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ELEVEN
Looking back through hindsight-tinted lenses, it’s easy to think the murders consumed me. That I did nothing but watch the news and obsess over what was happening on our side of the river.
In reality, they were little more than a backdrop to our daily lives– to begin with, at any rate.
But, as more women started going missing, fears in the community heightened. Strangers discussed the murders in line at the supermarket. Mothers whispered about them at the school gates. Even our teachers drummed into us the importance of personal safety, Stranger Danger no longer just for pre-schoolers.
The killer liked petite, slim, white women with curly brown hair, but he was an opportunist. He wasn’t interested in his victims’ backgrounds or jobs, only whether they were easy targets. Lone targets out at night, his speciality.
Women started carrying whistles. Phoned their families and roommates to say they were on their way home, held their keys between their fingers as they approached their front doors. And yet still he struck.
If he’d operated in a particular area or gone after a particular group, I imagine the police would have had an easier time catching him. But he was clever, never hit the same place twice. Went after homeless people as often as professionals.
It meant anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time was a potential victim. Not least my mother, who looked so much like all the others.
‘I wish you’d take a cab home,’ Linda told her. ‘It’s not safe walking on your own. Especially now it’s getting dark so early.’
She brushed off her friend’s concerns, said she wasn’t prepared to live her life looking over her shoulder.
Then the corpses of three more women were discovered. One near Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood. One in the ponds on Hampstead Heath. And another in a pool of blood at the recreation grounds all the way over in Totteridge.
The police didn’t reveal the exact details at the time, common practice in these sorts of cases, as I now know. There was one little snippet that leaked out though, the footprints found at several of the crime scenes. Prints not from shoes but bare feet. Though that wasn’t all he left.
The woman found at the ponds was Brenda Marsh, a sixteen-year-old runaway from Brixton who’d been missing for three weeks. She’d had rocks lodged in her throat and vaginal cavity, to weigh her down in the water, according to speculation I’ve read since. A sign that the perpetrator was perfecting his process, that he had no remorse for his actions, the criminologists say.
‘Who would do something like that?’ I remember my mother asking Matty, flicking a quick glance in my direction.
‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ he replied.
Did he sound proud, or is my memory toying with me again?
He’d just given me the birthday surprise he and my mother had been whispering about. Not a bike but a little white mouse I called Snowy. Eleven years old and highly original.
It tickled its way up my arm, down my sweater, coming out the other end into my waiting hand. Matty watched me, a smile dancing on his lips.
‘I used to have a mouse when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘Teeny tiny bones.’
My mother gave him a funny look, told me to put Snowy down while I blew out my candles.
‘Your mam’s right,’ Matty said. ‘You don’t want to set fire to the wee guy. Now make a wish, pumpkin.’
As police divers combed the canal, he tied a bandana around my eyes.
‘You ever played Blind Man’s Buff?’
The bandana was knotted too tightly. It smelled funny; sickly sweet like the perfume they sold at Superdrug for a fiver.
I tried to loosen it.
‘Uh-uh. No peeking!’
He spun me around, faster and faster, then let go.
‘Right, now find us!’
I was dizzy, stumbled, banged my shin hard against the table leg.
‘You hurt her!’
