Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

Crawford wouldn’t look his client in the eye. “There’s nothing I can do right now, Joseph,” he said. “They’re quite within their rights. But believe me, I’ll do everything in my power to help you.”

“Get me out of this!” yelled Randall, red-faced, twisting his head back toward Crawford as the constables dragged him out of the interview room. “Sebastian! Get me out of this now!”

Crawford was pale and hunched. He managed to summon up only the grimmest of smiles as he edged past Banks into the corridor and followed his client down the stairs.

“Now this is where it gets really interesting,” said Ferris after a long swig of Sneck-Lifter. He could certainly put it away, Annie thought, checking her watch. She could write off Coronation Street tonight, and maybe The Bill, too, the way things were going. Still, if Ferris’s story was as interesting as he obviously thought it was, maybe it would be worthwhile.

“A week or so after we found Jack Grimley’s body and the Australian lad got hurt, another local chap by the name of Greg Eastcote was reported missing by a workmate. Apparently, he hadn’t turned up at his job for several days. He was a delivery man for a fish wholesaler. We never found him, nor any trace of him.”

“Why do I get the feeling there’s always more?” said Annie. “This case is starting to resemble a hall of mirrors.” There was perhaps a quarter of an inch of beer left in her glass, but she wasn’t going to have another one, not this time. Control. Getting it back.

“It is, rather, isn’t it?” said Ferris. “Anyway, we went into Eastcote’s house to see if we could find any clues to his disappearance. He lived alone. I was there, along with Paddy Cromer. We had no evidence at all that there was any connection with what happened to Grimley and McLaren, but such mysterious disappearances and violent assaults were pretty rare around these parts, as I said. As far as his workmates were concerned, Eastcote was happy with his job and seemed generally uncomplicated and worry-free, if perhaps rather quiet and antisocial. A bit of an ‘odd duck,’ as one of them put it. To be honest, we didn’t know what we’d stumbled into at the time.”

“And now?”

Ferris laughed. “I’m not much the wiser.” He drank some more beer and resumed his tale. The lights dimmed and the pub started to fill up with evening drinkers. Annie felt somehow cut off from the laughter and gaiety of the crowd, as if she and Ferris were adrift on their own island of reality, or unreality, depending on how you saw it. She couldn’t explain why she felt that way, but somehow she knew that what Ferris was telling her was important, and that it had something to do with Lucy Payne’s murder, though Lucy would have been only ten in 1989. “It was what we found there, in his home, that puzzled us,” Ferris said. “In almost every respect it was a perfectly normal house. Neat and tidy, clean, the usual books, TV and videos. Normal.”

“But?”

“This never made the media,” Ferris said, “but in one of the sideboard drawers, we found seven locks of hair tied up in pink ribbons.” Annie felt her chest constrict. Ferris must have noticed some change in her because he went on quickly. “No, there’s nothing normal about that, is there?”

“Did you?… I mean…”

“Everyone knew there had been a serial killer operating in the north, and the general feeling was that now we’d found him, or at least found out who he was. We never did find Eastcote himself. As far as our tally was concerned, he had claimed six victims, but there were other girls missing, other unexplained disappearances, and one girl who survived.”

Annie raised an eyebrow.

“Kirsten Farrow. Someone interrupted him before he could finish her off,” Ferris went on. “She was in a pretty bad way for a long time, but she recovered.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yes. She’d been staying in Leeds at the time with a friend called Sarah Bingham. She was vague, Kirsten, but you can expect that when someone suffered the way she did, poor lass. She really couldn’t remember much about what happened to her at all. We also consulted with the investigators on the case, Detective Superintendent Elswick and his DS, Dicky Heywood. Greg Eastcote’s delivery routes coincided with the disappearances and murders of all six girls and with Kirsten’s assault. We also managed to match Kirsten’s hair sample with one of the locks, so we know that he took a sample from her, even though she survived, and another lock matched that of his most recent victim. The others were… well, they’d been buried for a while, but we did our best. And you know what hair’s like at the best of times; it’s hardy and durable enough, but practically damned impossible to make a match that’ll stand up in court, and these were early days for DNA. Too early. None of us had really heard much about it, and I doubt you could have got DNA from a hair follicle, even if there’d been one. But the hair had been shorn with sharp scissors, so that was pretty unlikely, anyway. And court was never an issue.”

“No?”

“Like I said, we never found Eastcote. A local woman said she thought she’d seen two people struggling on the cliff path just up past the abbey on the way to Robin Hood’s Bay, but she was a long way off, and she couldn’t tell us any more than that. We searched the area and found one of the fence posts had come out of the ground. It seemed as if someone had gone over the edge. We also found blood and fibers on the barbed wire, but we’d no way of knowing whose they were. We got Eastcote’s blood group from medical records, of course, and it matched, but so did forty-four percent of the country’s.”

“Were there any more killings?”

“Not after that. Not around here.”

“You think he went over?”

“We didn’t know for certain, but it was a reasonable assumption that his body had been carried out to sea on the tide.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could we do? We followed a few minor leads, queried some of the local B and Bs. One woman remembered Keith McLaren staying at her guesthouse, and that he struck up a conversation with a young woman there. Seems only natural, I suppose, when you’re young.”

“Did you question him about it?”

“When he came out of his coma, yes. He did remember something about a girl. Apparently they had a drink together, but that’s all.”

“Name?”

“Didn’t remember. Who knows, maybe he remembers more now. It’s been eighteen years.”

“Was there any follow-up?”

Ferris shook his head. “Years passed and nothing new came up. You know what it’s like.” He laughed. “Not like books or telly where the detective won’t give up until he gets his man.”

“Or woman.”

“Aye. Anyway, officially there was no murder, remember. Jack Grimley was killed by a fall, and Greg Eastcote disappeared. The only actual crime was the one against Keith McLaren, and he couldn’t remember anything, then he buggered off back to Australia. Pardon my French.” Ferris paused. “Besides, the feeling was that if Greg Eastcote was a serial killer, as he appeared to be, then someone had done us a bloody big favor.”

“I think you’d have been hard pushed telling that to Jack Grimley’s family, or to Keith McLaren.”

“Aye, well, I never said it sat well with me over the years, did I, but that’s the way things go, sometimes.”

“So you did nothing?”

“My hands were tied.”

“And that’s where it stands today?”

Ferris sighed. “Until now,” he said.

Annie frowned. The noise of laughter and conversation ebbed and flowed around them. Behind the bar, a glass smashed. “I still don’t get it,” she said. “It’s a fascinating story, but you must realize there’s nothing to connect those events directly with what happened to Lucy Payne the other day except the bee in your bonnet. It’s been eighteen years. The whole idea’s ludicrous.”