by Paul Finch
There was a lengthy pause. ‘This is news to me. When did it happen?’
‘Last night, around midnight.’
‘Nasty stuff, but I still don’t see …’
‘Two female hitchhikers alone on a dark night? Getting jumped by a single assailant, who takes one of them out ASAP with a lump of rock?’
‘That would be a common sense strategy for any random attacker attempting to overpower two people at the same time.’
‘I’m not sure this is a random attacker, ma’am. While he was stalking them through the fog, the assailant was whistling something.’
‘Whistling?’
‘It was a song you’re quite familiar with … Strangers in the Night.’
Now there was a much longer pause, and the sound of paperwork being shuffled. Heck could picture Gemma filching a pen from her drawer, shoving documentation aside as she opened a fresh daybook on her desk. Gemma was in the habit of starting a new log for every crime that was referred to her personal office. ‘Give me the details, Heck.’
He told her what they knew, which in truth wasn’t very much. Namely, that Tara Cook and Jane Dawson had gone astray while following a challenging route through the Langdale Pikes, at which point they’d been assailed first by that eerie whistling, and then by a strong, stocky figure, whose physical features had not just been concealed by fog, but by a full head mask and heavy outdoor clothing. He’d beaten Jane Dawson savagely – though whether it was to death was as yet unknown, as the sole witness, Tara Cook, had fled, only to be shot from behind. She’d survived the wound, but in a subsequent delirious state, had fallen down a waterfall, finishing up in Witch Cradle Tarn, where Heck had found her only an hour and a half ago.
Gemma listened long and hard, clearly undecided about the import of what he was telling her. While she tried to make her mind up, Heck glanced back from the Cragwood Keld front desk into the rear office, the little bit of floor space in there now taken up by a camping bed, on which the casualty, her more serious wounds dressed and bound, was reclining. Mary-Ellen was crammed in there alongside her, scribbling anything Tara could recollect into her pocketbook. The ambulance scheduled to take the casualty down to the Westmorland General Hospital, in Kendal – the nearest medical facility capable of dealing with a gunshot wound – had still not arrived. Nor had any supervision units from Windermere. In the meantime, they’d done the best they could, bringing Tara Cook directly back to Cragwood Keld in the police launch, which was now tied up down at the public jetty near to The Witch’s Kettle, and applying as much first aid as possible. Their cause was assisted by Tara Cook’s apparent determination to survive. She’d suffered a nasty-looking wound, but in reality the attacker had only winged her, which was understandable in such poor visibility. This started Heck thinking again.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘the Stranger was never accounted for, was he?’
‘Heck … that was ten years ago. And I shot him through the left side of his chest. That wound had to be fatal.’
‘But you didn’t see him die. The Stranger taskforce never found his body, and they dragged that mire for days afterwards.’
‘Why would he suddenly reappear now?’
‘I don’t know, but I’d be interested in finding out.’
‘Did he try to rape or rob these girls?’
‘We don’t know what he did with the girl he clobbered. We haven’t been able to get up there yet, and there’s no sign of a body down at this level.’
‘You say he shot the second girl? Well that wasn’t the Stranger’s MO, Heck. He never carried a firearm.’
‘Which he’s probably always considered a big mistake. I mean, it all went swimmingly for him until the night he met a nice-looking chick packing a .38.’
There was another long pause. Gemma was the arch-professional. Not just a top-notch administrator, but a highly organised investigator. She rarely let emotion get in the way of cool-headed logic, but he knew she’d been haunted all her career by the very close call she’d had at the hands of the Stranger back in 2004.
Despite that, she was clearly making an effort to be realistic. ‘Heck, as far as British law enforcement is concerned, the Stranger is dead. Not just because he suffered a deadly wound, but because no further victims were reported.’
‘Suppose he modified his MO. Suppose he didn’t just start carrying a gun when he went on the job, suppose he cleared off to another part of the country to do it. I mean, we know he’s a Scot. Up here in the Lakes, he’s only an hour from the border.’
‘Ten years ago, Heck …’
‘Yeah, but like you say, you shot him. Suppose he survived but was badly damaged. It might have taken a decade for him to recover his health.’
She sighed, though it didn’t sound like a sigh of frustration; more a sigh of puzzlement. ‘Heck … what do you want me to do about this?’
‘Well, now you mention it … nothing.’
‘Come again?’
‘I’m drawing this to your attention, ma’am, because I still respect you. And because I’d like to think we’re still friends to some degree. Plus I thought you might be interested. And you are, I can tell. If you remember, the Stranger taskforce never publicised that intelligence about the Frank Sinatra song.’
This was another key factor in Heck’s thinking. The original investigation team had avoided any public mention of Strangers in the Night. Firstly on the grounds the song was actually irrelevant to the case at the time, but secondly because cranks had a habit of putting themselves forward as serial killer candidates, so it was always useful to withhold one small detail.
‘What’s the current status of the enquiry?’ Gemma asked.
‘It’s not even started. I’ll be accompanying the casualty down to Westmorland General just as soon as the ambulance gets here. And then liaising with DI Mabelthorpe from Windermere nick.’
‘And this assault happened around midnight?’ She sounded unimpressed. ‘That’s almost eleven hours ago. Life moves at a slower pace up there, eh?’
‘Ma’am, we only found Tara Cook an hour and a half ago. And this fog is literally so bad we can’t get a chopper up to examine the main crime scene. In fact, we don’t even know where the crime scene is. Tara Cook reckons they’d been wandering for hours, lost, when they were attacked.’
‘Heck … this couldn’t just be some wandering maniac?’
‘The chances of that are a hundred to one, ma’am. First of all that any such person would exist up here without us already knowing it, especially as he’s armed. Secondly that he could have run into these girls in the fog purely by accident.’
‘You think he’d stalked them from earlier?’
‘Somehow or other he must’ve known where they’d be. I mean, stalking would be the Stranger’s style, wouldn’t it? From what I remember. He used to pick his targets in the pubs around the West Country, followed them for a couple of hours before they’d parked up somewhere and got down to it …’
Gemma went silent again, and this time he heard her fingers hitting a keyboard. The Serial Crimes Unit, which she headed, was one of the busiest offices in Scotland Yard’s elite National Crime Group. It existed solely to investigate or assist in the investigations of series or clusters of connected violent crimes, wherever in England and Wales they might occur. It was a near-certainty she’d have other important tasks to be getting on with as well as this.
‘Anyway, that’s it, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d give you a heads-up …’
‘And this suspect was definitely whistling Strangers in the Night? The witness is quite sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t prompt that from her in any way?’
‘Definitely not.’ Tara Cook had begun mumbling the moment Heck had carried her out to the boat and laid her on the deck, but they’d been halfway across the tarn, en route straight to the Keld, before he’d realised what she was actually saying. With her reeling senses and battered mouth, it had been difficult g
etting anything intelligible from her. She’d clutched at him and Mary-Ellen with hands like talons, burbling, weeping, showing remarkable animation for someone so badly hurt. ‘Din’ see his face. No face … but that song. Stran’ in the Ni’. Kept on whistling it while he was creeping after us. Strangers in the Night …’
‘That was the main thing she remembered about him,’ Heck said. ‘The song. Absolutely petrified her. Sounds like he was playing cat and mouse with them for quite a while before he struck.’
As he relayed all this, Heck wondered again about his own experience on the tarn’s east shore, specifically the chuckle he thought he’d heard. Hadn’t Gemma once described her assailant on Dartmoor as having a snorting, pig-like chuckle? Of course, there was no guarantee he’d actually heard anything. He’d been so isolated at the time by the mist and the trees and the icy, ear-numbing silence that his senses had been scrambled.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be part of this investigation once it kicks into action, ma’am,’ he added. ‘But if you’re interested, I’ll try and update you regularly.’
‘Do that by all means … if you wish.’
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘If I wish?’
‘The song’s most likely a coincidence, Heck.’ By her tone, she was quite decided on that. ‘For all we know, your perp could be some kind of crooner obsessive. And the fact he ran into two girls is exactly how it sounds – he ran into them. He got lucky.’
‘Just like the Stranger did ten years ago, you mean? Having carefully trawled for his victims first.’
‘Heck, it’s more likely some opportunist headcase than a middle-aged madman who survived a bullet wound in the chest and a dunking in a Devonshire swamp, and then suddenly, over a decade later, decided to recreate the best night of his life four hundred miles away on a frozen mountaintop.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you think?’
Heck was unwilling to admit that what she said made pretty good sense. Because still, some deep gut instinct advised him there was much more to this.
‘Like I say, ma’am, I’ll keep you informed.’
‘And like I say, Heck … if that’s what you want.’
‘I thought you liked to get ahead of the game, Gemma?’
‘I’ve always been a believer in the Golden Hour principle.’
‘And what about the JDLR principle? Remember that, from when you were a street cop? Just Doesn’t Look Right.’
She sighed. ‘I’m onside with that too. How could I have tolerated you for so long if I wasn’t? But the thing is, Heck … I’m not your supervisor anymore. You need to address these concerns to this DI Mabelthorpe. If there is something in this for us, I’m sure we’ll get the message through the usual channels.’
‘Okay,’ he said, disgruntled. ‘See you around, ma’am.’
‘Yeah. See you, Heck.’ And she hung up.
When Heck ambled back into the rear office, Mary-Ellen was gazing expectantly up at him. Though she’d only been a kid at the time, she knew all about the infamous Stranger enquiry. There was barely anyone in Britain who didn’t. She hadn’t leapt excitedly a few minutes ago when he’d first mentioned there were possible similarities between that case and this, but she was clearly fascinated to know more.
‘What does Superintendent Piper think?’ she asked.
Heck shrugged. ‘She doesn’t want to know.’
‘But what does she actually think?’
He chuckled without humour. ‘That’s always tougher to ascertain.’
Chapter 5
It might have been a signature of the Stranger that he always destroyed his victims’ eyes by stabbing or gouging, but he wasn’t alone in that, Gemma reminded herself. Okay, it wasn’t a common feature of serial sex murders, but occasionally the eyes had it – so to speak. And yet considering this was such a momentous thing to do, quite often those responsible would offer only garbled explanations as to why.
One had professed an ancient, long-discredited belief that an image of the last thing the victim saw before death would be imprinted on the internal optical structures, allowing identification of the murderer on the pathologist’s slab – though no one had taken it that seriously, given this was the educated twenty-first century. Another had described it as a convoluted act of remorse, saying he’d sought to remove all sense that his victims were human beings. ‘As the eyes go, so goes the soul,’ he’d whined in a voice that almost pleaded for his interrogators’ sympathy. ‘It’s easier to tear and mutilate a doll than a living person.’ A third had adopted the polar opposite viewpoint, coldly claiming his victims’ eyes as trophies, and keeping them in jars on the shelves in the ‘workshop’ located in his cellar. The idea they were somehow sentient had excited him. In his eventual confession, he’d admitted: ‘I was aroused by the thought they were being protractedly tortured, trapped indefinitely in sealed glass containers, unable to vocalise their suffering, unable even to blink away the sight of me, their captor, in my endless triumph.’
Gemma hadn’t memorised any of these details, but then she didn’t need to. Even before Heck had hung up, she’d accessed Serial Crimes Unit Advisory, or SCUA for short – the unit’s own intelligence databank, and now called up one case file after another on the screen in her office. Purely on principle, she would never have let Heck know she was doing this. He’d always been a chancer; he took risks and gambles, but so often they paid off because his instincts were very well-honed. She’d benefited from them hugely, but that didn’t mean she could openly approve of this approach, even indirectly, by attaching undue credibility to it. But it was unfortunate, or maybe fortunate depending on your view, that Heck hadn’t mentioned anything about the assailant up in the Lake District going for his victims’ eyes – if he had, that would have been a smoking gun no one could ignore. In the original Stranger investigation, the aspect of the eyes being attacked had been of crucial importance.
Gemma opened the files in question, for the first time in quite a few years. Immediately, all kinds of memories flooded back. The crime scene photographs ensured that, along with the hundreds of statements taken, the intelligence and analysis reports and the many, many names involved – not just the other officers on the case, but the victims and their families, and the numerous suspects who’d slowly, steadily and very frustratingly been ticked off the list as their alibis checked out. She imagined she could smell again the rankness of the reservoir that stifling hot night, could hear the wind whispering through the thick, dry grass on the Dartmoor ridges, could feel the heat rising from the sun-beaten landscape. But more than anything else, she could clearly visualise that bestial, leather-clad face with its frothing, gammy-toothed mouth. Despite the many awful things she’d seen since then, the small hairs at the nape of Gemma’s neck stiffened at the mere memory.
It didn’t affect her quite the way it used to. She didn’t dream about the Stranger anymore – at the end of the day he had given her a soaring career, so she could hardly complain. But like so many other cases for which no real and satisfactory solution had been provided, the subject came up in conversation with discomforting regularity. There’d never been anything to suggest the killer was still alive, but perhaps deep down it wouldn’t have surprised her if something did. Very little about that enquiry had actually been straightforward. The guy had murdered indiscriminately, yet at times had behaved more like a professional assassin than a sex case, never leaving a trace of physical evidence, covering his tracks with amazing skill. And yet all the way through he’d behaved as if he was on a kind of learning curve, constantly modifying and adjusting his methods – so much so that in the initial stages of the investigation, before Gemma was actually attached, West Country police forces hadn’t immediately been sure they were dealing with a serial killer. Had it not been for the brutal stabbing of all the victims’ eyes after death, which rapidly became the Stranger’s trademark, they might have set up separate enquiries.
With her usual painstaking thoroughness, she now ran back through the primary crime rep
orts.
The first known Stranger attack had involved the death of a lone householder, an elderly man living in a remote cottage on the edge of Exmoor in north Devon. He had died in the armchair in front of his fireplace on a cold February night in 2003, as the result of a flurry of blows to head and body, probably delivered with a stone taken from the wall outside, and several vicious stab-wounds to his neck and chest, one made with a spike-like object that was removed from the scene by the killer, the others caused by the victim’s own household implements – a carving knife and a wood chisel, both of which were left standing in his gaping wounds.
Though there was no sexual interference with this victim and nothing of value had been stolen from the scene, the initial assumption was that a burglar was responsible – that he’d simply not been able to find anything he wanted, and that the post-mortem stabbing out of the old man’s eyes had been a ghoulish act of vindictive anger.
The second attack had occurred on a quiet country lane in Somerset, the following July. It was late at night, and two teenage girls had been hitchhiking home from the Glastonbury Festival. Someone had stopped a car alongside them, but with no intention of offering a lift. This hadn’t been an out-and-out sex attack either, but it was closer to that than the first. One of the two victims, the heavier built of the two, who also, coincidentally, had worn her hair cut very short – which conceivably, in the dark, had led the attacker to mistake her for a male – had been felled with a single skull-crushing blow from behind, delivered with a heavy stone. The other victim had then been dragged into a roadside ditch and forcibly divested of her jeans, though not her underwear, before being subjected to a severe beating, at the end of which she was ripped and slashed with several edged implements. Once again, both girls’ eyes were gouged post-mortem with some kind of steel spike, which forensics examiners concluded was a sharpened screwdriver. If there was any lingering uncertainty they were dealing with the same killer as before, that disappeared when the old man’s DNA was discovered in both female victims’ eye-sockets, implying the same screwdriver had been used in both attacks.