Strange Blood (25 page)

‘Did you get the impression she didn't really want to go home, then?' Todd asked. ‘What I mean is, was she lonely, being on her own?'

The woman shook her head. ‘She never said so. She had plenty of friends.'

Todd leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. ‘And yet nobody missed her for four days?'

The woman closed her eyes, the crows' feet at their corners deepening as she tensed up. ‘That was my fault,' she whispered. ‘We were supposed to be going away for the weekend but I had to cancel because my son and his wife needed me to babysit.'

A uniformed WPC came into the room with a tray of tea and the woman took one, cradling it in her hands.

‘Mrs Green, this might sound like an odd question,' Megan ventured, ‘but can you remember exactly what your friend was wearing when you last saw her?' She caught Dave Todd's sideways glance.

‘Well, yes, I
think
I can.' The woman frowned. ‘It was a navy knee-length skirt and a patterned blouse. It was a nice blouse;
Marks & Spencer's.
She wore it a lot.' The woman paused, chewing on her lip. ‘And she'd bought a pair of new shoes. I remember her commenting on how comfy they were, considering they were new. They were red.'

*   *   *

So they'd found her at last. Not such a mess as the first one, but pretty gruesome viewing, nonetheless. That black reporter had scooped the Beeb, getting an interview right outside the shop. And it was on the front page of the evening paper.
BLACK MAGIC KILLER CLAIMS THIRD VICTIM.
Another cutting to add to the collection. It was getting easier and easier. Just two more days to go and there'd be a number four. Who would she be, this starin-waiting? One woman had already passed the audition. Wouldn't even need following home. Her address was there on the desk, in black and white.s

Chapter 18

‘Pendleton is a community living in fear.' Delva Lobelo was standing in the main square of the precinct. In the background were groups of sombre-faced shoppers and on her right was a woman in overalls. ‘Joining me now is Molly Hutchins,' Delva announced. ‘Molly works at Pendleton Pantry.' She turned to the woman. ‘Molly, what's the atmosphere been like over the past few days?'

Megan was sitting in front of the television in her pyjamas. The coffee table in front of her was littered with the lists and charts she had spent all night compiling. Everything she knew about Tessa Ledbury, Joanna Hamilton and Susan Thompson had been fed in to the computer and crosschecked.

She stared at the image on the TV screen. The woman from Pendleton Pantry was saying how shocked she had been by the news that a body had been lying in a room just yards away from the café; that someone who, like herself, lived and worked in the precinct could be dead for four days without anyone realising.

But someone did,
Megan thought grimly. Yesterday Dave Todd and the rest of the team had made endless phone calls and house-to-house visits. She had been with him to the flats on either side of the electrical shop. No one had seen or heard anything. Nor had there been any reports of anyone suspicious hanging around outside. Hardly surprising, really, Megan thought, given that the murder had taken place above a busy shopping precinct where strangers were coming and going all day long.

She picked one of the lists from the pile on the table. It showed aspects of the murders and details about the victims that were consistent across all three cases. All had been stabbed in the chest at least thirty times with a knife; all had been found with a white dishcloth of the same make and design in their mouths; all had lived in homes whose front or back doors were fitted with a Yale-type lock – the kind an experienced burglar would have no trouble picking – and all were last seen within a half-mile radius of Pendleton shopping precinct.

There were other details that differed in each case: the ages of the women spanned three decades; Tessa had blonde hair, Joanna's was dark brown and Susan's a pepper-and-salt mixture of grey and black; one woman was a married mother of young children, another a single lesbian and the third a widow with a grown-up daughter. There were far more differences between the women than there were similarities, Megan reflected.

She thought about Foy's theory of an occult connection. Nothing had been found in Susan Thompson's house to suggest an interest in anything of that nature. And her friend at the surgery had told them that Susan was the sort of woman who wouldn't even read her horoscope because she thought it was ‘a load of tripe'.

She looked again at the list of similarities between the women. Although Tessa and Susan were naked and Joanna fully-clothed, all of them were barefoot when their bodies were found. Susan's clothes, like Tessa's, had been lying in a pile at the side of the bed, but – as had been the case for both Tessa and Joanna – there were no shoes or slippers on the floor. The shoes Susan's friend remembered her wearing were in a cupboard in the hall along with an assortment of other footwear. Was it significant that two of the victims had been wearing red shoes when last seen alive? Megan frowned. If only she knew what Tessa had been wearing on her feet. Although she owned a pair of red shoes, no one had been able to recall if she'd had them on when she went to the precinct.

She thought about the style of shoes Joanna and Susan had been wearing. Joanna's were high fashion stilettos, while Susan's were low-heeled
Clark's Springers.
The red shoes Megan had seen in Tessa's house were more like Susan's than Joanna's. The only similarity between all three pairs was the colour, and the fact that they were proper shoes with covered toe sections rather than sandals.

Megan reached for the mug of lukewarm coffee that had kept her from nodding off in front of the TV. She had come across shoe fetishists during her research on sex offenders. One particular case stuck in her mind, of a man who had targeted women on buses in Wolverhampton in the 1950s. Armed with a razor blade, he would sit on the long sideways-facing seats, apparently looking at the floor, but what he was really doing was studying the feet of the women sitting opposite. If he spotted a woman wearing high-heeled ankle-strap shoes he would lean forward, as if to retrieve something he had dropped, and slash at the woman's ankles with the blade. He always waited until the bus was about to stop and he was up and away before anyone realised what he'd done. His victim was left screaming in agony, criss-crosses of blood oozing from her legs. He was eventually caught, but the reason for his bizarre obsession was never discovered because he committed suicide while awaiting trial.

She stared at the list on her lap. Was the killer a man like this? A man fixated by women in red shoes? That would certainly explain why the three victims were so different in every other way. The frenzied nature of the stabbings suggested that the victims represented a woman who aroused uncontrollable rage in the killer. Someone who, in real life, he was unable to murder. But what about the pentagram? What was the significance of that?

With a sigh she replaced the list and picked out another. This one showed the times of the last reported sightings of the three victims, together with estimates of time of death. The latest report on Susan Thompson stated that she had been dead between three and four days when her body was discovered. Joanna's time of death had been even more difficult to pinpoint. But Tessa had died within two hours of leaving Pendleton precinct. Working on the basis that the other women were killed within a similar time frame, Joanna would have been murdered on a Wednesday, early evening and Susan at the same time on a Thursday.

Megan looked at the dates. There had been a murder every week for the past three weeks, with the last sighting of each victim occurring within a twenty-four period between Wednesday and Thursday evening. A chilling thought occurred to her. Tomorrow was Wednesday. Would there be a
fourth
victim by tomorrow night?

She looked at her watch, knowing she should be in her office at the university. Since the meeting with the Vice-Chancellor she had popped in only briefly to collect a pile of exam papers, which now lay untouched in her study. She would phone in and make some excuse.
You're taking a huge gamble.
She grunted, ignoring Patrick's voice inside her head. Yes, it was a gamble. She was risking the wrath of the Vice-Chancellor, possibly her position as head of department, on solving this case. But how could she turn away now?

The sound of Delva's voice drew Megan's attention back to the television. ‘Some news just in,' she announced, ‘is that the team investigating the murders of the three women have re-arrested a man they were questioning at the weekend. The police haven't named the man they've taken into custody. We'll have more on the story in our next bulletin at eleven forty-five.' Delva's face disappeared from the screen as the programme went to a commercial break.

Who was it, Megan wondered? Surely not Sean Raven? He was languishing in a police cell when Susan Thompson was murdered. It must be Justin Preece, then. She pressed Dave Todd's mobile number but his phone was switched off.

*   *   *

Mariel Raven stormed into the foyer of Tipton Street police station dragging a terrified-looking girl in her wake.

‘Where is he?' She shouted at the man behind the glass partition. ‘What have you bastards done with my son?'

The girl began to sob, her large breasts straining the fabric of her dress. A button popped open and she struggled to fasten it, her wet fingers staining the pale pink cotton.

‘She'll tell you!' Mariel Raven grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pushed her towards the desk. ‘Go on!' she yelled. ‘Tell them what you and Justin were doing at six o'clock last Thursday night!'

Dave Todd was called to take the girl's statement. Mariel Raven had been taken off to another room and the girl seemed calmer now she had gone. Her face, streaked with mascara, looked much younger than her eighteen years.

‘Here you are, take one of these.' Todd offered her a box of tissues. ‘Now if you'd rather talk to a woman officer I can arrange for someone else to come and take your statement.'

‘No,' the girl cut in. ‘I just want to get it over with.'

‘Right.' Todd picked up his pen. ‘You said you were with Justin at his mother's house?'

She nodded.

‘Was it just the two of you, or were there other people there?'

‘There were others,' she whispered.

‘And what were you doing?'

The girl bit her lip, her eyes fixed on the graffiti-etched surface of the table. ‘We had sex,' she mumbled.

Todd frowned. ‘You had sex with Justin? And there were other people in the house? Was it a party?'

‘It was for the ritual. The others left the room while we did it.' She blinked and a tear rolled down her cheek. ‘He was cross with me.'

‘Why?' Todd said gently. ‘Why was he cross with you?'

‘Because it hurt me,' the girl sniffed. ‘He didn't know I was a virgin.'

*   *   *

Megan was looking at the list of sex offenders Dave Todd had sent. Something had struck her as she read through the previous convictions of one of the men. Clive Birkinshaw was a rapist. He had been ruled out by Steve Foy's team because he was currently on remand in Winson Green on a charge of GBH.

Birkinshaw had been released from Durham jail just before Christmas after serving six years for attacking a woman in Derby. Before that he had done a stretch at Sudbury for handling stolen goods. It was the dates of that jail term which had caught Megan's attention. The date given for the rape offence meant it had been committed while he was still an inmate of Sudbury. How could that be?

She frowned. Sudbury was an open prison.
Like White-ladies.
What had Bob Spelman said about prisoners on day-release work placements? She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. What if the killer was someone like Birkinshaw? Someone jailed for a minor offence who had graduated to murder while in prison?
The University of Crime
– that's what some of the lifers she'd interviewed called the prison system. It wasn't hard to imagine how fantasies might fester and develop in an atmosphere like that. Birkinshaw must have raped while he was out on day-release. She had to get into Whiteladies. Find out which of the inmates were allowed to work in Pendleton.

She went to call Dave Todd but the phone rang out before she reached it.

‘Meg, it's me.'

‘Ceri!' It was a relief to hear her voice. She'd had her phone switched off for the past two days.

‘I'm coming back tonight, but it won't be until late. I'm going to wait until the kids are ready for bed, then they'll sleep on the journey.'

‘Are you all right?' Megan asked. It was a stupid question. How could her sister be all right after all that had happened in the past few days?

‘I'm fine, honestly,' Ceri replied. She didn't sound it. ‘Do you know what's happened to Justin? They can't still be holding him – not now they've found that other woman?'

‘I don't know what's happening at the moment.' It wasn't really a lie. She didn't know for sure Justin was the one the police had re-arrested.

‘Only he's still not answering his mobile,' Ceri went on. ‘I wanted to try and talk to him – before I see Neil, I mean.'

Megan bit her lip. ‘Do you think that's wise?'

‘I have to get things clear in my head, Meg. I've been all over the place the past couple of days.' There was a pause. ‘Neil's due back at lunchtime tomorrow. Jill down the road's offered to have the kids so we can talk properly.' There was a hollow laugh at the end of the line. ‘She's the only one still speaking to me.'

‘Ceri, you won't go anywhere near Pendleton, will you?'