by Bill Rogers
Jo held up the copy of the map from the case file that she had brought with her. She held it up so that Sareen would know that she was following the route they took.
‘What were you drinking, Sareen?’ she asked.
‘Vodka fruit drinks mainly. In a bottle, obviously. Because it’s easier to put your hand over the top? Stop someone dropping something in it?’
She frowned. In the end it hadn’t made a damn bit of difference.
‘I should have asked before,’ said Jo. ‘Had you preloaded before you set out?’
Sareen shook her head. ‘No. We would normally have done. Saves you a fortune, but with us having only just got together and it being a last-minute decision, it wasn’t something we’d had time to arrange.’
‘So you left The Bobbin ahead of the guys?’
‘That’s right. Then we headed up the hill. We had one drink in each of the next six.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The Three Mariners, The Pub, The Robert Gillow, Merchants 1688, Ye Olde John O’Gaunt, The Penny Bank. After that I couldn’t say if we had more than one in each of the other pubs.’
Jo had printed off a satellite map of the city centre from Google Earth, and traced the route they had taken from the map in the file. All of the pubs had been in the centre of the city, on or close to a main road. Several had been in side streets or ancient lanes, but never far from cameras or prying eyes at that time on a Friday evening.
‘Then someone, I think it was Penny, suggested we finish off at The White Cross. It was on the route, and close to where the coach was supposed to be picking us up.’
‘Do you remember leaving the last of the pubs?’
Sareen shook her head.
‘Vaguely. It’s all a blur. I’m not even sure how much of what I’ve told you is what the others said we did, rather than what I really remember.’
‘But you never actually arrived at The White Cross?’
‘Not according to the others.’
Jo looked at the satellite map. It was a direct route, down George Street, across the junction, down Quarry Street and over the broad bridge by the canal. Just over two hundred yards. So near and yet so far.
‘Did you buy your own drinks, Sareen?’ she asked.
The student looked puzzled for a moment.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s what we agreed.’
‘Sorry, I meant did you have your bottles handed to you by one of the bar staff?’
Sareen’s expression alone would have sufficed as the answer. She was already beating herself up for her stupidity.
‘We had a kitty,’ she said. ‘In any case, there was never enough room at the bar. One of us bought the drinks and then handed them down the line to the rest of us.’
‘Through the crowd?’
She nodded miserably.
‘He must have been there watching us. Waiting his moment.’
Then how come he wasn’t picked up by any of the CCTV cameras? Jo wondered. Or had he already scouted the different pubs and worked out how to avoid being filmed? Or maybe they’d got it wrong. Perhaps there were two of them. One, a woman who did the legwork and slipped the drugs in the drinks, the other a man who carried out the abduction and the rape. It seemed inconceivable that a woman would stoop to that. She knew better. Fred and Rose West, and Hindley and Brady proved that when it came to human behaviour, nothing could be ruled out.
Jo suddenly realised that Sareen was waiting for a response.
‘That is one possibility,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t blame yourself. There is no way you could have known. And even if you had, there is only one guilty party here, and that’s him.’
‘But if I hadn’t drunk so much . . .’ Sareen began.
Jo cut her off.
‘Stop that!’ she said. ‘Don’t ever fall for the excuses men try to make. It’s never about what you drink or how much, about what you wear or how you behave. In the end it comes down to one word. No!’
‘But I never got the chance to say it.’
It came out as a whisper. It was as though she had shrunk into herself.
Jo shook her head.
‘You were never given the opportunity to say yes. It comes to the same thing.’ She softened her tone. ‘Come on, Sareen, you must have been told this a hundred times.’
The student smiled weakly.
‘Being told is one thing,’ she said, her tone sad and regretful. ‘Believing it is something else entirely.’
Jo looked at the notes on her tablet.
‘You told the police you had no memory of having been abducted. No sense of someone holding you up perhaps, or helping you into a car. Is that still the case?’
‘I spent the first two months trying to remember,’ Sareen said. ‘So hard that it hurt. Since then I’ve been doing my best to forget all of it . . . until today.’ She looked around the room distractedly, as though wondering what she was doing there.
Jo realised that it was not only pointless to ask if Sareen remembered anything about the assault itself, or how she came to be beside that bridge in Samlesbury Bottoms, but also cruel.
‘Thank you, Sareen,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry to put you through this again.’
‘It’s alright,’ she replied. For the first time since Jo had entered the room, Sareen’s smile had a trace of warmth to it. ‘This wasn’t as hard as I’d expected.’
‘How are things at the moment, Sareen?’ Jo asked. ‘How are your studies going?’
The question appeared to take her by surprise. She had to think about it.
‘I’m alright, I think. I can’t remember when I was last hysterical. I don’t cry any more. I haven’t had a panic attack this month.’ She looked up. ‘The last time I had a nightmare was during the summer holidays.’
Jo was concerned that this came across as so matter of fact and devoid of any emotion.
‘And your studies?’
‘My grades are okay. I’m on top of it, I think.’
Jo stood up and held out her hand.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re getting there, Sareen. It takes a long time, but I promise you can put all this behind you.’
The young woman’s hand was like a feather. Jo was afraid that even a gentle squeeze might shatter the bones. She held it lightly and waited until she had eye contact.
‘We will get him,’ she said.
Sareen’s pupils dilated.
‘He’s done it again, hasn’t he? That’s why you came?’
There was no point in lying. It would shortly be all over the media.
‘Yes, Sareen, we believe he has. Several times. But not here. Elsewhere in the region. And, although it may sound strange, the fact that he may have committed more offences is the reason that I know we’re going to get him. And soon.’
Jo felt Sareen’s hand shake as it was withdrawn, and saw in her eyes not fear but fathomless sorrow.
‘She’s a long way from resolution, whatever that may mean.’
Helen Merry, the student counsellor, stared out of the window and across fields to the heather-covered hills rising beyond the motorway. There were premature strands of grey in her shoulder-length hair that hinted at disappointment. Jo wondered how anyone could bear to listen to an endless litany of unhappiness. Helen turned and smiled wanly.
‘Compared with where she was immediately following the attack, Sareen has come a long way. Once the initial trauma passed, she was in a state of permanent numbness. We were really worried about her. We thought she might self-harm, or worse.’
‘What about her parents, her family?’ asked Jo. At least she had had Abbie after her own abduction.
Helen Merry shook her head.
‘I tried to persuade her to go home, take some time out, but she wouldn’t. It’s not unusual, I’m afraid. They came up here as soon as they heard, but her mother was in almost as bad a state as her daughter, and Sareen couldn’t bear to look her father in the face. She felt that she’d let them down, and of course t
hey were beating themselves up that they hadn’t been there to protect her.’
Jo nodded. She had known families to be torn apart by the aftershock of serious sexual assaults.
‘You’ve noticed how thin she is?’ said Helen Merry. ‘Well that’s my current concern. She’s not anorexic, not yet, but she will be unless she starts to eat at regular intervals, preferably in the lounge or the residence dining room with other students. I’ve got some of her housemates onside, so hopefully it’s only a matter of time.’
‘She mentioned that she’d managed to carry on with her studies?’ said Jo. ‘Her grades are good apparently?’
‘In a way that’s symptomatic of her problem. She’s thrown herself into studying to the exclusion of all else. She fought the nightmares and insomnia by studying into the night until she dropped off at her desk. Now it’s become a habit. She has no downtime, no leisure pursuits, she doesn’t go out with any of the other students. Basically, she’s become distrustful of the friends she’d begun to make, and hyper-wary of making any new ones, especially with male students. She’s in a prison of her own making.’
Helen saw the expression of disapproval on Jo’s face.
‘By which I meant,’ she said, ‘that she now has choices about how to move forward from this. That’s my job, to try and help her break out of her cocoon.’
The counsellor reached across to her out tray and selected a slim document. She held it aloft like a barrister before the jury.
‘Did you know,’ she said with barely controlled anger, ‘that one in three female students in the UK report having been sexually assaulted or abused. Forty-three per cent of students said they did not report it. And one per cent of students of both genders have been subjected to rape. That’s twenty-four thousand rapes! The vast majority are what the media likes to term date rapes, where alcohol, drugs and unwarranted coercion are involved, only five per cent involve violent stranger rapes such as the one that Sareen endured. But, believe me, the effect is just as damaging.’
Jo knew the statistics. She had worked closely with Manchester’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre, but it wouldn’t help to tell Helen Merry that.
‘It’s an epidemic, and it isn’t getting any better,’ the counsellor continued. ‘We have to eliminate the laddish culture in our universities, support women and girls to better protect themselves and – most important of all – educate boys from an early age about respect and consensual sex. And do you know what? It isn’t even a compulsory part of the school curriculum!’
‘Have you had any more incidents like Sareen’s in the past twelve months?’ Jo asked.
‘Stranger rape? No.’
Helen Merry threw the document down on the desk.
‘There have been other sexual assaults, and complaints of sexual harassment. We take a zero tolerance approach to them all. The victims are encouraged to report all allegations to the police. They investigate, and at the same time refer victims for specialist crisis counselling. We provide ongoing counselling here, for as long as it takes. Our record is better than most. We came fourth in the Safest University rankings in 2013.’ Helen Merry sighed. ‘But, of course, one case is one too many.’
‘Thank you for persuading Sareen to meet with me,’ Jo said. She stood up. ‘And for the use of your room. I just hope that I haven’t set her back by coming here.’
‘It may have done,’ Helen Merry replied. ‘But it’s never a straight road to recovery. More like a rollercoaster. I can tell you one thing that will help her,’ she said. ‘Finding the bastard who did this.’
Chapter 5
Jo parked on the Booths’ supermarket car park just as the heavens opened. Her regulation windcheater was in the trunk and so she decided to make a dash for it.
Inside she bought a couple of bottles of wine, a ready-to-cook fisherman’s pie for dinner, and a chicken sandwich for lunch. It was only when she came to put them in the trunk that she realised that she had picked up a meal for two. It was going to be a difficult habit to break.
In her heart of hearts, she still believed that Abbie would be back. She shrugged on her windcheater, pulled the hood up over hair that was already drenched, set the alarm on the Audi, and walked down Cable Street until she reached The Bobbin, and the start of Sareen’s fateful pub crawl.
Fifteen minutes later, Jo stared east down Quarry Road towards the bridge over the canal, rain dripping from the peak of her hood on to her shoes. She was none the wiser. One of the bottles from which Sareen had drunk could have been spiked in any one of the pubs.
Jo tried to put herself in the mind of the perpetrator. He could have chosen to wait in any of the dark, narrow lanes and back passages along the way, following the group of young women at a discreet distance. Perhaps he had seen the pub crawl event advertised on the university website, and brought along a copy of the route identical to the one that she now held in her hand? If so, it would have made sense to wait here, towards the end of the route, where his already heavily intoxicated target would be at her most vulnerable.
She began to walk towards the canal. On the opposite side of the road loomed the severe, almost windowless, side elevation of the city police station. At the junction with tree-lined Thurnham Street she crossed over and stood on the corner by the car park for the Magistrates Court. She tried to imagine this spot in the early hours of the morning. It would have been easy to lead a girl as slight as Sareen, confused and unsteady, up the blue cobbled banking, between the bushes and into the concealed car park.
Another hundred paces brought her to the canal bridge. The towpaths on either side were ideal locations for an opportunist rapist. But the unsub was not an opportunist. She was certain of that now. He was arrogant, confident and resourceful. He had to be, to take a young woman off the street within yards of her friends, by a busy pub, along a street close to the central police station. It beggared belief. But then, she reflected as she folded her map, serial sexual offenders always do.
Jo drove back to Manchester, bypassing Preston, from where the second victim had fled back to her family in New York State. Then it was Bolton, where there had been a string of alleged student rapes over the past three months, only one of which was clearly connected to Operation Juniper. This was another victim she would not be interviewing. The divisional senior investigating officer had told her that the twenty-year-old was off sick, so traumatised that her family and GP had requested that she not be subjected to any more questioning in the foreseeable future. Her account, already recorded in the files, was more or less identical to that of Sareen.
Half an hour later, Jo was back in the BSU offices. One of the meeting rooms had been transformed into a satellite Major Incident Room, complete with display boards and an interactive SMART Board. A PowerPoint projector had been installed on the ceiling. Dorsey Zephaniah, the unit administrator, Dizzy to her friends, was bursting to show her round.
‘Two dedicated telephones, two additional PCs with Internet and intranet access, a dedicated fax machine and printer, and a Home Office Large Major Enquiry System version two terminal – HOLMES2.’ She pointed to the far wall. ‘Those are three secure lockable storage and filing cabinets to ensure the integrity of all first-hand material generated by this team.’
‘This is amazing,’ said Jo. ‘How on earth did you manage to get it set up so fast?’
Dizzy grinned. ‘I’d love to take the credit, but it was part of the standard set-up.’
‘What’s the TV screen for?’ Jo asked.
‘Video-conferencing with the Major Incident Room, and whoever else you please. And another thing, you have a dedicated email account for Operation Juniper.’
The door opened, and Ram entered.
‘Not bad, is it?’ he said. ‘Not that we aren’t worth it. Dizzy’s worked another miracle.’
‘Get away with you!’ she said, punching him playfully on the shoulder as she passed him on her way out.
Ram pulled out a chair and sat down.
‘I thi
nk you’ll be pleased to learn,’ he said, ‘that while you’ve been busy at the sharp end, we’ve made some progress, Andy and I. Shall I ask him to join us in here?’
Jo began to shrug off her jacket. ‘That would be good,’ she said.
Ram returned, carrying two mugs of coffee. Andy accompanied him. They made an unlikely pair. The psychologist wore his usual beige cargo pants, brown hoody and Jungle Book plimsolls, contrasting with Ram in his leather jacket, ubiquitous cashmere scarf, and black skinny chinos tucked into lace-up Jacob boots. The English eccentric and the Asian urban fashionista.
Ram handed a mug to Jo.
‘Thought you might need this,’ he said. ‘I’ll be using the SMART Board, so I suggest you sit there.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and sat down next to Andy at the small table while Ram set up his presentation. The coffee reminded Jo that she was ravenous. She took the chicken sandwich from her bag and got stuck in.
‘I’ve been working on that behavioural profile,’ Andy told her. ‘I’ll be interested to see how it chimes with what you discovered this morning.’
‘I’m not sure that I learned anything at all,’ she said. ‘Aside from the fact that he’s clever, highly organised, arrogant, is not averse to high-risk scenarios, and he gets kicks from wrecking young women’s lives.’
‘That just about covers it,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me at all.’
‘Come on, Andy,’ she said. ‘We knew all those things about him before I went up to Lancaster.’
‘No, we didn’t. We surmised. That’s not the same thing at all. Everything we do here needs to be tested in the field, and either confirmed or refuted. Your interview confirmed it.’
Andy poured water from a small flask into a beaker, took a sip and observed her closely. ‘That’s not all you got out of that visit, is it, Jo?’
She stared at him.
‘I don’t know what you mean?’
‘When you set off, you had a mystery to solve. A riddle to unravel. But now you’re on a mission.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Oh yes,’ he told her. ‘Whenever we pick up a cold case, or are called into an investigation part way through, it feels as though we’ve been presented with a puzzle. In your former role with GMP, you were there from day one. Seeing the murder victim, attending the post-mortem. It’s only when you’re confronted with the human misery these people cause that it becomes personal. And when it does, it’s reflected in your eyes, your manner, your impatience.’