Aftermath (13 page)

Looking at pictures on a screen just didn’t do it for Jenny, so she spread out the photographs again on her desk, though she knew them all by heart: Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Leanne
Wray, Melissa Horrocks and Kimberley Myers, all attractive blonde girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

There had been too many assumptions for Jenny’s liking right from the start, the prime one being that all five girls had been abducted by the same person or persons. She could, she had
told Banks and the team, make out almost as a good a case for their not being linked, even on such little information as she possessed.

Young girls go missing all the time, Jenny had argued; they have arguments with their parents and run away from home. But Banks told her that detailed and exhaustive interviews with friends,
family, teachers, neighbours and acquaintances showed that all the girls – except perhaps Leanne Wray – came from stable family backgrounds and, apart from the usual rows about
boyfriends, clothes, loud music and what have you, nothing unusual or significant had happened in their lives prior to their disappearances. These, Banks stressed, were not your common or garden
teenage runaways. There was also the matter of the shoulder-bags found abandoned close to where the girls had last been seen. With the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation still hanging like an
albatross around its neck, West Yorkshire was taking no chances.

The number became four, then five, and no traces whatsoever could be found of any of the girls through the usual channels: youth support groups, the National Missing Persons Helpline,
Crimewatch UK
reconstructions,
Missing Can-U-Help
posters, media appeals and local police efforts.

In the end, Jenny accepted Banks’s argument and proceeded as if the disappearances were linked, at the same time keeping clear notes of any differences between the individual
circumstances. Before long, she found that the similarities by far overwhelmed the differences.

Victimology
. What did they have in common? All the girls were young, had long blonde hair, long legs and trim, athletic figures. It seemed to indicate the type of girl he liked, Jenny had
said. They all have different tastes.

By victim number four, Jenny had noticed the pattern of escalation: nearly two months between victims one and two, five weeks between two and three, but only two and a half weeks between three
and four. He had been getting needier, she thought at the time, which meant he might also become more reckless. Jenny was also willing to bet that there was a fair degree of personality
disintegration going on.

The criminal had chosen his haunts well. Open-air parties, pubs, dances, clubs, cinemas and pop concerts were all places where you were very likely to find young people, and they all had to get
home one way or another. She knew that the team referred to him as the ‘Chameleon’ and agreed that he showed a very high level of skill in taking his pick of victims and not being seen.
All had been abducted at night in urban settings, desolate stretches of city streets, ill-lit and deserted. He had also managed to stay well beyond the range of the CCTV cameras that covered many
city centres and town squares these days.

A witness said she saw Samantha, the Bradford victim, talking to someone through the window of a dark car, and that was the only information Jenny had about his possible method of abduction.

While the New Year’s party, the Harrogate pop concert, the cinema and university pub were common knowledge, and obvious hunting grounds, one question that had bothered Jenny since Saturday
morning was how the killer had known about the school dance after which Kimberley Myers had been abducted. Did he live in the neighbourhood? Had he simply happened to be passing at the time? As far
as she knew, these things weren’t advertised outside the immediate community, or even beyond the school.

Now she knew: Terence Payne lived just down the street, taught at the local comprehensive. Knew the victim.

Also, now, some of the things she had learned that day were making sense of some of the other puzzling facts and questions she had gathered over the weeks. Of the five abductions, four had
occurred on a Friday night, or in the early hours of Saturday morning, which had led Jenny to believe that the killer worked a regular five-day week, and that he devoted his weekends to his hobby.
The odd one out, Melissa Horrocks, had bothered her, but now that she knew Payne was a schoolteacher, the Tuesday, eighteenth April abduction made sense, too. It was the Easter holidays and Payne
had more spare time on his hands.

From this scant information – all this before the Kimberley Myers abduction – Jenny had surmised that they were dealing with an abductor who struck opportunistically. He cruised
suitable locations looking for a certain type of victim, and when he found one, he struck as fast as lightning. There was no evidence that any of the girls had been stalked either on the evening
of, or prior to, their abductions, though it was a possibility she had to bear in mind, but Jenny was willing to bet that he had scouted the locations, studied every way in and out, every dark nook
and cranny, all the sight lines and angles. There was always a certain level of risk involved in things such as this. Just enough, perhaps, to guarantee that quick surge of adrenalin that was
probably part of the thrill. Now Jenny knew that he had used chloroform to subdue his victims, that decreased the level of risk.

Jenny had also not been able until now to take into account any crime scene information because there hadn’t been a crime scene available. There could be plenty of reasons why no bodies
turned up, Jenny had said. They could have been dumped in remote locations and not discovered yet, buried in the woods, dumped in the sea or in a lake. As the number of disappearances increased,
though, and as time went on and
still
no bodies were found, Jenny found herself moving towards the theory that their man was a collector, someone who plucks and savours his victims and
perhaps then disposes of them the way a butterfly collector might gas and pin his trophies.

Now she had seen the anteroom, where the killer had buried, or partially buried, the bodies, and she didn’t think that had been done by chance or done badly. She didn’t think that
the toes of one victim were sticking through the earth because Terence Payne was a sloppy worker; they were like that because he wanted them that way, it was part of his fantasy, because he
got
off on it
, as they said back in America. They were part of his collection, his trophy room. Or his
garden
.

Now Jenny would have to rework her profile, factoring in all the new evidence that would be pouring out of number thirty-five The Hill over the next few weeks. She would also have to find out
all she could about Terence Payne.

And there was another thing. Now Jenny also had to consider Lucy Payne.

Had Lucy known what her husband was doing?

It was possible, at least, that she had her suspicions.

Why didn’t she come forward?

Because of some misguided sense of loyalty, perhaps – this was her
husband
, after all – or fear. If he had hit her with a vase last night, he could have hit her at other
times, too, warned her of the fate that awaited her if she told anyone the truth. It would have been a living hell for Lucy, of course, but Jenny could believe her doing that. Plenty of women lived
their whole lives in such hells.

But was Lucy more involved?

Again, possible. Jenny had suggested, tentatively, that the method of abduction indicated the killer might have had a helper, someone to lure the girl into the car, or distract her while he came
up from behind. A woman would have been perfect for that role, would have made the actual abduction easier. Young girls wary of men are far more likely to lean in the window and help when a woman
pulls over at the kerb.

Were women capable of such evil?

Definitely. And if they were ever caught, the outrage against them was far greater than against any male. You only had to look at the public’s reactions to Myra Hindley, Rosemary West and
Karla Homolka to see that.

So was Lucy Payne a killer?

•

Banks felt bone-weary when he pulled up in the narrow lane outside his Gratly cottage close to midnight that night. He knew he should have probably taken a hotel room in Leeds,
as he had done before, or accepted Ken Blackstone’s offer of the sofa, but he had very much wanted to go home tonight, even if Annie had refused to come over, and he didn’t mind the
drive too much. It helped relax him.

There were two messages waiting for him on the machine. The first was from Tracy, saying she’d heard the news and hoped he was all right, and the second was from Leanne Wray’s
father, Christopher, who had seen the press conference and the evening news and wanted to know if the police had found his daughter’s body at the Payne house.

Banks didn’t answer either of them. For one thing, it was too late, and for another, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could deal with them all in the morning. Now that he was
home, he was even glad that Annie
wasn’t
coming. The idea of company tonight, even Annie’s, didn’t appeal, and after all he’d seen and thought about today, the idea
of sex held about as much interest as a trip to the dentist’s.

Instead, he poured himself a generous tumbler of Laphroaig and tried to find some suitable music. He needed to listen to something, but he didn’t know what. Usually he had no trouble
finding what he wanted in his large collection, but tonight he rejected just about every CD he picked out. He knew he didn’t want to listen to jazz or rock or anything too wild and primitive
like that. Wagner and Mahler were out, as were all the Romantics: Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninov and the rest. The entire twentieth century was out, too. In the end he went for
Rostropovich’s rendition of Bach’s cello suites.

Outside the cottage, the low stone wall between the dirt lane and the beck bulged out and formed a little parapet over Gratly Falls, which was just a series of terraces, none more than a few
feet in height, running diagonally through the village and under the little stone bridge that formed its central gathering place. Since he had moved into the cottage the previous summer, Banks had
got into the habit of standing out there last thing at night if the weather was good enough, or even sitting on the wall, dangling his legs over the beck, and enjoying his nightcap and a cigarette
before bed.

The night air was still and smelled of hay and warm grass. The dale below him was sleeping. One or two farmhouse lights shone on the far valley side, but apart from the sounds of sheep in the
field across the beck and night animals from the woods, all was quiet. He could just make out the shapes of distant fell sides in the dark, humpbacked or jagged against the night sky. He thought he
heard a curlew’s eerie trill from high up on the moors. The new moon gave sparse light, but there were more stars than he had seen in a long time. As he watched, a star fell through the
darkness leaving a thin milky trail.

Banks didn’t make a wish.

He felt depressed. The elation he had expected to feel on finding the killer somehow eluded him. He had no sense of an ending, of an evil purged. In some odd way, he felt, the evil was just
beginning. He tried to shake off his sense of apprehension.

He heard a meow beside him and looked down. It was the skinny marmalade cat from the woods. Starting that spring, it had come over on several occasions when Banks was outside alone late at
night. The second time it appeared, he had brought it some milk, which it lapped up before disappearing back into the trees. He had never seen it anywhere else, or at any other time than night.
Once, he had even bought some cat food, to be more prepared for its visit, but the cat hadn’t touched it. All it would do was meow, drink the milk, strut around for a few minutes and go back
where it came from. Banks fetched a saucer of milk and set it down, refilling his own glass at the same time. The cat’s eyes shone amber in the darkness as it looked up at him before bending
to drink.

Banks lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall, resting his glass on its rough stone surface. He tried to purge his mind of the day’s terrible images. The cat rubbed against his leg
and ran off back into the woods. Rostropovich played on, and Bach’s precise, mathematical patterns of sound formed an odd counterpoint to the wild roaring music of Gratly Falls, so recently
swelled by the spring thaw, and for a few moments at least, Banks succeeded in losing himself.

According to her parents
, Melissa Horrocks, aged seventeen, who failed to return home after a pop concert in Harrogate on the eighteenth of April, was going through a rebellious phase.

Steven and Mary Horrocks had only the one daughter, a late blessing in Mary’s mid-thirties. Steven worked in the office of a local dairy, while Mary had a part-time job in an estate agent’s office in the city centre. Around the age of sixteen, Melissa developed an interest in the kind of theatrical pop music that used Satanism as its main stage prop.

Though friends advised Steven and Mary that it was harmless enough – just youthful spirits – and that it would soon pass, they were nonetheless alarmed when she started altering her appearance and letting her school work and athletics slip. Melissa first dyed her hair red, got a stud in her nose, and wore a lot of black. Her bedroom wall was adorned with posters of skinny, Satanic-looking pop stars, such as Marilyn Manson, and occult symbols her parents didn’t understand.

About a week before the concert, Melissa decided she didn’t like the red hair, so she reverted to her natural blonde colouring. There was a good chance, Banks thought later, that if she’d kept it red, that might have saved her life. Which also led Banks to think that she hadn’t been stalked before her abduction – or at least not for long. The Chameleon wouldn’t stalk a redhead.

Harrogate, a prosperous Victorian-style North Yorkshire city of about 70,000, known as a conference centre and a magnet for retired people, wasn’t exactly the typical venue for a Beelzebub’s Bollocks concert, but the band was new and had yet to win a major recording contract; they were working their way up to bigger gigs. There had been the usual calls for a ban from retired colonels and the kind of old busybodies who watch all the filth on television so they can write letters of protest, but in the end this was to no avail.