1980

We have no children.

I can’t sleep -

I never can.

My back bad, getting worse and worse, day by day.

Always awake, sweating and afraid, eyes wide in the dark beside Joan.

The radio on -

Always on:

Hunger strikers near death, thirty-two murdered in one LA weekend;

Gdansk, Tehran, Kabul, the Dakota;

The North of England -

No law.

I get out of bed and go downstairs.

I can hear the rain against the window pane, behind the curtains.

I go into the kitchen and put the radio on and wait for the kettle to boil.

The rain against the pane, a song on the radio:

‘Don’t be afraid to go to hell and back -’

I open my briefcase and take out the red ring-binder, the red ring-binder they gave me:

Murders and Assaults upon Women in the North of England.

The kettle’s boiling, whistling:

Everyone gets everything they want.

I unlock the back door and take the tea and the red ring-binder out into the black garden and the rain. I walk down the side of the garage to the shed I built at the back. I take the key from my dressing gown pocket and unlock the door to the shed.

I am cold, freezing.

I go inside, lock the door behind me and put on the light.

My room -

One door, one light, no windows; the smell of earth and damp, old exhaust fumes and ageing gardening gloves; a long desk across the length of the back wall, two grey metal filing cabinets standing guard on each of the side walls. Between them, on top of the desk, a computer and keyboard, a black and white portable television, a CB radio, a cassette recorder and a reel to reel, a typewriter. Under the desk, across the floor, wires and cables, plugs and adapters, boxes of paper, stacks of magazines and newspapers, tins and jars and pots of pens and pencils and paperclips.

I perch the tea on top of the red ring-binder on the corner of the desk and I switch on the two-bar electric heater and the computer -

Anabasis:

The bastard bits of an Acorn with Memorex RAMpacks, pirated parts from Radionics and Tandy, an unopened ZX80 still in its box, the whole machine covered in cassette tapes and blu-tack.

I sit down at the desk and stare at the wall above Anabasis:

At one map and twelve photographs -

Each photograph a face, each face a letter and a date, a number on each forehead:

I take the tea off the red ring-binder and open the first page:

Contents:

Divided by the years:

1974:

Joyce Jobson, attacked Halifax, July 1974.

Anita Bird, attacked Cleckheaton, August 1974.

1975:

Theresa Campbell, murdered Leeds, June 1975.

Clare Strachan, murdered Preston, November 1975.

1976:

Joan Richards, murdered Leeds, February 1976.

Ka Su Peng, attacked Bradford, October 1976.

1977:

Marie Watts, murdered Leeds, May 1977.

Linda Clark, attacked Bradford, June 1977.

Rachel Johnson, murdered Leeds, June 1977.

Janice Ryan, murdered Bradford, June 1977.

Elizabeth McQueen, murdered Manchester, November 1977.

Kathy Kelly, attacked Leeds, December 1977.

1978:

Tracey Livingston, murdered Preston, January 1978.

Candy Simon, murdered Huddersfield, January 1978.

Doreen Pickles, murdered Manchester, May 1978.

1979:

Joanne Thornton, murdered Morley, May 1979.

Dawn Williams, murdered Bradford, September 1979.

He’s already written the next chapter:

1980:

Laureen Bell, murdered Leeds, December 1980.

My chapter -

The last chapter.

I close the red ring-binder, the red ring-binder they gave me -

Nothing new.

I look up at the wall, the map and the photographs, the letters and the dates, the numbers:

Seven years, thirteen dead women, seven of them mothers, twenty orphaned children.

Reed’s voice echoing around the shed:

‘What do you know?’

My words echoing back:

‘Not much more than I’ve read in the papers.’

Echoing back round my head, this shed, this room -

My room -

The War Room -

My obsessions:

Murder and lies, lies and murder -

See them, smell them, taste them.

The War Room -

My War:

Motherless children, childless mothers.

I am forty years old, Joan thirty-eight.

We have no children, we can’t.

Somewhere back on the Moors, the visibility down to yards, I’d made that deal again:

I catch him, stop him murdering mothers, orphaning children, then you give us one, just one.