“She seems nice,” Dani said, matter-of-factly.
Tony wondered if she’d noticed his lack of composure in the clearing. Of course she had; she didn’t need to be a detective to see that he was attracted to the forensic anthropologist.
“She does,” he said, noncommittally.
“Any thoughts?”
“About Alina?”
She let out a short laugh. “No, about the discovery of a second body.”
“Umm, yes, actually. He seems to be undoing the work he did all those years ago. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t make any sense. Taking those poor girls in the first place doesn’t make any sense.”
“It made sense to him,” Tony said. “Which is why uncovering the bodies now, and leaving them in places where they’ll be found, is so baffling.” He let his thoughts go deeper, trying to put himself inside the head of the killer, trying to understand why the person who took these girls from the world was now giving them back.
He couldn’t come up with any compelling reasons; at least not any that would account for this profound transformation of behaviour.
A thought struck him, and he explored it further as they passed beneath the crime scene tape and stepped into the parking area.
“He didn’t do it,” he said, suddenly understanding.
Dani looked at him and frowned. “What?”
“He didn’t do it,” he repeated. “The person who took these girls buried them, hid them from sight. He probably kept them close, or at least in a place where he could visit their graves and relive his experience with them in his mind. He’d never dig them up and give them away. He simply wouldn’t do it.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“It’s someone else. Someone else is putting the girls where we can find them.”
Chapter 12
“What do you mean it’s someone else?” Dani asked. They were in her Land Rover now, driving north through the rain to Castleton, the wipers humming across the windscreen every few seconds.
Tony had mentally picked through his theory during the walk back from the sacred well to the guest house car park. The more he thought about it, the surer he became that his assertion was correct.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said. “The person who took those girls would never let them go. He had Daisy Riddle’s body buried in an unknown location for fifteen years. There’s no logical reason for him to dig up her remains and leave them somewhere they’ll be found.”
“Who says he logical?” Dani said. “He kidnaps and kills young women.”
“Yes, he does, and that seems crazy to us, but we’re talking about someone who is methodical, and intelligent. He got away with taking Daisy and those other girls for years. One of the main reasons for that was the lack of evidence. The police didn’t have the bodies. Some of the people he took were most likely assumed to be missing, not necessarily dead. Keeping the bodies hidden was the smartest thing he did. And now he’s handing them over to the police? I don’t buy it.”
“Perhaps he’s had enough of running,” she suggested. “Or he’s had a change of heart.”
“Then why not just hand himself in? He’s got fame and recognition for what he’s done. That’s what a lot of serial killers crave, especially once they think they’ve achieved all they’re going to.”
The DI shrugged. “I don’t know. But if it’s someone else digging up the bodies, then how did they find them? And why haven’t they come to us to report them, instead of digging them up and dumping them in public places? It doesn’t make any sense.”
She was right, and that was the part of Tony’s theory he was struggling with the most. If someone had found the girls’ graves, why not report the finding to the police? Digging up the bodies one by one and leaving them out in the open suggested a complex psychology at work in the person who was doing such a thing.
“I don’t know exactly going on,” he said, “but I do know that the person who took those girls is not the person who is digging them out of their graves. The man who took the girls is a collector. Their remains were part of his collection. He’d never willingly give them up.”
Dani was silent for a while as she digested the information, then said, “A lot of killers leave the bodies of their victims on display.”
“Not him. Not after all these years.”
She sighed. “You’re saying it doesn’t make sense for him to do this, but it doesn’t make sense for anyone else to do it, either. If it is someone else, then they’re just as warped as he is.”
“Maybe they are,” Tony said. “It’s certainly someone with deep psychological issues, perhaps related to the abductions, or the killings. He—and I’ll refer to him as a man, but it could just as easily be a woman—has a need to protect the killer, but also a powerful, conflicting desire to undo his work. That’s why he’s breaking up the collection and sending it to us but hasn’t told the police where the rest of the collection is, or who killed the girls.”
“Please don’t refer to it as a collection,” she said. “It sounds creepy.”
“You have to understand that that’s how the killer sees it. With every abduction, he was adding to a collection that he probably built over a long time. It was his secret, his prized possession. He’d never give it away.”
“All right, we’ll keep in mind that it could be someone else digging up the remains. At least that might double Forensic’s chances of getting some usable DNA from the victims.”
He nodded. “Hopefully.”
Although Dani had agreed to consider the possibility of another person being involved, Tony could tell she wasn’t sold on the idea. She had to keep an open mind, he understood that, but in his own mind, he was certain that the person who was digging up the bodies wasn’t the same person who had buried them.
They continued in silence for a while, during which time, Tony watched the wipers sluice rainwater from the windscreen, and tried to figure out who the person digging up the remains might be and what connection they had with the killer.
Dani brought him out if his thoughts by saying, “So, the anthropologist. What was her name, again?”
“Alina,” he said, trying to sound offhand about it. “Alina Dalca.”
Dani nodded slowly, as if she’d just been reminded of the name, even though he was sure she’d remembered it perfectly well by herself. She was a detective, after all, and recalling details was part of her skillset.
“Very pretty,” she said.
Tony tried to read her face, but she was staring intently at the road ahead. Was she teasing him?
“Yes, I suppose so.” He tried to sound disinterested.
“Oh, I thought you noticed.” She turned her head slightly towards him, and he noticed a slight smirk play across her lips.
Before he could answer, his phone rang. The screen told him it was DCI Battle.
Saved by the bell, Tony thought as he answered the call. “Good morning, boss, what’s up?”
“Where are you?” Battle asked. His voice was always gruff, but today it seemed to have become even more of a growl than usual.
“On our way to Castleton,” Tony said. “We’re going to have a look at the place where Daisy Riddle lived.”
“Never mind that. I want you to get over to Bakewell. There’s a Mrs Colleen Francis there who rang the incident room this morning. She thinks the body at the well might be her sister, Mary. Colleen was with Mary when she was taken. I want you to have a word with her. I assume DI Summers is with you?”
“She is.”
“Right, both of you get over there and see if she’s got anything useful for us.” He gave Tony an address in Bakewell.
“Has she been interviewed before?” Tony asked. “Colleen Francis, I mean. Have we got that interview on file?”
“Yes, she’s been interviewed before. Twenty-two years ago. She was twelve years old. I want you to have a word with her today. See if she remembers anyth
ing she didn’t tell the police at the time.”
Tony let out a breath. “Seems like a long shot.”
“Yes, it’s a bloody long shot but we have to follow up every lead. Now get over to her house and talk to her.” The line went dead.
Tony checked the screen. It said Call Ended. He put the phone on the dashboard.
“What was that about?” Dani asked.
“There’s a woman in Bakewell who thinks the body we found this morning might be her sister. Battle wants us to talk to her. Then he hung up on me.”
“You sure he wasn’t cut off? The reception around here is a bit spotty.”
“Maybe. He was shouting at me at the time, though, so I’m going to go with hung up.”
“I think it’s this case,” she said. “It’s getting to him a bit. He was the investigating officer when Daisy went missing, and now she’s turned up dead. It’s understandable that he’s feeling a sense of regret.”
“Of course.” Tony tried to imagine what the DCI was going through. It must be a blow, both on a professional level as well as personal one, when a girl you’d tried to find many years ago, a missing person who’d slipped into the shadows, suddenly emerged from those shadows as a corpse.
“What’s the address in Bakewell?” Dani asked. “You’d best put it into the SatNav.”
Tony leaned forwards and tapped on the SatNav screen, cancelling the current route, which had been taking them to Castleton, and replacing it with a new destination; Wyedale Crescent, Bakewell. The computer calculated a route, and the display told Tony that the Bakewell was fifteen minutes away. The female voice told them to stay on the road they were currently on.
“We should be there in no time,” he said, sitting back. “Although I doubt Colleen Francis will remember anything useful. Her sister was abducted twenty-two years ago, apparently.”
“That time frame fits with the condition of the body at the well.” Dani looked at him. “Alina said the body had been in the ground for many years.”
“Well, many doesn’t necessarily mean twenty-two. I’m afraid Colleen might want us to tell her what happened to her sister, and the truth is, we don’t know whether the girl at the well is her or not.”
“Even if it isn’t her sister, the person who took her might be the same one who took Daisy. Colleen might have seen the man we’re looking for. It’s a lead.”
Tony wasn’t so sure. Memories didn’t age well, and if Colleen Francis had seen some useful detail over two decades ago, it was unlikely she’d recall it now, at least not without some sort of help like hypnotic regression.
He knew it was a lead they had to follow, and he hoped he was wrong, and that Colleen would give them some clue that would lead them to the killer, but he was nothing if not a realist.
That was why he was trying to push thoughts of Alina Dalca out of his mind; he knew he didn’t realistically have a chance with such a woman. The opposite sex tended to see him as a geek, a weirdo even. The few relationships he’d had in his life had usually ended with him being given some version of the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, but he’d known every time that it was indeed him who’d been the problem in the relationship.
Part of it was his obsessive approach to his work. Once he got his teeth into a criminal case, or even his clinical work, he found it hard to think about anything else. Everything else felt like a distraction, and unfortunately, this meant he neglected communicating with people who weren’t part of his work.
To someone who didn’t understand this type of professional passion, he appeared detached and distant. The few women who he’d had a relationship with took his attitude towards them as a rejection, and a break-up would soon follow.
Tony didn’t blame them at all; he knew the fault was his.
And, knowing that, he tended to avoid romance altogether.
He hadn’t had a romantic relationship since well before he went to Canada and ended up in the house of the Lake Erie Ripper. He’d been so mentally scarred by that particular experience that he’d barely even thought about close connections with the opposite sex since.
Until this morning.
To drag his mind away from such thoughts now, he picked up his phone again and searched for the name Mary Francis, hoping to find details of the girl’s disappearance. None of the results that appeared on the screen had anything to do with a missing person. Then Tony remembered that Battle had said Mrs Colleen Francis. Her surname had probably changed.
So, he typed the words Colleen, Mary, missing person, and Bakewell into the search box.
This time, he got more relevant results, including an article entitled Young Girl’s Horror as Sister Disappears.
Clicking the link and reading the article, he discovered that Colleen’s and Mary’s surname had been Harwood, and that the abduction hadn’t taken place in Bakewell, but somewhere called Miller’s Dale.
“Do you know where Miller’s Dale is?” he asked Dani.
She shook her head. “No idea.”
He read on. It seemed that Colleen, 12, and her older sister Mary, 14, had been playing together on a riverbank near their home in Miller’s Dale during the evening of January 13th. Not the most sensible thing in the world, Tony thought. If he had children of that age, there was no way he’d let them play by a river unsupervised.
“What are you reading?” Dani asked.
“An article about Mary Harwood’s disappearance.” He read it out to her, up to the point where it mentioned the girls were by the river.
“We should probably let Colleen tell us the rest,” she suggested. “The press get things wrong all the time.”
Tony nodded. She was right about that. He’d experienced that first-hand. When he’d been recovering in a mental facility in Toronto, there’d been a headline in the Star that had read British Psychologist Loses Mind After Encountering Ripper.
The story had been overblown, an exaggerated account of his mental state. Anyone reading it, and not knowing the truth, could be forgiven for thinking Tony had been trussed up in a straitjacket and locked away in a padded cell. That story probably sold papers, but it wasn’t true.
And when he’d finally recovered and been released, the press hadn’t wanted to know. There were probably some tabloid readers in Canada who still thought that a British psychologist was being kept under lock and key in a high security mental hospital because he’d gone crazy after encountering the Lake Erie Ripper.
“Bakewell,” Dani said, as they passed a sign announcing their arrival at the town that was famous for having a pudding and a tart named after it.
Shortly after passing the sign, two left turns took them to Wyedale Crescent.
The house they were looking for was a neat little semi with a red Volkswagen Passat on the drive. Dani parked the Land Rover by the kerb and she and Tony got out.
After a short dash down the drive to avoid the rain, they knocked on the door.
The woman who answered was in her thirties—thirty-four, Tony told himself, after doing a quick mental calculation—and wore a baggy grey hoody and blue jeans. Her black hair was scraped back into a ponytail, and in her arm, she held a blonde-haired boy who couldn’t have been more than two years old. The child had a wide smile as he looked from Dani to Tony. The woman holding him had a less pleasant disposition. Her lips were slightly pursed, her eyes narrowed. She looked suspicious of the two people standing on her doorstep.
“Colleen Francis?” Dani asked, showing the woman her warrant card. “I’m DI Summers and this is Doctor Sheridan, from the Murder Force. I believe you wanted to talk to us.”
“Yes, come in.” She stepped aside. Tony followed Dani inside.
“The living room’s just in there,” Colleen said, indicating a room on the left with a nod of her head.
The room was furnished with a plush sofa that looked like it was made from silver coloured crushed velvet. A matching armchair sat next to it. The television was on, and a cartoon pig was talking to a cartoon rabbit
about jumping in puddles. Lego littered the floor, along with a number of dolls scattered here and there, staring at the ceiling with wide eyes, as if they’d become lost in the landscape of plastic.
“Take a seat,” Colleen said, indicating the sofa. She sat in the armchair and placed the child on the floor. He began picking up Lego bricks and throwing them at the dolls.
“Lucas!” his mother said. “Don’t do that!”
Chastised, the boy settled into a cross-legged position and stared at the television.
“What did you want to talk to us about, Mrs Francis?” Dani asked, taking a notebook and pencil out of her pocket.
“That body you found.” She nodded at the telly, as if the News was on the screen and not a cartoon menagerie of animals. “I think it might be Mary, my sister.”
“And what makes you think that?”
Colleen narrowed her eyes even further. “You know she went missing, right? Nobody was bothered then, but I thought you might be more interested now you’ve got a body.”
“Are you saying no one believed you when Mary went missing?” Tony asked. He’d seen this before. Witness statements from children were taken with a pinch of salt by some police officers.
“That’s right,” she said, turning her attention to him. “They all thought she’d drowned in the river and I was telling tales. The river had broken the banks, you see, and we probably shouldn’t have been down there in the first place, but our mum didn’t mind.” She paused and then let out a short breath through her nose. “We went there all the time. We knew to be careful, and we stayed away from the water.”
“Tell us what happened,” Tony said, leaning forward slightly and giving her his full attention.
She sighed. “Well, like I said, we were down by the river.”
“In Miller’s Dale.”
Colleen nodded. “Yes, that’s where we lived. My dad had a little farm there. Harwood Farm. That’s my maiden name. Harwood. Mary and I used to go wandering all over, climbing trees and hiking along the river. Proper little tomboys we were, both of us. I looked up to Mary because she was two years older than me. And I always felt safe with her. I always felt like she’d protect me from anything.”
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