Only Darkness

by Danuta Reah

  They’d inspected the river outfalls from the storm drains. They were fitted with grilles to stop people going into them, but one had been tampered with, the bolts holding it cut through and replaced. It made an easy entrance and exit to and from the track side.

  He pressed his hands over his eyes, trying to keep himself awake. The scene by the track came vividly into his mind again – the torchlight catching the rain, reflecting on the wet gravel, illuminating the woman on the ground, her face grey, tinged with blue; illuminating the figures of McCarthy and Curran, trying to hold on to any spark of life that was left. He was cursing himself inside – too late, too late – aware of Neave, frozen beside him. He remembered the sound of running feet as the paramedics arrived, he could see them crouched over the body on the ground, and then the words – OK, OK, that’s it, she’s still with us. And the scene began to move again.

  He sighed and reached for the phone.

  A light, unbearably bright, a harsh, metallic voice, cutting in and out. DEB-ah -orAH. Everything ached. A sharp, chemical smell. Something moaned.—AKE up! COME ON, De—

  Blackness.

  The light. Things clattering near her head. The pain. She tried to say something and gagged and choked on an obstruction in her throat. ‘It’s all right, Deborah. Just lie still. You’re in hospital,’ as the obstruction was pulled away. Voices in the background. I think that’s it … Is she … Early to say … She tried to move, but hands pressed on her shoulders. ‘Just stay where you are, Deborah. Keep still. You’re fine. You’re in hospital.’

  That’s stupid. I can’t be fine. I can’t move.

  Gina put down her knitting. It’s all in the head, she said, smiling. But there was someone behind her. She wanted to warn her mother, Look out! but her throat hurt too much. She sank back on to the pillow. The tunnel was rushing past her, she was being swept down and away by the water. She was trapped. She would never get out, get away. Deborah Sykes, Gina said, nodding her head thoughtfully. Half-hourly obs. She was walking away. She didn’t know Debbie was trapped, didn’t know that a giant was chasing her through the tunnels. She crashed into the pain. Someone was moaning. Blackness.

  A moment of clarity. She was lying flat on a bed. Her head hurt more than anything she’d ever felt, an icy, gripping pain. Her arms felt cold and heavy. The room was dimly lit, and there was a faint humming sound. A terrible sense of desolation. She could see the drip stand above her and the line running down from it. She couldn’t turn her head. Someone was holding her hand. She moved her eyes. Rob was sitting beside the bed, his arms resting on the cover, one hand holding hers, one hand supporting his head which drooped forward. She squeezed his hand. He leaned quickly towards her. She tried to smile, but it didn’t feel as though it worked. He looked across the bed, at someone or something she couldn’t see, then she was walking down the corridor behind a tall bulky figure. She couldn’t get past. She could see Rob walking ahead, away into the distance. He wouldn’t turn round. I shouldn’t expect too much at the moment, Gina was smiling again. Mum, Debbie wanted to say, I was trapped and I couldn’t get out, but the words wouldn’t come. She felt tears trickling down the side of her face, into her hair, her ears. Someone wiped them away. She drifted off into darkness.

  Berryman was reading the folder on William Stringer that Lynne had given him, expanded now with more details that had come through in response to her requests. The death of Charles Howard, Stringer’s stepfather, the death of a violent man with a history of alcoholism, hadn’t attracted much attention. Berryman got the impression of a cursory investigation coupled with a good riddance. If they’d suspected anything, they’d suspected the wife. If we’d had these facts … He went through the case in his mind again. Was there any way they could have come up with this name earlier? With hindsight, probably. In the maze of confusion they’d been working in? Probably not. And the Goldthorpe link. Gina Sykes’s death. Berryman wasn’t a man to castigate himself needlessly, but – should they have seen the link earlier?

  They had seen it – that was the point. Had they done enough? It was tenuous, it was being investigated, and Deborah Sykes, warned and watched, should have been safe. What series of mischances had put her alone on the station platform? That was what should never have happened. He remembered Neave’s haunted face, and wondered if he was going to be able to ask him the question. Why hadn’t he been there?

  Lynne Jordan came in, carrying a cup and a sheaf of papers. ‘Coffee, sir,’ she said, putting a cup in front of him. ‘You looked like you needed it.’ She put a piece of paper in front of him. He read it.

  ‘Right, we’ve got a match with the fingerprints. He’s the one who left those prints on Lisa’s bag. They’re checking the other stuff now. We need a positive identification. Have you got a current address for Stringer?’

  ‘We’re checking.’ There were other things she needed to know. ‘Any news about Deborah?’

  Berryman shook his head. ‘I’ve left Curran there for the moment. The medics said she wasn’t likely to come round properly tonight, and even if she does, she won’t be fit to talk to us.’

  Lynne had been at the hospital for a while but hadn’t heard the doctors’ verdict. ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘They think so. They wouldn’t commit themselves, of course. She was in a bad way – concussion, hypothermia, broken ribs, cuts and bruises, shock. No skull fracture, though. Anyone who’s taken on board as much of the Morebrook as she has is going to need watching, but apparently there was less muck in the storm drain – it was rain water rather than river water. No, it’s wait and see.’

  The house was large, a three-storey Victorian terrace. The small front garden was overgrown, a tangle of dead vegetation twining through the railings, a dark funereal shrub obstructing the gate. The low wall leaned outwards, pushed by roots and the weight of the damp earth. The windows looked on to the road, black and empty. The downstairs front was empty – no furniture, bare boards, when Lynne peered in through the sagging bay.

  They went round the back, which showed signs of habitation, signs of exit and entry. Rubbish bins overflowed on to the sparse, muddy grass and broken asphalt. The light from the moon streamed down from a sky that was now clear, but an iron fire escape from the next house in the row cast a shadow over the yard. There was a smell of damp and decay. A curtain was pulled across one of the basement windows, and Berryman knocked at the door. There was no response. He tried again, and then signalled to Lynne as he heard footsteps and the rattling of a key in the door.

  A young man, naked apart from a towel wrapped round his waist, stood blinking at them. He smelt of beer, and a frowsty mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and unwashed bodies hung in the doorway. He seemed confused, half asleep. Lynne showed her card. ‘William Stringer?’ But she already knew the answer. This man was too young. He shook his head and gestured towards the stairs. He said he was a lodger, had lived there for just under a year. He was planning to move on. He didn’t like it here, didn’t like Stringer, his landlord. A minute convinced them that this man knew nothing. West stayed with him, and they continued through the house, up the stairs from the basement, into the entrance hall.

  Bare boards and peeling wallpaper, the smell of damp and emptiness. Lynne tried the light switch. Nothing. She shone her torch round. There were rooms to either side of the front door, and a room behind them at the end of the corridor. Empty, apparently long empty, and neglected. McCarthy indicated the stairs, and they went up, Lynne slightly ahead, shining her torch off the walls and ceiling. The stairs led to a landing with three doors off it. McCarthy pushed the door to his right open. A bathroom. The light worked in here. The bulb was bare. A damp towel lay on the floor. The bath was not boxed in. There were rust stains round the plug hole where the tap dripped. The basin and the wall above it – no mirror – were spattered with white flecks. There was a sour smell of damp cloth, overlaid with a faint, sweet smell.

  The room to the left was a small room that overlooked th
e front of the house. It was dusty and empty. The last room showed signs of habitation. A bed, a chair, a rug in front of a two-bar electric fire. There were shelves against one wall with piles of magazines, some books. Lynne looked at them. They were railway magazines, mostly, going back over several years. A few pornographic magazines that Lynne thought were probably imported. She flicked through the pages – women tied and chained, exposed, helpless, flesh bulging against tight bonds. Penetrations with sharp heavy implements. Pain and screaming, simulated or real. It was evidence. She looked at McCarthy. His face registered distaste.

  Lynne looked at the shelves again. Underneath them, folded against the wall, was a loft ladder. Their eyes went up to the trap door in the ceiling.

  There was something clinical, sterile about the way the light bounced off the white walls, that contradicted the heavy, sweet smell of decay that pervaded the loft. It made the investigating team recoil as they arrived, made Berryman shake his head in disgust. It caught at Lynne’s throat and made her gag, but her eyes were drawn and held by the perfection of the railway, the miniature landscape that was laid out in front of her. The minute tracks ran between carefully sculpted hills and valleys, platforms and stations meticulously replicated, waterways, bridges and roads appearing and disappearing as they impinged on the line. A child’s toy, a plaything, become a playground for a monster. She thought about the labyrinth and the minotaur, the young women who were pursued to their deaths through the maze where the monster lived and fed.

  He had known his playground well, had known the entrances and exits, had enticed his victims into his game of hide and seek. She heard a whistle of amazement from McCarthy behind her. ‘A train anorak. A fucking train anorak.’ She left him to marvel over the models.

  She moved round the room, touching nothing, looking. She saw the computer with its pages of print-outs – timetables, freight schedules, dates, places, notes. She saw the overalls hanging against the wall, stained and stiffened, the pockets distorted. The smell was stronger here. She was glad, later, that it was other people who had to look closely at them, analyse the stains, empty the pockets.

  She saw the file of newspaper clippings. She looked at the board that hung on the wall above the entrance to the loft. It was the first thing she had seen as she had climbed through the trap door. Lisa, Kate, Mandy, Julie stared back at her, their mutilated pictures somehow more shocking than the pictures she saw every day in the incident room. And at the end of the row, Deborah Sykes, her picture almost torn to shreds where the sharp pins had been pulled through it.

  In the days that followed, there were loose ends to sort out. William James Stringer was the Strangler, and the Strangler was dead. Berryman doubted that the coroner would record anything other than accidental death against his name. The loft, which the newspapers used as a Bluebeard’s chamber to hang their stories on, gave up some secrets. The file that Lynne had seen, consisting mostly of newspaper cuttings, filled in some of the gaps in the story. It began with a birth certificate, that telling certificate that marked disgrace in those days, not so very long ago. Lynne wondered why Susan Stringer had kept her son. Had she loved him? She must have done, surely. Then, records of a marriage. Susan Stringer and Charles Howard. Howard was a local celebrity, a minor name on the boxing circuit. A newspaper photograph of the bride and groom, Susan Stringer smiling adoringly up at the face of her husband to be. A small child was half obscured by the edge of the frame. Records of work. Trains. Howard was a driver, and someone had recorded the schedules he worked, the routes he followed, the run from the freight yards to the docks at Hull at the end of each month.

  A newspaper report, a case of child cruelty. A depressingly familiar story of beatings, burnings, neglect. A mother who denied her son had been hurt by anyone. He’s careless, he falls. Her ignorance admonished but excused, his cruelty punished by a short prison sentence. Lynne wondered what cruelties were unknown and unspoken behind the routine indignation of the reports. Another cutting, this one almost falling to pieces – Darnall monster dies. The death of the stepfather. And then, many years later, the death of the mother. Local woman dies in blaze. William Stringer had lived quietly with his mother, it seemed, until her death when he was forty-five. The psychologist put his late eruption into psychosis down to this. She had held him in a state of arrested development, the psychologist speculated, until her death, when he finally broke free.

  Cuttings recorded the deaths of each of the victims, all reports into the developing investigation, carefully and chronologically placed, including the pictures of the victims as they had appeared in the paper where he first saw them. Lisa, smiling lovingly at her husband, Karen in the foreground, Kate smiling triumphantly at the Education Secretary, Mandy casting a fiancée’s loving look at Damien Hastings, Julie’s smile at Andrew Thomas – Broughton’s Winning Team – understandable, to those in the know. And Debbie, whose smile was directed at someone who wasn’t even in the picture. Each one an echo of Susan Stringer’s smile at her bridegroom, her smile turned away from the child half cut away from the frame?

  There, also, in due order, were the deaths of Sarah Peterson and Gina Sykes. Written under their names, in one of the few personal records that Stringer left, was the word Vermin. A bunch of keys, carefully labelled, lay beside the file.

  The world that Debbie woke up to was a different one from the one she’d left. A procession of people came to see her at the hospital. Berryman came, with Lynne Jordan. She wasn’t sure if this was an official visit or not. He asked her some questions, but didn’t push her when she said she couldn’t remember something. ‘If anything comes back …’ he said. He asked her about her keys, how they could have come into the killer’s possession, and she remembered the morning she had found them slung carelessly on her desk, as though someone had thrown them contemptuously down – and hadn’t wanted to think about what that meant. They told her that her mother, and Sarah, had both been victims. Debbie knew that she had led the killer to them, unwitting, unintentional though it had been. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Berryman had said, seeing the expression on her face. He was a kind man. The papers were full of the story for the first few days. The staff tried to keep them away from her, but it was impossible, really.

  She had no job. The redundancy notice had landed on her mat, posted on Friday morning before the news of the attack got out. Debbie rather thought they would have held off, if they had known. Louise brought it in to her on the third day of her hospital stay. She didn’t care.

  Tim Godber was a hero. His story appeared on the front page of the national that was now employing him. His picture, of the track pointing like an arrow, the group frozen underneath the eye of the signal light, the two men by the open pit lifting a limp figure with a lolling head, had been printed in every paper in the country. She’d looked at it once, and never wanted to see it again. The nurse said he’d come to the hospital, wanted to see her, but she’d told them to send him away.

  She thought about going home. But her house seemed like a stranger’s in her mind – the familiar furniture, the bits and pieces, the pictures and colours that had meant so much to her were just – nothing. He’d been there, he’d seen her things, he’d touched them. She didn’t feel revulsion, just distance. Louise had tried to reassure her. I’ve been round and really cleaned the place up,’ she had said. ‘Not that it needed it, but you know …’ Debbie could almost smell the lemon and lavender, the polish and bleach with which Louise had tried to obliterate him. Louise. Debbie smiled briefly. Lovely Louise, rallying round, supporting her, trying to put the pieces back together again, not realizing there weren’t any pieces to put together. Debbie didn’t feel broken, only changed. No, not changed – touched, spoiled, contaminated. She thought of the photographs on the table. Gina’s serious face above her graduation gown, her father’s proud smile at the little girl holding the trophy, his older, blurred face already fading into memory. And another face – she saw Sarah’s eyes watching her through a tangl
e of hair. Gone, all touched, contaminated and destroyed. The house would be cold after standing empty. The cold felt right. Cold stopped things from germinating, taking root, growing. She couldn’t go home. There was nowhere to go.

  There was still a lot they didn’t know. Stringer had been a solitary man. Their enquiries identified no friends, and few acquaintances. The men he had worked with had few memories of him – he was a quiet man, he was a loner. One of them said, He knew more about these railways than anyone I’ve ever met. He loved them. His lodger hardly saw him, living in the flat in the basement. He collected the rent and that was all. He’d bought the house with the insurance money from his mother’s death, and his redundancy. After his redundancy, he seemed to have made a living from renting the basement of the house he had bought. He wrote articles for model makers that were published in some special-interest magazines. Back issues had suddenly become collectors’ items.

  And then there were the questions that would probably never be answered. Berryman doubted they would have been answerable even if William Stringer was still alive. What makes a man stalk, mutilate and kill? They had something of his story now, but there had to be another part, the bit they didn’t know, the bit that was lost. Some dark part of his mind? Some cruelty that can’t be ignored or forgotten? The desires of an evil man? Berryman didn’t know the answer, and didn’t want to know it. It was over. Let it lie. He looked at the clock. Nearly ten. God knows when he’d get home. There was a tap on the door, and Lynne Jordan came in. ‘There’s just me and Steve left now, sir,’ she said.