Alarm clock? I felt drowsy when the sound woke me from a strange dream. I had no idea what time it was and after two seconds I came to realise that it hadn't been the alarm clock that woke me up but the mobile phone on the nightstand.
I was used to calls at all odd hours but it hadn't occurred in quite a while. I answered the phone, my voice still hoarse and heavy from sleep.
It was Donovan. She didn't sound any better but I presumed she had at least a ten minutes headstart. "What time is it?" I asked her. "It's now 6:23, Sir." I nodded and listened to the silence at the other end of the line. Then I realised she couldn't see me. "Er… why are you calling me half an hour before my alarm clock goes off?"

At 7 I already stood shivering at the bank of the river and overlooked the slow fading night. It was foggy and overall comfortless. I regretted that I didn't take the time to have at least one coffee.
"She has been found an hour ago by some…" Donovan hesitated, apparently thinking of a word to put it nicely. "drunkards." She looked tired and perished. I nodded in response. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. "Right. Shall we?" She surely had already a first glance at the body but she was polite enough to not announce it.

Forensics had already been diligent and were waiting in the background to put their tent over the body. Donovan gave me some space, fell a few steps behind and started a conversation with one of the Constables. I could hear their lowered voices while I examined the dead woman to my feet.
Water corpses were always the worst. Their faces - depending on the amount of time they had spent in the water - hardly recognisable anymore, bloated and waxen of blue-ish colour. They looked like frogs that got trapped in ice during the winter and popped onto the surface of the lake once the ice melted. Their empty eyes bulging out, not resembling anything "human" anymore. And then the smell…

I didn't recognise her at first. The individuality of her features got too replaced by the mask of death and the abidance in a watery grave for too many hours. It were her clothes I eventually recognised. The jeans, now tightly fitting around her calves and thighs, one sock went missing but never would I forget the remarkable fact that they had been neon yellow and green hooped, which was a fact that got stuck in my subconsciousness when I first saw her.
Her shirt had been white once with the embroidery of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. I couldn't see the kitten but I knew it was there and once they'd have turned the body over they would see it, as well.

I felt ice cold from the inside as if someone impelled an icicle through my core and all I could feel was hoarfrost.
The woman from the car boot. The woman Milverton had made me drive through the streets of London when he enforced this lunatic contract between us. He had lulled me into this false feeling of a fallacious truce. I thought I was nothing more than his chauffeur. He let me drive endless hours without any aim, just street after street after street.

It was on the last of this "tours" for him when I found her in the car boot; when I made this promise to get her out of there. The words even in memory becoming ashen and bitter in my mouth.

I had pushed her aside. Entirely. Back to a dark corner of my mind where she couldn't get out of if I didn't want her to. I didn't even have a name. She had been gagged and I didn't ask.
She remained a nameless victim. In life, in death.
"Greg!" Donovan's strident voice brought me back to the present. Away from the shadows of a past that was just a few months old and into the forlorn present and the company of a dead, nameless woman that impersonated my guilt. Ugly and bloated and bare of anything that had once been manlike, humane even.

Donovan never called me by my first name when we were out in the field.
I casted my eyes off the victim to my feet and looked at her. She was frowning and I could see worry in her eyes. She knew.
She didn't reach her position for her nice looks and the ability to run in high heels if she needed to when she just got out of a press conference she so confidently wielded every time just a minute prior.
She knew something was off.

"Sir?" she automatically switched back to the official appellation. I cleared my throat to buy some time. It felt as if my mind was filled with cotton.
"It is just… " I trailed off. "Do we have a name already?" I asked instead and Donovan shook her head, allowing me to change the subject so abruptly. For now.
"No, Sir. I had the Yard called and they are already in the missing persons database, but that will take a while. It may be wise to get the press involved?"

Everything but this!, I thought and stared at Donovan for longer than it would have been decent. "Yeah, that… would be wise, I assume." She eyed me and I could feel her doubts brushing over my clothes and my face with every second she watched me.
"I'll arrange everything, Sir."

I wanted to stop her, call her back when she walked away. I wanted to cancel it, but I simply couldn't. Still too much a copper to act against it. But dirty I was. Dirty I became those few months ago and now it hit me with the entire heaviness of this realisation.
I had become a dirty copper and that was a fact I would never be able to redeem again.