Chapter 1

“Finally!” Damien Milter put the phone back on the hook and pushed his black hair out of his eyes. It didn’t work properly and the strands just fell back over his face. “That was a long night!” He stood up and his brown eyes flitted quickly from his desk, and over to his red-head partner, Carla Alma, who was on the phone at the next desk. He waited till she hung up and caught her eyes.
“Carla, I'm going home,” he started to say, but she interrupted him.
“Sorry Dam,” she said. “There's a job we have to do first.”
Damien sighed. “What now?”
“I don’t know,” Carla replied. “But we need to get to the sporting high school. Something about a body.”

* * *

Yasmine Zhang hurried down the bus stairs. Her black hair bounced as she jolted down each step. Her bus had been late, and now she was late for school. She ran through the school gate and immediately saw a large crowd huddling at the base of the front office building. She sighed.
“Thank god!” she thought to herself. “Doesn’t look like the classes have gone in yet.”
She ran to join the crowd, and saw a cop car pull up behind her bus. A man with black hair jumped out of the driver’s side and ran toward the gates she had just come through. A pretty young woman jumped out the passenger side and followed him quickly, and the two of them pushed to the front of the crowd.
Where she was standing, Yasmine couldn’t see anything, but she spotted her friends, Lucy Williams, Celia Mathews and Mia Cowell standing toward the front of the crowd, and she pushed toward them. As she got closer, she realised something was terribly wrong.
Lucy turned and looked at her, and Yasmine saw that she was in shock. Yasmine rushed toward her.
“What is it?” she cried, but as she got toward them, she could see what was wrong, and why the crowd had gathered.

* * *

Damien and Carla strode passed the mass of murmuring students, heading to the front. Already some police were escorting traumatised students to another building to talk to them, and when they got to the front of the crowd they could see why.
“Get them all away from here!” Damien said angrily. The other police started herding the students into the school’s hall. “God!” Damien continued. “What kind of person let's kids see a dead body!?”
“Calm down,” Carla shuddered as she neared the body lying on the ground. It was a blonde girl lying face down on the ground, amidst a small group of glass shards. He looked around, and up the wall behind him, where he saw a smashed window on the second floor.
Talking to a man leaning over the blonde girl, he asked, “ How long?”
The man, turning said, “Morning Damien. I would say, around eight to twelve hours, but without an autopsy, I can’t say for sure. It couldn’t have happened before last night though, for sure, as there was a staff meeting here after hours, and they saw nothing.”
“Thanks Doc, have we identified the body?”
“There was no ID on her person, but a few girls who said they were her friends told Ray that her name is Felicia Collins, and she is in year nine.”
At this point Carla came over to Damien and the doctor. “Dam, I think you should see this…” He followed her over to the body of the girl, and looked as Carla pointed to the exposed right wrist.
***
Yasmine, Mia, Lucy and Celia stood together whispering, just to the side of where the police were working.
“What do we do?”
“Should we tell them?”
“No way! We need more proof, they’d never believe us!”
“Are you serious? Look what happened to Felicia!”
“But we can’t! It’s our word against-“
Lucy stopped mid-whisper as one of the policemen came over to the girls. “You were friends with …”
“Felicia,” Celia said softly, when he hesitated.
“Felicia,” he finished, nodding at her. “Were there more of you in her group than this?”
Silently, the girls nodded.
“Everyone is over in the hall, would you mind going over and finding the others?” Again, the girls nodded, again they were silent. Then Yasmine seemed to find her voice.
“Come on, we better go find them,” she said, starting to walk off towards the hall. Elsie hesitated, and then followed, as did the others.
The four walked slowly through the garden path that led to the quadrangle, and then to the hall. They didn’t talk for a while, and then Celia broke the silence.
“What are we going to do?”
“Tell them!”
“Keep it a secret!”
“GIRLS!” Mr Corry, the school principal, walking out of the hall, said sharply to them. “You should not be out here!”
Each girl tried to hide the fact that they had jumped, and then avoided the principal’s eyes.
Finally Yasmine informed him of what the policeman had asked them. He nodded, and then left them, possibly to talk to the police himself.
The girls walked into the hall, an air of unease among them. They were intercepted by an English teacher, Mrs. Crawpo, immediately after entering.
“Girls, you’re late,” she told them, before they explained again what the policeman had asked. “Alright,” she said, leading them up onto the stage to their right. Walking towards the microphone in the centre, she asked them who she should call for.
* * *
“The girls are getting together their group,” Damien told Carla. “ I don’t want them to see the girl’s body until I have talked to each of them, put her in another room, and I will take them in together to see the mark.”
He asked the Doctor if the body could be moved for a while, and after the man hesitated, he agreed. He watched as two of the other policemen put on gloves, and began to move the body. Looking past this sight, he saw the group of girls he had earlier sent away, walking towards him, accompanied by four he hadn’t seen before.
“In here,” he called across the remaining distance between them, indicating a spare classroom. He let the eight girls into it, then waited to catch Carla’s eye. When she saw him, he waved her over, and they entered the room as well, closing the door behind them.
The girls were all sitting on and at the desks, talking softly, or looking expectantly at the cops, who in turn looked curiously at them.
“Okay girls, this will work best if we all know each other. I'm Carla, this is Damien, and we are, as is per evident, exploring the death of your friend. As we have not contacted your parents, this will not be a proper questioning, though we do want to know if you can tell us anything,” Carla said quickly, glancing at her partner. “I'm going to go from this side of the room to that,” she pointed left to right, “If you could say your names in turn…”
“Yasmine Zhang.” Carla nodded.
“Lucy Williams,” said the girl next to her with rather long, light brown hair.
“Ummm,” said the next girl, “Mia Cowell.”
“Rebecca Moore,” The brunette sitting next to her said slowly.
“Aleisha,” said the next, without adding a last name.
“Jo.”
“Celia Mathews.”
“Valerie Hughes,” said the last, a girl in shorts instead of the skirt, and with blonde hair.
“Alright, now first up, we are gonna ask you some questions as a group, then some individually,” Damien said. “First off we’ll start easy. Did your friend have any enemies, or people who disliked her or her family that you know of?”
“Are you like, allowed to question us?” Aleisha said almost immediately. The other girls looked at her, before Yasmine joined in:
“Yeah, don’t our parents need to give consent?”
Carla looked at Damien.
“We’ve worked that out already, don’t worry. Back to the question, was there anyone that disliked her?”
The girls all looked at each other, and then shook there heads, one by one. Each murmured “no I don’t think so”, or something like it.
“Right,” Carla continued. “And has anything odd been happening with her recently?”
Again, nobody answered sufficiently. Damien sighed, “Okay, we’re gonna have to do this individually. Blondie, come with me.”