by Danuta Reah
The man who took her statement was pleasant, polite and not as reassuring as she had hoped. He asked her a lot of questions, some about the appearance of the man, though Debbie could tell him very little, and some questions were the same ones that Tim had asked her, coming back again and again to the broken light. ‘I just don’t know,’ Debbie said in the end. ‘At the time it seemed to come from the station, but I didn’t really think about it until I saw the glass. I just assumed, I suppose.’
‘That’s OK, Miss Sykes. Now just tell me again – you don’t think the man got on your train.’
‘I’m certain he didn’t.’
‘OK, and you’re sure you’ve never seen him before?’
‘I’m not certain, I couldn’t see him well enough, but I didn’t recognize him from what I did see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.’
‘I’d like you to talk to our artist, see if you can put together any kind of picture of this man’ – he waved aside her objections – ‘just a general impression if that’s all you can manage.’ He asked her some questions about the woman on the opposite platform, without either confirming or denying this was the murder victim, and some questions about her own Thursday night routine. He thanked her for coming in, but Debbie was still uneasy. ‘Do you think it was him?’ She wanted him to reassure her that it was nothing, nothing at all.
‘I don’t know, Miss Sykes. Leave it with us. It may not be relevant, but we need this information to find that out. You did the right thing coming in. By the way, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone about this.’
‘I’ve already talked to one or two people – I was worried.’
‘Well, if you could just avoid discussing it from now on …’
At the Saturday briefing, Berryman and his team went over the preliminary results of the postmortem on Julie Fyfe. It was the same as the others. Nothing that pointed directly to the killer, no hair, no fingerprints, no blood, no other fluids, no footprints. ‘Fuck-all,’ Berryman told them. What evidence there may have been had been washed away by the torrential rain. The ground underneath her body was as wet as the surrounding area, which suggested that she’d been dumped after the worst of the storm was over, but she was wet through with rain. She’d been outside for the storm.
What they did have, told them that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man. Death was by strangulation using some kind of smooth fabric, but whatever had been used had moved several times round the woman’s neck. The wire had been used after she was dead. The pathologist thought that the killer may have used partial strangulation as a means to subdue her, before he actually killed her. There was evidence of sexual assault – vaginal and anal bruising and laceration, a lot of internal damage. ‘He’s using a tool other than his tool,’ the pathologist had told Berryman. ‘Something thin and sharp, pointed. She would have bled to death if he hadn’t strangled her.’ The injuries to the eyes were caused by gouging – probably manual. ‘He was wearing gloves. Look for bloodstains on gloves,’ Berryman told his team. The general bruising and laceration was most probably caused by dragging of the – unconscious?, and later dead – woman along the ground. The lack of bruising and bleeding from some of these injuries suggested they were postmortem. There was possible impact injury, as though, after death, she had fallen heavily. Some gravel had been retrieved from the cuts. There was glass on the body. It was Lynne Jordan, the only woman on the team, who asked which of the other injuries were pre- or postmortem. Berryman couldn’t reassure. The sexual assault was carried out while the woman was alive. The other injuries? ‘Around the time of death,’ was all the information the pathologist could give them.
‘Did the glass come from the broken lights at Moreham station?’ That was Lynne again. Berryman shook his head. The glass came from the broken light near where the body had been dumped. There was no guarantee that Julie had gone to Moreham station, though it was probable that she had done so. They still hadn’t been able to trace her beyond the time she left work. Though the team had made extensive enquiries, no one had been found who had been on that route at the relevant time.
‘We’ve got one statement that just came in,’ Berryman said. ‘It relates to the crucial time – shortly after nine-thirty. This woman says that the station was deserted, except for one person, a man, who was behaving a bit oddly. I don’t have to tell you, we need to track him down. I’m still hoping for a car as well. There must have been cars going that way.’ Berryman took a deep breath. ‘OK. Let’s run through everything we’ve got. Let’s see what we’re missing here. He might be a lucky bastard, but he can’t do this and leave us nothing. There’s something we’re missing.’
That evening found Mick Berryman still at his desk. He’d been woken up at four the previous morning by the call from the station reporting Cath Hill’s find. He probably wasn’t going to see his kids today, nor his wife, for that matter. His family was on the back burner until this enquiry was over – if it ever was. He was going over some of the earlier statements, and was looking at the information that had come in from that teacher this morning. Could be nothing, or it could be something very important. It could be their first sighting of the killer. If only they could establish where Julie had been when she was taken. They’d searched the station at Moreham, but there was nothing much to see. Unless forensics came through with something. They needed to track her movements. He began to make notes.
She’d left work at nine-twenty, as usual for a Thursday. That had been easy to establish. She’d almost certainly walked to the station, despite the bad weather. It only took five minutes. She hadn’t called a taxi and there wasn’t a bus. Could she have accepted a lift? The people who worked with her were pretty certain: not Julie, she was far too careful, only with someone she knew. (And how often was it someone they knew, someone they trusted?) It was no distance to the station, anyway, she’d almost definitely gone there. But her train had been cancelled. She would probably have seen that on the screen as she arrived, but it had also been displayed on the platform screen. Could she have caught an earlier train? No, the earlier one had left over half an hour before, at eight-thirty-three, and yes, it had been running on time. So what had she done? Had she decided to wait for the next train? That seemed unlikely as it was over forty minutes before the next train was due. She would surely have gone for a bus or a taxi. Was she so broke she couldn’t afford to? Or so tight-fisted? He made some notes and thought on.
She hadn’t been at the station at nine-forty, according to the statement Deborah Sykes had given. So – leaves work at nine-twenty, at the station by, what, between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty. By nine-forty, she had gone. He reached for Deborah Sykes’s statement again. Who’d taken it? McCarthy. Everything should be there. Right. No one had come out of the station as the Sykes woman had come in. She hadn’t passed anyone on her way to the station. If Julie had left the station as soon as she saw the first display screen, she would almost certainly not have been on the road by the time Deborah Sykes came past. If she’d gone down to the platform before seeing her train was cancelled, then Deborah should have seen her walking back. He needed some more timings. He needed to know how long she’d been in that station.
Lynne Jordan was on the train to Sheffield. She’d taken to using the train when time permitted. Like most of her colleagues, she knew the roads of the area so well she could drive them with her eyes shut, predict the level of traffic for any time of day, say which roads the joy-riders were likely to choose to career their purloined cars around, tyres screeching as they performed their antics. But she didn’t know the trains. When the team pored over the maps, when they looked at the places the victims had been found, she saw pieces of landscape, not a seamless whole.
Today, she had made a mistake. She was spending an evening in Sheffield, and it had seemed a golden opportunity. But of course, by the time she got on the train, it was dark. It was after eight-thirty, and the line outside the carriage window was invisible.
She contented herself with getting a feel for her fellow travellers. There was a young man behind her, whose Walkman leaked a penetrating metallic beat. Somewhere further back in the carriage, there was someone with a loud and persistent sniff. A group of youths had piled on to the train at Meadowhall, shouting and nudging each other, sprawling over the seats, shoving their heavy trainers on to the upholstery. They brought the distinctive smell of young male into the carriage with them.
Lynne tried to see out of the window. The interior of the carriage reflected darkly back. She could see the empty crisp packet that lay on her table, the pool of liquid spilled from a soft drink container. She held her hands up to shadow her eyes. She could see light glinting off the tracks. She put her face closer to the window, then recoiled as something flashed past so close it seemed about to hit her.
They were passing a train. It wasn’t another passenger train – it seemed to consist of low, flat trucks with piles of long thin objects strapped to them. Her train slowed briefly, and she realized the other train was stationary, or moving very slowly. She saw the lights and tunnel ahead that meant they were nearly into Sheffield. The train came to a standstill. The freight train crawled past. She sighed and looked at her watch. She was going to be late.
Debbie came home from the police station as worried as she had been before she went, maybe a bit more worried. Talking to the police made it seem more real, that maybe she had seen the killer. Going out and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea.
So that night she went clubbing. She called Fiona, a university friend who was trying to make a career as a jazz musician and singer, but Fiona had a gig that night. ‘Try Brian,’ she suggested, naming the third member of their trio from student days. Brian was free, and so were some of the others, so Debbie enlisted them for a night out. She drank too much, danced a lot, drunkenly snogged Brian in the dark shadows of the club, and then later even more drunkenly snogged a beautiful stranger who appeared and then disappeared through the gaps in her memory. Her friends took her home and steered her through the front door. She must have got herself to bed, because she was there, alone, when she woke up the next morning with her head throbbing, her stomach heaving and her shoes still on. And nothing was any better.
The music is loud and invasive, and he purses his lips with judicious annoyance, then closes his window. He likes to keep the window open because there is a slightly sweet, sickly smell in the room that, he must admit, he finds a bit unpleasant. He can still hear the music, though not so loudly. The young man in the basement flat downstairs has no consideration for others. He really doesn’t approve of that. He decided that morning to let himself have the day off, but already he’s getting a bit restless. He’s the sort of person who likes to be doing things. He wonders if he deserves an hour with his trains – he has been working very hard, after all. Yes.
He pulls down the loft ladder, the loft being the feature that made the house so attractive to him when he looked at it. It was worth all the noise and disturbance he had to put up with by letting rooms. And after all, it wasn’t the worst kind of noise and disturbance. No one paid any attention to him. Everyone left everyone else alone. That was the way he’d been brought up by his mother, to approve of things like that. Live and let live.
The loft is truly magnificent. The roof is high above his head. The floor joists have been boarded over so that he can walk around without fear of putting his foot through the ceiling of his room below. He wired it himself so that he has all the power he needs, but no heating. He doesn’t need heating up here. But there is a small freezer in one corner, and a computer in another. He has all the facilities he needs. What is even better is its size. It stretches over the whole roof area of the house, and, as he found out one day, has access to the roof space of the house next door. The house next door is the first one of a block of three terraces, each one just like his, that have been converted into flats. It is a very simple matter to crawl through, and then climb out on to the fire escape at the back. No one notices one more person using those stairs that serve for every flat in the block.
He turns on the light that hangs from the roof joist – just a bare bulb, no need for anything fancy – and looks with some pleasure at his railway. He’s tried to make it as realistic as possible, to include the other landscape features, the hills, the river, the canal way. When he planned it, he decided to use n-gauge track so that the layout didn’t become too big – even so, it’s a close thing. He gets his map out. Even though it isn’t a working day, there’s no harm, surely, in just looking. After all, he needs to start planning another hunt.
4
The story appeared in the local paper that Monday: ‘I SAW THE FACE OF THE STRANGLER’ the headline declaimed, above a photograph of Debbie. The article, which was on the third page, was part of a big spread about the murders the paper ran that day. Details of the victims were given again, some quotes from the bereaved relatives and comment from the police. An editorial chided the investigation team – more in sorrow than in anger, it was true. Everyone knows the difficulties of the task these men and women face, and the Standard does not underestimate these. But the women of South Yorkshire are entitled to travel freely without fear … The article about Debbie began: Teacher Debra Sykes, 26, had a chilling encounter the night the Strangler struck. The attractive brunette told our reporter, ‘I just knew there was something wrong. There was something terribly wrong at the station that night.’ The article went on to give the basic details of Debbie’s story, including the broken lights, and the way the man had apparently tried to approach her. The police were quoted as saying that they were aware of the story but had no reason at present to think that Ms Sykes’s experience had anything to do with the killing. The quote rather implied that Debbie was a bit of an attention seeker. There was also an appeal for the man at the station to come forward ‘so that we can eliminate him from our enquiries.’ The article had a by-line: Tim Godber.
The first that Debbie heard about the article was Monday morning, when she was teaching her second-year A-level group again. Leanne Ferris, unusually prompt, dumped her bag on her desk, opened a can of Coke and said, ‘We want to hear about the murderer. Go on, tell us.’ Debbie looked blank. Leanne dived into her bag, and after a few seconds rummaging, pulled out a copy of the paper. ‘They’re doing a big thing about the Strangler, so I got it. Look.’ She showed Debbie the article, and the others crowded round.
‘It’s a good picture, Debbie.’ That was Sarah, with her usual capacity for focusing first on the least important issue. Or maybe to Sarah that was the most important – to look nice if she appeared in the local paper. Debbie recognized the photograph. It had been taken at the staff party in July. In the original, she and Tim had been together. This one was cropped, so she was alone, smiling up at someone who wasn’t there. She didn’t know if she was more angry or upset. She played down both the article and her reaction to it for the students, much to their disappointment.
‘Did he look really scary, you know, mad?’ Leanne’s eyes were bright with eager curiosity.
‘Look,’ Debbie began, firmly. ‘No one even knows …’
‘Did you see the body?’ That was Adam, aficionado of video nasties.
‘No one knows …’ Debbie tried again.
‘Were you scared?’ That was Sarah.
‘Listen.’ Debbie’s voice was louder than she’d intended. She got a moment’s silence. ‘Listen. There’s no reason to think that the person I saw was the killer. No one knows. I just talked to the police and I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
‘Didn’t he chase you then? With a knife?’ That was Leanne again.
‘Oh, come on, Leanne, it doesn’t even say that there. Now I’d just like to …’
‘He cuts their eyes out,’ Leanne said with relish to the rest of the group.
Adam chipped in. ‘He doesn’t use a knife. Not at first. He strangles them.’
‘Oh, trust you to know that!’ That was Rachel, m
ore level-headed than Leanne, quieter. ‘Look, Debbie says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Let’s drop it. Have you marked our essays, Debbie? Did I get an A?’
The session dragged on from there.
Debbie was angry, and she was worried. She left the classroom quickly when the morning was over, ignoring requests from the cohort of poor attenders, including Leanne and Adam, that she go over the new assignment again. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got time,’ she said, and then felt guilty. In the staff room, in response to Louise’s interrogative look, she said, ‘I didn’t talk to them.’
‘I thought you didn’t,’ was all Louise said.
The rest of the day she seemed to be saying over and over – I didn’t see the Strangler, I didn’t talk to the paper, I don’t want to talk about it now. She got a memo from one of the vice-principals asking her why she had given an interview to a local paper without clearing it with the college management, and wasted her coffee break trying to make contact with someone to explain – not that they’d believe her. She looked out for Rob Neave, so that she could explain to him what had happened – she wasn’t sure why she felt that was important, only that it seemed to be – but he was nowhere around. ‘He’s working off site today,’ Andrea, the clerical officer for that section, told her when she asked. She didn’t see Tim Godber until she was leaving at five. He was unapologetic.
