Danuta Reah - Only Darkness

‘Or was it just coincidence?’ That was Steve McCarthy again. Berryman scowled. Steve and Lynne tended to contradict each other’s ideas. He thought he’d been lucky at the beginning to have both of them on his team, because they were both good, skilled detectives. When the killer struck again, and again, he’d kept them working close to the centre as he coordinated the massive team that was now working on this investigation. He was beginning to wonder if this had been wise. They couldn’t seem to work together. He moved on to the next point.

‘How did he get her to Rawmarsh?’ Berryman tapped his pointer on the map. ‘If he grabbed her in a car, why leave her there? There’s no road runs close to where he dumped her. If he grabbed her at the station, how did he move her up the line?’

‘Took her on a train?’ Dave West, facetious. There was a stir of laughter around the room, lightening the atmosphere. West, a young DC on Lynne Jordan’s team, was dealing with this case early in his career. Some detectives never had to deal with a random killer, or the horrors of a sadistic sex killer.

Berryman treated it as a serious suggestion. If there was a way … ‘Tell me how he gets a dead woman on the train without anyone noticing, and how he gets the train to drop them off between stations, and I’ll give that one some serious thought.’ He waited to see if anyone else had anything to say on that point.

‘Emergency stop – communication cord?’ McCarthy’s face indicated that he saw the flaws in this, but was putting it forward anyway. Berryman shook his head. They’d thought of that. No train on that line had had an unscheduled stop that evening.

‘It’s the same …’

‘Kate Claremont …’

McCarthy and Jordan started together. Berryman looked at Lynne. She said, ‘It’s the same problem we’ve got with Kate. She was dumped on the line away from the road. There’s a footpath, but I wouldn’t want to carry someone – dead or alive – all that way. How did he get her there?’ She was only voicing a problem they’d discussed before. No one had anything to add.

Berryman felt weary at the thought of the work ahead. They’d done it all before, the house-to-house, tracking down the people who’d last seen the victim, talking to the relatives. It had got them nowhere, so far. OK, they needed her identity confirming, they needed to find her next of kin – who was missing her now? They needed to find out where she was going the night she died, who she’d seen in the days, weeks or even months before she died. They needed to know if she was just a random victim in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if she was carefully selected, chosen by the killer because something had drawn him to her. They needed to know this about all the victims, and they had so little to go on. Four women: Lisa, Kate, Mandy – and now Julie? It seemed it couldn’t be any other way, and he felt as though he’d let them down, each one more than the last. And the next one and the next one?

Saturday morning’s paper confirmed to Debbie that the dead woman was indeed a victim of the railway strangler. Debbie looked at the photograph of the woman who’d died, then read the article. The police put out the usual advice about women being careful, not going out alone after dark, etc., etc. She read through the article again, trying to find anything that might link the murder to the station, but as Tim had said, the body had been found several miles up the line at Rawmarsh. She looked again at the photograph of Julie Fyfe, twenty-four, younger than Debbie, and dead. She was laughing in the picture, at someone off camera to her left, fair hair tumbling rather glamorously round a small-featured face. Debbie looked for a long time, then she took some pieces of paper from beside her phone, and held them round the face in the picture, trying to see it with the hair pulled back into an elegant, business style. That cold feeling was coming back again now, because the face looking back at her could be, might be, no, was the face of the woman, the woman she’d seen so many Thursday nights, the woman who waited on the opposite platform for the Doncaster train.

Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

There was a phone number in the paper, and after several attempts she got through. The officer she spoke to seemed quite calm about what she had to say, which was a relief, but asked her if she could come in to talk to them in more detail. He wanted her to do that as soon as possible, which made that cold feeling stronger. ‘Can you make it today?’ he’d said. Debbie decided to go that morning. She wanted to exorcize the whole experience, and be reassured by the indifference of the police that she had seen nothing and knew nothing. She didn’t want to think about the implications of anything else, but she couldn’t stop. If it had been … him, then had she, Debbie, missed lying dead on the tracks by minutes? Had talking to Les Walker and Rob Neave saved her life? And cost Julie Fyfe hers?

The man who took her statement was pleasant, polite and not as reassuring as she had hoped. He asked her a lot of questions, some about the appearance of the man, though Debbie could tell him very little, and some questions were the same ones that Tim had asked her, coming back again and again to the broken light. ‘I just don’t know,’ Debbie said in the end. ‘At the time it seemed to come from the station, but I didn’t really think about it until I saw the glass. I just assumed, I suppose.’

‘That’s OK, Miss Sykes. Now just tell me again – you don’t think the man got on your train.’

‘I’m certain he didn’t.’

‘OK, and you’re sure you’ve never seen him before?’

‘I’m not certain, I couldn’t see him well enough, but I didn’t recognize him from what I did see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.’

‘I’d like you to talk to our artist, see if you can put together any kind of picture of this man’ – he waved aside her objections – ‘just a general impression if that’s all you can manage.’ He asked her some questions about the woman on the opposite platform, without either confirming or denying this was the murder victim, and some questions about her own Thursday night routine. He thanked her for coming in, but Debbie was still uneasy. ‘Do you think it was him?’ She wanted him to reassure her that it was nothing, nothing at all.

‘I don’t know, Miss Sykes. Leave it with us. It may not be relevant, but we need this information to find that out. You did the right thing coming in. By the way, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone about this.’

‘I’ve already talked to one or two people – I was worried.’

‘Well, if you could just avoid discussing it from now on …’

At the Saturday briefing, Berryman and his team went over the preliminary results of the postmortem on Julie Fyfe. It was the same as the others. Nothing that pointed directly to the killer, no hair, no fingerprints, no blood, no other fluids, no footprints. ‘Fuck-all,’ Berryman told them. What evidence there may have been had been washed away by the torrential rain. The ground underneath her body was as wet as the surrounding area, which suggested that she’d been dumped after the worst of the storm was over, but she was wet through with rain. She’d been outside for the storm.

What they did have, told them that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man. Death was by strangulation using some kind of smooth fabric, but whatever had been used had moved several times round the woman’s neck. The wire had been used after she was dead. The pathologist thought that the killer may have used partial strangulation as a means to subdue her, before he actually killed her. There was evidence of sexual assault – vaginal and anal bruising and laceration, a lot of internal damage. ‘He’s using a tool other than his tool,’ the pathologist had told Berryman. ‘Something thin and sharp, pointed. She would have bled to death if he hadn’t strangled her.’ The injuries to the eyes were caused by gouging – probably manual. ‘He was wearing gloves. Look for bloodstains on gloves,’ Berryman told his team. The general bruising and laceration was most probably caused by dragging of the – unconscious?, and later dead – woman along the ground. The lack of bruising and bleeding from some of these injuries suggested they were postmortem. There was possible impact injury, as though, after death, she had fallen heavily. Some gravel had been retrieved from the cuts. There was glass on the body. It was Lynne Jordan, the only woman on the team, who asked which of the other injuries were pre- or postmortem. Berryman couldn’t reassure. The sexual assault was carried out while the woman was alive. The other injuries? ‘Around the time of death,’ was all the information the pathologist could give them.