The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel

by P. D. Viner

  She sees him alight and struggle forward with his golf clubs and little pull-along case. She steals back to her car; it must be timed perfectly. He waddles forward, dragging his case and bouncing the club bag. Finally he gets to his car and throws his bags down in anger as he realizes what has happened. She must time this just right. She knows that. She eases out of her parking space and slowly moves toward him just pulling alongside as he gets out his phone. She winds her window down and shouts:

  “Are you okay?”

  He looks over at her; she can see he’s shaking with cold and anger. “Some fuckers have slashed my tires.”

  “Bastards. Kids today see something they want—a beautiful car—and they just have to wreck it.” She nods sadly.

  “If I could get my hands on ’em, I’d wring their fucking necks.”

  Patty smiles. “Do you want a lift back to the terminal? You could get security to call a repair truck or something.”

  He starts to shake his head but stops. Wind whisks freezing flakes into his face and he looks down at what he’s wearing.

  “Yeah.” He nods. “Thank you. Yeah.”

  Patty gives him her most dazzling smile, then flips open the boot. He walks around to it and throws his bag and clubs in.

  “Be careful of the wheelchair,” she shouts back to him.

  He closes the boot and gets in beside her.

  “I really do ap—”

  “Seat belt, please,” she interrupts.

  And as he reaches over to find it, she slides the hypodermic into his neck. He jerks away, but not far enough and she manages to push the plunger all the way home. He looks at her, incredulous, his lips try to form a word, an expletive—fuckers—but the syllables crumble, soundless, and then he does too.

  She shoves him back in the seat and clips the belt. Done.

  Her first stop is a dumpster she’d noticed on the drive there. She puts gloves on and then pulls out his case and clubs and throws them inside. She slides him out of his jacket and throws that in too, including his wallet and ID. Then she drives directly to the hotel, parking in the deepest recess of the underground car park. There is nobody else about. She walks to the back of the car and takes out the wheelchair. She unfolds it, and then, with every ounce of her strength, manages to maneuver his body into it and strap him in. She wheels him to the service lift and they go up to level two. Her room is close to the lift. She has the key ready. Luck is with her; there is no one around. She opens the door and wheels him in.

  She looks around at the room. It is exactly as she left it the night before. No one has been in. She turns on the TV and then turns to the man in the wheelchair. The man she has abducted.

  From her bag she pulls one of the thick rolls of gaffer tape. She pulls at it and it makes a sound like fabric ripping—she loves that sound. Then she begins to wind the tape around him, like a snake coiling its prey.

  She knows what she is about to do. She will restrain him so that there is no chance he can escape or call out. Then she will take a sample of his blood. She has already delivered the semen sample from the killer to a private lab in the city. Once she has his blood sample they will compare the two and when they match them—proving his guilt—she will return to this hotel room and then will cause him pain before she takes his life. After that there is probably nothing. Finally, after more than twenty years of waiting, Patricia Lancing takes a knife and cuts his flesh.

  INTERMISSION SEVEN

  Friday, January 9, 1981

  Patty looks at her watch: 5 a.m. Christ, she’s bored. She sits alone in her battered green Cortina with just her nan’s old Thermos, Trebor mints, a Zippo and two packs of B&H for company. She tries to stretch, but it’s a little car. She’d like to get out and walk around but she’s on surveillance and it’s really not good to get spotted by a nosy neighbor. Instead she lights a cigarette and smokes it like her granddad showed her—wrapped inside his hand like he did in the trenches. She can’t open the window and so the small car fills with smoke, nice.

  She wonders, for the thousandth time, if this is all a waste. An anonymous tip-off to the crime desk and she beats five boozy hacks, who all think the story should be theirs, and scuttles up to Leeds. This isn’t how it should happen. This is not investigative journalism—it’s a fucking feeding frenzy. Journalists calling in favors, throwing out backhanders, threatening pimps, pressuring whores—anything and everything to get an angle on him—and Patty is raking through shit with the best of them. She is the best of them, she knows she is. It just pisses her off that she has to work so hard to get those bastards to see it, and that she has to keep proving it. But this one would set it in stone—that she is the equal of any man. The Holy Grail of blood and murder, Sonia Sutcliffe. The police had taken her into protective custody at first, but they let her go, to “be with relatives” a couple of days later and—gone. No statement, nothing. Nobody knows where she is or who she is, this woman who married a monster, who might be a monster. That’s why Patty’s sitting, desperate for a pee, in a cramped smoky car all night. The thought of interviewing a female killer—multiple killer of women, a modern-day Bonnie Parker—well, it makes her heart soar. This was what she went into crime reporting for: to cut open the belly and see the filth and shit. To shine a spotlight into the corners and watch the spiders and cockroaches run. That is the only way she can see it getting better.

  “This is such a mind-numbing waste of time,” she thinks, just as the front door shoots open. Three men come out, walking quickly—they’re huge. A fourth figure emerges, much smaller—a woman. The men form a rugby scrum around her. From somewhere, behind Patty, there’s the sound of an engine turning over.

  “Fuck.” She’s out of her car in a second, running to the house. She’d parked across the street but they must have known she was there.

  The three goons walk quickly and are at the gate just seconds after Patty—the front two stretch out enormous hands. The third, comically, is trying to throw a blanket over the woman in the center, who shoves it back at him.

  “I have no camera,” Patty shouts, holding her hands up in the air like it’s a robbery.

  The blanket is thrown to the ground as the front two men separate, revealing Sonia Sutcliffe.

  “Sonia,” Patty calls. “I’m on my own. I just want to talk; hear your side.”

  Sonia steps out onto the pavement and Patty moves to bar her way. The front two men hesitate, unsure how to treat a woman reporter with no camera.

  “Your words, Sonia, not some hatchet job. That’s all, I promise. My name’s Patricia Lancing.” Patty holds out her hand.

  Sonia looks down at the outstretched fingers—then up into her face. For a moment she thinks she sees Sonia’s eyes soften—but there is no trust. Patty sees a woman who has heard too many promises that turned out to be lies. Sonia breaks the contact, turns and moves forward. A car screeches into the curb. Patty tries to follow but a giant hand holds her shoulder.

  “There’s big money in it, for your story,” Patty shouts after her—desperate to keep her there. Sonia doesn’t look back. The car door opens and she gets in, followed by the three men.

  “Sonia, please tell me. How could you not know? Sonia, how do you live with a monster? How do you live with yourself?”

  The car speeds off. It had all taken no more than a minute.

  “Bollocks.”

  She stands there, feeling the cold creep into her bones. Finally she gets back into her Cortina to finish the Thermos of lukewarm coffee and have a cigarette. She sits in the driver’s seat and goes over the encounter again and again. There was no interview, no story—but there was something. Sonia could have gone out the back way and avoided any confrontation, but she didn’t. She wanted to walk tall, not skulk away. That said a lot about her, but was that a story? It certainly wasn’t news. Patty finishes the cigarette and then has two more while she thinks. She should drive home. She could be there for the afternoon—but that makes the trip a waste and she wants a story.<
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  She drives to the hotel she’d booked. The room’s basic—it smells of stale smoke and dust. The overhead light doesn’t work; she has to turn on the bathroom light and use a shoe to hold the door open. The only window is painted shut. The saving grace is that the water is scalding hot. She runs a deep steamy bath and lies there for over an hour, smoking the rest of the pack and turning into a giant prune. The towel looks disgusting, so she drips dry on the carpet. She pulls back the sheets—they look okay. She falls into the bed naked and grabs a few hours’ sleep.

  It’s 11 a.m. when she wakes. She has to be out of the room in an hour so she dresses quickly and goes down to the breakfast room. There’s no food but she does manage to get a black coffee out of a young Italian girl. Deep in her notebook she finds a phone number she jotted down some months before. A Bradford number. It’s the home phone of the mother of one of the victims. No reply for quite some time but Patty is patient. She lets it ring and ring. Finally a woman answers dozily and agrees to meet.

  “Hello. Hello. We spoke on the telephone earlier,” Patty shouts through the letterbox. There is no reply. Patty waits a minute before trying again.

  “You said I should come. Patricia, my name’s Patricia Lancing.”

  She can’t see anything inside the flat but she can wait. She stands back from the door and turns to look out over the balcony. She’s on the third floor of a block of flats where four identical squat blocks face each other with a courtyard below. To one side there is an area of grass and some rotating clothes dryers but they’re naked, much too cold and wet for clothes to dry. The sky is gray, one of those English days where it won’t ever get properly light, merely go from dark to gray to dark again. Kids are running about in the courtyard.

  It takes two cigarettes and another round of pounding on the door before a bolt snaps back, a chain scrapes and the door opens. The woman doesn’t step out onto the balcony, merely beckons Patty inside with a wave of the hand. As she walks in, Patty can feel eyes on her from all directions. Patty follows the hand into the living room and it points to the sofa.

  “Tea?” the woman asks over her shoulder as she walks into the kitchen.

  “I’d love some,” Patty replies, even though she hates the industrial-strength tea they always serve in the north.

  While the woman makes a pot, Patty looks around the room. It’s pretty bare. On the walls she can see the telltale signs of pictures having been removed. Every family picture has been taken down. Destroyed, or stored away for a time when seeing them won’t cause such pain?

  The woman enters with a small tray—two mugs of tea and a little plate of biscuits. She pulls out a table from a nest and puts Patty’s tea and the biscuits next to her, before sitting in an armchair across the room, cradling her tea in her hands. Patty’s notes say this woman is forty-seven but she looks sixty-five. Her hair has fallen out in clumps all over her head. Her fingertips are speckled with dried blood where the nails have been shredded.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me.” Patty smiles.

  The mother says nothing but their eyes meet. All Patty can see in them is helplessness. The air swims with pine air freshener and Patty feels a little light-headed.

  “I’m not here to drag up awful memories.”

  “Me memories ain’t bad. They’re all I’ve got now,” the mother says in a voice that seems both raw and soft at the same time.

  “Tell me something wonderful, a great memory of the two of you.”

  The woman closes her eyes for a second, her forehead wrinkles.

  “She weren’t a bad girl. I know some a me neighbors’ll say different, but I had owt trouble. She were only seventeen.” Her eyes glisten.

  “Her father?”

  The woman frowns, as if she doesn’t understand the question at first.

  “Gone. Long gone. They’re all gone.” She gazes into her tea. “Tap.” She says suddenly.

  Patty shakes her head, not understanding.

  “She loved tap. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. Whenever there were one o’ them films on we’d watch it. She ’ad the shoes. I got ’em for ’er—sixth birthday, I think. She ’ad tap every Saturday morning. I loved to watch ’er … that were a special time.”

  Patty nods. She keeps nodding as the woman talks about her daughter, unfolds her box of memories. The mother talks for an hour.

  “I ’ave to go to church now. I go every day. Will youse come too?”

  They leave the council flat and walk down the stairs and across the courtyard, both silent. In the air are the sounds of a baby crying, and from somewhere far-off, a dog howling. The estate is only about twenty years old, but it already looks shabby and unloved. They walk through the courtyard and into a small alleyway, which Patty knows she would not walk down alone after dark. The alleyway leads into an identical courtyard, which leads to another scary alleyway. Through that they come to a small modern church, built as part of the estate.

  Inside, the church is Spartan. There are pews that look more like the kind of stackable chairs you’d find in a school. No stained glass; in fact, there are only three small windows—mounted quite high so very little light can enter. The only decorations are tapestries that look machine woven, depicting the twelve stages of the cross. One is particularly harrowing—Jesus being stabbed by a centurion. It’s in front of that image the two women stop. Patty stands, uncomfortable, while the grieving mother bows and crosses herself. Then she kneels and prays for her seventeen-year-old Lamb of God, slaughtered by Peter William Sutcliffe. Patty sits next to her, feeling like a fraud in the house of prayer.

  They sit in silence for twenty minutes and then it’s time to leave. Patty follows the mother out. While they were inside the light died; it’s turned dark and bitterly cold.

  “Thank you,” the mother says, throwing her arms around Patty, pulling her close, making Patty feel very claustrophobic. She lays her head on Patty’s shoulder and a great sob convulses her.

  “I am sorry for your—” Patty pauses. “For your daughter. I’m sorry.”

  The mother smiles a watery half smile before wearily heading back toward her flat. Patty stands outside the church for a while. She lights a cigarette, smokes it greedily all the way to the butt, and then heads back to her car for the long drive.

  It’s after midnight when she finally arrives home. Soon, after she left Bradford, she had felt a great pull, a real need to get back to Jim and Dani. Especially Dani. She realizes with shame that she never did call her today, she really had meant to, but …

  The house is quiet and dark. Once inside, she goes directly to Dani’s room and pushes the door open. There her daughter lies, asleep on her side. Not dead, not lost, but at home with them. As soon as she sees her, Patty realizes she has been nervous all the way home—scared she would not be there when she got back. She watches Dani sleep for a long time before she can tear herself away.

  In the dark of their bedroom she puts her pajamas on. Jim lies on her side of the bed but as she pulls back the covers he rolls over into the cold half, leaving her to snuggle into the warmth he’d just left.

  “Did you speak to her?” he asks, his voice a little slurry from sleep.

  “No, just a glimpse. She had three thugs. Spoke to the mother of one of the girls, though. Poor fucking woman. Heartbreaking.”

  “I’m sure.” He rolls over to face her, blinking some of the sleepiness away.

  “What about here, how’d it go?” Patty asks.

  “I cooked a big lunch.”

  “Love-struck pup come?”

  “Of course Tom came. Good too, he does the dishes.”

  “You don’t think he seems a bit too interested?” She pauses. “You know what I mean.”

  “They’re just friends.”

  “He’s here an awful lot.”

  “I don’t think he likes to go home. He likes Dani.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “Why’s that a problem?”

  Patty doesn’t answer,
not sure she can explain what she means. She worries that Dani has no sense of proportion. She’s got a dad who puts her on a pedestal, and some love-struck kid who would do anything for her.

  “Just that she might be a bit big-headed.”

  “Well, you keep her grounded,” he says, and Patty can’t tell if that’s barbed or not.

  “So did she like it?” Patty asks.

  “Oh, yes, she was really happy with it. After school we took it over to the lane and tried it out.”

  “Did you have cake?”

  “She said she was too old for cake. We had fish and chips and a semi-frozen cheesecake from over the road. I put a candle on her cod. Thirteen wouldn’t fit.”

  “Rubbish portions over there. Was it just you two?”

  “And Izzy. We missed you.”

  “Yeah, well. Now she’s a teen she’s meant to hate me.”

  “Do something nice for her in the morning.”

  She shakes her head. “I need to be in the office at the crack of dawn if I’m gonna get anywhere with the story.”

  “Okay,” he says without a hint of reproach. He kisses her softly on the forehead. He means it as a loving gesture but Patty finds it annoying. Within seconds he is asleep. Patty lies there wide awake. She can’t smoke in bed anymore, not since setting fire to the duvet, but she feels desperate for some nicotine goodness. For a long time her mind whirrs, thinking about Sonia and the grieving mother, about how both their lives have just been turned upside down. Then her thoughts drift back thirteen years, to when she is in hospital cradling her newborn daughter. At the time, the world seemed to offer everything, nothing scared her. Dani could grow up to be anything she wanted—and she would be safe and protected. Patty would never let any harm come to her—she would keep men like her own father from hurting Dani. And she would have the kind of relationship with her own daughter that had been impossible with her mother. Where had that gone wrong? How were they drifting apart as Dani got older?