Peter Robinson - Aftermath

One of the reasons she had spent so much time away, she had finally admitted to herself after coming back from California this last time with her tail between her legs, was to get away from Banks, from the easy proximity to him that tormented her so much while she pretended to be casual about the whole thing, and much cooler than she felt. And now they were working closely together.

With a sigh, Jenny returned her attention to her work.

Her main problem thus far, she realized, had been an almost complete lack of forensic and crime scene information, and without them, it was damn near impossible to produce a decent threshold analysis – an initial review that could serve as an investigative compass, help the police know where to look – let alone a more complex profile. About all she had been able to work on was the victimology. All this, of course, had given her detractors on the task force – and they were legion – plenty of ammunition.

England was still in the dark ages as far as the use of consultant psychologists and criminal profiling went, Jenny believed, especially as compared to the USA. Partly this was because the FBI is a national force with the resources to develop national programs and Britain has fifty or more separate police forces, all operating piecemeal. Also, profilers in the USA tend to be cops and are therefore more readily accepted. In Britain, profilers are usually psychologists or psychiatrists and, as such, are distrusted by the police and the legal system in general. Consultant psychologists would be lucky to make it to the witness box in an English court, Jenny knew, let alone be accepted as expert witnesses, the way they are in the USA. Even if they did get in the box, whatever evidence they gave would be looked at askance by judge and jury, and the defense would wheel in another psychologist with a different theory.

The dark ages.

When it came right down to it, Jenny was well aware that most of the police she worked with regarded her as perhaps only one step up from a clairvoyant, if that, and that they only brought her in because it was easier than not doing so. But still she struggled on. While she was prepared to admit that profiling was still, perhaps, more of an art than a science, and while a profile could rarely, if ever, point the finger at a specific killer, she believed that it could narrow the field and help focus an investigation.

Looking at pictures on a screen just didn’t do it for Jenny, so she spread out the photographs again on her desk, though she knew them all by heart: Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Leanne Wray, Melissa Horrocks and Kimberley Myers, all attractive blond girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

There had been too many assumptions for Jenny’s liking right from the start, the prime one being that all five girls had been abducted by the same person or persons. She could, she had told Banks and the team, make out almost as a good a case for their not being linked, even on such little information as she possessed.

Young girls go missing all the time, Jenny had argued; they have arguments with their parents and run away from home. But Banks told her that detailed and exhaustive interviews with friends, family, teachers, neighbors and acquaintances showed that all the girls – except perhaps Leanne Wray – came from stable family backgrounds and, apart from the usual rows about boyfriends, clothes, loud music and what have you, nothing unusual or significant had happened in their lives prior to their disappearance. These, Banks stressed, were not your common or garden-variety teenage runaways. There was also the matter of the shoulder bags found abandoned close to where the girls had last been seen. With the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation still hanging like an albatross around its neck, West Yorkshire was taking no chances.

The number became four, then five, and no traces whatsoever could be found of any of the girls through the usual channels: youth support groups, the National Missing Persons Helpline, Crimewatch UK reconstructions, MISSING: CAN-U-HELP posters, media appeals and local police efforts.

In the end, Jenny accepted Banks’s argument and proceeded as if the disappearances were linked, at the same time keeping clear notes of any differences between the individual circumstances. Before long, she found that the similarities by far overwhelmed the differences.

Victimology. What did they have in common? All the girls were young, had long blond hair, long legs and trim, athletic figures. It seemed to indicate the type of girl he liked, Jenny had said. They all have different tastes.

By victim number four, Jenny had noticed the pattern of escalation: nearly two months between victims one and two, five weeks between two and three, but only two and a half weeks between three and four. He had been getting needier, she thought at the time, which meant he might also become more reckless. Jenny was also willing to bet that there was a fair degree of personality disintegration going on.

The criminal had chosen his haunts well. Open-air parties, pubs, dances, clubs, cinemas and pop concerts were all places where you were very likely to find young people, and they all had to get home one way or another. She knew that the team referred to him as the “Chameleon” and agreed that he showed a very high level of skill in taking his pick of victims without being seen. All had been abducted at night in urban settings – desolate stretches of city streets, ill-lit and deserted. He had also managed to stay well beyond the range of the CCTV cameras that covered many city centers and town squares these days.

A witness said she saw Samantha, the Bradford victim, talking to someone through the window of a dark car, and that was the only information Jenny had about his possible method of abduction.

While the New Year’s Eve party, the Harrogate pop concert, the cinema and university pub were common knowledge, and obvious hunting grounds, one question that had bothered Jenny since Saturday morning was how the killer had known about the youth-club dance after which Kimberley Myers had been abducted. Did he live in the neighborhood? Was he a church member? Had he simply happened to be passing at the time? As far as she knew, these things weren’t advertised outside the immediate community, or even beyond the club’s actual members.

Now she knew: Terence Payne lived just down the street, taught at the local comprehensive. Knew the victim.

Also, now, some of the things she had learned that day were making sense of some of the other puzzling facts and questions she had gathered over the weeks. Of the five abductions, four had occurred on a Friday night, or in the early hours of Saturday morning, which had led Jenny to believe that the killer worked a regular five-day week, and that he devoted his weekends to his hobby. The odd one out, Melissa Horrocks, had bothered her, but now that she knew Payne was a schoolteacher, the Tuesday, eighteenth of April, abduction made sense, too. It was the Easter holidays, and Payne had more spare time on his hands.

From this scant information – all this before the Kimberley Myers abduction – Jenny had surmised that they were dealing with an abductor who struck opportunistically. He cruised suitable locations looking for a certain type of victim, and when he found one, he struck as fast as lightning. There was no evidence that any of the girls had been stalked either on the evening of, or prior to, their abductions, though it was a possibility she had to bear in mind, but Jenny was willing to bet that he had scouted the locations, studied every way in and out, every dark nook and cranny, all the sight lines and angles. There was always a certain level of risk involved in things such as this. Just enough, perhaps, to guarantee that quick surge of adrenaline that was probably part of the thrill. Now Jenny knew that he had used chloroform to subdue his victims; that decreased the level of risk.