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La Neige, La Neige

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The Fingerprint Expert

Before this story begins there are a few points I would like you to keep in mind
The fingerprints you are born with are yours for life. There is no such thing as a 90% match, with prints it is always a 100%, true there are matches that we know belong to the victim or the accused but they are useless in court, for instance if you are pushing an object prints get distorted and cannot be used in evidence. If someone throws an object there will be a peculiar kind of blurring to the print a strange wave pattern. Such prints are useless for identification purposes but, they reveal if something was hurled or thrown by the pattern of the smudging. And so they certainly tell me something

My story begins in the summer of 2008, my husband Mark and a group of friends, twelve of them in all had a strong desire to leave a colder than usual England far behind, I found a house to rent in the Var region of France big enough for us all. We had some good times that summer, spending three weeks together talking late at night under the stars around the pool. By day the sky was lilac and white the house was honey coloured with shutters of cornflower blue. The topaz pool beckoned me to it every morning, at night it was lit and I loved giving my body to its dark inky water under a sky that held galaxies far away.

One particularly warm day no one really wanted to go outside, even in the shade except for Don. He was a Michelin chef who had left work for a while to get treatment for his mobile phone phobias; he couldn’t even bear to be in the room with one. He developed problems if someone even mentioned their phone, how difficult could that make life? I had known Don since our time together at senior school. He spent many hours that holiday outside in the shade making marinades and trying out new dishes on the bar b q to cook for us, usually singing too. I could tell he was getting better.

Anyway this particular day Hannah, who was sitting across the old granite table in the kitchen reached over and picked up a piece of cheese with a fine skin on, being a fingerprint expert it was not unnatural for me to mention that I could lift an excellent print from the cheese. Others asked could I pick up their prints from the box of chocolates in the fridge “Yes of course” “What about from the depths of the pool?– Yes possibly I said, but not with the equipment I have here. I only had my basic kit with me (force of habit). Hannah set me a challenge “ okay how about this for a holiday game, you go out of the room and we will each touch a chocolate , you can take our prints first and then your job is to identify who picked up which sweet – like a who done it’. Well I had the kit and my computer to check the matches from the chocolates to the prints and so took the challenge. I told them that the sweets would be dangerous to eat after I had dusted them with my fluorescent powders and then left the room. They seemed impressed when I successfully identified everyone and even found a print that didn’t belong to any of them – it belonged to Anna the pool cleaner.

One Friday, about six months later at work a case came in from a particularly vicious rape, the victim’s toes and fingers were broken in the attack and she was left traumatised and unable to describe the attacker or recount important details that could lead to the assailants’ capture.

However a single finger print was found on her glasses that didn’t belong to her. At work we trawled our data base and linked up with others throughout the UK to try to identify the attacker with negative results. I had a particular interest in the case as the young girl was abducted from a bus stop just twelve miles from my home. Life is full of coincidences isn’t it? And that is why one Saturday when I was alone in the house I took out the mini data base of fingerprints I had kept from that holiday in Var and checked all the male prints against the one found on the victims glasses I’m still not sure why I did that, it seemed to take a nano second for the field to show Match, I breathed slowly as I clicked on the ID box and closed my eyes. I knew when I opened them the name of the person would be there. That group that I spent three weeks with in Var with were my friends some of them I had known since I was eleven years old, tears like glass splinters scratched my eyes,  I blinked and the name Mark Hutchinson flashed on and off in the ID box, my husband.

I heard his key turn in the the lock downstairs, I turned around to wait until he came upstairs into the little office so that I could look at his eyes. Everything in the room and the house turned black and white all colour vanished as if by magic. He called up to me “Would you like to have tea in the garden, I have got some fresh Austrian apple cake from the new patisserie in the Great Western Arcade in town. As he walked slowly up the stairs I turned towards the window it was as if the clouds had flattened in the sky and dropped like giant buttermilk pancakes on the floor all around me.

Short stories include: The Webmasters Wife, The Christmas Message, The Partner, The Old Girls Trip To The House of Lords, What Was Left - these are just five of the titles you will receive out of your fifty-two. Click here to read extracts of the stories.

Would you like to go to bed every Thursday night, knowing as you fall asleep that for the next fifty-two weeks you will wake up on Friday morning to an original, unique short story created by me in your e-mail box ,followed by one every Friday morning for the next fifty-two weeks. Pay one pound in total and receive all fifty-two – Lucinda.

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The Webmaster’s Wife

"Anna sat opposite to her husband Mark in the bookshop’s cafe. It felt to her that he was slipping away like a golden magical ball with a momentum all of its own slowly disappearing over green rolling hills silently without drama but definitely, as if by magic vanishing."

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The Christmas Message

"The lift door opened, a woman was already in there, she smiled a little but Sarah couldn’t help noticing how sad and tired she looked. Her hair was pale blond her eyes barely blue – and she was dressed almost in summer clothes, a white embroidered gypsy top and turquoise long skirt with pink sandals; there was a guitar by her feet."

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The Partner

"Tim turned the wheel of the car and drove onto the broad drive of a gothic period house that had been converted into a restaurant and hotel. 'This is one of my favourite eating-places”; He said without looking at her - yet during the twelve months that she had known him he had never mentioned the place before."

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Art For Sale

Sophie J Rush

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