The Nightmare Place (4 page)

Richard nodded to himself.

‘And frankly,’ he said, ‘when I get that sort of call, that’s exactly what I do.’

Four

‘All right,’ I told Julie Kennedy.

But she had just finished giving us her account of what had happened, and even as the words left my lips, I flinched at them. It was too easy a thing for me to say – blasé, almost – and I should have been more careful. Because it wasn’t all right. And however well she recovered from her ordeal physically, nothing was really going be all right for her ever again.

If Julie noticed my indiscretion, she didn’t show it, and perhaps I was simply compounding my mistake by making it all about me: by imagining that, after everything she’d been through, she would even notice my choice of language, never mind be offended by it.

Right now, she was sitting upright in her hospital bed, looking away from me and Chris, towards the drawn slats on the blind. The covers were pooled at her waist, and her hands – one of them encased in plaster, hiding the broken fingers and wrist – rested on her lap. The small room was illuminated only by a soft lamp on the drawers by the bed, but the visible injuries were still apparent. The far side of her face was wrapped with bandages, while the other side was swollen, the skin bright and discoloured, and criss-crossed with lines of bristling stitches.

After a few moments of heavy silence, her chest inflated slowly, and she gave a steady sigh that seemed to last an age.

‘I wish I’d fought back,’ she said.

She’d already told us that, while relating the details of the attack. I repeated now what I’d told her then.

‘You shouldn’t wish that. There’s every chance he could have killed you. You can’t blame yourself for things you didn’t do, especially when they’re things you shouldn’t have
had
to do. Look at me, Julie.’

After a moment, she turned her head slowly, and I stared her in the one eye I could see.

‘The only person to blame here is him,’ I said.

‘I was just too scared.’

‘I know.’

‘And he was so big. So strong.’

‘I know.’

It had been two and a half days since Julie Kennedy had been attacked in her home. The details were written down on the pad in front of me, but I didn’t need to refer to them; it felt like her quiet voice, every word of it from the last half-hour, was still somehow echoing in my head. Julie was our fifth victim. Four other women had come before her, and she had just told us much the same story as they had. Mercifully for her, her memory was fractured and incomplete, much of the attack stored away in the nightmare place, but she remembered enough.

The attack had taken place in the early hours of the morning, when she had woken to find a man standing beside the bed. He was dressed entirely in black, and wearing both a mask and gloves. Julie said it seemed like he entirely obscured the curtains, which was impossible, and was presumably either a trick of perspective or else an exaggeration born from fear. But then, other victims had reported something similar. The man was little more than an enormous silhouette – a monster – his presence instilling terror even before the assault began. During the attacks, he never spoke. One woman had called him a concentration of hatred; another said that he smelled of violence. They were bizarre, ephemeral descriptions on the face of it, but they made a degree of sense to me. In each case, I’d watched the woman trying to talk about the man in ways beyond words, because in her head, that was what he’d become.

Like the previous victims, Julie had been raped and savagely beaten. For hours after the man had left she had drifted in and out of consciousness, and at five a.m. she had managed to phone the police before collapsing. The subsequent two days she’d spent here in the Baines Wing of the hospital in a critical condition. For us, that period had been spent collecting evidence from her house, interviewing neighbours, pursuing leads.

‘Julie,’ I said. ‘I know this is difficult, and you’ve done very well. But I want to talk about what happened before the attack.’

‘Before? I was asleep.’

‘No, before that. When you went to bed.’

She tried to frown, but the stitches in her face wouldn’t let her.

‘It was … just the same as always.’

‘Did you check the door was locked?’

‘Yes. I always do. Locked, chained, sash jams.’

She was emphatic about that, and I believed her.

‘All right,’ I said.

I didn’t bother to kick myself this time, as I was concentrating on how to frame the next question. You have to be careful in this sort of investigation. You need to know, which means you have to ask, but this line of inquiry is always in danger of toppling over into blaming the victim. After everything Julie had been through, I had no wish to do that. But we needed to know how our man was getting into his victims’ houses.

‘All right,’ I said again, rubbing my hands together slowly. ‘What about the windows?’

‘She claims the window was closed,’ Chris said.

We were walking back through the warren of hospital corridors. I was brimming with a residual mix of anger and frustration, and while none of it was directed at him, that was how it came out.

‘No. Get it right. What she said was that she didn’t know. She said she
thought
so, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened it. And she was hesitant about that.’

‘You don’t think she’d remember leaving the window open?’

‘I don’t want to
assume
anything. You know what the weather’s been like. It’s sweltering. Everyone opens their windows. Maybe not everyone closes them properly again.’

‘It’s a twelve-point lock,’ Chris said. ‘You need a key to open it from the inside. As soon as the handle’s turned back down, it locks automatically. Clicks in place. It’s like the ones I’ve got at home.’

‘I’m aware of how windows work, Chris. Even if I hadn’t been before, it’s not like it hasn’t come up.’

‘Exactly. And it keeps coming down to this. When you’ve had the window open, and you pull it closed in the evening, or whatever, you
automatically
turn the handle down.’

‘I do. You do. He, she or it does.’ I was walking too quickly, and he was struggling to keep up. ‘But what do we know about what Julie Kennedy did? Even
she
doesn’t remember. Maybe the phone rang as she was closing the window. Maybe there was a wasp buzzing around outside, and she just pulled it to for a bit and then forgot about it.’

We reached the main foyer and headed out of the doors. The midday air was solid and hot, and after the artificial light of the hospital, the brightness ahead of us was momentarily blinding.

‘You’re grasping at straws,’ Chris said.

I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was right, and I don’t like to admit such a thing at the best of times.

But, yes, grasping at straws. Julie’s recollections matched those of the previous victims. In each case, the house had been secure when they went to bed: all the doors were locked, with any sash jams, chains or bolts in place. When the police arrived, they found a single downstairs window open. That
had
to be the exit point for the attacker, as it would have been impossible for him to leave via a door and then apply bolts and sash jams from outside. But we had no idea how he was
entering
the properties in the first place.

The open windows were undamaged. With those kinds of locks – and I know how windows work – you can’t lever them open from the outside because the frames snap off. It’s a security feature. There’s no access to the locks from the outside either. But none of the victims’ windows had been drilled.

One possibility was that there was some way of opening the windows that our team hadn’t come across yet. If so, the numerous security experts we’d consulted hadn’t come across it either. Another was that the victims were wrong: they were misremembering, and had actually left the windows ajar without realising.

The third possibility was that he was gaining access in some other way. But there were difficulties with that too. None of the five victims was missing house keys, and two of them had never even shared the property with anyone else. If the man had got in through a door, it would have to have been during the day, while they were out, because the sash jams and chains were on at night. That implied a whole different level of crazy, which was then compounded by the open window. Because if he could unlock a door somehow, why leave the house that way?

As we reached the car, I pulled out my keys and pressed the security button. The vehicle flashed and clicked once.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Although it’s not that I’m grasping at straws. I’m playing devil’s advocate.’

‘Of course.’

‘Whatever. I’m driving, by the way.’

We set off. I was still thinking about it, of course.

‘It can’t be the windows,’ I said eventually.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Because that would imply our man was playing a numbers game. A small number of people forget to close their windows, and he’s just opportunistic and lucky. But nobody’s that lucky.’

Chris nodded. ‘Someone would have clocked him by now.’

‘Yeah, there’s that. And he’s not opportunistic, is he? These women are specific targets. He’s not fishing around at random.’

He didn’t say anything, and I felt the frustration rising again. Because the terrible truth of the matter was that we simply didn’t know.

Back at the department, I prepared myself for the incident room. Everything was quiet as we walked along the corridor, but as we got closer to the main suite, I began to hear it: the thrum of activity on the other side of the wall. It’s an old building, and the walls are thin. It was easy to imagine that if I put my hand on the one to the left, I’d feel the vibration and the heat. Directly outside the door, the noise within was audible.

No pressure
, I thought as I opened it.

It was like walking into a concert that had already started. Over the last two and a half months, our case had graduated from a small-scale initial investigation to become the department’s primary concern; five victims in, we had every single available officer seconded to us, and the largest incident room in the building. Even so, with at least forty police working in here at any one time, it always felt crowded. There were even more here right now, crammed in along the walls and standing in the central aisle, all ready to receive the daily briefing and their updated action schedules.

I sensed a number of eyes on us as we entered, then more and more as we eased our way through the throng. The noise abated slightly as people gradually realised that the main act had arrived. Pressing through, I noticed the heat most of all; the air had the particular warmth that comes from too many people being too close together, and every time I glanced around, I saw damp hair, beads of sweat on people’s foreheads. The desk fans were all on, but they weren’t accomplishing much.

DCI Drake was leaning against the wall, close to the front of the room. Arms folded, face stern – no sweat on him, of course. For Drake, the production of sweat was something for other people to endure and worry about, and if they weren’t currently doing so, he could certainly help them with that.

No pressure
…

The area at the far end of the room remained clear. It was a mini stage of sorts, raised only by a couple of inches, and there were numerous tales of unlucky detectives inadvertently face-planting on their way to a nervy presentation. No such disasters for Chris or me today. He moved to the microphone that had been set up, while I walked over to the whiteboards along the back wall. They covered it floor to ceiling, all the way across. I turned my back on the expectant gazes for a few moments, and stared at the boards instead.

Photographs of the five victims were taped across them, with information scribbled in by various hands around each one. It was all on the computers, but I found it helpful to have a visual cue as well – to be able to see as much of it all at once as I could. So here were almost countless names, dates and addresses, people of interest. We’d assumed the attacker would be someone known to the first victim, Katie Rayland, so every possible male acquaintance, every angry ex-boyfriend, had been tracked down and ruled out of the inquiry. That theory had been more or less discarded as the number of assaults rose, and a connection between the victims proved apparently non-existent. The names were still there, just in case, but it was the victims I was interested in right now.

I stared at the photographs, oblivious to the room behind me. Superficially, the women all looked very different. They ranged in height, ethnic origin, hair colour, eye colour. But still, what I’d said to Chris in the car was true: I was sure they had been targeted. Because it was clear that our man had a type. He liked women in their mid to late twenties. He liked women who lived alone. And – the most obvious similarity between them – he liked women who would be considered conventionally very attractive. All five were, in their separate ways, exceptionally beautiful.

Of course,
liked
wasn’t the right word, except in the most tangential sense. In reality, he
hated
his victims. Along with his size and strength, each of them had emphasised the hate that they’d felt coming off him in waves. It seemed increasingly obvious to me that he hated them for
what
they were, rather than who. Young, attractive and successful, they were the kind of women you’d imagine finding on the arm of an alpha male, being shown off like a trophy or a badge.

If his hatred was obvious, something else was too. These photographs had all been taken after the assaults, to detail the injuries the women had received. And when you moved your gaze along the line of images, a strange thing happened. Despite the disparity in their appearances, you could trace along from the first picture to the last, from Katie Rayland to Julie Kennedy, and see damage accumulating. The victims merged into one, so that the effect was almost of viewing the cumulative destruction of the
idea
of a beautiful woman. While the rapes remained a constant feature, the assaults were becoming more vicious, more extended, more
central
to the crime. Our man was escalating. Julie had nearly been killed. It was only a matter of time before somebody actually was …