by Anita Waller
Standing by the side of the autopsy table left Erica and Beth in no doubt that the same person had killed both girls. Ivor turned over the right hand, and there was VI cut into it, along with the missing tip of the little finger.
‘Number six,’ Beth said quietly. ‘Thank God we’ve removed his seven and eight.’
Ivor looked at the two police officers. ‘Don’t underestimate him.’
‘You think it’s a him?’ Erica’s response to his comment was swift.
‘I’ve no idea. It’s just… dead bodies are heavy, and even more so when you’re battling the elements. But let’s not write off it being a fit woman. Anyway, I’m starting to record now.’
He took them through the main points, all of which were basically the same as the autopsy performed on Susanna Roebuck, and eventually Erica and Beth left the suite feeling queasy and concerned.
‘Are we in danger of underestimating this killer?’ Beth asked.
‘I’m not. This is the sixth post-mortem I’ve attended that’s a direct result of the actions of this one person. Let’s go and find a café, grab some breakfast, and talk things through. Then I’ll ring Diana and get things moving there.’
They walked to the outside of the building and Beth stopped. ‘That’s sunshine.’
‘Thank God for that. We’ve got teams out on the riverbank again today, but I’m calling them back in tomorrow. We’ve interviews to do, searches and stuff, but it’s important to get the crime scene cleared as soon as possible.’
‘And I want to start on tracking down anyone who hasn’t been around for five years.’ Beth glanced at her watch. ‘Half eight. I’ll ring a locksmith while we’re waiting for breakfast, then that’s ticked off my to-do list.’
It was quiet in the office. Most of the team were at the river, and Erica and Beth had opted for computer work.
Erica angled her screen carefully to cut out the winter sun that was directly on it, and pulled up the file from twenty-fourteen. There had been no physical contact between the girls who had lost their lives to the L-killer, but the link between them, their names, had been obvious. ‘What if that wasn’t the link,’ she mumbled, but with nobody else near her she received no answer except one inside her own head. What if?
Had they, he or she, been influenced by the press jumping on the bandwagon with their L-killer headlines? Could it have been something else? Erica pulled up a second file headed Leanne Fraser.
Leanne had been the first to be discovered, at the end of April in twenty-fourteen. A seven-year-old boy, Finn Draper, had run into the woods on his way to school, and found the posed, naked body. He had been interviewed, swore he hadn’t touched anything because he watched CSI on television. His mother had cried through most of the interview. She had been distraught that her only child had seen such an awful sight, and she had been unable to prevent it. Finn had been quite blasé about the whole situation. However, they had been unable to help with anything other than finding her.
Nobody else had seen anything, the significance of the slash on her right palm wasn’t obvious at that stage, and even though the Propofol was found in her system, they could find nothing to point them to the killer.
Erica read through Leanne’s employment history, her family life, and nothing helped. It was very much a live investigation by the time it reached mid-May, and on the eighteenth a second posed and naked body was found in woods near to where the Pennine Trail passed through Woodhouse, on the outskirts of Sheffield.
Once more the body was placed so that it would be easily found, and still nobody suggested an idea that the two slashes on Lucy Owen’s palm meant anything other than he’d slipped with whatever he had used to cut off the tip of her little finger.
It was obvious it was the same killer, and the newspapers made noises about serial killers. This was squashed by the police. Yes it was two bodies, but two bodies do not a serial killer make, was their take on the matter.
The third body had. Serial killer strikes again was the gist of the headlines and this time nobody denied it. Laurel Price died in July, on the ninth, but wasn’t found until the afternoon of the tenth. Two boys riding bikes through Rolleston Woods found her and freaked. They had heard of the other two murders, and knew they needed help. One boy stayed nearby, too scared to be too close, and the other went to the edge of the woods to meet the police, after calling them on his mobile phone. They too watched CSI and knew they hadn’t to touch anything at the scene.
Erica read through them carefully. She digested every word until these old cases became as clear in her head as the new ones did. Laurel was the oldest of the four victims at twenty-three, was about to marry, and this fact gave her prominence in the newspapers. Her fiancé was distraught, as were her parents, and although the fiancé hadn’t had an alibi, he had for the first two murders.
She made a note of his name, Nicholas Payne, and decided to check if he had alibis for Susie and Clare’s murders. Rule him out once and for all.
Lilith’s murder had been the final one, and the one that had confirmed what the palm marks meant. She was number four, with an inherent promise of there being more. Except no more appeared, not then. Lilith had been found in Ecclesall Woods, in the south of the city, and gave no more clues than any of the others. She had been found on the twenty-seventh of July, a beautiful sunny day; she never saw the sunrise.
Other than the letter L, they had found no link between the girls, but Erica knew there had to be one, she felt it. Somehow the killer had known the girls, had chosen his victims because of their names, but initially he or she had known them. They had to find that connection with the help of the knowledge they were picking up from the new murders. He or she had known them.
Erica’s page was filled with notes, yet nothing of outstanding interest had occurred to her other than Nicholas Payne’s name, and that was a kind of straw-clutching exercise really, and she knew it.
Four girls with families that still hadn’t had full closure, a killer who was seemingly proud of their work, and who was forensically well informed, leaving nothing at the scene to give them any information.
‘I’ll find you this time, though, you bastard,’ Erica whispered, closed down the file and walked across the office to Beth’s desk.
Beth looked up. ‘Okay?’
‘Kind of. I’m heading out to the river, see what’s happening if anything, then I’m going home. If you need me, ring. One thing I have learned is that the kids of twenty-fourteen all seemed to watch CSI, thank God. Maybe we should have that as part of the qualifications you need to have to get into the police.’
11
Beth went home at three and met with the locksmith, who secured everything for her. Although unafraid of Evan, she felt much happier that he could no longer invade her home. After saying goodbye to the elderly man who had given her peace of mind, she spent some time moving furniture around.
No longer would everything be focused on the television, and she cleared a corner for the installation of a small desk. It had always occurred to her that a laptop wasn’t actually meant for a lap, and so she would have a desk. The friendly Argos website said they could deliver the same day, and she mentally prepared herself for an evening of flat-pack assembly.
The sound of a key in the lock caused a spasm of fear to pass through her, and she knew who it was on the other side of the door. She slid over to the window, and glanced outside. Evan’s car was parked across the road. She waited.
The key was inserted for the second time, and then she heard a thud as he kicked the door.
A couple of minutes or so later she heard the same key insertion sound, but this time in the back door. Then he banged loudly. ‘You in there, Beth?’
She remained quiet. She had to stifle laughter as she heard a muttered ‘Fucking woman. Think you can change locks and keep me out? Fucking woman.’ She was tempted to move towards the kitchen window and wave at him, but she didn’t really want to have to arrest him for harassment or breaching t
he peace, or probably even GBH. She wanted to spend her evening building a desk, not down at the station booking her ex.
He eventually gave up and she moved back into the lounge, watching as he walked down the road towards his car. He sped off with a squeal of tyres, and she finally gave in to the laughter. He hadn’t known of her change of car which was parked on the kerbside; four doors away had been the nearest she could get to her home. He had obviously worked it out that she wasn’t in. She briefly wondered what he had come to take this time, but dismissed it as irrelevant. From now on she would decide what he could have.
Erica walked up and down the riverbank, talking to members of her team who were fingertip searching. With the onset of the afternoon rain following the hopeful sunshine of the morning, everyone was looking wet, and shortly before four, satisfied that everything possible had been done, she called off the activities.
‘Okay,’ she called, and her team stopped, hoping the instruction wasn’t to move to another area. ‘Time to pack up and go. Please check in every evidence bag when you get back to the briefing room, and I’ll see you there for a quick chat, then it’s home time.’
There was a brief but heartfelt cheer, and Erica asked Ian to make sure the crime scene tape was still secure around the small area where Clare’s body had been found, before heading back to her car.
For a short time she sat and let her thoughts wander. This had been a nightmare week and she hoped she had stopped it getting any worse by hiding away the other two girls. They had to step up the search for the killer – he or she had a pattern, and she sensed their brain wouldn’t allow them to deviate from that plan. Two girls from the four-girl group had gone, and she suspected he would wait until the remaining two went back into society. They couldn’t keep them locked up for ever, they would have to resume their university life one day.
As Erica started the car her phone rang, and she sat with the engine running while she answered Frannie. ‘I’m frozen.’
‘I imagine you are. You at the river?’
‘I am. We’ve found nothing, Fran.’
‘So what will you do next?’
‘I have no idea. Sit and think about it, for a start. What time are you home?’
‘Should be no later than nine. I did put it in your journal. You know, Erica, I can cancel it if you need me there now…’
‘No you can’t. It’s your job. I’ll be fine. I made some notes when I went through the twenty-fourteen file, so I’ll work on them, see if they clarify anything. I’ll put jacket potatoes in about eight, and they’ll be ready when you get home.’
‘Okay. Let’s have something exotic with it. How about curry?’
‘That’s exotic?’
‘It’s tasty even if it’s not exotic, and it’s already in the freezer. I’d better go. Wanted to check in with you, make sure you’re okay.’
They said ‘love you’ and disconnected. Erica put the car into drive, and set off down towards the city centre, and her office. The team would all appreciate an earlier night, and hopefully return the following morning feeling refreshed and alert. They would need to be – most of them would be out doing door-to-door interviews.
She would be going back to the beginning, she decided. What had sent this killer from random girls with L names, to a group of girls all living together? Where had the information come from? The university?
Time to stop the initial evidence-gathering, she needed to move on to the real work, and start thinking like a killer. She would get the girls to write down a list of their tutors, and as many as they could remember who had been there for Susie and Clare, then she would head for the university, already armed with a certain amount of knowledge. Technology had moved on since twenty-fourteen, and she intended making full use of it. The tutors’ names would be fed into HOLMES within minutes of her getting them, and maybe something out of kilter would hit her.
Beth couldn’t believe how simple it was to erect the desk. Even the two drawers had been almost easy, and she sat on the typist’s chair she had ordered at the same time, and surveyed her kingdom. Queendom. Well, whatever.
It looked so cosy now she didn’t have to have everything worked around watching football, and she opened up her laptop, firmly ensconced on the desk and not falling off her lap. She entered her complicated password that had taken her three days to learn, and, as usual, felt inordinately pleased that she had got it right. She opened up the files she had spent all day collating, asked Alexa, the tiny round machine she found invaluable, to play her some piano music, and settled down to work.
Six names were on her list, all men who had been given long sentences in twenty-fourteen, and were out in the community once more. There were no women, and she wondered if she hadn’t looked in the right place.
By the end of the evening Beth was at the hot chocolate stage, and satisfied that she had a core list of eight – seven men and one woman who came into the particular time frame. There had been others she could discount – too infirm, too elderly, residing out of the country, and she ruled out anybody living too far north or too far south. She closed down her laptop, blew out the candles and made her way upstairs feeling satisfied with the work she had done, and more than satisfied that she had kept Evan out of her home and at the same time turned it into a warm, comfortable haven.
She checked the road as she closed the curtains, then checked again before getting into bed. There was no sign of her ex-partner, and sleep came easily for the first time in weeks.
It was almost eleven before Erica and Frannie went to bed. After eating their curry-topped jacket potatoes they talked – Frannie explaining what had happened at the meeting, how they would check on the children causing them concern for one more week, then it would be decision time as to whether they would be taken into care or left with their inadequate parents.
‘How do you feel about it?’ Erica had seen the quiet times when the children had been on Frannie’s mind, and she knew it was a really difficult decision they would have to make as a group.
‘It’s a poisonous atmosphere these children live in, but it’s going to devastate the mother if we remove them. The father is a horrible man, never seems to be sober, and controls everything. If we could remove him and put him in care it would solve everything. We could give the mother the support she needs to get her clean of both alcohol and drugs, which in turn would make the lives of the children so much better, but that’s not how it works.’
Erica nodded. She had seen the same scenario so many times, felt the same anguish Frannie was feeling at the unfairness of a situation. ‘And everyone is of the same mind?’
‘Everybody is of the mind that we should kill him, painfully, and then give the help that’s needed. But we’ve all agreed in principle that it can’t go on for much longer, so we’ll have a meeting in seven days, and if nothing has changed we have to get those children to a place of safety. We’ll sort visitations out once they’re settled. The appointments will be carefully monitored, and there’ll have to be massive lifestyle improvements before these children are allowed back to the family home. So, lovely lady, how’s your case progressing? Anything you can talk through with me?’
Erica laughed. ‘I can talk anything through with you. I think we’ve been together long enough to know that trust is a major component of our relationship. If only there was something to talk through…’
‘It’s not progressing well?’ Frannie frowned at her wife.
‘It’s progressing marginally because two of the girls who share that student accommodation have been killed, so we can see the pattern. We’ve removed the other two to the safe house so hopefully that’s stopped him, even if it’s only temporarily.’
‘It’s definitely a he, then?’
‘I think it has to be. The terrain on the banks of the Porter is pretty rough in places, and to be carrying a body in that area isn’t going to be easy, so I’m not convinced a woman would have the physical strength for it.’
‘I’m not
saying you’re wrong, Erica, but if you saw some of the women who go to my gym, you’d change your mind about that. The women who work mainly with the weights are proper tough cookies, could easily carry a body. But you’re right, carrying it on a slippery riverbank is different to picking up a weight and lowering it to its resting place on a block.’
Erica sighed. ‘I know. This killer hasn’t been off my mind for five years now. He or she might have gone quiet, and I know there’s a reason for that, but they’re back and I have to find who it is. We start tomorrow with interviews. We need to find out what the connection is that led this fuckwit to our girls, and let’s face it, the one thing they do have in common above all else is the university.’
‘Fuckwit. Love it. Professor Fuckwit of Sheffield University. It has quite a ring to it.’ She clasped hold of Erica’s hand. ‘You’ll find him, I know you will. You’re not a lowly DS anymore, Cheetham, you set the rules. Go get him.’
12
Erica was getting out of bed when the telephone rang. She grabbed at it hoping to silence it before it woke Frannie who finally seemed to have dropped off to sleep. They had both had a disturbed night, and she knew Fran didn’t have any early meetings scheduled. She slipped quietly out of the bedroom before speaking.
‘Morning.’
‘Morning, ma’am. It’s PC Fisher, front desk.’
‘That’s fine as long as you’re not ringing me to tell me we have another body.’
There was a moment of silence, and she guessed he was trying to decide whether she was joking or not.
He decided she wasn’t. ‘Sorry, DI Cheetham. A dog walker has reported finding a body. A female. He says she’s naked, so I guess she’s yours.’