DANUTA REAH
ONLY DARKNESS

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublisher 1999

Copyright © Danuta Reah 1999

Danuta Reah asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006513155

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007476558

Version: 2016-10-04

Dedication

For my mother, Margaret Kot, who died

before this manuscript was accepted for

publication.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

1

It was a Thursday in December, the night that Debbie saw the killer.

She had just finished her evening class and was on her way out of the college. It was late – about nine-thirty. The students had kept her talking after the class was finished, and by the time she had dumped her books in the staff room and grabbed her coat, Les Walker was standing in the entrance lobby waiting to lock up after her.

He jingled his keys as she approached and tapped his watch meaningfully. ‘Not got a home to go to?’

‘Doesn’t seem much point now,’ she said, looking at her watch in response to his gesture. ‘Sorry. Are you on again first thing?’ Debbie hated keeping people waiting. ‘Have I stopped you from going home?’

Les shook his head. He didn’t seem too put out. ‘No, it’s gone ten by the time we’re finished here. Got to check all the rooms on the top yet.’

He opened the heavy entrance door. A gust of wind pushed it in against him, and a spatter of rain hit the floor. ‘Wild night,’ he observed. ‘Got your car in the top car park? We’ve not locked it yet.’

‘No.’ Debbie looked apprehensively at the shiny dark of the pavement. ‘I’m on the train.’

‘You be careful then.’ Les was serious now. ‘Remember those girls …’

Thanks, Les, I needed that. ‘That was way over outside Doncaster.’

‘Not got him yet. He’ll do it again. That kind of nutter, he’ll keep on till he’s caught. They want hanging, doing something like that, I’ll tell you …’

The sound of feet on the steps outside silenced him, and Rob Neave, the security officer, pushed his way through the door. His hair was plastered to his face with the rain, and water was dripping from his jacket. ‘Finished over here?’ he said to Les. He acknowledged Debbie with a nod.

‘Just got the top floor to do.’ As Rob Neave had overall control of the day-to-day running of the building, and a reputation as a bit of a new broom, the caretakers were wary of him. ‘Just seeing Debbie out. I was telling her …’

The wind gusted again, and the sound of a window swinging back against its hinges stopped him. He looked at Debbie. ‘You be careful, now.’ He disappeared up the stairs, leaving her with Rob Neave.

She finished fastening her briefcase and looked towards the door. ‘I’d better be off,’ she said uncertainly as the wind sent rain spattering across the windows.

‘Are you in the top car park? The lights are out. I’ll walk across with you.’ The car park, late in the evening, was dark and deserted.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks. But I’m on the train.’

He looked at her thoughtfully. She was aware that her mac was only showerproof and her shoes were lightweight for this kind of weather. It was fine this morning! She pulled out her umbrella, and he shook his head and laughed. He held the door open for her and watched her down the steps as she struggled to open her umbrella against the wind, then he closed the door, leaving her to the mercy of the storm.

And it was a storm. The rain was drenching, and the wind carried it round, up, under her umbrella, driving against her, freezing her face as she tried to pull the collar of her coat around her. She hurried down the hill towards the station. She was later than usual, but there was a chance the bad weather might have delayed her train and she had some hope of catching it. If not, she was in for a half-hour wait on a freezing platform. There was a small waiting room, with seats and a wall heater, but it was always locked when the last of the station staff left at nine.

She reached the main road and waited for the lights. It was raining too hard to see clearly if any cars were coming. The air smelt unusually clean. Normally, there was a miasma of car fumes at this junction, but the rain seemed to have cleaned them away. The green man lit up, and she hurried across the road, towards the bridge. She might just do it. As she crossed the bridge, she could hear the river rushing against the narrow banks, swollen by the rain.

Another gust of wind caught her, and she heard the sound of glass shattering. Some insurance jobs tomorrow, she thought, reminding herself to check for fallen roof tiles in the morning. She splashed through the puddle outside the station, and was under cover.

The ticket office was a blank face requesting her to buy her ticket on the train. The screen showing arrivals was a black and white blur – another storm victim. She began to run towards the platform in case her train was in. She hurried down the covered ramp, and then, seeing that there was no train on the platform, slowed down. Had she missed it, or was it late?

The platform was empty, and she began to realize that there was something wrong with the light. It was yellow and flickering, not bright enough. The shadows in the corners were larger and darker, and the waiting room was black. She tried the door. Locked. The opposite platform – the only other platform – was in darkness, and the fair-haired young woman who sometimes shared Debbie’s evening wait on the other side of the rails wasn’t there. There was no one there, so the Doncaster train must have gone.

I didn’t mean to think about Doncaster.

The wind caught the platform sign and sent it rattling on its chain against the pipe work. The rain splashed on the rails, and then stopped. The light flickered again, the strange, yellow light, and then there was silence.

Uneasy, Debbie stood at the edge of the platform looking to see if the train was coming. Her feet crunched in something. She looked down. Glass, broken glass. She remembered the noise of glass breaking as she came over the bridge, and looked round. Up. The glass over the light was broken, and the tube was hanging loose, giving off that dull, flickering light.

That wasn’t the wind. Someone broke that. Someone broke that just as I crossed the bridge. No one came out of the station.

She looked back up the ramp towards the only exit. Her mouth went dry. Someone was standing there at the top of the ramp, not moving, just looking towards her on the platform. She couldn’t see him – it must be a him, he was so big – clearly. The light was behind him. Her sensible brain said, It’s a passenger, don’t be stupid, but the hairs were standing up on her arms, and her heart was thumping. The figure began to move towards her down the ramp.

There’s no way out!

Just then, the sound of the train came up the track. She waited in suspense for its lights in the dark. Her legs felt shaky and she wanted to grab the train door as it went past her, slowing. She pressed the door-open button without waiting for the light, and when the door finally slid open almost fell into the carriage. Then she felt like a fool, and looked out of the window to see what her alarming fellow passenger was doing.

But there was nobody there.

By the time Debbie got home, it was late. She closed her umbrella, shaking it as she did so, and hurried down the passage that led on to the back of the row of small terraced houses. She went in through the kitchen, dumping her coat and umbrella behind the back door, and quickly through to the living room, turned on the gas fire and stood there for a few minutes soaking up the heat. Debbie’s dream was to come back to a warm and welcoming house, but she didn’t have central heating yet, and Debbie couldn’t see when she would be able to afford it. The salary of a young further-education lecturer didn’t allow for luxuries.

The room was starting to warm up now. Debbie looked round it with some pride. She’d bought the house eighteen months ago. It had been, in estate agents’ jargon, in need of modernization. She hadn’t been able to afford rent and a mortgage, so she lived in the house, keeping one room more or less habitable, while the rewiring, plumbing and plastering went on around her. Now it was gradually starting to look the way she wanted it to, and this room was almost finished. Fitted carpets had been beyond her pocket but her mother had offered her the Persian rug from the little-used front room of the house Debbie had grown up in. Debbie accepted the rug, sanded, varnished and sealed the boards herself, and the rug glowed in the middle of the floor. She had changed her mind about a fitted carpet when she had seen how it looked. There was very little furniture in the small room – two easy chairs and a polished table in between. Bookshelves ran up each side of the chimney breast. There were pictures on the walls – a drawing of the woods outside Goldthorpe, and a framed poster for the Monet exhibition that Debbie had seen at the Royal Academy a few years ago. The only other ornaments were a group of photographs on the table.

The photographs were strictly family – her father with a younger Debbie, looking proudly at his daughter as she smiled toothily and waved a trophy. What was that for? The junior swimming gala? Her mother looking unaccustomedly serious in her Open University graduation gown. She’d insisted on having an official photograph taken. I’ve waited long enough for this, she’d told Debbie and her husband. A later picture of her father, taken about a year before he died.

The cat flap sounded its snick-snack rattle, and Debbie’s cat came urgently into the room, tail up, with breathless mews of excitement. She picked it up and went into the kitchen, looking for the tin opener. The cat nibbled her ear and clawed impatiently at her shoulder. She put it on the floor, where it wove in and out between her feet, tripping her up as she filled a dish with food. When the dish was on the floor, the cat single-mindedly put its head down and ate. Debbie hadn’t meant to get a cat. She was out a lot, she needed to go away, it just wasn’t convenient, but when a bedraggled kitten had turned up cowering behind the old shed in the garden, she couldn’t turn it away. It had taken her a week to coax the little animal closer and nearly a week more before she could touch it. After that it began to come in the house. Two weeks later, it was turning its nose up at cheap cat food and ambushing Debbie’s ankles as she went past. She called it Buttercup, because of its yellow tabby coat.

She remembered her wet mac in the kitchen, so she took it into the hall and hung it on a hook. If it didn’t dry in time, she’d just have to wear her jacket tomorrow. She was reluctant to sit down and be quiet. Usually after an evening class, she spent maybe half an hour just winding down, having a glass of wine or maybe a beer, listening to music; and then she would take another glass of wine into the bathroom and run a hot deep bath – setting the water heater to come on early on Thursdays was one of her extravagances – then lie there sipping wine and relaxing. When she felt sleepy, she went to bed, and usually fell asleep in minutes, not waking again until the alarm went off at eight.

She poured herself a glass of wine, went back into the living room and sat down in front of the fire. The memory of that encounter at the station lingered and she couldn’t settle. When she closed her eyes, she could see that strange light. The drumming of the rain on her window became the drumming of the rain on the station canopy. The figure on the platform began to walk towards her and her legs were heavy and she couldn’t move. She tried to call out but her voice was too weak to make any sound. She looked for the train coming in, but the line was gone and a fast-flowing river, smooth and dangerous, ran beside her. She looked at the ground and the river was running underneath her feet. The thin lattice she was standing on began to crumble away. The dark figure was behind her, but she couldn’t see it.

She jerked awake in the chair, the image shattering, the rushing of the river becoming the hiss of the gas fire. It was time she was in bed.

Early next morning, in the small hours, after the storm had blown itself out, a freight train taking a load of scrap from Leeds to Sheffield slowed a bit as the train approached the junction near Rawmarsh, in response to the signal. As it speeded up again beyond the junction, the driver noticed something slumped against a post by the rails. It could have been a sack of rubbish. He radioed through and the call went to the local police to investigate.

‘Where exactly did he say?’ Kevin Naylor walked along the track side and shone his torch along the line towards the bridge. The railway was particularly inaccessible here, and they’d had to bump the car along a muddy bridle path and walk to the bridge.

‘Just beyond the junction.’ His partner, Cath Hill, was fed up. It was cold and wet and she didn’t want to push through the thick undergrowth alongside the track in search of somebody’s dumped rubbish. They’d been heading back for a break when the call had come through. She poked around in the bushes. ‘Enough condoms here to start a factory. It’s along the line, he was coming through the junction, he said. He hadn’t stopped but he’d slowed right down, so it’s probably not too far along. He said something about a post. Let’s get this done and get back to the car.’

As they walked back along the line, playing their torches ahead, the light from the steelworks faded behind them. Cath shone her torch against the bushes. The wet leaves glistened back at her, but the light hardly penetrated the shadows in the thick foliage. Gravel crunched underfoot, and something rustled and moved in the undergrowth. She shone her torch at the sound, but it wasn’t repeated. The wind was getting up again, and Cath had to brace herself as it rattled the leaves, releasing a sudden spatter of rain water. Ahead was a cutting where the track ran into darkness. Cath didn’t fancy going into that narrow space without knowing what was ahead. The hairs on her arms were beginning to rise, and she looked back along the track to make sure she wasn’t alone.

She shone her torch through the gully, playing the light up and down the wet stone. She could see the post now, just beyond the far end, and, yes, there was something bulky lying against it. Her fatigue had gone, and she felt apprehension tightening her stomach. Her senses sharpened. She called to Kevin who was shining his torch into the undergrowth further back along the line. He started in her direction. Cath walked towards the post. She didn’t hurry now because she knew what was there. In the torchlight she could already see fair hair, and as she got nearer she could see the woman’s face oddly shadowed, her eyes great pools of darkness. She moved up to the woman and crouched down in front of her, shining the torch directly into her face.

‘Oh Christ, oh shit!’ She pulled the torch back as Kevin’s shone over her shoulder. She heard his exclamation as he turned away. The lower half of the woman’s face was covered with black tape that had made it appear shadowed from a distance. Her eyes were – not there. She stared at them from bloody sockets, her head held back against the post by the wire twisted tight around her neck.

Rob Neave turned over in bed, woken up by his radio. Half past five, just time for the shipping forecast and Farming Today. He usually woke at this time, early shift or not, and either listened to the radio as he got up, or lay in bed listening as the shipping forecast became the farming programme, and then Today. The farmers were worrying about pigs again this morning. He was getting to be an expert on pigs – the price of pork, anyway. He’d never seen a real pig in his life.

He decided to go in for the seven-thirty start again. There wasn’t too much to be at home for, and if he didn’t have to go to work, he found it hard to get out of bed at all. Didn’t seem much point really. He hadn’t got in until gone ten the night before, listened to some music, drunk a couple of beers. It had been a long day, so he’d made himself something to eat and gone to bed. Sleep hadn’t come easily. He’d turned on the radio in the end and listened through close-down and then the World Service.

He was coming out of the shower, towelling himself when he caught the end of the first news bulletin … The body of a woman was found on railway lines early this morning in South Yorkshire. A police spokesman commented that it is too early to say how the woman had died. Three women have been killed in the South Yorkshire region in the past eighteen months and their bodies left on or near railway tracks …

He listened to the end of the bulletin which just recapped on the killings, but gave no more information about the dead woman. He could see Deborah Sykes in her light mac, struggling to hold her umbrella straight as she had disappeared into the storm the night before. He decided to leave breakfast, and started pulling his clothes on, looking round for his keys and cash. Ten minutes later he was braking for the first set of lights that held him on red in the middle of an empty road.

2

City College, Moreham, is so called because it stands in the centre of the town, five minutes’ walk from the train and bus stations, and just a stone’s throw from the fine medieval church and the chapel on the bridge. The college buildings display a selection of twentieth-century architecture. The North building, the most modern, nearly twenty years old, presents a face of smoked glass to the world; its entrance is hard to find and the casual visitor can get lost in a confusing maze of corridors. The Moore building, the middle sibling, is a box of glass windows and concrete, nearly forty years old, and shabby and depressing. Inside, it is more comfortable. On the other side of the road stands the oldest, and the most beautiful despite its run-down appearance, the Broome building, an elegant art-deco construction with an oak door in its curving facade. Its windows watch you like eyes.

Debbie had overslept, and had arrived at the station two minutes before a train was leaving. She usually read the paper on the journey, but as she hadn’t had time to buy one, she stared out of the window instead. The track side was overgrown with weeds and the high walls were covered with graffiti – mostly incomprehensible and, to the uninformed eye, indistinguishable, tags, and the occasional word. Joke was written in letters about two feet high across a wall covered and over-covered in spray paint. When Debbie had been at college, the graffiti had been political: anti-government slogans, ANC slogans, comments about the Gulf War, even some left over from the bitter miners’ strike – Coal not dole, Thatcher out, Save our pits. Now it seemed to be tagging, a meaningless cry of, I’m here! or the inevitable, Fuck you, Wogs stink, Irish scum.

The train ran on through the industrial East End of Sheffield where the skeletons of the great steelworks were gradually disappearing and the streets and houses looked decayed and defeated. The toy-town dome of Meadowhall shopping centre stood among sprawling acres of car parks, already full. People struggled off the train, other people got on. They looked anxious and tense. The bridge that took the shoppers over the road was seething with people. To the shopping, a sign said. Joke … The train pulled out, past some tumbledown buildings, through areas of green where the canal ran sluggish and black close to the line. Fisto was spray-painted on a stone building, and again on a derelict shed. It looked quite decorative. The spire of Moreham church came into view, and Debbie picked up her bag as the familiar platform ran past her window.

The college day was in full swing when she pushed her way through the crowd of students on the steps leading into the Broome building. The day was fine after the storm of the night before, but cold. The steps served as an informal coffee bar, meeting place and, since the college management implemented a no-smoking policy, a smoking room for students and staff. It didn’t make a particularly attractive venue, as a busy road ran between the buildings, and conversation was interrupted by the noise of cars, and buses pulling away from the stop outside the main entrance. The air always smelt dirty, particularly on cold, still days.

Debbie nodded to Trish Allen, a psychology lecturer and hardened smoker, who was continuing her class through the coffee break with a small group of students, all huddled in a companionable, smoky ring. She saw the lanky figure of Sarah Peterson, one of her A-level students, standing uncertainly in the entrance, drawing awkwardly on a cigarette. Debbie greeted Sarah as she went past and received a quick, eyes-averted smile. She felt tempted to go back out and join the group on the steps, spend ten minutes talking to another human being – something she hadn’t done since nine-thirty the previous night, but she pushed through the double doors into the dark, high-ceilinged corridor beyond.

One of the first people she saw as she pushed through the doors was Rob Neave coming down the stairs towards her, heading out of the building. He stopped when he saw her. ‘Get wet last night?’ he asked. Debbie nodded and he laughed. She began to feel more cheerful.

‘There was something I wanted to ask you about,’ she said. ‘I had a bit of bother last night, during my class.’

‘OK. I’m on my way to a meeting now.’ He pulled an eloquent face. ‘But I’m free later. I’ll come along to your staff room – four-thirtyish?’ He directed a smile at her that made her feel pleasantly buoyant, and she turned towards her staff room. Chatting with Rob Neave was one of the grains of sugar in the otherwise worthy muesli of Debbie’s working life.

The lie on Debbie’s timetable was that Friday morning was her morning off, as payback for her evening class. The lie on her contract was that she worked a thirty-five-hour week. She was usually at her desk by ten on Friday mornings, catching up with her marking and the never-ending paperwork that was now a feature of the job.

She let herself into the small room she shared with Louise Hatfield, who was in charge of the English section which, these days, meant her and Debbie, and the changing faces of part-time staff who were employed through an agency. When Debbie had started at City, the English section had consisted of five members of staff, but financial crises and falling student numbers had led to a series of early retirements, and now there were just Louise and Debbie. ‘There goes my empire,’ Louise had remarked to Debbie at the end of last term. ‘Our days are numbered too. You mark my words, girl.’

Debbie had been hoping that Louise would be in the staff room, but the locked door told her that she must still be teaching – so no one to talk to. She began to sift through the pile of mail on her desk. She was tired. When she’d gone to bed, she hadn’t been able to sleep, and had lain awake listening to the radio until gone three. Now she was at her desk, she couldn’t concentrate. She wanted to talk to someone about the odd scene at the station the previous night, laugh about it to get rid of the lingering feeling of – what? – dread? – that the silent figure had evoked.

Don’t be stupid. It was nothing.

She sighed and turned over the pile of post that had arrived on her desk that morning. Most of it was circulars and advertising from companies selling textbooks and training. Bin the lot. There were a couple of memos, one from the principal about an audit of class registers, and one from the union about the ever present threat of redundancy.

Debbie ran her hand through her hair, worried. She felt vulnerable. She wasn’t sure how she would manage if she lost her job. There was no point in thinking about it for the moment. She had other things on her mind – like marking. She pulled her work folder towards her, and tried to pin back a lock of hair that had freed itself from its confinement of combs. The disturbance brought the whole lot down round her shoulders, and she irritably pulled it back off her face and wound a rubber band round to hold it. Fifteen A-level essays to mark, and about thirty GCSE pieces. She picked up the first one and started reading.

She wasn’t even halfway through at twelve-thirty when hunger drove her over to the canteen in the Moore building.

Fridays usually weren’t too busy in the canteen. Most students didn’t have classes on a Friday afternoon, and a lot of those that did ‘wagged’ it. Debbie collected a mixed salad from the salad bar, struggled with her conscience and got a side order of chips, and looked around for somewhere to sit.

‘Hey, Debbie!’ Tim Godber, media studies lecturer, journalist manqué and at one time a lover of Debbie’s, was waving her over.

‘Hi, Tim.’ Debbie was wary. She’d been very attracted at one time, but once they had fallen into bed together after a departmental party, he’d turned into a game player who’d tried to control and manipulate her through different hoops via charm and indifference, and Debbie was nowadays more put off than interested. They’d gone out for drinks together a couple of weekends ago, and again ended up in Debbie’s bed, but she’d told herself the next morning that that was the last time.

He pushed his hair back from his forehead and moved his empty tray to make space at the table for her. ‘How are you, sweetheart?’

‘I’m not your sweetheart.’ Debbie had learnt to be brisk. ‘And I’m fine. How are you, lover boy?’

‘I’m not your lover boy, and I’m fine too.’ Tim no longer found it necessary to charm Debbie. They chatted in a desultory way as they ate, exchanging gossip from their different staff rooms. Debbie was fielding an invitation for a drink, when there was a flurry of discord from the coffee bar at the far side of the canteen, shouts and the sound of breaking china – breaking glass – that meant either horseplay or a fight. She got up from the table to see what was happening, though she had no intention of doing anything about it. Some of the young male students could be quite intimidating. Someone seemed to be dealing with it anyway. The shouting had died down. Rob Neave was talking to a group of students over where the trouble had been.

Tim, who had no more desire than Debbie to get involved in student fights, looked relieved, but continued to watch the situation with interest. ‘Machismo fascismo,’ he said, ‘wins out every time.’ Debbie looked at him. ‘Your friend the ex-policeman. The one laying down the law over there.’

He did look a bit authoritarian, actually, but Debbie was damned if she was going to agree with Tim about it. She liked Rob Neave. ‘I don’t think he’s laying down the law. Why should he be doing that? He’s just sorting them out. Is he an ex-policeman?’ Debbie thought that she ought to have known it.

Tim knew everything. It was partly his journalist’s love of gossip, and partly his connections at the local newspaper. ‘That’s his job. Security, antivandalism, keep the buggers down. You remember that business with the lift last term?’

Debbie shook her head. Tim’s story gradually came out about how some students at the end of last term had vandalized one of the lifts in the Moore building so badly they’d jammed it, trapping themselves inside. When they pushed the alarm button and summoned a rescue party, Neave, working the situation out, had delayed the rescue for two hours, claiming they couldn’t get the lift moving. The caretakers had stood around outside the lift, threatening to light a fire in the shaft. By the time the pair were released, they were pretty subdued, and the college authorities, faced with a bill for the lift repair, weren’t in any mood to listen to complaints. Debbie laughed as he got to the end of the story. Tim was a good raconteur. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘the railway strangler has struck again.’

‘What?’ Debbie dropped her fork.

‘Didn’t you hear? It’s been all over the radio this morning. It’ll be in the paper as well, I should think. They found a body on the line last night.’

Debbie felt cold. ‘Where? When last night? Who was it?’

‘On the way to Mexborough, I think. They haven’t given a name and they haven’t said it’s him again, but it must be.’ He picked up one of Debbie’s chips and ate it. ‘You’ll get fat.’ He ate another.

‘Not at this rate. Look, Tim, this woman, she wasn’t killed in Moreham, at the station, was she?’

‘Don’t know, shouldn’t think so for a minute.’ He began to look at her more closely. ‘Why? Come on, tell me.’

Debbie found herself telling him about her encounter at the station last night, and the way the strange figure had made her feel. ‘He looked sort of, well, dangerous,’ she finished, lamely. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘No, go on, it’s interesting.’ She had his attention now, and he plied her with questions she couldn’t answer. Had she really heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the station? Not from anywhere else? What did he look like? Was she sure he didn’t catch the train?

‘Perhaps you saw him – the strangler,’ he said, half seriously.

‘Rubbish! If it was over at Mexborough it can’t have been anything to do with what I saw.’ Debbie was annoyed because she felt uneasy.

‘It’s the next stop up the line.’

She thought about it, and then saw what time it was. ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to go. I’m teaching in five minutes.’

Tim smiled at her encouragingly, and as she left was getting out a notebook and pen. ‘I’ll just stay here and get some work done. It’s quieter than in our staff room. See you later.’

As she left the canteen, she saw Rob Neave leaning against the wall watching the students with a conspicuously bleak expression. He caught Debbie’s eye and winked. As she went past him, he said, ‘It’ll be nearer five than four-thirty. Is that OK?’

‘Yes, it won’t take long. It’s nothing much.’

He looked sceptical. ‘Your last nothing much took half my budget,’ he said, referring to the time when Louise and Debbie had decided to take advantage of the fact that the college had actually appointed someone with responsibility for security. They’d campaigned for better lighting in some of the isolated parts of the campus, assuming that the boyish face and easy charm of the new appointee meant he would be a pushover. He’d proved to be a tough negotiator, who was, fortunately, on their side. They’d got their lighting.

Debbie noticed as she looked more closely at him that he was tired and drawn. She wondered if he was another person who’d had a sleepless night. She almost told him about her experience at the station. She felt in need of expert advice.

Debbie’s Friday afternoon A-level class distracted her and she forgot, for the moment, about the incident at the station. The students were studying ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and making heavy weather of it. Debbie had asked them to think about the lines: God save thee, ancient Mariner!/From fiends that plague thee thus!/Why look’st thou so?’ With my crossbow/ I shot the Albatross. Why, she had asked them, did the mariner shoot the albatross that had brought good luck to the ship? Somehow, the discussion had got hijacked into an animal rights argument that was interesting, but not what Debbie wanted them to do.

‘Anyway, it’s cruel,’ said Sarah Peterson, who had been following the discussion closely. Debbie sighed. Sarah rarely contributed, but it was typical that when she did it was with the wrong end of the stick securely in her hands. She could see Leanne Ferris, one of the brighter members of the group, about to deliver a sharp rebuttal, and she pulled them back to the poem, and began to work them around to thinking about a less literal interpretation. She saw Sarah diligently writing down the points she was making.

Sarah was Debbie’s particular concern that year, a different kind of student from Leanne. Leanne, quick-minded and confident about her own ideas, would sail through anything the exam system threw at her, as long as Debbie could persuade her to do a bit of work. Sarah worked very hard, but didn’t understand. She had no confidence in her own ideas and opinions, so she wanted someone – Debbie in this case – to tell her what she should think. She didn’t want to know why the answers were correct, what they meant or what the implications were. She just wanted the answers, as her palpable puzzlement when answers weren’t offered made clear.

After the class, Sarah waited until the others had gone, and then asked rather diffidently if there was time to discuss her last essay. ‘The one I did on Othello. I didn’t get a very good mark.’ She rummaged in her bag and produced the essay which looked rather crumpled, and a can of Coke. ‘I’ve got to go straight to work,’ she said apologetically, gesturing at the can. Sarah, like a lot of students at City, could only afford to stay at college by working. She had a job at a pub on the outskirts of Moreham.

They discussed the essay, or at least, Debbie did, while Sarah wrote things down. ‘Have another go at it,’ Debbie suggested. ‘Once you’ve got one good essay, it gives you a model for others. Let me have it on Monday, OK?’

‘Thanks, Debbie.’ Sarah smiled and briefly met Debbie’s eyes before hurrying out. Debbie collected her things and headed back to her room.

When she got there, Rob Neave was leaning on the windowsill beside her desk, flicking through the pages of one of her books – a collection of Auden’s poems. He usually showed some interest in her books, though she sometimes found it hard to tell if he really meant it. His face could be difficult to read. He looked up as she came in. ‘Deborah.’ He was one of the few people who used her full name. ‘So what’s this nothing much problem?’

‘Do you want a coffee? There was something else as well, actually.’ He declined the coffee, as she knew he would. He’d made some pointed comments in the past about the standard of the coffee that she and Louise drank. He waited as Debbie got herself a drink, idly turning the pages of the Auden.

She remembered the last time she’d talked to him about poetry. He’d picked up a copy of The Waste Land from where it was lying on Debbie’s desk. What had this got to do, he’d wanted to know, with the lives most of the students led? ‘A lot,’ Debbie had retorted. And was it going to help them with what they really needed in their lives – a way to make a decent living? ‘It teaches them how to think.’ Debbie wasn’t giving anything away to anyone about the value of studying literature. He’d argued the point good-naturedly for a bit longer and she’d wondered at the end of it if he’d been winding her up.

‘You can borrow that, if you want.’ She was surprised when he said he would. ‘I thought you didn’t see any point in poetry,’ she said.

‘I didn’t say that.’ He was still turning the pages, but not really reading.

Aware that it sounded a bit blunt, Debbie asked, ‘Is it right that you used to be in the police?’

He looked at her. ‘Who’s been talking to you? Yes, for ten years.’ He didn’t seem to mind her question, but something told her not to ask any more.

‘Let me show you this.’ She took the book out of his hands, and started leafing through it. ‘This one. That end bit there.’ She was looking at the lines towards the end of ‘The Shield of Achilles’, the bit about the ragged urchin in the weed-choked field. That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third/ were axioms to him, who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept/ Or one could weep because another wept. He read it through and looked at her, waiting. ‘Didn’t you meet that boy a hundred times when you were in the police force?’

He was still reading the lines. ‘Yes, you see them all the time.’

‘That’s what I meant. Poetry has a lot to do with their lives.’

He grinned, acknowledging both the point, and the fact that she wasn’t prepared to let the argument go. ‘OK, but you can romanticize as well.’

‘I don’t think that romanticizes. It calls raping and killing axioms.’ She was standing close to him as they read the lines, and she was aware of the warmth coming from him, the smell of a laundered shirt, the faint smell of sweat.

He nodded, but cut the topic off. ‘Right. What’s the problem.’ He listened while Debbie outlined the concerns that she had working in Room B110 at night, where the curtainless windows, brightly lit, looked out on to the street and gave any passer-by a clear view of who was – and who wasn’t – in there. She told him about some trouble she’d had with youths in the street the night before. He looked at her – ‘Why didn’t you report it at the time?’ – making a sudden switch from friendly to official. She had seen him use this device to wrong-foot people, and now it derailed her.

‘There wasn’t anyone around to report it to,’ she protested, sounding defensive in her own ears.

He thought for a moment and seemed to make a conscious effort to move back into a more relaxed stance. ‘I know there’s still a problem with security in the evenings. You could do with mobile phones really, the teaching staff.’ He gave her a quick smile. ‘But that’d be the rest of my budget.’ After he’d made some notes, he said, ‘What was the other thing?’

‘Oh, well …’ Debbie was a bit uncertain now, unsure of his reception, but he leant back against the wall and waited, so she told him about her encounter at the station. He listened in silence. ‘Should I tell the police?’ she said.

‘Yes. Next question.’

‘Do you think it had anything to do with the murder?’ Debbie tried to keep the anxiety out of her voice, but something must have come through, because he narrowed his eyes and his face went serious.

‘I’ve no idea, Deborah. You’ll have to tell them and let them work it out. Why don’t you bring your car when you’re working late?’

‘Because I haven’t got one. I don’t drive.’

He looked exasperated, but Louise turned up before he could say anything, and the conversation turned to more general college matters. After a few minutes he left, promising to get back to Debbie about Room B110.

Louise was packing a pile of marking into her briefcase. ‘A bit of leisure activity,’ she added, seeing Debbie look at it. ‘Doing anything interesting this weekend?’

Debbie felt low. ‘I hate weekends. I’m not going anywhere, I haven’t got anyone to go with and even if I did I’ve got so much work I couldn’t anyway.’

‘Fancy a drink this evening?’ As Debbie accepted Louise’s invitation, she thought that the older woman must have seen how down she looked. Debbie, the youngest lecturer in the English and humanities team, was usually known as the most cheerful, having, as Louise pointed out, a lot more energy than the others, ‘and the chance of a future that will get you out of this dump.’ They agreed to meet later at Louise’s house. Louise didn’t like pubs much, and Debbie felt like a quiet evening.

Rob Neave was home in his flat, listening to music and letting his mind drift. Maybe things were getting better. They didn’t seem to be getting any worse. The flat was tiny, a bedsitter, really, but called a flat because it was self-contained. He had a small kitchen and a bathroom to call his own, and that was all he’d wanted at the time. He’d taken the first offer on the house he used to share with Angie, the first offer that would cover the mortgage. All he’d taken from the house were his stereo and some pictures. He’d bought everything else he needed – a bed, a chair, carpets, curtains, a cooker. It was all he could manage to do, to find a new place to live, a new job.

The evening stretched in front of him, bleak and empty. He could go out – but where and why? He could stay in, read, listen to music, like he’d done for the past countless number of evenings. He wondered about giving Lynne a ring, going over to her place, talking a bit of police shop, picking up the gossip, spending a couple of hours in her bed. It would be a distraction, something to do. Though she’d probably be busy at this short notice.

Maybe it was time to move on. Staying here, everything was a reminder. Places he went to, people he saw. He’d found a letter waiting when he got in, from an ex-colleague, Pete Morton. Morton had gone into the security business up in Newcastle, Neave’s childhood city. He’d written to ask if Neave was interested in joining him. There’s a load of work here, Morton had written. I’m starting to turn stuff down. Neave thought seriously about the offer, about going back to Newcastle. He needed to get away.

Applying for the job at City College had been part of getting away. He didn’t know anyone there, and no one knew him. The job had looked interesting as well. The place was wide open, equipment was walking out through the front door, the buildings were being vandalized and staff and bona fide students were starting to feel intimidated. It had been a challenge he’d enjoyed, imposing a system on to the anarchic world of post-sixteen education. It had given him something to think about, but he’d done as much as he could there.

He knew he wasn’t particularly liked. It didn’t worry him. He had the capacity to get on well with people, inspire trust – it had been an asset in his last job, but he didn’t need it now. His face in repose looked boyish and good-humoured, and his eyes, despite – or perhaps because of – the lines under them that seemed to be a permanent feature now, tended to look as though he smiled a lot. When people found out he wasn’t the easy-going person he seemed, they resented it. But he got results.

He thought about his conversation with Deborah Sykes that afternoon. He remembered his first meeting with her. She’d been banging her head against the brick wall of management, trying to get a perfectly reasonable request for decent lighting implemented. The response had been to agree in principle and postpone action until the budget allowed – i.e. indefinitely. He’d played traitor on that one, and helped her get it through. She, and then Louise, her sharp-tongued boss, had become his first supporters in the place. He enjoyed their company, and had taken to dropping into their room to talk to them.

He’d fired Debbie’s evangelical instincts when they’d had some kind of argument about books, about the value of poetry, and she’d started lending him things she wanted him to read. Typical bloody teacher. He smiled. He liked Debbie, and he’d been relieved when he’d seen her come through the college entrance that morning. His mind wandered. He could picture her now, not very tall – her head had just reached his shoulder when she stood beside him this afternoon. She kept her black hair firmly pulled back and held in a knot with pins and combs, and it had smelled clean and sweet. He tried to picture it curling down round her pale, pretty face and over those small, high tits … He shook himself awake, pushed that line of thought out of his mind – you don’t need that – and picked up the book she’d lent him, turning the pages back to the poem she’d pointed out … were axioms to him, who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept/ Or one could weep because another wept.

She was right, he’d known them, the empty-eyed children who didn’t seem to know – or to care – what or why their lives meant to themselves or anyone. And maybe it was him, too.

He read on through some of the other poems, and found more words that spoke to him – the glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed … He even found that ‘Stop all the Clocks’ poem from the last film he’d seen with Angie. He couldn’t read that. It had made Angie cry, and it would make him cry now, if he could cry, if he wanted to cry.

‘The thing is,’ Debbie said, pouring herself another glass of wine. ‘Sorry, did you want one? The thing is, I like being on my own and I don’t – if you see what I mean. When things are going OK it’s great, but when you’ve got something on your mind, you haven’t got anyone to talk to.’ She stood up, feeling the wine she’d drunk, and got another bottle out of her bag. ‘I bought a red. Is that all right?’ She had arrived about eight-thirty, and they’d spent the first hour talking about work, students, and drinking a bit too quickly.

‘Yes, fine. I dunno about all this talking it over.’ Louise had been married for twelve years and sometimes envied Debbie her freedom. ‘Dan only has conversations with the television these days. What problems? Want to talk about it?’

‘Oh, it’s complicated. A bit of it’s Tim, I suppose.’

‘Tim Godber? He’s always a problem. I wish he’d go and be a proper journalist and stop wasting my time.’ Louise had to organize curriculum and timetables, and thought that Tim didn’t take his teaching work seriously. ‘What’s your problem with Tim?’

‘Well, we had a bit of a fling and I wish we hadn’t. There’s something a bit creepy about him.’

‘Is he giving you any hassle?’ Louise’s voice sharpened.

‘No, oh no, nothing like that. I just wish, I don’t know, that I’d kept away from him, really …’

‘Did you enjoy it at the time?’ Louise refilled her glass and raised an eyebrow at Debbie.

‘Well, OK, yes, I did.’

‘Well then.’ Louise dismissed the problem. ‘Was that all? That’s worrying you, I mean? You’ve been quiet all day.’

‘Louise?’

‘Still here, still listening.’

‘You know Rob Neave?’

‘The security man? Yes. What about him? You haven’t joined the Rob Neave fan club, have you?’

‘Is there one?’

‘Oh, I think so. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed. Mind you, I wouldn’t kick Tim Godber out of bed either, if that was all I had to put up with from him.’

‘Someone told me he used to be in the police.’ Debbie had been curious about Rob for a while, but this was the first opportunity she’d had to ask questions.

‘Neave? That’s right. I don’t know much about it, though.’

‘Why did he leave, do you know?’

‘No, some kind of personal crisis, I think. Something to do with his marriage? I don’t know any more, though someone said he was drinking a lot before he came to City.’ Louise was looking at Debbie speculatively. ‘Be careful,’ she said.

Debbie wanted to leave the subject now. She hadn’t known he was married. If he still was. She went on, quickly, and rather addled by the wine, to tell Louise about the man at the station. Louise listened quietly until Debbie had finished. ‘And he, Rob Neave, said to go to the police. I can’t see how it could be to do with the killing, but …’

Louise was her efficient work self now. ‘Wait until tomorrow, then see what’s in the paper. If it is one of those killings, go and tell them. If it isn’t, then you’ve no need to worry. And I wouldn’t tell anyone else. You don’t want it all over the college.’

‘I’ve already told Tim.’

Louise’s eyebrow lifted again. ‘Bad idea,’ was all she said.

They’d moved quickly since finding the body. The men searching the embankment by the line had found a handbag discarded in the grass. A purse was still in there, intact, containing £30, a debit card, a credit card for a chain store, some miscellaneous receipts and other pieces of paper that were being checked to see if they gave any information about the woman’s movements in the weeks and days before she died. It seemed certain that this had belonged to the dead woman, as there was a brand-new travel pass with a photograph, and though her face was brutally changed, it looked very like – the same mass of fair hair, the small features. Mick Berryman, the senior investigating officer, had looked at the photo for a moment, then said, ‘Has anyone checked out this address?’

Now he was looking at the scene-of-crime photographs, with Julie Fyfe’s sightless face staring at him from the track side, half masked by the tape over her mouth, the thin cord embedded in the bruising round her neck. He looked at the initial report from the pathologist: … hands secured by tape round the wrists … cuts to the hands … numerous cuts, bruises and abrasions to the body … injuries to both eyes … He hadn’t been prepared to commit himself any further at that stage. Had she been raped? Damage to the genital area made that a possibility but he couldn’t say until after doing a postmortem. Were her injuries pre- or postmortem? Impossible to say without further examination. What kind of maniac dumped mutilated, dead women by railway lines? More your field than mine.

‘OK.’ Berryman looked at the team who were working on the strangler killings. ‘It isn’t officially confirmed yet, but we all know – we’ve got another one.’ He pinned the photograph up on the board, and ran through the known facts about this killing. ‘Young woman, twenties found’ – he indicated on the map – ‘here, just outside Rawmarsh, near the junction. Injuries to the eyes. Mouth and wrists taped. Bruising to the neck, general damage, probable sexual assault. What else?’ Berryman could see Lynne Jordan, a DS who had been involved with the team since the first murder, checking back through her notebook.

‘First week of the month,’ she said, flicking over a page. ‘That’s different. The others have all been in the last week. Poor visibility – the moon was well into its last quarter. A rainy night – it was fine when Kate and Mandy disappeared.’

‘Any thoughts about that, Lynne? Anyone?’

‘The rain – if it’s as heavy as it was last night – that makes our job more difficult,’ Lynne said. ‘A lot of evidence could just get washed away. On the other hand, it makes it more likely that he’ll leave marks. Footprints, tyre tracks.’

Berryman nodded. The problem was, the killer had left them nothing like that so far, except for one set of fingerprints, on the handbag of the first victim.

‘How could he know? If he’s planning ahead.’ That was Steve McCarthy, also a DS who had, like Lynne Jordan, been on the team since the beginning. He was looking at Jordan with some hostility. ‘What about broken glass?’

‘The light above the post was smashed. How recently we don’t yet know. They’re looking for glass on the body.’

‘Timing.’ That was Lynne again. ‘We thought his interval might be getting shorter. We’ve got a seven-month gap, a six-month gap, but now we’ve got eight months.’ She shrugged. She didn’t know what to do with the information. They wanted a pattern, not randomness.

‘Show us on the calendar, Lynne.’ Berryman believed in visual presentation of information.

Lynne went over to the calendar that was pinned to the wall next to the display board. ‘The first killing, right, was at the end of March. That was Lisa. Seven months later, we get Kate. Last week in October. Six months after that, Mandy is killed, last week in April. That looks too much like a pattern to ignore. We expected the next one at the end of September, but nothing happened. Until now. Now we get one in the first week of December. Why the change?’ There was a murmur of interest, a shifting, around the room.

‘Or was it just coincidence?’ That was Steve McCarthy again. Berryman scowled. Steve and Lynne tended to contradict each other’s ideas. He thought he’d been lucky at the beginning to have both of them on his team, because they were both good, skilled detectives. When the killer struck again, and again, he’d kept them working close to the centre as he coordinated the massive team that was now working on this investigation. He was beginning to wonder if this had been wise. They couldn’t seem to work together. He moved on to the next point.

‘How did he get her to Rawmarsh?’ Berryman tapped his pointer on the map. ‘If he grabbed her in a car, why leave her there? There’s no road runs close to where he dumped her. If he grabbed her at the station, how did he move her up the line?’

‘Took her on a train?’ Dave West, facetious. There was a stir of laughter around the room, lightening the atmosphere. West, a young DC on Lynne Jordan’s team, was dealing with this case early in his career. Some detectives never had to deal with a random killer, or the horrors of a sadistic sex killer.

Berryman treated it as a serious suggestion. If there was a way … ‘Tell me how he gets a dead woman on the train without anyone noticing, and how he gets the train to drop them off between stations, and I’ll give that one some serious thought.’ He waited to see if anyone else had anything to say on that point.

‘Emergency stop – communication cord?’ McCarthy’s face indicated that he saw the flaws in this, but was putting it forward anyway. Berryman shook his head. They’d thought of that. No train on that line had had an unscheduled stop that evening.

‘It’s the same …’

‘Kate Claremont …’

McCarthy and Jordan started together. Berryman looked at Lynne. She said, ‘It’s the same problem we’ve got with Kate. She was dumped on the line away from the road. There’s a footpath, but I wouldn’t want to carry someone – dead or alive – all that way. How did he get her there?’ She was only voicing a problem they’d discussed before. No one had anything to add.

Berryman felt weary at the thought of the work ahead. They’d done it all before, the house-to-house, tracking down the people who’d last seen the victim, talking to the relatives. It had got them nowhere, so far. OK, they needed her identity confirming, they needed to find her next of kin – who was missing her now? They needed to find out where she was going the night she died, who she’d seen in the days, weeks or even months before she died. They needed to know if she was just a random victim in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if she was carefully selected, chosen by the killer because something had drawn him to her. They needed to know this about all the victims, and they had so little to go on. Four women: Lisa, Kate, Mandy – and now Julie? It seemed it couldn’t be any other way, and he felt as though he’d let them down, each one more than the last. And the next one and the next one?

3

Saturday morning’s paper confirmed to Debbie that the dead woman was indeed a victim of the railway strangler. Debbie looked at the photograph of the woman who’d died, then read the article. The police put out the usual advice about women being careful, not going out alone after dark, etc., etc. She read through the article again, trying to find anything that might link the murder to the station, but as Tim had said, the body had been found several miles up the line at Rawmarsh. She looked again at the photograph of Julie Fyfe, twenty-four, younger than Debbie, and dead. She was laughing in the picture, at someone off camera to her left, fair hair tumbling rather glamorously round a small-featured face. Debbie looked for a long time, then she took some pieces of paper from beside her phone, and held them round the face in the picture, trying to see it with the hair pulled back into an elegant, business style. That cold feeling was coming back again now, because the face looking back at her could be, might be, no, was the face of the woman, the woman she’d seen so many Thursday nights, the woman who waited on the opposite platform for the Doncaster train.

Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

There was a phone number in the paper, and after several attempts she got through. The officer she spoke to seemed quite calm about what she had to say, which was a relief, but asked her if she could come in to talk to them in more detail. He wanted her to do that as soon as possible, which made that cold feeling stronger. ‘Can you make it today?’ he’d said. Debbie decided to go that morning. She wanted to exorcize the whole experience, and be reassured by the indifference of the police that she had seen nothing and knew nothing. She didn’t want to think about the implications of anything else, but she couldn’t stop. If it had been … him, then had she, Debbie, missed lying dead on the tracks by minutes? Had talking to Les Walker and Rob Neave saved her life? And cost Julie Fyfe hers?

The man who took her statement was pleasant, polite and not as reassuring as she had hoped. He asked her a lot of questions, some about the appearance of the man, though Debbie could tell him very little, and some questions were the same ones that Tim had asked her, coming back again and again to the broken light. ‘I just don’t know,’ Debbie said in the end. ‘At the time it seemed to come from the station, but I didn’t really think about it until I saw the glass. I just assumed, I suppose.’

‘That’s OK, Miss Sykes. Now just tell me again – you don’t think the man got on your train.’

‘I’m certain he didn’t.’

‘OK, and you’re sure you’ve never seen him before?’

‘I’m not certain, I couldn’t see him well enough, but I didn’t recognize him from what I did see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.’

‘I’d like you to talk to our artist, see if you can put together any kind of picture of this man’ – he waved aside her objections – ‘just a general impression if that’s all you can manage.’ He asked her some questions about the woman on the opposite platform, without either confirming or denying this was the murder victim, and some questions about her own Thursday night routine. He thanked her for coming in, but Debbie was still uneasy. ‘Do you think it was him?’ She wanted him to reassure her that it was nothing, nothing at all.

‘I don’t know, Miss Sykes. Leave it with us. It may not be relevant, but we need this information to find that out. You did the right thing coming in. By the way, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone about this.’

‘I’ve already talked to one or two people – I was worried.’

‘Well, if you could just avoid discussing it from now on …’

At the Saturday briefing, Berryman and his team went over the preliminary results of the postmortem on Julie Fyfe. It was the same as the others. Nothing that pointed directly to the killer, no hair, no fingerprints, no blood, no other fluids, no footprints. ‘Fuck-all,’ Berryman told them. What evidence there may have been had been washed away by the torrential rain. The ground underneath her body was as wet as the surrounding area, which suggested that she’d been dumped after the worst of the storm was over, but she was wet through with rain. She’d been outside for the storm.

What they did have, told them that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man. Death was by strangulation using some kind of smooth fabric, but whatever had been used had moved several times round the woman’s neck. The wire had been used after she was dead. The pathologist thought that the killer may have used partial strangulation as a means to subdue her, before he actually killed her. There was evidence of sexual assault – vaginal and anal bruising and laceration, a lot of internal damage. ‘He’s using a tool other than his tool,’ the pathologist had told Berryman. ‘Something thin and sharp, pointed. She would have bled to death if he hadn’t strangled her.’ The injuries to the eyes were caused by gouging – probably manual. ‘He was wearing gloves. Look for bloodstains on gloves,’ Berryman told his team. The general bruising and laceration was most probably caused by dragging of the – unconscious?, and later dead – woman along the ground. The lack of bruising and bleeding from some of these injuries suggested they were postmortem. There was possible impact injury, as though, after death, she had fallen heavily. Some gravel had been retrieved from the cuts. There was glass on the body. It was Lynne Jordan, the only woman on the team, who asked which of the other injuries were pre- or postmortem. Berryman couldn’t reassure. The sexual assault was carried out while the woman was alive. The other injuries? ‘Around the time of death,’ was all the information the pathologist could give them.

‘Did the glass come from the broken lights at Moreham station?’ That was Lynne again. Berryman shook his head. The glass came from the broken light near where the body had been dumped. There was no guarantee that Julie had gone to Moreham station, though it was probable that she had done so. They still hadn’t been able to trace her beyond the time she left work. Though the team had made extensive enquiries, no one had been found who had been on that route at the relevant time.

‘We’ve got one statement that just came in,’ Berryman said. ‘It relates to the crucial time – shortly after nine-thirty. This woman says that the station was deserted, except for one person, a man, who was behaving a bit oddly. I don’t have to tell you, we need to track him down. I’m still hoping for a car as well. There must have been cars going that way.’ Berryman took a deep breath. ‘OK. Let’s run through everything we’ve got. Let’s see what we’re missing here. He might be a lucky bastard, but he can’t do this and leave us nothing. There’s something we’re missing.’

That evening found Mick Berryman still at his desk. He’d been woken up at four the previous morning by the call from the station reporting Cath Hill’s find. He probably wasn’t going to see his kids today, nor his wife, for that matter. His family was on the back burner until this enquiry was over – if it ever was. He was going over some of the earlier statements, and was looking at the information that had come in from that teacher this morning. Could be nothing, or it could be something very important. It could be their first sighting of the killer. If only they could establish where Julie had been when she was taken. They’d searched the station at Moreham, but there was nothing much to see. Unless forensics came through with something. They needed to track her movements. He began to make notes.

She’d left work at nine-twenty, as usual for a Thursday. That had been easy to establish. She’d almost certainly walked to the station, despite the bad weather. It only took five minutes. She hadn’t called a taxi and there wasn’t a bus. Could she have accepted a lift? The people who worked with her were pretty certain: not Julie, she was far too careful, only with someone she knew. (And how often was it someone they knew, someone they trusted?) It was no distance to the station, anyway, she’d almost definitely gone there. But her train had been cancelled. She would probably have seen that on the screen as she arrived, but it had also been displayed on the platform screen. Could she have caught an earlier train? No, the earlier one had left over half an hour before, at eight-thirty-three, and yes, it had been running on time. So what had she done? Had she decided to wait for the next train? That seemed unlikely as it was over forty minutes before the next train was due. She would surely have gone for a bus or a taxi. Was she so broke she couldn’t afford to? Or so tight-fisted? He made some notes and thought on.

She hadn’t been at the station at nine-forty, according to the statement Deborah Sykes had given. So – leaves work at nine-twenty, at the station by, what, between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty. By nine-forty, she had gone. He reached for Deborah Sykes’s statement again. Who’d taken it? McCarthy. Everything should be there. Right. No one had come out of the station as the Sykes woman had come in. She hadn’t passed anyone on her way to the station. If Julie had left the station as soon as she saw the first display screen, she would almost certainly not have been on the road by the time Deborah Sykes came past. If she’d gone down to the platform before seeing her train was cancelled, then Deborah should have seen her walking back. He needed some more timings. He needed to know how long she’d been in that station.

Lynne Jordan was on the train to Sheffield. She’d taken to using the train when time permitted. Like most of her colleagues, she knew the roads of the area so well she could drive them with her eyes shut, predict the level of traffic for any time of day, say which roads the joy-riders were likely to choose to career their purloined cars around, tyres screeching as they performed their antics. But she didn’t know the trains. When the team pored over the maps, when they looked at the places the victims had been found, she saw pieces of landscape, not a seamless whole.

Today, she had made a mistake. She was spending an evening in Sheffield, and it had seemed a golden opportunity. But of course, by the time she got on the train, it was dark. It was after eight-thirty, and the line outside the carriage window was invisible. She contented herself with getting a feel for her fellow travellers. There was a young man behind her, whose Walkman leaked a penetrating metallic beat. Somewhere further back in the carriage, there was someone with a loud and persistent sniff. A group of youths had piled on to the train at Meadowhall, shouting and nudging each other, sprawling over the seats, shoving their heavy trainers on to the upholstery. They brought the distinctive smell of young male into the carriage with them.

Lynne tried to see out of the window. The interior of the carriage reflected darkly back. She could see the empty crisp packet that lay on her table, the pool of liquid spilled from a soft drink container. She held her hands up to shadow her eyes. She could see light glinting off the tracks. She put her face closer to the window, then recoiled as something flashed past so close it seemed about to hit her.

They were passing a train. It wasn’t another passenger train – it seemed to consist of low, flat trucks with piles of long thin objects strapped to them. Her train slowed briefly, and she realized the other train was stationary, or moving very slowly. She saw the lights and tunnel ahead that meant they were nearly into Sheffield. The train came to a standstill. The freight train crawled past. She sighed and looked at her watch. She was going to be late.

Debbie came home from the police station as worried as she had been before she went, maybe a bit more worried. Talking to the police made it seem more real, that maybe she had seen the killer. Going out and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea.

So that night she went clubbing. She called Fiona, a university friend who was trying to make a career as a jazz musician and singer, but Fiona had a gig that night. ‘Try Brian,’ she suggested, naming the third member of their trio from student days. Brian was free, and so were some of the others, so Debbie enlisted them for a night out. She drank too much, danced a lot, drunkenly snogged Brian in the dark shadows of the club, and then later even more drunkenly snogged a beautiful stranger who appeared and then disappeared through the gaps in her memory. Her friends took her home and steered her through the front door. She must have got herself to bed, because she was there, alone, when she woke up the next morning with her head throbbing, her stomach heaving and her shoes still on. And nothing was any better.

The music is loud and invasive, and he purses his lips with judicious annoyance, then closes his window. He likes to keep the window open because there is a slightly sweet, sickly smell in the room that, he must admit, he finds a bit unpleasant. He can still hear the music, though not so loudly. The young man in the basement flat downstairs has no consideration for others. He really doesn’t approve of that. He decided that morning to let himself have the day off, but already he’s getting a bit restless. He’s the sort of person who likes to be doing things. He wonders if he deserves an hour with his trains – he has been working very hard, after all. Yes.

He pulls down the loft ladder, the loft being the feature that made the house so attractive to him when he looked at it. It was worth all the noise and disturbance he had to put up with by letting rooms. And after all, it wasn’t the worst kind of noise and disturbance. No one paid any attention to him. Everyone left everyone else alone. That was the way he’d been brought up by his mother, to approve of things like that. Live and let live.

The loft is truly magnificent. The roof is high above his head. The floor joists have been boarded over so that he can walk around without fear of putting his foot through the ceiling of his room below. He wired it himself so that he has all the power he needs, but no heating. He doesn’t need heating up here. But there is a small freezer in one corner, and a computer in another. He has all the facilities he needs. What is even better is its size. It stretches over the whole roof area of the house, and, as he found out one day, has access to the roof space of the house next door. The house next door is the first one of a block of three terraces, each one just like his, that have been converted into flats. It is a very simple matter to crawl through, and then climb out on to the fire escape at the back. No one notices one more person using those stairs that serve for every flat in the block.

He turns on the light that hangs from the roof joist – just a bare bulb, no need for anything fancy – and looks with some pleasure at his railway. He’s tried to make it as realistic as possible, to include the other landscape features, the hills, the river, the canal way. When he planned it, he decided to use n-gauge track so that the layout didn’t become too big – even so, it’s a close thing. He gets his map out. Even though it isn’t a working day, there’s no harm, surely, in just looking. After all, he needs to start planning another hunt.

4

The story appeared in the local paper that Monday: ‘I SAW THE FACE OF THE STRANGLER’ the headline declaimed, above a photograph of Debbie. The article, which was on the third page, was part of a big spread about the murders the paper ran that day. Details of the victims were given again, some quotes from the bereaved relatives and comment from the police. An editorial chided the investigation team – more in sorrow than in anger, it was true. Everyone knows the difficulties of the task these men and women face, and the Standard does not underestimate these. But the women of South Yorkshire are entitled to travel freely without fear … The article about Debbie began: Teacher Debra Sykes, 26, had a chilling encounter the night the Strangler struck. The attractive brunette told our reporter, ‘I just knew there was something wrong. There was something terribly wrong at the station that night.’ The article went on to give the basic details of Debbie’s story, including the broken lights, and the way the man had apparently tried to approach her. The police were quoted as saying that they were aware of the story but had no reason at present to think that Ms Sykes’s experience had anything to do with the killing. The quote rather implied that Debbie was a bit of an attention seeker. There was also an appeal for the man at the station to come forward ‘so that we can eliminate him from our enquiries.’ The article had a by-line: Tim Godber.

The first that Debbie heard about the article was Monday morning, when she was teaching her second-year A-level group again. Leanne Ferris, unusually prompt, dumped her bag on her desk, opened a can of Coke and said, ‘We want to hear about the murderer. Go on, tell us.’ Debbie looked blank. Leanne dived into her bag, and after a few seconds rummaging, pulled out a copy of the paper. ‘They’re doing a big thing about the Strangler, so I got it. Look.’ She showed Debbie the article, and the others crowded round.

‘It’s a good picture, Debbie.’ That was Sarah, with her usual capacity for focusing first on the least important issue. Or maybe to Sarah that was the most important – to look nice if she appeared in the local paper. Debbie recognized the photograph. It had been taken at the staff party in July. In the original, she and Tim had been together. This one was cropped, so she was alone, smiling up at someone who wasn’t there. She didn’t know if she was more angry or upset. She played down both the article and her reaction to it for the students, much to their disappointment.

‘Did he look really scary, you know, mad?’ Leanne’s eyes were bright with eager curiosity.

‘Look,’ Debbie began, firmly. ‘No one even knows …’

‘Did you see the body?’ That was Adam, aficionado of video nasties.

‘No one knows …’ Debbie tried again.

‘Were you scared?’ That was Sarah.

‘Listen.’ Debbie’s voice was louder than she’d intended. She got a moment’s silence. ‘Listen. There’s no reason to think that the person I saw was the killer. No one knows. I just talked to the police and I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

‘Didn’t he chase you then? With a knife?’ That was Leanne again.

‘Oh, come on, Leanne, it doesn’t even say that there. Now I’d just like to …’

‘He cuts their eyes out,’ Leanne said with relish to the rest of the group.

Adam chipped in. ‘He doesn’t use a knife. Not at first. He strangles them.’

‘Oh, trust you to know that!’ That was Rachel, more level-headed than Leanne, quieter. ‘Look, Debbie says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Let’s drop it. Have you marked our essays, Debbie? Did I get an A?’

The session dragged on from there.

Debbie was angry, and she was worried. She left the classroom quickly when the morning was over, ignoring requests from the cohort of poor attenders, including Leanne and Adam, that she go over the new assignment again. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got time,’ she said, and then felt guilty. In the staff room, in response to Louise’s interrogative look, she said, ‘I didn’t talk to them.’

‘I thought you didn’t,’ was all Louise said.

The rest of the day she seemed to be saying over and over – I didn’t see the Strangler, I didn’t talk to the paper, I don’t want to talk about it now. She got a memo from one of the vice-principals asking her why she had given an interview to a local paper without clearing it with the college management, and wasted her coffee break trying to make contact with someone to explain – not that they’d believe her. She looked out for Rob Neave, so that she could explain to him what had happened – she wasn’t sure why she felt that was important, only that it seemed to be – but he was nowhere around. ‘He’s working off site today,’ Andrea, the clerical officer for that section, told her when she asked. She didn’t see Tim Godber until she was leaving at five. He was unapologetic.

It was a legitimate interview; Debbie should make it clear if she was talking off the record and what was she making all the fuss about? He’d only written what she had told him.

Debbie left college that day in the mood she’d often left school when she was a child, particularly that bad year when two of her classmates – once her friends – had decided to gang up on her. ‘We don’t want you,’ Tracy would say, putting her arm through Donna’s; and, ‘Nobody play with Deborah Sykes, her mum’s a witch!’ they’d tell the others. She couldn’t remember now what had started the campaign, or what had ended it, but she could still remember how miserable it had made her feel. She often thought that the saying, Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you was one of the most stupid ones she’d ever heard.

As she walked through the town centre, she couldn’t shake off a feeling of foreboding. It was as if she was being watched by malicious eyes. She had felt exposed in the college, as though people were looking at her, talking about her, but now the feeling chilled her as it followed her through the streets to the station, until she managed to shake it off in the anonymous brightness of the train.

When she finally got home, the phone was ringing. She waited for a minute to see if it would stop, and when it didn’t, she answered it. ‘Deborah Sykes speaking.’ Silence. ‘Hello?’ she said. There was no reply, and then the phone was put down. She tried 1471, but no number was recorded.

Sarah was combing her hair in front of the mirror in the students’ cloakroom, prior to going home. She could smell the smoke from Leanne’s cigarette as Leanne and Rachel chatted over a cubicle door. Sarah stared into the mirror, and wondered if her face was too fat. She was thinking about Nick. Was she attractive enough? When she looked in the mirror she thought she was, but sometimes she caught sight of herself unexpectedly and saw someone frighteningly plain. She was seeing him on Friday. She put away her comb, anxiously looking at her reflection.

‘… essay title?’

‘Sorry?’ Her hand jerked a bit. Leanne was beside her, energetically back-combing her hair.

‘Have you written down that essay title?’ Leanne bundled her hair up on top of her head. ‘Look out, world,’ she said. She usually relied on other people to keep her up to date with assignments. ‘Are you coming to Adam’s party on Friday?’

Sarah felt the usual pang of exclusion. ‘He didn’t ask me,’ she said.

Leanne was applying colour to her eyes. ‘You don’t listen, do you? He asked everybody in the group. You can come with me and Raich if you want.’

Sarah was cautious. Leanne made her nervous. ‘I can’t, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m seeing Nick.’

‘Bring him.’ Leanne fastened a clip into her hair. Sarah bit her fingernail. Nick could be difficult with other people. He didn’t like students.

‘OK, I’ll ask him,’ she said, not meaning to. ‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t ask him, tell him,’ said Leanne, running the tap over her cigarette end and discarding it in the basin. ‘See you.’ She and Rachel left.

Sarah went back to her contemplation of the mirror. Now Leanne would want to know why she wasn’t there on Friday. She couldn’t say that Nick didn’t want to go. They wouldn’t ask her again. Maybe she should suggest it to him. It was the kind of thing he liked, though Sarah preferred quieter places where her soft voice wouldn’t be drowned out by loud music and shouting. Maybe if they did that they wouldn’t have an argument. She ran a tentative hand over the bruise hidden by the scarf on her neck.

Mick Berryman’s mind shut down on him. He needed a break. The clock on the wall said six, but it hadn’t been altered since the clocks went back weeks ago. He’d been at it for over ten hours. He could go home, put his feet up, but he decided to go over to the Grindstone for an hour or so. He needed a drink and he needed some quiet.

The pub, like most of the pubs in Moreham centre in the early evening, was almost empty. There were a couple of old men at a table in the corner, and a solitary drinker at the bar, reading a paper. As he crossed the room, he realized that the man at the bar was Rob Neave, and slowed his pace for a moment.

It was eighteen months now since Neave had left the force. He’d been one of the most talented officers in the division, following Berryman up the promotions ladder. They’d worked together, and they’d spent a lot of time at this bar. They’d made a good team. He couldn’t understand why Neave had left what had been a promising career, getting his promotion to DI six months before he gave it all up. But after Angie, Neave had gone to pieces. His colleagues had rallied round in support, looked after him, got him drunk – not that he’d needed any help with that at the time. Finally, Berryman had advised him to go on sick leave and get some help, even though that would put a blight on his promotion prospects. But Neave wasn’t interested.

‘The fact is,’ he’d told Berryman, ‘I just don’t give a bugger about any of it any more. I just want out.’ Berryman was beginning to understand that feeling now, though he hadn’t been able to understand it then, the same way he’d never been able to understand Neave’s obsession with Angie – oh, pretty, he’d give you that, but weird. He couldn’t have stood it for a week.

He hadn’t seen Neave for nearly six months. Claire had had a go at him – ‘Why don’t you ask Rob round for an evening? We’ll feed him up, have a few beers, it might cheer him up.’ Claire had developed a soft spot for his ex-colleague. He’d phoned, but the offer had been declined, as Berryman had known it would be. Without the job, they had lost their common ground. He went up to the bar. ‘Want another one in there?’

Then he couldn’t think of anything to say. Berryman had been with Neave when he and Angie first met, and it had been Berryman who had seen him at the end. She stood between them like an unspoken ghost.

Neave looked pleased to see him, but turned down the offer of a drink. He still had almost a pint in his glass and it looked as if he had been spinning it out for a while. They exchanged bits and pieces of news, the talk halting and awkward. Looking around for topics, Berryman glanced at the paper Neave had been reading when he came into the pub. It was the Moreham Standard. It was open at the two-page spread about the Strangler.

Berryman groaned. It had got in the way of his thoughts all afternoon. The police should be doing this, the police aren’t doing this, Christ, what did they expect? Magic? Neave glanced at him, saw what he was looking at and gave him a sympathetic grin. ‘Giving you a hard time,’ he said, rather than asked.

‘They want my balls on a plate,’ Berryman said gloomily.

‘Yeah. Then Mystic Meg could gaze into them and give you the answers.’ Neave looked at the paper again. ‘Is it right? You’ve got nothing?’

Berryman decided to talk. He knew he could trust Neave to keep his mouth shut. ‘This bastard really knows what he’s doing,’ he said, after a moment. ‘He’s not made many mistakes. We’re getting nowhere. Four of them now, and we’ve got nothing.’

‘Nothing? You must have something. He’s got to leave something behind.’

‘Oh, we’ve got stuff that’ll help when we catch him. If we catch him. We’ve got lines of enquiry we haven’t used up yet, but we’ve got nothing to tell us who he is. It’ll be a Yorkshire Ripper thing again. He’ll do it once too often and we’ll have him. This kind of thing doesn’t help. It just gets people panicked, and it puts out information I don’t want putting out.’ He tapped the article headlined, I saw the face of the Strangler. ‘That’s rubbish. It’s just speculation. Stupid bitch.’

Neave looked at the article. ‘He works at the college,’ he said, indicating the name of the writer. ‘She probably forgot he was a journalist when she talked to him. She was worried about it. She asked me what she should do.’ He intercepted Berryman’s look and grinned again. ‘I told her to talk to you lot. I didn’t tell her to sell her story.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘You’re worried about it though. Was it him she saw?’

‘I don’t fucking know. Whole of South fucking Yorkshire knows, but I don’t.’

But the fact was, Berryman was worried by Debbie’s story. ‘One thing we’ve got is that we know where he picked up the first one, Lisa Griffin. He left her by the track just outside Mexborough station. That’s where she was headed for, and we had witnesses who put her there. He’s learned something since then. We don’t know where he killed the others. They were dumped on the line away from any stations. There were two things we found – fingerprints we can’t account for, on her bag. I’m not saying they’re the killer’s, but they’re there. Also, broken glass. We don’t know why. He’d taken the lights out on the platform near where we found Lisa. We found broken glass on the others as well. Kate, Kate Claremont, there was glass in her hair. And there were bits of glass caught in Mandy’s dress.’

Neave looked off into space, his eyes half closed. ‘Is it lights he doesn’t like, or is it glass? Reflections? Does he need the glass? Does he use it on them?’

Berryman went over the old ground again. They didn’t know, they could only guess. ‘The glass isn’t the kind that breaks into shards. It doesn’t look like a weapon. He seems to be funny about lights. He smashes them, but he isn’t consistent.’ He saw Neave’s question forming. ‘We don’t know. It could be a convenience thing, pure and simple, but it’s there.’ He sighed and emptied his glass. Neave signalled to the barman.

‘How does he pick them up?’ he asked.

‘Good question,’ Berryman said. ‘And one we’d like the answer to.’ They didn’t know where he’d picked them up, where he’d taken them or where he’d killed them. They knew what he’d done to them though. ‘This last one, for instance, Julie, she was last seen leaving work on Broomegate. She never got home. He must have got her shortly after she was last seen, but the time of death was probably around midnight. If he picked her up on the street, someone should have seen it. There were enough cars around. If he picked her up in the station, how did he get her to bloody Rawmarsh? If he’s using a car, he’s got to get her out of the station and then he’s still got to get her down to the line – no road where we found her. Someone must have seen something, but no one’s come forward.’

‘Apart from.’ Neave indicated the photo in the paper.

Berryman scowled. ‘We need to talk to her again. We need to be sure that Julie wasn’t at the station. We need to find this man, whoever he is. He might have seen something.’

‘But it could be your man?’ Neave didn’t wait for an answer. ‘So how does he find them?’ His glass was now empty. He shook his head as the other man gestured to ask if he wanted another. He had that narrow-eyed intent look that Berryman remembered from earlier days.

‘We’re working on it,’ he said. The general feeling of the men working the investigation was that the killer chose his victims at random – waited till he saw a likely-looking one, then struck. Berryman wasn’t so sure. ‘I’ve got a bit of a feeling about it. Lisa’s little girl, she’s only five, she kept talking about the ugly man – and Mandy’s mum said that Mandy had been getting some funny phone calls. Mind you, she said that was down to Mandy’s boyfriend. I don’t know. It doesn’t add up to much. We’ve looked into it, and there’s nothing there you can put your finger on. I’ve got Lynne Jordan’s team working on it now. You know Lynne?’ Neave made a noncommittal noise. ‘The boyfriend admits he made “one or two” calls. It’s not just that, though. It’s too neat the way he lifts them. He always manages to do it without a witness. He’s got to know about them to do that. No, my money says he plans it well ahead.’

It was gone ten when they left the pub. Berryman headed for his car and Neave turned towards the river and his flat. Outside the pub, he zipped up his jacket and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Winter had the town in its grip now. The air was icy and the pavement sparkled with frost. The centre was deserted as usual – just a few kids rode their skateboards around the pedestrianized shopping area, a small group of adolescents huddled together outside the local burger joint. His footsteps echoed as he walked through the pedestrian precinct towards the river. The wind cut between the buildings and blew bits of rubbish around on the ground and up into the air. An empty can rattled its way down the street as if in pursuit of the lighter burger cartons and chip wrappings. A twenty-minute walk and he’d be home. He was glad he didn’t have to watch over his shoulder, to be wary of every empty alleyway. He thought of Deborah walking through the town centre alone.

Berryman’s mind drifted back to the past. Angie. He and Neave had been working over in Sheffield at the time. There had been some attacks on women in the university district. A young woman had reported a prowler and they were following it up. The house was a typical student house, a terrace with an uncared-for frontage, and ragged curtains up in the bay window. The young man who opened the door gave them a hostile stare as they announced themselves, then called over his shoulder, ‘Angie!’ He pushed past them on his way out. Neave gave Berryman a look – give the little shit a hard time? – but they let him go. Putting the frighteners on a cocky young man wasn’t what they were here for.

A young woman was coming down the stairs, tying the belt of a flimsy dressing gown round her waist. Her hair was wet, and she was carrying a towel. She looked surprised to see them. ‘I thought …’ They were obviously not who she was expecting to see.

Berryman took over. He always played the hard man, a part he was well suited to with his heavy jaw and thick eyebrows. Neave would stay back, quietly, looking sympathetic and friendly. It established a useful relationship if it was needed for later, though it didn’t particularly reflect the way they actually were, Berryman thought. He was a bit of a soft touch, unlike Neave. He introduced himself, showing her his identification. ‘We’re here about this man you reported.’ She had phoned in, and later told the patrol officer that a man had been peering in through the ground-floor windows late at night. Berryman didn’t doubt it, if she always went around dressed like that. Her gown was made of some silky material that kept sliding off her shoulders, and where her wet hair dripped on to it, it clung and lost its opacity.

He tried to catch Neave’s eye as the woman took them into the downstairs front room, but all he met was an expression of blank amazement. He looked as if he’d been hit by a car he hadn’t seen coming. Berryman grinned. He didn’t often see Neave rattled.

The room was a tip. There were papers all over the floor, and books. Two empty cups occupied the rug in front of the fire. The walls were a confusion of colour from pictures, posters, photographs, hangings all tacked up at random. In one corner there was a music stand and a violin case on the floor beside it. There was a bed under the window with a patterned cover thrown over it. The woman sat down on the rug, briefly revealing the inside of a white thigh, and gestured towards the bed. ‘I’m a bit short of chairs. Please sit down.’ Berryman sat himself gingerly on the bed. He didn’t like mess and he didn’t like women who couldn’t keep a place clean. Neave remained standing and leant his arm on the mantelpiece. The woman began to towel her hair in front of the fire, the towel providing some of the concealment that the dressing gown failed to do.

‘Right, Miss …’ Berryman checked his notes. ‘Kerridge. What can you tell us about this man? Just start from the beginning and tell us what you can remember.’ It didn’t sound like the same man – it sounded like the Peeping Tom they’d had problems with in the past. He wound the interview up quickly, asked her if she’d be prepared to make a statement and look at some photographs. As they left, he was conscious that Neave had been a silent spectator throughout. He tried a ribald comment on the woman’s dress or lack of it, but got a monosyllabic response. Neave could be a moody bastard.

He didn’t say anything to Berryman about seeing the woman again, but three weeks later she had moved into his flat, and two years after that, just after Flora was born, they were married.

They were all young, under twenty-five. Lisa was the oldest at nearly twenty-five, Kate was just twenty, killed within a month of her birthday, Mandy was twenty-one and Julie was twenty-four. Their lives had some similarities, some differences. Lisa was married, had been for three years. Her young husband had been given a hard time by the investigating team when her mutilated body had been found on the line near Mexborough station. She had a little girl, Karen, five years old. Kate and Mandy were both single and had no children. Kate got out and about – the Warehouse, pubs with comedy evenings, concerts at the Arena, the students’ union, the Leadmill. Lived in a shared house with three other students. Lots of boyfriends, no one special. They’d talked to them all. Nothing. Mandy was quieter, lived with her parents, had a little mongrel bitch, had been engaged for a couple of months but had just finished with her boyfriend. They’d given him a hard time, too, but there was nothing they could pin on him. Julie, they still had to find out more about Julie. She was single, lived alone, apparently had no children but they didn’t have much more information yet. Lisa worked part time as a secretary, Kate was a politics student, active in the students’ union, Mandy was a clerk for the local council and Julie was a PA. Her company had just won a Small Business of the Year Award before she was killed.

Lynne Jordan went through the details of the victims again, looking for that elusive something that linked them together. It was there, and she was missing it. She looked at the photographs the families had supplied. Lisa was dark-haired, attractive. She was smiling at the camera and doing an exaggerated glamour pose. She looked young, happy, confident. Kate was more serious, dark-haired again, strong features, well-defined brows. This picture had been taken when she was campaigning for the student union presidency. Attractive, but in a different way from Lisa’s vivacious femininity. Mandy had fair hair, a light brown often called mousy. She smiled rather tensely and artificially at the camera. A plain woman, if the picture was right. She doesn’t take a good photo, our Amanda, her mother had said sadly. We had a lovely one for the engagement announcement. We put it in the paper. Julie was blonde, fine-boned, lovely. She smiled confidently at the camera, a young woman at ease with her looks.

Their dead faces stared back from the board in the room where Berryman’s team was based; and from another wall, in another place.

He keeps the photographs on a board just by the entrance to his loft. He likes doorways, entrances, spaces that are neither one place nor the other. In the doorway, on the threshold, there is a place that is nowhere. It is a place where it is easier for him to be his real self. It is a dangerous place – some people protect themselves from it by hanging charms above the door, or protect their loved ones by carrying them across it. It isn’t dangerous for him, he lives in this space. He doesn’t need any charms. He can’t keep his souvenirs on the threshold, but he likes to see his pictures as he climbs from one world into another.

The trains are rattling around the tracks, running to time, running like clockwork. At eight-thirty-two, a train pulls into Goldthorpe station, another pulls out of Sheffield on its way to Barnsley, another on its way to Hull, calling at Meadowhall, Moreham Central, Mexborough, Conisbrough, all the way to the end of the line. Signals change, points move, freight trains rush through stations without stopping, slow and stop at signals. At night, the landscape is illuminated with points of light – lights at the stations, lights where the roads run near to the track – but there are dark places too where the track runs through unlit expanses, the trains briefly lighting up the night and vanishing, leaving silence behind them.

The Christmas shoppers are out in force now. They crowd the stations. An InterCity express thunders through the small station at Meadowhall, as the tannoy warns travellers to stand back from the edge as a fast train is approaching. These places are dangerous. A station is a first step across the threshold. A train is a doorway. The train is the doorway, with its exit miles, maybe hundreds of miles, away. The threshold ends at the destination. But things can happen in places that are no places, places that are doorways hundreds of miles long. Such places are dangerous.

He can’t settle. He needs to do something. He looks at the paper again. He frowns. When he first saw it, he’d been quite upset. They were saying, they were implying, that he’d made a mistake, and he hadn’t made a mistake at all. It was all a matter of timing. He knew the other Thursday woman would be there. He’d arranged it so that he was gone by the time she arrived. Of course he’d had to go back. He needed to check that he hadn’t left anything behind. He liked to prolong, to savour the moment, to delay just a little. He’d had the forethought to make sure that the light was dim on the other platform. He would have done something about her if he’d needed to. In fact, he can see that it might all be working out for the best. He gets his scissors out and carefully cuts around the photograph. This is the first time he’s had a such good photograph of before. The others are most unsatisfactory. The photographs of after are better. If you want a job doing well …

He knows why he can’t settle. He’s been given the sign. He needs to hunt again, and time is getting short. This one is a good one. She goes to places where he can hunt, he knows that already. After all, he’s been watching. Carefully, he tapes the photograph to his notice board in the loft, and looks at it for a moment. Then he takes a Stanley knife and, using a fresh blade, cuts first one eye, then the other from the picture. Then he pushes a pin through the place where the mouth is. This one speaks and he doesn’t much care for what it says.

5

Tuesday morning, Debbie, who had woken up at about half past five and had been unable to get back to sleep, caught the seven-twenty train and was actually in college by quarter to eight. She had planned to spend an hour catching up on her marking, but as she sat at her desk sipping a cup of bitter coffee, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. Right. Something else then. She had her GCSE English class at nine that morning. They’d been looking at ghost stories – it was a topic Debbie always did at Christmas, and she was trying to get them to write stories of their own. They had trouble with writing horror, because the model from their own experience of books and film was fantasy based and excessively violent. The idea that their own world of the everyday could be far more horrific was alien to them. Debbie decided that today she would show them ghosts.

The Broome building offered an excellent venue for a ghost story. Debbie went roaming, trying to remember the best stories, find the best places. The high-ceilinged corridors were shadowy, brown, grey and black, the brighter colours on the paintwork long since worn off. Ghosts could easily walk here. Debbie went on up the stairs to the top corridor – there was a story here – and began a narrative in her head in which someone was standing where she was standing, her back against the window, watching through the crazed glass in the swing doors, the shadow of something stalking her, knowing she was trapped in a dead end with no way out but the eighty-foot drop through the window behind her.

Footsteps beyond the doors brought her back to earth – the sound was heavy and solid. A man, then. She peered back down the corridor into the shadows, and saw a shape loom against the glass. The door opened, and Les came through, carrying a bunch of keys. He looked at Debbie.

‘Morning,’ he said. Should she explain what she was doing? He didn’t seem curious, but he must have wondered. As he came towards her, she said, ‘I was just looking at those places that you tell the stories about, you know, the ghosts.’

‘Not me.’ Les looked dour. ‘It’ll be one of those young ones telling you a lot of nonsense. I’ve worked here near on forty year, and I’ve never seen any ghosts.’

‘But they’re good stories. I was trying to remember that one that was supposed to have happened one Christmas – I’m sure it was you that told me.’

‘Oh, you mean the footsteps on the long staircase.’ Les seemed reluctant to tell the story at first, but Debbie had remembered it as soon as he mentioned the staircase.

The long staircase was originally a fire escape. It ran in a spiral down the inside of a tower-like structure built at the point where the corridors ended. An external fire escape now served the building. The doors that led on to the long staircase were nailed up and had been since before Debbie started work at the college. The only way on to it now was through the IT resource centre. At the back of the room was the old fire exit with a push-bar handle. Students no longer used the long staircase which led out into the lane behind the college, and now it was mostly used for storage. It was dark even on the sunniest day.

The story that Les was telling was about a caretaker who had gone down the staircase one night to check that the outside door was locked. He went down the stairs and checked the door. He didn’t check anything else, because there was nothing else to check. As he was climbing back up the staircase, slowly, because it was late and he wasn’t a young man, there was a sudden draught, the door above him slammed shut and the light went out. He stopped, because it gave him a shock to be suddenly in the dark, then went on, a bit more quickly now. It was cold and somehow unpleasant, at night, on the stairs, in the dark. Then he stopped again. Down below him, on the stairs he’d just climbed, he could hear something, something that sounded like footsteps coming lightly and quickly up the stairs behind him, from where there had been nothing but an empty staircase and a locked door. He didn’t wait. He ran as quickly as he could in the dark, up the last two flights to the door that was hard to open from the inside. As he struggled with it, he could hear the footsteps getting closer and moving more quickly as they came towards his landing. He managed to get the door open, was through it and had it shut and bolted behind him more quickly than he thought was possible. He was leaning against the door getting his breath when something struck it with such force he was knocked to the ground. But nothing was ever found on the staircase to account for it.

When Debbie had first heard the story of the footsteps that came from nowhere, pursuing their victim in the dark, the hairs had stood up on her arms. That would be an excellent story to tell the students. She could take them on to the stairs, show them.

The double doors were pushed open, making them both jump, and Les fumbled with his key ring as Rob Neave came into view. ‘On the warpath today,’ he muttered.

Neave saw Debbie, and made some attempt to hide his irritation. ‘I want you down with the delivery van,’ he said to Les. ‘Get Dave or someone to open these rooms and for Christ’s sake don’t take all day.’ His face was white and he looked ill, as if he had a serious hangover. Debbie remembered what Louise had told her the other evening.

‘That was my fault,’ she apologized for Les. ‘I was getting him to tell me his ghost story.’

Neave looked at her with a faint smile and shook his head when she asked him if he knew it, so she told him the story she’d just heard from Les. He didn’t seem too impressed. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

‘Of course not, but it’s a good story. Don’t you think so?’

He smiled properly this time, and she felt a small sense of triumph. ‘No, I just see Les coming up the stairs with his head tucked under his arm.’ She laughed, and then he said, ‘I need a word with you. Will you be in your room around five?’

The ghost tour of the Broome building went down very well. Debbie wondered, only half facetiously, if she should suggest it to the college marketing forum as a money spinner. Despite the success of her class, she felt uneasy. That feeling of foreboding was back, and she was glad that the college was bustling with pre-Christmas activity. She felt better in the crowded corridors. As soon as she was on her own she had that feeling of eyes on her, a sense of cold and menace. She cursed Tim, and she cursed herself for thinking about ghost stories – especially college ones.

It didn’t help when, at coffee break, her head of department summoned her to his office to discuss the newspaper article. Peter Davis listened to her explanation, but his concluding, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time but don’t let it happen again,’ served to fire up her anger. It was hard to pull her mind away from it and concentrate on her class. Anyway, she missed coffee.

At lunchtime there was a union meeting. City College was in trouble. Falling student numbers and financial constraints meant that the college was losing money, and the college management were planning cuts. The union was fighting for its members’ jobs, but the staff were divided and undecided. The meetings were usually acrimonious or inconclusive.

The room was filling up as Debbie arrived. She’d meant to give herself time to buy a sandwich before the meeting started, but she’d stayed behind to talk to two of the students, and had had to come straight along. She saw Tim Godber indicating an empty seat next to him, but ignored him – Why is Tim trying to be friendly again? – and found a seat at the other side of the room. The news was all bad. City College was running more deeply into debt, and the management were looking for savings in the staffing budget. Nervously, Debbie thought about her overdraft and the money she needed each month just to pay the mortgage.

She had to leave before the meeting was over, and go straight to the classroom for her afternoon session with another GCSE group. They were a particularly lively group – standard euphemism, Debbie thought, for difficult and obnoxious – and she didn’t feel up to controlling them through a trip round the building. No ghost tour, then. She decided to read them some ghost stories instead, and try to get them writing that way. They enjoyed the stories and contributed some of their own – mostly plots from videos, but there were one or two local stories that were interesting, and Debbie got them to record those on to audio tape, after they’d giggled and messed about. The students stopped cooperating when it came to writing, though, and dealing with the disruption, the constant demands for attention, requests for pens and paper tried her patience almost to breaking. By the end of the afternoon she had a headache and was too exhausted to feel hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since she left the house that morning.

When Rob Neave got to the staff room it was gone quarter past five. Debbie was sitting in her chair drinking coffee and eating chocolate. She offered a piece to him. ‘What is it about teachers and chocolate?’ he said, turning her offer down.

‘This’ – she waved the chocolate bar – ‘is because I haven’t had anything since breakfast.’ He still looked tired, she noticed, as if he’d had as little sleep as she’d had these past few nights, but he looked better than he had in the morning, more like himself. She wanted to say something about this, but she couldn’t think of any way to say it that didn’t sound like an intrusion. ‘Have you heard about the cuts?’ she asked instead.

He had but didn’t seem too concerned. ‘I’m not planning a long stay here, anyway.’

Debbie wondered when he planned to leave. The place would be duller without him. ‘You said you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’

He seemed unsure of himself, which was unusual. ‘That thing at the station. I’ve been talking to some people,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘and it’s possible you did see something important that night …’ He was watching her closely now. Debbie put down her chocolate bar. She wasn’t hungry any more. ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you again, I think. Just – be a bit careful. Don’t use the train on your late nights.’

‘Is this official?’ Debbie tried hard to keep her voice calm.

‘No, it’s just advice. From me, not them.’

‘I need a drink.’ Debbie plucked up her courage. ‘Come and have a beer or something – if you’re free.’

He looked at his watch and hesitated. She thought he was going to refuse, but he said, ‘I’ve just got some stuff to see to in the office. Where are you going? Across the road? I’ll see you in half an hour.’

Suddenly elated, Debbie packed her work into her briefcase and sorted her mail into the out tray. As she was leaving the room, the phone rang, and it was a bit more than half an hour before she was walking through the door of the Grindstone into the smell of beer and old smoke, and saw Neave leaning on the bar, talking to the landlord.

He bought the first round, bringing the drinks over to a table, and dropping a packet of salted peanuts in front of her. ‘You need to get something inside you,’ he said, pushing his chair away from the table as he sat down, and hooking his foot over the rung of another. Debbie felt shy, as though she didn’t know what to say to him in this new context, but he didn’t seem to notice anything, and talked casually about the pub and how it had been the place where the police used to drink, when he was in the force. ‘More crimes got solved at this bar than at the station,’ was how he put it. He seemed more relaxed in this atmosphere, and Debbie asked him a bit about his life in the police force. He made her laugh with some stories of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met, and then he asked her about herself, moving on to her parents, her childhood, her current life and her plans for the future.

Debbie found herself talking about her father, something she didn’t often do. ‘He was a miner,’ she said. ‘It was in the family, kind of thing. His father was a miner as well. He used to spoil me rotten.’ Rob sat there quietly, watching her as she talked. ‘He couldn’t cope when they closed the pits down. He got paid off, but he couldn’t get another job. He used to hate the way the people down at the job centres talked to him.’ She paused. She wasn’t sure about the next bit.

‘What happened?’ He was sitting close to her, listening.

‘He died … It’s some time now.’ But Debbie could remember what it felt like, believing he hadn’t cared enough, thinking that he had chosen to leave them. She still felt angry about it. She wanted to change the subject. She realized that, though they’d been talking for a while, she still knew very little about Rob.

‘You’re not local, are you?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve lived round here for years, but no, I was born in North Shields. Lived in Newcastle while I was growing up.’

‘What brought you to Moreham?’ It seemed a strange place to come, to Debbie.

‘Nothing. I came to Sheffield to work.’ He still seemed relaxed, but Debbie was aware that he was stonewalling her questions, that he didn’t want to talk about himself.

She tried another tack. ‘You said you weren’t planning to stay at City. Where next?’

He was looking round the room, watching the other drinkers at the bar. ‘Nothing planned. But City has only ever been a temporary thing. You ought to be thinking about moving on as well. It’s no place to get stuck.’

‘I like it.’ Debbie recognized his ploy to turn the conversation back to her. ‘I like the students and I like the work. I am looking for something else though – but only because of what’s happening.’ She tried again. ‘Would you go to another college, or what?’

He laughed. ‘No, I’m not planning a career in college security. I don’t know yet, something. Do you want another drink?’

‘My round.’ Debbie reached for her purse and found it contained her travel pass and fifty pence. She went red. ‘Oh, God, I ask you for a drink and I haven’t got a penny on me.’

He thought it was funny. ‘I’ll ask you next time I’m broke. Don’t worry, Deborah. Come on, what do you want. I’m buying.’

‘OK, thanks, I’ll have the same again. But next time …’

When he came back from the bar he smoothly took charge of the conversation again. ‘Your father wasn’t an old man, was he?’

Debbie shook her head. ‘He was fifty-five when he died.’ She thought Rob was watching her, but he was looking across towards the bar, frowning slightly, as though he was thinking something over.

‘What is it that makes you so angry about it?’ His question was so unexpected that she felt winded. The response was forced out of her before she had time to think about his right to ask it.

‘Everything. All of them.’ She felt her face flush. ‘He thought it was his fault, you see. He was a pit deputy and he thought he should have joined the strike.’ She looked at Rob, uncertain whether to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He voted to strike. He was Catholic,’ Debbie explained. ‘His mother’s family were deep-dyed Irish Catholics. So he felt guilty.’ She thought about it again. ‘They just threw them out, made them feel useless. Oh, there was good redundancy, but Dad didn’t want that, he wanted his job, he was proud of it.’

He leant towards her, his arms on the table. ‘And what happened?’

‘Nothing happened. He got cancer. Lung cancer. He’d had a cough for a while. But he wouldn’t do anything about it. We could tell, me and Mum, that he wasn’t well, but he just didn’t seem bothered. By the time they found it he was too far gone.’ She sighed. It had been an awful death.

‘You were his only daughter?’

‘His only child.’ Debbie smiled. ‘He wasn’t a practising Catholic by the time he met Mum. That was something else he felt guilty about.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not something I really understand.’

‘No. It’s not something I know much about.’ That was the first personal comment he’d volunteered.

She told him something about the stories her father used to tell about the priests and nuns, and her Aunt Caitlin’s house in County Cork with its holy pictures and statues.

‘You didn’t get all that?’ he asked.

Debbie shook her head. ‘Like I said, he’d given up Catholicism by the time he met Mum. She wouldn’t have had any truck with it anyway. It was something that happened when he was a teenager. His sister, she was only a baby, she died. She was only about three months old, and she hadn’t been baptized. She’d been ill. My grandmother, apparently she believed that the baby wouldn’t go to heaven because it hadn’t been baptized, and she was just destroyed. My father said that he realized then he didn’t believe a word of it any more.’

He went on watching her after she’d finished, unnervingly silent until she saw that he hadn’t been paying attention, was thinking about something else. His face looked tense, distant. He shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just thought of something.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She felt a stab of disappointment. His glass was empty. He waited while she finished her drink. ‘Are you on the train?’ Debbie nodded. ‘I’ll walk down as far as the bridge with you. I’m going that way. When’s your next train?’

A bit fazed by the sudden change, Debbie scrabbled in her bag and checked her timetable. ‘It’s in ten minutes.’

It was nearly seven as they left the pub, and the town centre was quiet. A cold wind was blowing now, buffeting against the buildings, pulling Debbie’s hair out of its pins and combs and whipping it against her face. They didn’t talk as they walked towards the river. The station lights came into view, and they stopped at the crossing. ‘I go this way,’ he said. He looked over towards the station. There were people going in. It looked quite busy. ‘Will you be OK from here?’

‘Yes, fine.’ Debbie checked her watch. ‘I’m early.’ She had nearly seven minutes before the train arrived, assuming it was running on time. She looked at him. The wind had blown his hair about and he’d turned his collar up against the cold. His face was half in shadow. She shivered.

‘You’re frozen,’ he said. ‘There’s no warmth in that.’ He touched the collar of her mac. ‘Here.’ He unwound the scarf he was wearing from under his coat and wrapped it round her neck. His good humour seemed to be back. He caught hold of one of the tendrils of her hair that had escaped from its confinement and tucked it behind her ear. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, ‘You’d better get that train.’ He waited as she crossed the road, then turned and walked away towards the river. She could hear her train on the line. She hurried to the station entrance, and an hour later she was standing in her kitchen, feeling unaccountably depressed.

She ought to eat something. The two beers she’d had with Rob had gone to her head. She wandered round the kitchen, opening cupboards. Buttercup yarped insistently at her feet. ‘I’ve fed you,’ Debbie told the little cat, and, picking her up, took her to the cat dish. Buttercup spurned the food with a burying motion, and hurried back to the kitchen after Debbie, mewing.

Some pasta, some wizened mushrooms, some eggs and some onions were the results of Debbie’s trawl. A mushroom omelette, then. She put some oil to heat in the frying pan, and stirred the eggs in a dish. She washed the mushrooms and chopped them, deciding to fry them in butter as she deserved a treat. The mushrooms were cooking, and she was just pouring the eggs into the pan when the phone rang. Shit. She was tempted to leave it, but she couldn’t stand a ringing phone. She was always convinced it was something serious on the other end. As soon as she picked it up, it stopped. She banged it down in frustration, and it started again. She picked it up and again it stopped. She waited a moment, then just as she was about to pick up the receiver to try 1471, the phone rang a third time. She grabbed it and waited. A voice she recognized well at the other end said, ‘Debbie?’

‘Mum!’ She was relieved. ‘Are you having phone trouble again?’ Gina Sykes had been supplied with a series of jinxed phones by an increasingly apologetic and baffled phone company. The most recent one had behaved itself until, apparently, now.

‘No. Should I have? After all the trouble I’ve had …’ And she rattled off into the long story about inefficient operators and astronomical phone bills. Then she said, ‘Now, love, I’m phoning about that article in the Standard. Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s a bit much when I’m terrified for my daughter nearly a week too late.’

Debbie sighed. She’d been hoping, rather unrealistically, that her mother wouldn’t see the article, as she rarely read the local paper. She explained what had happened, and, feeling a bit guilty for not having said anything to her mother about the whole business in the first place, she told her about the interview with the police, and a slightly edited account of Rob Neave’s opinion.

‘Well, you pay heed to that,’ Gina advised her. ‘It’s what your dad would have said as well. Listen, Debbie, I’m going up to the grave on Saturday, taking some flowers. Do you want to come too?’

Of course! It was her father’s birthday on Saturday. Debbie, who never remembered birthdays – sometimes including her own – had always relied on her mother to remind her, so she could send her father a card and a present. Now it seemed she needed to be reminded about anniversaries. She felt guilty. ‘Of course I will,’ she said, trying to remember if she’d made any arrangements for the weekend. ‘Shall I try and make it over on Friday night? If I’m not too busy. I could stay Saturday as well.’ Though her mother was only a few stops up the line, Debbie didn’t see as much of her as either of them would like. Debbie’s work schedule got in the way, and Gina’s job, though part time, occupied irregular hours.

After some more desultory conversation, Debbie rang off, and stood by the phone, looking at the photo on the table, her and her father displaying that trophy so proudly. Had her mother been trying to get through or not? Or was there someone else trying to phone her? A smell of burning brought her back, and she rushed to the kitchen to be confronted by pans full of burnt eggs and blackened mushrooms. She scraped the eggs on to a saucer and offered them to Buttercup, who crouched down intently to eat them. She dumped both pans in a sink full of water, angrily ripped a crust off the end of the loaf and ate it dry. It was stale.

Midnight, and again, Neave couldn’t sleep. He drank some beer, listened to some music, read for a while, but he couldn’t get his head to be still. It was all there, just waiting. The smallest thing brought it back. Angie.

The children’s home where he’d spent most of his childhood had been run by people with very traditional views – no political correctness there. Boys were encouraged to boys’ activities and girls to girls’. He hadn’t minded this, except for the book with the pictures in. ‘What are you reading that for?’ Marlisse used to say. ‘You don’t want to read that. You’re a boy,’ and she’d substitute a sports book or an adventure book that she considered more suitable.

But the book with the pictures fascinated him and he went back to it again and again. All the pictures were mysterious, with watery, twisting colours that suggested unseen things lurking in the shadows on the page. The pictures were all supposed to be of fairies and elves – which is why Marlisse thought it wasn’t a boy’s book – but these weren’t pretty little children with big eyes and gauzy wings. Some of them were twisted, ugly and strange, and some of them were wild and dangerous. There was one picture that he couldn’t get out of his mind. In the background of this picture, a figure was half concealed behind some flowers. She had red-gold hair and an expression of glee on a face that had a wild, pinched beauty. He had been in love with her – whatever she was. They had had adventures together where he’d saved her from dungeons, and enemy soldiers, and high mountains and dark caves. She had been a companion in some of the loneliest times. He hadn’t thought about the picture for years, and had certainly never expected to see it again, until she’d run lightly down the stairs in that dressing gown and looked at him with surprise.

He could see Berryman watching her as she knelt in front of the fire. He’d watched her as well. She’d known, and had casually moved the towel that she was using to dry her hair to obscure Berryman’s view. But she had known he could still see her from his position by the mantelpiece, and had sparkled her eyes briefly in his direction. She was playing a dangerous game, and he liked that.

He waited until the end of that shift. It was nearly seven before he left the station. He turned down Berryman’s suggestion of a drink. He had two days free now, and he and Berryman had plans for them, involving a couple of women they’d met the week before and invited over to his flat Saturday night; but first he decided to go back. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say – More questions? Forgot to ask …? He’d wing it when the time came. He parked outside the shabby terrace. It was getting dark now. He tried out one or two phrases – Sorry to disturb you again, could you just go over … but it wasn’t how he expected.

He knocked at the door. He could hear music coming from the downstairs room, which stopped as he knocked the second time. She opened the door and looked at him, then she smiled and invited him in. She took him into the room they’d been in earlier and she made some kind of gesture, of welcome, he wasn’t sure. She was dressed now, wearing something that seemed to consist of scarves and swirls, a confusion of shadow colours. Her hair, now it was dry, curled on to her shoulders a vivid red-gold. He couldn’t stop looking at her.

The violin was out of its case, propped up next to the music stand. ‘I was just practising,’ she said. ‘I’ve nearly finished. You don’t mind waiting?’ She picked up the instrument again, smiled briefly at him, and then became intent as she played. He watched the way her body bent and danced with the music, as though she was part of it. She was unselfconscious. He had given himself the right to watch her last time, this time she had given him the right. When she finished the piece she was playing, he asked her about the music. He’d never heard anything like it before. She picked up the violin again and played him pieces as she was talking about them. Then she showed him how to draw the bow across the strings and after a couple of tortured cat sounds, he produced a high, clear note.

His interest aroused her enthusiasm. She pulled out some books of songs that he had forgotten he knew, and made him sing, harmonizing her clear soprano with his tenor, but he didn’t have the technique to do that for long, and they ended up laughing and breathless. Then they talked, sitting in front of the fire. He was good at getting information out of people, he could question them gently, expertly until they told him far more than they intended, but this time he let her draw him out, talked about things he’d rarely talked about before, until she knew as much about him as he knew about her. There was no rush, no hurry.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.