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FORTY-SIX
At twelve years old, you’re not nearly as grown-up as you think you are.
My fear had nothing to do with deep down suspecting Matty though. It’s true there were some strange coincidences, though if it hadn’t been for my mother, I don’t suppose I’d have thought twice about any of them. People have a hard time accepting that, but it’s the truth.
Matty was the closest thing I had to a father. I was hardly going to leap to the conclusion he was a serial killer just because he drove the same model of car as the guy in the sketch. Because he happened to have a dog leash at his house. Or because he’d been in the area when Niamh Keenan was murdered.
There was no hard evidence tying him to the crimes. No bloodstained knife in his wardrobe, no body parts under the floorboards. Harper Lee was right, people see what they look for. And none of us is looking for the person we love to be a multiple murderer.
‘Human beings are social creatures. We’re designed to trust others,’ Janice told me during one of our early sessions.
My GP had sent me to her, refused to write out the prescription for Prozac I wanted unless I spoke to a ‘professional’ first.
‘And of course, the people we trust most are our parents,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s their job to look after us, to keep us safe.’
My mother didn’t keep me safe, I thought. She brought a monster into our lives, left me alone with him while she went to a party.
I kept that to myself though, said instead:
‘I trusted him completely. It makes me feel so stupid.’
She fixed me with her unblinking stare; disquieting at first, but I got used to it.
‘You were a child. He was kind to you. Of course you trusted him. You can’t blame yourself for that.’
But blame isn’t something you can just switch off. It’s impervious to argument, however rational.
I was scared, not because I thought Matty was the Shadow, but because I was terrified there was a killer on the loose who might come after us.
Before the murder in Brownstone, the murderer targeted adults. Niamh’s death marked a new direction. His tastes had changed. He was interested in kids now. As well as women who looked like my mother.
I stopped complaining about having to walk home from school with Bea. Started thinking maybe Matty wasn’t being melodramatic after all. That those rape alarms he’d bought my mother and me weren’t actually so stupid.
I switched on the TV one afternoon. North Londoners were being interviewed on the local news.
‘Are you more safety conscious since the murders started?’
‘Oh yes,’ one woman answered, leaning into the microphone. ‘I don’t travel at night on my own any more. If I meet up with friends, I always call to say I’ve got home safely afterwards. We’re all doing that.’
The public was on high alert, there was increased police presence on the streets. None of it was having an effect though. Bodies were still showing up.
Is ‘He’ Actually a ‘She’? the Post asked in one of its editorials. Is that how the killer keeps slipping through the net? Because we’re all looking the wrong way. The ultimate smoke and mirrors trick.
The idea got picked up by other papers. The Tribune interviewed Professor Wilson, the criminologist who’d been on television after the arrest back in March.
‘No, I don’t believe the offender is a woman,’ he told the journalist. ‘Female serialists kill for personal gain, money mostly. On top of that, the sexual element in these murders doesn’t fit with a woman perpetrator.’
Not that he would be drawn on what the sexual element was. The police had managed to hold that back despite the business about the footprints leaking out.
That he could be a transvestite was another suggestion. Or perhaps he simply used women’s clothes as a disguise, one tabloid suggested darkly.
There was also some discussion about whether the perpetrator would have given his real profession when luring victims, whether saying he was a bereavement counsellor was a ruse. The ubiquitous Professor Wilson had explained to an anchor woman that game playing was typical of psychopathic killers like the Shadow– along with a sense of invincibility and superiority.
‘He likely gets off on telling his victims his profession,’ he said. ‘Same as knowing his face will be the last one they see before they die.’
The other theories, the cross-dressing idea in particular, were rather far-fetched though. I don’t think anyone really believed any of them. We just wanted answers, were desperate for them. We needed a way to make sense of the madness. To shape some kind of order out of the chaos.
My mother was no different in that respect.
