Blood of the Innocents by Chris Collett

thought were the horn-rimmed glasses. He really didn’t want to do this. He’d other things on his mind. Greenwood was already behaving as if she was afraid of him, but then, he was a man so she probably was. He couldn’t imagine her having had much experience of the opposite sex.
    She was about to take her lunch break. ‘I’ve brought sandwiches and I usually go out for a bit of fresh air,’ she told Knox apologetically.
    ‘Well, perhaps you could walk me to where it happened,’ Knox suggested. ‘Then you can tell me about it.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know...’
    ‘We’ll take it slowly. You can stop any time you like.’
    ‘All right,’ she said, sounding as if it was anything but.
    It was going to be a waste of time, thought Knox. She was scared of her own shadow. She led him down the footpath, back towards the railway station until it almost reached the meadow, where the path went briefly through an area of shrubs and there was plenty of scope for concealment. She stopped abruptly. ‘It was about here.’
    ‘So he could easily have been waiting over there on the rough ground until you came along, then hopped over the wire. Was there anyone else about?’
    ‘Not here. I mean, the campus wasn’t deserted, but there was no one down here at the time.’
    ‘Do you take the same route every day at the same time?’
    ‘I did then, yes, but not any more. If it’s quiet I walk all the way round on the road now.’
    ‘Can you describe exactly what happened?’ Knox took out his notebook, partly because his memory didn’t seem to be all that reliable at present, but also so that she wouldn’t have to look at him while she talked.
    ‘I was just walking down to the station to catch the train, along here. It was one of the first nice warm days we had. He just stepped out from the bushes in that way that everyone says they do. I didn’t notice at first, then he smiled at me so I smiled back but his smile was sort of . . . lewd, and then we were almost level when I happened to glance down. I don’t know what made me do it, and I saw that he had his, his . . . thing out’
    ‘His pri—His penis?’
    ‘Yes. He was holding it. And it was huge, and horrible. I just felt sick.’ Glancing up, Knox saw that she’d flushed scarlet. He looked back at his notebook.
    ‘What did you do?’ he asked.
    ‘I just got past him, around him, as fast as I could and hurried down towards the station.’
    ‘Did he follow you?’
    ‘I don’t know. I didn’t dare to look back, but I don’t think so.’
    ‘So what was he like?’
    ‘That’s the silly thing. I don’t really know. I didn’t notice. I only glanced at him for a second.’
    Great . ‘Was he white or black?’
    ‘White.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘Yes, he seemed to have a very high colour, from the little I could see. He had this cap pulled down low so I couldn’t really see his eyes, but his cheeks and his chin were—’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Sunburnt, I think. His chin was very red.’
    ‘What colour was the cap?’
    ‘Dark. Blue or green, I think. One of those that most young men seem to wear these days.’
    A baseball cap. ‘How tall was he? Same as me?’
    She looked Knox up and down. ‘Taller, I think. And thinner.’
    Knox pulled in his stomach. This was better than he’d expected. ‘You’re doing well,’ he told her. The other overriding image, she said, was the powerful smell of his cologne. ‘It smelled sort of cheap and nasty. It was much too strong.’
     
    Taking the statement and getting back to the car took Knox around an hour. A couple of times he’d had to ask Helen Greenwood to repeat what she’d said because he’d missed it. Now, back in the office, he was finding it difficult to concentrate on what was on the screen in front of him. He’d some detective work of his own to do and wouldn’t be able to settle until he’d done it. The office was quiet, everyone taken up with the two investigations. Knox reached for the thermos he’d