2007.
Another junkie. Another death. Same old story. Repeated so many times, it was easy to stop caring about each individual case.
This one was found face down in a big pile of bin bags at the rear end of a housing complex. Those who found her didn’t know which smell was worse: the rotting garbage or the rotting corpse.
Her death was unremarkable as these things go. An OD. Shooting up at the rear of the property, collapsing among the bags. Her last desperate breaths taking in the scents of rotting fruit and decomposing meat. A sad end to a sad life. But in the grand scheme, no better or worse than most.
The girl had a sheet stretching back decades. Drug addiction. Prostitution. Debts out of her eyeballs. Both to banks and other unregulated institutions. She was homeless in an on and off fashion. She sold the Big Issue for three months, working the pitch on Union Street, harassing the punters heading for the bookstore, sometimes getting a gentle warning from the community officers for being overly aggressive with her sales patter. Eventually she got booted from the programme for habitually and consistently selling while high.
There are rules, after all. Helping the homeless to help themselves. Not just helping the homeless for nothing.
She didn’t get that, really. Expected just another charity she could try and scam.
Banned from the Issue, she turned tricks, same way she had when she was new to the scene. Back then she’d been heroin chic, still with that little-girl-lost appeal. But years pumping powder left her looking old before her time. Bone thin, plaster white, reminding any potential punters of death more than lust. Slowing hearts more than speeding them up. Her whining pitch didn’t help matters, like she was begging folk for a fuck rather than offering an illicit thrill.
It didn’t work out. So she escaped like she always did.
Got high. Turned on. Tuned in. Dropped out one last and final time. Right on top of Tesco Value meals and crushed cans of lager.
The cops worked the scene with dutiful respect for the dead. But no one mourned her passing. Her name passed before the eyes of so many people who just shrugged and accepted her death as part of the cycle of things. It wasn’t that these people didn’t care. It was that the weight of the things they saw every day was so much greater than the death of a person who seemed to have done little to try and save themselves. To them, the dead girl seemed to have been seeking death more than living life.
And then her name passed before Sandy Griggs.
The Burns project was winding down. Griggs had tried to fight it, but the powers that be were insisting that the old man and his operations could no longer be classed a priority. Griggs and a few others continued to work the old man’s files. They would do so until someone told them to stop. They had feelers out on the streets and in the police station. They read the official reports. Kept an eye on the old man. His suppliers. Their customers.
Any business relating to Burns came to them. And finally, it simply came to Griggs. The last man standing. The last man with the energy to care about an operation no one wanted any more.
The man who dealt to the dead girl went by the name of Damon Oliver. He was thirty-three years old, had a business degree and was working off a big debt to one of the old man’s enforcers. At the same time, he was chancing his arm by working as a police informant. Figuring he could play both sides against each other. In his head, Oliver was the smartest guy in the room. It was the kind of lie people tell themselves so they don’t just give up.
Hence why, when the girl died, Oliver held up his hands and said, ‘The batch was good. It was her system that was fucked, couldn’t handle it.’ Figuring he had to get ahead of this one before they thought she was violating the terms of his agreement with the cops. It was a double bind, but in Oliver’s mind, he wasn’t the one at fault.
Oliver supplied the drugs.
Oliver was in hock to David Burns.
The girl’s name was CeeCee McKenzie. She kept her married name even after the divorce. Because it embarrassed her brother. Her brother who was a cop.
She wasn’t born CeeCee. She was born Catherine.
Catherine Griggs.