Three Ladies

[The Unvirginiser]

Three Ladies

 

It was almost eight in the morning and Detective Moore had been working around the clock with her partner. Her mind had briefly drifted away from the suspect in front of her and lingered on to her own family. She felt the usual warm stir of feelings as she pictured her husband getting the kids ready for school and frantically making breakfast. Her eyes slowly met Detective Warner’s, she snapped out of her slight day dream and they silently agreed that it was time to continue. The person opposite them was Janet Tandy. She was short middle aged woman with dyed, greasy hair. Her large earrings clashed hideously with her cheap clothes and didn’t flatter her overweight figure. A few hours earlier Janet’s children had been awoken to the sound of the front door being smashed in, and then had a dozen officers charging in to the house. They instantly restrained her and began seizing her belongings. For a second Moore thought back to her own children again, eating the hastily made toast and packing their schoolbags, but then they focused very intently on Janet.

 

“Janet, we need to go over your relationship with Colin again.”

“I met him over Facebook, I got a random add from him one day and we got talking.” Janet had been quite defensive over the last hour, but the stress was beginning to get to her and she was starting to open up.

“Did you ask him how he added you? Had he stumbled on your randomly or did you have some friends in common?”

“I didn’t ask, I thought he was dead good looking and he started chatting to me about stuff.”

“Did your husband know about this?”

“No. We were talking for a few weeks, sometimes until three or four in the morning on weekends. He’d text me all day and all night and I’d speak to him on the phone.”

“And where did it go from there?” Moore spoke softly, like she understood what Janet was going through and felt her pain.

“We started talking about fantasies and stuff we were in to. After a while we were texting each other photos and having cyber sex,” Janet’s eyes began to well up again, Detective Warner moved the box of Kleenex towards her, “obviously I have my husband and I’m the worse wife in the world.”

“Did you feel like you were in love with him?” Moore decided to play on her emotions.

“Yes. He started talking about marriage and coming down to see me. He said he was a businessman and was going to retire in a few years and live abroad somewhere."

Warner sat forward on her chair and leaned in to Janet, then spoke softly in her Scottish accent, “Janet, I know this is a horrible ordeal you‘e been through, and it must be so humiliating.”

“It is! I‘m going to lose my family! What will I have then?”

Warner and Moore paused, both of them were deliberating to best way to proceed. Moore decided to push Janet further while she was down.

“Janet, we understand what you’re going through, but we need your help a hundred percent to know what’s happened. You said you had sex online and discussed fantasies, what sort of stuff did Colin say?”

“It started off everything you’d expect, nothing strange. We’d both put our webcams on and... you know.”

“Janet, we have Colin’s laptop, his phone and yours. We’re getting very close to catching him, so we need to hear the truth from you before we get lies from him. I know this is difficult to talk about...”

“He started sending me weird sites, like pictures of dad’s in the bath with their kids and stuff. I told him I’m not in to that. Then he’d bring his children on webcam while we’d be talking and they’d be naked which I thought was weird, obviously.”

“And did it stop there?”

“No. He started asking me to send him photos.” Janet couldn’t look them in the eye.

“What did he ask you to send him?” Moore’s voice had turned sterner, she knew that she had to keep the pressure up.

“He wanted photos of the kids at the nursery.”

“Did you send him any?”

“No, not at first.” Tears began to run down her eyes, “but it was like he was losing interest in me, I knew he was talking to other women too and I began to get really upset.”

“So what did you do?”

“I took them for him.”

“Where did you take them?”

“When I had to take the kids to the toilet at the nursery I did it then.” Janet’s face began to turn red as her voice quivered. Moore and Warner took a step back to let her compose herself, then they pushed further.

“How many photos did you send him?”

There was a long pause as Janet decided how best to answer, a sudden look of surrender poured over her, “about twenty five or thirty but I can’t remember. He started sending me stuff back but I just deleted them.”

"Why did you carry on at this point?"

"I don't know, I loved the attention, he was so sweet and lovely."

 

Moore and Warner glanced at each other as Janet stared at her feet. Warner pulled a folder from her briefcase and opened it on the table. Inside was a single photo which looked like it had been taken from a hazy camera phone.

“Janet, you’re not the only woman that he’s done this to. We’ve found three other women, all of them worked at nurseries. He finds you, he gives you a phony story about retiring a millionaire and letting you run away with him... he uses you and then once he has what he wants he moves on. He never loved you Janet, he just used you and here you are picking up the pieces. We found an old phone of his which was discarded, obviously by now you can tell what we found on the memory card. Please tell me why you think you’ve been arrested.” Moore’s voice had turned soft again, the guilt overwhelmed Janet.

“The video...”

“When was it taken?”

“Sometime last year, I don’t know.”

“And how old was he then?”

“About fifteen months old.”

“And what was happening?”

“I was doing oral sex on him.”

“Janet, we know that this is of a sexual nature but we need your help as much as we can.”

“I’m sorry! I’m just so sorry! I just loved the attention he gave me, I was in love with him, I loved him!” Janet was hysterical crying. Warner nodded to Moore, silently they agreed to end the interview. Moore left the room and decided to go home and see her children before they left for school.

[mark-2007]

Just got around to giving this a read through now. Pretty chilling stuff, but I really enjoyed the full circle of the two police women thinking of their own children. I liked it mate, short and sweet - you got any plans to expand on it or is it a one-off?

[Eminence]

If I'm honest, all I could think after reading this was just how much I hated it... but bear with me lol. It just left me feeling really quite horrible for having read it in a sense, one of those that just sends a shiver down your spine - and only a powerful story can do that. So I think that's a benchmark for how 'good' it is, in a way. I was weary of how to respond to it because I can't say I 'enjoyed' it, you see - it left me feeling pretty uncomfortable. But that doesn't take away from its power as a piece of writing.

 

Actually, I think the woman's deal with the pedophile in this would make it a very appropriate entry for this month's SSotM, if you wanted to take it that way?

[The Unvirginiser]

Sure, why not? If you could change the description for me and enter it then that's great!

 

It isn't my best written piece, and I might go over it and spice it up. Obviosuly it's very dialouge heavy, and I think it's probably the first story I've written without a male directly in it. I tried to focus on the content, which is based on a true story, and when I heard it I was really shocked and disgusted, but I knew that this would give that feeling to readers. I just wanted to write something very effective, that nobody would 'like' and it would give them the same horrible knot in their chest that I got when I first heard it.

[Rhoda]

I think this is a different style for you, but I'm not saying that's a bad thing. All I'm saying is it's quite easy to forget who posted it, but the good thing is there's little traces and hints here and there that make it your own. It's one of those pieces you feel a little funny enjoying, but I suppose I've read worse around there's parts so I shouldn't be shocked! The part that got me the most I think was when Moore left to see her children before school. I can just imagine what she's thinking. It changes the whole experience for her now, knowing what Janet had done and how she was supposed to deal with that having kids of her own. It's clumsily worded but I hope you get what I mean.

 

All in all, I liked it, but that ending just nailed it. You're getting better all the time.