Be My Girl

by Tony Hutchinson

  He knew the police might pat him down, but they wouldn’t place their hands inside his tracksuit bottoms.

  Sliding his hands inside them, he removed the second sandwich bag he always carried. That bag was carefully placed on an adjoining bench.

  Pulling off his training shoes, he pushed down his tracksuit bottoms and kicked them off. He never wore underwear when he was going out on a date.

  He removed his tracksuit top and stood there completely naked. He slapped his stomach and considered losing weight. The girls might appreciate a flatter stomach.

  He took the two pieces of rope from the backpack, put them on the sheet, and then rolled up the sheet and put it inside a large polythene bag.

  Walking into the downstairs shower room, he caught sight of his grin in the mirror. He opened the blade of the knife, dropped it into the bleach-filled sink, and stepped into the shower. Under the cascading hot water a wave of remorse and revulsion overcame him. It was always the case. She had seemed very nice. As he was leaving her bedroom, she had quietly asked him between stifled sobs, ‘why me?’. His reply wasn’t contrived; it was a genuine response. ‘Because there’s no way someone like you would go out with someone like me.’

  Of course, remorse and revulsion wouldn’t stop him. The time would come when he would need to prove himself again. His encounters weren’t borne out of anger against women. He just wanted a relationship with a woman and he had to prove to himself that he could have one. He needed these women. They were his salvation, but salvation could only be achieved by remarkable planning, both before and after his liaisons. They had called him an under-achiever at school but his ability to plan was improving each time. As he lathered himself in an aqua shower gel, he smiled at his bare pubic region; he had carefully shaved before leaving the house. One pubic hair was potentially all the police would need to identify him. They could examine every fibre of her bedclothes and clothing. They would find no hairs. You couldn’t leave behind something you hadn’t taken in.

  Chapter Four

  Ed Whelan answered the mobile on his way out of the front door, his mouth a little furry from last night’s lager, his head just a little thicker than usual. He was looking forward to the amateur football match, hoping the white frost wouldn’t cause a postponement. Standing in the cold for nearly two hours would revitalise him, and then he could enjoy a couple of lunchtime beers by a roaring open fire. His wife and teenage daughter had left yesterday for a weekend in Newcastle, and he was relishing the prospect of a few more hours in male company, watching and talking football. It was a short walk to the football pitch and an even shorter one back home from the pub.

  ‘Sam. Hi. What do I owe this honour on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘Ed, there’s been another rape. A girl in her house. Last night. Same MO as the last one I understand. I only got an email from Trevor Stewart on Friday asking us to take a look at the one from November.’

  Ed listened, recalling the rape, and the media attention it attracted. To be raped by an intruder in your own home was very unusual.

  Sam was speaking again. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but can you meet me at the office as soon as?’ she asked.

  Bollocks, Ed thought. Not often I get let off the leash.

  One phrase flashed repeatedly in his head. Same MO. The same modus operandi. The same ‘method of operation’.

  ‘Okay, I’m on my way. How is she? The victim?’

  ‘He didn’t beat her up, thankfully, but she’s traumatised, and pretty badly by the sound of it. Who wouldn’t be? We’re not going to be talking to her at any length today.’

  ‘How old?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Not sure yet, but she’s in the same range as the first one.’

  ‘Where did it happen?’

  ‘Conifers Estate,’ Sam told him. ‘She was found at 4.30am. Taken straight to hospital, she was so distraught. Look, I’ll brief you at the office. I’m getting into the car now and I don’t have a hands-free kit. Don’t want to give the Black Rats an opportunity to pull a DCI.’

  ‘Okay. I’m on my way.’

  He smiled as the ‘black-rat’ phrase darted through his mind. After all these years, the traffic department, or Road Policing Unit as they were now known, were still referred to as ‘black-rats’. Some even wore ‘black-rat’ enamel tie-pins, a humorous two-fingered salute to the detectives who coined the phrase way back in police history.

  He put the mobile back in his pocket and turned his thoughts to the victim.

  Poor kid…raped in her home…in her own bed. Bastard! Prison’s too good for them. Castrate them, or better still, put them in a room full of women and lock the doors. How many of these bastards have you interviewed, Ed asked himself? Fuck, I’d have loved to beat the shit out of the lot of them.

  Even now, at 55, he still enjoyed that euphoric feeling when they were caught – the look in their eyes. The passing years didn’t diminish that feeling.

  He would ring Sue later to tell her he had been called out. After 30 years of marriage she was used to ‘the job’ and the impact it often had on their social lives.

  Jesus, where’s the car? Did I leave it at the pub last night?

  Temporarily disorientated, he remembered Sue had changed her mind at the last minute about getting the train and had taken the VW Golf. He would have to go to work in ‘Doris’, his lovingly restored 1972 VW bay window camper van.

  He opened the electric garage doors, slid on to the white leather driver’s seat, and caught sight of his broad shoulders and shaved head in the wing mirror. He took hold of the retro ‘Banjo’ steering wheel and started her up, marvelling at the musical sound of the air-cooled engine. The drive would take about 15 minutes.

  As he drove, the two rapes consumed his thoughts. A second victim, if they were linked, would really ratchet up the local media interest. They wouldn’t have been officially told about the latest attack yet but Ed knew the Press – or at least the proper ‘operators’ – would soon have picked it up. They had their sources.

  More importantly, if this rapist has struck twice, it was odds-on he would strike again. He needed to be caught, and caught quickly. Sam Parker would be thinking the same.

  Ed winced and wriggled his bum. The upright driving position wasn’t the easiest for someone over 6’4’ but being behind the wheel of this beautiful classic more than compensated for any discomfort.

  So they were due to start a review tomorrow. Not an unusual request. Reviews had been going on for some years now, normally around homicide, and this was just another re-examination of a serious offence. Their job would be to establish if there were any new potential lines of inquiry and whether the lines of inquiry tracked during the initial investigation had been properly followed to their natural conclusion. A second attack would change the perspective of the review. Now they needed to establish if the rapes were linked.

  He looked right as he emerged from a junction.

  ‘I despise rapists. Bastards.’

  Ed worked well with Sam and knew they would bounce ideas off each other.

  The CID at Seaton St George would be handling the initial enquiries into the new attack whilst the Major Incident Team, headed by Sam, would start to review the first.

  He considered the criteria to establish if the two attacks were linked.

  What was the age group of the victims? Did they live alone? What was the method of entry? Were weapons used? What words were spoken? But, most importantly, the order everything happened during the attack.

  The next batch of questions would follow. Were there other undetected stranger rapes? Had this bastard attacked more than two women?

  Slow down, Ed, slow down. Let’s see what we’ve got. Follow the evidence. That phrase should be every investigator’s mantra.

  Doris’s heater and insulation were poor compared to modern vehicles. Ed’s feet were so cold he would probably have been warmer outside. He wiped a drop off the end of his nose, glanced out of the side window at the dense housing passing
by, and remembered the time when Seaton St George hadn’t spread its tentacles of urban sprawl across the once green fields. He had lived in the town, on the North East coast, all his life, and wished he had an aerial photograph from when he was a child to show his daughter the vast changes.

  Ed drove into the HQ car park nearest to the Major Incident Team offices. Knowing he wasn’t going to be on public display today, he wore the casual clothes he had been wearing to watch the football: blue jeans and a grey jumper, the wellington boots replaced with brown loafers. He presumed Sam would also be in her ‘casuals’. It was more important to get to the office quickly than it was to be ‘suited and booted’. The Executive – Chief Constable, Deputy Chief, and two Assistant Chiefs – were going to want to know first thing tomorrow morning whether these attacks were linked. In all likelihood, so was the Press pack.

  Punching the code into the combination lock, he walked into the office. It was this space, simply referred to as ‘the room’, that housed all the HOLMES computers and paperwork. HOLMES, a software program, was an abbreviation for Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. It had been refined many times since it was set up following the Yorkshire Ripper case in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

  Ed guessed Sam would come to this long office, where 11 officers could sit in comfort, each with their own computer terminal and each with a specific role in the HOLMES function.

  ‘Hi Sam,’ Ed said, smiling.

  ‘Ed,’ said Sam, as she stood up, ‘thanks for coming out so quickly. Sorry I’ve ruined your Sunday.’

  Ed had guessed correctly, not just about which office Sam would be in but also her wardrobe selection. Sam was one of those women who always looked good. Ed reasoned she would look attractive even when she was blue with cold and shovelling snow in a pair of XL overalls. She was one of nature’s beautiful people, a statuesque brunette carrying no excessive weight, looking very attractive now in a clingy white sweater and tight blue jeans tucked inside black leather boots.

  A graduate with a keen sense of humour, she had been a DCI for two years, very thorough and with a keen eye for detail. That was all that mattered to Ed. Good investigators who cared. Thorough cops who wanted to catch bad guys. Cops who were prepared to come in on a Sunday at the drop of a hat.

  Sitting at a separate desk and nursing a cup of tea, Sam told Ed what she knew of the latest attack.

  ‘Firstly, I haven’t called anybody else out yet. Let’s see what needs doing. If we need extra staff we can call them later.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ Ed said, pulling his chair a little closer to the desk.

  ‘Right,’ Sam began, tying her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail as she spoke. ‘Today’s victim is Danielle Banks, 25 years old. She lives alone in a one-bedroom flat at 13, Forestry Gardens, Conifers Estate.’

  Ed knew the area and the flats. He had had a school friend who lived close to Forestry Gardens. The flats were built in the early 1980s and were two storeys high. Each flat had its own front door at ground level. The doors opened on to a small hallway or on to a staircase, depending whether you lived on the ground or first floor. The ground floor flats also had a back door giving access to the kitchen. It had been a gated estate when it was built, but the gates had long since been removed and anyone was free to walk around the cluster of flats, which were either owner-occupied or rented from private landlords.

  ‘Danielle’s been released from hospital. She’s been medically examined and is still sedated. As I said, she was heavily traumatised, understandably. At about 4.30am, Danielle woke up the ground-floor neighbours, banging on their windows and shouting for help. They came out to find her hysterical. She was barefoot and naked from the waist down.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Ed said, shaking his head as he raised the mug to his mouth.

  ‘One of the neighbours managed to discover from her that she had been raped. Another got her a blanket. The uniforms and ambulance were called and arrived almost together. A policewoman went to hospital with her in the ambulance. Uniform did a quick, cursory search of the flat just to make sure that no one was inside and then put a cop at the front door to secure and preserve the scene.’

  Ed was nodding with approval. The search was good policing. What would be worse than the offender still on the property and not discovered by the police?

  ‘The Crime Scene Investigators are still at the house,’ Sam went on. ‘They’ve been there since just after 6am.’

  Ed smiled. They all had to get used to calling Scene of Crime Officers ‘Crime Scene Investigators’ nowadays – or CSIs as they liked to be called – not SOCOs. All those American police shows had a lot to answer for.

  ‘Apparently, there’s not a lot of disturbance in the house. We do know the rape happened in the bedroom and that’s been the place for the crime scene guys to get started.

  ‘I’ve told the Detective Sergeant at Seaton to call us if he needs any advice. I’ve also told his management team if we think there’s a link to the other rape, we’ll happily take over this investigation.’

  Ed nodded again. He liked decision makers. He had worked with plenty over the years in the CID, both in the ‘80s in his first stint in the force and in the time since his return. Sam was always willing to ask advice from subordinates but never frightened of being the principal decision maker. He had seen first hand what a good Senior Investigating Officer she was. She had led murder investigations, was comfortable with the media, and was well thought of by her senior and junior officers alike. Her gender wasn’t an issue to him. It may have been to some of his colleagues back in the day but not to Ed. He had worked with female detectives in the ‘80s when they were few and far between and had had no issues with them. He certainly didn’t have any issues now. He could even remember the name of the first female Assistant Chief Constable in the country and the attention that received. Now there were many women at all ranks.

  ‘What arrangements have been made to interview her?’ Ed asked.

  ‘As I said, she’s sedated. Her parents have agreed for us to speak to her this afternoon. She never spoke during the journey in the ambulance and the female officer who was with her didn’t want to ask her questions given the state she was in.’

  Sam told Ed another uniformed officer trained to deal with sexual offences had also gone to the hospital hoping to get some details from Danielle but they were sketchy and both young policewomen had enough about them not to push it.

  ‘What we do know, from what Danielle told the neighbours, is that a masked man raped her in her bedroom after brandishing a knife.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Ed said, visibly tensing and straightening in his chair. ‘Has the file arrived from the previous attack?’

  ‘All there,’ said Sam, pointing at a box full of paperwork on the floor in the corner of the office.

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got then, shall we?’

  Chapter Five

  The knife had been washed and bleached and was back in the rucksack with the bricks and two new pieces of rope. The plastic bag and its forensically incriminating contents were now in a large sports hold-all.

  The Dralon sofa had seen better days. Purchased by his mother when they had moved into this house, it was now 10 years old. Still, it satisfied his needs. He picked up the game controller, sat down, and started playing Grand Theft Auto. Driving the muscle car across the 50’ TV screen, he conjured up an image of his mother. She would never have allowed such a huge TV – and her approval had been required for everything. Not once in his entire life had he brought a friend back to the house. Not once. Not that he had any friends. Not at school. Not now. He did tell her about the bullying when it first started, but she had just laughed at him.

  ‘Just like your father. Bloody useless.’

  He suffered the daily torment at school in quiet acceptance after that. It was mostly name-calling. He wasn’t even deemed worthy of a beating. Sharon Brown had beaten him up once. Beaten up by a girl. God, they’d all loved that.

  When he w
as seven years old, his dad had died of a heart attack. He had been a great father.

  The car crashed on the TV as he recalled weekend walks to the park in the summer and that one, and only, trip to see Newcastle United. The excitement he felt on the train. More people than he had ever seen in one place, a heaving mass of humanity outside St James’ Park. The terraces rammed with people, young and old, singing and shouting in unison. Bovril at half-time. The match-day programme, as pristine now as the day his dad bought it, safely tucked away in his bedroom drawer. That drawer housed all his treasured possessions. Occasionally he would flick through the programme and still smell the meaty drink.

  Dropping the controller on to the , he flopped backwards with closed eyes.

  I’m glad you’re dead, you cow. Fuckin’ bully. Bullied me. Bullied Dad.

  She had wanted to move to the new build. He had liked the old house, the one they shared with dad. It was always about what she wanted. Now it was about him. Before her death four months ago, he found nursing her liberating. Helpless, she relied on him for everything; feeding, washing, toilet visits. He enjoyed the power. She was under his control. Before she fell ill, the only time he had any control over his own life was each Tuesday when she went to bingo.

  ‘Good riddance Mother,’ he said aloud.

  Energised, he jumped up. There was work to do.

  The frost crunched under his black hiking boots. The cold, dull morning had left the estate eerily quiet. Who could blame people for staying indoors in this weather? In the five minutes he had been out he hadn’t seen one other person. He began to imagine what was going on behind the windows he passed: fathers playing with their children; mothers cooking fried breakfasts or preparing the vegetables for a family Sunday lunch.