by P. R. Black
It also had a clear timeline, from which she cribbed the majority of her notes.
First victim: Anne-Marie Kittrick.
There was a picture of a girl with natural dirty blonde hair and bright red lipstick – she was out at a party. The analogue shot was slightly blurry, as if there were flames at the bottom of the screen, and she was clearly on a night out. Her top was plated gold, and her arms were bare. They were the arms of someone with little fat on their bones, and her neck and shoulders hinted at a swimmer. Anne-Marie was twenty-two years old when she vanished on a training run for a half-marathon, in the summer of 1994. Her route had taken her over a cattle grid and into an underpass – photographed in all its terrifying detail on Red Ink. It was the type of place Freya would have instinctively ignored, even as a person who routinely ran down alleyways and in quieter forest paths. It was a place a troll might have lived; it was where Anne-Marie was abducted.
Whoever had done it was efficient and cunning, possibly having parked at a rest area just off the main road above, a place hidden by the trees in full leaf at the height of summer. He had taken a chance on being the only vehicle present in the lay-by, and the gamble had paid off. There were signs of a brief struggle, but little or no physical evidence to go on, and no body, either. Anne-Marie had just had her graduation ceremony, and was preparing to do a master’s after the summer. The half-marathon had been scheduled for that September, and she had been confident of a good time.
Second victim: Coleen Arden.
Coleen Arden was a beautiful girl who had been a catalogue model in her Edinburgh childhood. She had settled down south. When she vanished she was twenty-four years old and working as a paralegal. She had varied interests including horse-riding and, latterly, canoeing. Coleen had a habit of taking a train every Saturday out into the South Downs, in order to climb a six-hundred-foot hill. The significance of this baffled her friends, who often implored her to stay out on a Friday night with them, but it seemed to be an unshakable commitment when she had spare time. It was rumoured that the hill was a similar physical challenge to climbing Arthur’s Seat, a weekly ritual with her father when she was growing up. It was almost certainly this ritual that brought her into contact with the Woodcutter. She vanished without trace in October 1994, on a bleak, wet day.
Coleen left haunting images on prototype CCTV, caught on videotape at a shop as she walked to the train station, a slender, tall figure in expensive hiking gear and waterproof clothing, chin held high, on her way to the train. Freya thought she looked like someone who had once been on Coronation Street, a strikingly attractive girl.
Freya typed a quick note: Not party girls?
Victim three: Max Dilworth.
Max Dilworth was the outlier. There were many theories that Dilworth had met his end at the hands of someone else in February 1995, but how he had vanished matched the MO of the Woodcutter. He was a former squaddie, twenty-seven years old, having done five years with the Royal Artillery. He was working as a security guard for the time being but had plans to join the prison service. He had kept up his excellent physical fitness, combining running with weight training – a formidable-looking young man with sharp, even chiselled features. ‘Ladies’ man’, said the profile on Red Ink, somewhat acidly. Max Dilworth had disappeared off a canal track. Tyre tracks spotted near a rest area usually filled by a mobile coffee stand had matched a transit van, stolen years before, which was later found burnt out. This was the closest investigators came to obtaining a physical clue in these cases.
Victim four: Danielle Pearson.
Danielle was a swimmer who had been out walking her dog down a country lane during the Easter holidays in 1995. An eighteen-year-old first-year student, tall, red-haired and pale-skinned, with a delicate starfield of freckles across her cheeks, she was the youngest of the Woodcutter’s victims. She had been home for the holidays and enjoying a nice walk on a clear, cool evening across an old railway track, fringed with wheatfields. There were no signs of a struggle, but there must have been one: the dog, a fairly handy German shepherd named Bo, was found with its skull cleft in two. An axe had been used to kill the dog, and it had taken one single, savage blow to do it.
Victim five: June Caton-Bell.
This was how they had caught him. June Caton-Bell had disappeared after working on the doors of a nightclub in a small Essex town, the only such place for miles around, serving people who came in from dozens of towns nearby. As such, it was not in want of any action, and June Caton-Bell was known as someone who could handle herself, easily a match for the men who caused trouble as well as the women. An experienced and intuitive bouncer, she was well regarded by colleagues and trained at a local boxing club alongside the men. But she wasn’t quite the hard case she seemed; she had been training to become a paramedic, and she had been regarded as a promising student who had a passion for helping people.
June Caton-Bell had walked home in the early hours of the morning after a shift, skirting a massive country park, which had a reputation for its ancient forest. It was here that she was chased down and chopped up, with her body discovered hours later. This case could also be regarded as an outlier because the body had been discovered, whereas in the other four cases, remains had yet to be recovered. It was here that a man with dark hair and eyes was seen getting into a black transit van, not long after June Caton-Bell was estimated to have died, by the woman who lived in a tiny cottage, partly hidden from the main road. The woman used her birdwatcher’s eye to identify the man in a subsequent ID parade as Gareth Solomon, a long-distance driver who was known to have been passing the area at the time. Solomon had been convicted of killing Caton-Bell, on very flimsy circumstantial evidence.
There were theories that the Woodcutter was behind other abductions, the most compelling case involving a Dutch backpacker called Florence Ceulemans, who had disappeared while she had been working on a farm in the summer of 1994. No one had ever been arrested over her death, although the rural setting, and the girl’s slender, tall physique and high level of physical fitness fit the profile of the Woodcutter’s victims.
One woman had escaped: Natalie Grey, the woman Harvie had spoken of, who had been snatched off the street but had fought hard to avoid being put into a dark van. She had been beaten savagely over the head when someone came to help and she’d managed to scream, and was left for dead at the roadside. She had suffered head injuries that led to lasting damage. Her memory of the event was understandably but annoyingly hazy. She had mentioned a dark van and a man with black hair and eyes – although she had also mentioned a beard, which her father did not have at that point.
Freya hit the final full stop, then sat back, staring at the document. That was it – the five victims, plus one who was possibly abducted and one woman who had escaped.
Now it was time to ask her dad about them.
10
The man the world knew as the Woodcutter clapped his hands with some glee as his daughter sat down in front of him in the visitors’ room.
‘This is like Christmas! Twice in a matter of weeks! Usually hardly anyone comes to see me. Psychologists wanting to write about serial killers in their PhDs, for the most part. Or journalists. I’ve learned not to speak to them, over the years. The psychologists are the worst.’
Freya was startled by how animated he got, how child-like he seemed in his enthusiasm. She wondered if she would ever feel relaxed in his presence, even if there was a pane of glass separating them and some bulky, stern men to act as an extra bulwark, if necessary.
This is going to take some getting used to. That’d be true even if he wasn’t in jail for being a maniac.
‘Speaking of journalists… how about Mick Harvie?’ she asked.
‘Harvie… You met him? How’s he looking these days?’
‘Little wiry bloke, crooked teeth? Looks like he’s been sleeping in a skip for the night.’
‘That’s uncannily close to how he looked years ago,’ Solomon said. ‘I used to speak t
o him a fair bit…’
‘He expected you to be a bit more forthcoming?’
‘Well, no. He expected me to be guilty. He expected me to admit it, to maybe look for the notoriety or something. He soon got bored of me denying everything and asking him to set the record straight. You don’t sell too many books by taking that angle. Or maybe I’ve just got one of those guilty faces. So, he spoke to just about everyone else. My miserable family. He missed you, though. It must have irritated him to realise that.’
‘For all I know, he’s writing a sequel.’
Solomon raised an eyebrow. ‘And what are you writing?’
‘Me? Well, I’m writing some articles. I want to get to the truth of what happened. That’s where you can help me.’
‘My appeal is ongoing. Can’t say too much about it. Can’t prejudice a supreme court judge and all that, but quietest is safest.’ He sighed. ‘Sorry about that. You look disappointed. This is the first time I’ve properly disappointed my daughter. I’m going to have to take a minute or two to process it.’
‘I don’t mean about your appeal. Not as such.’ Freya cleared her throat. He had a way of staring that made her uncomfortable. He didn’t blink or break eye contact. It seemed to be some kind of intimidatory tactic – perhaps it was second nature behind bars – and she had to admit, it worked well. ‘I mean about you. I mean about your life.’
‘Biography, then. Got you.’ He winked.
‘No. I’m curious. It’s not for a book. It’s not for a project. It doesn’t even have to be about why you’re in here. It’s about you.’
‘Say again?’
‘I want to know about my dad. It’s not for an article. It’s not for homework. It isn’t for a book report. You’re my dad.’ Her voice faltered; she surprised herself with the emotion that bubbled out, just for a second.
Solomon almost looked angry at this, but his tone was gentle when he spoke. ‘What is it you want to know?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘I’m a Yorkshireman. Born in Bradford. If you want to pinpoint a place I came from, you could say it’s there. I was in care for a while. So, well, that was fun. Schooling didn’t amount to much in that environment. The subjects I enjoyed most were art, technical studies, craft and design – working with your hands, really.’
‘I want to know about family. Where you come from. What were my grandparents like?’
‘Well, Mummy ran off, which I suppose was a formative experience. That was when I was four. I can barely remember her. Dark eyes. Like me. Like you. She already had three kids, two girls and a boy, not much older than me. I can’t recall them too much, either. Her maiden name was Lawrence. Sally Lawrence. I remember a wedding portrait of them. Late fifties. They must have loved each other. Anyway, David Solomon, builder by trade, struggled a little bit with us young ones. But he had his outlets – drinking, fish and chips on a Friday, and a good supply of tarts… Sorry. That language isn’t any good any more. A stream of young ladies, who would sometimes stay the night. I slept in the bedroom next to his, and had to listen to them. Had a bit of stamina, your grandad – I’ll say that for him. Anyway, that aside, his other hobbies were beating the shit out of us, and me in particular.’
He took a sip of water from a plastic cup; the eyes of both guards fixed on him intently as he did so.
‘I looked more like her than my brothers and sisters – which is to say I looked nothing like him. He raised this quite a lot, you know – “You aren’t mine”, he would say. He broke the crowns off my front teeth with one single punch. A cracker, I have to say. He had a good dig on him. Thankfully they were just baby teeth. Anyway, after that, the school got involved, and the rest of the kids were taken into care. I lost contact… Someone once told me he died. Sally is dead as well.’
‘You lost contact with your siblings?’
‘Yeah. They’re easy enough to look up – Mick Harvie took the liberty of doing it for me. None of them had much good to say about me. Roger, my elder brother, told some absolute lies. Stuff about me torturing animals, that kind of thing. We threw rocks at rats down the back of the Scout hall, I’ll admit to that, but the rest of it was bollocks. That’s the thing about being convicted of murder, even if it’s one you didn’t do – it makes it very hard for you to sue people for libel.’
He grinned at this, delighted with the witticism. He was growing louder, as if warming to his theme. Either he was someone who couldn’t shut up during normal times, or he was someone who didn’t speak at all, and had finally been given an outlet.
‘Next up was the children’s home. That’s where I got my first taste of sexual abuse, on top of the physical. A music teacher, would you believe, a Mr Umber – never forget the name. And you know, some days I was grateful for the affection.’ He barked laughter, but no one else did.
Freya’s shoulders bunched tight, as if a hand had seized her by the scruff of the neck. ‘That’s awful. How can you laugh about it?’
‘Well, as I’ve always said – people will joke about stuff. It’s part of being human. Even if you’re not quite human. Tell someone they’re going to hell, chances are they’ll joke about it. Even when they’re staring the devil right in the eyes.’
‘You need therapy. You need to talk to someone. Not just me.’
‘I’ve talked to a bunch of psychologists. As I told you – they’re the worst. Although I enjoy trying to get a smile out of them.’
‘Did you ever go to the police?’
‘God, no. You accepted it as part and parcel of the school experience. You got treats in return – sweets and crisps, and then beer, as we got older. It seemed an acceptable trade-off. Someone grassed on him, though. They found him hanging in a shed at his house. Married, wife, kids, would you believe. I think it all came out. There was an inquiry after it. I was never called as a witness. Anyway, from there, I fell into the wonderful world of work, with Mrs Thatcher’s revolution in full swing. I worked at a warehouse, packing clothes for a catalogue company. There, I made the sanest, most practical decision of my life. I learned to drive, then got an HGV licence. I didn’t like it on the big wagons, so I drove a van, worked as a courier, taking packages and transferring parts to garages, that kind of stuff. I even transported dodgier things, no questions asked. It was great money. I moved around a lot. And that’s probably where the final psychological piece of the puzzle falls into place. I must admit, I do tick a lot of those serial killer boxes.’
‘How about friends? Girlfriends?’
He shrugged. ‘I had some, here and there. But they never lasted. Life wasn’t built for friends.’
Freya felt a tingle of recognition. She thought of the empty flat; her empty bed.
‘I felt I was in shock, a lot of my life. I lived with blame. A psychologist might tell you that I felt guilt – guilt at my mother having left; guilt at my dad for blaming me for it; guilt that I didn’t stop the abuse. Thing is, though… I can’t tell you whether guilt is real for me, or not. But I’ve found it hard to get friends. Bit of a loner, maybe. But women… I worked out how to get those.’
‘Tell me about them.’
Solomon bit the inside of his mouth. ‘Nah, that’s enough about me. Now – tell me about you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The same. I’ve told you my life story – now tell me yours.’
‘Well… there’s not much to tell.’
‘There is. Of course there is. Tell me about Mary. Tell me about your mum.’ He crossed his legs and linked his hands over one knee. Freya could not tell if his expression of sincerity was a dreadful fake, or too intense for comfort. She didn’t like it either way.
‘Well… I stayed in the town. You know. Where you and Mary met.’ Freya cleared her throat. ‘I didn’t have any siblings, and Mum was a care home kid herself.’
Solomon’s eyes widened. ‘That’s right! She was! I remember now. I think we bonded over that. Both kids in care. What do you know?’ He seemed delighted at the
memory.
‘So, it was just me and her. She went back to work in the pub. A lot of the time I was left with a woman I remember as Auntie Lesley, but she wasn’t a relation. House full of kids, a year between each sibling. I forget if there were eight or nine of them… It didn’t bring me out of my shell. I was quiet. Mary always told me I was quiet. I think I believed her. I had some friends at primary school, but no best friends. I was invited to parties, but couldn’t gel with kids my own age. I was… the word is weird. It’s not a nice word. But it’s me.’ Freya noticed the prison officers staring at her, and cleared her throat, suddenly hesitant.
‘Don’t mind these gorillas. They’ve got hearts of gold, underneath that fleshy exterior.’ Solomon was camp as Liberace as he said this, and grinned at one of them. The man looked away from her father abruptly.
‘I think primary school was happy, for all that. I was drawn into my own worlds.’
‘Tell me about Mary.’
‘She was lovely. No-nonsense. Sense of an Irish mammy. Wicked sense of humour. Lots of fun. Lots of friends. Brought some of them back from the pub after closing time. She loved a sing-song, but it was never a bad crowd, never bad people.’
‘Were there ever any uncles for you to get to know?’ Solomon asked quietly. ‘Or step-dads, if you want a less quaint term?’
‘Some… No one who came to live with us. We were a team, really. It wouldn’t be fair to say we were like sisters, but I was very close to her. Clingy, even. And she worried about me all the time. My idea of a great night was being sat with her, watching The X Factor with a hot chocolate.’
‘Homebody,’ he mused. ‘That’s sweet. Part of me thinks I would have liked to have been a homebody. I feel a little tug in my heart when I think about that, you know? A little nip. A nice, safe, warm family home. Christmases, even. What were Christmases like?’
‘You’ll have to unwrap that later,’ the guard nearest Freya said, tapping his watch. ‘Your time’s up.’
‘I haven’t even asked you about the case. The victims…’ She was flustered, her face glowing.