Mari: A dark Game Series

Hi...... well I'm detective Marilyn Peters.. Mari for short. I'm a 5'7" light skinned black woman with very curly hair that I gave up straightening or going to the salon for, I may be the perfect Barbie doll you've seen with huge doe like brown eyes, full lips and a pretty nose and just about so sexy that I've been into a lot of one night stands.. but suck it up bitches and d**k heads coz this is my funny little story P.s... If you find it really offensive I dont really feel sorry, I'm clumsy and experiencing a hangover (hiccup) (giggle) Xo. Well this is idk? probably a prologue or chapter one? This writer's currently going through some block or something but it'll be sorted out once I'm okay. Or maybe not. I began with what most of you whites or woke and advance people call abusive or traumatic (hiccup) my parents flogged caned us (me and my siblings) if we were wrong which made me know how to lie, and undergo a lot of pain. Some luxury some of you cant afford.(No hard feelings meant here by the ways...) So where were we.... we had a cat called Peaches and for your info, I hated that stupid cat since all my life. It was a b***h and really deserved what it got. They say cats have got nine lives so I tried it on Peaches when she ruined my dress. I guess I killed her by suffocation. Yeah I stuffed it in an air tight bag and left it to thrash around till it stopped to breath To be honest. I was really fascinated That fascination stuck around like cheap perfume. For days after I kept sneaking back to the airing cupboard where I'd stashed the bag, just to check the cat was still proper still. No twitch, no nothing. Clean. I felt this weird rush—like I'd won something no one else even knew was a game. Mum never twigged. She just moaned about "that bloody cat must've got out again" and carried on with the ironing. Dad was too busy watching Match of the Day to care. But my little sister Chantelle, she was only eight kept asking where Peaches went. I'd shrug, tell her "cats do one sometimes, innit," and she'd cry into her Peppa Pig duvet. My brother Jamal clocked me once though. Caught me staring at the cupboard door like it was a telly. He didn't say s**t, just gave me that long look he does when he knows you've f****d up but he's not grassing. That's how we rolled family business stayed family business. Couple weeks later some kid on the estate started spreading it round that "Mari Peters done drowned her cat in a bag." I laughed it off in the playground, called him a wasteman, but inside? I was buzzing. Someone knew. Someone saw the power in it. And I liked that they were scared. Fast-forward to Year 10 at secondary. That same itch never went away, it just got sneakier. I started on smaller stuff, girls who thought they were better than me because their braids were fresh or their mums let them wear lip gloss to school. I'd "borrow" their phones, send a few mad DMs to the wrong mandem, watch their clout crash and burn. Nothing traceable. Just enough chaos to see them squirm. There was this one girl, Shania, proper stuck-up, always chatting breeze about how bougie her yard was. She nicked my favourite hoop earrings once. Next week her locker got "accidentally" filled with tuna mayo from the canteen. She cried in the toilets for a whole period. I stood outside the cubicle listening, heart racing like I'd just done a line. Same feeling as Peaches. The thrashing, then the quiet. Only this time it was tears instead of paws. And I def felt like silencing her but it would make me a horrible person. I just controlled the feeling. I never got caught. Teachers called it "bullying," but I called it balance. And deep down I knew why I did it: I liked being the one who decided when the noise stopped. By sixth form the games got bigger. I started targeting the boys who thought they could chat to me like I was some easy link-up. One lad, Tyrone, big mouth, always flexing his fake Rollie and new creps. He tried to pressure me at a party, grabbed my wrist too hard, whispered some bullshit about how I "owed" him for buying me a drink. I smiled, said "cool," then spent the next week turning his whole crew against him. Fake screenshots, whispered rumours about him chatting to younger girls, even "found" a burner phone with his number on it sending mad nudes (I photoshopped quick on my old Nokia). By Friday, he was ghosted by everyone. Last I heard he dropped out, moved to his auntie's in Croydon. Quiet now. Peaceful. Just how I like it. That's when I realised the itch wasn't going anywhere. It was growing. And school wasn't big enough anymore. Fuck me, this hangover's still rattling. Room smells like stale WKD and regret, phone's dead somewhere under the duvet, and I'm here typing about a dead cat like it's normal Sunday morning reading. Should be in the shower scrubbing last night's bad decisions off me skin, not reliving primary-school serial-killer starter pack. But here's the mad thing: every time I walk into a crime scene now, some bird strangled in her flat, some geezer stabbed in the stairwell. I get that same flicker. The stillness after the fight. The way everything goes quiet when the thrashing stops. I stand there with the SOCO lot taking photos, and part of me is back in that airing cupboard, bag in hand, fascinated all over again. Maybe that's why I stuck with the job. Not to catch the bad guys. But to get close enough to feel it without being the one holding the bag this time. Or maybe I still am. Who f*****g knows. I joined the Met straight out of college. Didn't have the grades for uni, didn't want the debt anyway. Passed the entrance exams, fitness tests, interviews—no one asked about my childhood pets or why I smiled a bit too much when they talked about "reading people." They liked that I was calm under pressure. Said I had "good instincts." If only they knew those instincts started with a cat and a Sainsbury's bag. First few years were grunt work community policing on the estates, nicking joyriders, breaking up domestics. But I volunteered for every suspicious death, every unexplained suffocation or overdose. I wanted to see the bodies up close. Wanted to watch how the light left the eyes, how the chest stopped rising. Same quiet as Peaches. Same rush, muted now by the uniform and the paperwork. Then came the promotion to the Detective Constable. Now I'm the one they call when things look too clean. Too neat. Too much like an "accident." Last month we got called to a block in Stockwell. Young mum, early twenties, found in her bathroom. Carrier bag over her head, wrists zip-tied with the kind you buy in B&Q for a fiver, door locked from inside. 'Suicide', the sergeant reckoned. Open and shut. No note, but she had postnatal depression, history of self-harm on record. Case closed before lunch. But I stood there looking at the body, her lips blue, eyes popped, the bag still fogged up inside and all I could see was Peaches thrashing in the dark. I didn't say nothing to the team. Just nodded, took notes, let them box it as self-harm. But later, alone in the car, I kept replaying it. The knot was too neat. The bag too airtight, no tears in the plastic, no struggle marks on the wrists beyond the zip-ties. The bathroom door had one of those cheap push-button locks; easy to pick from outside if you knew how. And the baby? Asleep in the next room the whole time. Not a peep. I went back the next day on my own time. Knocked on neighbours' doors, asked casual questions. One old girl downstairs said she heard "banging" around 2 a.m like someone thrashing against a door. Then silence. The husband was out "working late," phone records showed he was at a mate's yard drinking. But his mate later told me (off the record) the husband left early, around 1:30. Plenty of time to come home, do the deed, lock up, and bounce. I dug deeper. Found old texts on her phone of him gaslighting her, calling her "mad," "useless," saying she'd be better off gone. Financials showed he'd taken out a big life insurance policy six months back. Nothing flashy, but enough to pay off the flat and start fresh. I could've pushed. Could've flagged it as suspicious, got forensics back in, cracked the husband. But I didn't. I sat in my car outside the block for an hour, staring at the window where it happened, and felt that old fascination creep back in. Not horror. Not anger. Just… recognition. Someone gave her the Peaches treatment. Neat. Quiet. Final. And part of me admired the efficiency. I closed the file. Told the sergeant it was solid suicide. He bought it. Case shut. Some days I wonder if I'm protecting victims or protecting the people who do what I used to dream about. Maybe both. Maybe it's all the same in the end. The itch is still there. Always will be. But now I get paid to scratch it—slowly, carefully, with a badge to hide behind. And on quiet nights, when the hangover fades and the flat's too silent, I think about Peaches. About the thrashing. About how good it felt when it stopped. Then I smile. Because some fascinations never die. They just learn how to wear a suit and carry a warrant card It always felt like taking opium...... I'm so fuckin' addicted.