Killing the Shadows

TWENTY-EIGHT

Joanne Gibb remembered a doctor friend once talking about the abbreviations the medical profession scribble on notes. Not the ones about blood pressure and pulse rate the ones like FLK for ‘Funny Looking Kid.’ What came to mind that Monday morning was NFRH—‘Normal For Round Here.’ Working serious cases in CID produced similar effects in every dedicated officer. Pale skin, hair that was lank within an hour of showering, black smudges under the eyes, frown lines across the forehead and around the mouth, shoulders held unnaturally stiff. Yup, definitely NFRH. She scowled at herself in the mirror of the women’s toilet. It was cosmetic surgery she needed, not cosmetics.

Given how she’d aged externally in three years working for Steve Preston, she shuddered to think about the condition of her internal organs. She poked her tongue out at her reflection, noting it already had its coating of yellowish fur only an hour after the alarm clock had ended the four hours’ unconsciousness she’d managed the previous night. Too much coffee and too little sleep was giving her ulcers, she was convinced of it. The cigarettes were wrecking what remained of her aerobic fitness and she didn’t even want to think about what the drink was doing to her liver. Now her boyfriend was muttering about settling down and starting a family. Judging by the state of the rest of her, all she could expect from her reproductive system was a three-headed monkey.

Men, she decided, had it easy. They mostly managed somehow to look attractively wrecked or admirably haunted like Steve Preston, making women want to take them home and mother them. Women, on the other hand, ended up labelled dog-rough, deserted by their men for next year’s model. Well, it had been her choice, joining the Met. She could have got a job in a bank or in retail management and hung on to what looks she had for a bit longer. And been bored shitless, she reminded herself as she dragged a brush through her jaw-length brown bob. Maybe if she had her hair cut? Something a bit more lively instead of the heavy curtain that hung lifeless round a face she’d once thought of as heart-shaped.

Joanne closed her eyes and sighed. Enough of this self-pitying vanity. She should remember what was important and take her pride in that, not in what she looked like in the mirror. She stuffed her make — up back in its pouch and then into her bag. Picking up the bundle of folders that represented her weekend’s work, she managed to find a spare finger to pull the door open and headed down the corridor to brief the boss.

She found Steve Preston behind his desk with his usual mug of Earl Grey tea, the smoke from the first slim cigar of the day pooling under the low ceiling. “Morning, Joanne,” he said. He looked to her familiar scrutiny like he’d had about the same amount of sleep as her.

“Boss,” she acknowledged, dumping her files on the edge of his desk and subsiding into the chair opposite him.

“You didn’t log off till half past two this morning,” he observed.

Joanne excavated her cigarettes from her bag and lit up. “I was chasing.”

“Catch anything?”

Joanne waved her hand at the files, trailing a thin ribbon of smoke. “I concentrated on the Met, the City boys and the Home Counties. I can do a wider trawl if you think it’s worth it. You know, it would make this sort of job so much easier if we had some sort of central reporting system for serious offences she said with the tired bitterness of those who have to work against inadequate systems.”

“It’ll come,” Steve said. “Too late for our sanity, probably, but it’ll come. The Bramshill boys are playing around with the Canadian system, VICLAS. It’s supposed to be more sophisticated than anything the FBI have got, but it’s anybody’s guess when they’ll actually start using it to benefit field operations, especially the ones as far down the pecking order as this has become. So till then, we’re stuck with phone calls and faxes and calling in favours. How did you do?”

“Depressingly well. I can’t say it’s been fun to be reminded of just how many rapes and serious sexual assaults get reported in any given year. But I think I’ve dug up some interesting stuff. I’ve done a digest for you. That’s what I was doing at half past two this morning.” Joanne opened the top file and took out two sheets of paper. “There you go.”

Steve glanced at the carefully collated information. “Nice job, Joanne. Want to take me through it?”

Joanne grabbed her own copy of the digest and pulled the top file on to her lap. She took a pair of reading glasses out of the breast pocket of her shirt and perched them on her nose. “How I did it, I asked for cases that matched all five criteria that you asked about,” she began, relishing as she always did the process of report and discussion that frequently stimulated new ideas. “Then I asked them to include any other cases that matched three or more of the criteria. What I was looking for was cases where the assault took place out of doors, where a knife was involved, where the victim was a young blonde female, where there were child witnesses to some or all of the assault and where the perpetrator may have made his escape by bike.

“To be honest, I didn’t expect many hits. But we’ve got four rapes and two serious sexual assaults that incorporate all five points. All six took place north of the river. The first was reported two and a half years ago, in Stoke Newington. A woman sunbathing in her garden with her baby asleep in its push chair was assaulted by a man wearing cycling gear who climbed over her garden fence. Her screams alerted a neighbour and her assailant got away.

“The second was in Camden about ten weeks later. A woman was walking along the canal towpath with her three-year-old son when a man jumped out from behind a wall and held a knife to her throat. He told her he was going to rape her, but they were disturbed by a group of students who came along the towpath. He jumped back over the wall and pedalled off on a bike before anyone could stop him.

“The third one was on the top floor of a multi storey car park in Brent. Fifteen weeks later. This time, he raped a woman shopper. She had installed her kid in the car seat and he came up from behind, pushing her down on the seat and raping her at knife point According to the investigating officer, she thought he was wearing a cycle helmet.

“Nearly six months go by before the next reported rape. This time, he moved further west, to Kensal Rise. The victim was taking her new baby for a walk in the cemetery.” Here, Joanne’s professional mask slipped and she glanced up at Steve. “It’s not as weird as it sounds,” she said defensively. “These old Victorian cemeteries can be quite attractive, you know. Especially where there’s not much green space around.”

Steve shook his head. “I never said a word, Joanne. My mate Kit reckons Highgate Cemetery is the best source of inspiration he knows. Of course, he’s not a copper…”

“Anyway, she was walking the baby in the cemetery when she was jumped by a bloke in lycra shorts and a top, with a cycle helmet and goggles and what looked to her like one of those expensive kitchen knives that are made from one solid piece of metal. She fought back pretty hard and got seventeen stitches in her arm for her pains. She saw him take off afterwards on a mountain bike. It’s the best description we’ve got.”

“ICi male, between five-ten and six feet, slim build, dark hair, pale complexion,” Steve read wearily. “Well, that makes half the male members of the Metropolitan Police suspects.”

“Not half of them, boss. I reckon there’s not more than ten percent could make anything like a decent getaway on a bike.”

Steve grimaced at his cigar. “You’re probably right. What’s interesting is that the description doesn’t fit Francis Blake. He’s too short, and I don’t think anyone would describe him as slim. He’s far too broad in the shoulder. OK, let’s hear the rest of it.”

“Number five was a school cleaner in Crouch End. She was last out of the building one Friday night eighteen months ago. He was waiting for her. As she locked up, he came up behind her and held a knife to her throat. He dragged her into some bushes at the edge of the path and raped her. She had no kids with her, but I’ve included this one because it took place in a primary school playground and he was definitely on a bike. What do you think?”

“It’s worth keeping in the cluster for now. And the last one?”

“Now, this one’s really interesting. It was only five weeks before Susan Blanchard’s murder. And it was a bit further afield, actually in Hatfield. But it was in a park. A nanny was out with the little boy she looks after, walking in the woodland garden area. She was knocked to the ground, reckons she was actually unconscious for a few minutes. When she came round, she’d been dragged into the bushes and he was raping her. He had a knife at her throat and told her he’d stick her like a pig if she made a sound.”

“Fuck,” Steve swore softly. “Why didn’t we pick up on that when Susan Blanchard was killed?”

Joanne’s mouth tightened in a prim line. “Principally because Hertfordshire didn’t tell us about it.”

“Why the hell not? It’s not as if we kept the Blanchard murder a secret! It was all over the media. Didn’t it occur to them that it might be the same bloke?”

“Apparently not. The reason being that they reckoned one of their own for it. They had an accused rapist out on bail and they thought this was him taking one last bite of the cherry before he went down. As the investigating officer charmingly put it to me,” Joanne added tartly. “By the time Susan was killed, chummy was inside doing a seven stretch for three rapes, so they didn’t bother telling us because it couldn’t have been him, could it?” Sarcasm saturated her voice.

“Great.” Steve crushed out the stub of his cigar and sighed. “Did their rapist admit to the nanny as well, then?”

“Apparently so. But all his other rapes were late-night back street jobs, and none of his other victims were blondes. Hertfordshire believed him, but I don’t.”

“No, me neither. But I suppose at the time they had no good reason not to, and it cleared the books for them. They’re not the only ones who snatch at the easy option.”

Joanne glowered. “With respect, sir, Blake wasn’t the easy option. He was a plausible suspect.”

“That’s history, Jo. I’m more interested in the future than the past.” Steve got up and paced restlessly behind the desk. “And these six cases are all still unsolved?”

“Apart from the Hertfordshire one, yes. He doesn’t leave much in the way of evidence. He used a condom. And cycling gear doesn’t leave a lot of fibre evidence. What we do have is a few pubic hairs from the Kensal Rise rape, which has given us a DNA profile. But so far there’s no match with any of the DNA samples on record.” Joanne closed her file and replaced it with the others. “There are no viable suspects in any of the outstanding cases. I don’t know where we start to look, boss.”

“Me neither. But I know a woman who might.” Steve came to a halt opposite the window and stared unseeingly at the depressing view beyond.

“Dr. Cameron?” Joanne asked.

Steve nodded.

“I thought she’d refused to work with the Met again?”

“She did. And she meant it.” He turned back to face her, an ironic smile on his face. “Hand me down my grovelling shoes.”

“You’ll be wanting a flak jacket as well,” Joanne said, remembering Fiona Cameron’s icy stare.

“I don’t doubt it, Jo. I don’t doubt it for one minute.”