Sisters

Part 3 of a psychological thriller

                                    Chapter 7

                              An Indecent Assault

Despite his shortcomings, Yvonne Cartwright had always been deeply in love with her husband and she took his death hard; feeling the day after she learned of it, as she imagined one would after being run over by a juggernaut lorry. The girls did their best to comfort her, but nothing really helped. Jemma told her, ‘He didn’t suffer, mum. The doctors say that he just had a seizure and his heart packed up. He wouldn’t have known a thing.’

     Wordlessly, her mother clutched at her older daughter’s hand. She was sure that Jemma meant well, but hearing her husband’s death described in this way was just too much to bear. She began sobbing again. Tanya got up and crossed the room to put her arms around her mother. The three of them just clung to each other for a few minutes, as though they had just been rescued from a shipwreck or something. The group made a touching tableau, but the fact was that only one of them was really afflicted by grief. The other two were doing their best, but found it hard to be convincing. Luckily, Mrs. Cartwright was too distressed to notice that neither of her daughters were really as affected by the death as they claimed to be.

     Jemma and Tanya were not the only ones unmoved by George Cartwright’s death. Two of the guests who had been at the ill-fated party six months earlier were also not in the least sorry about it. Jennifer Cole was pleased that Cartwright was dead, for the same reason that Jemma was. Chloe Donague was also glad. Jemma’s father had assaulted her almost three years earlier and ever since that day, she had hated him and dreamed of being revenged upon him.

     The older he grew, the less cautious had George Cartwright become about which women he chased after; not that he had been particularly finicky and discerning before. Jemma and Tanya both went to the local Ursuline; a Catholic girls’ school. From the age of fourteen or so, he had followed Jemma's friends around with his eyes whenever she had brought any home with her. Not only did he find the leggy teenage girls attractive in themselves, he also had a secret fetish for school uniforms and the sight of the girls, laughing and shaking their hair about, drove him almost frantic with desire. He had noticed that as he reached middle age, his lusts were becoming quite indiscriminate and found it slightly alarming that he should feel sexually aroused by such young girls. Never the less, he was quite unable to stop watching them lasciviously at every opportunity. By exercising almost superhuman control, Cartwright managed to avoid actually propositioning any of his daughters’ school-friends until the elder of his two daughters entered the sixth form and she and her classmates were all definitely over the age of sixteen.

     There were one or two embarrassing scenes when George Cartwright took to brushing against the girls who came home with Jemma and making veiled suggestions about what he might be up for. Most of them simply dismissed him as a creep and kept quiet about it because they didn't want to upset Jemma. Only one said anything to Jemma herself and she regretted it bitterly, because Jemma went mad at her and ditched her as a friend. She could not hear a word spoken against her father, whom she believed loved her more than he did his wife. The idea that he would pursue any other female was preposterous to Jemma. By the time that Jemma was up at Durham though and brought home her new best friend, all this had been forgotten; at least by George Cartwright himself. He put the moves on Chloe the second time that she visited the house. It had happened like this.

     It was the Easter vacation and Jemma Cartwright had asked Chloe to come and stay at her house for a week. The two girls had been inseparable companions since getting to know each other well in the first term at Durham and they now spent most of their spare time in each other’s company. Jemma did not yet know that Chloe had a massive crush on her which would, in the fullness of time, ripen into love. She just thought that they were mates and fast getting to be best friends. She said to Chloe, ‘My parents would love to see you. You can come for a few days or a week, can’t you? I’m going to miss you so much otherwise.’

     Chloe, who had received this invitation with tingling pleasure and was looking forward with breathless anticipation to the prospect of wallowing in Jemma’s company for twenty-four hours a day, said, ‘I don’t know. Are you sure your mum and dad won’t mind?’

     ‘They’ll love you. Go on, say you will. Please?’ Jemma batted her eyelashes at her friend in mock entreaty and said, ‘Pretty please? With sugar on?’

     Feeling as though her heart would burst with love, Chloe said, ‘Oh go on then. You persuaded me.’

     Jemma gave her a hug and said, ‘We’ll have a great time!’ Chloe didn’t doubt it for a moment.

     The first few days at Jemma’s house went fine. Her mother, father and sister were all as friendly as could be and it wasn’t until Jemma, Tanya and their mother went off to visit an aunt for the afternoon, leaving Chloe alone in the house, that things went wrong. Whether by accident or design, George Cartwright arrived home from work less than half an hour after the others had left. He affected surprise at finding Chloe alone in the house and then, having disposed of the preliminaries, he tried to persuade her to have sex with him. Not that he put it like that, of course. He started by talking about boyfriends and having established that Chloe didn’t have one, he said, ‘Perhaps you find those boys at university a bit young for you, eh? A sophisticated woman like you, you probably prefer somebody with some maturity. I get that.’

     As a rule, Cartwright hit on almost every woman he met between the ages of sixteen and forty. Well over ninety per cent of them gave him the brush-off; although some were flattered by the attention.  Of the rest, about a third eventually ended up having sex with him. Since he propositioned so many women, this scatter-gun approach, with a success rate of perhaps one in thirty or forty, meant that he usually had some woman other than his wife on the go.

     As he tried to flirt with Chloe, George Cartwright moved closer to her. They were in the kitchen, where Chloe had been making herself a cup of coffee when Jemma’s father walked in. It would have been awkward to bolt for the door and so as he talked and moved closer and closer towards her, in a clumsy attempt at intimacy, she casually stepped backwards until her bottom was pressing against the granite work-surface and there was no more room to retreat. ‘Don’t be shy,’ said Cartwright, ‘I don’t bite.’

     So far, the man in the kitchen with Chloe had what might be termed ‘plausible deniability’. He was an expert in this; putting the moves on women, while making sure that if things went sour he could dismiss it all as a bit of teasing banter. On this occasion though, he could not restrain himself. It had been almost three weeks since he had made love to a woman; and his need for sex was becoming desperate. He said, ‘They won’t be back for at least a couple of hours if they’ve gone to see Aunt Joan. She lives up in Harlow, you know. Come on, you’re game for a bit of fun, aren’t you? Why don’t we nip upstairs?’

     Slightly taken aback at the sheer crassness of his proposal, Chloe said nothing; which George Cartwright took for assent. He reached out and ran his hand over her right breast. The thought of any man touching her in that way made her feel sick, but this sleaze-bucket was almost unbearably repulsive to her. She was frozen in shock and began hyperventilating. Chloe could not bear to feel trapped and she had a great aversion to people pushing their faces towards her and invading her personal space as George Cartwright seemed intent upon doing. Having convinced himself that this attractive young girl was not actually opposed in principle to getting into bed with him, Cartwright moved in even closer; whereupon Chloe kneed him in the balls. Nothing of the sort had happened to him since he was a schoolboy and the sudden, sickening pain caused him to double up and fall to the floor groaning. ‘You bitch,’ he cried in agony, ‘You fucking little bitch!’

     With Jemma’s father rolling about in pain, it seemed to Chloe that this was the best opportunity she was likely to get to escape. She ran from the kitchen and charged down the hall and out of the front door; not even troubling to close it behind her. Then she jogged to the end of the street and, when she was out of sight of the house, stopped to consider matters.

     She knew that telling Jemma of this episode would signal the end of their friendship. Jemma adored her father in a way that Chloe found a little unhealthy. She was fond enough of her own dad, but she didn’t behave as though she was in love with him; which was how Jemma sometimes came across. Everything about her father was, according to Jemma, perfect. He was handsome, kind, loving, clever and accomplished. And of course, he thought the world of Jemma. Privately, Chloe dismissed all this as an unresolved Electra Complex; what she privately thought of as ‘Daddy’s Little Princess Syndrome’. Not that she would have let Jemma know that.

     As she walked the streets, it dawned on Chloe that the only real option, if she wished to remain close to Jemma, was to say nothing about her father’s actions. Surely the man himself would not wish to tell anybody about what had happened and after the way she had reacted, he could be in no doubt about how she felt about him. The chances of his trying it on again with her were, she decided, vanishingly small. After reasoning the matter out, Chloe went to the High Street and sat in a McDonald’s for a couple of hours until she judged it safe to return to Jemma’s house. Jemma and her mum were back by then and George Cartwright was nowhere to be seen.

     Just as she had suspected, nothing was ever said about the incident by Jemma’s father and she herself said nothing to Jemma about it. Nor did she ever again speak to George Cartwright, unless it would have appeared odd to others not to; for example, at the dinner table when she was visiting Jemma. But she never forgot the horror of being trapped with that slobbering creep and from time to time she entertained fantasies where she tortured him to death; starting by slicing off his genitals with a blunt knife.

                                    Confession

The nurse bustled around the room cheerfully. She was a voluble and good-natured Irishwoman, with an unfortunate tendency to treat incapable and helpless patients as being all but feeble-minded.

     ’How’s you, my darling?’ she said. Then, without waiting for an answer or even looking at the patient, she said to the woman sitting on the edge of the bed, ’No sitting on the beds, me dear. You’ll be after gettin’ me shot if anybody should see you. Come on now, there’s a perfectly good chair over there by the window. Ye can pull it up closer to the bed if you’ve a mind to.’

     Temperature was taken, tubes checked, charts filled in and physical needs tended to; all without once making eye-contact with the helpless woman. While the nurse busied herself with the machinery which was keeping the woman in the bed alive, she was closely observed by the young woman sitting by the window. In particular, she watched carefully as the heart monitor was adjusted. No alarm sounded as it was disconnected and moved to another part of the patient’s body; which was interesting. Already, the germ of an idea was forming.

     After the nurse had left, without even noticing the frantic rolling of eyes by which the woman in the bed hoped to attract her attention, there was silence for a few seconds. Then the woman sitting by the window said, ‘Something I did read about, when I was looking into the whole serial killer thing I mean, was that the gaps between murders get shorter and shorter, until there is often a spree which practically guarantees the that the person is caught. I was sure that that wasn’t going to happen to me, but I have to say it was a terrible strain. Unless you’ve killed somebody and got a taste for it, you won’t understand.’

     There was another silence; this one longer than the last. At length, the woman said, ‘I set myself a strict limit. It was the only way of making sure that I didn’t go over the top. I decided that I wouldn’t kill anybody for at least six months after that death in the hospital. It worked pretty well, except that…. Well, I’ll tell you about it. Truth is, I’ve got it a bit muddled up, you see. That business with the bicycle spoke wasn’t the second person I killed; it was the third. That’s funny, isn’t it? I mean that I could jumble it up like that. I’ve found lately that stuff like that is happening a lot. Getting things mixed up. But that’s another story. The second death was like this.’

                                     Chapter 8

                                    Blackmail

Two weeks after the party at which Sophie McAllister had died, a young man called Jack Simmons rang up one of the women who had been at the party and whom he had observed doing something which he thought distinctly fishy. It was nothing very dramatic and in all the fuss and confusion at the time, the significance of what he had seen had escaped him. He had seen a plastic tube, about the same size as a tube of smarties, casually dropped on the kitchen floor; five minutes or so after the paramedics, unable to revive Sophie McAllister, had carried her corpse off in their ambulance. Jack had been pretty pissed at the time and seeing the plastic tube with the yellow and white label rolling under the cooker had not really registered when it had happened.

     Jack Simmons wasn’t the brightest of individuals, he was only there at the party because he was banging a friend of Tanya Cartwright’s, and it wasn’t until he heard the girl he was kind of going out with talking about the discovery of the epiPen which could have saved Sophie’s life, that he twigged what had happened that night. Googling ‘epiPen’ brought up images which matched precisely his memory of what he had seen rolling across the kitchen floor.

     Some people, on realising that they had information which might shed light upon the tragic and unexpected death of a young woman, would go at once to the police with a view to making statement. Jack Simmonds wasn’t at all from that mould. He was a chancer, always with an eye to the main chance, and his first thought, when once he had figured out just what it was that he had witnessed, was how he might turn this knowledge to his own advantage. He decided that his best bet would be to blackmail the person he had seen ditching that syringe. As he understood it, the woman who’d dropped the EpiPen had, at the very least, had a hand in causing the death of that loud-mouthed lezzer who’d been getting on everybody’s nerves that night.

     Getting the number of the woman he’d seen wasn’t hard; Jack was pretty good at finding out stuff like that. The conversation with the person he regarded as his mark went even better than he could have hoped. The girl got his drift at once, without anything having to be spelled out.

     ‘You won’t remember me. I was at the party the other week.’

     ‘Oh, yes. What about it?’

     ‘Saw something weird there. After that girl collapsed.’

     ‘What was that, then?’

     ‘You dropped something. In the kitchen. Afterwards.

     There was a long silence, as she digested this information. He had to give it to her; she was as cool as they come. No panicking, no anger, no protestations of innocence. Her only interest was in finding out what this unknown man wanted. She said, ‘How can I help you?’

     ‘Thing is, I’m, a bit hard up right now. Thought you might be able to help?’

     ‘I bet we can work something out. Maybe we should meet?’

     ‘Yeah, maybe we should at that. Where? It’s gotta be somewhere we can

      talk without anybody ear-wigging.’

     ‘Where are you now?‘

     ‘Tottenham.’

      ‘What about the marshes, then? Say an hour’s time?’

     ‘Which bit?’

     ‘You know the gate near Northumberland Park station? What about there?’

     ‘OK. Half three?’

     ‘Yes.’

     This was all going to be easier than Jack could ever have imagined. He would ask for a hundred or so to kick off with and then see what she might be worth. He was guessing that her family had money that she could get hold of somehow. Things were looking up.

     For ten miles of its length the River Lea, which enters the Thames in London’s East End, is flanked by scrubby wasteland known simply as ‘The Marshes’. Stratford Marsh, Hackney Marshes, Walthamstow Marsh, Tottenham Marshes, they are all much of a muchness; grassy plains, arid rather than marshy, with a scattering of low shrubs and spindly trees. It was the nearest thing to open country that many of the children living in North London were ever likely to be familiar with.

     It was a pleasant enough afternoon in late April and when he saw the girl waiting for him by the entrance to the marshes, Jack Simmons felt his heart lifting and he became quite optimistic about the future. Although he hadn’t really thought all that far ahead, his plan was roughly speaking to bleed this woman and her family dry and then, when there was no more to be had from her, see if he couldn’t get some sort of reward from the police for putting them onto somebody who might very well be a murderer.

     The woman watched the weasel-faced boy approaching and felt nothing but contempt for him and an overwhelming sense of superiority. Arranging to meet him here had been an inspired idea. She had visited the marshes recently with a friend and they had messed around a little there; finding an exciting and slightly hazardous spot to stand and chat. It was to this location that she intended leading the youth who was now slouching towards her.

     Being under the impression that he was menacing her, Jack was vastly surprised to be met with a welcoming smile and cheerful greeting. This bird was acting like she was really pleased to see him. She was wearing a short, tartan kilt and her hair was tied back in a pony-tail. Although he guessed that she was in her early twenties, she looked about sixteen. He wondered if she knew what was going on here and then, being a young man of dull apprehension and limited imagination, he thought that perhaps she fancied him. This idea gave him another boost. He’d had a spliff before coming to this meeting and perhaps this had blunted his sensibilities even more than was usually the case. ‘Alright?’ he asked gruffly, ‘You wanna walk round a bit?’

     ‘Sure. I know just the place where we can talk. It’s really private.’

     This time, there was no mistaking the flirtatious look which the girl shot him and Jack Simmons began to think that his luck had changed in a big way. Did this dozy mare think perhaps, that if she let him do it then he wouldn’t put the bite on her? Good luck to her, she’d soon find out the difference! In the meantime, he felt his penis twitching in anticipation of what might be about to happen.

     The girl said, ‘I came up here with my friend last week. We found a really private spot. You’ll see.’

     ‘Go on then, lead the way.’ Despite the seriousness of the situation, it was not after all every day that one began blackmailing somebody in connection with a sudden death, Jack felt quite light-hearted. He said, ‘You’re a one. I hope you’re not leading me astray?’

     She laughed coquettishly and said, ‘Why? Don’t you like being led astray?’

     His luck was in here and no mistake. The young woman took him towards the river, to the point where the railway line crossed it heading south. A smoke-blackened, brick-built bridge carried the line over the Lea. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘Scramble up here.’

     ‘Up there? What for?’

     ‘You’ll see. Come on, don’t be a slowcoach. If you want to know what I did, I ground up a peanut between two spoons and sprinkled it on the pizza she was eating when she wasn’t looking.’

     Jack was beginning to feel wrong-footed.  He had come there with the simple motive of extracting a hundred pounds for concealing his knowledge of the fact that this woman had evidently hidden the EpiPen which would have saved Sophie McAllister’s life. That at least was what the girl he was with at the party had told him. He’d never heard of anaphylactic shock before and certainly didn’t grasp the vital role of the EpiPen in preventing death. Now though, he was larking around with his supposed victim like a kid and she’d suddenly let on that there was more to this than he had guessed. Well, there’d be time enough later for business. If she wanted to fool about a bit first, maybe with the aim of distracting him; well, that was fine. Now though, hearing that sudden casual confession to murder, he stopped dead in his tracks for a moment. Something was very wrong and none of this was going the way he had planned. As he pondered his best course of action, the girl had darted off and was scrambling up the grassy embankment leading to the railway line.

     The young man ducked through a gap in a wire-netting fence and climbed up a low embankment until the two of them were standing by the tracks which carried the trains between London and Hertfordshire. The girl said, ‘Come on!’ and darted off to the bridge. Shaking his head in amusement, Jack followed her; keeping a wary eye out for any oncoming trains. His physical desire was growing stronger and it served to quell any misgivings which he might otherwise feel.

     The bridge had a parapet about four feet high running from one end to the other. Halfway across was a strange structure; a little like a sentry box. It was six feet high and there was just room inside for two people to squeeze. It had been erected when the bridge had been built, in the days of thundering steam locomotives. Any workers on the bridge would be able to shelter there when a train passed and not run the risk of being caught up in the slipstream and dragged to their death beneath the wheels. Otherwise, there was a clearance of only three feet or so between the passing carriages and the parapet.

      When they reached the curious little structure, the girl nipped inside and when Jack appeared at the entrance, she said, ‘I know what you want!’ She opened her denim jacket and lifted up her sweater; revealing that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Jack Simmons caught his breath, as his penis began throbbing in anticipation. She said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ Nothing loathe, he entered the enclosed space and reached out for her breasts. As he did so, the girl casually put out her hands and began unzipping his trousers.

     Friends of Jack’s had more than once remarked that he was easily led by his prick and so it proved that afternoon, because all thoughts of blackmail faded from his mind; overwhelmed by the urgent need to get his cock inside the girl whose tits he was fondling. Breathlessly, he pushed forward against her, moving his right hand down to get her skirt up and try and pull down her knickers. Jack was so preoccupied with this manoeuvre, that he was quite oblivious to the singing of the rails which signalled the approach of a distant railway train.

     The girl had managed to work Jack’s cock out of his trousers and was rubbing it gently; causing him to moan in pleasure. He mumbled, ‘Christ, let me stick it in you.’

     ‘In a minute,’ she said, smiling enticingly at him, ‘There’s just one more thing first.’

     ‘What, what?’ he muttered, incoherent with sexual desire.

     The train was almost upon them now and by leaning forward, the girl could just see it, away to her right. ‘Just this,’ she said and gave Jack Simmons an enormous shove, which sent him flying backwards into the path of the oncoming train. ‘Die, you little fuck!’ she screamed at the top of her voice. She adjusted her clothes and as soon as the train had passed, walked briskly, but without showing any sign of agitation or undue haste, off the bridge, down the embankment and back onto the path leading out of the marshes and onto the streets of Tottenham. The train driver had applied his brakes at once, but such was the momentum; the train was a quarter of a mile past the bridge before it ground to a halt. By the time that the emergency services arrived, there was just the mangled body of a young man to collect. Because his companion had been hidden from sight in the shelter, the driver was able to state truthfully that he had only seen one person apparently leap into the path of his train. At the subsequent inquest, an open verdict was recorded.

                                Chapter 9

                        A Little Bedtime Reading

After his wife had gone up to bed with her library book, Giles Lucas poured himself a small Scotch and fetched his briefcase. He sat down at the dining table and then took out a bundle of documents; spreading them out so that he could sort through them. There were print-outs of witness statements, photographs, stuff from CRO about Melanie Pearl and various other things. Before beginning work, Lucas skimmed through everything to remind himself what he was dealing with.

     As a rule, the inspector was not a man who believed in coincidence. In the present instance, four people who knew the dead woman, all milling around within a short walk of where her body was discovered and all of whom claimed to have nothing to do with her death, stretched coincidence well beyond breaking point. There simply had to be a connection between at least one of those four young women and Melanie Pearl plunging to her death on those railings.

     Taking this as a working hypothesis soon led Inspector Lucas’ thoughts in a disturbing direction. To begin with, he mulled over one or two things that he had noticed when investigating Pearl’s death. One thing that he had soon picked up on when exchanging messages with and talking on the telephone to the other members of the London Underground group, was that those four were seen as a distinct group. They knew each other in real life; whereas all the other members of the group only interacted via the internet and occasional phone calls. All twenty-one of the other members who had been on that picnic at Greenwich only ever met when they went to events of that kind. Otherwise, they messaged each other on Facebook and commented on each other’s posts. That was the first point.

     Another thing he had observed was the way that three of the group, the two sisters and their friend from university, all vouched for each other; claiming that they had all been within sight of the other two for the whole time. Everybody else that day, as far as he could make out, had been wandering all over the shop; looking first at this Bronze Age burial mound, then a bit of a Roman temple or some statue or other. None of them could swear that any specific individual had been within their sight for the entire day. Except, that is, for Jemma Foster, Tanya Cartwright and Chloe Donague. If they were to be believed, then Jemma could be seen by either Tanya or Chloe for the whole time. Likewise with the other two. All three, on the other hand, were quick to deny having seen Jennifer Cole at all times. Either she really was the one who had tossed Melanie Pearl over those railings to her death, or the other three had tacitly decided to drop her in it.

     Lucas prided himself on having a feel for wrong’uns and also being able to spot liars and those trying to mislead him. Yet having spoken now to all those young women, he had picked up nothing at all; despite his being quite sure that one of them had killed the woman whose body had been found at the foot of the Point. This was odd, because killing somebody like that and then being questioned about it a few hours later; you’d expect the person to be a little edgy and to stumble over her answers. He’d both listened to the original tapes made later that same afternoon and spoken to all four of the women himself and detected nothing at all but honesty and a genuine desire to help him sort the thing out.

       Since these were none of them villains or low-lifes, he assumed that in the usual way of things, somebody committing murder would be likely to be a little unsure of themselves when talking about the events around the time that the murder had taken place. That there was nothing of the sort about any of the four, led Inspector Lucas to a disconcerting conclusion. Either all four of them really were quite innocent or three of them were guiltless and one so cold-blooded and experienced in such affairs that she had done something of the kind before and the killing of Melanie Pearl was not such a shocking business as it would be to an ordinary person. Since Lucas was certain-sure in his own mind that the death was the work of one of them; then it seemed to him that he was probably dealing with a woman who had killed at least once and possibly several times before. Turn it round in his mind as he might, he could see no other explanation which fitted all that he believed he knew about the death of Melanie Pearl.

     Even as a boy, Giles Lucas had been fascinated by crime and his bedroom had contained a shelf full of true crime books about famous murders, memoirs of pathologists and similar subjects. At his parents’ insistence, Lucas went off to university, but there was never the least doubt in his mind what career he would be pursuing. As it happened, his degree from Oxford stood him in good stead and allowed him to move onto an accelerated path for promotion.

     After tidying up his papers, he went upstairs to bed; carrying with him one or two books on forensic psychology. He climbed into bed with his wife; placing the pile of books on the floor by the bed. Diana glanced up from her own novel and said, ‘I’m surprised you don’t get enough of that kind of thing at work.’ She was looking at the cover of the book which he had opened. It was Criminal Investigations by Hans Gross.

     ‘It’s a tricky business. I don’t know what to make of it.”

     ‘What, a case you’re on at the moment?’

     ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

     Diana Lucas was a primary school teacher and she seldom had any desire to discuss her husband’s work; any more than he really wanted to hear about the exploits of her eight and nine year-olds. She had sensed lately though that something was on his mind and so was giving him an opening if he needed it. She said, ‘You don’t know if the case is yours? Or you don’t know if it’s a case at all?’

     ‘Yeah, that.’ replied her husband, ‘I don’t know if I’m chasing shadows or if there’s a maniac on the loose.’

     ‘Well then, maybe I should let you concentrate on that while I focus on Proust.’

     Lucas turned to look at her fondly, saying, ‘I love you.’

     ‘I love you too. Go on, get on with it. You’ll be like a dog with a bone until you’ve sorted it out; I know the signs.’

     Inspector Lucas opened the book at the place which he had marked earlier that day and read;

It is customary carefully to distinguish between serial killers such as 'Jack the Ripper' and so-called ‘spree-killers’; for instance lone gunmen, who embark upon a rampage of murder on one, sustained occasion. This distinction is wholly arbitrary and quite unwarrantable. In fact, the two categories are by no means so clearly separate as the literature suggests and may even be two facets of an identical syndrome.

     Many serial killers end their careers with a multiple murder which results in their capture or death. Similarly, a high proportion of spree-killers are, on subsequent investigation, found to have committed a number of murders at intervals before launching the attacks which draw public attention to them. Two examples of this phenomenon should suffice to illustrate the point. Both are from the United States, although similar cases are to be found throughout the world.

     On the morning of December 11^th 1962, 29 year-old Francis Covenay loaded his hunting rifle and went out into the streets of the small Oregon town of Fisher’s Landing. He shot dead five men and three women before being himself shot dead by an off-duty police officer. It was later established, from ‘trophies’ found in his home, that it was likely that Covenay had killed eight women in the course of the previous six years. In other words, here was a serial killer who had progressed to mass murder.

     Throughout the 1970s, police hunted a killed who preyed upon hitchhikers and vagrants; whose mutilated bodied regularly turned up in shallow graves in the Arizona desert. No progress was made in the investigation and the perpetrator was only caught when he killed five people in the course of a single day, on September 5^th 1979.

     An interesting and noteworthy circumstance is that the intervals between the murders committed before the ‘spree’, tend to become shorter and shorter. In the case of Francis Covenay, almost two years elapsed between his first and second known murders. Only a month separated his seventh and eighth murders though and the killing rampage in which he then engaged took place just three weeks after the final murder in his ‘series’. The same pattern was to be observed in the Arizona killings.

     It is hypothesised that what are sometimes known as ‘lust murders’ of this kind have the eventual effect of blunting the sensitivities of those undertaking them and that only more gruesome, cruel or frequent murders are then able to stimulate the same degree of arousal in the murderer. It has further been suggested that if only one could gather accurate and reliable data on the activities of a serial killer, then it might be possible to predict and even prevent further killings and perhaps apprehend the criminal before he, for such murderers are invariably men, progresses to the point where he launches a furious spate of multiple killings over the course of a few hours or less.

     Lucas put down the book and stared into space. If there was anything in these ideas, then it might be that whoever killed Melanie Pearl was even now choosing her next victim.

     ‘D’you want the light off yet?’ asked his wife.

     ‘No, you’re alright. I need to think.’

     ‘You’re OK, aren’t you? You seem awfully taken up with this business lately, whatever it is.’

     Lucas turned to look at Diana and then leaned forward and kissed her on the nose. He said, ‘Truth is Di, I think there might be a killer on the loose. It’s unofficial though. I can’t really spend my time at work on this, so that’s why I’ve been bringing stuff home. It wouldn’t sit right with me if I just forgot all about it and then the person killed somebody.’

     ‘I’m here, you know.’

     Giles Lucas gazed at his wife fondly. He said, ‘I know that. But this might be a really filthy business. I don’t want you to have to hear about it. If I’m right, it’s just foul.’

     ‘Well I hope you know what you’re about. I’ve got to sleep now. I’m shattered. Goodnight.’

     ‘Goodnight, Di. You know how much I love you, don’t you?’

     ‘Of course I do, silly. Goodnight.’

     Once Diana had closed her eyes and her breathing had become regular and deep, Lucas put down his book and got out of bed again; trying not to disturb her in the process. Then he went downstairs to make a coffee.

     The chief thing which led Inspector Lucas to believe that he was looking in Melanie Pearl’s death at the work of a practiced killer was the neatness of the thing. Having made a cup of instant coffee, he sat at the table and went over what he was convinced in his own mind must have happened in Greenwich during the day of that picnic.

     The first point was that the time frame was exceedingly tight. None of those women could have vanished for more than twenty minutes or half an hour without it being noticed. If one of them did leave Greenwich Park, nip over to the Point and murder Pearl; then it must have been done very briskly indeed. Lucas had timed the walk from various parts of Greenwich Park and by his reckoning, the thing could just about be done. There’d be no time for messing about though on arrival at the Point. It would be a question of marching up to Melanie Pearl, grabbing hold of her straight away and throwing her to the ground, banging her head hard on the concrete of the path by the railings and then heaving her over to her death. Then the murderer would have to leave at once and walk straight back to rejoin the picnic. It would be no good getting back to the park red in the face, dishevelled or hysterical either. That would be sure to attract unfavourable attention. The last thing that the killer would wish would be to find herself the object of remark on her return. After all, she would presumably have told others that she was just popping to the loo or to get an ice-cream of something of that kind.

      There are very few people able to kill in such a coldblooded fashion and to accomplish such a feat on a first attempt was, thought Inspector Lucas, improbable in the highest degree. No, the only way that this hung together, if it was indeed a murder, was if the woman who did this had killed before and knew that she could handle the matter without breaking sweat. At this thought, Lucas shivered momentarily, as though somebody had walked across his grave. Imagine being able to commit murder without breaking sweat! He’d never heard the like.

     There had been no traces of paint from the railings on the front of Melanie Pearl’s clothes; only a few flakes on the back of her jacket and jeans. This too pointed to her not having climbed over the railings at the top of the Point, with a view to hurling herself to destruction. All this had been in Lucas’ report and the file submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to blame either his superiors for declining to launch a murder hunt or the CPS for not authorising charges against anybody. There simply wasn’t enough evidence against any one person. Nor was there even the cast-iron certainty that murder had been committed.

     There was another factor to consider though; always assuming that Melanie Pearl's death had been murder and not suicide. It had without doubt been an enormously swift and efficient murder; but at the same time, it had been a very careless and risky crime. Suppose that somebody had been looking out of the window in one of those houses in Maidenstone Lane? Or what if there had been anybody in the back gardens at the time, who might have chanced to glance up at the right moment? Not only that, there was nothing to have stopped anybody walking into the Point from Blackheath, just as Melanie Pearl was being chucked over those railings to her death.

     Then again, surely the odds of the woman being killed outright by the method used were not all that good? It was sheer chance that Melanie Pearl should had landed so neatly that one of those spikes penetrated her heart. This may have been a swift and determined crime, carried out without hesitation, but it was also a sloppy and haphazard affair; one in which the intended victim might easily have survived to testify against her assailant.

     One of the things that Inspector Lucas had been picking up from his reading was that a serial killer might carry on carefully for years and then, for no apparent reason, grow careless and take enormous risks. If Dr Gross, author of Criminal Investigations, was to be believed, hasty and poorly planned murders of this sort were, when carried out by a practiced serial killer, often the precursor to a murder-spree. Such people would typically spend years killing at intervals, plotting each murder with meticulous care, and then something would happen which upset all the careful planning and caused them to begin taking wild chances which might lead to their arrest. This change in pattern was, it appeared, often linked with the onset of a sudden series of murders which would lead inevitably to the criminal's detection. In other words, the murder in Greenwich had all the signs of having been carried out by a serial killer who was on the very cusp of turning into a mass murderer who was about to begin an indiscriminate orgy of violence.

      It was getting late, and Lucas knew that he had to be up in the morning even earlier than his wife. He switched off the kitchen light and went up to bed.

                                   Chapter 10

                Playing the Lover’s Part and Making Amends

There were two people in Jemma Foster’s life who were devoted to helping her and removing obstacles from her path. These were her sister Tanya and her best friend Chloe. A third woman would have been only too happy to undertake the same office, had she been given the opportunity. This was Jennifer Cole; whom Jemma despised. Learning the real reason for Jennifer’s puppy-like devotion had done nothing to reduce the contempt that Jemma felt for her; quite the opposite.

     Tanya had spent much of the time since she was of an age to realise what she had done to her sister, trying her best to make amends for that terrible day when she had mutilated Jemma’s face. Putting things right for Jemma had been a leit motif of her childhood and adolescence. As an adult, despite from time to time coming to the realisation that it was absurd to be constantly working out a penance for something she had done at the age of two; Tanya was still trapped in the same mode of thought. Whatever could be done for Jemma, must be done. Not only that, but these various sacrifices and actions on her part must remain quite unknown to her sister. It was her private crusade; one she sometimes feared would go on for as long as she and her sister both lived.

     For Chloe, on the other hand, doing things for Jemma was her way of sublimating the feelings of erotic love which she entertained for her friend. Had she been able to declare her love openly, then she would have delighted in bringing flowers and gifts, arranging surprise meals, taking Jemma out and showing her off; all the things which a lover would do for the object of her affection. Since Chloe was deceived into believing that Jemma didn’t know how she felt about her, she adopted instead a policy of finding anything which was troubling her friend and then dealing with it without her knowing about it. Chloe saw herself as Jemma’s paladin; fighting on her behalf and undertaking acts of errantry with no reward, other than knowing that she was defending her beloved’s interests.

     In their second year at Durham, a boy began making a nuisance of himself to Jemma; pestering her to go out with him. At first, she was quite flattered, but then when he began hanging round places where he thought he might bump into her; it became annoying. She told Chloe that it was getting to the point that she was avoiding certain parts of the university, in case she came across Rob waiting for her around the corner.

    One evening, Rob Challoner was on his way back to the Halls of Residence, after a few drinks in town. He stopped to have a piss in a doorway and just as he had almost finished relieving himself, nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt a piece of cold metal being pressed against the side of his neck. A husky voice said, ’Move a muscle and I’ll cut your fucking throat!’

     Rob was scared of being hurt, which perhaps accounts for why he was so scared that didn’t even notice that the deep voice threatening him belonged not to a man but a woman. He was so frightened that his throat really would be cut that he didn’t even realise that he was now pissing down his leg. The person behind him said, ’You ever go near Jemma Cartwright again and you know what’ll happen?’ He felt a hand reach round between his legs and grasp his penis. ’I’ll cut this off and stuff it in your mouth.’

     Then it was over and he heard rapidly retreating footsteps. By the time Rob had pulled himself together, whoever it was had vanished into the darkness and he was left with both a soaked and clammy trouser-leg and also a mortal fear which made his mouth taste as though he’d been sucking copper coins. From that day on, he not only stopped stalking Jemma; he took evasive action when he saw her coming. What had been a laddish game had turned into dangerous real life and Rob Challoner felt no inclination to try and find out if the person who had offered to castrate him that night had really meant it or if it had been no more than an idle threat.

      Tanya and Chloe seemed somehow to recognise that they both of them had Jemma’s interests at heart and so got on famously almost as soon as they met. Nothing was said between them; but both knew instinctively that they were allies, dedicated to a cause higher than themselves and this gave them a shared intimacy. Jemma saw how well her sister and best friend got on and was pleased about it; although she didn’t guess the reason.

     The relationship between the three women could hardly have been less healthy or more dysfunctional, yet they all gained something from it. Tanya saw it as a penance for her wicked behaviour as a child, Chloe could pretend that she and Jemma were in love and Jemma herself enjoyed knowing that she had two willing servants who would do anything for her. Looking in on this strange arrangement from the outside, Jennifer Cole was jealous and would have given anything to be part of the group. Being close to Jemma was what she had always desired most in life, ever since she started school. It was not until long after she had left school that she learned the true reason for her devotion to Jemma Cartwright, but the knowledge had done nothing to diminish her determination to continue trying intermittently to get closer to Jemma and her sister.