“So, the six murders? And …”
“Worthington, Marven, Rudd, MacGowan, Fotherby and Davies were the six men who were murdered. White, respectable, middle-aged men, married or divorced, but secretly homosexual … or at least bisexual. White-collar workers, as they used to be called. It was another world back then, of course. There was still a stigma attached to homosexuality.
“The Scribbler picked up his victims in busy city-centre bars in Norwich. Went with them in their cars to secluded places, mostly woodlands, a few miles out. Stabbed them and dumped them in ditches across Norfolk and Suffolk. Drove their cars back to where they started or as close as he could. Went home and disappeared for another few months.”
“Always their cars?” she queried. “That’s odd.”
He nodded his reply. “There were suggestions he may have driven a car or a van that would stand out, be remembered, if it were seen in a layby late at night. An ice cream van, maybe. Imagine that, trying to outpace a police car in an ice cream van.”
Carrie smiled, pleased that they were already at ease together.
“Or he may not have had a car. Or not been allowed to drive … because he hadn’t passed a test … or on medical grounds. He may have had epilepsy. These were all lines of enquiry that led nowhere. Fact is, we just don’t know. It’s an odd one, though.”
“But … if he drove their cars … he must have left something behind. A muddy footprint? Hair? Fingerprints? Surely? Very, very risky. Why not torch them?”
He shrugged. “Always dangerous that and, on a more mundane level, maybe he didn’t want to walk three miles or whatever back into town. As for traces, nothing. We think he was incredibly thorough. And it was the 1980s,” he added, “different days. If it were today, the advances in DNA collection would probably give us a trace however careful he thought he’d been …”
He went on, “Deposition sites weren’t protected the way they are now. I remember one, late 80s, where I was standing guard by a corpse, a young woman had been raped and murdered. I found a cigarette stub close by and we all thought we had a good forensic lead. Turned out Hoskins, an old-timer who dated back to Eynsham Hall days, had had a crafty fag before I took over.”
“Was there sexual activity?” she asked, taking her mobile phone out of her pocket to open Google Maps.
“Non-consummation, for want of a better expression. They’d be in the early stages of having sex, him supposedly active, the victim passive, often on all fours or laying on their front, legs apart. He stabbed them. Killed them when they were at their most vulnerable.”
“And the six other deaths?” she said, resting her phone on her thigh. “No reception,” she added.
He nodded. “We don’t need it. I know how to get there. I Googled it last night … Hope, Tanner … Bulgin … Hardy, March and one more … Gerry Rhodes. Six more middle-aged men – similar profile to the known victims. All went missing from Norfolk and Suffolk between the first and last murders … no, one, Rhodes, was just after, a few weeks. None of them has been heard of since.”
“So, they’ve never been found,” she stated. “Their remains are out there somewhere rotted away in ditches?”
“Maybe,” he answered, accelerating the car up to 70mph on a long, straight stretch of the A12. “That was how the others were left. Dumped in ditches. There was no attempt to bury the bodies. Maybe he found a better place to put them later on.”
“What about the ones who got away?”
“There were three of them. That we know of anyway. Alan Wade. Thirty-five at the time, a teacher at a private school in Suffolk. An all-boys school. He went with The Scribbler to a field outside Swainsthorpe, crouched down on all fours and The Scribbler went to stab him with a screwdriver. Somehow, he managed to fight him off and made his way to the main road where he hid by a layby all night, scared out of his wits, and then stopped a passing police car in the morning.”
“What do we have from him?”
“Not a lot. He gave a statement. It’s in the file. Read it later. And a description. Vague. The Scribbler wore some sort of peaked cap, maybe a baseball cap, throughout. He used the words ‘lean’ and ‘baby-faced’ and ‘soft-featured’. Said he – The Scribbler – had a bit of a Suffolk accent. Sloightly on th’ huh, but not fully. But a local. Maybe second generation.”
“And the next one?”
“Much the same. Wilkerson. Bank manager from Diss, forty-two. Picked up in another busy city-centre bar, the other side of the city. Taken to a field on the way to Drayton. The Scribbler stabbed him two or three times before they were about to … supposedly … have sex. He was interrupted by a dog walker. He ran off. Left Wilkerson for dead. It was touch and go, but he pulled through.”
“His statement and description?”
“He was the most reluctant to talk. Bank manager. Married man. Two children. All very middle class, respectable. He didn’t want it coming out. Marriage. Career. All of that would have ended back then, especially in a bank. Issues of trust and blackmail. We have a statement and a description; similar to Wade’s. You could swap them around and not know whose was whose. Identical modus operandi. Only difference was that he said The Scribbler smelt of a farmyard. A farmer’s boy? That was followed up without success.”
“And the third?”
“The third one who got away – that we know of – was a vicar. Edwin Lodge, fifty-one, from Ipswich. From his statement, The Scribbler made him put on a condom … and then attacked him … stabbed at his genitals with a screwdriver but cut the vicar’s thigh instead. The vicar was the
