The Fell Walker (18 page)

Chapter 27

The daunting prospect of single-handedly trying to hunt down a murderer stopped Ben in his tracks for a while. What chance did he have on his own when the police, with their teams of detectives, forensic scientists, profilers, often struggled for years with a case, and didn’t always succeed. For two days he achieved nothing as myriad thoughts and concerns surged through his mind.

That he should be doing something, and quickly, he had no doubt. Like it or not, it had become his res-ponsibility. But what to do? Where to start? Who to talk to?

How could he, a small town, part-time journalist, with no detective training, hope to track down a serial killer. A serial killer! How he disliked that description of a murderer. Its incessant use by Hollywood, television and the rest of the media, as a subject to sell their wares, had made the mass murderer’s fiendish activities seem commonplace. Somehow, it had almost taken on a badge of respectability, as though it was a chosen profession.

He had to admit, however, that initially, he too had been absorbed by the horrendous stories played out on his television screen. He had always been a sucker for a good detective story; preferably a who-dunnit, investigated and solved by a world weary British chief inspector who had personal troubles at home.

The new, hard-hitting breed of programmes from America had come as a shock. But, like the rabbit in the headlight, he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from them. That is, until they became so frequent that they became routine, and then, in search of ever increasing horror, banal.

He had stopped watching them some time ago, but now he wondered if all those hours might not have been wasted. Perhaps some of the investigation techniques and methods, which were reputedly authentic, had registered deep in his subconscious. Maybe he would be able to recall and use them. He closed his eyes and tried. Nothing.

Maybe he had been thinking too much lately, maybe his brain was tired. He couldn’t remember a single episode from any series, not even a single plot. So much for my powers of retention, he thought.

He had now reached a point, which he recognised: the point where no amount of extra thinking gets you anywhere; the point where you have to start doing something, however trivial or, in retrospect, stupid, in the hope that the activity will kick start you on another route towards solving the problem. He decided, therefore, to start at the absolute beginning. He went upstairs to his office and picked up his favourite book.

Helen had bought him ‘The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’ for his last birthday. The 3,767 beautifully bound pages, in two volumes, were a joy to peruse. In it he looked up the definition of ‘serial killer’. It read: ‘a person who murders repeatedly with no apparent motive.’
Great,
he thought, as he took in the last three words; I have just confirmed the impossibility of my task. If there is no motive, where do I start looking? He hoped the word ‘apparent’ might prove the let out.

Now the word ‘serial’ started to bother him. He looked it up on its own and found, as he had expected, that it referred to events taking place in
regular
succession or intervals. He knew that the murderer he was looking for did not operate on a regular basis, and he suspected that most mass murderers did not follow a regular pattern. So he concluded that the word ‘serial’ had been misused and should be replaced with something like ‘repeat’.

Having established that he was now looking for a ‘repeat killer’ rather than a ‘serial killer’, and knowing that all this playing around with the semantics of the English language was nothing more than procrastination while he put off taking the plunge into the unknown, he came to the realisation that he needed professional help.

If the murders were motiveless, then the only way to find the killer was to start by looking for the
type
of person who might commit them, and that was a psychological profiler’s job. But how could he find a profiler, and, if he did, how could he ask for advice about murders which were just theoretical at the moment, and with which the police were not involved? Maybe he could consult on a hypothetical basis. Fat chance.

He remembered recently reading a feature article in a Sunday paper. It mentioned that there were only 20 accredited profilers in the country, all busy psychologists or psychiatrists who tried to fit the police work around their normal laden schedules. They were definitely not going to find time for him.

There was only one thing for it. He would have to try to pick up some basic profiler knowledge and methods himself. He would visit the library and try to find books on profilers, police detection methods, and serial killers.

In the meantime, he would work on the assumption that there was a link between the victims and their killer, that there was a motive, and he would try to find it by studying the lives and backgrounds of the victims. He would also put his mind to the ‘summer sniffs’ clue at every available moment, and finally get round to visiting the summit of Dale Head to look for blood-stains.

Now that he had a plan to work to, however small or inept, he felt better. He had always found that if he worked hard at something, even though he appeared to be getting nowhere, something relevant would come out of the blue to assist the cause, as though the very act of working at it set up some invisible vibrations that triggered something somewhere else. It was all very mysterious and other-worldly, and he didn’t believe in that, yet his ‘vibrations’ hypothesis had never failed the test.

That afternoon he visited Keswick library and found exactly the book he was looking for. ‘The Serial Killers - a study in the psychology of violence’ by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, proved, on reading, to contain all the elements he was looking for.

After reading its horrific contents, he felt almost ashamed to be human. Its graphic accounts of the heinous acts carried out by people who, unfortunately, were now household names, showed that there was no limit to human depravity.

However, its main purpose was to shed light on the work and methods of the psychological profilers, and to publish their insights into the minds of serial killers. Ben read with alarm that apart from a few isolated historical cases, serial killers have only been appearing, in ever increasing numbers, since the 1960s.

Making copious notes as he went along, Ben felt that he had gained a fundamental understanding of the terrible subject by the time he closed its 349 pages. He then studied his notes, and using a highlighter pen, highlighted the essential basics that he must try to absorb, and work to, and to which he could refer at a glance.

The first lesson he had learned was that in order to find the type of person who kills repeatedly, the usual first step is to identify the type
of victim the killer chooses. Although the killings are apparently motiveless, with the killers not knowing the victims personally, usually the victims had something in common and, could therefore also be categorised by type.

However, finding the commonality could be very difficult as it ranged from the very specific - prostitutes with red hair - to the very broad - they liked shopping in the evening. All this confirmed that he had been right to put the investigation of the victim’s backgrounds as his first step.

While continuing to study his notes and the book, Ben also determined to watch every police programme on television. His patience was rewarded when the second of a Thursday evening’s crop of four threw up a scene in which a harassed police chief stood in front of a board on which he had written in large letters:

WHY

WHEN

WHERE

HOW

He was berating his team of detectives for not concentrating on basic investigative procedure. ‘We know the When, the Where, the How,’ he snarled. ‘My goddamned grocer could tell me that from reading the papers. But we are not even getting close to the Why…and why not? Because you’ve forgotten the first rule of investigation! And what might that be Baker?’

He glared at an unsuspecting rookie detective sitting at the back.

The rookie stood up, swallowed, and said: ‘Identify the victim, Chief. Then link the victim to the killer ...somehow.’

‘Smart boy,’ the Chief shouted. ‘Now let’s get out there and do it for Christ’s sake. You know what to do - don’t ya? Knock on neighbours’ doors, visit friends, talk to her frigging dentist. I want to know everything about this poor woman by tomorrow night...got me.’

Miraculously, by the next scene, the Chief had all the information he wanted, and he eventually went on to capture the killer after the inevitable car chase.

Ben knew it wasn’t going to be quite as easy as that, but once again, he had confirmation that the victim was the right place to start. Initially, that meant ploughing through all the police records again to see if there was any victim commonality. He was beginning to think that, as with so many difficult endeavours, it might be perspiration rather than inspiration that eventually brings results.

Before starting his examination of the police records he typed some headings into a database on his computer: Name. Address. Sex. Age. Height. Weight. Nationality. Married. Single. Retired. Divorced. Children. Religion. Politics. Member Of. Hobbies. Travel. Sport. Military. Relatives. Enemies.

He felt sure that he hadn’t covered everything, but knew he could add to it as he went along.

The journey through the police records, extracting and typing the relevant information on to the database, was long and painstaking. And eventually it was disappointing. The information held on most of the victims was very sketchy, leaving many of his database columns incomplete. The exception was Mrs Elaine Fraser. Presumably because she was the wife of a government minister, whose death had caused a big investigation, she had warranted special attention. Indeed, reading through the files, the police had paid much more attention to Mrs Fraser than Ben had given them credit for. They had looked in depth at her life as well as that of her husband’s, but clearly, had found nothing that warranted a suspicion of murder, or a motive for murder. Not surprisingly, the proposition that she and her husband could be the random victims of a serial killer had not been mooted.

In Mrs Fraser’s case, Ben had been able to fill every column of his database, and add some more that the police had covered, such as Medical History. On the face of it, there was nothing in Mrs Fraser’s data to suggest that she was any particular type
of person, and there was nothing to link her with any of the other victims at this stage.

Ben now knew that he would have to contact the families of the other victims to obtain more background information. As he contemplated this unwelcome task, his natural reticence was cast aside when he read in his notes that there was ‘always a connection between victims, usually simple in retrospect, because the killer is usually simple-minded.’ He was also encouraged to ‘study the minutiae of events in all cases.’

He felt as though he was about to embark on a very long journey. He decided to start it close to home, by visiting Tessa’s friends and neighbours to see if they could fill in her data gaps, and then he would head for the place of her death - Dale Head.

*

After a morning for the Tribune, a clear afternoon saw Ben taking the same route as Tessa on her last walk up Dale Head. He parked his car at the slate quarry and trudged the hour-long steep climb to the top.

As he climbed, he recalled some of the con-versations he had had with her friends and neighbours as he collected information from them, in the guise that it was going to be used in some future article about her.

Nothing surprising had come out of it. They all confirmed she was a beautiful, gifted person. His questions had brought tears to the eyes of an elderly neighbour who recalled that she had been ‘a lovely girl’, a term Ben thought very fitting for the ever-youthful Tessa.

Having filled almost all her database categories, he compared them with those of Mrs Fraser. Apart from the obvious commonality of sex, and height, he could see no apparent connection between the two of them and, as yet, no indication of the joint characteristics that would group them into a particular type of person.

As he approached the summit, his mind switched to the constantly nagging riddle of ‘summer sniffs.’ After days of contemplating it at every spare moment, and coming up with some bizarre, and fruitless explanations, he was beginning to dread putting it back in his mind. He was finding it hard to get to sleep because of it, and was waking up with it still gnawing away.