Constrained Writing Exercise - Police Procedural

First time doing a Constrained Writing exercise. It had to include all these and be a police procedural, under 800 words.

• Ritual

• Hiraeth

• Sisyphean

• Bleat

• The thing that should not be

• She never went out without a book under her arm

• Happiness is mandatory

The man’s screaming had lost all coherence. His pain and loss so overwhelming that they could no more be conveyed in words than the bleat of a farm animal.

DI Trainor rubbed the bridge of his nose and tried to maintain his composure and the empathy he knew he should feel. Unfortunately, the baby had been keeping them up so much that everything had started to take on a dream-like quality, that made rational thought and normal emotions hard to hold onto. He was fighting a desperate urge to tell the grieving Father to shut up. Instead, he took it out on the young DC who had managed to allow the poor guy to see his daughter in this state.

“What the hell are you playing at!”, he hissed at his cringing junior, who apologised and started to back away from Trainor's fury. "No, don’t you try and fucking slink off. You are going to stay here and deal with this. If nothing else, I promise you, you will learn a lesson today.”

Trainor ushered the father away. Behind them, the SOCO’s were systematically documenting the room. Every spot of blood, from what appeared to be some sort of ritual cutting. The poor chap was babbling about a book now. Trainor had seen this before. Faced with the thing that should not be, stressed minds sometimes react by fixating on tiny details. People complaining of a cut on a hand, while paramedics dealt with a deep stab wound. Family of an RTI fatality trapped in a loop of disbelief that this could happen on the victims birthday. The father just kept asking where her book was. Eventually, once they were out of eyeshot of the body, Trainor asked the man what he meant.

“Her book. She never went out without a book under her arm. Did they do this to her for a book?”

Trainor patted the man on the shoulder and gestured for someone to get the man a cup of tea. “I don’t know. I don’t know why they did it.” He wished he did. This was the third body they’d found like this and so far, nothing by way of connection to any of them. Managing to keep the details out of the press was the only thing of any use he’d achieved.

“Then where is her book? Maybe it’s a clue!”

“OK. OK, let me ask the team to look. What was she reading?”

“Um, a dictionary of words. Like, interesting words. Not a normal dictionary. Yesterday she read me an entry she liked. Sondering. It is a word to describe that feeling of realising everyone in the whole world has their own life and thoughts as complex as yours.” The clean memory of his daughter talking cheered him for a moment. Then he was lost again. Trainor relayed the intel to the site lead and looked around frantically for a tea carrying colleague.

As the uniform returned with a plastic cup of something not entirely unlike tea, there was a call from the room behind them. “Guv, I think you are going to want to see this.”

Trainor made his apologies to the father (with a shameful amount of relief) and returned to the crime scene. The team were standing around the book the father had described. It was open at H. “Hiraeth” was highlighted. Some twaddle about being homesick. He looked up at the SOCO who had called him. The woman was clearly itching to show him something further.

“Come on then Elaine. I’ve seen that look. It normally means a case is about to take a big jump forward. So please put me out of my misery.”

Elaine pointed at the page next to the word. “You see the number there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are 20 numbered entries in the book, OK? I didn’t notice at first but there was a blood spatter, and I had to document a couple of pages.”

“OK, so she was picking her top twenty to tweet.”

“Hiraeth, Altschmertz. Paro was 3 and 4. It means the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong. It was double underlined as well. Just like Sisyphean at 8 and 9. A never-ending task, also double underlined.”

Trainor failed to hide his confusion.

“It’s a message. It spells out “Happiness Is Mandatory”. It’s from him.”

Happiness is mandatory. Trainor thought of the sobbing rubble of a person in the next room. It would explain why the bastard carved that smile onto them all though. Trainor thanked Elaine, and called his boss. Two was a bad sign. Three, and now a cryptic message? This was going to get worse. A lot worse.