‘So what are your plans?’ Laura asked.
Her parents had gone to bed, and the two girls were whispering together in the darkness. Laura was in bed, and Zoe was lying on a thick fur rug on the floor, inside a sleeping bag. It was quite cosy.
‘What do you mean?’ Zoe replied.
‘Well, you can’t stay here forever.’
‘Of course I realise that,’ Zoe said, hiding her dismay. ‘You don’t think I want to be stuck here hiding like this, do you? But I need to stay with you until we work out what I’m going to do. I can’t just leave, with nowhere to go, can I?’
‘You could go home,’ Laura pointed out.
‘No, I already told you, I can’t. I’m never going back there. It’s just not possible.’
‘Well, you have to go somewhere. People are going to start asking questions.’
‘What people?’
‘Well, school for a start. This is serious, Zoe. You know I lied to the police when they came to school? You can’t keep this up much longer. Once they speak to your parents and find out you’re not actually sick, they’ll want to know where you are, and then everyone will know you’re missing.’
‘Who’s everyone?’
‘The school must have reported your absence by now. Why else were the police there? Besides, my parents are bound to find you, sooner or later, and then I’ll be for it. And anyway, it’s beginning to smell in here.’
‘And I suppose you think that’s my fault?’
Admittedly, Zoe hadn’t showered for days. She thought about what Laura had said.
‘Laura?’
‘What?’ Laura replied sleepily.
‘Can I use the bathroom tomorrow? As in, use the shower?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want you abusing my parents’ hospitality.’
‘What are you talking about? What hospitality?’
‘You’re staying in their house, aren’t you? Eating their food.’
‘Yes, but they don’t even know I’m here!’
‘Shh, keep your voice down. They’ll hear you. If they find out you’re here, I’ll be in real trouble.’
‘So, you’ll let me stay as long as I keep quiet and don’t let them find me?’
‘No, I already said, you can’t stay here. For fuck’s sake, you’ve already been here for a week. That’s long enough. I want you to leave.’
‘But I haven’t got anywhere else to go.’
‘Go home.’
‘If you won’t let me stay, I’ll tell your parents,’ Zoe said in desperation.
‘If you don’t go, I’ll tell them myself. Seriously, Zoe, I’ve had enough of this. It was a lark to begin with but it’s gone on for long enough. I can’t keep nicking food from downstairs, and I’ve spent my entire allowance for this month on buying stuff for you. You’ve got no money, and I can’t keep on supporting you like this. I’m not your mother. Just bloody well go home, will you? And now shut up, I’m trying to get some sleep.’
Zoe lay awake for a long time, fuming. Not only furious with her parents for being so horrible, now she was angry about her friend’s betrayal as well. It was hardly her fault she was homeless.
‘I would have let you stay with me,’ she muttered, but Laura was either asleep or else ignoring her.
In a sudden temper, Zoe clambered out of the sleeping bag she was lying in and began to shove her few belongings into her backpack. She was startled when a light was suddenly switched on. Blinking, she looked round. Laura was sitting up in bed, staring at her.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded in a furious whisper.
Zoe scowled at her. ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m packing. I know when I’m not wanted.’
‘I never said you had to go right now,’ Laura protested.
They both knew that was not true.
‘You don’t want me here,’ Zoe replied.
‘You don’t have to leave tonight.’
Zoe grabbed a T-shirt and stuffed it in her bag.
‘Hey, that’s mine,’ Laura said.
Zoe retrieved it and flung it at her friend. ‘Here you go,’ she muttered crossly.
‘Listen,’ Laura said, leaning forward. ‘Why don’t you stay for another week? You must see that in the long run, it’s going to be impossible. Apart from school interfering and asking questions, and getting on to social workers and truancy people and everything, my mum’s bound to come in here sooner or later. I’ve done my best to warn her off, and after that she’s usually all right for a while, but then she has these fits when she’s like a complete control freak and insists on coming in here and cleaning everything. I can’t do a thing without her breathing down my neck. You have no idea. She can be a right pest.’
‘So I can stay here for another week?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Awesome.’
A week was a long time. Zoe was sure she could think of somewhere else to go.
‘I might go to London and get a job,’ she said, but Laura had fallen asleep again.
30
By the following day, a number of responses had come in from people claiming to recognise the image of the dead woman. Some of them were easily dismissed, but others were credible leads. Geraldine decided to focus on the handful of local reports first, and requested DNA samples to be taken for each of the possible missing persons. With that work in progress, she checked on the team who were examining CCTV looking for someone pushing a large brown wheelie bin into the alley. After that, she could only wait for the results of the various investigations.
‘It must be awful, waiting and thinking it might be your missing wife or mother or daughter whose body was found,’ Ariadne said. ‘I always think the uncertainty would be the worst part of it, not knowing whether to grieve or keep on hoping. This must be torment for Zoe Watts’ parents.’
It struck Geraldine that she would never know if her own sister went missing. Perhaps the criminal gang had already abducted Helena and were intending to use her to coerce Geraldine to do whatever they wanted. She felt uncomfortable distrusting Ian, and, on reflection, was sure he would not have lied to her about what had happened. Her anger towards him had already begun to fade. She had been nearly ready to relent, understanding that he had only acted in her interest, until the appearance of an unidentified victim outside a club. Of course the dead woman wasn’t her sister, but she could have been. With the reminder that she had no idea where her sister was, or whether she was safe, her anger against Ian returned.
That afternoon, the forensic lab called to report that a match for the unknown victim’s DNA had been found. There was no longer any doubt that the dead woman’s remains belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old woman called Leslie Gordon. Geraldine went to see the family with the sad news. Leslie had lived with her husband in a small semi-detached house round the corner from the station. Parking nearby, Geraldine tried to prepare herself mentally for the task ahead. Dealing with the remains of the dead was never as painful as coping with the grief of the living. She rang the doorbell and a grey-haired man came to the door. He stooped slightly as he gazed at her with a worried frown.
‘Mr Gordon? Mr Robert Gordon?’
‘Yes, is this about my wife? Has she been found?’
Older than his twenty-seven-year-old wife, he looked as though he was in his fifties. Stifling a sigh, Geraldine introduced herself and suggested they went inside. As she spoke, Robert’s anxious expression turned to one of despair and his shoulders drooped even further.
‘Something’s happened to her, hasn’t it? Is she going to be all right?’ he asked.
‘Please,’ Geraldine replied gently, ‘let’s go in and sit down.’
It was not easy telling him that not only was his wife dead, but she ha
d been so horribly mutilated after her murder that her face was no longer recognisable as human, let alone as his wife. She shared the news as sensitively as she could and he broke down, dropping his face in his hands and sobbing. When she was able to make out what he was saying, she heard him mumbling that he was to blame for what had happened.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘How was this your fault?’
It was hard not to ask a leading question.
‘I’m responsible for what happened to her,’ he blurted out, still sobbing. ‘It’s all my fault she’s dead.’
When he had calmed down sufficiently to speak coherently, he explained that he and his wife had argued on the night she disappeared from home.
‘She was younger than me,’ he explained apologetically. ‘Twenty-five years younger, to be precise, but she assured me the age difference wasn’t a problem for her.’ He sighed. ‘I wasn’t sure, but she was adamant she wanted us to get married.’ He sighed. ‘As it turned out, the age difference was a problem after all. Leslie was always wanting to go out, have fun, you know. Fun,’ his voice broke and he sobbed again. ‘What fun is she going to have now? We thought – we both thought I would go first. It never occurred to either of us that I might outlive her. I’d made provisions for her after my death.’ He broke off, too overwhelmed to carry on.
‘What happened the last time you saw her?’
‘She was all dressed up to go out. She said she was meeting a girlfriend.’
‘Can you give me her name?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Leslie didn’t say. All she told me was that she was going out with a colleague from work. She left the house about nine and didn’t come home. I never saw her again.’ He stifled a sob and drew in a deep breath before continuing. ‘I waited up for her all night and the next morning I went to the police station to report her missing. They weren’t very helpful. If they had found her sooner, she might be alive now.’
Geraldine told him that they believed his wife had probably been murdered on the night of her disappearance, but he shook his head as though he didn’t believe her.
‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ he replied, with a flash of anger.
But he immediately broke down in tears again. Repeating her commiserations, Geraldine left. There was nothing more to be learned from Leslie’s widower, and she had work to do.
Leslie had worked as a waitress in one of the many coffee shops in York. This one was near Lendal Bridge. Geraldine went straight there on leaving Robert, and found a small café bustling with customers. Having arrived at tea time, she waited patiently in a queue at the counter where a middle-aged woman, two girls and a young man were working and waiting at the tables. Geraldine held out her identity card.
‘I’d like to speak to each of you in turn,’ she said quietly.
The older woman answered her. ‘Please, come and take a seat,’ she said, leading Geraldine to an empty table in a corner. ‘What is this about?’
‘Did Leslie Gordon work here?’
‘Leslie? Yes. But she hasn’t been here for a week.’
‘Didn’t you find it strange that she just stopped coming into work?’
‘I called her and her husband told me he didn’t know where she was.’ The woman shrugged. ‘There was nothing I could do about it if she’d run off and left him. I mean, I don’t know where she is, if that’s what you’re asking. It wasn’t as if she took me into her confidence. Oh, she was pleasant enough to work with, and she did her job all right, but we weren’t what you might call friends. We had a good working relationship. I was going to wait until the end of the month before looking for someone to replace her, just in case she came back. But even if she turns up again after a month, she can hardly expect to walk back into her job, can she? I’ll have to check her rights, but I don’t see how she can think I’m going to keep her job open when she’s just taken off. How do I know if she’s ever going to come back?’
‘She won’t be coming back,’ Geraldine said gently. ‘Leslie’s been murdered.’
The woman’s jaw dropped and she stared at Geraldine in consternation.
‘Murdered?’ she repeated in a stunned whisper.
She gazed around the café, as though she expected all her customers to stand up and walk out.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Geraldine replied.
‘How did it happen?’
‘I’m sorry but none of the details can be shared with you yet, but we do need to find out as much as we can about Leslie, any enemies she might have had, and what happened on the night she died.’
She quizzed the manager and the other employees, but none of them had known Leslie very well, or was able to reveal anything about her, and what was more significant, none of them admitted to having gone out with her on the last night of her life. Unless one of them was lying, none of her work colleagues knew anything about where she had gone that night. Geraldine was inclined to believe them, not least because they all concurred that Leslie had not formed any particular friendships with any of them.
‘Not that she wasn’t sociable or anything like that,’ one of the young girls at the café told Geraldine. ‘She had loads of friends.’
She was the most relaxed and the most loquacious of the employees there, and did not seem at all dashed by what had happened to her colleague. On the contrary, she seemed slightly excited. Geraldine spent the most time with her, hoping she would come up with something to shed light on what had happened to Leslie.
‘What makes you say that?’ she prompted the girl.
‘Just that she was always going out. She was always rushing off at the end of the day to meet a friend.’
‘Was it always the same friend?’ Geraldine asked, concealing her sudden interest in what the girl was telling her.
‘I don’t know, do I? All I know is that she was always rushing off to meet her friends. She used to bring clothes to work to change into before she left.’
‘What kind of clothes.’
‘Oh, you know, going-out clothes. Like she was going clubbing.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Apparently her husband was a lot older than her, and she used to go out without him, on the pull, you know. But that’s just what I heard,’ she added, clearly remembering that they were talking about a woman who had recently died. ‘It probably wasn’t true. I mean, I don’t want to gossip about the dead.’
31
Another victim had been reported in the news. This time a young woman had allegedly been killed outside a club in the centre of York, in the early hours of Saturday morning. The news item did not describe how she had been killed. It made no mention of the way her face had been smashed in repeatedly with a heavy weapon, after she had been suffocated. At the time, there had been no particular reason for destroying the woman’s face like that, other than a passing rage against her and every other woman in the world. But that additional assault on her corpse was bound to lead the police down a false trail, suggesting as it did that the killer had been concerned to conceal the victim’s identity, when in fact the dead woman was unknown to her killer, a completely random victim.
As it turned out, it was just as well that her head had caved in like that, her post mortem injuries concealing the fact that she had already suffocated. The dead do not bleed, but even that detail had been skilfully dealt with, so there was no way the police would ever work out how the victim had actually died. With a killer both bold and intelligent, the victim had been thoroughly silenced by the time the body was discovered. She had no mouth, and in any case her brain was reduced to a soggy mess of bloody torn tissue that held no memory of her killer, or anything else for that matter. She might as well never have been a person at all, considering all that was left of her. Still, it had been an unnecessarily troublesome experience, because the blood had been difficult to expunge. Nothing like that would ever be allowed to happen again. From now on, suffo
cation would have to be enough. That was how it would be, simple and certain, the lure of blood resisted. It was just too messy.
For a few days he seemed content, but it wasn’t long before he was drawn back to his former habits, as though nothing had happened to interrupt his hidden way of life. He seemed unable to control his compulsion. However dangerous it was for him, there was no question he would continue, even though he risked exposure at every turn. The terror of discovery loomed large but there were still women for him to prey on, and in spite of everything he seemed incapable of resisting the temptation.
One day he might conquer his weakness, when he was too old and frail to continue. Sooner or later, when his turn came to fight for his last breath, he might be overwhelmed by the terror of death that would consign him to the fires of eternal damnation. But he was not yet ready to give up his addiction, and steadfastly refused to contemplate the eternal consequences of his actions. And perhaps, after all, there would be no final judgement, and this world was all that he had to enjoy, or fear. If that was the case, he would not need to feel any regret when he died, only glory in the satisfaction he had found in life. Eventually everything might yet unravel and he would be forced to confront his sins and repent. But he was not ready yet.
32
The team had been looking for a connection between the two victims. If they could only find something the two women had in common, it might help them to trace the killer, but so far nothing concrete had come up. Geraldine had a feeling it could be important that they had both been employed as waitresses, albeit in different cafés, but the significance of that was not yet clear. Apart from their work, there didn’t seem to be anything to link them.
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