Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller (14 page)

The Falcon pub, Clapham Junction

Friday, August 9, 1991; 19:00

I left the pub with a mouth like Gandhi’s flip-flop and a head like Christmas afternoon. The sweltering, petrol-drenched early evening air didn’t help.

Shep had united the team but I still felt odd man out. I’d no experience. No allies. I needed to pass this test to become a fully-fledged member of a murder squad. My career hinged on making a good impression.

I let the booze unfetter my mind so that I could once again run with the illogical idea that Marion was trying to steer me to her killer from beyond the grave. What if Marion’s spirit somehow knew that I’d end up working on her case? What if that’s why she came to me on both those occasions? But why had I failed to crack the clues she’d given me? This seemed to let the whole concept down.

I began to wonder: if I returned to the murder scene, would she come to me again with a fresh clue? Once again in my life, booze galvanised me. I decided to give it a go.

Sangora Road was ten minutes’ walk. I’d get as close as possible to number 21, then see what happened.

No matter how slowly I took it in the screaming low sun, I got there breathless, a little delirious. Heat to an insomniac must be like thick-crust pizza to an anorexic: it knocks you out.

At the bottom of the road, I stumbled into the Roundhouse pub, craving its cool inner gloom just for a few minutes. I took my pint to a window seat out of the sun. My eyes – still scored by the glare – struggled to adjust to the darkness. I tried to focus on something midway between shine and shade, and settled on the people sitting outside enjoying their evening meals. Couples, friends, families chatted, gossiped, laughed. Beyond them, a grandstand view of the steps to number 21, just a half dozen doors up the road. The carefree revelry seemed disrespectful and shallow. Didn’t these people know what happened here a few weeks ago? Didn’t they care?

As I drained the glass, a flash of auburn hair on the sunny street caught my eye. I put the glass down and stared hard through the alfresco diners. She stood on the pavement, side-on to me, just staring towards 21. I knew that thick, curly, blood-red hair. I knew that dowdy, flowery dress. I blinked hard and fast to make sure she wasn’t a hallucination.

‘Marion?’ I mumbled.

‘Marion!’ I called, loud enough for the drinkers inside to look my way. Someone on the outside table stood, blocking my view. I jumped to my feet.

Still she stood there, motionless, oblivious.

‘Marion!’ I shouted. Now everyone on the outside tables stared.

‘Fuck it,’ I thought, and made for the door.

I got outside and scanned the pavement: there was no sign of her. I jogged up to where she’d stood and looked around. She’d vanished.

As I walked on towards 21, I noticed the To Let sign in the front garden. I wondered who’d cleared out Marion’s stuff. Who had painted over the bloodstains on the wall and scrubbed them out of the carpet? Knowing estate agents, they’d probably raced here with buckets and J-cloths. I was certain they wouldn’t be mentioning the grisly murder to any would-be tenants.

I didn’t want anyone thinking I was some sort of crime scene deviant, so as soon as I reached the steps to Marion’s house I wheeled left, back past the pub towards the Common. I looked left to cross the road and saw her: Marion, motionless on the pavement of Strathblaine Road. Again, she was staring towards 21. Her hair blazed scarlet along with the raging low sun. This time I didn’t panic. I walked steadily up towards her.

‘Marion?’ I called out gently. She didn’t respond.

‘Marion!’ I cried loudly.

Next thing, I found myself walking past the pub again. I turned to look where I thought I’d just been. She was gone. Had that actually happened? I felt rattled, disorientated, scared. What was happening to me? I aimed for the shade of the nearest tree on the Common.

I felt in no doubt now: Marion was breaking through to me from the other side. She was hijacking my subconscious, I presumed to help me find her killer. It was illogical, supernatural, an affront to logic. But it was the truth.

I lay down to better cling onto the tree and the wildly spinning world.

Clapham Police Station, South London

Saturday, August 10, 1991; 10:00

While the rest of the squad were out focusing on Peter Ryan’s relationship with Karen Foster, I was office-bound on the paper trail of Marion’s Lone Wolf Killer.

DS Glenn’s team had made strenuous efforts to get their hands on the case files for every unsolved stranger attack on a woman in London over the past four years. Some were on the computer system, the rest were in box files strewn across an empty office floor.

The Met police was in the throes of ditching its old manual ‘card’ system for computers, so records were a mess. By now, a few stations had everything on computer. Some had part of their records on computer. More still hadn’t even started the process. As a result, lots of paperwork was in transit. And we all know what happens when paperwork gets moved about.

Not that getting hold of case files from other murder squads proved simple at the best of times. Bitter rivalries simmered between many senior officers and, as a result, their CID teams. Most Detective Chief Supers ran their ‘manors’ like personal fiefdoms. They resented other teams snooping around and cracking their outstanding cases. It was petty, small-minded and dangerous – nobody dared stock-check the number of deaths caused by police teams who had failed to cooperate or communicate. The Met hoped technology would tear down these walls of ego and secrecy, and that computers would one day crack crimes all on their own.

I clicked open the folder named Unsolved, then the file named Overview and congratulated myself on my initiative. It was a painstakingly prepared report of the records that had been requested, but not received from stations still converting to the chip. Someone had optimistically dubbed these files: ‘Currently Misplaced’.

A second file contained a comprehensive list of sexual offenders recently released from prison. None of their prints matched those found at Marion’s murder scene. Each had been interviewed and eliminated from the investigation. I had to hand it to Glenn’s team: they were thorough, dogged, methodical – eager hounds chasing the wrong scent.

The third file was a report penned by forensic psychologist professor Laurence C. Richards BSc, MSc, FRSA; criminal behavioural analyst.

Despite Shep’s cynicism, if there was a Lone Wolf Killer (LWK) lurking somewhere in these files, I wanted to know how to identify him. Before I waded through hundreds of offences, I needed some sort of criteria to narrow down the suspects: a sort of
LWK Modus Operandi
tick list. I was terrified of missing a vital clue, leaving the killer free to strike again.

I quickly realised that Professor Richards’ chief skill was to deliver lots of general, common sense observations with absolute certainty. Whoever killed Marion must have escalated to that level of extreme violence. He will have forced his way into homes before and attacked women at knifepoint. This was ‘his thing’.

The report went on: ‘Although the victim had not been raped or sexually assaulted, the attacker will have gained sexual gratification from the attack. He may well have shortcomings that prevent him having sexual relations with women. As a result, he may despise women. However we shouldn’t rule out that he’s raped women in the past.’

In short then, we were looking for a violent misogynist who was once a rapist but now can’t get it up so he takes it out on random women with a knife. Or possibly not. I couldn’t help thinking that the Prof was covering all the bases.

I decided to start on the ‘unsolved stranger crimes’ already in the computer system: it looked less daunting than the scatter of dusty binders.

I scrolled down through countless unsolved attacks on women, mostly sexual.

London’s rape statistics were one of the few things that stayed with me from my training. Every day, the Metropolitan police force received six reports of rape and twenty-one reports of sexual assault. About ten per cent of these attacks were carried out by someone unknown to the victim: that’s about four stranger rapes per week. Judging by these cases, most ‘stranger’ rapists tried to force anal intercourse on their victim too.

The sheer scale of random, seemingly arbitrary violence scared me: the city is full of men who despise women. Every time I concluded that an unsolved rape/attack on a woman couldn’t be linked to Marion’s murder, I wrestled with more guilt. It felt like I was walking away from their cries for help, leaving them lying in the dirt where they’d been violated.

Yet I knew I had to be brutally selective, or we’d wind up with more suspects than police officers.

Of course, detectives all over London had already been busy making connections. The first serial attacker to catch my eye was the so-called Night Stalker, who operated in South East London. Described as black and in his thirties, this man expertly broke into the homes of old women living alone in the middle of the night. He raped them at knifepoint and stole anything valuable to hand.

Marion was twenty-three. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted. As far as we could tell, her killer hadn’t broken in. Nothing had been stolen from the scene. I ruled him out.

Links had been made between four attacks near train stations in West London. The attacker threatened his victims with a knife, led them to covered wasteland then raped them. Marion’s flat was five minutes’ walk from Clapham Junction train station. Had he been casing out that station, only to discover a complete lack of deserted areas to strike? He noticed Marion. He came back to wait for her again, and again. One day he followed her, found out where she lived, did nothing. He bided his time, confirmed her daily routine over days and weeks, like an assassin. Then one day he waited near her home. Somehow he distracted her as she opened the front door, forcing her at knifepoint to unlock the flat and walk up the stairs. She fought back. He lost it and went berserk, then fled the scene.

I realised that the same case could be made against every stranger rapist in any file. I had to find something more tangible, a connection more damning and evidential. I trawled and trawled that eye-bleeding green text until the end, failing to settle on a single connection.

I printed out the list of ‘Currently Misplaced’ paper case files and cross-referenced it with the folders sprawled across the empty office floor. I realised that one new file had turned up since this stock take. I spotted it immediately – the one not caked in dust. The courier’s packaging confirmed it had been delivered from Plumstead police station in East London that weekend.

As I opened the box file, I felt an icy frisson of fearful anticipation: no one else had seen this ‘unsolved stranger attack’ paperwork. What if he was in here? What if I found him? I told myself to be extra-vigilant. I reminded myself that he liked to use a knife and attack women in their homes. I thought of the messages Marion’s spirit had communicated to me: banging the door, appearing to me on two streets near the crime scene. I pushed it all to the front of my mind, ready to snag on any link or connection in these files.

The first case to catch my eye, because of its name, was the Green Chain Attacks. To my relief, the Green Chain turned out not to be some soothingly-coloured yet gruesome martial arts weapon but a series of connected parkland walks near Plumstead. Over the past four years, a lone male had attacked over seventy women on the Green Chain. His crimes had escalated from beatings, to sexual assaults to rape. He sometimes used a ligature, more often a knife.

Descriptions of the suspect were vague because he always wore a balaclava or a mask. As I’d discovered in most other linked sex attacks, witness estimations of weight and height varied wildly. He’d been described as five foot six and broad, six foot two and slim, and just about everything in between. But DNA evidence proved it was the same man.

I looked at the other odds and ends in the box file. An intelligence report from two months ago caught my attention. A couple with an address at Winn Common – part of the Green Chain expanse – had phoned police describing a man ‘hanging about’ in their neighbour’s back garden, apparently spying on a young blonde woman ‘who often walks around her flat semi-naked’. The husband went out and kept an eye on the suspect until a police patrol arrived.

‘I bet he did,’ I thought.

When police quizzed the loiterer, he insisted he was merely taking a walk and had stopped for a piss. He gave his name and address: Robert Napper, 126 Plumstead High Street. The officer wrote: ‘Subject strange, abnormal. Should be considered a possible rapist, indecency-type suspect.’

I took a deep breath and stopped my mind skidding off in too many directions. Had this man progressed from attacking women on the Common to breaking into their homes? Surely we should at least cross-reference his DNA with the Green Chain victims?

I rifled through the file’s remaining contents. Intelligence reports identified other local weirdos skulking around parks and commons, spying on sunbathers, flashing and wanking behind bushes. Other notes identified couples and gay men and their repeated attempts to initiate ‘stranger sex’ in public. I was beginning to realise that London’s green spaces gave a whole new meaning to the term, ‘Parks and Recreation’.

Then I found a handwritten note. It was dated almost two years ago – October 1989 – but someone clearly believed it deserved attention. ‘At 9.10 a.m., Mrs Maureen Napper of 19 Raglan Road SE18 rang to say that her son, Robert, 26, of basement flat, 126 Plumstead High Street, told her he’d raped a woman “on the Common” two months earlier, in August. The police sergeant on duty checked the records and found no report of an attack or rape on Plumstead Common, or any connected green spaces, during August or the previous two months.’

My hands trembled. It was that man Robert Napper again, who they’d recently found in the garden of a woman’s flat. Allied to this rape confession, his MO surely made him a suspect for the Green Chain attacks, if not Marion’s. I asked Mick what the procedure was for pursuing leads like this: ‘Just ring ’em up,’ he said. Soon I was on the phone to a duty officer at Plumstead. He agreed to check the log book of all recorded crimes for August 1989. He confirmed there had been no reported rapes or sexual assaults on any Commons on their patch that month. He checked July and September: same result.

…
on the Common.
Did Napper even mean Plumstead Common? He could have struck at another Common: Clapham Common? I checked the A to Z: there are Commons all over London, dozens of them.

It was already after six. As Mick got up to leave, I asked him to run Napper through the police computer. ‘Robert Clive Napper, born February 25, 1966, one criminal conviction: possession of an airgun in a public place, 1986.’

‘Sounds like a menace, at least to the local rabbit population,’ he laughed.

I had a feeling about Napper. But I didn’t want to present it half-cocked at Monday morning’s briefing. I needed to connect Napper to the rape he’d boasted about. If I pinpointed that rape – the rape he’d confessed to his own mum – we could cross-reference it forensically with any DNA and prints found at 21 Sangora Road. This new twist made me realise I had to go through all of the remaining paperwork – and back again through the cases on the computer – to cross-reference all rapes on London Commons between June and September ’89.

Before getting stuck in, I called Gabby to say I couldn’t make it over tonight.

‘What a shame,’ she said, ‘it’s so unusual for the house to be empty. And I’ve bought all this lovely food.’

My body groaned.

‘Were there going to be candles?’

‘I can confirm there were going to be candles,’ she giggled, ‘and Shiraz.’

‘I’m truly sorry,’ I said, ‘mostly for me.’

‘You’re missing out, I can assure you of that, Donal,’ she teased, ‘I’d even tidied my room.’

‘Wow, I’ve seen your room. That’s commitment. You must be exhausted?’

‘I’ve got more stamina than that,’ she giggled.

‘Okay, I think under some UN guideline this actually constitutes torture. I can’t take another second.’

‘Wimp!’

‘We’ll see about that, madam,’ I said, realising at that point that I could only fuck this up now, so I added a swift: ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Look forward to it.’

‘Bye,’ I managed, before slamming the handset and my forehead down against the desktop, over and over.