Demand Generation

One “I loved my office” — Francesca BoyleBailey Troy looked briefly at the woman she had come to see. Then her training took over, and she started scanning the room. It was large for an office, maybe 30 feet square, but with only the one simple desk tucked in a corner. Plain and utilitarian, the office had about it a sense of slightly haphazard efficiency — untidy without being disorganised. The desk was littered with the detritus common to any commercial organisation — piles of invoices and delivery dockets, rows of lever-arch folders with indecipherable scribblings on the spine, a battered old 14-inch computer monitor behind a coffee stained keyboard. The walls were plain and unadorned except for one large and much scribbled-on wall planner. A window stretched along the far wall, set high enough simply to let in light without distracting the occupants with any kind of view. On the wall immediately to Bailey’s left was a row of old filing cabinets. To her right was a photocopy machine, its tangy metallic ozone aroma mingling with the other odours that Bailey had come to expect at these encounters. She gave her attention once more to the woman in front of her. Sat in the room’s only chair, pushed slightly away from the desk, Francesca Boyle faced out at the room with her head resting lightly against the light tan paintwork of the wall. She was young — early twenties, Bailey guessed — and dressed in a simple but upmarket business-casual skirt and blouse that spoke of a nonchalant refinement devoid of any slavish adherence to fashion. Her clean-scrubbed and intelligent girl-next-door looks were, Bailey noticed, carefully enhanced with the expert and restrained application of eye shadow. Her physique was what Bailey would describe as “athletic” — a body kept trim and finely toned through exercise rather than emaciated by dieting. Bailey created a quick mental character-sketch of the young woman before her. Refined and intelligent? Certainly. Confident and independent? Most probably. A young woman who had, perhaps, recently aced a respectable degree through natural aptitude and the sparing application of hard work. And doing so, Bailey speculated, while splitting her spare time between volleyball, pizza and the playful navigation of the rites of passage to adulthood. In the back of her mind Bailey mused that, under other circumstances — in the right kind of bar, perhaps — Francesca Boyle might just be the sort of woman that she would make a pass at. The sort of woman who might just have been curious enough and playful enough to be coaxed into bed with a glass of Merlot or two and the lure of some new and unexplored forms of intimacy. But Bailey Troy would not be making any passes at Francesca Boyle. Not here or in a bar, not now or later. Because Francesca Boyle was dead. The small hole an inch below her left eye and the lumpy red splatter down the wall behind her made that abundantly clear. A subtle head-shake from the paramedic a few minutes previously, after a token search for a pulse, had simply confirmed the obvious. The ozone from the photocopier mingled with the smell of firearm discharge and the faint but unmistakable stench of s**t — signalling that the victim had, as was often the case, suffered the final indignity of death. Bailey took one last look around — at the starkly utilitarian office, at the incongruously elegant and even more incongruously dead Francesca Boyle, at the scene-of-crime examiners crawling their way across the floor. Too young for a husband, she thought, better start with the boyfriend. And with that, Detective Inspector Bailey Troy turned and left.