“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said eventually. Nikki, meanwhile, had gotten her laptop out and was reading rapidly through the same Wikipedia article Heather had seen. Her eyes had grown very wide.
“Hev, this bloke was a monster. He used to arrange the pieces of these poor women’s bodies in these elaborate displays, all interlaced with plants and … bloody hell, I’m sure I’ve seen the CSI episode based on it. There were bits of their bodies they never found. They still think there are victims they don’t know about yet. Hev, did your mum know? Did she know what he was doing before he was caught? Do you think this could have anything to do with her, you know…”
Heather shook her head. “I’ve not read all the letters, but in the ones I’ve seen, they don’t talk about him killing anyone. But I mean, what do I know? Did I even know her at all? This man, currently serving life for chopping women up into bits, apparently knows a whole different side to my mum I’ve never seen.” Heather picked up her hot mug of tea and put it back down again. “She must have known him while he was killing those women, but was she aware of what he was doing? I’ve no idea. Plus, I don’t have any of her letters. Who knows what she was asking him? I mean, did he even know she had a family? A husband? Did my dad know what she was up to?” She half laughed, feeling abruptly sick again. “Oh god, was my mum one of those mad women who gets fixated on prisoners because they think they can change them?”
“Heather, I don’t know what to say.”
“And then there’s the note she left behind. To you both. The monsters in the wood? I mean, I thought that was weird enough before I found the letters, and now …”
There was a second’s silence. Heather could hear a clock ticking in the hallway. She shook her head. Spilling it all out to Nikki only seemed to be making it more unbelievable.
“And he’s in the news now? What’s happened?”
Nikki brought up one of the more reputable news sites on her laptop and pushed it toward Heather.
“An old lady found the body in a field in Lancashire, or at least most of the body. It had been dismembered and placed inside a tree. It’s everything the Red Wolf used to do, except that the Red Wolf has been safely packed away in prison for decades.” Nikki paused, her lips pressed into a thin line. “And it’s not the first one. Do you remember, a few weeks ago, that young woman who went missing from Manchester? Everyone was looking for her.”
Heather’s stomach turned over. “Sharon Barlow. They found her by a river, didn’t they? I remember …” Except that the horrible thing was, she didn’t remember much. Once the frantic search was over, media attention had faded away and Sharon Barlow became one more woman lost to an unknown monster.
“The police seem to think it was the same guy.”
“There will be stuff they haven’t told the press, stuff that links the two cases together.” Heather thought of her days on the newspaper, sniffing after every tiny detail the police let slip. “Christ, I dread to think.’ She looked away from the laptop, trying not to picture what had happened to Sharon Barlow. “So, what? He has a tribute act?”
“He’s always said he didn’t do it, you know,” said Nikki. “Even twenty odd years later, he still says he didn’t. What if they have the wrong man after all and maybe … your mum knew that?”
Heather curled her hand around the hot mug of tea, trying to find some comfort in the familiarity of it. A new serial killer on the loose, or a miscarriage of justice. Did this man, who had known a side to her mum completely invisible to Heather, also know why she had killed herself? Either way, these were questions she desperately wanted answers to.
“Hev,” Nikki said eventually. “Hev, you’ll have to take these letters to the police. There could be stuff in here that might be useful to them. Look, there’s a phone number here for anyone with information.’
Heather nodded slowly. She thought of the man in the mugshot and wondered what he looked like, twenty-five years later.
“Nikki,” she said, “do you think they’ll let me speak to him?”
“What?”
“This man knows more about my mother than anyone else on earth. Christ, they could have been phoning each other, Nikki! She could have been visiting him, and I wouldn’t have known. I’m sure if anyone knows why she killed herself, it’s him. Maybe that’s what she was getting at in her note. I want to talk to him.”
Nikki placed her hands flat on the worktop and sighed. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I doubt they let just anyone rock up and talk to these people.”
“Well, I’m not just anyone, am I?” Heather picked up the biscuit tin lid and turned it over and over in her hands. She still felt sick, but it was mixed with a tight feeling of excitement in her chest. There could be answers here. “I’m the only daughter of his only friend in all the world, it turns out. Nikki, I need to know. I have to find out what happened to my mum.”
“Hev,” Nikki met her eyes steadily, and again there was the expression of sympathy Heather found so hard to look at. “Sometimes there are no answers. Sometimes awful shit just happens. All I mean is … don’t get your hopes up, okay?”
Heather walked home that night half in a trance. She had phoned the police from Nikki’s phone, and had eventually spoken to a
