was the trouble?’ she’d ask, and I’d say: ‘Oh, nothing much, only your HRT patch stuck in the filter again.’”
Annette collapsed in a fit of giggling. When she’d nearly stopped she said: “Oh, Charlie, I do…” Then she did stop.
“You do what?” I asked, but she shook her head. I reached out, putting my arm across her shoulders and pulling her towards me, meeting no resistance. I buried my face in her mass of hair, smelling it that close for the first time. “You do what?” I insisted. “Tell me.”
“I…I…I do enjoy being with you,” I heard her muffled voice say.
“That counts for a lot,” I told her, and felt her nod in agreement. I tilted her chin upwards and kissed the lips I’d longed to kiss for a long time. A grown-up kiss, tonight, with no holding back. She broke off before I wanted to.
As I held her I said: “I’ve dreamed of that ever since I first saw you.”
She replied with a little “Uh” sound.
“It’s true. I’m not looking for a one-night stand, Annette, or a bit on the side. You know that, don’t you?”
“Aren’t you?” she replied.
“No. I want you to believe that.”
“Take me home, please.”
I started the engine and pulled my seatbelt back on. We drove most of the way to Heckley in silence. As we entered the town I said: “If luck’s on our side we’ll find something tomorrow to link Silkstone with other attacks in Somerset.”
“Do you think you will?” Annette asked.
“Depends whether he did them,” I replied. “And even then, it’s a long shot.” As we turned into her street I said: “I don’t know what to think. About anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth bothering.” We came to a standstill outside the building which contains her flat. “Here we are,” I said. “Thank you for a pleasant evening, Annette. Sorry if I stepped out of line. It won’t happen again.”
She shook her head, the light from the street lamps giving her a copper halo that swayed and shimmered like one of van Gogh’s wind-blown cypress trees. “You didn’t step out of line, Charlie,” she told me.
“Honest?”
“Mmm. Honest.”
“Good. I’m glad about that.”
She reached for the door handle, like Sophie had done, then hesitated and turned to me in exactly the same way. “What do you have against one-night stands and a bit on the side?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all.”
I held her gaze until she said: “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I’d like that very much.”
Chapter Fourteen
I blamed the traffic for being late. Bob asked if I’d come down the Fosse Way or Akeman Street, but I said: “Oh, I don’t know,” rather brusquely and asked him what he had for me. I realised later that it was an office joke, probably imitating one of the traffic officers who always swore that the quickest way from A to B was via Q, M and Z.
Plenty was the answer. I wanted to see the basic stuff first and then move on to the specific. I asked myself, as I looked at the ten-by-eights of poor Caroline’s body, if this was necessary. Couldn’t I have gleaned the information I wanted from someone’s report? No doubt, but this way was quicker. Caroline had been strangled and raped, from the front and not necessarily in that order. Also, the deed was done outdoors. Serial rapists develop a style, like any other craftsman. Some, who often have a record for burglary, prefer to work indoors. Others, quicker on their feet, strike in parks and lonely lanes. If Silkstone was our man he’d changed his style. Caroline’s body was left in a shallow stream and not discovered for two days, hence the lack of forensic evidence.
Bob had extracted a list of statistics from the pile of information, to show how extensive the enquiry had been: fifteen thousand statements; twenty thousand tyre prints; eighteen thousand cars. He fetched me a sandwich and percolated some decent coffee while I read the statements made by the officers who had interviewed the Famous Four: Silkstone, Latham, Margaret, and Michelle Webster. What could they have said to differentiate themselves from all those thousands of others, short of: “I did it, guv, it’s a fair cop?”
But they didn’t, and were lost in the pile of names just like others before them and a few since.
“Cor, that’s good,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. “Just what I need.”
“Late night?” Bob asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Working?”
“No, er, no, not really. It was, um, a promotion bash. Went on a bit late.” I liked that. A promotion bash. He was a detective, so he could probably tell that I was smiling, inside.
There were twenty-one reported attacks on women in the previous ten years that may have been linked to Caroline’s death. Seventeen of them were unlikely, two looked highly suspicious. I started at the bottom of the pile, working towards the likeliest ones. Had I done it the other way round I might have become bogged down on numbers one and two. Some had descriptions, some didn’t. He was tall, average height — this was most common — or short. Take your pick. He wore a balaclava, was clean shaven and had a beard. There were three of them, two of them, he was alone. He spoke with a local accent, a strange accent, never said a word. He had a knife, a gun, just used brute force. He was on foot, rode a bike, in a car.
Which would the good people of Frome prefer, I wondered? A serial rapist in their midst or twenty-one men who’d tried it once, for a bit of fun? Most of the attacks occurred on the way home from a night out, after both parties had imbibed too much alcohol. Some of the reports appeared frivolous, some hid tragedies behind the stilted phrases of the police officers. This was fifteen plus years ago, when the courts believed that a too-short skirt and eye contact across a crowded room meant: take me, I’m begging for it.
I’d placed the four favourites to one side. I untied the tape around the top one and started reading. She was a barmaid, walking home like she did every night. Someone struck her from behind, fracturing her skull, and dragged her into a field. She survived, after a December night in the open and three in intensive care, but never saw a thing of her attacker. One year, almost to the day, before Caroline.
Bob was busy at another desk. I raised an arm to attract his attention and he came over. “He had full penetrative sex with this one,” I said. “Do we know if she became pregnant?”
Bob lifted the cover of the file to look at the name. “The barmaid,” he said. “On the Bristol Road. She nearly died. Of these four she was the last and the only one where he managed it. We’ve thought of that so she can’t have been.”
I didn’t curse. I felt like it, but I didn’t. It was good news for her. All the same, if he’d made her pregnant and she’d gone full term we could have done a DNA test, introduced someone to his or her daddy, perhaps.
The next one I looked at happened eighteen months earlier, in the summer of 1981, and he drove a Jaguar. “Bob!” I shouted across the office.
“What is it?” he asked, coming over.
“This one,” I told him, closing the folder to show the name on the front. “Eileen Kelly. In her statement she says that the car she accepted a lift in was a Jaguar. On the wall of Silkstone’s bedroom is a photograph of him posing alongside a Mk II Jag. You can read the number and it’s in the file somewhere.”
“I’ll get on to the DVLC,” Bob said. “When are we talking about?”
“She was attacked in August, ’81.”
He went back to his telephone and I read the Eileen Kelly story. She was sixteen, and had just started work at the local egg-packing factory. At the end of her second week the other girls invited her out with them to a disco. They met in a pub and Eileen was disappointed to discover that they stayed there, drinking, until closing time. As soon as they entered the disco the other girls split up, each appearing to have a regular boyfriend, and Eileen was left on her own. The last bus had gone and she didn’t have enough money for a taxi. The thought of rousing her
