Читать книгу Strangers: The unforgettable crime thriller from the #1 bestseller - Paul Finch - Страница 15

As a policewoman, Lucy counted herself an old stager. She’d dealt hands-on with all the horrors of urban living, from child abuse to fatal road accidents, from violent brawls on Saturday nights to forgotten OAPs so long abandoned there were only bones remaining when someone finally found them. Nothing shocked her, nothing upset her – she simply refused to let it. But possibly thanks to her being in a semi-disorientated state due to the new work patterns, not to mention the strange nature of the new work, she couldn’t help but brood on what she’d seen that night. The memory alone was hardly conducive to sleep: that dank, soulless location; those wet woods and rain-washed roads; that grubby little lorry drivers’ caf with the rubbish heaped behind it and the nasty little toilet in its guts. And then the shadowy forms on the edges of her vision: the girls themselves, the pimps, the addicts, the muggers.

Lucy’s alarm was set for two o’clock that afternoon, but she gave up on bed around seven-thirty a.m. When she tottered downstairs in a sweater and pyjama bottoms, her mum was still in the house, dressed for work but clearing away the breakfast things in her usual efficient way. The explanation Lucy offered was that she’d try to snatch some zeds later but that for now she wanted to catch up on what was happening, which was at least partly true. She curled on the couch and tuned the television to one of the all-day news channels, from whose coverage of the two latest murders she immediately detected a change in tone.

The news teams were now all over it, to the exemption of any other item. It was still early, but various anchormen had already departed the studios. One was broadcasting live from outside Robber’s Row, which was almost hidden from view behind a wall of press and TV vans, while another was intoning into a microphone on the edge of one of the north-west’s many interchangeably bleak and featureless wastelands. In this latter case, dog-teams, both the officers and their pooches clad in hi-viz jackets, could be seen progressing slowly across the grey clinker-desert.

‘Two of them this time, apparently,’ Cora said, placing a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast in front of Lucy as she sat riveted to the screen.

‘Yeah, I know … I heard last night.’

‘They don’t think these two were actually up to anything.’

Lucy glanced at her. ‘Sorry … what do you mean?’

‘According to the news, they were just a pair of lads trying to sling some rubbish.’

‘Yeah?’ This was first Lucy had heard about the new murders in any actual detail, and it surprised her. She turned back, refocusing on the breaking story.

It seemed that two young men from Hindley Green, Wigan, Kevin Crumper, aged twenty-five, and Arnold ‘Barney’ Hall, aged twenty-seven, were thought to have been fly-tipping on the evening of October 18^th, on a stretch of former colliery wasteland at Bickershaw, when they’d encountered their killer.

Twenty-five and twenty-seven.

Two robust young blokes.

Again, Lucy wondered if there might be more than one assailant. If there was – say if there was more than one prostitute involved – it meant that she and the rest of the Ripper Chicks would have to step even more lightly. One twisted killer was dangerous enough, but a conspiracy of them? Under those circs, you had to be extra wary who you got friendly with and who you asked questions of. But still … there had only been that single figure on the Atherton CCTV video.

What kind of girl would a single killer have to be to overpower two red-blooded young guys on her own? In her mind’s eye, Lucy pictured a kind of Amazon, an unfeasible example of the female form, someone part way between an Olympic athlete and a supermodel. Unless, of course, she’d used guile rather than brute force. Both men had not necessarily been killed at the same time, for example. They could have been separated from each other first.

But even then it couldn’t have been easy.

On reflection, Lucy wasn’t sure which theory was more unlikely, the Amazon Queen or the tag-team from Hell. Whatever, in this particular case it was certain the two victims had fallen foul of the same person, or persons, known as Jill the Ripper. According to the TV, the causes of death had now been determined by medical examiners. Both men had been brutally beaten with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, and then mutilated with a knife, subsequently dying from blood loss.

She pondered this as she sipped her tea and nibbled her toast.

It was noticeable and understandable that the taskforce was still withholding the detail of the severed genitals, but adding that there were unspecified mutilations was more information than had been given out previously. The probability was that they were seeking to ram it home to the public just how sickening these crimes were and thus make it more likely that someone, if they knew anything, would talk.

The choice of victims was a bit of a right-turn, though. Two lads dumping waste.

Lucy knew from her own experience, which admittedly wasn’t extensive in this field – though she had worked on the periphery of murder investigations before – that repeat sex-killers didn’t always stick religiously to their MO. Inevitably, some targets had to be targets of convenience. This ‘double-event’, as reporters were now referring to it, was also responsible for a new tone of sobriety in terms of the coverage. Beforehand, while the press hadn’t exactly demonstrated an air of frivolousness with regard to these crimes, there’d been the usual morbid fascination but minus any attached horror and dismay – as if kerb-crawlers were asking for trouble anyway and maybe, just maybe, were getting what they deserved. Now the attitude was markedly different

For her own part, Lucy always tried to avoid making any such rushed judgement.

From what she’d seen, men who used prostitutes didn’t always have sinister motives. Often, they were lonely or had problematic sex lives at home, or they simply didn’t wish to offend their wives or girlfriends by asking for fetishistic things. Certainly there were oddballs and weirdos out there – they existed too, but it didn’t sound as if Crumper and Hall were especially wholesome characters either. They’d been in the act of committing an offence when they were attacked, but of course had no record for being sexual predators, so the press at least was prepared to cut them some slack.

‘What’s the latest?’ Cora asked, sitting in the armchair, also sipping tea.

‘I think it’s all about to move up a gear,’ Lucy replied.

‘You anywhere near catching her?’

‘Not as far as I’m aware, though this could change everything. New crime scene, new evidence. We’ll have to wait and see what the forensic teams make of it.’

‘At least she’s only killing men,’ Cora said.

Lucy glanced round at her. ‘Personally, I’d rather she wasn’t killing anyone.’

‘So do I, but, well …’ Cora shrugged and sipped again. ‘I know lots of women who’ve had a rough time over the years thanks to the fellas in their lives.’

If Lucy had been surprised by the previous comment from her normally mild-mannered mum, she was even more surprised by this. Cora’s friends, whom she sometimes went out for a couple of drinks with at the Labour Club, all seemed pretty normal: mostly married and with grown-up kids, the majority of them hard-workers and gentle souls.

‘But all this dirty business, you know …’ Cora shook her head, a pink dot on either cheek. ‘Girls going out at weekends, making a show of themselves. You’ve seen them in the town centre. Practically nothing on. And they’re not even prostitutes. Blokes sniffing round them like dogs at the butcher’s dustbin …’

‘Mum, for God’s sake!’ Lucy exclaimed.

‘Well, what do you expect to happen, Lucy? You’re not telling me that won’t lead to trouble. But maybe now that it’s trouble for the men things will change.’

‘It’s not all men, Mum.’

‘No, of course it’s not all men. But look at the problems only a handful have created.’

Not for the first time, Lucy found herself wondering about the father she’d never met.

Dan the Bus Driver.