The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (22 page)

She knows what she is about to do. She will restrain him so that there is no chance he can escape or call out. Then she will take a sample of his blood. She has already delivered the semen sample from the killer to a private lab in the city. Once she has his blood sample they will compare the two and when they match them—proving his guilt—she will return to this hotel room and then will cause him pain before she takes his life. After that there is probably nothing. Finally, after more than twenty years of waiting, Patricia Lancing takes a knife and cuts his flesh.

Friday, January 9, 1981

Patty looks at her watch: 5 a.m. Christ, she’s bored. She sits alone in her battered green Cortina with just her nan’s old Thermos, Trebor mints, a Zippo and two packs of B&H for company. She tries to stretch, but it’s a little car. She’d like to get out and walk around but she’s on surveillance and it’s really not good to get spotted by a nosy neighbor. Instead she lights a cigarette and smokes it like her granddad showed her—wrapped inside his hand like he did in the trenches. She can’t open the window and so the small car fills with smoke, nice.

She wonders, for the thousandth time, if this is all a waste. An anonymous tip-off to the crime desk and she beats five boozy hacks, who all think the story should be theirs, and scuttles up to Leeds. This isn’t how it should happen. This is not investigative journalism—it’s a fucking feeding frenzy. Journalists calling in favors, throwing out backhanders, threatening pimps, pressuring whores—anything and everything to get an angle on him—and Patty is raking through shit with the best of them. She is the best of them, she knows she is. It just pisses her off that she has to work so hard to get those bastards to see it, and that she has to keep proving it. But this one would set it in stone—that she is the equal of any man. The Holy Grail of blood and murder, Sonia Sutcliffe. The police had taken her into protective custody at first, but they let her go, to “be with relatives” a couple of days later and—gone. No statement, nothing. Nobody knows where she is or who she is, this woman who married a monster, who might be a monster. That’s why Patty’s sitting, desperate for a pee, in a cramped smoky
car all night. The thought of interviewing a female killer—multiple killer of women, a modern-day Bonnie Parker—well, it makes her heart soar. This was what she went into crime reporting for: to cut open the belly and see the filth and shit. To shine a spotlight into the corners and watch the spiders and cockroaches run. That is the only way she can see it getting better.

“This is such a mind-numbing waste of time,” she thinks, just as the front door shoots open. Three men come out, walking quickly—they’re huge. A fourth figure emerges, much smaller—a woman. The men form a rugby scrum around her. From somewhere, behind Patty, there’s the sound of an engine turning over.

“Fuck.” She’s out of her car in a second, running to the house. She’d parked across the street but they must have known she was there.

The three goons walk quickly and are at the gate just seconds after Patty—the front two stretch out enormous hands. The third, comically, is trying to throw a blanket over the woman in the center, who shoves it back at him.

“I have no camera,” Patty shouts, holding her hands up in the air like it’s a robbery.

The blanket is thrown to the ground as the front two men separate, revealing Sonia Sutcliffe.

“Sonia,” Patty calls. “I’m on my own. I just want to talk; hear your side.”

Sonia steps out onto the pavement and Patty moves to bar her way. The front two men hesitate, unsure how to treat a woman reporter with no camera.

“Your words, Sonia, not some hatchet job. That’s all, I promise. My name’s Patricia Lancing.” Patty holds out her hand.

Sonia looks down at the outstretched fingers—then up into her face. For a moment she thinks she sees Sonia’s eyes soften—but
there is no trust. Patty sees a woman who has heard too many promises that turned out to be lies. Sonia breaks the contact, turns and moves forward. A car screeches into the curb. Patty tries to follow but a giant hand holds her shoulder.

“There’s big money in it, for your story,” Patty shouts after her—desperate to keep her there. Sonia doesn’t look back. The car door opens and she gets in, followed by the three men.

“Sonia, please tell me. How could you not know? Sonia, how do you live with a monster? How do you live with yourself?”

The car speeds off. It had all taken no more than a minute.

“Bollocks.”

She stands there, feeling the cold creep into her bones. Finally she gets back into her Cortina to finish the Thermos of lukewarm coffee and have a cigarette. She sits in the driver’s seat and goes over the encounter again and again. There was no interview, no story—but there was something. Sonia could have gone out the back way and avoided any confrontation, but she didn’t. She wanted to walk tall, not skulk away. That said a lot about her, but was that a story? It certainly wasn’t news. Patty finishes the cigarette and then has two more while she thinks. She should drive home. She could be there for the afternoon—but that makes the trip a waste and she wants a story.

She drives to the hotel she’d booked. The room’s basic—it smells of stale smoke and dust. The overhead light doesn’t work; she has to turn on the bathroom light and use a shoe to hold the door open. The only window is painted shut. The saving grace is that the water is scalding hot. She runs a deep steamy bath and lies there for over
an hour, smoking the rest of the pack and turning into a giant prune. The towel looks disgusting, so she drips dry on the carpet. She pulls back the sheets—they look okay. She falls into the bed naked and grabs a few hours’ sleep.

It’s 11 a.m. when she wakes. She has to be out of the room in an hour so she dresses quickly and goes down to the breakfast room. There’s no food but she does manage to get a black coffee out of a young Italian girl. Deep in her notebook she finds a phone number she jotted down some months before. A Bradford number. It’s the home phone of the mother of one of the victims. No reply for quite some time but Patty is patient. She lets it ring and ring. Finally a woman answers dozily and agrees to meet.

“Hello. Hello. We spoke on the telephone earlier,” Patty shouts through the letterbox. There is no reply. Patty waits a minute before trying again.

“You said I should come. Patricia, my name’s Patricia Lancing.”

She can’t see anything inside the flat but she can wait. She stands back from the door and turns to look out over the balcony. She’s on the third floor of a block of flats where four identical squat blocks face each other with a courtyard below. To one side there is an area of grass and some rotating clothes dryers but they’re naked, much too cold and wet for clothes to dry. The sky is gray, one of those English days where it won’t ever get properly light, merely go from dark to gray to dark again. Kids are running about in the courtyard.

It takes two cigarettes and another round of pounding on the door before a bolt snaps back, a chain scrapes and the door opens. The woman doesn’t step out onto the balcony, merely beckons Patty inside with a wave of the hand. As she walks in, Patty can feel eyes on her from all directions. Patty follows the hand into the living room and it points to the sofa.

“Tea?” the woman asks over her shoulder as she walks into the kitchen.

“I’d love some,” Patty replies, even though she hates the industrial-strength tea they always serve in the north.

While the woman makes a pot, Patty looks around the room. It’s pretty bare. On the walls she can see the telltale signs of pictures having been removed. Every family picture has been taken down. Destroyed, or stored away for a time when seeing them won’t cause such pain?

The woman enters with a small tray—two mugs of tea and a little plate of biscuits. She pulls out a table from a nest and puts Patty’s tea and the biscuits next to her, before sitting in an armchair across the room, cradling her tea in her hands. Patty’s notes say this woman is forty-seven but she looks sixty-five. Her hair has fallen out in clumps all over her head. Her fingertips are speckled with dried blood where the nails have been shredded.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me.” Patty smiles.

The mother says nothing but their eyes meet. All Patty can see in them is helplessness. The air swims with pine air freshener and Patty feels a little light-headed.

“I’m not here to drag up awful memories.”

“Me memories ain’t bad. They’re all I’ve got now,” the mother says in a voice that seems both raw and soft at the same time.

“Tell me something wonderful, a great memory of the two of you.”

The woman closes her eyes for a second, her forehead wrinkles.

“She weren’t a bad girl. I know some a me neighbors’ll say different, but I had owt trouble. She were only seventeen.” Her eyes glisten.

“Her father?”

The woman frowns, as if she doesn’t understand the question at first.

“Gone. Long gone. They’re all gone.” She gazes into her tea. “Tap.” She says suddenly.

Patty shakes her head, not understanding.