Innocent Monsters Read Online Free Page A

was just wondering if you could come to see me at the station tomorrow morning. There’s a few things I would like to go over with you about your sister’s case.”
    Jessica sat up. “My sister’s case? I don’t understand... What case?”
    “Yes, you see, the law requires us to investigate every suicide. So, as I said, I would like you to come and see me, review a few details in person if possible. Tomorrow?”
    “Tomorrow’s fine.”
    “Great. The station is the Ingleside District Station, in Young Lane. The details are on the business card I left with you. Do you still have it?”
    She tried to remember if the card was still laying face up on the kitchen table. “I think so.”
    “I should be at the station all morning. Just ask for me. If I’m not there, please wait. Thank you. Good evening.”
    Jessica lay on the sofa for several minutes after the phone call feeling inexplicably thrilled. Her mind started racing through the last few days again, wondering which details Brown intended to discuss, but she was tired and soon memories became muddled with weird dreamlike sequences, the way it always happened when she slowly fell asleep.
    Tired. She was so tired...
    UNTIL THE age of twenty-two, a couple of years after she had started therapy, every single one of Jessica’s dreams was acted out in the house she grew up in. If she dreamt about being at a party, the party would be held in her old house; if she dreamt about having a new job, she would be working out of her old bedroom; if she needed to go to the toilet while walking in the street, the public toilet she’d walk into would suddenly become her old family bathroom.
    Lorna had suggested that the house represented a jail, her jail, a place she could not simply walk out of, a place she couldn’t leave even though she didn’t live there anymore.
    She hadn’t dreamt of the house in about two years now; she could remember every detail but hardly ever thought about it. Yet entering through the front door at that precise moment didn’t feel strange or disturbing. She knew she had to go. Kaitlyn was still in there, she knew she was.
    Jessica walked through the hallway, past the kitchen, past the sitting room, calling her name.
    “Kaitlyn? I’m here now. Kaitlyn? I’m back.”
    She walked up to their bedroom door, suddenly afraid of what she would find on the other side.
    “Kaitlyn?”
    Inside the room, the beds and the wardrobe had disappeared, the magnolia on the walls, the Nirvana posters, everything replaced by the old fashioned bathroom of her current apartment, its goldenrod walls and its dripping tap.
    Kaitlyn was in here, sitting in pink bathwater, her back weirdly straight and her arms limp by the side of her naked body. And when she opened her mouth to speak it wasn’t her voice that came out, but a weird distortion, something that might have belonged to a frail old woman.
    “Jessica, you believe me don’t you? It wasn’t me. I didn’t do this. I’ll tidy up. Please don’t tell mother.”

27 October 2000
    THE ROOM in which Jessica sat after the detective greeted her and asked her if he could offer her a coffee was gloomy, the air stale. The barred windows didn’t look as if they had been opened or washed any time recently.
    The wooden table between her and Brown was old, the varnish greasy, scribbled in places.
    She had imagined herself sitting in an immaculate white questioning room with large mirrors, like the ones she always saw on the big screen; now she felt more like a character in an episode of a gritty TV cops series.
    Brown looked tired and somehow untidy, much older than she remembered him, probably in his late sixties. His shirt wasn’t properly ironed and he wasn’t wearing a tie; his hair, balding at the top and too long at the back could have done with a good brushing. He didn’t look out of place in the shabby room but he seemed kind and caring and she felt at ease.
    He opened a yellow folder on the table in front of him