Only Darkness

by Danuta Reah

  Carol Varney looked blank. Lynne said, ‘Did Mandy say anything about the voice, and did she say what he said?’

  ‘Of course she did. I told you. It was that Damien.’ She spat the name. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got all that.’ West looked at his notes. ‘Can you remember when the calls started? Was it straight after they split up?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Carol Varney was certain. ‘It was as soon as they’d got engaged, almost. It was as if he was jealous, or something. Phoning to see if she was in, and then just hanging up when she picked up the phone. Then after they’d broken it off, then he started talking, saying things like he wanted his share of the car, and he wanted his money for the ring.’

  ‘Were all the calls like that? You told us about the ones Damien made when he spoke to your daughter, but were there any others? Did he ever speak to you, or did he ever do anything else?’

  Her face was becoming animated now. ‘He certainly did. I answered the phone several times and he just hung up. And poor Amanda – she was here alone one evening and the phone was ringing and ringing and he was hanging up as soon as she picked it up. He was doing that right from the time they got engaged, and that went on. She was ever so upset. He often picked on evenings when she was here on her own.’

  ‘Mrs Varney.’ West was going carefully now, Lynne was pleased to note. ‘How did you know that the hang-up calls were from Damien?’

  She looked at him. ‘One-four-seven-one,’ she said. ‘Then I dialled three and I got straight through. I started to give him a piece of my mind, but he put the phone down.’

  ‘I see.’ West thought again. ‘And did Mandy – Amanda – catch him out the same way?’

  ‘No, he’d got wise to it, hadn’t he,’ she said. ‘There was no number stored, Amanda said, when she tried that. She phoned him to tell him to stop, that first time, but he wasn’t answering. She was thinking about going back with him, but I told her, he’s crazy, and that made her think twice, I can tell you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ West put his notebook away. ‘That’s just cleared up one or two things. If you can think of anything else …’

  The animation was dying out of her face now. She shook her head.

  In the car on the way back to headquarters, Lynne ran over the information Mrs Varney had given them. Mandy’s fiancé – ex-fiancé – had been quite open and quite adamant about the phone calls. ‘Of course I called,’ he had said in his first interview. ‘I wanted to get back with her. I was upset. I told her I wanted my stuff if she was going to play silly buggers. I never hung up on her, only if I got that old witch. I’d had enough of talking to her.’ Then he’d started crying, got angry with himself for showing emotion. He’d been easy to interview, Lynne remembered. She’d been able to wrong-foot him, trip him up, get him rattled – but his story had stayed the same. He didn’t have the best alibi in the world, an evening at home, where he lived with his parents, but the details matched and held. His story was convincing. And he did have a cast-iron alibi for the first murder. He’d been in hospital, immobilized with a broken leg. West had managed to get some dates for the evenings Mandy had got the calls. They might try and check lover boy’s alibi for those nights, but Lynne’s own view was that he hadn’t made those calls.

  ‘You reckon it was our man?’ West asked. Lynne nodded.

  Later that day, Lynne Jordan was going through the files looking at the details of the earlier killings when McCarthy came into the office. He looked depressed, and she raised her eyebrows at him in query. ‘The inquest. Murder by person or persons unknown. I’ve been talking to the family,’ he said by way of explanation. Lynne nodded.

  ‘Anything?’ Lynne paused in her reading.

  ‘Nothing. They didn’t know much about her life. She didn’t live at home. She was a good girl, her mother said.’ McCarthy looked at the files on Lynne’s desk. ‘What are you doing?’

  Lynne hesitated. She knew that McCarthy resented her presence on the team, but whether it was because he didn’t like women officers or whether it was Lynne herself that he saw as a threat, she wasn’t sure. But his attitude was infectious, and she found herself wanting to steal a march on him, wanting to keep ideas to herself until they produced results. That was the kind of attitude that left gaps in an investigation, gaps that the killer could slip through. And the kind of attitude that could foul up promotion chances. She’d seen Berryman watching them at the briefings. She didn’t need to play games. She could make her way without that. ‘I’m going over the killings again.’ I’m looking for patterns we might have missed. I’m looking for anything really.’

  ‘Drawn a blank on the previous incident search?’ His voice was expressionless, but he looked pleased.

  ‘I’m still working on it,’ she said, keeping her own voice neutral. ‘This is something else.’

  She could see that glint of irritation in his eye, but he sat down at the next desk. ‘Let’s have a look. If there’s anything there, two of us have got a better chance of spotting it than one.’

  ‘OK.’ He was right. Lynne tipped her chair back. ‘I’ll go through what I’ve found, and you can fill in the details, tell me if you see anything I haven’t.’ She paused for a moment to get her thoughts clear. ‘Right. Lisa Griffin.’ She went through the facts of the case. Lisa, the first victim, disappeared on the way back from visiting her parents in Mexborough. She had left her parents’ house at half past eight, intending to walk to the station. She had been seen by a neighbour about a hundred yards from the house, and had exchanged greetings. There was another unconfirmed sighting on the bridge across the river, just before the station, and a woman answering her description had been seen going into the station at the appropriate time. She had been found the following morning, dumped on the line a short way outside the station on the way to Denaby, by the embankment. They hadn’t been able to identify anyone who’d been at the station at the relevant time. Sunday evenings were not busy.

  Berryman’s team had questioned the staff on the train Lisa had planned to catch, but the answers had been very unclear. The conductor said that no one had boarded the train at Mexborough, but the record of ticket sales and checks suggested that he hadn’t been too meticulous about checking after every station.

  Lisa’s husband had reported her missing about two hours after she should have arrived home. She had been found hours later by a workman, about six o’clock. She’d died around midnight.

  Kate, the second victim, had vanished when she was travelling back from her hometown, Hull, to Sheffield. She had got on the train in Hull – her friends had seen her off – but she hadn’t been on the train when it arrived in Sheffield. A friend had been waiting to meet her. They’d planned an evening out. Her body was found near the line that ran through a nature reserve at Balby Carr, south-west of Doncaster. The train had been quite busy and several people remembered seeing Kate. Lynne put the statements from the passengers aside for further scrutiny.

  Mandy commuted from Moreham to Conisbrough to work. ‘That’s not right, for a start,’ Steve said. ‘No one works in Conisbrough.’ This was an exaggeration, but Lynne knew what he meant. Conisbrough was another town that was struggling with the aftermath of recessions that had destroyed the local industries. She thought of the trip she’d taken on the waterbus one summer, along the river to Conisbrough to visit the medieval castle that stood on the east side of the town. Her impression had been of trees and fields, but she knew there was another side, a dying town centre, boarded-up shops, vandalism and a growing drug problem. Mandy had worked there as a clerk in the local school. She hadn’t come home one night. She had been found the next day in the cutting where the line ran under the Ml just outside Doncaster.

  Lynne thought. The drops were all isolated, not easily accessible from the road, difficult to carry a body, unconscious or dead. Except for … She looked across at Steve. ‘Does the same thing strike you as strikes me?’ she said. ‘That the first drop is different?’

&nbs
p; He nodded. ‘We’ve talked about that. Why did he leave her so near the station? We’ve got to assume the others were picked up a fair way from where they were found. Berryman thinks it might be that he didn’t realize how much evidence he could leave where he killed them. Then he finds out, and makes sure we don’t know. What about the second one, Kate?’

  ‘She must have got off the train.’

  ‘Yes. We talked to her friends. She probably got off at Doncaster. The train waits about five minutes at Doncaster, so she’d jump off, buy herself a coffee to drink on the train, and get back on again.’

  Lynne looked at the pile of statements. ‘I don’t suppose they talked to everyone on the train?’

  Steve made a who can tell gesture. ‘We tracked a lot of them down. I’d put money on it that we haven’t seen them all, but these trains are like buses. There’s no way of recording the passengers. Not individually.’

  Lynne stretched. ‘OK, what do we know? For three of the victims, he grabbed them at fairly lonely stations at night, and dumped them some distance from there along the line.’

  ‘You’re making assumptions with Julie,’ Steve reminded her. ‘We don’t have a witness can put her at the station, and Moreham isn’t like Conisbrough or Mexborough. It’s a lot busier.’

  ‘OK,’ Lynne conceded, ‘but until there’s good reason to think otherwise, why don’t we assume she went to the station? And Moreham station is just as dead as those others at certain times in the evening. I’ve been using the train a lot recently.’

  Steve gave her a sharp look, but only nodded in grudging agreement. ‘Possibly. But we’ve still got a problem with Kate. Doncaster isn’t a quiet station. Never. But no one saw anything. We haven’t found one person who saw her there.’

  Lynne knew most of this. ‘Did her friend raise the alarm? The one who was supposed to meet her in Sheffield?’

  McCarthy shook his head. ‘She did the journey every Sunday. She caught the same train and she always got off in Doncaster to buy a coffee. She often said she cut it a bit fine. They had an arrangement to meet at the club if the train went without her.’

  ‘Habits,’ Lynne said. ‘Berryman says he stalks them.’

  ‘She always did the same thing.’ McCarthy ran his hand over his chin. He was in need of a shave. ‘According to her friends, she’d get on the train in Hull, grab the seat nearest the door. She liked to sit on her own, so she’d take the aisle seat and put her bags on the window seat. Then she’d sleep until the train got into Doncaster. Cup of coffee to wake her up, twenty minutes into Sheffield, and she was ready for a night out.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ Lynne said.

  Friday night, nine-thirty. Debbie felt like an addict who’d just found out she couldn’t do without her fix. She’d found Rob Neave attractive from the time she’d first met him, and he must have been aware of that. She had thought that he liked her, as well. She had wondered, sometimes, what it would be like if he made love to her, a fantasy, out of sequence with her life. Well, she’d lived her fantasy, but it had seemed, almost, like a dream – an unfamiliar, isolated place, a stranger she thought she knew, a sense of danger lurking, a suspension of time. But it had been real and she wanted it to happen again, to move on and develop. And it wasn’t going to. What was worse was a sense of loss. Before, he’d been a friend. Now, she wasn’t sure that she could count him as that any more. Let’s stay friends, always seemed to her to be a futile exercise. Sex ruined friendship. She knew that.

  He’d phoned her at lunchtime and suggested that they meet. ‘We need to talk,’ he said. Forewarned is forearmed. They met in a pub ten minutes’ walk from the college. He asked her if she wanted to eat, but she wasn’t hungry. They had a glass of beer each instead. She knew more or less what he was going to say, so she took the initiative. ‘Last night was a mistake, wasn’t it?’ He nodded, running his hand across his face. He looked ill. The mask was off again, briefly, and the look of tired despair on his face made her want to reach out to him, but she couldn’t.

  Then he started talking. ‘There are some things you need to know, Deborah,’ he said. ‘Do you know that I’m married … used to be married?’

  Debbie nodded. ‘Yes, I … Someone told me.’

  ‘Fucking grapevine,’ he said. She hadn’t heard him swear before. He seemed angry, not at her, but in a general, unfocused way. He looked at her again, then looked down at the table. ‘I’m not good at talking, not like this. She used to make me talk, but I’ve got out of the habit since …’ He ran his hand over his face, looking baffled.

  ‘What happened?’ Debbie wondered how much bitterness and hurt lay behind his unhappiness. She wasn’t ready for his answer.

  ‘No one knows exactly. It was one of those freak accidents, they said. No one’s fault. No one should have been killed.’

  Debbie was silent for a moment. She should have guessed. ‘Your wife was killed,’ she said.

  ‘Angie.’ He seemed to find it hard to say her name. He picked up a beer mat, turned it round in his hands, looking at it. His voice was toneless. ‘And our daughter. Flora. She was six months old.’

  Debbie went cold. She hadn’t known. She should have known. He went on. ‘They should have been all right. They were strapped in. But the car went through a wall and over the edge. They should even have survived that.’ He was speaking quite unemotionally, still looking down at the table, his hands occupied with splitting the beer mat in two. ‘That makes it worse.’ He stopped, and carefully peeled the illustration off the front of the mat in one piece. He looked at it for a moment, then screwed it up and dropped it into the ash tray. Debbie waited. After a moment, he looked at her and there was something in his eyes that made her want to take hold of his hands and stop him. ‘There was a fire, you see. They would have been trapped. The people who dealt with it say that they died in the impact or almost, wouldn’t have known anything, but no one would tell me for sure, and the reports aren’t … Flora was still strapped in her chair. Angie was between the seats. Impact, they told me.’ Debbie felt her eyes fill with tears of shock. ‘Don’t, Deborah,’ he said sharply. ‘Just … don’t.’

  ‘I’m …’ Debbie swallowed her I’m sorry. It was inadequate, trite. ‘I didn’t know.’ There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She wanted to touch him, to try and show him what she felt that way, but everything about him warned her off.

  ‘I can’t do it, Deborah, I can’t start anything else. Last night – it should be going somewhere. It can’t. This isn’t bullshit. You’re worth more than one night and goodbye, but I haven’t got anything else to offer.’

  Debbie took a deep breath. She wanted to argue, to say, Please and, Let’s try. She wanted to prolong this encounter because it was the last one. Oh, she’d see him in college often enough, but those talks in the staff room, a drink together after work, all the things that happened when something seemed possible – those encounters wouldn’t happen. He would make sure they didn’t. She could feel tears very near the surface. She trod firmly on her emotions. Now was not the time. ‘I’m not sorry it happened,’ she said. ‘I’m just sorry …’ She shrugged. Her voice was almost right, almost in control. ‘Listen, I’d better go. Don’t stay away. Keep in touch.’ She reached across the table and touched his hand. He squeezed hers briefly and ran his thumb across her fingers. She managed a fairly convincing smile before she left.

  Debbie looked at the clock. Nine-forty-five. Time was dragging. She ought to be exhausted, she ought to be able to fall into bed and sleep till morning, but she knew she wouldn’t. She needed to turn her mind off, somehow. She stroked Buttercup, who was lying on her knee with her front legs pointing one way and her back legs pointing another. Hope she doesn’t have to get up in a hurry. The little cat stretched and sank her claws into Debbie’s wrist.

  Debbie remembered she was going to Goldthorpe the next day, going home. Going home to put flowers on her father’s grave. Tears began to prickle her eyes. Don’t get maudlin. She went upstairs t
o her bedroom and pulled her briefcase out from under the small table that she used as a desk. She could do some marking. That would soon get her in a mood for sleep. Her keys rattled against the brass catch of the case. She kept them clipped to the little ring that held the catch in place. It was strange. She never unclipped her keys. She could have sworn she’d locked the staff room door behind her when she’d gone to her class, and yet the keys had been on her desk. Maybe she could ask Rob … No … she stamped firmly on the thought, and pulled the pile of essays towards her.

  The photographs are blurred, dull. Sometimes the pictures dissolve into patterns of shadows, as though his prey is escaping again, eluding him as he hunts them through his landscape. His own pictures are much more satisfactory. If you want a job doing well … Black and white, they match the others, but they tell a truth that the others don’t. Black and white is perfect. Black and white gives you the shadows of the dark places, the gleam of stuff that oozes and flows, the reality behind the flat images that were all he had before.

  Photographs can be poor keepers of the truth. He has another one, a flat, grainy picture, creased and faded. There is a mother, a stepfather and a child. The faces are shadowy and vague. Not the mother’s face, which is turned away. He knows that face. That is real. She holds a bunch of flowers, looks towards the stepfather, smiles, but he knows that the mother’s smile is for the child. The child is just a pattern in greys, a pattern that could be a bewildered, big-eyed face, confused and afraid behind wire-rimmed glasses.

  But now the child is watching, and not seeing. Now the child has shiny tracks down his face. ‘Mam …?’ The whisper comes from nowhere, fades in the shadows of the roof.