by James Nally
Blundering cops left a maniac knifeman free to slay a mother and her four-year-old daughter when they missed vital clues from his previous attacks …
… Despite warnings from an eminent forensic psychologist that a Lone Wolf Killer was on the loose, the investigating team tried to frame a twenty-five-year-old trainee nurse with no criminal record …
… An insider today revealed that a junior officer – Acting DC Donal Lynch – missed several clues that pointed to the triple killer …
I had to hope Shep was right. And I needed to provide as many compelling reasons as possible to make the Commissioner believe us. If I could show him significant differences in the modus operandi of each crime, he’d realise that there had to be two killers, however improbable.
Soon I had scraped the barrel and come up with a list, which I wrote out in large hand on a clean sheet of paper.
• Samantha Bisset’s killer(s) attacked her as soon as she opened the front door. Marion Ryan had let her killer(s) inside her flat, which suggests she knew her killer(s).
• Samantha Bisset’s killer(s) spent a considerable amount of time fastidiously dismembering her body before leaving the scene. Marion Ryan’s killer(s) carried out a frenzied attack which lasted between two and three minutes, then fled.
• Jazmine Bisset had been sexually assaulted. Samantha Bisset had been genitally violated with a knife. Marion Ryan had not been sexually assaulted or genitally violated.
That was the best I could come up with. I might as well have written: ‘He didn’t rush so much the second time.’ I placed my handy, bite-sized, exaggerated bullet points on Shep’s desk: I would have felt less grubby squatting over it and taking a dump. Guilt and doubt gnawed away at me, eroding what little bottle I had left.
I exited the station into the hum of a warm summer night. As I turned into Lavender Hill, a sudden guttural grunt startled me.
‘Cheer up pal, it might never happen,’ said a drunk in a doorway.
‘It happens all the fucking time, pal,’ I said wearily, flicking him a pound coin and wondering why they always seemed to be Scottish or Irish.
‘Yer still here though, aren’t ya?’
I had to smile: today’s events had pretty much stripped me down to that level of existential optimism.
As I turned onto Trinity Road, it hit me like a brick in the face. Today I’d attended a double murder scene. The spirits of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset would come to me tonight, for sure. At that precise moment, I wanted to be dead. I’d never felt like that before.
Chapter 30
Trinity Road, South London
Wednesday, August 14, 1991; 21:00
I got back to the flat, forced the front door open over the junk mail we never picked up, and smelled cleaning products. Confused by the gloom, I crept cagily into the shadowy sitting room, sensing someone inside. The irrational part of me feared that the Bissets were already waiting.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted to register a pair of candles glowing above a table set for two. The romantic mood failed to soothe my gnawed nerves.
‘Is that you, Donal?’ Eve called from the kitchen.
‘Yeah, wow, what’s all this?’ I said, feeling unsettled, wrong-footed.
She walked in with a bottle of wine and two gleaming glasses.
‘I’ve cooked you dinner, just to say thanks for letting me stay.
‘Here,’ she handed me the uncorked bottle, ‘it’s one of your favourites. I made a note when I threw out all your empties.’
I wondered what else she’d made a note of. I couldn’t figure out why her efforts had set me on edge: I said she could stay for a few nights, not assume the role of Woman of the House. I hoped to Christ that Aidan hadn’t planned to come home tonight.
She returned to the kitchen as I filled a glass to the brim, downing half of it. ‘Shall we pretend it’s 1988?’ I said, to no one in particular.
I sat at the table as she carried in two steaming oval plates. As she placed one in front of me, I registered her low-buttoned white blouse and scarlet lips. She teetered back to her side, giving me an eyeful of her short, tight black skirt and strappy heels. Had she remembered my thing about waitresses?
‘Wow,’ I said, as she sat down, ‘and the food looks tasty too.’
‘Stop it,’ she giggled. ‘Now, tell me all about your day.’
I looked down at the plate, registered the ribs and managed, somehow, not to spew.
‘Are you okay?’ she demanded.
In a bid to distract myself from recalling the Bisset horror show, I focused on Peter’s interview and the bunny boiler antics of Karen Foster. Once we’d exhausted that subject, our unplanned date began to feel a little awkward. I realised that we’d already wrung dry all our news from the last three years. The only subject that remained unresolved was our future. Did we have one? We had hit an impasse. I had to find out how she felt.
‘So, what are you planning for the rest of the summer?’ I tried.
Somehow, she wriggled free of this and steered the conversation back to Marion and her post-death visits. I’d found her initial interest in the topic flattering, but now it was all we – she – wanted to talk about. It reminded me of the time she became obsessed with the murder of Choker Meehan’s mother; how she hassled me for months to get Fintan to pull all the newspaper cuttings for her.
I was growing jealous of my dubious ‘gift’ – it was getting more attention than me.
She seemed particularly fascinated now by my daylight visions of Marion at both Sangora and Strathblaine Roads.
‘You need to stop going to that road, never mind the murder scene. It’ll drive you spare,’ she said, and I had to smile. ‘Drive you spare’ already seemed such an outmoded teenage expression. I realised that the trauma of her ordeal had stunted Eve emotionally so that, in effect, she was still seventeen – suspended in 1988 like an ant in amber. I suddenly felt overcome with pity.
‘And what did your psychologist say about it?’
‘Oh well, that’s another story. It’s the most excited I’ve seen her. She wants to try to prove that my subconscious is using dream imagery to crack the case. In the scientific world, this could be quite a big deal, apparently.’
‘You never mentioned it was a she,’ said Eve, eyeing me suspiciously. Another realisation: she was now a professional victim, always seeing and interpreting things in ways that made her the wounded party – deceived, wronged, cheated. What an effective distraction from looking within.
‘Didn’t I? She’s about forty. Nice old dear.’
I wasn’t sure why I’d said that.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Lilian. Lilian Smith. Why do you need to know?’
‘I’m only asking. Jesus, why are you so defensive?’
I was trying to think of an answer when the doorbell’s electroconvulsive buzz shook my bones.
‘Shall we ignore that?’ I said.
‘It could be important,’ she frowned.
I went to the door, booting the post to one side to open it.
‘Hi,’ said Gabby, reading my startled face.
‘Hi,’ I said, wondering if she could see inside.
‘Are you not going to ask me in?’ she smiled. I noticed she was wearing more make-up than usual. And a dress.
‘Yeah, erm, of course,’ I said, taking a step out into the hallway, half closing the door behind me.
‘Just to let you know, I’ve got someone staying at the moment. An old friend from home,’ I said quietly.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ she said, her smile now quizzical, curious. I had two choices: run inside and slam the door or let her in. I stood to one side.
As Gabby tiptoed over the mail into the sitting room, I added quickly: ‘She’s made dinner actually, just to say thanks.’
As we entered the room, I saw it through Gabby’s eyes and knew I should have slammed that front door.
‘Hi,’ smiled Eve, a little triumphantly, I thought,
not bothering to get up.
Gabby spent what seemed an age taking it all in.
‘Candles,’ she said, finally.
‘Oh God it’s not how it looks …’ I said, each word shrivelling faster than the last, ‘Eve’s staying for a few nights until she gets herself sorted, isn’t that right, Eve?’
Eve didn’t say a word.
‘Perhaps you could give me a call some time,’ said Gabby, ‘when you’re not busy.’
She turned to Eve: ‘It was nice meeting you, Eve.’
Eve pulled a ‘yeah, whatever’ shrug. Gabby turned, marched out and gave the front door fittings their sternest test yet.
‘Well thanks a lot,’ I said, ‘you could have said something there to help me out.’
‘I didn’t know who she was. You didn’t introduce us.’
‘Oh and I suppose Fintan didn’t tell you all about her. He tells you everything else.’
‘You didn’t tell me though, did you Donal?’ she spat, slamming her cutlery on the table, storming into my bedroom and creating another Force 10 door quake.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take the couch,’ I shouted after her.
As I scraped our aborted rib dinner into the bin bag, I spotted a pink overturned Post-it note deep in the mulch. I managed to fish it out. ‘Gabby called, coming over at 9’ it said, in Eve’s unmistakably neat print.
What the hell was she playing at? Did she really want us – me – that badly?
As I blew out the candles, my brain suddenly bit on a thought and refused to let go. Was I as bad as Peter Ryan? The same as Peter Ryan? Shep’s words boomed between my ears:
Oh he’s the classic Golden Boy Irishman, adored by his dear old mum.
I would have slept with Eve last night, had she let me.
He’ll use and abuse women until he finds one who’ll adore him the same.
Could I look in the mirror and say I was any better than Peter Ryan?
I dismissed the idea, flopped onto the couch, opened a Shiraz and wallowed in grape-based guilt. The Bissets were coming tonight: fuck it, bring them on. I could take the terror of another ghostly encounter, if it got me any closer to the truth behind their murders.
Chapter 31
Trinity Road, South London
Thursday, August 15, 1991; 08:00
Samantha and Jazmine didn’t show.
I spent the night wondering why I wasn’t being accosted by their tormented spirits. I came up with two possible explanations:
A: I’d been deluding myself about having some sort of ‘gift’: I was simply a borderline alcoholic insomniac with a history of inexplicable mental and physical collapses.
B: They didn’t need to come to me because I was already on the trail of their killer.
I favoured A, dreaded B. Did their no-show confirm what I feared most: that they’d been murdered by the same person who killed Marion?
As I walked to work, Samantha and Jazmine winked at me from every window. They were blonde, pretty, murdered in their own home – all ingredients guaranteed to secure them blanket newspaper and TV coverage.
The red-tops screamed ‘serial killer’ with undisguised glee. The young, pretty women of London were not safe in their own homes, and this ‘monster’ would come for their ‘tots’ too.
The incident room seemed strangely deserted. Mick warned me that Shep had been summoned to the Yard for a ‘crisis meeting’. ‘I’d make myself scarce if I were you.’
Before I left last night, Shep had flushed some judge out of his Mayfair drinking club to sign a search warrant. At daybreak, the Foster family home in Lee, South East London got the knock.
A forensics team was busy taking fingerprints from all current and recent employees of the Pines residential care home. How I craved a result there.
Two teams had spent the evening going door-to-door on Sangora Road. Mick told me to get stuck into their reports.
I quickly realised that London must be the best place in the world to get away with murder. The citizens of this city simply don’t look at other people, let alone observe their behaviour. We avoid eye contact because that eye might belong to a psychopath actively seeking someone to batter. Having read the blood-curdling contents of London’s unsolved crime files, I couldn’t blame them.
I found one single reference to a woman on the street at the relevant time. The statement read: ‘At about five forty p.m., Charles Crosby, of 74 Vardens Road was cycling home from work along Sangora Road when he saw two women coming down the steps of either 21 or 23. The second woman carried a black gym bag and may have been black.’
I dug out testimony from the residents of number 23 – the house next door to the murder scene. Angela Adeyemi, an IC3, or African female, said she left the house with a friend at about five thirty-five that evening to attend a gym on Clapham High Street. This surely torpedoed any hopes that Crosby had seen Karen and her accomplice fleeing the scene.
Just after eleven, Shep almost ran into the office. ‘I’ve just had my nuts blowtorched for two hours,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to make this collar happen.’
I handed him the note detailing what Crosby saw. Then, with an apologetic grimace, I passed over the statement from Ms Adeyemi.
Shep read both, gave them back and said: ‘Get Crosby in, as soon as possible.’
As he walked off, I gave Mick a quizzical look.
‘Desperate times …’ he said.
I rang Crosby’s home phone number. His haughty wife delighted in informing me that he couldn’t possibly make it to the station until after four p.m.
Just before lunchtime, DS Barratt returned with his forensic ferrets, fresh from their forage of the Foster family home. He sported the smug gait of a man with sterling news.
First, he produced half a dozen true crime books, retrieved from Karen’s old bedroom: these included the bestselling Murder Scene Secrets, by Professor Laurence C. Richards BSc, MSc, FRSA.
‘This is how Karen learned to thoroughly and comprehensively trash our crime scene,’ said Barratt.
‘Can you believe Richards is allowed to make money giving away our techniques?’ barked Shep.
Barratt said they were wrapping up their search when he spied a mop in the garage.
‘And look what I found buried in the mop’s handle,’ he said, pulling out a metal ruler which had been pared down to a point at one end. ‘This end is potentially lethal,’ he said, ‘and it measures five inches. As we know, that’s about the length of the blade used to kill Marion. Karen’s dad, Terry, is a window cleaner, she and her sisters often help him at the weekends. He told us he uses this ruler to scrape dirt out of awkward corners.’
I couldn’t help thinking a ruler as a murder weapon looked a little desperate.
‘When I asked him about the day of the murder, well, that seemed to be his most awkward corner yet.
‘He told us that he got home at his usual time, three p.m. He said he left the mop in its usual place, standing in the corner of the garage. We asked him if he remembered this metal ruler being there the day after the murder. He got really agitated and, get this, said he couldn’t remember. I pressed him and he said it again, he couldn’t remember.’
Shep decided to do our thinking for us: ‘Karen wouldn’t have had access to potential murder weapons. She could have popped home on the afternoon of the murder, when she was supposedly shopping in Blackheath, picked that up before driving to Marion’s.
‘After killing her, Karen had to get straight back to the Pines, because Bethan Trott and her sister Laura were her alibis. She must have brought the weapon back with her and stashed it somewhere before going to see Peter to do the fish. Then, at a later date, she would have slipped the weapon back into the mop.’
It was plausible, if a little stretched. Without forensic evidence, I felt a jury would never buy it,
Shep went on: ‘I trust you took it to the lab?’
‘Got it checked out, right away. Of course it’s clean,’ said Barratt, ‘but at least
you can wave it in front of Karen, see how she reacts. Judging by Terry’s response, this is our murder weapon and they know it.’
Shep told him to take the blade to the pathologist: ‘See if he’ll confirm that it could have been the murder weapon, in terms of shape, size, sharpness.’
‘There’s something else,’ said Barratt, relishing his moment in the sun and wringing it out for all it was worth. ‘Karen still gets some of her post sent to her family home. When I looked on top of the fridge, I found her bank statement from July. It seems that when she was shopping in Blackheath with her sister Laura on the afternoon of 1st July, at four ten p.m. her cash card was withdrawing ten pounds from Lambeth High Street – just up the road from the Pines.’
Shep grabbed and scoured the statement: ‘So much for Karen’s rock-solid alibi. The only people backing her story now are her sister Laura and the woman they watched TV with from five thirty to six that day. What’s her name?’
‘Bethan Trott,’ someone said.
‘Get her in, Barratt, as soon as you can.’
Charles Crosby turned up bang on four, bang on stereotype. Late forties, cowlick fair hair, square face, strong chin, pinched pink cheeks, chunky knitted pullover, big tits, big arse, mustard corduroys: ‘A good cove,’ was how any judge would view him. I’d always found it fascinating how the two most pronounced social stereotypes in Britain are the richest and the poorest: the Toffs and the Chavs. Maybe they’re not as different from each other as they think.
Unlike my colleagues, I held no inferiority-based grudge against posh English people. To me, they seemed very polite and very sexually repressed – characteristics I could readily relate to.
As instructed by Shep, I took Crosby into his office and left them to chat. About fifteen minutes later, Shep called me in.
‘Mr Crosby has kindly agreed to give us his statement. Can you write it down for him please?’ The media studies lecturer wasted no time getting to the important bit: ‘At about five forty-five p.m., I was cycling down Sangora Road on my way home from work when I saw a man and a woman coming down the steps of number 21. I didn’t get a close look but the woman was aged between twenty and thirty, had long dark hair and wore a red top. Both she and the man were white Europeans. The woman carried a black gym bag.’