the moment Heck had carried her out to the boat and laid her on the deck, but they’d been halfway across the tarn, en route straight to the Keld, before he’d realised what she was actually saying. With her reeling senses and battered mouth, it had been difficult getting anything intelligible from her. She’d clutched at him and Mary-Ellen with hands like talons, burbling, weeping, showing remarkable animation for someone so badly hurt. ‘Din’ see his face. No face … but that song. Stran’ in the Ni’. Kept on whistling it while he was creeping after us. Strangers in the Night …’
‘That was the main thing she remembered about him,’ Heck said. ‘The song. Absolutely petrified her. Sounds like he was playing cat and mouse with them for quite a while before he struck.’
As he relayed all this, Heck wondered again about his own experience on the tarn’s east shore, specifically the chuckle he thought he’d heard. Hadn’t Gemma once described her assailant on Dartmoor as having a snorting, pig-like chuckle? Of course, there was no guarantee he’d actually heard anything. He’d been so isolated at the time by the mist and the trees and the icy, ear-numbing silence that his senses had been scrambled.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be part of this investigation once it kicks into action, ma’am,’ he added. ‘But if you’re interested, I’ll try and update you regularly.’
‘Do that by all means … if you wish.’
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘If I wish?’
‘The song’s most likely a coincidence, Heck.’ By her tone, she was quite decided on that. ‘For all we know, your perp could be some kind of crooner obsessive. And the fact he ran into two girls is exactly how it sounds – he ran into them. He got lucky.’
‘Just like the Stranger did ten years ago, you mean? Having carefully trawled for his victims first.’
‘Heck, it’s more likely some opportunist headcase than a middle-aged madman who survived a bullet wound in the chest and a dunking in a Devonshire swamp, and then suddenly, over a decade later, decided to recreate the best night of his life four hundred miles away on a frozen mountaintop.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you think?’
Heck was unwilling to admit that what she said made pretty good sense. Because still, some deep gut instinct advised him there was much more to this.
‘Like I say, ma’am, I’ll keep you informed.’
‘And like I say, Heck … if that’s what you want.’
‘I thought you liked to get ahead of the game, Gemma?’
‘I’ve always been a believer in the Golden Hour principle.’
‘And what about the JDLR principle? Remember that, from when you were a street cop? Just Doesn’t Look Right.’
She sighed. ‘I’m onside with that too. How could I have tolerated you for so long if I wasn’t? But the thing is, Heck … I’m not your supervisor anymore. You need to address these concerns to this DI Mabelthorpe. If there is something in this for us, I’m sure we’ll get the message through the usual channels.’
‘Okay,’ he said, disgruntled. ‘See you around, ma’am.’
‘Yeah. See you, Heck.’ And she hung up.
When Heck ambled back into the rear office, Mary-Ellen was gazing expectantly up at him. Though she’d only been a kid at the time, she knew all about the infamous Stranger enquiry. There was barely anyone in Britain who didn’t. She hadn’t leapt excitedly a few minutes ago when he’d first mentioned there were possible similarities between that case and this, but she was clearly fascinated to know more.
‘What does Superintendent Piper think?’ she asked.
Heck shrugged. ‘She doesn’t want to know.’
‘But what does she actually think?’
He chuckled without humour. ‘That’s always tougher to ascertain.’
It might have been a signature of the Stranger that he always destroyed his victims’ eyes by stabbing or gouging, but he wasn’t alone in that, Gemma reminded herself. Okay, it wasn’t a common feature of serial sex murders, but occasionally the eyes had it – so to speak. And yet considering this was such a momentous thing to do, quite often those responsible would offer only garbled explanations as to why.
One had professed an ancient, long-discredited belief that an image of the last thing the victim saw before death would be imprinted on the internal optical structures, allowing identification of the murderer on the pathologist’s slab – though no one had taken it that seriously, given this was the educated twenty-first century. Another had described it as a convoluted act of remorse, saying he’d sought to remove all sense that his victims were human beings. ‘As the eyes go, so goes the soul,’ he’d whined in a voice that almost pleaded for his interrogators’ sympathy. ‘It’s easier to tear and mutilate a doll than a living person.’ A third had adopted the polar opposite viewpoint, coldly claiming his victims’ eyes as trophies, and keeping them in jars on the shelves in the ‘workshop’ located in his cellar. The idea they were somehow sentient had excited him. In his eventual confession, he’d admitted: ‘I was aroused by the thought they were being protractedly tortured, trapped indefinitely in sealed glass containers, unable to vocalise their suffering, unable even to blink away the sight of me, their captor, in my endless triumph.’
Gemma hadn’t memorised any of these details, but then she didn’t need to. Even before Heck had hung up, she’d accessed Serial Crimes Unit Advisory, or SCUA for short – the unit’s own intelligence databank, and now called up one case file after another on the screen in her office. Purely on principle, she would never have let Heck know she was doing this. He’d always been a chancer; he took risks and gambles, but so often they paid off because his instincts were very well-honed. She’d benefited from them hugely, but that didn’t mean she could openly approve of this approach, even indirectly, by attaching undue credibility to it. But it was unfortunate, or maybe fortunate depending on your view, that Heck hadn’t mentioned anything about the assailant up in the Lake District going for his victims’ eyes – if he had, that would have been a smoking gun no one could ignore. In the original Stranger investigation, the aspect of the eyes being attacked had been of crucial importance.
Gemma opened the files in question, for the first time in quite a few years. Immediately, all kinds of memories flooded back. The crime scene photographs ensured that, along with the hundreds of statements taken, the intelligence and analysis reports and the many, many names involved – not just the other officers on the case, but the victims and their families, and the numerous suspects who’d slowly, steadily and very frustratingly been ticked off the list as their alibis checked out. She imagined she could smell again the rankness of the reservoir that stifling hot night, could hear the wind whispering through the thick, dry grass on the Dartmoor ridges, could feel the heat rising from the sun-beaten landscape. But more than anything else, she could clearly visualise that bestial, leather-clad face with its frothing, gammy-toothed mouth. Despite the many awful things she’d seen since then, the small hairs at the nape of Gemma’s neck stiffened at the mere memory.
It didn’t affect her quite the way it used to. She didn’t dream about the Stranger anymore – at the end of the day he had given her
