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Constable Simon Smith had never seen anything like it. Sure, he had only joined the police force a few years ago, which his more experienced – he called them senile behind their backs - comrades never let him forget, but this was simply terrible. He even lost his dinner when he first saw what waited for them in the cluttered one bedroom flat above a Chinese restaurant. His partner, Constable David Terrace, who had started work around the same time as Smith, promised he would never utter one word about Simon's upset stomach, but it was still embarrassing as hell. Smith hoped he'd never lose it like that when anyone else from the precinct was around, they would never let him live it down. There was a lady-sergeant who still now and then found puking bags on her desk when she came into work in the morning. And she had the valid excuse of having had a stomach bug when she'd eaten her lunch backwards at a very messy murder-suicide three years ago.
Said lady-sergeant was on parental leave right now, so Sergeant Butchers was working this case. Butchers was the biggest a*s this side of hell as far as Simon was concerned. And he simply had to be involved in something illegal like taking bribes from criminals or the like because he always got those calls on his mobile that would make him look around and, should he find somebody within hearing distance, leave the room. Simon had also noticed that strange cases seemed to end up on Butchers' table and then all of a sudden weren't strange any longer. Butchers could always be trusted to find some more or less reasonable explanation for the most bizarre circumstances. Like that homeless guy last winter who had his head nearly chewed completely off. So this case seemed right up Butchers' alley and he'd been grilling Simon and his partner for the last quarter of an hour about the call from a concerned neighbour they'd followed up on to find this.
And even reliving how they'd forced the door open to come face to face with a horror movie set made Simon feel queasy again. It had been nearly 2 am when dispatch sent the Constables Smith and Terrace into this less then respectable neighbourhood. Apparently the Indian widow living next to a single mother, Ms. Emilia Travis, and her son had been hearing a commotion in her neighbour's flat tonight: "It sounded like a party, but with only male guests if you get what I mean, and with the little boy in the house to boot." But she didn't pay much attention to that until the boy started to cry and shout for his mother a while later and wouldn't stop for half an hour, even when she hit the thin wall between the flats with here fist and shouted for his good-for-nothing mother to shut him up. Then she'd called the police, because she was coming down with something and really needed her sleep, so could the nice policemen please shut the brat up already?
What had sounded like your usual case of disturbance of the peace turned into something that would haunt Constable Smith until the end of his life. When David and he entered the flat, the first thing they saw was the mess. Furniture was turned on its head or thrown about, crisps littered the floor, crunching under their advancing feet, as they followed the child's wailing to a spot behind an overturned sofa. While Simon was busy in the bathroom David slowly coaxed the boy away from what was left of his mother. It took a long time to loosen those small fingers from the woman's bloody arm and the boy kicked and screamed all the way over to the bedroom. And once in there and out of sight of his mother's corpse the child suddenly curled into a ball and went very quiet. Hugging his knees his tears were soaking into his blood stained pyjama bottoms – the pyjama had little smiling toy cars on it, Simon would always remember that. The boys name was Pete and he was 12 years old, the files said, but he wouldn't react to his name that night, wouldn't even look up or flinch.
While Simon stayed with the boy David went back to his mother to check for signs of life although he was sure that he wouldn't find any since most of her blood which should be inside her body seemed to be on her clothes, the carpet and even the walls and ceiling. David avoided looking to closely at what used to be her neck lest he might need a trip to the bathroom as well. He called in reinforcements and an ambulance. When David returned to the bedroom Simon was softly talking to the boy, trying in vain to reach him through the shock of having found his mother murdered and then spending God knows how long desperately clinging to her cooling body, trying to wake her up. Constable Terrace pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his sweating face, wiping away the tears leaking out of his eyes as well.
The boy had been taken away by the ambulance a while ago. He had been fighting all the way and only calmed down when the female driver of the ambulance switched places with her colleague and took the boy into her arms.
Now David and Simon having given their statements were being more or less politely told to p*ss off and let the more experienced policemen and the forensics team do their job. Both sergeants were very surprised when the whole thing turned out to be nothing more then a robbery gone wrong, according to there superiors, and both never again mentioned the little boy covered in blood they had found crying in a poxy one bedroom flat over a Chinese restaurant.