The Stranger You Know (10 page)

‘So he didn’t bother cutting her hair for the sake of it. That must mean there’s a practical reason for him to do it,’ I said. ‘He didn’t need to, with Maxine.’

‘Maybe the short hair attracted him to her in the first place,’ Peake suggested.

‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? We don’t know what attracted him.’ Godley sighed. ‘You’ve had less time than this lot to look into your victim’s life, Andy, but tell us what you know anyway.’

The inspector’s ears coloured slightly as everyone turned to look at him. He liked being important but not being put on the spot, I thought. Power but not pressure.

‘Maxine Willough by was twenty-nine. She was Australian, from some tiny town in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and she’d been living in London for nine months. She worked near Covent Garden, in the marketing department of an insurance company. She didn’t have anything to do with clients or the public – it was more of a backroom job. Her colleagues liked her. She worked hard, and long hours. No boyfriend and it became a standing joke with her colleagues that she needed to find a good Englishman. She didn’t seem to be trying to meet anyone. The word her colleague used was “asexual”. When she joined the company, the single men all tried it on with her but she wasn’t interested or didn’t notice.’

‘Maybe she wasn’t interested in men,’ I suggested.

‘Not a lesbian. I asked. One of her colleagues was, and Maxine found the whole subject agonising in case she said the wrong thing.’

‘Both Kirsty and Maxine had accents,’ Burns said.

‘Everyone has an accent. You have an accent. There’s no such thing as a neutral voice.’ Una Burt didn’t even look to see if the sergeant minded being corrected. I was starting to realise that she wouldn’t have been upset to be told she was wrong so she assumed everyone else felt the same way. The important thing to her was being accurate.

Burns cleared his throat. ‘I mean, they were both from places with distinctive accents. Maybe he spoke to them on the phone.’

‘Does anyone know about Anna? No?’ Godley turned to me. ‘Make sure you ask her friends and colleagues about the way she spoke. We can get the phone records for all three and see if there are any common numbers.’

That sounded like a fun job. I didn’t mind asking the question but I would rather poach my eyes in lighter fluid than spend days reading reams of numbers.

Bradbury continued. ‘Maxine wasn’t your stereotypical Aussie. She was shy and reserved, young for her age. The big city intimidated her. She picked Whitechapel as a place to live without knowing very much about it and she found it hard to settle in.’ I thought of the street stalls that lined the main road in Whitechapel, the market sellers shouting in hundreds of languages, the sense that thousands of lives were being lived all around you. Coming from a quiet rural community, Maxine must have been dazed.

‘Why did she stay there?’ Godley asked.

Bradbury shrugged. ‘She could afford it.’

‘I think she was too proud to admit to her folks she’d made a mistake in moving there,’ Peake said gently. It was a sensitive reading of Maxine’s decision to stay where she was. I knew people who loved Whitechapel, who wouldn’t live anywhere else, but I still thought she’d have been happier elsewhere.

‘I don’t have this on a PowerPoint display, but these are the crime-scene pictures.’ Bradbury skimmed them across the table, laying them out so we could all see them. ‘Carnations underneath the body. White, of course. But she was naked.’

She was covered with a sheet, not exposed. The bed was surrounded with tea lights this time, ten or twelve of them, all burnt out. The carpet was cream and not new, marked in various places with stains that didn’t look recent. Her room was neat but the furniture was as cheap as it gets.

‘Any DNA?’

‘Nothing.’ Bradbury corrected himself. ‘Nothing fresh.’

‘They could at least have replaced that carpet between tenants,’ Groves muttered.

‘No sign of a break-in. No mention to friends or family that she’d recently met someone, as far as we can tell. Unlike Kirsty, she didn’t seem to have any hobbies. She wasn’t the kind to go out and join clubs.’

There was something desperately pathetic about the girl who’d travelled to the other side of the world to live in a grotty flat in Whitechapel, alone, and work hard at a job where her colleagues thought her awkward and immature. It was a rite of passage for young people from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but they tended to flock together, taking over whole neighbourhoods and creating their own version of London. Maxine hadn’t made it to her own group. And lone animals were more vulnerable outside the herd.

‘Okay. Wait.’ Burns was snapping his fingers. ‘I’m getting an idea.’

‘Brace yourselves,’ Groves said.

‘Colours. Places.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘
Black
heath.
White
chapel.
Green
Lanes.’ He looked triumphant. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think there are a lot of places in London with colours in their names,’ Groves said. ‘A hell of a lot.’

‘And it was Lewisham, you said, not Blackheath.’ Una Burt was flipping back through her notes to check, her forehead puckered.

‘Greenwich. Redbridge. Limehouse. Blackfriars. Bethnal Green. Wood Green. White City.’ Groves sounded as if he was going to go on all night, and Godley spoke over him.

‘Is there anything else anyone would like to share? Any ideas?’

‘Plenty of ideas, but they don’t lead anywhere,’ Peake said. ‘Every time we come up with a way to find him, he’s already thought of it and avoided it. Everywhere we look, he’s missing. No DNA. No CCTV. No parking tickets. Nothing that links the victims. Nothing that tells us why he chose them and not someone else. He hasn’t left us anything but dead women. It’s like he knows how we think.’ I could hear the bitterness in his voice, the frustration at two months of getting nowhere. ‘It’s like he’s better at this than we are.’

We were all thinking it, but Bradbury said it.

‘It’s like he’s one of us. A police officer.’

Godley shuffled his papers, looking down so I couldn’t catch his eye. I switched my attention to Burt, who had a bland, inscrutable expression on her face. The smallest suspicion was starting to form in my mind.

But it was clearly ridiculous.

‘He could be a copper,’ Groves said. ‘We thought of that. He could have got in by pretending he needed to ask them questions.’

‘It would fit in with them doing what they were told,’ Una Burt said.

‘He’d be used to ordering people around.’ Burns was looking bleak.

We contemplated the idea in silence, until Groves spoke again.

‘The gaps are getting shorter. Seven months to two months. He’s getting more confident. You know what that means.’ We all did, but he said it anyway. ‘We don’t have long before he does it again.’

Chapter 9

Having wimped out at the house when Dr Hanshaw was doing his worst, I made a point of attending Anna Melville’s post-mortem and managed not to disgrace myself by fainting or throwing up or acting as if it bothered me to see her turned inside out. I found it was easier in the morgue, where she was out of her own context. It turned her body into an object of scientific interest rather than something that had once lived and felt and breathed. And Hanshaw was on better form in his own environment as he methodically unravelled all of Anna Melville’s secrets. I stood beside Godley, my hands in the pockets of my coat, well back from the action but with a grandstand view nonetheless. I had been at enough post-mortems to know what to expect, so none of it came as a surprise.

Except for one part.

‘Your victim was
virgo intacta
. No sign of sexual assault, no sign of sexual activity at all.’

‘At her age? Seriously?’ I was struggling to believe it.

‘So it seems. Maybe she was saving herself for the right man,’ Hanshaw suggested.

I batted it back. ‘But she found Mr Wrong.’

‘Please, don’t. All we need is for the papers to start calling him that.’ Godley was looking pained, as well he might. The news had got out that there was another death, which meant there was a serial killer stalking single women. That was a headline-grabbing development in itself, but then, at the press conference Godley had reluctantly given, a tabloid reporter had christened him the Gentleman Killer.

Godley
hated
it.

Now he shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. We know he doesn’t interfere with his victims but there has to be a sexual element to it – dressing them up like that, cutting the hair. He gets a kick out of what he does.’

‘Maybe he can’t have sex with them,’ I said. ‘Or maybe he isn’t prepared to risk leaving body fluid and skin cells on the victims, if he’s scared we’ll find his DNA. He was extracareful about cleaning up, which suggests we have him on file somewhere. When I’m back in the office, I’ll have a look through the CRIS reports for anything that sounds similar in any respect – strangulation and not necessarily to death, cutting hair, removing eyes – all the combinations.’

‘You’ll be swamped. There’ll be too much for you to review alone.’

‘I can get someone to help me. Colin Vale would be good.’ It was the sort of task that was pure grinding tedium. That made Colin light up with excitement.

‘Colin’s busy.’

And I decide who does what on my team
, I filled in silently.

‘He must be very controlled,’ Dr Hanshaw said, and I was grateful to him for breaking the awkward silence that had fallen. ‘This would be the high point of his sexual gratification, if that’s why he does it. Not touching them, not touching himself – doesn’t that spoil it for him?’

‘The crime scenes suggest someone in command of the situation, someone prepared to take their time to achieve what they imagined. I don’t pretend to understand the psychology but I know there’s a kind of killer who gets off on reliving the thrill afterwards, like Ted Bundy. Killing is the risky part, with the highest likelihood of being caught. Once he’s done it and got away, he can indulge himself at his leisure.’ Godley sighed. ‘Maybe fiddling with them isn’t the point of what he’s doing. But I would dearly love to know what is.’

‘It might just be killing them. And leaving them for us to find as he wants us to find them,’ I risked.

‘Controlling how we see them.’ Godley nodded. ‘The hair depersonalises them. Maybe that’s what he wants. It’s a pretty powerful signifier of femininity. Cutting it off, dressing them in white, lighting candles, women who have sworn off men – what does that say to you?’

‘Becoming a novice.’

‘A bride of Christ,’ Godley said.

‘You know, He wasn’t on my list of suspects up to now.’

It was a joke, but Godley didn’t laugh. ‘That’s rather the trouble. There doesn’t seem to be a list. These three women – nothing overlaps.’

‘There’ll be something,’ Hanshaw said, lifting a glistening object out of her chest and placing it into a bowl to be weighed. ‘He’s not picking them at random.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Godley asked.

‘I saw how he left the others. He’s a perfectionist. He wants conformity. So they’ll have something in common that attracted his attention, even if you can’t see it yet.’

‘I never thought I’d wish for a common-or-garden murderous rapist,’ Godley said. ‘At least it’s easy to understand what motivates them.’

‘But if we can understand what he’s trying to do with the way he leaves the bodies, we should be a lot closer to finding him,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s the common-or-garden murderous rapists who go undetected for years because they just do their straightforward raping and killing and fade away into the night. This guy is making it complicated, which gives us more to go on.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t been killing for years? Decades, even?’ Godley’s voice was cold. ‘Kirsty Campbell is the first one we can link to him directly, but she won’t be the first of his victims. He’ll have done something to someone before that, even if it wasn’t murder. And you should know that, Maeve.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hanshaw glance at us, then share a look with his assistant.
Not you too …

I kept the hurt out of my voice. ‘That’s why I wanted to look at the CRIS reports. He’s specialised in his MO to the point where we should be able to find a pattern and watch him escalate. He’s making that easy for us.’

Godley’s jaw was tight. ‘He’s making it a hell of a lot more complicated. If you knew—’ He stopped.

‘If I knew what?’

‘Not now. Not here.’

I knew better than to argue with a superior officer so I shut up and watched the completely routine remainder of the post-mortem while I tried to think of a polite way to tell him everyone thought we were shagging and could he please stop making cryptic remarks all the time as it was making a bad situation worse.

I failed.

When the PM was over, Godley went back to the office but sent me in the opposite direction to Anna Melville’s place of work in the City, so I was alone with my thoughts and several hundred strangers on the Underground. It was a long, dull journey. The train was slow, held up by signal problems way up the line, and we stopped between stations. I tested how much I could find out just by looking at my fellow passengers. What they read, and what they carried, and what they wore. Work ID cards were a gift: name, job title, office address … what more could you need? It was the perfect environment for hunting, proximity allowing fleeting intimacy. And it was so easy to follow someone without being noticed in the surge of people coming and going through the maze of corridors and escalators at every station. I wondered if that was all the killer had needed to do – sit on the train and wait. Look for the feminine, submissive kind of woman, the sort who stood back to let others get on first. The ones who blushed if you stood beside them. The ones who read books about falling in love. The ones who couldn’t help staring at kissing couples wistfully, when everyone else in their immediate environment was trying not to yak. The ones who would make ideal, obedient victims.

I got off the train at Bank and came out into the fresh air in the shadow of the venerable Bank of England itself. I noticed, as always, the sudden upsurge in wealth that distinguished the Square Mile from the rest of central London. The bars advertised twenty types of champagne, the women wore immaculate suits and carried bags worth multiples of my salary, everyone walked fast and talked loudly in acronyms that were meaningless to me. The City was all about money, making it for other people and for yourself, and it was so far removed from my world that I felt as if I’d landed in another country. Disorientating too was the sense that the glass-and-steel modernity was just the latest layer of development. The history of the place lived in the street names and the idiosyncratic angles they took along medieval byways. Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire had started in 1666. Cheapside. Tokenhouse Yard. Threadneedle Street. The old thriving life of the city seemed to stir in the shadows, the names a reminder of a time when trade was in the things that kept you alive, like bread and poultry, not futures and securities.