Only Darkness (6 page)

Neave looked off into space, his eyes half closed. ‘Is it lights he doesn’t like, or is it glass? Reflections? Does he need the glass? Does he use it on them?’

Berryman went over the old ground again. They didn’t know, they could only guess. ‘The glass isn’t the kind that breaks into shards. It doesn’t look like a weapon. He seems to be funny about lights. He smashes them, but he isn’t consistent.’ He saw Neave’s question forming. ‘We don’t know. It could be a convenience thing, pure and simple, but it’s there.’ He sighed and emptied his glass. Neave signalled to the barman.

‘How does he pick them up?’ he asked.

‘Good question,’ Berryman said. ‘And one we’d like the answer to.’ They didn’t know where he’d picked them up, where he’d taken them or where he’d killed them. They knew what he’d done to them though. ‘This last one, for instance, Julie, she was last seen leaving work on Broomegate. She never got home. He must have got her shortly after she was last seen, but the time of death was probably around midnight. If he picked her up on the street, someone should have seen it. There were enough cars around. If he picked her up in the station, how did he get her to bloody Rawmarsh? If he’s using a car, he’s got to get her out of the station and then he’s still got to get her down to the line – no road where we found her.
Someone
must have seen
something,
but no one’s come forward.’

‘Apart from.’ Neave indicated the photo in the paper.

Berryman scowled. ‘We need to talk to her again. We need to be sure that Julie wasn’t at the station. We need to find this man, whoever he is.
He
might have seen something.’

‘But it could be your man?’ Neave didn’t wait for an answer. ‘So how does he find them?’ His glass was now empty. He shook his head as the other man gestured to ask if he wanted another. He had that narrow-eyed intent look that Berryman remembered from earlier days.

‘We’re working on it,’ he said. The general feeling of the men working the investigation was that the killer chose his victims at random – waited till he saw a likely-looking one, then struck. Berryman wasn’t so sure. ‘I’ve got a bit of a feeling about it. Lisa’s little girl, she’s only five, she kept talking about
the ugly man
– and Mandy’s mum said that Mandy had been getting some funny phone calls. Mind you,
she said that was down to Mandy’s boyfriend. I don’t know. It doesn’t add up to much. We’ve looked into it, and there’s nothing there you can put your finger on. I’ve got Lynne Jordan’s team working on it now. You know Lynne?’ Neave made a noncommittal noise. ‘The boyfriend admits he made “one or two” calls. It’s not just that, though. It’s too neat the way he lifts them. He always manages to do it without a witness. He’s got to know about them to do that. No, my money says he plans it well ahead.’

It was gone ten when they left the pub. Berryman headed for his car and Neave turned towards the river and his flat. Outside the pub, he zipped up his jacket and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Winter had the town in its grip now. The air was icy and the pavement sparkled with frost. The centre was deserted as usual – just a few kids rode their skateboards around the pedestrianized shopping area, a small group of adolescents huddled together outside the local burger joint. His footsteps echoed as he walked through the pedestrian precinct towards the river. The wind cut between the buildings and blew bits of rubbish around on the ground and up into the air. An empty can rattled its way down the street as if in pursuit of the lighter burger cartons and chip wrappings. A twenty-minute walk and he’d be home. He was glad he didn’t have to watch over his shoulder, to be wary of every empty alleyway. He thought of Deborah walking through the town centre alone.

Berryman’s mind drifted back to the past. Angie. He and Neave had been working over in Sheffield at the time. There had been some attacks on women in the university district. A young woman had reported a prowler and they were following it up. The house was a typical student house, a terrace with an uncared-for frontage, and ragged curtains up in the bay window. The young man who opened the door gave them a hostile stare as they announced themselves, then called over his shoulder, ‘Angie!’ He pushed past them on his way out. Neave gave Berryman a look –
give the little shit a hard time?
– but they let him go. Putting the frighteners on a cocky young man wasn’t what they were here for.

A young woman was coming down the stairs, tying the belt of a flimsy dressing gown round her waist. Her hair was wet, and she was carrying a towel. She looked surprised to see them. ‘I thought …’ They were obviously not who she was expecting to see.

Berryman took over. He always played the hard man, a part he was well suited to with his heavy jaw and thick eyebrows. Neave would stay back, quietly, looking sympathetic and friendly. It established a useful relationship if it was needed for later, though it didn’t particularly reflect the way they actually were, Berryman thought. He was a bit of a soft touch, unlike Neave. He introduced himself, showing her his identification. ‘We’re here about this man you reported.’ She had phoned in, and later told the patrol officer that a man had been peering in through the ground-floor windows late at night. Berryman didn’t doubt it, if she always went around dressed like that. Her gown was made of some silky material that kept sliding off her shoulders, and where her wet hair dripped on to it, it clung and lost its opacity.

He tried to catch Neave’s eye as the woman took them into the downstairs front room, but all he met was an expression of blank amazement. He looked as if he’d been hit by a car he hadn’t seen coming. Berryman grinned. He didn’t often see Neave rattled.

The room was a tip. There were papers all over the floor, and books. Two empty cups occupied the rug in front of the fire. The walls were a confusion of colour from pictures, posters, photographs, hangings all tacked up at random. In one corner there was a music stand and a violin case on the floor beside it. There was a bed under the window with a patterned cover thrown over it. The woman sat down on the rug, briefly revealing the inside of a white thigh, and gestured towards the bed. ‘I’m a bit short of chairs. Please sit down.’ Berryman sat himself gingerly on the bed. He didn’t like mess and he didn’t like women who couldn’t keep a place clean. Neave remained standing and leant his arm on the mantelpiece. The woman began to towel her hair in front of the fire, the towel providing some of the concealment that the dressing gown failed to do.

‘Right, Miss …’ Berryman checked his notes. ‘Kerridge. What can you tell us about this man? Just start from the beginning and tell us what you can remember.’ It didn’t sound like the same man – it sounded like the Peeping Tom they’d had problems with in the past. He wound the interview up quickly, asked her if she’d be prepared to make a statement and look at some photographs. As they left, he was conscious that Neave had been a silent spectator throughout. He tried a ribald comment on the woman’s dress or lack of it, but got a monosyllabic response. Neave could be a moody bastard.

He didn’t say anything to Berryman about seeing the woman again, but three weeks later she had moved into his flat, and two years after that, just after Flora was born, they were married.

They were all young, under twenty-five. Lisa was the oldest at nearly twenty-five, Kate was just twenty, killed within a month of her birthday, Mandy was twenty-one and Julie was twenty-four. Their lives had some similarities, some differences. Lisa was married, had been for three years. Her young husband had been given a hard time by the investigating team when her mutilated body had been found on the line near Mexborough station. She had a little girl, Karen, five years old. Kate and Mandy were both single and had no children. Kate got out and about – the Warehouse, pubs with comedy evenings, concerts at the Arena, the students’ union, the Leadmill. Lived in a shared house with three other students. Lots of boyfriends, no one special. They’d talked to them all. Nothing. Mandy was quieter, lived with her parents, had a little mongrel bitch, had been engaged for a couple of months but had just finished with her boyfriend. They’d given him a hard time, too, but there was nothing they could pin on him. Julie, they still had to find out more about Julie. She was single, lived alone, apparently had no children but they didn’t have much more information yet. Lisa worked part time as a secretary, Kate was a politics student, active in the students’ union, Mandy was a clerk for the local council and Julie was a PA. Her company had just won a Small Business of the Year Award before she was killed.

Lynne Jordan went through the details of the victims again, looking for that elusive something that linked them together. It was there, and she was missing it. She looked at the photographs the families had supplied. Lisa was dark-haired, attractive. She was smiling at the camera and doing an exaggerated glamour pose. She looked young, happy, confident. Kate was more serious, dark-haired again, strong features, well-defined brows. This picture had been taken when she was campaigning for the student union presidency. Attractive, but in a different way from Lisa’s vivacious femininity. Mandy had fair hair, a light brown often called mousy. She smiled rather tensely and artificially at the camera. A plain woman, if the picture was right.
She doesn’t take a good photo, our Amanda,
her mother had said sadly.
We had a lovely one for the engagement announcement. We put it in the paper.
Julie was blonde, fine-boned, lovely. She smiled confidently at the camera, a young woman at ease with her looks.

Their dead faces stared back from the board in the room where Berryman’s team was based; and from another wall, in another place.

He keeps the photographs on a board just by the entrance to his loft. He likes doorways, entrances, spaces that are neither one place nor the other. In the doorway, on the threshold, there is a place that is nowhere. It is a place where it is easier for him to be his real self. It is a dangerous place – some people protect themselves from it by hanging charms above the door, or protect their loved ones by carrying them across it. It isn’t dangerous for him, he lives in this space. He doesn’t need any charms. He can’t keep his souvenirs on the threshold, but he likes to see his pictures as he climbs from one world into another.

The trains are rattling around the tracks, running to time, running like clockwork. At eight-thirty-two, a train pulls into Goldthorpe station, another pulls out of Sheffield on its way to Barnsley, another on its way to Hull, calling at Meadowhall, Moreham Central, Mexborough, Conisbrough, all the way to the end of the line. Signals change, points move, freight trains rush through stations without stopping, slow and stop at signals. At night, the landscape is illuminated with points of light – lights at
the stations, lights where the roads run near to the track – but there are dark places too where the track runs through unlit expanses, the trains briefly lighting up the night and vanishing, leaving silence behind them.

The Christmas shoppers are out in force now. They crowd the stations. An InterCity express thunders through the small station at Meadowhall, as the tannoy warns travellers to stand back from the edge as a fast train is approaching. These places are dangerous. A station is a first step across the threshold. A train is a doorway. The train is the doorway, with its exit miles, maybe hundreds of miles, away. The threshold ends at the destination. But things can happen in places that are no places, places that are doorways hundreds of miles long. Such places are dangerous.

He can’t settle. He needs to do something. He looks at the paper again. He frowns. When he first saw it, he’d been quite upset. They were saying, they were implying, that he’d made a mistake, and he hadn’t made a mistake at all. It was all a matter of timing. He knew the other Thursday woman would be there. He’d arranged it so that he was gone by the time she arrived. Of course he’d had to go back. He needed to check that he hadn’t left anything behind. He liked to prolong, to savour the moment, to delay just a little. He’d had the forethought to make sure that the light was dim on the other platform. He would have done something about her if he’d needed to. In fact, he can see that it might all be working out for the best. He gets his scissors out and carefully cuts around the photograph. This is the first time he’s had a such good photograph of before. The others are most unsatisfactory. The photographs of after are better. If you want a job doing well …

He knows why he can’t settle. He’s been given the sign. He needs to hunt again, and time is getting short. This one is a good one. She goes to places where he can hunt, he knows that already. After all, he’s been watching. Carefully, he tapes the photograph to his notice board in the loft, and looks at it for a moment. Then he takes a Stanley knife and, using a fresh blade, cuts first one eye, then the other from the picture. Then he pushes a pin through the place where the mouth is. This one speaks and he doesn’t much care for what it says.

Tuesday morning, Debbie, who had woken up at about half past five and had been unable to get back to sleep, caught the seven-twenty train and was actually in college by quarter to eight. She had planned to spend an hour catching up on her marking, but as she sat at her desk sipping a cup of bitter coffee, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. Right. Something else then. She had her GCSE English class at nine that morning. They’d been looking at ghost stories – it was a topic Debbie always did at Christmas, and she was trying to get them to write stories of their own. They had trouble with writing horror, because the model from their own experience of books and film was fantasy based and excessively violent. The idea that their own world of the everyday could be far more horrific was alien to them. Debbie decided that today she would show them ghosts.

The Broome building offered an excellent venue for a ghost story. Debbie went roaming, trying to remember the best stories, find the best places. The high-ceilinged corridors were shadowy, brown, grey and black, the brighter colours on the paintwork long since worn off. Ghosts could easily walk here. Debbie went on up the stairs to the top corridor – there was a story here – and began a narrative in her head in which someone was standing where she was standing, her back against the window, watching through the crazed glass in the swing doors, the shadow of
something
stalking her, knowing she was trapped in a dead end with no way out but the eighty-foot drop through the window behind her.

Footsteps beyond the doors brought her back to earth – the sound was heavy and solid. A man, then. She peered back
down the corridor into the shadows, and saw a shape loom against the glass. The door opened, and Les came through, carrying a bunch of keys. He looked at Debbie.

‘Morning,’ he said. Should she explain what she was doing? He didn’t seem curious, but he must have wondered. As he came towards her, she said, ‘I was just looking at those places that you tell the stories about, you know, the ghosts.’

‘Not me.’ Les looked dour. ‘It’ll be one of those young ones telling you a lot of nonsense. I’ve worked here near on forty year, and I’ve never seen any ghosts.’

‘But they’re good stories. I was trying to remember that one that was supposed to have happened one Christmas – I’m sure it was you that told me.’

‘Oh, you mean the footsteps on the long staircase.’ Les seemed reluctant to tell the story at first, but Debbie had remembered it as soon as he mentioned the staircase.

The long staircase was originally a fire escape. It ran in a spiral down the inside of a tower-like structure built at the point where the corridors ended. An external fire escape now served the building. The doors that led on to the long staircase were nailed up and had been since before Debbie started work at the college. The only way on to it now was through the IT resource centre. At the back of the room was the old fire exit with a push-bar handle. Students no longer used the long staircase which led out into the lane behind the college, and now it was mostly used for storage. It was dark even on the sunniest day.

The story that Les was telling was about a caretaker who had gone down the staircase one night to check that the outside door was locked. He went down the stairs and checked the door. He didn’t check anything else, because there was nothing else to check. As he was climbing back up the staircase, slowly, because it was late and he wasn’t a young man, there was a sudden draught, the door above him slammed shut and the light went out. He stopped, because it gave him a shock to be suddenly in the dark, then went on, a bit more quickly now. It was cold and somehow unpleasant, at night, on the stairs, in the dark. Then he stopped again. Down below him, on the stairs he’d just climbed, he could hear
something, something that sounded like footsteps coming lightly and quickly up the stairs behind him, from where there had been nothing but an empty staircase and a locked door. He didn’t wait. He ran as quickly as he could in the dark, up the last two flights to the door that was hard to open from the inside. As he struggled with it, he could hear the footsteps getting closer and moving more quickly as they came towards his landing. He managed to get the door open, was through it and had it shut and bolted behind him more quickly than he thought was possible. He was leaning against the door getting his breath when something struck it with such force he was knocked to the ground. But nothing was ever found on the staircase to account for it.

When Debbie had first heard the story of the footsteps that came from nowhere, pursuing their victim in the dark, the hairs had stood up on her arms. That would be an excellent story to tell the students. She could take them on to the stairs, show them.

The double doors were pushed open, making them both jump, and Les fumbled with his key ring as Rob Neave came into view. ‘On the warpath today,’ he muttered.

Neave saw Debbie, and made some attempt to hide his irritation. ‘I want you down with the delivery van,’ he said to Les. ‘Get Dave or someone to open these rooms and for Christ’s sake don’t take all day.’ His face was white and he looked ill, as if he had a serious hangover. Debbie remembered what Louise had told her the other evening.

‘That was my fault,’ she apologized for Les. ‘I was getting him to tell me his ghost story.’

Neave looked at her with a faint smile and shook his head when she asked him if he knew it, so she told him the story she’d just heard from Les. He didn’t seem too impressed. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

‘Of course not, but it’s a good story. Don’t you think so?’

He smiled properly this time, and she felt a small sense of triumph. ‘No, I just see Les coming up the stairs with his head tucked under his arm.’ She laughed, and then he said, ‘I need a word with you. Will you be in your room around five?’

The ghost tour of the Broome building went down very well. Debbie wondered, only half facetiously, if she should suggest it to the college marketing forum as a money spinner. Despite the success of her class, she felt uneasy. That feeling of foreboding was back, and she was glad that the college was bustling with pre-Christmas activity. She felt better in the crowded corridors. As soon as she was on her own she had that feeling of eyes on her, a sense of cold and menace. She cursed Tim, and she cursed herself for thinking about ghost stories – especially college ones.

It didn’t help when, at coffee break, her head of department summoned her to his office to discuss the newspaper article. Peter Davis listened to her explanation, but his concluding, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time but don’t let it happen again,’ served to fire up her anger. It was hard to pull her mind away from it and concentrate on her class. Anyway, she missed coffee.

At lunchtime there was a union meeting. City College was in trouble. Falling student numbers and financial constraints meant that the college was losing money, and the college management were planning cuts. The union was fighting for its members’ jobs, but the staff were divided and undecided. The meetings were usually acrimonious or inconclusive.

The room was filling up as Debbie arrived. She’d meant to give herself time to buy a sandwich before the meeting started, but she’d stayed behind to talk to two of the students, and had had to come straight along. She saw Tim Godber indicating an empty seat next to him, but ignored him –
Why is Tim trying to be friendly again?
– and found a seat at the other side of the room. The news was all bad. City College was running more deeply into debt, and the management were looking for savings in the staffing budget. Nervously, Debbie thought about her overdraft and the money she needed each month just to pay the mortgage.

She had to leave before the meeting was over, and go straight to the classroom for her afternoon session with another GCSE group. They were a particularly lively group – standard euphemism, Debbie thought, for difficult and obnoxious – and she didn’t feel up to controlling them through
a trip round the building. No ghost tour, then. She decided to read them some ghost stories instead, and try to get them writing that way. They enjoyed the stories and contributed some of their own – mostly plots from videos, but there were one or two local stories that were interesting, and Debbie got them to record those on to audio tape, after they’d giggled and messed about. The students stopped cooperating when it came to writing, though, and dealing with the disruption, the constant demands for attention, requests for pens and paper tried her patience almost to breaking. By the end of the afternoon she had a headache and was too exhausted to feel hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since she left the house that morning.

When Rob Neave got to the staff room it was gone quarter past five. Debbie was sitting in her chair drinking coffee and eating chocolate. She offered a piece to him. ‘What is it about teachers and chocolate?’ he said, turning her offer down.

‘This’ – she waved the chocolate bar – ‘is because I haven’t had anything since breakfast.’ He still looked tired, she noticed, as if he’d had as little sleep as she’d had these past few nights, but he looked better than he had in the morning, more like himself. She wanted to say something about this, but she couldn’t think of any way to say it that didn’t sound like an intrusion. ‘Have you heard about the cuts?’ she asked instead.

He had but didn’t seem too concerned. ‘I’m not planning a long stay here, anyway.’

Debbie wondered when he planned to leave. The place would be duller without him. ‘You said you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’

He seemed unsure of himself, which was unusual. ‘That thing at the station. I’ve been talking to some people,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘and it’s possible you did see something important that night …’ He was watching her closely now. Debbie put down her chocolate bar. She wasn’t hungry any more. ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you again, I think. Just – be a bit careful. Don’t use the train on your late nights.’

‘Is this official?’ Debbie tried hard to keep her voice calm.

‘No, it’s just advice. From me, not them.’

‘I need a drink.’ Debbie plucked up her courage. ‘Come and have a beer or something – if you’re free.’

He looked at his watch and hesitated. She thought he was going to refuse, but he said, ‘I’ve just got some stuff to see to in the office. Where are you going? Across the road? I’ll see you in half an hour.’

Suddenly elated, Debbie packed her work into her briefcase and sorted her mail into the out tray. As she was leaving the room, the phone rang, and it was a bit more than half an hour before she was walking through the door of the Grindstone into the smell of beer and old smoke, and saw Neave leaning on the bar, talking to the landlord.

He bought the first round, bringing the drinks over to a table, and dropping a packet of salted peanuts in front of her. ‘You need to get something inside you,’ he said, pushing his chair away from the table as he sat down, and hooking his foot over the rung of another. Debbie felt shy, as though she didn’t know what to say to him in this new context, but he didn’t seem to notice anything, and talked casually about the pub and how it had been the place where the police used to drink, when he was in the force. ‘More crimes got solved at this bar than at the station,’ was how he put it. He seemed more relaxed in this atmosphere, and Debbie asked him a bit about his life in the police force. He made her laugh with some stories of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met, and then he asked her about herself, moving on to her parents, her childhood, her current life and her plans for the future.

Debbie found herself talking about her father, something she didn’t often do. ‘He was a miner,’ she said. ‘It was in the family, kind of thing. His father was a miner as well. He used to spoil me rotten.’ Rob sat there quietly, watching her as she talked. ‘He couldn’t cope when they closed the pits down. He got paid off, but he couldn’t get another job. He used to hate the way the people down at the job centres talked to him.’ She paused. She wasn’t sure about the next bit.

‘What happened?’ He was sitting close to her, listening.

‘He died … It’s some time now.’ But Debbie could remember what it felt like, believing he hadn’t cared enough, thinking that he had chosen to leave them. She still felt angry about it. She wanted to change the subject. She realized that, though they’d been talking for a while, she still knew very little about Rob.

‘You’re not local, are you?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve lived round here for years, but no, I was born in North Shields. Lived in Newcastle while I was growing up.’

‘What brought you to Moreham?’ It seemed a strange place to come, to Debbie.

‘Nothing. I came to Sheffield to work.’ He still seemed relaxed, but Debbie was aware that he was stonewalling her questions, that he didn’t want to talk about himself.

She tried another tack. ‘You said you weren’t planning to stay at City. Where next?’

He was looking round the room, watching the other drinkers at the bar. ‘Nothing planned. But City has only ever been a temporary thing. You ought to be thinking about moving on as well. It’s no place to get stuck.’

‘I like it.’ Debbie recognized his ploy to turn the conversation back to her. ‘I like the students and I like the work. I am looking for something else though – but only because of what’s happening.’ She tried again. ‘Would you go to another college, or what?’

He laughed. ‘No, I’m not planning a career in college security. I don’t know yet, something. Do you want another drink?’