Only Darkness

by Danuta Reah

  He dialled Berryman’s number, but he was in a meeting. He left a message for Berryman to phone, then paced the room restlessly trying to decide what to do. He went to the phone again, and this time dialled Lynne Jordan’s number – her mobile. When she answered he could hear traffic noise. She was out somewhere. ‘Lynne,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Hi, how are you? You’ve caught me bang outside the bus station, I can’t hear a thing.’ She sounded cheerful enough.

  ‘Listen, Lynne, have you got some time? Can you meet me? In about an hour?’

  There was a pause while she thought. ‘Make it a bit later. I’m off at three – well, I’m not but I’m checking some stuff in the library, so I expect I can give you a few minutes.’

  They arranged to meet in the coffee bar of the library building. Neave checked the time – half past one. He felt edgy and impatient. He made himself a bacon sandwich and ate it pacing up and down waiting for Berryman to get back to him. When there was no call by two-thirty, he remembered that Berryman had the number of his mobile, and went out to meet Lynne.

  The coffee bar was one of those with plastic-stacking chairs and a pervasive smell of steam and stale cloths. He was unenthusiastically stirring sugar into a cup of pale-beige coffee when Lynne came through the door, her short brown hair sparkling with rain drops and her face flushed with the cold. She waved and went to the counter to get a drink. Wiser than Neave, she came back with a Coke. She looked at his cup. ‘Christ, Neave, what died in there?’ He was pleased to see her and didn’t try to keep the smile off his face. She grinned back at him. ‘So. What’s the hurry? What’s on fire?’

  He felt anxiety press down on him again, and he rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Nothing, I hope. Listen, this Sarah Peterson killing …’ He saw her frown, but he quickly ran through his conversation with Berryman, and the fact that Berryman had agreed to have her interviewed about the Thursday break-in. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, Lynne. Does he know it’s the same girl?’

  Lynne looked at him. ‘I know about the Thursday thing. Berryman sent me round to talk to the Sykes woman about it.’ She paused, thinking. ‘As far as I know, no one talked to the Peterson girl. Berryman knows who she is. But it doesn’t get us any further.’

  ‘Someone killed her.’

  ‘Yes. And we were on the blocks waiting to go as soon as we heard. But it didn’t look right, and the postmortem confirmed it. It wasn’t a strangler killing. Or it wasn’t the Strangler. It looks as though it was the boyfriend. She went out of the pub to meet him, in a hurry because he’d got locked out. They’d had a row a week or two before – her friends talked about it. She was always turning up at college with bruises, black eyes, things like that.’ She gestured her distaste.

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘I agree. It would put him in the frame, but that’s all. The thing is, he was there, that’s the point. He came hammering on the pub door, got a flea in his ear from the landlord and went off after her breathing fire. Then he lied about it when they picked him up. There doesn’t seem much doubt.’

  ‘Is that definite? Are they going to charge him?’

  Lynne wasn’t sure. ‘They will, when they can. They’re still questioning him – he’s cooperating.’

  ‘If they’re so bloody sure, why hasn’t he been charged?’ Neave was insistent.

  ‘Christ, Neave, I don’t know. It’s not my case.’

  ‘Forensics?’

  ‘Not much, I heard. Can’t be, or they would have charged him. It’s early days. They won’t have that information yet.’ Lynne sipped her Coke and pulled a face. Neave changed tack.

  ‘So what did Deborah say?’

  Lynne gave him the gist of Debbie’s account. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to have been down there, anyone who was looking for her. And there’s no sign of anything else. We’ve warned her, Neave, she knows she’s got to be careful. At the moment, I don’t see what else we can do.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, the Peterson girl getting killed.’

  Lynne let her irritation show. ‘I agree it’s a coincidence. We’re keeping an eye on it, I told you. I don’t like coincidences. What else do you want us to do?’

  The comeback was quick. ‘More than you’re doing at the moment!’

  Lynne knew when to go in hard. It was one of the qualities that made her a good officer. ‘Everyone walks on egg shells with you, Neave. They think you can’t cope with things because of what happened to Angie and the baby. You’re panicking because you got involved with this woman, so you think she’s going to die. You think she’s going to be murdered. And Berryman listens to you because you used to be a good copper. Used to be. Now you’re getting in the way.’ That made him more angry, she could see that. He’d gone white and his face looked tense. She hadn’t particularly wanted to upset him, but it had to be said, and no one but her had the balls to say it. She looked away and lifted her glass to her mouth.

  For a moment she thought he was going to walk out. She was aware of him making a conscious effort to calm down. ‘OK. Sorry. You’re right. Only – I think there is something going on. Look, I’ll be getting off. You’ve got work to do.’ But his tone didn’t mean sorry at all. She didn’t think he was going to forgive her for that one.

  When Lynne arrived back at the incident room, Steve McCarthy was at his desk going through a pile of statements. ‘Anything interesting?’ she said. Her encounter with Neave had left her feeling depressed, and she wanted some distraction.

  He didn’t look at her. ‘Statements from passengers on Kate Claremont’s train. I’m trying to answer that question.’ When she didn’t respond, he glanced across. ‘Where did Kate get off the train?’ he reminded her.

  Lynne looked over his shoulder. ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Look, we’ve been assuming that she got off at Doncaster, right?’ Lynne nodded. ‘We’ve got her friends’ statement that says she often did that. But look at these.’ He pushed some sheets of paper towards Lynne. ‘Those are all people who mention seeing Kate on the train. We know she got on at Hull. Her friends saw the train off. Several people say they saw her, anyway. This guy’ – he waved a statement at Lynne – ‘saw her when he got on at Ferriby. Someone here gets on at Goole. He saw her. This woman got out at Thorne North. She said she had to lift her bag down over a woman who was asleep. That was Kate – same seat, same description. That’s it. No one saw her after that.’

  Lynne looked at the map. ‘Well, the next station is Doncaster, so that would fit.’

  ‘No,’ McCarthy said. ‘It was a slow train. It would have stopped at Kirk Sandall. Look.’

  ‘Why would she get out there?’ Lynne looked at the station on the edge of the – what? Village? Small town? It looked like a nondescript place. Why would someone like Kate get off the train at Kirk Sandall. ‘Suppose she did? Where does that get us?’

  ‘It solves the Doncaster problem. He doesn’t take them from busy stations.’

  ‘OK, but it’s still guesswork. There’s nothing that tells me she did anything different from normal.’

  ‘Something did happen, though. There was a delay.’ He looked at Lynne to see if she was with him. She listened, without saying anything. ‘I checked with the conductor’s statement. He says there was a short delay – couple of minutes – because one of the doors got stuck – it wouldn’t shut. We know something odd happened on that journey, and that’s the only thing I’ve been able to find. I’m going back through the statements to see if there’s anything else happened there. Something that made Kate get off the train.’

  Lynne was hooked. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’ He nodded, and passed across a pile of papers. They settled down to read.

  Lynne was trying to concentrate on yet another account of the journey from Hull to Sheffield – this one from a Thorne to Doncaster traveller – when McCarthy’s voice interrupted her. She picked up the suppressed excitement in his tone. ‘Lynne!’ She swive
lled her chair round, still holding the statement she was reading in her hand. ‘Listen to this.’ He began reading. ‘“When we stopped at Sandall I thought they called Doncaster and I got off, but it wasn’t so I got on again.” That guy was sitting in the seat in front of Kate’s.’ He looked at Lynne.

  ‘Kate thought it was Doncaster? Someone tricked her? How?’

  McCarthy leant towards her. ‘Think about it, Lynne. Kate’s next to the door. She always grabbed a seat by the door, her friends said. An airline seat, by the door, next to the aisle, her bags on the window seat. She’d have a sleep and jump out at Doncaster to get a drink and a paper.’

  ‘And he knew that …’ Lynne thought. ‘Someone calls “Doncaster”, she wakes up and it’s dark … Could he be sure she’d fall for it?’

  ‘I’d say it was a good bet. She had to move quickly to get off and on again in five minutes at Doncaster. She was probably tuned for waking up then, and hearing the word must have jolted her out of sleep. She was probably on automatic pilot.’

  Lynne went over to the map and looked at the pins marking the places where the bodies had been found, and the places where the women were last seen. If McCarthy was right, it would be the only pick-up beyond Doncaster. She looked at Kirk Sandall, and she looked at the small lake east of Balby Carr where Kate had been found. Then her eyes went back to the map again. ‘Steve!’ she said. ‘Look at this!’

  Now Neave wasn’t sure. He was angry with her, but trusted Lynne’s judgement – more in some ways than he trusted Berryman’s. He was basing all his suspicions on very little. He wasn’t sure what to do next, and that feeling of uncertainty was something he wasn’t used to. He could go and talk to Debbie, find out exactly what was going on from her perspective. But Lynne had done that, and said that nothing was going on. He was reluctant to seek Debbie out. It would open things up that he hoped were closed. He planned to keep out of her way as far as possible when term started, but if he did need to talk to her, it would be better in the college.

  He went into work after he left Lynne. He needed something to distract him. The college was very quiet. The caretaking staff were in, but the students and teaching staff wouldn’t be back until after the New Year. The quiet, the silent corridors and classrooms suited his mood. He walked the college, checking it over, getting a feel for it. The North building, which housed most of the administrative staff, was the busiest. He stopped and talked to the receptionist for a while, fielded questions about his Christmas and found out what had been happening in his absence. She talked a bit about the dead student, but in a detached way. She hadn’t known the girl. ‘It brings it close to home, though, doesn’t it?’ she said. Neave nodded agreement, though in fact he didn’t think it did come close to home. When it came close to home …

  The Moore building was like a graveyard. He met no one on his walk, and the small office that served as a reception area was locked and empty. He wondered why the building was even open and made a note to check if it should be kept locked until the teaching staff were back.

  The long, high-ceilinged corridors of the Broome building reminded him of Debbie. He could see her walking briskly through the imposing gloom, laughing with the students, telling ghost stories with wide-eyed conviction. He’d come across her with one of her classes, and had listened from a discreet distance as she told a story – some nonsense about mysterious figures walking into locked rooms – to a fascinated and silent group. She’d make an excellent con-artist. He remembered her white-faced terror locked on the long staircase. He stopped his mind there, but went on up to the IT suite to look at the staircase again.

  He was surprised to find the receptionist at her desk, working at her VDU. She looked up when he came in, apparently as surprised as he was. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

  ‘Hello’ – he did a quick mental trawl and came up with her name – ‘Sheila. I didn’t expect to find anyone here.’

  ‘If I don’t get this paperwork done when it’s quiet, I don’t get it done at all,’ she explained. ‘Did you want to work in here? I’m not going to disturb you, am I?’

  ‘No, not at all. You might be able to help me with something. Can you show me the attendance log for the twelfth of December, the evening? I want the last hour and a half.’ He’d already seen the log, but he wanted to look at it again. ‘Were you on duty that night?’

  Sheila shook her head, then said, ‘Hang on, yes, I was. I did that night because someone was off ill.’

  ‘I know it’s some time ago, but you notice things, Sheila. Tell me what you can remember about the people who were in here on that Thursday.’ He showed her the attendance sheet and she went through the details of the students she could remember, but she didn’t know a lot of the evening attendees.

  She ran her finger down the list, trying to remember each student. ‘He just came in to leave some work … I don’t remember him … she had an appointment with David Matthews … then this girl, Sarah, she was here till the end. That’s about it, I think.’ The name didn’t seem to register with her.

  ‘Did anyone come in late, towards the end?’

  She frowned, thinking, then her face brightened as she remembered. ‘Debbie Sykes brought some students in about eight, eight-fifteen. They went through the fire door – they weren’t using the machines.’

  ‘Anyone after Deborah?’ That memory of Debbie was good, it would help Sheila to pinpoint the evening in her mind. She shook her head. No one after Debbie. He talked her through the system for using the room, booking people in and out, keeping an eye on who had access to the equipment. It was a vanilla system, but it seemed to work. ‘You don’t book me in when I come in,’ he said. ‘Is that policy?’

  ‘Oh, we don’t book in the staff. Well, the teaching staff we do, but the technicians and the caretakers are in and out all the time. We don’t book them in.’

  He had to be careful now, make sure she gave him an accurate answer. ‘Can you remember if anyone like that came in on that Thursday? Say, after Deborah Sykes brought her students in?’

  She thought again. ‘I wouldn’t really notice, if they didn’t stop to talk. I think one of the caretakers might have come in.’ She closed her eyes, trying to picture it. ‘I really can’t remember,’ she said, shaking her head apologetically.

  ‘Thanks, Sheila, that’s helpful. Let me know if you remember anything else.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Is there a problem? I mean, was there a problem?’

  No point in alarming anyone. ‘No, I’m just taking a look at some of these rooms. I don’t think it’s a good idea that you’re alone in here of an evening, for one thing.’

  She nodded and leant across the desk confidentially. She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t usually work evenings, but Elaine says they used to get all sorts coming in at one time. It’s been better since they’ve closed off some of the entrances. But it isn’t very nice. You’ve got no back-up if there’s trouble.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he promised. ‘I’m just going to have a look at the fire escape, OK?’ She gave him a quick smile and turned back to her screen.

  The long staircase looked as though no one had opened the door since he’d been through it before Christmas. The broken light fitting still dangled unrepaired. He wondered if Berryman had kept his promise about getting the light fitting checked. Neave thought for a minute. If the person who’d damaged the light was a standard student vandal, there’d be prints on the fitting. If it was someone else, then the fitting would probably be wiped clean. He needed to know that at least.

  Berryman looked at the map that Lynne was showing him. ‘McCarthy thinks that Kate may have got off the train here,’ she said, pointing to Kirk Sandall. ‘Now look.’ She ran her finger along the line west of Kirk Sandall, and down a freight line that ran off it. The freight line ran south-west past the mine at Armthorpe, past Bessacar and then joined up with another freight line just by the lake where Kate’s body had been f
ound.

  McCarthy leaned over the map. ‘And look, sir,’ he said, leaning forward round Lynne. ‘Here – Mandy.’ Berryman looked where he was pointing, at the freight line branching off close to the spot where the killer had left the remains of Amanda Varney. ‘And,’ McCarthy went on, ‘look at the siding near Rawmarsh. Freight lines run off the junction there.’

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence.’ Lynne stood back from the map. ‘We think this man could be a driver for one of the freight companies, and he’s using those trains to move around the tracks.’

  ‘OK.’ Berryman could buy that. ‘That’s worth following up. But there’s still Lisa, remember. And you haven’t solved the main problem. He can’t be driving those trains and killing women at stations at the same time, right? A train isn’t something you can park up for half an hour until you need it again.’ He looked at them. ‘Come on, this has to be something. Think. What is he doing?’ Lynne shook her head in baffled frustration.

  ‘Right. You two get on to the freight companies now. Any that run traffic along these lines. You want times and dates, and you want employees – anyone who’d know the schedules.’

  The start of term came with a change in the weather. From the freezing cold of December, January brought grey skies and rain. The day barely got light and progressed in grey dullness until what light there was faded into the late-afternoon darkness. The weather seemed to have affected the mood of the people coming back to City. The students, who normally provided the noise, the colour and the light, were dull and apathetic – either sullen and uncooperative or oppressed by work. They caught the more general feeling of darkness that hung about the college with the knowledge that one of their number had died, had been murdered, within a mile or two of the college doors.

  As Debbie walked towards the Broome building, she looked up at the dark windows watching her, and was reminded of that sense of menace that had haunted her last term. She was glad to collide with Louise, who was struggling up the steps with boxes, bags and a briefcase. ‘Holiday work,’ she explained breathlessly, ‘in case I ran out of things to do.’ Debbie took one of the boxes and a couple of bags, and pushed open one of the double doors into the building with her shoulder. They dumped their burden on the table that stood in the entrance hall.