discomforting regularity. There’d never been anything to suggest the killer was still alive, but perhaps deep down it wouldn’t have surprised her if something did. Very little about that enquiry had actually been straightforward. The guy had murdered indiscriminately, yet at times had behaved more like a professional assassin than a sex case, never leaving a trace of physical evidence, covering his tracks with amazing skill. And yet all the way through he’d behaved as if he was on a kind of learning curve, constantly modifying and adjusting his methods – so much so that in the initial stages of the investigation, before Gemma was actually attached, West Country police forces hadn’t immediately been sure they were dealing with a serial killer. Had it not been for the brutal stabbing of all the victims’ eyes after death, which rapidly became the Stranger’s trademark, they might have set up separate enquiries.
With her usual painstaking thoroughness, she now ran back through the primary crime reports.
The first known Stranger attack had involved the death of a lone householder, an elderly man living in a remote cottage on the edge of Exmoor in north Devon. He had died in the armchair in front of his fireplace on a cold February night in 2003, as the result of a flurry of blows to head and body, probably delivered with a stone taken from the wall outside, and several vicious stab-wounds to his neck and chest, one made with a spike-like object that was removed from the scene by the killer, the others caused by the victim’s own household implements – a carving knife and a wood chisel, both of which were left standing in his gaping wounds.
Though there was no sexual interference with this victim and nothing of value had been stolen from the scene, the initial assumption was that a burglar was responsible – that he’d simply not been able to find anything he wanted, and that the post-mortem stabbing out of the old man’s eyes had been a ghoulish act of vindictive anger.
The second attack had occurred on a quiet country lane in Somerset, the following July. It was late at night, and two teenage girls had been hitchhiking home from the Glastonbury Festival. Someone had stopped a car alongside them, but with no intention of offering a lift. This hadn’t been an out-and-out sex attack either, but it was closer to that than the first. One of the two victims, the heavier built of the two, who also, coincidentally, had worn her hair cut very short – which conceivably, in the dark, had led the attacker to mistake her for a male – had been felled with a single skull-crushing blow from behind, delivered with a heavy stone. The other victim had then been dragged into a roadside ditch and forcibly divested of her jeans, though not her underwear, before being subjected to a severe beating, at the end of which she was ripped and slashed with several edged implements. Once again, both girls’ eyes were gouged post-mortem with some kind of steel spike, which forensics examiners concluded was a sharpened screwdriver. If there was any lingering uncertainty they were dealing with the same killer as before, that disappeared when the old man’s DNA was discovered in both female victims’ eye-sockets, implying the same screwdriver had been used in both attacks.
These initial three slayings constituted what investigators would later come to refer to as ‘the first string of murders’, primarily because they hadn’t yet fully adopted the Stranger’s trademark MO.
The ‘second string’ would commence within a few months. These would be more organised and less opportunistic in nature, and as they’d focus primarily on courting couples and doggers, would comprise the crimes for which the Stranger would best be remembered. He was clearly learning fast by this stage, because in these cases all the new victims were stalked beforehand, covertly and professionally. But he was also enjoying himself more – possibly because the females in these cases were ‘dressed for sex’, and because the very isolated locations in which he found them allowed him to take his time. Whatever the reason, the methods used to eliminate these latter victims were increasingly more gruesome, a wider variety of implements used, the females in particular suffering ever greater and more prolonged savagery.
Gemma perused the raw detail with her usual unemotional eye, though even for someone who had been physically present at several of the crime scenes, the final few photographs made harrowing viewing, while the accompanying medical reports were sufficient to put the most experienced homicide investigator off her lunch. Of course, in all this mass of information there were only three obvious connectors to the case Heck had just reported from the Lakes. As he’d said, the unsuccessful assault on the two walkers was vaguely similar to the successful assault on the two hitchhikers near Glastonbury. But that could be coincidental. Likewise the second possible connector, which was the blitz assault with the heavy stone; again, the use of such a crude weapon would not be atypical of the average opportunist offender. But the third connector was more difficult to dismiss.
Strangers in the Night.
The press had only come to dub the killer ‘the Stranger’ when the second string of murders was well underway and he’d settled on his targets of choice: sexual adventurers looking to hook up with strangers. But as far as Gemma was aware, that was the only reason they’d given him such a moniker. By pure chance, the song Strangers in the Night had happened to be on the radio during his final attack – the one in which she had been the intended victim – but the investigation team had never publicised this fact. The only other non-police person who could have known about it was the Stranger himself.
On its own, this fact perhaps wasn’t quite enough to chill the blood, but then Gemma would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit she hadn’t spent at least some part of the last ten years wondering where the Stranger’s body lay.
Or if indeed it lay anywhere at all.
She ruminated on this for several minutes, before standing up, straightening her skirt and leaving her office. The main detectives’ office, or DO, as it was known, was located at the far end of the department’s main corridor and filled with chattering keyboards and idle discussion. As usual, about half the team were on base, and one of these was big, bearded Detective Sergeant Eric Fisher. SCU was not a cold-case unit, but Gemma always believed in keeping half an eye on the past, and it fell within DS Fisher’s remit, along with his many other analytical roles, to regularly review all their open and unsolved cases, particularly in response to new and possibly relevant info flowing in from more current enquiries.
‘Eric, what are you doing?’ Gemma asked.
He glanced up from the nest of paperwork over which he’d been slumped.
‘Homework, ma’am.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m at Winchester Crown tomorrow. Regina v Smallwood.’
‘If you’re giving evidence tomorrow, I’d have hoped you’d be on top of it by now.’
‘So would I.’
‘Yeah, well drop it for the time being.’
Fisher sat back, his swivel chair creaking beneath his vast girth. ‘Ma’am, I …’
‘This won’t take a minute.’ Gemma leaned with folded arms against the filing cabinets alongside him. ‘Strangers in the Night …?’
‘Okay … nice song.’
‘That’s all it means to you?’
‘Well …’ He adjusted his glasses as he pondered this. ‘Believe it was originally part of a movie score. Frank Sinatra released it sometime in the mid-60s …’
‘No comedians today, Eric, please.’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ He pawed the spillage of paperwork on his desk. ‘Always get nervous when I’m going
