by Jack Benton
Slim bought a coffee from a machine, then headed for a study area where he could use a computer with an internet connection. After a few minutes of searching, he uncovered the names of a couple of journalists who had covered the case. Further investigation came up with an obituary for one, but remarkably, the other was still active and working at a local publication called The Peak District Chronicle as sub-editor.
The Chronicle’s offices were a few miles east in Jennifer’s hometown of Wentwood. Slim wrote down the address and then caught a little Peak District hopper bus from a stop outside the library.
The journey took less than half an hour. Slim, one of only three passengers—the other two an elderly lady and a teenage boy holding a skateboard across his knees—leaned against the window and stared out at the picturesque countryside as they bumped along country lanes, through rolling hills and open moorland, past pretty lakes and forested valleys. While it was certainly beautiful in a windswept, rugged way, Slim’s detective mind couldn’t think past it being a great place to hide a body.
Wentwood was of a similar size to Holdergate but a little more modern. Its high street had more cosmopolitan shops than its eastern neighbour, but there were some pretty buildings around the quiet town square where Slim got off the bus. A clock high on the wall of a bank read just after three o’clock as he made his way up to the Chronicle’s offices. He had thought about calling ahead but wanted to have a better look around the local area, and he had also found that people were more likely to talk to him when you showed up in person. A phone call was far easier to refuse.
A receptionist took his request and headed off into a back room. Slim stared at pictures on the walls—a collection of nature-themed covers of the magazine, all depicting pretty landscapes of rolling hills. The subheadings on the covers were things like Best Peak District Rivers for Swimming, The lost farming practices of the Iron Age, and Composting In 10 Easy Steps. It looked like a peaceful line of work, one far removed from the supposedly crime-riddled wasteland of the surrounding industrial heartlands of Manchester and Sheffield.
‘Mr. Hardy?’
Slim looked up at a grey-haired man in overlarge spectacles leaning through the doorway. He had a kindly face and wore a slightly tatty tweed jacket with a turned-up collar which made him look like he had just come in from a garden. His cheeks were rosy, his hair ruffled. He resembled a vet or a market gardener; it was hard to imagine him as a young twenty-something reporter covering a mysterious disappearance.
‘Yes? Are you Mark Buckle? Thank you for your time. Please call me Slim.’
He felt awkward as he handed Buckle a business card with his name and contact details on one side and PRIVATE DETECTIVE written on the other. Kim had insisted he needed one, printing them off the computer on large sheets so they still had perforations along the sides. So far he had only given out three: two at the TV company and one to a police officer in the park across the street from his current flat in order to prove he wasn’t homeless after the P.C. asked him to move on.
‘I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a lady by the name of Jennifer Evans, way back in 1977. I was researching the case and came across a newspaper article you wrote. I know it was a long time ago, but I’d love to talk to you about it.’
Buckle frowned. ‘Wow. Well, that was a long time ago. I’ve got to finish a few things up, but if you’d like to get a coffee after?’
Slim nodded. ‘Sure.’
Buckle told him of a place where they could meet. Slim didn’t feel like sitting alone, so he wandered up and down Wentwood’s high street. A handful of cramped but modern chain stores rubbed shoulders with souvenir shops and local cafes. Slim peered in the doors of a tiny single-screen cinema, saw the film they were showing had been out six months already, and found himself smiling. If you were planning to disappear, it was a good place to do it.
Mark Buckle was waiting at a table inside the window when he returned to the cafe.
‘I thought you’d stood me up,’ he said, standing up to shake Slim’s hand. ‘I quite often stop by here on the way home anyway, so I got in a doughnut.’
Unsure if Buckle was making a joke or not, Slim gave a noncommittal chuckle and sat down.
‘I must apologise for the abruptness of my visit,’ Slim said.
‘Not at all. We’re not exactly run off our feet over at the Chronicle.’ He pushed the glasses up his nose as he gazed off into space, remembering old adventures, perhaps. ‘So, it’s Jennifer Evans you want to know about, is it?’
‘Anything you remember. I was contacted by her daughter, Elena Trent. She wondered if I might be able to uncover what happened to her mother.’
‘After all these years?’
Slim felt his cheeks redden. ‘Mrs. Trent saw me on a, um, TV show. Contacted me on a whim, I think.’
‘You’re one of those TV detectives, are you?’ Buckle said with a smile. ‘Taking on impossible cases?’
‘It’s not like that,’ Slim said. ‘My last case was a little high profile, that’s all.’
‘Well, I’m not sure how much I can help you,’ Buckle said. ‘I do remember the case, though. I was a junior on my first contract and it was quite exciting to be asked to write about it. I’d never gone on location, interviewed witnesses, anything like that. For a time it felt like an adventure.’
‘For a time?’
Buckle sighed. ‘I lost my taste for it fairly quickly,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean journalism, I mean crime reporting. In 1980 I got a chance to transfer to the rural affairs department and I’ve never looked back.’
‘And the Evans case turned you?’
Buckle laughed. ‘Oh, that was nothing. No, a year later I had to cover the Strangler. I was done after that.’
5
Jeremy Bettelman. The Peak District Strangler. Sentenced in March 1979 for the murders of four women whose bodies were found in the Peak District between January and April of 1978. Slim found himself in the kind of discussion he’d hoped to avoid by taking this case, about women found in ditches and shallow graves, strangled so violently that two of the four had had their necks broken. Bettelman had maintained his innocence throughout the trial, despite overwhelming evidence against him. Still maintaining his innocence, he had taken his own life in his prison cell in January 1984, taking whatever secrets he had to his grave.
Slim listened, wishing he had something harder to drink than coffee, as Buckle recounted the events of the long, terrible summer of 1978 from the point of view of a young journalist charged with covering an investigation for which he was far from qualified. Bettelman, arrested in June for one murder, had pleaded not guilty, even as first a second, then a third and fourth body were discovered over the next three months. Even as the trial began in August, Bettelman refused to cooperate and maintained his innocence, the struggle for clear and damning evidence eventually dragging the trial out for more than six months. The whole region could barely look away during the trial, partly because of the chance he might be acquitted, and partly because of the fear that he was telling the truth and that the real strangler still stalked the streets.
‘There was, of course, suspicion that Jennifer had been taken by the Strangler, but she fitted none of the victim profiles of the others. His victims had all been taken in the Greater Manchester area, had all been young prostitutes, killed locally and then dumped in the Peak District as though he was attempting to throw the police off the scent.’
He had eventually been picked up after his car had been recognised by a girl working the street. On searching the vehicle, police found fibres matching the clothing worn by three of the girls at the time of their deaths. He had been convicted of the fourth based on a boot print found in mud along a path a few metres from where the victim’s body had been found.
Bettelman’s defence had argued that the fabric could be explained by their client’s regular use of working girls—something he never denied—and the boot print by the fact that he was also
a keen hiker around the Peak District in his spare time.
In the end, his stated alibis had failed to add up and the jury had been unconvinced. That there had been no such similar murders in the area in the four decades since suggested that the law had got its man, even though families of the victims hoping for a post-conviction confession had been left disappointed.
Buckle gave the kind of strained account of a man haunted daily by what he had reported on, but remembered the events in vivid detail. Of the Evans case, unfortunately, he was less clear.
‘It was one of those things I thought more on in retrospect,’ he said. ‘I was at the police press conference a couple of days after Jennifer’s disappearance, and I did a little asking around of my own, as an eager young journalist was wont to do. There was really nothing concrete to go on. She never arrived home. Her bag was found lying alongside the old bridleway which followed the line between Holdergate and Wentwood. It wasn’t found until the snow melted a few days later, so it was assumed to have been dropped on the night she went missing.’
‘Wasn’t there a witness?’
‘Yes, that emerged a couple of weeks later. Someone had taken a photograph of tracks in the snow and apparently witnessed Jennifer running off in a supposedly panicked state.’
Slim nodded. ‘There was no mention of a name in any of the reports I found. If I could speak to the witness directly, it would be a huge help.’
Buckle shrugged. ‘I imagine you’ll have to track down the official police report for that. The name was never given out to journalists because the witness was allegedly a minor, a young boy, only six or seven years old. The camera was an old Polaroid, given to him as a birthday present. He apparently spotted a missing persons picture in a supermarket window a few days later, told his parents, and they in turn told the police. Any statement he gave would have been in the presence of his parents. Plus, considering his age, his reliability as a genuine witness was always in question, therefore little was read into it. Trusting the imaginative mind of a child was likely to lead the police off on a wild goose chase. Sure, they had the photograph, but here’s where the word “allegedly” takes centre stage. There’s no absolute proof the boy saw Jennifer running away. There’s no absolute proof he saw anyone at all.’
6
Mark Buckle left contact details, telling Slim to get back in touch if there was anything further he could do, but Slim felt like he had exhausted a good lead already.
Despite the lack of any decent connection, the Peak District Strangler was worth a read-up, so the next morning Slim woke early and headed for Holdergate’s public library. He printed off a couple of web profiles and also checked out a couple of true crime books, even though he was sceptical of the sensationalist angle they usually took. Retiring to a study section, he looked over what material he had.
Born in 1947, Jeremy Bettelman had been a delivery driver for a local Manchester bathroom fittings firm. The nature of his job often required trips to Sheffield, which had come up in the trial as circumstantial evidence, giving him an opportunity to dispose of the bodies. Handed into the care of social services at a young age, he had shown many of the common traits shown by other serial killers: cruelty to animals, trouble with the law during his teenage years, violence and suspected abuse during his years in care, alcohol problems, a preference for being solitary. After serving two years for mugging two elderly women a month apart, it had seemed he had turned over a new leaf. He had trained in prison as an installer and gotten a job as a delivery driver as part of a new government rehabilitation program.
For six years, until being picked up and convicted as the Peak District Strangler, his record had been unblemished.
There were some who still believed him wrongly convicted, and that the real Peak District Strangler has been spooked by Bettelman’s arrest and either gone to ground or relocated to continue his killing spree elsewhere, perhaps in a major metropolis like Birmingham or London where the deaths of a few women were more likely to pass unnoticed.
It was a can of worms Slim wasn’t ready to open, but as Jennifer’s disappearance had predated the murders by a full year, there was a strong possibility her abduction could have been a serial killer’s prologue, a trial run, an attempt to understand himself, his desires, and his capabilities, before he settled into a routine which suited him best.
His eyes sore from a morning spent staring at various forms of text, Slim took his loaned books and headed out into the warm sunshine. A river threaded through the centre of Holdergate with part of the riverside turned into an attractive park. At one end, the railway line appeared through trees before cutting away to the station. Slim looked up at a hazy sun and wondered again how the most pleasant places could hold the darkest secrets.
He sat on a bench to have a sandwich and a coffee, pondering what ought to be his next move. He could follow up the possibility of Jennifer being an early victim of the Peak District Strangler, or he could consider other options.
No trace of her had ever been found, so the official line—that she had run off—might be the correct one. People did it all the time. Sometimes it was for the sake of a lover, or to escape an abusive spouse. Other times it was financial, escaping from bad business decisions, prosecution, creditors both legitimate and street. Then there were those who suffered from mental health issues, who might run away to escape demons only they could see, or even be unaware they had run away.
Then there were those who might quite literally have fallen down a hole.
Slim unfolded a map of the local area across his knees. The urbanised area had changed a lot, but the railway line and much of its surrounds remained unchanged.
Heading east from Holdergate to Wentwood, it made a gradual northward arc, curving around a small hillock called Parnell’s Hill. Wentwood spread out around its northern edge, and Slim had marked with an X the location of the Evans’ home, at the end of a long, straight street leading north from the station.
Officially, the distance from Holdergate to Wentwood was 3.2 miles along the bridleway that ran alongside, station to station. The Evans’ house was another half a mile from the station, but Jennifer could have saved that by going off-road, cutting around the eastern edge of Parnell’s Hill.
Crisscrossed by hiking trails according to the map, in the snow they might have been hard to follow, and in any case there was a far greater hazard than simply getting lost.
Parnell’s Hill was quarry country.
7
Wind unnoticeable in the town had made itself far more apparent as Slim stood at the top of Parnell’s Hill, gasping for breath from a strenuous climb to the lookout point. Figuring that a six-mile round trip was still a single digit number and therefore easily manageable during a warm afternoon, he had already decided to cut his losses and get the evening train back from Wentwood, the town’s outer urban areas spread around the foot of the hill.
From here, as well as a panoramic visual feast of the Peak District, he could see the exact route Jennifer might have taken, following a signposted hiking trail that intersected with the bridleway and curved around Parnell’s Hill’s base.
He had taken that route himself, turning off halfway to climb to the summit. A pleasant, grassy trail had become a strenuous climb, but even on the lower path the danger was apparent. Winding amongst the remains of quarrying operations now reclaimed by local vegetation, there were dozens of rocky slopes, gullies, and crags.
Fun climbing for adventurous teenagers it might be, but what about a final resting place for a woman who had tried to walk home in the snow and taken a wrong step at the precise wrong point?
Pausing on a bench to catch his breath, Slim pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and read the information he’d printed off from a historical weather records website. The snow on the day of Jennifer’s disappearance had been forecast but come on heavier than expected. While it was likely, as a local person familiar with the area’s weather, that Jennifer had been prepared for such weath
er conditions, she may have been keen to get home as quickly as possible. She might have been moving quickly, running even, increasing the risk of a deadly fall.
Slim climbed back down to the main path and spent some time peering into the gullies and cracks alongside the path. Some were marked only by a knee-high rope fence, one that would have been easy to miss in the estimated twenty centimetres of snow that had fallen that night.
A couple of times Slim even clambered carefully down over rocks the size of cars to reach grassy hollows hidden from the path, peering into shadowy spaces, pulling back shrubs and brambles in the search for cavities large enough to hold a body.
It wasn’t that he hoped to find something, but he was examining the possibility that a body could have remained undiscovered.
According to the news reports, a series of searches for Jennifer had been undertaken over the follow days. Even though they had found nothing except her bag, several major searches of the countryside, often involving hundreds of volunteers, had been undertaken while the Strangler was active. Two of the bodies had been found buried in shallow graves a couple of hundred metres from a major road.
Slim frowned and shook his head. It wasn’t impossible that Jennifer’s body had fallen somewhere and lain undiscovered for over forty years, but with no animal capable of dragging off a human corpse, it was highly unlikely.
Slim stood up and stared off into the distance. The tumbling slope flattened out, becoming an earthy chaos of slag heaps buried in bracken and brambles before the moorland took over once again.
Of course, she might have fallen but not died. She could have dragged herself through the snow, disorientated, her strength giving out far from the path.
Again, he shook his head. He couldn’t rule it out, but there were definitely other possibilities which were far more likely.