Checking for instances of theft or acts of indecency with ladies’ shoes, for example. I also want every prostitute and dominatrix in the area questioned about any clients they might have with foot or shoe fetishes.’
Then he turned to Glenn Branson. ‘Related to this, DS Branson’s been studying Dr Proudfoot’s report on the Shoe Man. What do you have for us, Glenn?’
‘It’s a real page-turner!’ Glenn picked up a heavy-looking document. ‘Two hundred and eighty-two pages of behavioural analysis. I’ve only had a chance to speed read it, since the chief tasked me with it earlier today, but there is something very interesting. There were five reported offences linked directly to the Shoe Man but Dr Proudfoot believes he could have committed a lot more that weren’t reported.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Many rape victims are so traumatized they cannot face the process of reporting it. But here’s the really interesting thing: the first of the Shoe Man’s reported rapes, back in 1997, occurred in the Grand Hotel, following a Halloween ball there. He lured a woman into a room. Does that sound familiar?’
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. The Grand Hotel was next door to the Metropole.
‘There’s more,’ Branson went on. ‘The room at the Grand was booked by a woman – in the name of Marsha Morris. She paid cash and all efforts to trace her at the time failed.’
Grace absorbed the information in silence, thinking hard. The room at the Metropole, where Nicola Taylor was raped on New Year’s Eve, was booked by a woman, according to the manager. Her name was Marsha Morris too. She paid in cash. The address she wrote in the register was false.
‘Someone’s having a laugh,’ Nick Nicholl said.
‘So does this mean it’s the same perp,’ Emma-Jane Boutwood said, ‘or a copycat with a sick sense of humour?’
‘Was any of this information released to the public?’ Michael Foreman asked.
Grace shook his head. ‘No. The name Marsha Morris was never public knowledge.’
‘Not even to the Argus?’
‘Especially not to the Argus.’ Grace nodded for Branson to continue.
‘Here’s where it gets even more interesting,’ the DS said. ‘Another of the victims was raped in her home, in Hove Park Road, exactly two weeks later.’
‘That’s a very smart address,’ Michael Foreman said.
‘Very,’ Grace agreed.
Branson continued. ‘When she arrived home, the burglar alarm was switched on. She deactivated it, went up into her bedroom and the offender struck – coming at her from out of a wardrobe.’
‘Just like Roxy Pearce’s attacker last night,’ Grace said. ‘From what we know so far.’
No one spoke for several moments.
Then Branson said, ‘The Shoe Man’s next victim was raped on the beach, beneath the Palace Pier. The one after that in the Churchill Square car park. His final one – if the chief’s assumption is right – was taken walking home from a Christmas Eve piss-up with her friends.’
‘So what you’re saying, Glenn,’ Bella said, ‘is that we should be taking a close look at car parks in a week’s time.’
‘Don’t go there, Bella,’ Grace said. ‘We’re not going to let this get that far.’
He put on a brave, confident smile for his team. But inside he felt a lot less sure.
1998
38
Tuesday 6 January
‘Does it work?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, course it works. Wouldn’t be selling it otherwise, would I?’ He glared at the lean man in the brown boiler suit as if he had just insulted his integrity. ‘Everything in here works, mate, all right? If you want rubbish I can point you up the street. In here I only do quality. Everything works.’
‘It had better.’ He stared down at the white chest freezer that was tucked away between the upturned desks, swivel office chairs and upended settees at the rear of the vast second-hand furniture emporium in Brighton’s Lewes Road.
‘Money-back guarantee, all right? Thirty days, any problems, bring it back, no quibble.’
‘Fifty quid you’re asking?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s your trade price?’
‘Everything here’s trade price.’
‘Give you forty.’
‘Cash?
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Taking it away with you? I’m not delivering for that price.’
‘Gimme a hand out with it?’
‘That your van outside?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Better get a move on. There’s a warden coming.’
Five minutes later he jumped into the cab of the Transit, a few seconds ahead of the traffic warden, started the engine and drove it with a bump off the pavement and away from the double yellow lines. He heard the clang of his new purchase bouncing on the hessian matting on the otherwise bare metal floor behind him and moments later heard it sliding as he braked hard, catching up the congested traffic around the gyratory system.
He crawled passed Sainsbury’s, then made a left turn at the lights, up under the viaduct, and then on, heading towards Hove, towards his lock-up garage, where the young woman lay.
The young woman whose face stared out at him from the front page of the Argus, on every news-stand, beneath the caption HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? Followed by her name, Rachael Ryan.
He nodded to himself. ‘Yes. Yep. I’ve seen her!’
I know where she is!
She is waiting for me!
39
Shoes are your weapons, ladies, aren’t they? You use them to hurt men in so many ways, don’t you?
Know what I’m saying? I’m not talking about the physical, about the bruises and cuts you can make on a man’s skin by hitting him with them. I’m talking about the sounds you make with them. The clack-clack-clack of your heels on bare floorboards, on concrete paving stones, on floor tiles, on brick paths.
You’re wearing those expensive shoes. That means you’re going somewhere – and you’re leaving me behind. I hear that clack-clack-clack getting fainter. It’s the last sound of you I hear. It’s the first sound of you I hear when you come back. Hours later. Sometimes a whole day later. You don’t talk to me about where you’ve been. You laugh at me, sneer at me.
Once when you came back and I was upset, you walked over to me. I thought you were going to kiss me. But you didn’t, did you? You just stamped your stiletto down hard on my bare foot. You drilled it right through the flesh and bone and into the floorboard.
