Only Darkness (25 page)

Debbie needed to be back on the train. She wouldn’t travel alone. Something told him that she was wary, something had made her wary. Right,
he
had to be the one taking her to the station, and then … He began to devise plans for the way he could be with Debbie but not visibly so, be there to observe, to photograph –
that
would be a story – to get the last bit he needed to write his piece. He began composing the article.
Brave journalist, Tim Godber
– would
Timothy
sound better, more serious? –
risked his life to save
… That was the rub, though. Suppose, just suppose, the Strangler attacked Debbie. Lizzie had given him as much information as she could. She was indignant when he told her that Berryman was cutting him out of the loop. Tim knew that the investigation suggested that the Strangler was a big man, strong. He’d need to cover his bases.

Keep back, in the shadows. And if the killer was there, if the killer was waiting? Tim would have his phone –
999, woman
being attacked at the station.
With a bit of luck, the Strangler wouldn’t spot him, but if he did …

He looked at the can of Mace. He’d get into trouble for having it, but would anyone prosecute him – dare prosecute him – the brave journalist who’d been the only one looking out for the Strangler’s next victim? Who’d been abandoned by Berryman – and by Neave? He could see the pictures, see the headlines.
Barnsley Ace Beats the Strangler.
He’d be a hero.

And save Debbie. She’d be grateful for that.

At the morning briefing, there was an atmosphere of tension. The investigation seemed to be moving, but it was the slow, imperceptible movement of routine and paperwork, and they had followed that route before into dead ends. ‘What progress?’ Steve McCarthy asked, echoing the fatigue of the team.

Berryman looked at him thoughtfully. ‘It depends what you call progress, Steve. We’ve got fingerprints that are likely to be his. We’ve got a line on the way he’s finding them, we’ve got a good indication that he
is
stalking them. We’re getting some kind of a timetable. We think we know how he’s moving them round the track, and that’s given us somewhere to look for him. That’s not an actual name and address, I’ll grant you that. You going to tell us that?’

‘No, sir.’ McCarthy flushed and avoided Lynne Jordan’s eye. The rest of the team waited in case Berryman had any more to say.

‘How’s the check on the freight companies going?’

‘We’ve got people on it round the clock. We’re starting to get names for possibles. It’s going to be a massive interview job.’ Berryman knew that. McCarthy ran through some of the names he’d got. ‘These were all in the right place at the right time – there’s no more than that to go on. They’re familiar with the right schedules, they’re local and they weren’t at work on the dates in question. None of them have got form. We won’t know any more until we talk to them. We’re starting today. These are people who are still working. I’ve only just got the lists of ex-employees.’ Everyone knew about the redundancies. Everyone knew how long those lists would be.

‘How far back have you gone?’

‘Five years.’

‘What details have you got?’ Berryman was sure that employee records wouldn’t hold the information they were looking for.

‘We’ve got people standing by to look up background information. For any that look likely. Then we’ll start on the unlikely ones.’ His gesture indicated the size of the task.

‘OK. There’s a whole team to do the initial sorting, Steve. Keep at it. You don’t need me to tell you how important it is. Right, any questions? Yes, Dave?’

Dave West flicked through his notebook. ‘How are we using the time-scale information?’

Berryman went over the timing again, pointing out the dates on the photos that had appeared in the newspaper, and the six-to-eight-week time gap between the picture and the killing. ‘We’re looking at intervals of seven months, six months and then eight months. We’d look for another killing from May onwards, if the timing is an important factor. Which means that women appearing in photographs in the
Moreham Standard
from the end of February are potential victims. The break in the pattern worries me, though. Why didn’t he go after Julie Fyfe in September? Everything we’ve found says that he should have done.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t.’ McCarthy leaned back in his chair.

‘We know she was away for the crucial week,’ Berryman said. ‘With her boss. What we don’t know is why, after that, he waited another ten weeks. And why he changed his time. Is the last week in the month important, or is it just convenient?’ They’d asked this question before. Was it a work pattern, a shift worker who had free time around the end of the month? Did something happen that made the killings easier then? No one had come up with anything that looked promising.

‘No one seems to know much about her,’ said Lynne, going back to Julie. ‘She wasn’t particularly friendly with anyone at work …’

‘Except Thomas,’ West interrupted.

‘If you want to call that friendly,’ said Lynne. ‘And he
couldn’t tell us much about her life. It’s that sort of detail we want to find out about that ten weeks.’

‘How much can we rely on him to stick to this timing pattern?’ This was West again.

Berryman shook his head. ‘We can’t. We don’t have enough information. The expert opinion is that he’s satisfied his needs for a certain length of time after a killing. Then he needs to do it again, and he needs the whole of the ritual. The stalking is part of it. But the expected pattern is for the intervals between the killings to get shorter. We haven’t got that. I want someone looking into this timing thing with Julie Fyfe. Talk to the people at Broughton’s. We need to know if there’s anything in that ten weeks that tells us why the killer left her alone.’

He runs the trains forward and back, forward and back. He feels resentful, angry.

It’s so near the time, so near, and she’s changed. First she wasn’t there, and now she is there, she’s never alone. He’s been watching, but careful, hidden, from a distance. Forward and back, forward and back. He’s had to do it before, change his plans. But the hare has never escaped the hound. He won’t let this one go … There’s so little time. But … if at first … He’s put so much time, so much effort into this hunt. Everything is ready, everything is right. He looks at the picture and twists the pins that secure it to the board, one where each eye used to be, one where the mouth is. Then he looks at the calendar. The moon will be gone, the sky will be dark and with luck – and isn’t he always lucky – cloudy, the night she should be at the station on her own. If she won’t come to him, he knows where to find her. It has to be right. It will be right.

It was strange to be on her own in the house. Debbie had been a bit disconcerted when Rob had seen her home, and then announced his intention of going back to his flat. ‘I’ve got a lot of stuff to sort out,’ he said vaguely. Debbie hadn’t objected. She felt disadvantaged by the fact that in her contacts with him, she was the needy one, the helpless one. First she had been trapped and terrified by – what? By whatever had been on the stairs. That episode confused her now, and she was coming round to the idea that she had imagined it. But whatever had happened, she’d done a classic damsel in distress, and the erotic charge from that had propelled them – fortunately or unfortunately, she couldn’t tell – into bed. Then she had been alone and grieving. She was more grateful than she could say for Rob’s help, but she knew that gratitude and neediness were not good bases for a relationship, and she knew – or she thought – that she wanted the relationship. She needed to change the balance of things.

So she’d smiled more cheerfully than she’d felt and said, ‘OK, I’ll see you at work tomorrow.’ He’d hesitated for a moment before he’d left, started to say something, then stopped.

‘Right. I’ll see you tomorrow. Debs.’ And he’d given her a quick hug and gone, leaving her feeling a bit uncertain, a bit uneasy.
Pull yourself together, Deborah!
She went round the house, drawing curtains and picking up bits and pieces that had been left lying around, looking at the house with new eyes. Buttercup materialized at her feet, rubbing against her legs and trying to trip her up.

‘Oh, so I’ll do now, will I,’ Debbie said tartly, picking the
animal up. Buttercup twisted in her arms and positioned herself across Debbie’s shoulder, purring loudly. ‘Fickle, fickle,’ Debbie chided her. When Rob was there. Buttercup, with that infallible feline instinct for the cat hater – or at least the indifferent to cats, Debbie amended – followed him round, jumped on to his knee, gazed into his eyes with quivering whiskers and breathy purrs, in a shameless display of adoration. And it worked. For cats, it damn well worked. He’d moved from pushing the little cat away, to ignoring her, to stroking her and finally to adopting Debbie’s habit of talking to her.
You see?
Buttercup seemed to be saying, looking at Debbie with benign contempt.
It’s easy.

‘It’s all very well,’ Debbie continued the argument. ‘But I’ve got my pride which
you
most certainly have not.’ Buttercup purred even louder and rubbed her furry cheek against Debbie’s face. Holding the animal in her arms, Debbie completed her tour of the house, and wondered what to do with the evening. Give Fiona a ring? Or Brian? Or both of them? She decided that she didn’t feel like company, but she felt nervous about spending the evening on her own. This would be the first time since that evening after Gina’s death. She decided she needed a lot to do. The marking in her briefcase nagged at her conscience. If she did it this evening, she might get some time free at the weekend.

But once she was upstairs at her desk, she began to feel nervous, uneasy. The thought of the dark rooms below her made her edgy. Had she locked the doors? Drawn the curtains? In the silence, she began to imagine she could hear someone moving outside the house – or was it inside, downstairs, in the darkness? She found herself standing in the bedroom doorway, waiting, listening.

There was a sudden clatter, and Buttercup shot past her, tail erect, fur fluffed out. Debbie let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Cats. She’d been frightened by cats. After that, she decided work was out of the question. She settled down in front of the television downstairs. But she checked all the doors and left the lights on.

Steve McCarthy and Ian Curran were looking through the
records and tag ends that were the last remains of Julie’s life when Lynne came back to the office. The records consisted of statements from workmates, friends, family, the details from the postmortem, the scene-of-crime details and pictures. The tag ends consisted of the clothes she had been wearing and possessions that had been with her when she died. Lynne stopped to ask them if they wanted a hand. She wanted to review the Fyfe killing. McCarthy was working his way methodically through the statements. Curran, young and less inured to the violence that the job threw him up against, was finding it hard to come to terms with the death of such a young, and such a pretty, woman. Such a death, as well. His eyes kept wandering back to the postmortem photographs. McCarthy glanced at Lynne suspiciously, but gestured towards the box of Julie’s possessions. ‘We haven’t looked at those yet,’ he said. Lynne wanted to look at the statements, but started going through the contents of the handbag again – a purse, an address book, a diary – all being painstakingly followed up. Lynne opened the purse – a bit of cash, her travel pass with nearly a year to run, a library card for the college, an organ donor card. There was an irony, Lynne thought.

Curran was helping McCarthy with the statements. ‘There isn’t much from her neighbours,’ he said.

McCarthy said, ‘She hadn’t lived there long. And her neighbours were new.’ He looked at the others. ‘She moved in at the beginning of April. The neighbours, the ones next door, didn’t move in until the end of November. So they won’t have had much time to get to know each other.’

‘Who lived there before?’

McCarthy flicked through the details. ‘Rebecca Wilcox. Same age as Julie.’

‘Did anyone talk to her?’ A young woman was more likely to attract Julie’s confidences than the middle-aged couple who rented the house now.

McCarthy was still looking. ‘I’m trying to remember, there was something … yes. She emigrated. She’s gone to Australia. Berryman’s been trying to get a contact for her.’

Lynne was thinking. Why that ten-week gap? There was
something she wasn’t connecting. McCarthy was on to it too. He was staring blankly at the desk, caught by the moment.
She was away in September. She’d moved. She’d been promoted. Her neighbour moved.
Lynne went back to the purse she’d been looking at. The travel pass, a one-year pass, to be renewed on the thirtieth of November the following year. She looked at the other two. ‘She’d just bought a travel pass,’ she said, ‘or she’d just renewed one.’ She and McCarthy looked at each other, then Lynne reached for the phone as McCarthy whipped open the file. Curran looked baffled.

Lynne was still hanging on, waiting for the clerk from travel office records to phone her back, when McCarthy waved a piece of paper at her. She raised her eyebrows at him and he gave her the thumbs-up. Then the phone rang. ‘Yes, that’s right, Fyfe, yes. That’s the address. She did? And the date? Thank you.’ She looked at them. ‘Julie’s travel pass ran out at the end of September. She didn’t get it renewed again until the middle of November. But the woman I talked to at Broughton’s said they gave her a travel card as part of the package when she was promoted.’

McCarthy held out the receipt he’d found in the file. ‘It’s here. She paid for a ten-month pass.’

Lynne was thinking. ‘They gave her the money, that’s what they said. They gave her a year’s worth, and she paid for ten months.’ They looked at each other.

‘She wasn’t travelling on the train for those ten weeks,’ said McCarthy. ‘And bang goes her travel pattern.’

‘But he waits,’ Lynne said, ‘because he knows she’ll go back.’ Berryman was right, she thought, he does stalk them.

One of the things that Debbie noticed on her return to work was that the feeling of menace and foreboding around the college that had disturbed her was definitely gone. Maybe, now that something really bad had happened, she didn’t need to feel any sense of danger. The real had overtaken the imaginary.

After her morning class, she went back to the staff room, hoping to see Louise. They’d agreed to have a talk over sandwiches and coffee. However, when she got there, Tim
Godber was sitting at her desk, and Louise’s chair was empty. ‘Hi,’ he greeted her. ‘Louise asked me to tell you that she’s got a meeting with Pete Davis this lunchtime. As message bearer, I thought I’d hang around and see if there was a coffee in it.’

Debbie thought quickly. ‘Thanks, Tim, but I said I’d meet someone. I’m running a bit late as it is. Help yourself to coffee.’

He stayed put, watching her as she put her books and folders away. ‘Making the most of it?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ There was something in his voice she didn’t like.

‘Oh, come on, Debbie, it’s not a secret, you know. You and the SAS, or whatever he is.’

Debbie felt her face go red. ‘It’s none of your business, Tim,’ she said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice.

‘Of course not. Did I say a word? I just thought you were making the most of it before he goes. Good luck to you.’

Debbie froze. ‘Before he goes?’ She looked directly at Tim and thought for a moment she saw triumph in his eyes.

‘Well, he’s off in a fortnight, isn’t he? Off to the wilds of Newcastle or somewhere, I thought. Or have I got it wrong?’ Now he was talking casually, as though this was something widely known.

Debbie felt cold all over.
Rob leaving? Going to Newcastle?
She could feel Tim’s eyes on her, measuring the effect of his words. Her mouth was dry. She felt as though something had thumped her hard in the stomach.
Say something!
‘I didn’t think it was common knowledge,’ she said, her voice sounding strange even to her ears.

‘Oh, it’s been around for a while,’ Tim said, breezily.

Debbie sorted her marking into her Friday folder, concentrating on what she was doing. ‘Word gets around,’ she managed, after a moment. She looked at him quickly, and caught an expression of satisfaction on his face. That was it. She couldn’t stand Tim’s company any more. ‘I’ve got to go. I’m late. I’ll have to lock up.’ She waited impatiently as he unwound himself from her chair and wandered towards the door.

‘See you, Debbie,’ he said cheerfully as he left.

Debbie sat down in the chair he’d vacated. She felt a deep anger against Tim, and, though she tried to pretend it wasn’t there, she was starting to feel it against Rob as well. He’d left her wide open to that. He should have told her. There was no point in hanging around. She needed to talk to him, and she needed to talk to him now. If she spent all afternoon brooding about this, she’d be good for nothing. She tried telling herself that Tim had probably got hold of the wrong end of the stick, or that he was just being malicious, but she knew he was telling the truth. He never passed on information unless he was sure about it.

She looked at the clock. She had an hour before her next class. Time to go and find Rob. She crossed the road to the Moore building, and went along the corridor to his office, a small room off the larger office where Andrea and the reception staff worked. Andrea was at her desk, and gave Debbie a blank stare as she walked through. Rob’s door was open, and he was sitting at his desk, drumming his fingers as he read something on the screen in front of him. The desk top was empty, apart from a folder that was open next to the keyboard. He hit a button and the screen display changed. She tapped her fingers on the open door to let him know she was there. He looked pleased to see her. ‘Debs!’ He gestured to a chair and stood up to push the door shut behind her. ‘Are you OK?’ He closed the folder and put it to one side. ‘Paperwork. It’s what I hate about this job.’ He waited for her to tell him why she was there.

‘Yes. Me too.’ She managed a smile. She didn’t want a row. If he was going, that was his right. They’d made no commitment –
just for now,
she’d said it. But he should have told her. ‘Listen, there’s no easy way to say this. Is it right that you’re leaving City in a couple of weeks and going to work in Newcastle?’

His face immediately went blank. He tapped a couple of buttons on the keyboard and said, ‘Yes, more or less. I’m going to Newcastle in about a month.’ He wasn’t looking at her.

‘That means it’s … There never was any chance of any future in it, was there?’ Her voice sounded calm, the way she wanted it to, but she could feel anger under the surface.

He studied the screen for a moment. She waited. ‘I should have told you,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Debbie twisted a rogue tendril of hair round her finger. Her anger was starting to bubble up now, but whether it was with Tim, or with Rob for leaving her vulnerable to Tim’s malice, or with herself for being such a fool, she didn’t know. Her voice sounded sharp in her ears. ‘I wish you had. I had to hear it from Tim Godber.’ He looked surprised, but didn’t say anything. ‘Who else knows?’ Debbie persisted, at the same time telling herself,
Stop it, stop being angry.
‘Everyone apart from me, I assume.’

‘No one,’ he said, calmly. ‘No one should know. I handed my notice in to personnel before Christmas.’ He looked at her. ‘Debs, we agreed …’

She felt the anger build up. ‘I know what we agreed. That doesn’t give you a licence to treat me like shit. That doesn’t give you a licence to lie to me.’ She wanted to shake him out of his calm – he had no right!

His eyes narrowed. ‘I didn’t lie to you, Deborah.’

That had got to him. ‘You weren’t exactly truthful, though, were you? Did you think it wasn’t relevant, something I didn’t need to know? Something else for you to be so bloody secretive about?’ She stood up. She was going to start crying in a minute, and she was damned if she was going to let him see that. ‘I’m going.’ She turned to the door, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

‘Listen, for Christ’s sake, will you?’ He was close to her, looking at her, and they were both silent for a moment. The anger that had built up exploded. She shouted incoherently and lashed out at him. He let go of her, and put his hand up to protect himself. She grabbed his arms and tried to shake him, digging her nails into his skin, saying,
‘Bastard, bastard, lying bastard!’
He fended her off easily and held her away from him. His face was white with anger. She tried to pull her hands free, but he was holding her wrists too tightly. ‘Just stop it, Deborah, just fucking stop it!’