Only Darkness (4 page)

‘Well, OK, yes, I did.’

‘Well then.’ Louise dismissed the problem. ‘Was that all? That’s worrying you, I mean? You’ve been quiet all day.’

‘Louise?’

‘Still here, still listening.’

‘You know Rob Neave?’

‘The security man? Yes. What about him? You haven’t joined the Rob Neave fan club, have you?’

‘Is there one?’

‘Oh, I think so.
I
wouldn’t kick him out of bed. Mind you, I wouldn’t kick Tim Godber out of bed either, if that was all I had to put up with from him.’

‘Someone told me he used to be in the police.’ Debbie had been curious about Rob for a while, but this was the first opportunity she’d had to ask questions.

‘Neave? That’s right. I don’t know much about it, though.’

‘Why did he leave, do you know?’

‘No, some kind of personal crisis, I think. Something to do with his marriage? I don’t know any more, though someone said he was drinking a lot before he came to City.’ Louise was looking at Debbie speculatively. ‘Be careful,’ she said.

Debbie wanted to leave the subject now. She hadn’t known he was married. If he still was. She went on, quickly, and rather addled by the wine, to tell Louise about the man at the station. Louise listened quietly until Debbie had finished.
‘And he, Rob Neave, said to go to the police. I can’t see how it could be to do with the killing, but …’

Louise was her efficient work self now. ‘Wait until tomorrow, then see what’s in the paper. If it is one of those killings, go and tell them. If it isn’t, then you’ve no need to worry. And I wouldn’t tell anyone else. You don’t want it all over the college.’

‘I’ve already told Tim.’

Louise’s eyebrow lifted again. ‘Bad idea,’ was all she said.

They’d moved quickly since finding the body. The men searching the embankment by the line had found a handbag discarded in the grass. A purse was still in there, intact, containing £30, a debit card, a credit card for a chain store, some miscellaneous receipts and other pieces of paper that were being checked to see if they gave any information about the woman’s movements in the weeks and days before she died. It seemed certain that this had belonged to the dead woman, as there was a brand-new travel pass with a photograph, and though her face was brutally changed, it looked very like – the same mass of fair hair, the small features. Mick Berryman, the senior investigating officer, had looked at the photo for a moment, then said, ‘Has anyone checked out this address?’

Now he was looking at the scene-of-crime photographs, with Julie Fyfe’s sightless face staring at him from the track side, half masked by the tape over her mouth, the thin cord embedded in the bruising round her neck. He looked at the initial report from the pathologist: … hands secured by tape round the wrists … cuts to the hands … numerous cuts, bruises and abrasions to the body … injuries to both eyes … He hadn’t been prepared to commit himself any further at that stage. Had she been raped?
Damage to the genital area made that a possibility but he couldn’t say until after doing a postmortem.
Were her injuries pre- or postmortem?
Impossible to say without further examination.
What kind of maniac dumped mutilated, dead women by railway lines?
More your field than mine.

‘OK.’ Berryman looked at the team who were working on the strangler killings. ‘It isn’t officially confirmed yet, but we all know – we’ve got another one.’ He pinned the
photograph up on the board, and ran through the known facts about this killing. ‘Young woman, twenties found’ – he indicated on the map – ‘here, just outside Rawmarsh, near the junction. Injuries to the eyes. Mouth and wrists taped. Bruising to the neck, general damage, probable sexual assault. What else?’ Berryman could see Lynne Jordan, a DS who had been involved with the team since the first murder, checking back through her notebook.

‘First week of the month,’ she said, flicking over a page. ‘That’s different. The others have all been in the last week. Poor visibility – the moon was well into its last quarter. A rainy night – it was fine when Kate and Mandy disappeared.’

‘Any thoughts about that, Lynne? Anyone?’

‘The rain – if it’s as heavy as it was last night – that makes our job more difficult,’ Lynne said. ‘A lot of evidence could just get washed away. On the other hand, it makes it more likely that he’ll leave marks. Footprints, tyre tracks.’

Berryman nodded. The problem was, the killer had left them nothing like that so far, except for one set of fingerprints, on the handbag of the first victim.

‘How could he know? If he’s planning ahead.’ That was Steve McCarthy, also a DS who had, like Lynne Jordan, been on the team since the beginning. He was looking at Jordan with some hostility. ‘What about broken glass?’

‘The light above the post was smashed. How recently we don’t yet know. They’re looking for glass on the body.’

‘Timing.’ That was Lynne again. ‘We thought his interval might be getting shorter. We’ve got a seven-month gap, a six-month gap, but now we’ve got eight months.’ She shrugged. She didn’t know what to do with the information. They wanted a pattern, not randomness.

‘Show us on the calendar, Lynne.’ Berryman believed in visual presentation of information.

Lynne went over to the calendar that was pinned to the wall next to the display board. ‘The first killing, right, was at the end of March. That was Lisa. Seven months later, we get Kate. Last week in October. Six months after that, Mandy is killed, last week in April. That looks too much like a pattern to ignore. We expected the next one at the end of September,
but nothing happened. Until now. Now we get one in the first week of December. Why the change?’ There was a murmur of interest, a shifting, around the room.

‘Or was it just coincidence?’ That was Steve McCarthy again. Berryman scowled. Steve and Lynne tended to contradict each other’s ideas. He thought he’d been lucky at the beginning to have both of them on his team, because they were both good, skilled detectives. When the killer struck again, and again, he’d kept them working close to the centre as he coordinated the massive team that was now working on this investigation. He was beginning to wonder if this had been wise. They couldn’t seem to work together. He moved on to the next point.

‘How did he get her to Rawmarsh?’ Berryman tapped his pointer on the map. ‘If he grabbed her in a car, why leave her there? There’s no road runs close to where he dumped her. If he grabbed her at the station, how did he move her up the line?’

‘Took her on a train?’ Dave West, facetious. There was a stir of laughter around the room, lightening the atmosphere. West, a young DC on Lynne Jordan’s team, was dealing with this case early in his career. Some detectives never had to deal with a random killer, or the horrors of a sadistic sex killer.

Berryman treated it as a serious suggestion. If there was a way … ‘Tell me how he gets a dead woman on the train without anyone noticing, and how he gets the train to drop them off between stations, and I’ll give that one some serious thought.’ He waited to see if anyone else had anything to say on that point.

‘Emergency stop – communication cord?’ McCarthy’s face indicated that he saw the flaws in this, but was putting it forward anyway. Berryman shook his head. They’d thought of that. No train on that line had had an unscheduled stop that evening.

‘It’s the same …’

‘Kate Claremont …’

McCarthy and Jordan started together. Berryman looked at Lynne. She said, ‘It’s the same problem we’ve got with Kate. She was dumped on the line away from the road.
There’s a footpath, but I wouldn’t want to carry someone – dead or alive – all that way. How did he get her there?’ She was only voicing a problem they’d discussed before. No one had anything to add.

Berryman felt weary at the thought of the work ahead. They’d done it all before, the house-to-house, tracking down the people who’d last seen the victim, talking to the relatives. It had got them nowhere, so far. OK, they needed her identity confirming, they needed to find her next of kin – who was missing her now? They needed to find out where she was going the night she died, who she’d seen in the days, weeks or even months before she died. They needed to know if she was just a random victim in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if she was carefully selected, chosen by the killer because something had drawn him to her. They needed to know this about all the victims, and they had so little to go on. Four women: Lisa, Kate, Mandy – and now Julie? It seemed it couldn’t be any other way, and he felt as though he’d let them down, each one more than the last. And the next one and the next one?

Saturday morning’s paper confirmed to Debbie that the dead woman was indeed a victim of the railway strangler. Debbie looked at the photograph of the woman who’d died, then read the article. The police put out the usual advice about women being careful, not going out alone after dark, etc., etc. She read through the article again, trying to find anything that might link the murder to the station, but as Tim had said, the body had been found several miles up the line at Rawmarsh. She looked again at the photograph of Julie Fyfe, twenty-four, younger than Debbie, and dead. She was laughing in the picture, at someone off camera to her left, fair hair tumbling rather glamorously round a small-featured face. Debbie looked for a long time, then she took some pieces of paper from beside her phone, and held them round the face in the picture, trying to see it with the hair pulled back into an elegant, business style. That cold feeling was coming back again now, because the face looking back at her could be, might be, no,
was
the face of the woman, the woman she’d seen so many Thursday nights, the woman who waited on the opposite platform for the Doncaster train.

Cover her face.
Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

There was a phone number in the paper, and after several attempts she got through. The officer she spoke to seemed quite calm about what she had to say, which was a relief, but asked her if she could come in to talk to them in more detail. He wanted her to do that as soon as possible, which made that cold feeling stronger. ‘Can you make it today?’ he’d said. Debbie decided to go that morning. She wanted to exorcize the whole experience, and be reassured by the indifference
of the police that she had seen nothing and knew nothing. She didn’t want to think about the implications of anything else, but she couldn’t stop. If it had been … him, then had she, Debbie, missed lying dead on the tracks by minutes? Had talking to Les Walker and Rob Neave saved her life? And cost Julie Fyfe hers?

The man who took her statement was pleasant, polite and not as reassuring as she had hoped. He asked her a lot of questions, some about the appearance of the man, though Debbie could tell him very little, and some questions were the same ones that Tim had asked her, coming back again and again to the broken light. ‘I just don’t know,’ Debbie said in the end. ‘At the time it seemed to come from the station, but I didn’t really think about it until I saw the glass. I just assumed, I suppose.’

‘That’s OK, Miss Sykes. Now just tell me again – you don’t think the man got on your train.’

‘I’m certain he didn’t.’

‘OK, and you’re sure you’ve never seen him before?’

‘I’m not certain, I couldn’t see him well enough, but I didn’t recognize him from what I did see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.’

‘I’d like you to talk to our artist, see if you can put together any kind of picture of this man’ – he waved aside her objections – ‘just a general impression if that’s all you can manage.’ He asked her some questions about the woman on the opposite platform, without either confirming or denying this was the murder victim, and some questions about her own Thursday night routine. He thanked her for coming in, but Debbie was still uneasy. ‘Do you think it was him?’ She wanted him to reassure her that it was nothing, nothing at all.

‘I don’t know, Miss Sykes. Leave it with us. It may not be relevant, but we need this information to find that out. You did the right thing coming in. By the way, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone about this.’

‘I’ve already talked to one or two people – I was worried.’

‘Well, if you could just avoid discussing it from now on …’

At the Saturday briefing, Berryman and his team went over the preliminary results of the postmortem on Julie Fyfe. It was the same as the others. Nothing that pointed directly to the killer, no hair, no fingerprints, no blood, no other fluids, no footprints. ‘Fuck-all,’ Berryman told them. What evidence there may have been had been washed away by the torrential rain. The ground underneath her body was as wet as the surrounding area, which suggested that she’d been dumped after the worst of the storm was over, but she was wet through with rain. She’d been outside for the storm.

What they did have, told them that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man. Death was by strangulation using some kind of smooth fabric, but whatever had been used had moved several times round the woman’s neck. The wire had been used after she was dead. The pathologist thought that the killer may have used partial strangulation as a means to subdue her, before he actually killed her. There was evidence of sexual assault – vaginal and anal bruising and laceration, a lot of internal damage. ‘He’s using a tool other than his tool,’ the pathologist had told Berryman. ‘Something thin and sharp, pointed. She would have bled to death if he hadn’t strangled her.’ The injuries to the eyes were caused by gouging – probably manual. ‘He was wearing gloves. Look for bloodstains on gloves,’ Berryman told his team. The general bruising and laceration was most probably caused by dragging of the – unconscious?, and later dead – woman along the ground. The lack of bruising and bleeding from some of these injuries suggested they were postmortem. There was possible impact injury, as though, after death, she had fallen heavily. Some gravel had been retrieved from the cuts. There was glass on the body. It was Lynne Jordan, the only woman on the team, who asked which of the other injuries were pre- or postmortem. Berryman couldn’t reassure. The sexual assault was carried out while the woman was alive. The other injuries? ‘Around the time of death,’ was all the information the pathologist could give them.

‘Did the glass come from the broken lights at Moreham station?’ That was Lynne again. Berryman shook his head. The glass came from the broken light near where the body
had been dumped. There was no guarantee that Julie had gone to Moreham station, though it was probable that she had done so. They still hadn’t been able to trace her beyond the time she left work. Though the team had made extensive enquiries, no one had been found who had been on that route at the relevant time.

‘We’ve got one statement that just came in,’ Berryman said. ‘It relates to the crucial time – shortly after nine-thirty. This woman says that the station was deserted, except for one person, a man, who was behaving a bit oddly. I don’t have to tell you, we need to track him down. I’m still hoping for a car as well. There must have been cars going that way.’ Berryman took a deep breath. ‘OK. Let’s run through everything we’ve got. Let’s see what we’re missing here. He might be a lucky bastard, but he can’t do this and leave us nothing. There’s something we’re missing.’

That evening found Mick Berryman still at his desk. He’d been woken up at four the previous morning by the call from the station reporting Cath Hill’s find. He probably wasn’t going to see his kids today, nor his wife, for that matter. His family was on the back burner until this enquiry was over – if it ever was. He was going over some of the earlier statements, and was looking at the information that had come in from that teacher this morning. Could be nothing, or it could be something very important. It could be their first sighting of the killer. If only they could establish where Julie had been when she was taken. They’d searched the station at Moreham, but there was nothing much to see. Unless forensics came through with something. They needed to track her movements. He began to make notes.

She’d left work at nine-twenty, as usual for a Thursday. That had been easy to establish. She’d almost certainly walked to the station, despite the bad weather. It only took five minutes. She hadn’t called a taxi and there wasn’t a bus. Could she have accepted a lift? The people who worked with her were pretty certain: not Julie, she was far too careful, only with someone she knew. (And how often was it someone they knew, someone they trusted?) It was no distance to the
station, anyway, she’d almost definitely gone there. But her train had been cancelled. She would probably have seen that on the screen as she arrived, but it had also been displayed on the platform screen. Could she have caught an earlier train? No, the earlier one had left over half an hour before, at eight-thirty-three, and yes, it had been running on time. So what had she done? Had she decided to wait for the next train? That seemed unlikely as it was over forty minutes before the next train was due. She would surely have gone for a bus or a taxi. Was she so broke she couldn’t afford to? Or so tight-fisted? He made some notes and thought on.

She hadn’t been at the station at nine-forty, according to the statement Deborah Sykes had given. So – leaves work at nine-twenty, at the station by, what, between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty. By nine-forty, she had gone. He reached for Deborah Sykes’s statement again. Who’d taken it? McCarthy. Everything should be there. Right. No one had come out of the station as the Sykes woman had come in. She hadn’t passed anyone on her way to the station. If Julie had left the station as soon as she saw the first display screen, she would almost certainly not have been on the road by the time Deborah Sykes came past. If she’d gone down to the platform before seeing her train was cancelled, then Deborah should have seen her walking back. He needed some more timings. He needed to know how long she’d been in that station.

Lynne Jordan was on the train to Sheffield. She’d taken to using the train when time permitted. Like most of her colleagues, she knew the roads of the area so well she could drive them with her eyes shut, predict the level of traffic for any time of day, say which roads the joy-riders were likely to choose to career their purloined cars around, tyres screeching as they performed their antics. But she didn’t know the trains. When the team pored over the maps, when they looked at the places the victims had been found, she saw pieces of landscape, not a seamless whole.

Today, she had made a mistake. She was spending an evening in Sheffield, and it had seemed a golden opportunity. But of course, by the time she got on the train, it was dark.
It was after eight-thirty, and the line outside the carriage window was invisible. She contented herself with getting a feel for her fellow travellers. There was a young man behind her, whose Walkman leaked a penetrating metallic beat. Somewhere further back in the carriage, there was someone with a loud and persistent sniff. A group of youths had piled on to the train at Meadowhall, shouting and nudging each other, sprawling over the seats, shoving their heavy trainers on to the upholstery. They brought the distinctive smell of young male into the carriage with them.

Lynne tried to see out of the window. The interior of the carriage reflected darkly back. She could see the empty crisp packet that lay on her table, the pool of liquid spilled from a soft drink container. She held her hands up to shadow her eyes. She could see light glinting off the tracks. She put her face closer to the window, then recoiled as something flashed past so close it seemed about to hit her.

They were passing a train. It wasn’t another passenger train – it seemed to consist of low, flat trucks with piles of long thin objects strapped to them. Her train slowed briefly, and she realized the other train was stationary, or moving very slowly. She saw the lights and tunnel ahead that meant they were nearly into Sheffield. The train came to a standstill. The freight train crawled past. She sighed and looked at her watch. She was going to be late.

Debbie came home from the police station as worried as she had been before she went, maybe a bit more worried. Talking to the police made it seem more real, that maybe she had seen the killer. Going out and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea.

So that night she went clubbing. She called Fiona, a university friend who was trying to make a career as a jazz musician and singer, but Fiona had a gig that night. ‘Try Brian,’ she suggested, naming the third member of their trio from student days. Brian was free, and so were some of the others, so Debbie enlisted them for a night out. She drank too much, danced a lot, drunkenly snogged Brian in the dark shadows of the club, and then later even more drunkenly snogged
a beautiful stranger who appeared and then disappeared through the gaps in her memory. Her friends took her home and steered her through the front door. She must have got herself to bed, because she was there, alone, when she woke up the next morning with her head throbbing, her stomach heaving and her shoes still on. And nothing was any better.

The music is loud and invasive, and he purses his lips with judicious annoyance, then closes his window. He likes to keep the window open because there is a slightly sweet, sickly smell in the room that, he must admit, he finds a bit unpleasant. He can still hear the music, though not so loudly. The young man in the basement flat downstairs has no consideration for others. He really doesn’t approve of that. He decided that morning to let himself have the day off, but already he’s getting a bit restless. He’s the sort of person who likes to be doing things. He wonders if he deserves an hour with his trains – he has been working very hard, after all. Yes.

He pulls down the loft ladder, the loft being the feature that made the house so attractive to him when he looked at it. It was worth all the noise and disturbance he had to put up with by letting rooms. And after all, it wasn’t the worst kind of noise and disturbance. No one paid any attention to him. Everyone left everyone else alone. That was the way he’d been brought up by his mother, to approve of things like that. Live and let live.

The loft is truly magnificent. The roof is high above his head. The floor joists have been boarded over so that he can walk around without fear of putting his foot through the ceiling of his room below. He wired it himself so that he has all the power he needs, but no heating. He doesn’t need heating up here. But there is a small freezer in one corner, and a computer in another. He has all the facilities he needs. What is even better is its size. It stretches over the whole roof area of the house, and, as he found out one day, has access to the roof space of the house next door. The house next door is the first one of a block of three terraces, each one just like his, that have been converted into flats. It is a very simple matter to crawl through, and then climb out on to the fire escape at the back. No one notices one more person using those stairs that serve for every flat in the block.