Only Darkness (30 page)

West was looking at the fence, and called. Behind the shrub, the wire was pulled away at the bottom, leaving a gap easily large enough for an adult to get through. There were stains on the wire. She thought.
Quickly, woman!
‘Get Berryman!’ she shouted to West. ‘Quick.’ Her gestures transmitted any of the message the storm obscured. She turned to McCarthy, pointed to the cover of the drain. ‘Help me get this thing open.’ It took two of them to shift the heavy bar holding the cover down.

They were dragging the cover off with an improvised lever as Berryman ran up with Curran. Lynne shone her torch
inside. A ledge, just about four feet below the opening, and a deep dark shaft. There were dark stains on the ledge, and something that looked like crumpled paper. She shone her torch down the shaft. Water, just a few feet down, dirty and stinking, and … something floating, weed, rags, no, hair, a woman’s long hair, a woman was under the water in the shaft.

Neave could see the cars by the station, the blue lights flashing, the officers keeping back the small crowd that had gathered even in the appalling weather. He ran up to the entrance. One of the officers was someone he knew. He couldn’t remember the name. ‘They phoned me,’ he said.

The man looked doubtful, but didn’t try to stop him as he pushed through. He sprinted down the ramp. He could see lights along the line, bobbing as though the people carrying them were running. He ran on, wiping the rain out of his eyes. The lights grouped ahead of him, stopped, but seemed to be getting no nearer. Then he was there. The rain was slowing now, and he could see them clearly, the men working in the open drain, Lynne and Berryman standing to one side, Berryman talking urgently into his radio, the light of the signal hanging like a green eye above them. He looked back up the track and saw the figure of Tim Godber on the bridge, watching, hands raised to his face.
Flash!
Lynne turned. She came and stood with Neave and they watched together as West and McCarthy lifted the lifeless body of Deborah Sykes on to the ground by the track.

Berryman was tired – more tired than he could remember being. It was a mess. Loose ends flapping around, and no way to tie half of them up quickly. They’d searched the drain after the river level dropped. They’d found the body of a man down there. He wore blue overalls that had ripped on the sleeve and caught on a broken rung set into the wall of the inspection pit. He had cuts – they looked as though they’d been inflicted with a knife – on his hands and legs, but he’d almost certainly drowned, hooked on the metal as the river flooded in. The postmortem would confirm it. There was nothing on him to identify him. Lynne’s late – almost too late – findings about William Stringer would give them a starting point, and Berryman hoped, a finishing point, at last.

They’d inspected the river outfalls from the storm drains. They were fitted with grilles to stop people going into them, but one had been tampered with, the bolts holding it cut through and replaced. It made an easy entrance and exit to and from the track side.

He pressed his hands over his eyes, trying to keep himself awake. The scene by the track came vividly into his mind again – the torchlight catching the rain, reflecting on the wet gravel, illuminating the woman on the ground, her face grey, tinged with blue; illuminating the figures of McCarthy and Curran, trying to hold on to any spark of life that was left. He was cursing himself inside –
too late, too late
– aware of Neave, frozen beside him. He remembered the sound of running feet as the paramedics arrived, he could see them crouched over the body on the ground, and then the words –
OK, OK, that’s it, she’s still with us.
And the scene began to move again.

He sighed and reached for the phone.

A light, unbearably bright, a harsh, metallic voice, cutting in and out. DEB-ah -orAH. Everything ached. A sharp, chemical smell. Something moaned.—AKE up! COME ON, De—

Blackness.

The light. Things clattering near her head. The pain. She tried to say something and gagged and choked on an obstruction in her throat. ‘It’s all right, Deborah. Just lie still. You’re in hospital,’ as the obstruction was pulled away. Voices in the background.
I think that’s it … Is she … Early to say
… She tried to move, but hands pressed on her shoulders. ‘Just stay where you are, Deborah. Keep still. You’re fine. You’re in hospital.’

That’s stupid. I can’t be fine. I can’t move.

Gina put down her knitting.
It’s all in the head,
she said, smiling. But there was someone behind her. She wanted to warn her mother,
Look out!
but her throat hurt too much. She sank back on to the pillow. The tunnel was rushing past her, she was being swept down and away by the water. She was trapped. She would never get out, get away.
Deborah Sykes,
Gina said, nodding her head thoughtfully.
Half-hourly obs.
She was walking away. She didn’t know Debbie was trapped, didn’t know that a giant was chasing her through the tunnels. She crashed into the pain. Someone was moaning. Blackness.

A moment of clarity. She was lying flat on a bed. Her head hurt more than anything she’d ever felt, an icy, gripping pain. Her arms felt cold and heavy. The room was dimly lit, and there was a faint humming sound. A terrible sense of desolation. She could see the drip stand above her and the line running down from it. She couldn’t turn her head. Someone was holding her hand. She moved her eyes. Rob was sitting beside the bed, his arms resting on the cover, one hand holding hers, one hand supporting his head which drooped forward. She squeezed his hand. He leaned quickly towards her. She tried to smile, but it didn’t feel as though it worked. He looked across the bed, at someone or something she couldn’t see, then she was walking down the corridor
behind a tall bulky figure. She couldn’t get past. She could see Rob walking ahead, away into the distance. He wouldn’t turn round.
I shouldn’t expect too much at the moment,
Gina was smiling again.
Mum,
Debbie wanted to say,
I was trapped and I couldn’t get out,
but the words wouldn’t come. She felt tears trickling down the side of her face, into her hair, her ears. Someone wiped them away. She drifted off into darkness.

Berryman was reading the folder on William Stringer that Lynne had given him, expanded now with more details that had come through in response to her requests. The death of Charles Howard, Stringer’s stepfather, the death of a violent man with a history of alcoholism, hadn’t attracted much attention. Berryman got the impression of a cursory investigation coupled with a
good riddance.
If they’d suspected anything, they’d suspected the wife.
If we’d had these facts
… He went through the case in his mind again. Was there any way they could have come up with this name earlier? With hindsight, probably. In the maze of confusion they’d been working in? Probably not. And the Goldthorpe link. Gina Sykes’s death. Berryman wasn’t a man to castigate himself needlessly, but – should they have seen the link earlier?

They
had
seen it – that was the point. Had they done enough? It was tenuous, it was being investigated, and Deborah Sykes, warned and watched, should have been safe. What series of mischances had put her alone on the station platform?
That
was what should never have happened. He remembered Neave’s haunted face, and wondered if he was going to be able to ask him the question. Why hadn’t he been there?

Lynne Jordan came in, carrying a cup and a sheaf of papers. ‘Coffee, sir,’ she said, putting a cup in front of him. ‘You looked like you needed it.’ She put a piece of paper in front of him. He read it.

‘Right, we’ve got a match with the fingerprints. He’s the one who left those prints on Lisa’s bag. They’re checking the other stuff now. We need a positive identification. Have you got a current address for Stringer?’

‘We’re checking.’ There were other things she needed to know. ‘Any news about Deborah?’

Berryman shook his head. ‘I’ve left Curran there for the moment. The medics said she wasn’t likely to come round properly tonight, and even if she does, she won’t be fit to talk to us.’

Lynne had been at the hospital for a while but hadn’t heard the doctors’ verdict. ‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘They think so. They wouldn’t commit themselves, of course. She was in a bad way – concussion, hypothermia, broken ribs, cuts and bruises, shock. No skull fracture, though. Anyone who’s taken on board as much of the Morebrook as she has is going to need watching, but apparently there was less muck in the storm drain – it was rain water rather than river water. No, it’s wait and see.’

The house was large, a three-storey Victorian terrace. The small front garden was overgrown, a tangle of dead vegetation twining through the railings, a dark funereal shrub obstructing the gate. The low wall leaned outwards, pushed by roots and the weight of the damp earth. The windows looked on to the road, black and empty. The downstairs front was empty – no furniture, bare boards, when Lynne peered in through the sagging bay.

They went round the back, which showed signs of habitation, signs of exit and entry. Rubbish bins overflowed on to the sparse, muddy grass and broken asphalt. The light from the moon streamed down from a sky that was now clear, but an iron fire escape from the next house in the row cast a shadow over the yard. There was a smell of damp and decay. A curtain was pulled across one of the basement windows, and Berryman knocked at the door. There was no response. He tried again, and then signalled to Lynne as he heard footsteps and the rattling of a key in the door.

A young man, naked apart from a towel wrapped round his waist, stood blinking at them. He smelt of beer, and a frowsty mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and unwashed bodies hung in the doorway. He seemed confused, half asleep. Lynne showed her card. ‘William Stringer?’ But she already knew
the answer. This man was too young. He shook his head and gestured towards the stairs. He said he was a lodger, had lived there for just under a year. He was planning to move on. He didn’t like it here, didn’t like Stringer, his landlord. A minute convinced them that this man knew nothing. West stayed with him, and they continued through the house, up the stairs from the basement, into the entrance hall.

Bare boards and peeling wallpaper, the smell of damp and emptiness. Lynne tried the light switch. Nothing. She shone her torch round. There were rooms to either side of the front door, and a room behind them at the end of the corridor. Empty, apparently long empty, and neglected. McCarthy indicated the stairs, and they went up, Lynne slightly ahead, shining her torch off the walls and ceiling. The stairs led to a landing with three doors off it. McCarthy pushed the door to his right open. A bathroom. The light worked in here. The bulb was bare. A damp towel lay on the floor. The bath was not boxed in. There were rust stains round the plug hole where the tap dripped. The basin and the wall above it – no mirror – were spattered with white flecks. There was a sour smell of damp cloth, overlaid with a faint, sweet smell.

The room to the left was a small room that overlooked the front of the house. It was dusty and empty. The last room showed signs of habitation. A bed, a chair, a rug in front of a two-bar electric fire. There were shelves against one wall with piles of magazines, some books. Lynne looked at them. They were railway magazines, mostly, going back over several years. A few pornographic magazines that Lynne thought were probably imported. She flicked through the pages – women tied and chained, exposed, helpless, flesh bulging against tight bonds. Penetrations with sharp heavy implements. Pain and screaming, simulated or real. It was evidence. She looked at McCarthy. His face registered distaste.

Lynne looked at the shelves again. Underneath them, folded against the wall, was a loft ladder. Their eyes went up to the trap door in the ceiling.

There was something clinical, sterile about the way the light bounced off the white walls, that contradicted the heavy, sweet smell of decay that pervaded the loft. It made the
investigating team recoil as they arrived, made Berryman shake his head in disgust. It caught at Lynne’s throat and made her gag, but her eyes were drawn and held by the perfection of the railway, the miniature landscape that was laid out in front of her. The minute tracks ran between carefully sculpted hills and valleys, platforms and stations meticulously replicated, waterways, bridges and roads appearing and disappearing as they impinged on the line. A child’s toy, a plaything, become a playground for a monster. She thought about the labyrinth and the minotaur, the young women who were pursued to their deaths through the maze where the monster lived and fed.

He had known his playground well, had known the entrances and exits, had enticed his victims into his game of hide and seek. She heard a whistle of amazement from McCarthy behind her. ‘A train anorak. A fucking train anorak.’ She left him to marvel over the models.

She moved round the room, touching nothing, looking. She saw the computer with its pages of print-outs – timetables, freight schedules, dates, places, notes. She saw the overalls hanging against the wall, stained and stiffened, the pockets distorted. The smell was stronger here. She was glad, later, that it was other people who had to look closely at them, analyse the stains, empty the pockets.

She saw the file of newspaper clippings. She looked at the board that hung on the wall above the entrance to the loft. It was the first thing she had seen as she had climbed through the trap door. Lisa, Kate, Mandy, Julie stared back at her, their mutilated pictures somehow more shocking than the pictures she saw every day in the incident room. And at the end of the row, Deborah Sykes, her picture almost torn to shreds where the sharp pins had been pulled through it.

In the days that followed, there were loose ends to sort out. William James Stringer was the Strangler, and the Strangler was dead. Berryman doubted that the coroner would record anything other than accidental death against his name. The loft, which the newspapers used as a Bluebeard’s chamber to hang their stories on, gave up some secrets. The file that
Lynne had seen, consisting mostly of newspaper cuttings, filled in some of the gaps in the story. It began with a birth certificate, that telling certificate that marked disgrace in those days, not so very long ago. Lynne wondered why Susan Stringer had kept her son. Had she loved him? She must have done, surely. Then, records of a marriage. Susan Stringer and Charles Howard. Howard was a local celebrity, a minor name on the boxing circuit. A newspaper photograph of the bride and groom, Susan Stringer smiling adoringly up at the face of her husband to be. A small child was half obscured by the edge of the frame. Records of work. Trains. Howard was a driver, and someone had recorded the schedules he worked, the routes he followed, the run from the freight yards to the docks at Hull at the end of each month.

A newspaper report, a case of child cruelty. A depressingly familiar story of beatings, burnings, neglect. A mother who denied her son had been hurt by anyone.
He’s careless, he falls.
Her ignorance admonished but excused, his cruelty punished by a short prison sentence. Lynne wondered what cruelties were unknown and unspoken behind the routine indignation of the reports. Another cutting, this one almost falling to pieces –
Darnall monster dies.
The death of the stepfather. And then, many years later, the death of the mother.
Local woman dies in blaze.
William Stringer had lived quietly with his mother, it seemed, until her death when he was forty-five. The psychologist put his late eruption into psychosis down to this. She had held him in a state of arrested development, the psychologist speculated, until her death, when he finally broke free.