Only Darkness. Danuta Reah

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СКАЧАТЬ if that’s all you can manage.’ He asked her some questions about the woman on the opposite platform, without either confirming or denying this was the murder victim, and some questions about her own Thursday night routine. He thanked her for coming in, but Debbie was still uneasy. ‘Do you think it was him?’ She wanted him to reassure her that it was nothing, nothing at all.

      ‘I don’t know, Miss Sykes. Leave it with us. It may not be relevant, but we need this information to find that out. You did the right thing coming in. By the way, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to anyone about this.’

      ‘I’ve already talked to one or two people – I was worried.’

      ‘Well, if you could just avoid discussing it from now on …’

      At the Saturday briefing, Berryman and his team went over the preliminary results of the postmortem on Julie Fyfe. It was the same as the others. Nothing that pointed directly to the killer, no hair, no fingerprints, no blood, no other fluids, no footprints. ‘Fuck-all,’ Berryman told them. What evidence there may have been had been washed away by the torrential rain. The ground underneath her body was as wet as the surrounding area, which suggested that she’d been dumped after the worst of the storm was over, but she was wet through with rain. She’d been outside for the storm.

      What they did have, told them that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man. Death was by strangulation using some kind of smooth fabric, but whatever had been used had moved several times round the woman’s neck. The wire had been used after she was dead. The pathologist thought that the killer may have used partial strangulation as a means to subdue her, before he actually killed her. There was evidence of sexual assault – vaginal and anal bruising and laceration, a lot of internal damage. ‘He’s using a tool other than his tool,’ the pathologist had told Berryman. ‘Something thin and sharp, pointed. She would have bled to death if he hadn’t strangled her.’ The injuries to the eyes were caused by gouging – probably manual. ‘He was wearing gloves. Look for bloodstains on gloves,’ Berryman told his team. The general bruising and laceration was most probably caused by dragging of the – unconscious?, and later dead – woman along the ground. The lack of bruising and bleeding from some of these injuries suggested they were postmortem. There was possible impact injury, as though, after death, she had fallen heavily. Some gravel had been retrieved from the cuts. There was glass on the body. It was Lynne Jordan, the only woman on the team, who asked which of the other injuries were pre- or postmortem. Berryman couldn’t reassure. The sexual assault was carried out while the woman was alive. The other injuries? ‘Around the time of death,’ was all the information the pathologist could give them.

      ‘Did the glass come from the broken lights at Moreham station?’ That was Lynne again. Berryman shook his head. The glass came from the broken light near where the body had been dumped. There was no guarantee that Julie had gone to Moreham station, though it was probable that she had done so. They still hadn’t been able to trace her beyond the time she left work. Though the team had made extensive enquiries, no one had been found who had been on that route at the relevant time.

      ‘We’ve got one statement that just came in,’ Berryman said. ‘It relates to the crucial time – shortly after nine-thirty. This woman says that the station was deserted, except for one person, a man, who was behaving a bit oddly. I don’t have to tell you, we need to track him down. I’m still hoping for a car as well. There must have been cars going that way.’ Berryman took a deep breath. ‘OK. Let’s run through everything we’ve got. Let’s see what we’re missing here. He might be a lucky bastard, but he can’t do this and leave us nothing. There’s something we’re missing.’

      That evening found Mick Berryman still at his desk. He’d been woken up at four the previous morning by the call from the station reporting Cath Hill’s find. He probably wasn’t going to see his kids today, nor his wife, for that matter. His family was on the back burner until this enquiry was over – if it ever was. He was going over some of the earlier statements, and was looking at the information that had come in from that teacher this morning. Could be nothing, or it could be something very important. It could be their first sighting of the killer. If only they could establish where Julie had been when she was taken. They’d searched the station at Moreham, but there was nothing much to see. Unless forensics came through with something. They needed to track her movements. He began to make notes.

      She’d left work at nine-twenty, as usual for a Thursday. That had been easy to establish. She’d almost certainly walked to the station, despite the bad weather. It only took five minutes. She hadn’t called a taxi and there wasn’t a bus. Could she have accepted a lift? The people who worked with her were pretty certain: not Julie, she was far too careful, only with someone she knew. (And how often was it someone they knew, someone they trusted?) It was no distance to the station, anyway, she’d almost definitely gone there. But her train had been cancelled. She would probably have seen that on the screen as she arrived, but it had also been displayed on the platform screen. Could she have caught an earlier train? No, the earlier one had left over half an hour before, at eight-thirty-three, and yes, it had been running on time. So what had she done? Had she decided to wait for the next train? That seemed unlikely as it was over forty minutes before the next train was due. She would surely have gone for a bus or a taxi. Was she so broke she couldn’t afford to? Or so tight-fisted? He made some notes and thought on.

      She hadn’t been at the station at nine-forty, according to the statement Deborah Sykes had given. So – leaves work at nine-twenty, at the station by, what, between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty. By nine-forty, she had gone. He reached for Deborah Sykes’s statement again. Who’d taken it? McCarthy. Everything should be there. Right. No one had come out of the station as the Sykes woman had come in. She hadn’t passed anyone on her way to the station. If Julie had left the station as soon as she saw the first display screen, she would almost certainly not have been on the road by the time Deborah Sykes came past. If she’d gone down to the platform before seeing her train was cancelled, then Deborah should have seen her walking back. He needed some more timings. He needed to know how long she’d been in that station.

      Lynne Jordan was on the train to Sheffield. She’d taken to using the train when time permitted. Like most of her colleagues, she knew the roads of the area so well she could drive them with her eyes shut, predict the level of traffic for any time of day, say which roads the joy-riders were likely to choose to career their purloined cars around, tyres screeching as they performed their antics. But she didn’t know the trains. When the team pored over the maps, when they looked at the places the victims had been found, she saw pieces of landscape, not a seamless whole.

      Today, she had made a mistake. She was spending an evening in Sheffield, and it had seemed a golden opportunity. But of course, by the time she got on the train, it was dark. It was after eight-thirty, and the line outside the carriage window was invisible. She contented herself with getting a feel for her fellow travellers. There was a young man behind her, whose Walkman leaked a penetrating metallic beat. Somewhere further back in the carriage, there was someone with a loud and persistent sniff. A group of youths had piled on to the train at Meadowhall, shouting and nudging each other, sprawling over the seats, shoving their heavy trainers on to the upholstery. They brought the distinctive smell of young male into the carriage with them.

      Lynne tried to see out of the window. The interior of the carriage reflected darkly back. She could see the empty crisp packet that lay on her table, the pool of liquid spilled from a soft drink container. She held her hands up to shadow her eyes. She could see light glinting off the tracks. She put her face closer to the window, then recoiled as something flashed past so close it seemed about to hit her.

      They were passing a train. It wasn’t another passenger train – it seemed to consist of low, flat trucks with piles of long thin objects strapped to them. Her train slowed briefly, and she realized the other train was stationary, or moving very slowly. She saw the lights and tunnel ahead that meant they СКАЧАТЬ