by Bill Rogers
Jo entered the apartment, cancelled the alarm, closed the door and stood for a moment with her back against it. A week ago, she had stood just like this as she plucked up the courage to face Abbie. Now it was with the dread of entering the empty apartment. She took a deep breath, picked up her work bag and the Booths bag-for-life, walked into the lounge and switched on the lights.
It was just as she had left it. She placed her bags on the kitchen table, removed the two bottles of wine and placed them in the rack. She turned the fisherman’s pie over and read the instructions. Forty-five to fifty minutes in an oven. She wasn’t sure she could stay awake that long.
She popped the meal in the oven, and then checked the phone for voice messages: there were none. She went into the bedroom, threw her jacket on the bed, stripped, and left her clothes in a heap on the floor.
The shower’s nebulizing mist spray drenched her body, along with wave after wave of foaming shower gel flushing away the accumulated sweat and grime of the past sixteen hours, and the stress that came with it. Jo wrapped a towel around her head, shrugged on her bathrobe and stepped back into the bedroom.
An uneasy feeling came over her. She sat on the bed and looked around. She had no idea what it was that was so disturbing. The bed was made, the room neat and tidy, but for the pile of her discarded clothing. The dressing table was just as she had left it. She stood up and opened the fitted wardrobes one by one. Nothing had been disturbed. The two rails where Abbie hung her winter clothes, and all of her drawers, had been emptied six days ago while Jo was at work. The remaining rail still held her summer dresses, skirts and trousers. She closed the door and looked around the room again. Something prompted her to go back into the wet room.
Jo’s eyes were drawn to the tiled shelf above the twin sinks. The year they had moved in together for the first time, they had bought a pair of matching mugs each with a red heart beneath their name. She was certain that Abbie’s mug had been there this morning. Now it was gone. Jo felt dizzy and clutched the doorjamb for support. The absence of that tiny object threatened to engulf her with an overwhelming sense of loss, of grief, that Abbie’s physical presence had not. She took a moment to compose herself, switched off the light and lay down on the bed. She closed her eyes and invited sleep to rescue her.
An insistent beeping told Jo that the pie was ready. With a sigh, she rolled over, swung her feet off the bed, and went through to the kitchen. She removed the pie from the oven, spooned half of it on to a plate, took it through to the lounge and switched on the television.
She caught the depressing tail end of the Ten O’Clock News, and was about to channel-hop when the presenter segued to Regional updates. The Operation Juniper press conference was the final North West item.
Jo hated watching herself at the best of times, but decided to stick it out if only to see how her appeal had been received. Judicious editing had cut out most of the Q&A session, with the exception of her angry response to the TV reporter. She winced as the camera zoomed in on her face, and then cut away to catch Helen Gates’s expression. But at least the appeal was shown in its entirety.
The weather forecast followed the news. There was no good news for those in Cumbria, struggling to recover from the devastating floods following Storm Desmond. Another would be hitting the UK mainland within the next few days. Jo switched off and returned to her meal. After a few mouthfuls she realised that her appetite had disappeared.
Jo took her plate into the kitchen, scraped the remains into the food caddy, and then did the same with the remaining half. Delicious as it was, she could not face reheating it in the microwave like some sad and lonely spinster. She set the alarm, went into the bedroom, switched off the light, and crawled beneath the duvet.
She lay in the dark, lost in their king-size bed, listening in vain for the soothing sound of Abbie’s breaths beside her. The silence was implacable, a brooding force that weighed down on her, and brought tears to her eyes. An eerie creaking sound startled her. Jo sat up, and reached for the light switch, before realising that it was only the hot-water pipes contracting in the walls as the temperature dropped.
She lay down again, rolled on to her side, closed her eyes, and prayed for a deep and dreamless sleep. But the dreams came thick and fast. None of them memorable. With one exception.
She was walking in a wood on a path of pine needles, springy beneath her feet, each step wafting scent into the air. Birds were singing, and shafts of sunlight filtered through the trees. Then the path began to narrow, and the trees crowded in on either side. The wood became a dark and impenetrable forest. She turned and began to run back the way she had come, tripping over a root and sprawling on her hands and knees. When she got to her feet, her shoes were missing. Now every step was agony, the naked soles of her feet pricked and probed by the bed of needles. A wall of branches blocked her path. Someone screamed.
Jo woke bathed in sweat, knowing that it was she that had screamed. When she checked the time, she realised that she had either slept through the alarm or had failed to switch it on, so that she was an hour later than she had intended. Worse still, she felt physically, emotionally, and mentally drained.
Chapter 12
‘Did you sleep okay?’
Ram sounded genuinely concerned. Jo smiled. ‘Yes, thanks.’
‘You need to go back home and sleep some more,’ Dorsey Zephaniah called over from beside the fax machine. ‘You look . . .’
‘Terrible, I know,’ said Jo. ‘But I’m fine, honestly.’
‘Well, I’m fixing you a big mug of coffee,’ Dizzy said. ‘Did you have breakfast?’
Jo’s face was a giveaway.
‘I thought not,’ said Dizzy. ‘I’ll fix you toast when I’ve done the coffee.’
Jo was too tired to argue. She put her jacket over the back of her chair and her bag on the desk, sat down, and stared at her ghostlike reflection on the monitor screen.
‘Here you go, dear.’
Jo looked up and saw Dizzy standing there, a coffee in one hand and a plate of buttered toast in the other.
‘Zeph, you’re an angel sent from God,’ she said.
Dizzy beamed one of her gleaming smiles.
‘I know it. Where do you want this, Ma’am? On your desk or in the rest area?’
Jo moved her bag to make space.
‘Here’s fine. I need to get started before people start wondering where I am.’
The administrator raised her eyebrows.
‘Too late for that,’ she said. ‘Check your emails.’
By the time the computer booted up, and she had logged in, Jo had demolished both slices of toast. At least, she thought, my appetite has returned.
There were fifty-three emails. It took her two minutes to delete the dozen or so that the spam filter had failed to block and mark as read another dozen that looked like NCA administrative circulars. The remainder, from Gerry Sarsfield, Harry Stone, and the SIOs from Lancashire and West Yorkshire, she quickly prioritised.
Gerry had sent her seven, each of them expressing growing frustration at her failure to respond. She decided to ring him rather than reply to his emails.
‘Thank God, I was beginning to think something had happened to you,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ she replied. ‘It’s a long story. I’ve only just got into the office. The appeal certainly seems to have had an impact?’
‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘But how exactly remains to be seen.’
He didn’t sound as upbeat as she had expected.
‘Seventy phone calls, and two allegations of rape,’ she pointed out. ‘That sounds like a result to me.’
‘Mmm. Depends where they take us. They’ve all been collated, and I’ve got a pair of specialist detectives from the Operation Talon syndicate following up the most promising. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’
‘Why, Gerry? What are you saying?’
‘Half of them are historical. Go back anything up to twenty years ago. I
f your lot are right, our unsub would have been at primary school.’
‘And the other half?’
‘Five have all the hallmarks of time-wasters and, before you jump down my throat, yes, we are going to talk to them.’
‘I never doubted that, Gerry.’
‘Fair enough,’ Sarsfield said. ‘I’m sorry, Jo, it’s just that I’ve got accustomed to having to defend every action we take just because of the way allegations of rape and sexual assault were treated in the past. It’s not easy being a man.’
‘It’s not just male officers who face this kind of thing. How would you like to be accused of betraying the sisterhood?’
‘That’s never going to happen, is it?’
She sensed him smiling.
‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘Seven of them are the wrong age, inasmuch as they don’t fit his current pattern. In their thirties and upwards. One of them’s sixty-three.’
‘It doesn’t mean . . .’
‘I know. We’re doing a second-level triage on all of those, and a further seventeen that fall outside the pattern. We will follow every one of them up within the next forty-eight hours.’
‘And the remaining six?’
‘You’ve been counting. I’m impressed. Those six are the ones that are being interviewed today. Not that any of them set our pulses racing.’
‘When you say outside the pattern, what markers are you using?’
‘Students, attending a university or college in the North West or West Yorkshire, late teens to mid-twenties, petite, blonde, been out drinking, and approached in the way you described in the appeal. We’ve broadened it to include any responses from Cheshire and Derbyshire.’
She couldn’t fault his logic.
‘What about the two allegations of rape?’
‘Those are being processed in line with our standard procedure. I have to say from the outset that neither of them appear to be connected to our man.’
‘Because?’
‘Because one of them has the hallmarks of a date rape. We have a name and location for the alleged offender. We expect to have him in custody within the next hour or so. The other one looks like an opportunist attack, in an alley near to a host of student lets. We’re pretty sure this is the same person who made an unsuccessful attempt last weekend. We have a good description. He’s a teenager, South East Asian, thin, five feet three or four, and he was brandishing a knife.’
Jo felt suddenly deflated. He must have sensed it from her silence.
‘Jo,’ he said, quietly, ‘last year, in the first three months of the university year, we investigated thirty student rapes across Greater Manchester. Sadly, these two are nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but those committed by our unsub are. Do you know what my colleague Ram found when I asked him to research rape abductions?’
‘No. Surprise me.’
‘That it proved impossible to come up with a reliable figure. Child abductions are classified separately in the UK, but those involving adults are hidden within “violence against the person”. Even so, with the exception of abduction for sex slavery, which includes rape, and kidnapping for forced marriage, genuine abduction for the purpose of rape is as rare as hens’ teeth.’
‘I read in the Manchester Evening News that a geneticist at Manchester University has discovered hens with teeth,’ he told her. ‘It’s a mutation, apparently.’
Jo was too tired to hide her exasperation. ‘This is rape we’re talking about.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, sounding genuinely chastened. ‘Inappropriate.’
‘Accepted,’ she replied. She gathered her thoughts. ‘Furthermore, Ram found that cases involving kidnapping for rape in which the victim was later released were the rarest of all.’
‘Much more likely to be murdered and the body hidden.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Like the Moors Murderers and the Ripper.’
‘There is one exception,’ she told him. ‘It’s a current unsolved investigation. The Batman rapist.’
‘He started back in the 1990s,’ Sarsfield said.
Jo imagined him nodding as he searched his memory bank.
‘Almost exclusively in Bath,’ he continued, ‘carjacking lone women. He made them drive him to a different area where he assaulted them, and then made them drive him back to the area where he’d abducted them. Also referred to by the press as The Riddler, on account of the baseball cap with a question mark on that he deliberately left at one of his crime scenes.’
‘Either you’ve an excellent memory, or you’ve just been going through the case.’
‘Neither. The Head of Operation Talon told me about it when I joined the team. They’ve always had an interest in it, not least because the Somerset and Avon operational name for the Batman case is Operation Eagle.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t mention him before?’
‘I would have, except that if he’s still alive, he’ll be somewhere between fifty-five and seventy-five years of age. Plus, all of his offences were committed in the same area, he’s a tights fetishist, and he appears to have been inactive for over a decade.’
‘Even so,’ she said, ‘there may be a connection. Operation Eagle, Operation Talon, and our unsub leaving a falcon tattoo on his victims? Is he making a point?’
‘If he is, he’s taking the piss.’
‘Let’s hope that’s his undoing.’
In the silence that followed, the two of them reflected on the fact that it had not been the undoing of the Riddler rapist.
‘Aren’t you seeing victim number five today?’ he asked.
Jo looked at her watch.
‘Five minutes ago.’ She logged off, scooted her chair back from the desk and grabbed her bag. ‘I have to go, Gerry. I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve finished.’
Chapter 13
Jo had hoped to remain inconspicuous, but the Chancellor’s Building lecture theatre was packed, and she had to stand at the back with a handful of other latecomers. At least they haven’t started yet, she thought, as she scanned the room.
The room was elegant and circular, with high walls and a domed roof. The walls were clad with geometric-patterned acoustic tiles, and the floor was carpeted. The audience were sitting on concentric rows of chairs facing a table directly opposite Jo at which were seated two young women and a slightly older man. She estimated that between two and three hundred people were present, the vast majority female, and almost exclusively of student age and appearance. The woman at the centre of the table stood up. As if by magic, the buzz of conversation ceased.
‘My name is Miriam Hood,’ she said. ‘On behalf of the National Union of Students, I’d like to welcome you to this Say No And Stay Safe seminar. Before we begin, I’d like to thank the University of Manchester for offering this venue without charge, and the Salford and Manchester Metropolitan Universities for also helping to sponsor the event.’ She now adopted a serious expression and tone. ‘It is an indictment of the society in which we live that we have to resort to a series of seminars such as this.’
There were murmurs of agreement.
‘An indictment of parenting, of the education system, of policing, and of the criminal justice system.’
The murmurs grew louder. The speaker paused, and looked slowly from left to right around the room.
‘It is gratifying,’ she said, ‘to see so many of you here today, and to know that you will spread the word among your own institutions. But I can’t help feeling, and I say this while acknowledging the handful of courageous men in this audience, that I’m addressing the wrong people. Specifically, the wrong gender!’
The room erupted with cheers and applause. Jo wondered if there wasn’t a danger that this was going to turn into an evangelical meeting. Not that there was anything wrong with that per se, only that in her experience, when emotion drowned out reason, some of the most important lessons were lost. The speaker waited patiently for the noise to subside, and
then nodded in empathy with her audience.
‘As things stand, these seminars have little option but to focus on what we can do to protect ourselves. And yes, I’m addressing the men in this audience too. As you’ll discover shortly, male rape is also on the increase. What the rest of society – parents, schools, the medical profession, politicians, the media, the criminal justice system – have to do is get their act together in addressing the issue of prevention. Put simply, we need to change the mindset, the culture and the behaviour of men!’
This time Miriam Hood cut the applause short by raising a hand.
‘If there is anyone here who doubts this, consider the following data from just two of the scores of studies in recent years into societal attitudes towards rape in the Western world.’
She picked up a sheet of paper and read from it, ignoring as she did so the growing chorus of angry comments elicited by the evidence.
‘In one study, over thirty per cent of male students said that they would force a woman to have sexual intercourse if they could get away with it. When asked the same question but using the term rape, the percentage fell to under fourteen per cent.’
She looked up. ‘See how men delude themselves when it comes to sex?’
She returned to her text.
‘Another large survey found that forty per cent of female undergraduates regarded rape as an exercise of male power over women.’
Miriam Hood looked at her audience.
‘A figure that I personally find worryingly low, but what percentage of male students do you think agreed with them?’
The replies predictably ranged from less than thirty per cent down to the ‘Zero’ a student standing next to Jo shouted out.
The speaker shook her head.
‘Eighteen per cent,’ she said. ‘And do you know what the male undergraduates were more concerned with? I’ll tell you. With protecting their fellow male students from false allegations of rape!’