Shatter

29

DI Cray has organised for six boxes to be delivered to the cottage. They must be back in the incident room by morning. A courier will collect them just after midnight.

Inside the boxes are witness statements, timelines, phone wheels and crime scene photographs relating to both murders. I managed to get them into the house without Julianne noticing.

Closing the study door, I turn the key and take a seat before opening the first box. My mouth is dry but I can’t blame my medication. Stacked in boxes around my feet is evidence of two lives and two deaths. Nothing will bring these women back and nothing can harm their feelings any more, yet I feel like an uninvited guest sorting through their underwear. Photographs. Statements. Timelines. Videos. Versions of the past.

They say once is an event, twice is a coincidence and three times is a pattern. I have only two crimes to consider. Two victims. Christine Wheeler and Sylvia Furness were the same age. They went to school together. Both were mothers of young daughters. I try to imagine each of their lives, the places they went, the people they met and the events they experienced.

Already, in the space of forty-eight hours, detectives have pieced together a biographical history of Sylvia Furness (nee Ferguson). She was born in 1972, grew up in Bath and went to Oldfield School for Girls. Her father worked as a haulage contractor and her mother a nurse. Sylvia went to university in Leeds but dropped out in her second year to go travelling. She worked on charter boats in the Caribbean where she met her future husband, Richard Furness, in St Lucia in the West Indies. He had taken a year off from university and was transferring yachts for rich Europeans. They married in 1994. Alice came along a year later. Richard Furness graduated from Bristol University and has worked for two major pharmaceutical companies.

Sylvia was a party girl who loved to socialise and go dancing. Christine couldn’t have been more different. Quiet, unadventurous, hardworking and reliable, she didn’t have boyfriends or an active social life.

One interesting point was that Sylvia took self-defence classes. Karate. In this case, it didn’t help her fight back. There were no defence wounds on her body. She submitted. The pillowcase that hooded her head was a popular high street brand. The handcuffs belonged to the husband- purchased from a sex shop in Amsterdam- ‘to spice up their sex life.’

How did the killer know about the handcuffs? He must have been inside Sylvia’s flat, invited or otherwise. She didn’t report any burglaries or break-ins. Maybe Ruiz is right and it’s a former a lover or boyfriend.

Wondering out loud, I begin talking to him, trying to understand how a predator like this one thinks and feels. ‘You knew so much about them- about their houses, their movements, their daughters, their shoes… Did you tell them what to wear?’

There’s a knock on the study door. I turn the key and open it a crack.

It’s Julianne. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I heard you talking to someone.’

‘Myself.’

She tries to peer under my arm to the desk. I block her view. ‘Why is the door locked?’

‘There are things I don’t want the girls to see.’

Her eyes suddenly narrow. ‘You’re doing it, aren’t you. You’re bringing this poison into our house.’

‘It’s just for tonight.’

She shakes her head. Her voice is flat. ‘I hate secrets. I know most people have them, but I hate them.’

She turns away. I see her bare feet beneath her dressing gown, disappearing along the hall. What about your secrets, I feel like saying, but she’s gone and the question remains unspoken. Closing the door, I turn the key.

The second box contains crime scene photographs, beginning with long distance shots and narrowing down to the minutia of individual body parts. Halfway through the albums my constitution fails. I get up, recheck the door, and stand at the window, looking through the bare branches of the cherry trees to the churchyard.

I have two hours before the courier arrives. Taking a notebook, I place a photograph of Christine Wheeler and Sylvia Furness side-by-side on my desk. Not an image of them naked, but a normal, head and shoulders shot. Then I create a more confronting collage, using images from each crime scene.

Those of Sylvia stand out more because of the hood covering her head. Her feet could barely touch the ground. She had to stand on her tiptoes. Within minutes her legs must have been in agony. As she grew exhausted, her heels dropped and her handcuffed wrist took the full weight of her body. More pain.

The hood, nakedness and stress position are elements redolent of torture or execution. The more I stare at the photographs, the more familiar they seem. These are images from a different sort of theatreone of conflict and war.

Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became synonymous with torture and physical abuse. Pictures were beamed around the world of hooded prisoners, naked and leashed, being taunted and humiliated. Some were kept in stress positions, standing on tiptoes with arms outstretched, or pulled painfully behind them. Sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme heat or cold, hunger and thirst, these are the hallmarks of interrogation and torture.

It took six hours to break Christine Wheeler. How long did he have with Sylvia Furness? She went missing on Monday afternoon; she was found on Wednesday morning- a window of thirty-six hours. She was dead for two-thirds of that time. Normally, it takes days to brainwash a person, to pick apart their defences. Whoever did this, managed to break Sylvia within twelve hours. That’s incredible.

This wasn’t bloodlust. He didn’t lash out with his fists or his feet. He didn’t batter these women into submission. There were no marks on their bodies that indicated beatings or violence or any sort of physical assault. He used words. Where does a person gain this type of skill? It takes practice. Rehearsal. Training.

Dividing the page of a notebook, I write the heading Things I Know and begin writing points.

These were deliberate, relaxed, almost euphoric crimes, expressions of a corrupt lust. He chose what each victim wore and didn’t wear. He knew what they each had in their wardrobe. What make-up they wore. When they’d be home alone. The shoes were important to him.

I think out loud again. ‘Why these women? What did they do to you? Did they ignore you? Laugh at you? Leave you behind?

‘Sylvia Furness would not have submitted easily. She was no innocent. You must have worn her down, marched her to the tree, your voice in her ear, saying what? It takes enormous skill to control somebody to this degree- to unlock a woman’s mind. You’ve done this before.

‘I have met minds like yours. I have seen what sexual sadists can do. These women represented something or someone you despised. They were symbolic as well as precise targets- that’s why they were so unalike. They were actors, cast in your drama because they had a particular look or were the right age or because of some other factor.

‘What are the elements of your fantasy? Public humiliation is a feature. You wanted them to be found. You made these women strip naked and parade. Sylvia’s body was hung like a piece of meat. Christine scrawled “slut” on her stomach.

‘The first crime scene didn’t make sense. It was too public and exposed. Why didn’t you choose somewhere private- an empty house or isolated farm building? You wanted Christine to be seen. It was part of the deviant theatre.

‘You did this for gratification. It might not have begun as your motive, but that’s what it’s become. At some point in your fantasy, sexual desire has become messed with anger and the need to dominate. You have learned to eroticise pain and torture. You have fantasised about it- taken women in your dreams and humiliated, punished, and broken them. Degraded. Devalued. Destroyed.

‘You are fastidious. You take notes. You find out everything you can about them by watching their houses and their movements. You know when they leave for work, when they get home, when the lights go off at night.

‘I don’t know the exact details of your planning, therefore I don’t know how closely you followed the strategy, but you were willing to take risks. What if Christine Wheeler had been rescued on the bridge or if Sylvia Furness had been found before the cold stopped her heart, they could have identified you.

‘It doesn’t make sense… unless… unless. They never saw your face! You whispered in their ears, you told them what to do and they obeyed, but they didn’t see your face.’

Pushing the notebook aside, I lean back and close my eyes, drained, tired, trembling.

It is late. The house is silent. Above my head, the light fitting has captured dead moths in the bowl of frosted glass. Inside there is a light bulb, a fragile glass shell, and inside that is a glowing filament. People often use light bulbs to represent ideas. Not me. My ideas begin as pencil marks on a white page, soft abstract outlines. Slowly the lines grow clearer and acquire light and shade, depth and clarity.

I have never met the man who killed Christine Wheeler and Sylvia Furness, but suddenly I feel as though he has sprung from within my mind, flesh and blood, with a voice that echoes in my ears. He is no longer a figment, no longer a mystery, no longer part of my imagining. I have seen his mind.