Eeny Meeny

30

Sandra Lawton. Age: 33. Stalker.

Helen scanned the file. Sandra Lawton was a romantic obsessive who when spurned turned nasty. She already had three convictions for putting a person in fear of violence by harassment. Safe to say her treatment didn’t seem to be working and her belief that smart, educated men in positions of authority secretly wanted to sleep with her was as strong as ever.

Helen scrolled on to the next one. Sandra was nuts, but she wasn’t violent.

Isobel Screed. Age: 18. Cyber stalker. Again, Helen rejected her. This girl was a slip of a thing, who spent her life abusing soap actresses via text and Twitter. She threatened to cut their wombs out and so on, but by the looks of it never left her bedsit, so she could be ruled out. The classic cyber coward.

Alison Stedwell. Age: 37. Possession of an offensive weapon. ABH. Multiple harassment charges. This was more promising. A serial, experienced offender who had attempted to fire a crossbow at a co-worker she’d been stalking, before she was arrested and later sectioned. She was out in the community again now, under supervision apparently, and hadn’t offended for several months. Was she capable of putting something like this together? Helen slumped in her chair. Who was she kidding? Alison might be a nasty piece of work, but she wasn’t exactly subtle in her techniques – her stalking was visible and deliberately so – nor was she a looker. Peter Brightston’s description of a raven-haired beauty could in no way apply to the gappy-toothed blob that stared back at Helen from the screen. Another one to scratch off the list.

She’d been using HOLMES2 for hours now, searching out every British female stalker convicted in the last ten years. But it was fruitless. The individual they were hunting was exceptional, a far cry from the clumsy stalkers Helen was looking at now. Their stalker must have shadowed her victims for weeks, so as to discover Amy and Sam’s propensity for hitching, as well as the ins and outs of Ben and Peter’s weekly trips to Bournemouth. To have plotted their abductions in ways that allowed them to be executed on remote roads, in areas with no mobile phone reception, was impressive. But also to find locations to hold them in where they wouldn’t be found or heard, where they could go slowly mad with hunger and terror, was something else. Such an individual wouldn’t be buried away in the bowels of HOLMES2, she would be a living legend already, the regular subject of police seminars and literature.

After the discovery about Ben’s car, Helen and Charlie had re-interviewed Amy, Peter and their families, searching for any evidence of stalking. Amy and Sam were easy-going types, not watchful in the slightest, who lived on a busy student campus. Nothing – or nobody – had stood out as odd. Peter Brightston said he would have noticed an attractive woman following him, but it sounded like empty bluster – he had had no reason to be suspicious or on his guard. Ben was a different kettle of fish; he had been by nature cautious and careful, but he was not around to ask any more and his fiancée insisted he hadn’t expressed any fears to her in the run-up to his abduction.

The one small break they did have came as a result of Ben’s car. The killer had had a very narrow window in which to punch a hole in Ben’s fuel tank. A matter of three to four hours at the most, as the group meeting at the Bournemouth office was shorter than usual that day. Ben usually parked in the office car park, but that was full because of a client lunch on site, so he’d parked in the NCP round the corner. Instinct told Helen that anything out of Ben’s normal routine could have posed his killer a problem and so was worth investigating. CCTV showed Ben and Peter parking on the fourth floor, not far from the lifts. They left and five minutes later a female figure in a lime-green puffa and white Kappa cap had walked past. Was she scouting the scene? Probably, because moments later a gloved hand suddenly appeared in front of the security camera, spray-painting out its view on the world. Helen had asked for the footage to be analysed, enhanced if possible, and had set Sanderson the task of checking CCTV footage from the vicinity of the NCP to work out the suspect’s route into the building, but for now they had to work with what they’d got. It wasn’t much, but it was a fleeting view of their killer and it seemed to confirm everything Amy and Peter had told them about her. Not least the fact that she was a she. There had been some in her team – Grounds and Bridges particularly – who’d questioned whether a woman was really behind all this. But they had their answer now.

Helen shut down HOLMES2 and headed out and round the corner to the Parrot and Two Chairmen pub. It was the station’s Christmas do today and despite the fact that Helen viewed the event as wholly inappropriate in the circumstances, she had to go. It wasn’t done for senior officers to duck it – crazy really as the last thing rank-and-file want when they’re letting their hair down is their bosses hanging around.

Helen saw her team and pushed her way through the crowd to find them. They were all uncomfortable at being off the case when there was still so much to do, but they were making the best of it. Mark especially was in good spirits, proudly sporting his slimline tonic like a trophy of sobriety. Still, he looked well on it – his lean face had more colour, his eyes more sparkle. He greeted Helen warmly and seemed keen to include her in the group banter about the nightmare of New Year, etc. He was laying it on a bit thick she thought and on more than one occasion Helen caught a knowing look from Charlie.

‘So who fancies a kiss under the mistletoe?’

Whittaker. He was a different man out of the office. Gone were the anxiety and politicking, replaced by an effortless bonhomie.

‘So many pretty girls, so little time,’ he said casting mock lascivious glances at the assembled females.

‘Been there, done that,’ Helen replied wryly. ‘I wouldn’t write home about it.’

‘Charlie, then,’ Whittaker continued. ‘Make my Christmas.’

Charlie blushed to her roots, unsure how to handle the humorous advances of a slightly tipsy Detective Superintendent.

‘She’s married, sir. Or as good as,’ Helen interjected.

‘I heard she was still living in sin, which must mean there’s a chance,’ Whittaker said unabashed.

‘I’d move on, sir. Plenty more fish in the sea.’

‘Pity. Still you’ve got to know when you’re beaten.’ His eyes settled on the young and attractive DC McAndrew.

‘If you’re desperate, I’d happily oblige,’ Mark threw in. Helen laughed, as did the others, but Whittaker wasn’t amused. He’d never seemed that keen on his male officers – it was the women that interested him.

‘Think I’ll pass. If you’ll excuse me…’

And he headed off to find others to molest. The conversation resumed, DC Sanderson asking everyone where they were spending Christmas. Helen took this as her cue to leave.

She was surprised to find she’d been in the pub for well over an hour. It had actually been quite refreshing – a moment for her brain to shut down – but now as she walked back to the station through the cold night air, her mind was once more full of the case. She wanted to follow up the benzodiazepine link. Where was the killer getting her supply? Could that be a route to her?

Helen returned to the empty incident room and once more continued her hunt for the killer who would not be caught.