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Chapter 43
Thursday 1st April
DI Mike Stanley leans back in his chair with a soft groan, and glances at the clock on the mantelpiece. 1.45am. They’ve just watched a taxi pull up outside number 21 opposite, and the woman they now know to be Peter Chong’s ex-girlfriend clamber into it. Mary called Steph half an hour ago, explaining that the woman, Megan Walker, had been distraught after Chong ended their relationship and had come round in an inebriated state wanting to talk things through.
‘She was in a bad way – she lunged at me at one point, and for a moment I thought … Well, anyway, Pete stopped her, and it’s all fine. She’s just come downstairs, and I’ve given her some coffee and she seems calmer now,’ she said. She was making the call from the downstairs toilet, she said, leaving Megan to finish her drink in the kitchen.
‘Pete’s having a lie down, apparently. He looked really drained earlier. I think it’s taken the stuffing out of him a bit, her turning up like that. He’s in his room, and yes, I know we agreed to stay together in the lounge for the night but I’ll just leave him to rest for a few minutes and then I’ll go and wake him up, don’t worry. And I’ve ordered Megan a cab, so don’t panic when you see it stopping outside, OK?’
The taxi has left now, and the street is quiet once more, a light rain falling, spattering the windows. There’ve still been no reports of any unusual activity from anywhere nearby, and even though they’re less than two hours into the day, Mike’s starting to wonder yet again if all this is a waste of time. He knows it has to be done – of course it does. This killer has been true to his word with all the other dates and all the other victims. But to give Mary three months’ notice, and still turn up to try and kill her? He just can’t see it happening, and he can already feel boredom setting in.
‘Tell us a story, boss,’ he says suddenly.
Steph, sitting to his right, turns to look at him, and even in the darkness he can see the surprised expression on her face.
‘Pardon? How old are you, five?’ she says.
He laughs.
‘Not a bedtime story. Tell us about some of the big cases you worked on before you transferred to Gloucestershire. Go on, to pass the time. You had a couple of serial killers, didn’t you? Tell us about the one in Manchester. The Ashford Mall killer?’
‘Oooh yes, go on,’ says James, and Miriam, who’s been sitting at the back of the room, pulls her chair a little closer to the others.
‘Think you might have to now, Steph,’ says Jess, and Mike can hear the smile in her voice.
Steph sighs.
‘OK, but keep your eyes on the road, and one ear on your comms, all of you, OK? We can’t forget what we’re here to do, even if it does seem eerily quiet out there at the moment.’
She clears her throat.
‘It was the second serial killer case I’d been assigned to. Five victims. I’m sure you all know the basics – it was all over the news back then. Builders were working on a big, new out-of-town shopping centre, the Ashford Mall, and suddenly they’re digging up bodies. Three at first. Two of them were later identified as sex workers who’d gone missing a couple of years before; the third was a man, an older guy in his sixties or seventies. We still don’t know who he is to this day, which has always bugged me.’
She pauses, leaning forwards in her chair as there’s a sudden movement in the street below.
‘It’s just a fox,’ says Mike quietly, and Steph gives a soft laugh as the creature scurries across the road, pausing to snuffle at the patch of grass outside Mary’s next-door neighbour’s house before scampering away down the road.
‘Anyway, there was little in the way of forensic evidence – the building site had been flooded a number of times over the previous two winters, which hadn’t helped. But we did find that all the victims had a matching injury, andthiswasn’t ever made public: they all had a broken finger on their left hand. The ring finger.’
‘Wow,’ whispers James. ‘Weird.’
‘That rang a bell for me,’ Steph continues.
Her voice and the rhythmictick, tick, tickof the clock are the only sounds in the shadowy room, four pairs of eyes fixed on her silhouette in the window.
‘I remembered a rape case, a year or so before, in Leeds. The victim wasn’t killed, but she was beaten and the ring finger of her left hand was broken. She had other broken bones too – her nose, a couple of ribs – but I got hold of her statement, and she said her attacker had deliberately chosen that finger to break. She described how he gripped her hand between his knees and then carefully lifted her ring finger and snapped it.’
‘Oh my God. Poor woman,’ says Miriam.
‘Pretty horrific, yes,’ says Steph. ‘But her rapist had been caught, and was already in prison …’
‘Cole Carter,’ says James. ‘I remember. Evil-looking bastard.’
‘That’s him,’ says Steph. ‘So we talked to him. He denied murdering anyone, of course, even when we pointed out the finger thing. But then we spoke to his cellmate, who told us that Carter had told him stories about his big back garden in Manchester, where he’d buried a load of bodies. The guy didn’t believe him at first, but when he heard we were questioning him, he thought he should share. And it turned out that some years before, Carter had lived in a bedsit adjoining the waste ground that became the site for the Ashford Mall. That piece of ground was, apparently, what he referred to as his back garden.’
‘Bloody hell.’ James lets out a low whistle.
‘Indeed. So we carried on digging and found two more bodies. Two more missing sex workers. Same broken fingers. And this time one of them was much more recent – he must have killed her just before he was arrested for the rape. We were able to find DNA evidence, and matched it to Carter. When we confronted him, he broke down and told us everything. He couldn’t understand how he’d been caught – that was the weirdest thing. He didn’t seem to realise that blabbing to a cellmateandleaving a calling card like that on every victimandleaving DNA at the scene might be a bit of a giveaway. Quite stupid really. You expect serial killers to be a bit brighter, don’t you?’
