AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

Previously on Photo Finish: Naomi and Emily are taken to their new safe house and discover that a new female DC has been added to their protection team. Katie enlists the help of Johnny White's henchmen for protection when she and Effy go to meet up with Cook. Two mysterious, unidentified figures clash in the shed and one of them stabs the other before hiding on hearing the girls arrive. Johnny White's boys enter to find the dead body lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the shed.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: PSYCHO KILLER, RUN, RUN, RUN AWAY!

After an awkward, eerie silence that was so strained and intense that one could have heard a pin drop, although not apparently the nervous breathing of another person hiding in the shed, one of Johnny White's henchmen asked the obvious question.

'Do either of you girls know who he is?'

Effy turned her pale, drawn face towards Dumb – or it might have been Dumber, it's hard to distinguish between the two, at least on an intellectual level – and croaked a whispered response which betrayed the state of utter confusion and bewilderment that she was in.

'It's my therapist. It's Doctor Foster!'

'Your therapist?' He considered Effy's surprising reply carefully for a moment or two before following it up with an observation which in the circumstances was unusually perceptive. 'This is a bit of an odd place to have a session with your therapist, if you don't mind me saying, love.'

'Yeah,' agreed his mate, nodding as he looked around him. 'I mean, there's no couch to lie down on. A therapist always has a nice, comfortable couch for his patient to lie down on.'

'She wasn't expecting to meet him here!' said an exasperated Katie who could see how distressed Effy was, although it was hard to tell how much of her distress was down to finding the brutally savaged body of Dr Foster and how much of it was the crushing disappointment of not meeting up with Freddie or even Cook as she had hoped.

'Oh,' said Dumb, a trifle bashfully, guessing that he had got the wrong end of the stick. 'I'm sorry, Effy. I didn't mean to upset you. So, what's this guy doing here if he wasn't the one you were supposed to be meeting?'

'I don't know,' said Effy tearfully, shaking her head. 'None of this makes any sense. I thought he had moved away from Bristol. He told me he was leaving to take up another job somewhere else.'

Katie could see the guys' perplexed expressions as they struggled to comprehend who and what they were dealing with and decided to fill them in on their reason for being there.

'Effy got a text message earlier on from Cook telling her to meet him here tonight, saying he had some news about her boyfriend, Freddie, who went missing a few weeks ago. She was hoping to see Freddie tonight, or at least Cook with some news.'

'I see,' said Dumb, marginally the smarter of the two, for whom the penny was finally starting to drop. 'But instead of finding Freddie or Cook, alive and well, we appear to have found your therapist, very much dead.'

'I don't understand what he was doing here or who could have killed him!' shrieked Effy who was starting to get the shakes again, having fought valiantly to keep control of her senses since seeing the dead body. Katie put an arm around her horrified friend and led her slowly out of the shed, judging that there was no need for them all to be standing around a dead body any longer. She was obviously heavily in shock and needed to be pulled away from the appalling scene without delay.

'Well, this is a bit of a turn up for the book, isn't it?' said Dumber to his comrade-in-arms as they watched the girls leave the shed. 'What do you think we should do?'

'I don't know, mate. Do you think we should call the boss?'

'Ooooh, I'm not sure about that. I can't see him being very pleased at being disturbed. I think he was on a bit of a promise tonight.'

'Really? Who with?'

'Why, with that young Katie, I think.'

They looked at each other and frowned, puffing their cheeks out in almost perfect synchronicity. 'I can't see Katie being much in the mood for romance tonight, can you? Not after a shock like that. It would put me right off sex, a dead body, I can tell you.'

'How would you know? When did you last have sex?'

His mate pondered the leading question for a while before smiling as the answer suddenly came to him. 'It were a Tuesday, I think. Yeah, that's right. Definitely a Tuesday.'

'Tuesday last week?' His mate looked at him in disbelief. 'No way!'

'No! It were some time last year! But it was definitely a Tuesday.'

Katie returned to break up the philosophical musings of Dumb and Dumber with a pointed question. 'What the fuck are we going to do, boys? We can't leave the body here. Freddie's Dad and sister still live here. Suspicion's bound to fall on them, for Christ's sake.'

The heavies muttered their agreement on that point and made the executive decision that the body had to be moved and dumped somewhere else far away from Freddie's house.

'You just leave it to us, Katie my love. You go and look after Effy, you hear. We can see she's very upset. We'll take care of everything.'

Katie nodded and thanked Dumb and Dumber profusely for agreeing to dispose of the body, giving them each a lingering peck on the cheek for helping her and Effy out in their hour of need. The two boys beamed broadly like Cheshire cats and shuffled their feet to hide their embarrassment, unused as they were to receiving such a show of affection and gratitude from such a beautiful young girl. It was with considerable sadness and regret that they watched Katie lead a still badly shaken Effy out of the garden before disappearing from view around the side of the house.

'She's a lovely girl, that Katie, isn't she?' said Dumb admiringly, letting out the heavy sigh of a man who knew he'd just allowed a sure thing to get away from him.

'Smashing girl,' agreed Dumber. 'Mind you, I could have sworn her name was Emily, not Katie.'

Emily's mood had picked up considerably in the last couple of hours or so since they had set foot inside their temporary new home. A nice little smooching session with Naomi in the bedroom had helped, admittedly carried out initially with a degree of trepidation that one of the officers might suddenly burst into the room without warning or even so much as a by your leave. But amazingly they had been left undisturbed which Emily had put down to the instructions of the new police woman rather than a change of attitude on the part of DC Sweeney.

She had always had the impression when he was living in their house that he was perpetually and creepily fascinated by the two of them living together as a couple and was constantly looking out for any outward signs of affection between her and Naomi as if he was suddenly going to produce a camera from nowhere and get the evidence on film to show round the station when he got the chance. He gave her the willies, so to speak, and she was mightily relieved when this new female officer turned up to increase the level of their protection.

She had found out that her name was Cathy and although it was still very early days and Emily knew it was dangerous to go jumping to conclusions too soon, it did seem as if she very nice and a huge improvement on DC Sweeney in terms of sensitivity, understanding of their awkward situation and unsurprisingly the level of conversation. It had only taken an hour or so for Emily and Naomi to realise that they had exhausted all the possible topics of conversation between them and Sweeney. Cathy appeared to offer the potential to be a much more interesting and amusing companion and the girls had spent a fun last hour and a half chatting away to her in the kitchen whilst DC Sweeney was giving a passable impression of a couched potato in front of the TV in the lounge.

Pizza had been ordered in for the four of them from a local delivery outlet and the three girls had been tucking into theirs at the kitchen table together whilst Sweeney was eating his straight from the box sitting on the sofa so as not to miss any of his favourite cop programme.

'So, you didn't fancy snuggling up to DC Sweeney on the sofa and watch yet another repeat of Inspector Morse with him?' Naomi asked with a mischievous glint in her eyes as she bit greedily into the last slice of her pizza.

'Jesus! I'd rather stick pins into my arm or perhaps hack my head off with a rusty meat cleaver.' Cathy snorted in derision at Naomi's obviously sarcastic suggestion.

'Don't you two get on, then?' Emily laughed at Cathy's response and exchanged a knowing smile with Naomi.

'It's not so much that we don't get on. It's more that we seem to have absolutely nothing in common. He's about as far removed from the sort of people I like to hang out with as it's possible to get.'

'And what sort of people are they?' Naomi was interested to find out what she was really like but already she had found her to be far more pleasant and amusing company than ever likely to be.

'Oh, you know, just ordinary, down to earth, straightforward people with no ridiculous hang-ups, no pathetic caveman, Neanderthal attitudes, no ideas about women which are still stuck in the Middle Ages.'

'Who can you be referring be?' Surely you don't mean DC Sweeney? But he's such a sweet, modern, New Age Man type of guy.' Naomi didn't bother to lower her voice, seemingly past caring whether the aforementioned dinosaur could hear her in the other room.

The three of them sniggered conspiratorially and immediately Emily felt a bond had been forged, a connection had been made with Cathy which she hoped might sustain her and Naomi through the difficult days ahead. She was a very pretty young woman, medium height, slim, with long dark hair and emerald green eyes that always suggested a roguish hint of a smile whatever the situation. Emily guessed her to be in her mid to late twenties as she said she had joined the police force straight from school and had been in it for almost ten years.

'Has he been giving you any grief, then? Cathy asked, drinking the last mouthful of her fizzy drink and wiping her mouth with her serviette.

'No, not t really,' said Emily.

'Oh, come on, Ems. You told me he gives you the creeps half the time. We couldn't walk around the house even half-dressed without him staring at us like some creepy perv. You said you felt like he was thinking 'Come on girls, get down and dirty for me, show us what you can do, you naughty little lezzers.'

'Oh, Jesus Christ! I'll have a word with him on the quiet and tell him to stop acting like a total nobhead. I'll tell him he's the one who's in the minority here so he can stop acting like some big macho stud otherwise we'll put it around the station that we've discovered he's into gay porn.'

Emily and Naomi burst out into fits of laughter and the three of them made such a noise with their hysterical cackling that Sweeney was prompted to haul himself off the sofa in the living room and come out into the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about. His puzzled, innocent face served only to set the three young women off on one again and he was despatched smartly out of the women-only club and back to the comfort of his lounge-lizard pit with a few suitably disparaging remarks along the lines of 'You wouldn't understand, Sweeney' and 'Trust me, you'd rather not know.'

It took Johnny White's boys a good half an hour to clean up the unsightly mess of a dead body surrounded by a tell-tale pool of blood in the middle of the shed. Firstly they had to get something to wrap the body of John Foster in. Dumber disappeared for five minutes, leaving Dumb on his own standing next to the body, shaking his head in frustration and tutting away quietly to himself. He could scarcely believe his eyes at the lack of craftsmanship and quality nowadays in terminatory services. 'God, there are some real bloody cowboys around!' he thought. 'What a mess they've made of the place. No finesse, no planning, no style. It's all a bit of a bloody shambles. Just as well we turned up to put it all right!'

His mate returned with a large sheet of tarpaulin and the two of them carefully lifted up the dead body of John Foster and placed him on it, then wrapped it around him and tied up the two ends so that he was properly secured. They then carried him out into the garden and swiftly round the side of the house and towards the back of the car which had been reversed up the path as far as it could go without drawing an unwarranted amount of attention. Not that there was a soul to be seen at that time of night although experience told them not to take any chances.

After loading the corpse into the boot of the car they returned to the shed where they set about the final task of removing all the remaining evidence by cleaning up the dark red pool of blood that lay testament to the brutality of the killing which they had walked in on. All the while they were mopping up the blood with an impressive array of rags and cleaning equipment, a silent shadowy figure at the back of the shed watched them with a keen interest, fervently hoping that he wouldn't be discovered and so would not be required to add two further bodies to his list of victims for the evening.

Ten minutes later and the boys were finished, pausing only to admire their handiwork which now completely concealed the fact that a fatal stabbing had ever taken place in the shed. They nodded at each other in approval and went on their way, closing the shed door quietly behind them and slipping furtively out through the garden and into the cold, dark autumn night. The figure at the back of the shed heard them leave but gave it another couple of minutes before judging that they weren't coming back and that it was safe to come out of his hiding place.

He stood on the spot where the body had been sprawled only a short while ago and murmured his own approval. These fellows were certainly professionals, he thought. They knew their stuff and no mistake. There wasn't a spot of blood left – all traces of the murder he had committed had been expertly removed with cold, clinical precision, He would have liked to be able to thank then for the trouble they had saved him but he knew that wasn't ever going to be possible. He was glad now that he hadn't been forced to kill them as well in order to protect himself. Besides, disposing of one dead body wouldn't have presented too many difficulties but getting rid of three – well, that would have been a completely different kettle of fish. That could have been tricky and messy so he was relieved to have been spared that particular ordeal.

He peered out through the window into the garden and up at the house which was still shrouded in darkness and decided he might as well fuck off out of there as well. There was nothing to be gained in hanging around any longer – his mission had been accomplished and it was time to move on to the next step. This bit had been relatively simple to carry out. The next part was a whole new ball game and one that he wasn't especially looking forward to. He needed to give it some serious thought and so he automatically reached a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He inhaled deeply for several seconds before blowing out the smoke into the crisp, cool evening air, enjoying that special feeling an addicted smoker gets when he can finally light up a fag after having previously been denied the pleasure.

After Katie had dragged Effy away from Freddie's house and the appalling sight of Foster's mutilated corpse lying prostrate on the ground in the shed, she decided that her friend should not be left on her own that night. She could see that she was still badly shaken up by the whole shocking experience and although she herself was more affected by it than she was letting on to Effy, she knew she needed to be strong for her and be there for her to help her recover.

'You're coming back to our place, Effy,' said Katie with a quiet determination in her voice that made it clear that she would accept no protests from her friend. But Effy was in no fit state to argue with Katie and nodded silently in agreement. She called her Mum to let her know that she was staying round at Katie's for the night, keeping the conversation as brief as possible so her Mum couldn't detect the distress she was suffering. The girls were soon back at the Fitch retreat and after a few vague and empty pleasantries had been exchanged with Jenna and Rob, Katie led a muted and stunned Effy up the stairs and into her bedroom.

No sooner had Katie closed the door behind them than Effy burst into tears. Katie pulled the sobbing, clearly freaked out girl over towards her and hugged her tightly, rubbing her consolingly on the back and mumbling a few inconsequential words of comfort and support as one does in times of stress and anguish.

'It's okay, Eff, it's okay. It's just delayed shock, that's all. You need to get it out of your system. You have a good cry, you'll feel much better afterwards, I promise.'

Effy took Katie very much at her word and had a damn good cry for several minutes whilst Katie held her and offered whispered encouragements. After a while Effy's sobs began to subside and soon she stopped altogether whereupon the two girls sat down next to each other on the bed and looked at each other in stunned silence.

'I don't understand any of this, Katie,' said Effy eventually, rubbing her red, tear-stained eyes with the back of her hand and reaching into a pocket for a tissue. 'Why was Dr. Foster in the shed in the first place? Who could possibly have wanted to kill him? And where was Cook? Why didn't he show up?'

'Has it occurred to you that maybe it was Dr. Foster who sent you the text message? He could have wanted to meet up with you for some reason and someone found out and killed him?' Katie's mind was racing like the clappers, desperately trying to make some sense of the bizarre and extraordinary events of that evening. She wasn't used to thinking on this sort of intellectual scale and hence it wasn't long before she had the mother of all headaches, largely due to all this unaccustomed brainpower.

'But if it was him who sent me the message, how come he was using Cook's phone? That doesn't make sense, does it?'

'I don't know. I mean, Cook disappeared off the face of the earth just like Freddie. Maybe…oh God, my brain hurts! Maybe he met up with Foster somehow and….I don't know, perhaps he lost his phone and Dr Foster found it and used it to text you.'

Effy shook her head from side to side. She wasn't having any of that. 'But Cook didn't know Foster. They never even met. Freddie met Foster on a couple of occasions when he came to visit me at the clinic.'

'Well, maybe Freddie, Cook and Foster have all ended up in the same place for some reason.' It was a fairly lame and unconvincing theory, she knew but like Effy she was totally baffled and was clutching at straws to come up with a credible explanation for the irrational sequence of events.

'Who would want to kill Dr. Foster, for Christ's sake? He was so nice to me and made me feel so much better about myself. Why would anyone want to harm him, Katie? He wouldn't have hurt a fly!'

Katie shook her head and put an arm around Effy's shoulders. 'I don't know, babe. None of it makes any sense at the moment. But one thing I do know, Effy. We can't tell anyone about what happened tonight. Agreed? Not just yet, at any rate. Not until we've thought things through a bit more. And maybe not even then. Okay?'

Effy fell silent again and nodded meekly, staring down at the bed, fighting to keep hold of her senses and not freak out all over again. What she really wanted more than anything was to have Freddie there by her side. He would know what to do; he would come out with the right words to comfort her and make all the pain and suffering go away. Where the fuck was he for when she needed him most? She yearned for him right at that moment more than she had ever done before.

'Yes!' screamed Naomi in delight on throwing the five that she wanted. She triumphantly pumped her right fist in the air and demanded a high five from an exasperated Emily sitting opposite her. She moved her bright yellow coloured playing piece into the space in the middle of the board and sat back in anticipation, waiting patiently for the other two girls to have a debate over what subject to choose for her.

The three girls had been playing Trivial Pursuit for over an hour and a half and Naomi and Cathy were battling it out as they neared the end of the game. Emily had been left floundering in their wake but was enjoying watching the keenly fought contest between the other two. Naomi was as competitive as she always was whenever she took part in any contest, whether it was just for a bit of fun or if something serious was at stake. Emily knew Naomi hated losing at anything and had fully expected her to win the game quite comfortably but she had been surprised at how clever and knowledgeable Cathy had proved to be. In a weird kind of way she was thoroughly enjoying watching Naomi being put under immense pressure by the detective constable and was managing to wind up Naomi very successfully with some well-judged little quips, remarks and asides.

'We've got to choose sport, Cathy,' said Emily confidently, flashing a quick glance at Naomi to observe her immediate reaction. 'She knows almost as little about sport as I do. It's easily her worst subject.'

'I think you're right, Emily,' nodded Cathy with a wide grin as Naomi looked on impassively, making a determined effort to keep her feelings in check. 'Go on, then, read her the question. Let's see how she stands up to the pressure.'

Emily picked out the next available card in the box and after searching for the sports option, grinned hugely and smiled. 'Oh, this is a nice easy one for you, Naoms. '' Which golfer holds the record for the most number of career majors won?''

'Fuck me!' said Naomi with a sigh of annoyance, turning her eyes up to the heavens in disgust. 'Why couldn't it have been a football question, at least? I don't know…um….hold on a minute! Surely…it's got to be Tiger Woods!'

Emily looked at the card, then across at Cathy whose face remained expressionless and then over to a suddenly hopeful Naomi who was beginning to think she might have got it right. 'Is that your answer?'

Naomi nodded expectantly. 'Bad luck, sweetheart. It's Jack Nicklaus with eighteen.'

'Bollocks!' said Naomi, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

'Thank you, vicar,' remarked Cathy with a wide grin. 'I think it's my turn now. Come on darling,' she whispered to the dice which she had picked up from the board and was now cradling in her hand. 'Let's have a nice little three, shall we?'

Cathy threw the dice onto the board and smiled as the three appeared face up. Naomi made an indescribable sound of frustration and had a quick discussion with Emily after which they agreed to select the subject of Science & Nature for Cathy which Naomi was convinced had been her shakiest topic in the game so far. The question was read out by Naomi and answered correctly by Cathy after much silent deliberation and prolonged contemplation of the table. The DC celebrated her win with a yell of triumph and a hilariously exaggerated dance around the room, leaving a pissed off Naomi and a laughing Emily watching her with a mixture of envy and amusement.

The girls packed away the board game and prepared to turn in for the night, Naomi being the first to say goodnight to Cathy and go up the stairs and claim the bagging rights to the bathroom first. Emily joined her some five minutes later after helping Cathy to tidy up the kitchen and headed straight for their bedroom, seeing the light was still on in the bathroom.

She opened the door and moved into the room but before her hand could switch the light on she was grabbed from behind and a hand was pressed over her mouth, though not roughly this time compared with the previous occasion. A familiar voice calmed her racing heart before she could think of screaming as she heard a whisper in her ear.

'Don't even think about screaming, sweetheart. Resistance is useless. I'm going to fuck your brains out. Miss Thicky's feeling horny!'

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