nobody knew anything; the police weren't saying anything interesting in any statements, witness statements were vague and jumbled at best, and the writing the vigilante left didn't make sense even when it was translated – it was all just a confusing mess.

Everything about the case was just so random, but there had to be a connection that everyone was missing. Maybe Amelia wasn't seeing it, but maybe it needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Maybe a victim's pair of eyes.

At first, it seemed like there wasn't anything to go on. Hundreds of interviews later, and Amelia could feel her fiery passion being drowned in the notebooks and references she was making, the mountains of work she was sifting through.

Day by day, it felt like her soul was being drained. She looked at her notes, she checked the information she had got from the police, looked through the interview scripts that she had gotten illegally. It all felt so pointless,

No wonder the police hadn't been able to do anything; Amelia wasn't doing much either. She just spent her day staring at the computer screen, glancing intermittently at her notebook and occasionally annotating it, looking through her scribbles and trying to remember what she was going to check next. It was so arduous; she wanted to scream with frustration.

When she finally did give in to temptation and scream her rage, hurling her notebook against the wall, she felt a bit better. As though letting out her anger somehow helped her concentrate afterwards.

It just restarted the cycle and the frustration of failure began to build in her once again. She'd feel like crying, so she resolved to work harder and promised herself that, when the time came, she could scream even louder than before.

Then she noticed it. A hidden detail in some of the accounts, easily overlooked. Near the blaze was a youth with deep blue eyes and an angelic smile. Some even managed to remember he had light brown hair. Very few people could remember him, but amongst the families and residents, the veritable army of witnesses who lived nearby, at least one person could remember him at each event.

Amelia phoned up her contacts in the police, but understaffed as they were, they hadn't noticed the tiny detail. She couldn't blame them. Two weeks of talking to onlookers, sifting through her notes, and reading the newspaper reports of another killing, she had nearly missed it all too. But there it was: that one little anomaly, that one person in the crowd which almost no one could remember.

They asked her for the names of the people she had talked to, promised to talk to them all, and said they would check cctv footage. Amelia knew what it all meant – nothing. The description was so vague that it was barely worth noting, and sifting through hours of footage, pulling up pictures of every young male and trying to identify him would need even more police time, more manpower; resources the force didn't have.

The depressing part was this was the first clue that the police had found in weeks. They were so utterly desperate that they had latched onto anything. They had burned through all their options, as forensics had turned up nothing, the Pheonecian writing didn't mean anything, and the victims seemed randomly chosen. Some were high profile cases, murderer charges that were dropped years ago or spent convictions, but most were just ordinary people.

Still, thought Amelia as she phoned her boss with her miniscule discovery, at least people would buy her paper tomorrow.

The office was empty when Amelia walked in, the florescent strip lights flickering into life to illuminate a pile of papers covering her desk. She knew she would be the only one in when she got there, but she needed to feel like she was doing all she could on the story, even if it meant giving up on sleep. She was too involved now to just go home and lie in her bed trying to drift off into a peaceful slumber; not that her dreams were peaceful anymore.

Her computer was still on from when she left hours ago. The obnoxious creaks and whirs of its fans and processors were a tell-tale sign as to its age. Still, Amelia loved her old machine – it had made some of her best reports, and it would help her through this one last story.

She paused, puzzled by the thought. She knew deep down it was true, but she had never really thought about it. This would be her last story. She just couldn't keep doing journalism anymore, not after all that had happened with this one story. The realisation shocked her, saddened her, but also comforted her. It was like she had received permission from herself to retire, to do something different with her life. Silently, she vowed to make it the best she ever wrote.

With renewed vigour, she started sifting through the notes her colleagues had left on her desk. Some of them were almost useful, but most were pointless padding – regurgitated information that the police had already drowned in. Mercifully, the work experience menace had kept his research on his own desk. "Probably trying to steal the scoop from me" Amelia murmured to herself.

There was one interesting thing though – a single piece of paper. It was a copy of an artist's rendition of the youth with the angelic smile. One of her contacts in the police had forwarded it over; a thank you for discovering what so many officers had missed. Amelia felt a surge of emotions that brought her close to tears. Her story would be the first that had anything substantial on who the murderer could be. It was the sort of story that could make her renown amongst investigative journalists.

But then horror set in as she started to think about what it all meant. It hadn't even been twelve hours since she let the police know her discovery. They were far more desperate than she had ever realised if they were willing to pull together witnesses at such short notice. At this rate, Jamie's death would never be avenged, justice could never happen.

The revelation fuelled her resolve, as she typed furiously into the wee hours of the morning.