Alex Gray: Never Somewhere Else

The blue eyes were hard and cold as he contemplated this latest murder. For a few moments he allowed himself to mourn the passing of someone else’s daughter, then forced such feelings aside to prepare a terse statement for the gentlemen of the Press.

Martin Enderby picked up the photo of the dead girl from his desk. She had been pretty, he thought. A blonde with a shy smile looked up at him from the black and white print. And now there was a name to match this face: Sharon Millen.

Teenager Sharon Millen’s mutilated body was found today by gardeners arriving for work in St Mungo’s Park.

She had been missing overnight after failing to come home from the cinema with her boyfriend, James Thomson. Police were notified of Sharon’s disappearance by her parents after her father Joseph had telephoned James Thomson in the early hours. However, James had seen Sharon safely on the number 7 bus which would have taken her to within yards of her home. How she came to be in St Mungo’s Park, which lies at the other end of the city, is a mystery with which the police are now dealing. They are anxious to speak to any passenger who may have been travelling on that route between 11.15 and 11.40 p.m. or to anyone who may have seen or spoken to Sharon in the vicinity of her home.

This dreadful death is now the third to have occurred in a fortnight. Although Chief Inspector William Lorimer assured our reporter that investigations are very much under way, there is a feeling that the police remain in the dark as far as these horrific crimes are concerned.

The question on everybody’s lips of course is: will the killer strike again?

Martin read the article with a frown. Not enough about the victim. And certainly not enough about the boyfriend. It was a pity the lad Thomson hadn’t supplied a photograph of them together, but his parents had refused to let him speak to the Press. He was too upset. Only a lad of eighteen himself. Still, he couldn’t be a suspect or surely Lorimer would have him in custody. Anyway, the public could easily see the pattern of these crimes now, thought Martin.

He had written a good piece on Donna Henderson, the first victim. Poor girl had been last seen leaving a city centre club on her way to a taxi rank. Only no taxi had picked her up. Then her body had been discovered in St Mungo’s Park. Martin chewed over the phrase ‘Murders in St Mungo’s’. Or maybe ‘The St Mungo’s Murders’. It was suitably alliterative, anyway. Lucy Haining had met the same fate; strangulation with a bicycle chain then mutilation. Martin shuddered. He balked at the mental image of human flesh slashed away like that. God help the relatives who had had to identify the bodies.

More on the horror of three murders in two weeks, he thought, starting to type some detail into his copy.

Linda Thomson knocked on her son’s door quietly. The terrible sobs had subsided and she hoped that he had slept. She too had wept in her husband’s arms, shocked and stricken when the police had come to bring the awful news. James had gone with them to the police station in the city centre. It had been hours before they brought him home, chalk white and frozen cold with shock. Couldn’t anyone see the poor lad was in a state? His reaction clearly showed that he was innocent of any hint of crime.

Anyhow, Linda thought, anyone who knows James can tell that he’d never hurt a fly. She took the mug of tea into the darkened room and placed it on the bedside table. James was lying face down on his bed, the duvet only partly covering his legs. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Linda stroked her son’s dark hair. A long convulsive sob broke from him, but he uttered no words. He was too exhausted to speak, she thought, remembering his scream of pain earlier that day.

‘Why, Mum, why?’

Outside the sunset glowed on the horizon, making all the foreground shapes one black silhouette. A crow sat on the rooftops turning its head this way and that, as if waiting for a mate before flying off to roost for the night. Darkness would soon gather and in the darkness unmentionable fears would rise and percolate around the city, fears which might spill over into careless talk to give a clue to these deeds of death.

Lorimer had officers scouring several haunts in the city, primed to receive any word which could lead him to the killer. The Superintendent was breathing down his neck, talking about psychological profiling. After Lucy Haining’s death he had thought, ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ Now he was not so sure.

*

On a glass shelf three trophies stand. The dried blood has congealed to make a brown stain like dull varnish on the glass. Three swathes of hair adorn the shelf, blonde, red and near-black, trophies of a grisly hunter.

Outside the room where these scalps are kept, daylight has broken again. A greenish light is cast on the bare distempered walls from the uncurtained windows set high above the city. A bird flies past outside. Look and see. A concrete tower with blank eyes staring, anonymous. No one will ever find you here.

Chief Inspector Lorimer stood at the window of his office, hands clasped behind his back. Before him the morning had turned dull and drizzly, puddles forming in the car park below. Uniformed men scuttled across the yard to their vehicles. Doors slammed. Engines revved. Lorimer saw and heard all this without noticing it at all. His eyes and ears were in St Mungo’s Park, trying to pierce through the darkness of three sinister nights.

There was nothing, nothing at all to link these victims other than the grisly manner of their death. Donna Henderson had been a hairdresser, just an ordinary enough lassie, almost eighteen. Lucy had been an art student. English family. Lived in digs near the Art School. By all accounts she had had a promising future in jewellery design, having won some award or other in this, her final year. And it had been her very final year. Then young Sharon Millen, just a wee girl really, still at school. No police records to link them, no common backgrounds. Even their appearances differed, as if the killer picked and chose for sheer variety. Lorimer understood too well that this type of killer was the most difficult to find and the most dangerous. Some crazy person with an obsession, a fetish in their sick mind, looking for victims. The scalping hadn’t shown any sort of expertise, the MO claimed. But maybe he would improve his technique given time, thought Lorimer to himself. And we mustn’t give him time.

He clenched his fists harder. So far there was nothing at all to show for the painstaking work by his squad. House-to-house interviews, as well as a thorough scouring of the park, had drawn a blank. The families of the victims had been questioned, their closest friends and colleagues brought in to make statements. The places they had been on the night of each murder had been turned inside out.

Donna Henderson had been murdered in West George Lane. Forensics had matched hair and blood samples. No one had seen or heard a thing and yet the murder must have taken place only minutes after she had left her companions. The killer could not possibly have known that the young hairdresser would take that particular route. The victim had been picked quite at random; yet Lorimer felt certain that a murder had been intended. Someone had lain in wait to pounce on a solitary girl in that lonely place.

The exact location of Lucy’s death had taken rather longer to discover. It emerged that she had been on her way to visit a fellow student — Janet Yarwood — but had never arrived. Lucy had often dropped in on this girlfriend whose flat was a short walk away. In her statement Janet had said that she had not expected Lucy, exactly, in the sense that no prior arrangement had been made. But there had been nothing unusual about this. However, enough evidence had been found on the waste ground between the back courts of two rows of tenements to establish that Janet’s flat had been Lucy’s destination that night. His men had sifted through all sorts of rubbish, used needles included, and had even taken apart the beginnings of a heap destined to become a bonfire on Guy Fawkes night.