Becky didn’t sleep. The balance of their home had been put out of kilter, and this was their second night with only three of them there. She didn’t like it. It had been good to walk through the door before; now she knew the absence of one of them would be an ongoing fact for the rest of their time in the house. Forty-three Crookesvale Gardens had changed forever.
She heard a door open, then the flush of the toilet, and knew that she wasn’t the only one unable to sleep, they were all feeling the loss deeply.
5
Ivor wheeled out the trolley holding Susanna Roebuck’s body, and rolled the sheet covering her to one side. ‘You ready?’ he said and Erica nodded.
He lifted the girl’s right hand and turned it so that it was palm up, indicating that Erica should move forwards.
She did, and Ivor waited for a moment before rolling Susie slightly to one side, revealing a small puncture wound in her neck.
Seconds later Erica breathed an almost silent, ‘No…’
The briefing room noise subsided into silence as Erica moved to the front. She had talked the results over with Beth, and her sergeant accompanied her to the whiteboard.
‘Morning, everybody. First of all, thank you for the initial work you all took on yesterday, and major acknowledgement goes to everybody who went down the culvert into that bloody river. I want two of you down there today, so make sure you’ve got waders, because you’ll also be heading upstream. We need to know where Susanna Roebuck’s body went into the water. I know it’s still pissing down, but hey, nobody ever said being a copper was an easy job.’ She flashed a quick smile around the room.
There was a brief round of applause at her words, and then silence fell again.
‘What I’m going to tell you now I’m hoping is so far off the mark that you’ll all laugh me out of the room, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. Who was here in July twenty-fourteen?’
Four hands were raised including Beth’s.
‘I was a DS at the time,’ Erica continued, ‘newly appointed to the position and keen to make my mark. In April we had a death, a young girl called Leanne Fraser. She was twenty, worked in Marks and Spencer’s, had a boyfriend who initially came under suspicion of course but had a strong alibi, and she was a regular sort of girl. Didn’t take drugs, didn’t even smoke, liked a drink on a Friday night unless she was down to work the weekend shift, a nice girl. She was strangled with tights that the murderer brought with him, and she was carefully posed in Boden Hostead woods. She wasn’t hidden or covered in any way, he wanted her to be found. He hadn’t placed her far into the woods, and it was a child on their way to school who found her. The seven-year-old boy thought it rather exciting, his mother was distraught. The post-mortem revealed one or two clues, but it was only later we realised what we had.’
Erica glanced around the room. Everybody was silent; they all seemed to be holding their collective breaths.
‘There was a small puncture wound in her neck, and a drug called Propofol was found to be in her body. It’s the drug that’s used to sedate or knock you out prior to an operation. It depends how much you’re given as to how it affects you. This was somebody who knew the dosage to give. She was then strangled with the tights, but we don’t know whether it was in his car, or where she was found. It was definitely the cause of death though. After she died he slashed her right palm with a line running from the base of her palm to the bottom of her middle finger, and he removed the tip of her right little finger from the first knuckle joint.’
DC Ian Thomas held up a hand. ‘Is it definitely a man?’
‘We don’t know. All the victims were slim, not tall, a woman could have manoeuvred them as all the bodies were placed on show not far from the roads adjacent to the murder scene. I’m using the term he loosely, you need to keep an open mind. There were three more victims before the end of July twenty-fourteen, Lucy Owen, Laurel Price and the final one, Lilith Baker-Jones. They were all left, carefully posed, in different wooded areas around the city. In every case Propofol was used, and the right hand was mutilated, but differently.’
Erica took a sip of water. ‘He still removed the tips of the right little fingers, but on Lucy the slash on the palm was two parallel lines, on Laurel it was three, and by the time he’d finished with Lilith it was an IV. He was using the roman numeral system to do the body count for us. We had also realised all his victims had a Christian name beginning with L, and that he was posing every one of them. He was proud of what he was doing. All of them were naked, no evidence of rape, and we didn’t find the clothing. This,’ she said, as she stuck a photo on the whiteboard, ‘is the hand of yesterday’s victim, Susanna Roebuck. As you can see, the tip of her little finger is missing, and the palm cut is a V.’ She put up a second picture. ‘And this is the puncture mark on her neck.’
There was a muted chorus of shits, buggers, fuck me, from around the room. Erica sat down and Beth stepped forward.
‘Questions?’
‘It’s almost as if it’s an obsessive compulsive thing with him, isn’t it? Do you think we’ll have more victims? That he’s missing the killing?’
‘It’s a strong possibility,’ Beth said. ‘We’ve certainly got to bear it
