Bradshaw nodded. ‘So far. We won’t actually know how many victims there are until he stops.’
‘And by then it could be too late,’ said Helen.
‘For the victims, yes.’
‘It is a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ admitted Tom, intrigued now.
‘There’s something else. To be honest, I don’t know if it’s anything at all.’ Bradshaw seemed reluctant to come to the point.
‘What is it?’ asked Helen.
‘Eva Dunbar is the most recent woman to disappear,’ he said, ‘and she’s a redhead. She has auburn hair, the same as the woman in the woods.’
He let that sink in, then Tom asked, ‘Another coincidence, or there’s someone out there with a type?’
Helen asked a question then. ‘Are you saying she was …?’
She hesitated, leaving Tom to complete her chilling deduction: ‘A replacement.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Helen and Tom had agreed on the spot to help Ian Bradshaw, and not just because the case intrigued them. The lives of five missing women depended on this, and they wanted to start straight away. Helen suggested that they immerse themselves in the case files at police HQ and it seemed a sensible starting point to Bradshaw, not least because it would free him up to do other things.
Bradshaw had hoped to spirit them into the building without being noticed, but that was always a long shot. They were in a corridor at HQ when he spotted DS O’Brien coming the other way. The man had a face like thunder. His partner, DC Skelton, trailed in his wake. Bradshaw guessed they had been lobbying Kane – unsuccessfully – to get themselves reinstated, since they were among the eight officers who had been suspended on suspicion of corruption. It had long been rumoured that O’Brien and Skelton had a lucrative sideline in shaking down drug-dealers but it had taken the intervention of the newspaper and documentary crew to bring it into the open and force their suspension. Bradshaw had clashed with both O’Brien and Skelton in the past, and so had Tom Carney. They were popular officers, nicknamed the ‘Regan and Carter of Durham Constabulary’ because their no-nonsense approach led to arrests and convictions; they regarded Bradshaw as a goody-two-shoes. When they found out he had been receiving counselling, they gleefully told everyone that Bradshaw was bonkers.
As soon as O’Brien saw Tom in the building his nostrils flared. ‘What is he doing here?’
‘Helping me with a case,’ said Bradshaw, but O’Brien wasn’t listening.
‘It’s because of you that I’ve been suspended.’
‘Tom had nothing to do with it,’ said Bradshaw.
‘He’s a journalist!’ snapped O’Brien. ‘And it’s their lies that have caused all this trouble.’
‘So I am personally responsible for every word written by all journalists now, am I?’ asked Tom with a flicker of amusement.
‘Journalists lie,’ DC Skelton interjected. ‘All of them, including you, and there are good coppers who pay the price for those lies.’
‘Good coppers? Not all detectives are corrupt,’ answered Tom. ‘Just some of them. Only you and he know which camp you’re in, but I had nothing to do with the article that got you suspended, so back off.’
The two men glared at each other and Bradshaw thought for a moment that Skelton might take a swing at Tom right there in the corridor. He tensed, ready to intervene. O’Brien clamped a hand on his fiery partner’s shoulder to restrain him. ‘Leave it, mate,’ he cautioned. Tom had the impression it was their perilous position in the force he was thinking of and not the reporter’s well-being.
‘You want to watch yourself,’ hissed Skelton.
Tom’s response was derision. ‘Oh, join the queue,’ he sneered.
‘Just watch it,’ repeated the detective constable, and he deliberately barged into Tom as he forced his way past them, knocking the younger man to one side. O’Brien followed his partner, scowling as he went.
‘Nice guys,’ said Helen when they were gone.
‘They’re just a little upset,’ said Bradshaw, steering them along the corridor.
Bradshaw showed Helen and Tom into the room where the files were stored, then immediately announced he would have to leave them to it.
‘What’s so important?’ asked Helen.
‘Yeah, how come you get to skive off?’ said Tom.
‘Because I am “skiving off”, as you put it, so I can speak to the families of these missing women myself,’ he told them. ‘And then there’s somewhere else I have to be that will be almost as much fun.’
‘Where?’ asked Tom.
‘The mortuary,’ Bradshaw told him. ‘Want to swap?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Then I’ll catch up with you both tomorrow.’ He nodded at the files. ‘Have fun.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There was one question that kept coming back to Eva, over and over again: Why?
Why her and not someone else? Why take her? Why keep her here? He hadn’t tried to kill her, or rape her, or hurt her. What was he waiting for? Were there other men involved? Was that it – he was waiting for them to show up? Would she be the entertainment for a group of madmen, some criminal gang or ring of sadists who would take delight in her terror?
Would Eva be taken from here and sent off somewhere, perhaps to another country? Was she now a part of a slave trade, something to be sold, like someone’s property? Would the real abuse start then? She had heard terrible tales but it couldn’t happen in this country, could it?
But if that wasn’t the reason, what could it be?
This man was feeding her and bringing her water, but why?
Eva had nothing but time to think: hours – days, in fact – to speculate on and worry about her fate. There were worse things than dying. She believed that now.
The only break from her thoughts was when the man came and opened the container, two, sometimes three times a day; always with the gun, always with his face covered. She was glad about that. If he ever came without wearing his balaclava, she would know it was over. He would kill her then.
Sometimes he would leave food and water for her without speaking. Other occasions she might get a few words, and that deep voice would urge her to eat or drink and maybe add, ‘You’ll be saved now,’ which made no sense to her at all.
The one thing that did make sense to Eva right now was getting out of here and it looked like she would have to make that happen herself. She picked up the lamp and began to examine every inch of the crate again, searching for a weak point in the metal.
Bradshaw visited members of five families that afternoon. Jessica Davies’ fiancé said her disappearance was his fault entirely. Bradshaw didn’t know if he wanted the detective to agree with him or absolve him. Either way, this was not a confession. The young man had taken a call from Jessica after she missed her bus and would normally have driven from their flat to pick her up, ‘But,’ he said, ‘I’d had a few at the pub that night, hadn’t I, and I didn’t want to risk it. I need my licence for my job, and I have to have a job if we are ever going to get married, so I said she’d have to wait for the next one.’ He looked as if he had been beating himself up over that decision ever since, and Jessica had been gone for three months. ‘If I hadn’t been drinking, she’d be here with me now.’ He glanced up at the photograph of his fiancée that smiled down at him from the mantelpiece. ‘If we don’t get her back, I’ll never forgive myself.’
Bradshaw couldn’t think of one crumb of comfort to offer the poor lad.
The parents of Sandra Lane hardly said a word. They just looked at him as if he’d suddenly landed from another planet and they couldn’t for the life of them understand what he was doing in their living room. Their answers to his questions came in monosyllables, and he eventually left the shocked couple with no more information about Sandra than when he had arrived.
Stephanie Evans’ husband seemed worried the detective might think he had something to do with his wife’s disappearance. Bradshaw didn’t, at first,
until Bob mentioned it more than once. ‘They kept going on about the wedding ring,’ he explained, meaning Bradshaw’s colleagues.
‘Oh, yes, the wedding ring.’ It had been mentioned in the file. ‘She left it behind when she went out with her friends in Durham.’
‘And I was away that night, so they made it sound like a big deal, which it really wasn’t. I mean, there are lots of reasons why a woman might take off her wedding ring and forget about it, right?’
You mean other than to pretend she was unmarried while her husband was away, thought Bradshaw. ‘Like doing the washing-up?’ he offered gamely.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘She wore it when she was doing that.’ His face clouded over at that point. ‘I meant other reasons,’ he added, but it seemed he wasn’t able to think of any just then. Bradshaw asked him a series of routine questions and made his own mind up about Bob Evans. This wasn’t a man who had killed his wife because he knew she was having an affair; this was a man whose wife had disappeared without her wedding ring, so now, as well as dealing with her loss, he was also wondering if she had been looking for something outside their marriage.
Alice Smith’s mother clung to the positive possibilities of her daughter’s disappearance with an almost messianic zeal. She knew Alice wasn’t dead, she informed Bradshaw, because she would know it if her daughter had been killed. She would have felt it deep inside her. No, Alice must have gone somewhere, with someone, and she couldn’t get in touch for some reason, though Alice’s mother could offer no possible explanation for this highly uncharacteristic behaviour.
That left one more home and family to visit.
Ian Bradshaw had never seen anyone look as tired as Nancy Dunbar. She had deep, dark grooves under her eyes and the whites were bloodshot. Her hair was almost entirely grey and, when she sat down in the armchair, she looked as if she might not have the energy to get up out of it again. In short, this was not a well woman.
‘This is my hour,’ Eva’s mother said as she gestured for him to sit down on her sofa. ‘Simon is at the daycare. My son has autism,’ she explained. ‘I take him there twice a week on the bus. It gives me a break but by the time I drop him off then get the bus back home and do all the housework, I get about an hour’s rest before I’m back on the bus again to collect him. I don’t know why I’m rambling on about that.’
Eva’s mother had been talking to him non-stop from the moment he confirmed he had no new information as to her whereabouts. Was it relief because her daughter’s body had not been found or the crushing realization that Eva was still missing that had led to her nervous chatter?
‘I don’t know what I can do to help you,’ she said. ‘I told your colleagues everything I can think of. Eva’s a good girl. She wouldn’t just run off, she wouldn’t … leave us.’ She said this haltingly, as if there were a tiny scintilla of doubt in her mind, just for an instant, before she banished it. ‘It’s been hard, I’ll admit that, but she loves Simon and he loves her. She wouldn’t just go. Please believe me.’
‘I do,’ Bradshaw told her, and he could see her become less tense, as if him believing her were half the battle. But what else could he offer this distraught woman? Not much.
‘You’ll want to look round,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what they do on the telly?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘If you think it will help.’ Before he answered, she got up and led the way out of the room, and he followed her, because it was a small thing to do and it might make her feel a little better, even though he knew the house had already been searched and nothing had turned up.
She guided Bradshaw upstairs and showed him Eva’s room. He took a look round while she stood by the door, watching. Was she expecting him to make some significant breakthrough from evidence gleaned by looking at the contents of her daughter’s room?
There wasn’t much to see, just a single bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe, all in white, but surely Eva would have outgrown the pink-patterned wallpaper by now. They probably just didn’t have the time or the energy to redecorate. There was a simple black dress hanging from the wardrobe door but no jewellery or make-up on the dressing table, just a hairbrush and a deodorant. A poster of Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction adorned one wall and another had a clip-framed photo of Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet hanging on it. There was barely anything else to see, barring a couple of photo albums and a CD player. It was neat, unfussy and lacked the usual clutter he had seen before in young girls’ bedrooms. Eva did not seem to value possessions all that much, and Bradshaw warmed to her because of it.
‘Everything all right?’ Nancy asked.
‘It’s very tidy.’ He smiled. ‘No make-up or clothes.’
‘I haven’t touched anything,’ she told him, as if it were a crime scene. ‘She was never that bothered about getting dolled up.’
Perhaps it was the sight of a detective standing in her missing daughter’s room that did it, but suddenly she was wiping tears away. ‘You will find her? You’ll do everything you can?’ she managed.
‘Yes, we’ll do everything we can. We have some really good investigators working on it. I promise you, they’re the best.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘I’ll admit it,’ said Tom. ‘Right now, I haven’t got a bloody clue.’
They were standing next to each other, surveying the photographs of the five missing women which were face up on the table. Between them, they had read as much material in the case files as possible.
Helen regarded the photographs closely. ‘He doesn’t appear to have a type.’
One of the women had dark hair tied back off her face; one had brown hair with a fringe; two were blonde, but one looked natural, the other as if the colour came from a bottle. Then there was Eva Dunbar, who had long, auburn hair that reached below her shoulders. It made a striking contrast to her pale and delicate face.
It wasn’t just the hair. When you examined their facial features or skin tone, it was immediately clear that the women were all quite different. The files revealed they were of different heights and weights, and their ages spanned ten years: the youngest was twenty; the oldest was just over thirty. Their backgrounds varied; one was a student from a reasonably well-to-do middle-class background, one a young woman with impoverished parents who was working two jobs (cleaner and supermarket cashier), to support herself and them.
None of the women had children, but was this just a coincidence? If they were abducted, had he been stalking them for weeks, or had he known nothing about them, acting impulsively and dragging them from the street?
‘Not a type, then,’ agreed Tom, his tone thoughtful, ‘except they are all youngish women. But is there any pattern to this that we’re missing somehow?’
‘They all disappeared when they were returning home from work or an evening out,’ said Helen, ‘but the times vary and so do the locations.’
They had marked the last-known whereabouts of each woman on a map. The sites were in County Durham or into Northumbria but there was no defined area with a specific location at its centre, and even the places themselves were markedly different. One disappeared after a night out in Newcastle,’ continued Helen. ‘Another went missing following a friend’s birthday drink in Durham city, one after she missed a bus home to her village, another was last seen coming out of an office she had been cleaning at the end of a working day, and the first victim had been shopping.’
‘And there is no known link between any of them,’ he recounted. ‘They didn’t attend the same school, work near one another or go to the same gym. They had no shared friends or boyfriends and their political or religious views, hobbies and interests varied. Not one of them had any history of stalkers, troublesome ex-boyfriends or overbearing families. I can’t see a single link here, can you?’
‘No and nor could any of the officers that worked the case before us. There’s nothing.’
‘So, he likes to take women,’ concluded Tom. ‘Not too young but
not too old, and he’s very careful about it. The pattern is there is no pattern. He must have covered some miles to do all this and my gut feeling is that he takes advantage of any opportunity spontaneously when he spots someone who fits the bill. That way, no one is expecting him. The police can warn women to be careful when they’re walking home at night in a rural location, say, but then he grabs a woman right off the streets of Newcastle. It’s chilling.’
‘Every woman’s nightmare,’ said Helen.
It wasn’t like it was on the telly. It was never like it was on the telly. On the TV, hard-nosed detectives walked into autopsies like they were a matter of routine. Young, freshly minted detectives might throw up in a corner, to the irritation of their older superiors, but you weren’t meant to bat an eyelid once you’d been doing this for a while. You were supposed to take it in your stride, ignore the evidence of your own eyes, disregard the overpowering smell of chemicals and the sight of carefully extracted internal organs and somehow ask intelligent questions about the cause and time of death, then go home and have your tea like nothing had happened. But Bradshaw hated this part of the job.
He didn’t relish the idea of going to the mortuary to pick up the results of the post-mortem on the woman in the woods. He hoped there wasn’t a fresh cadaver on the slab when he opened the door and was grateful for that small mercy when he found the pathologist making notes at his desk in a corpseless room.
‘Yes?’ The pathologist looked irritated by the disturbance.
Bradshaw introduced himself and explained why he was there.
‘You too? I do have other things to be getting on with.’
‘Who else has been down here?’ He knew it wasn’t Kane, who preferred a few sentences in summary from a subordinate.
‘It’s been like Piccadilly Circus,’ harrumphed the pathologist, but it seemed that was all Bradshaw was going to get in the way of an answer. Maybe the old grump wasn’t referring to the same case. Who knew how many other bodies he was working on, even if it was only to rule out foul play? There were usually a few on the go at any one time and Bradshaw always wondered what it did to your mind to be constantly surrounded by reminders of your own mortality, to be poking into corpses of people who had been walking around just a few days or even hours before, until a crime or a traffic accident, a heart attack or a brain tumour, suddenly and prematurely ended their life without warning. ‘I’m assuming you want the top line?’ He peered over his reading glasses at Bradshaw.
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