Only Darkness. Danuta Reah

frontage, and ragged curtains up in the bay window. The young man who opened the door gave them a hostile stare as they announced themselves, then called over his shoulder, ‘Angie!’ He pushed past them on his way out. Neave gave Berryman a look – give the little shit a hard time? – but they let him go. Putting the frighteners on a cocky young man wasn’t what they were here for.

      A young woman was coming down the stairs, tying the belt of a flimsy dressing gown round her waist. Her hair was wet, and she was carrying a towel. She looked surprised to see them. ‘I thought …’ They were obviously not who she was expecting to see.

      Berryman took over. He always played the hard man, a part he was well suited to with his heavy jaw and thick eyebrows. Neave would stay back, quietly, looking sympathetic and friendly. It established a useful relationship if it was needed for later, though it didn’t particularly reflect the way they actually were, Berryman thought. He was a bit of a soft touch, unlike Neave. He introduced himself, showing her his identification. ‘We’re here about this man you reported.’ She had phoned in, and later told the patrol officer that a man had been peering in through the ground-floor windows late at night. Berryman didn’t doubt it, if she always went around dressed like that. Her gown was made of some silky material that kept sliding off her shoulders, and where her wet hair dripped on to it, it clung and lost its opacity.

      He tried to catch Neave’s eye as the woman took them into the downstairs front room, but all he met was an expression of blank amazement. He looked as if he’d been hit by a car he hadn’t seen coming. Berryman grinned. He didn’t often see Neave rattled.

      The room was a tip. There were papers all over the floor, and books. Two empty cups occupied the rug in front of the fire. The walls were a confusion of colour from pictures, posters, photographs, hangings all tacked up at random. In one corner there was a music stand and a violin case on the floor beside it. There was a bed under the window with a patterned cover thrown over it. The woman sat down on the rug, briefly revealing the inside of a white thigh, and gestured towards the bed. ‘I’m a bit short of chairs. Please sit down.’ Berryman sat himself gingerly on the bed. He didn’t like mess and he didn’t like women who couldn’t keep a place clean. Neave remained standing and leant his arm on the mantelpiece. The woman began to towel her hair in front of the fire, the towel providing some of the concealment that the dressing gown failed to do.

      ‘Right, Miss …’ Berryman checked his notes. ‘Kerridge. What can you tell us about this man? Just start from the beginning and tell us what you can remember.’ It didn’t sound like the same man – it sounded like the Peeping Tom they’d had problems with in the past. He wound the interview up quickly, asked her if she’d be prepared to make a statement and look at some photographs. As they left, he was conscious that Neave had been a silent spectator throughout. He tried a ribald comment on the woman’s dress or lack of it, but got a monosyllabic response. Neave could be a moody bastard.

      He didn’t say anything to Berryman about seeing the woman again, but three weeks later she had moved into his flat, and two years after that, just after Flora was born, they were married.

      They were all young, under twenty-five. Lisa was the oldest at nearly twenty-five, Kate was just twenty, killed within a month of her birthday, Mandy was twenty-one and Julie was twenty-four. Their lives had some similarities, some differences. Lisa was married, had been for three years. Her young husband had been given a hard time by the investigating team when her mutilated body had been found on the line near Mexborough station. She had a little girl, Karen, five years old. Kate and Mandy were both single and had no children. Kate got out and about – the Warehouse, pubs with comedy evenings, concerts at the Arena, the students’ union, the Leadmill. Lived in a shared house with three other students. Lots of boyfriends, no one special. They’d talked to them all. Nothing. Mandy was quieter, lived with her parents, had a little mongrel bitch, had been engaged for a couple of months but had just finished with her boyfriend. They’d given him a hard time, too, but there was nothing they could pin on him. Julie, they still had to find out more about Julie. She was single, lived alone, apparently had no children but they didn’t have much more information yet. Lisa worked part time as a secretary, Kate was a politics student, active in the students’ union, Mandy was a clerk for the local council and Julie was a PA. Her company had just won a Small Business of the Year Award before she was killed.

      Lynne Jordan went through the details of the victims again, looking for that elusive something that linked them together. It was there, and she was missing it. She looked at the photographs the families had supplied. Lisa was dark-haired, attractive. She was smiling at the camera and doing an exaggerated glamour pose. She looked young, happy, confident. Kate was more serious, dark-haired again, strong features, well-defined brows. This picture had been taken when she was campaigning for the student union presidency. Attractive, but in a different way from Lisa’s vivacious femininity. Mandy had fair hair, a light brown often called mousy. She smiled rather tensely and artificially at the camera. A plain woman, if the picture was right. She doesn’t take a good photo, our Amanda, her mother had said sadly. We had a lovely one for the engagement announcement. We put it in the paper. Julie was blonde, fine-boned, lovely. She smiled confidently at the camera, a young woman at ease with her looks.

      Their dead faces stared back from the board in the room where Berryman’s team was based; and from another wall, in another place.

       He keeps the photographs on a board just by the entrance to his loft. He likes doorways, entrances, spaces that are neither one place nor the other. In the doorway, on the threshold, there is a place that is nowhere. It is a place where it is easier for him to be his real self. It is a dangerous place – some people protect themselves from it by hanging charms above the door, or protect their loved ones by carrying them across it. It isn’t dangerous for him, he lives in this space. He doesn’t need any charms. He can’t keep his souvenirs on the threshold, but he likes to see his pictures as he climbs from one world into another.

      The trains are rattling around the tracks, running to time, running like clockwork. At eight-thirty-two, a train pulls into Goldthorpe station, another pulls out of Sheffield on its way to Barnsley, another on its way to Hull, calling at Meadowhall, Moreham Central, Mexborough, Conisbrough, all the way to the end of the line. Signals change, points move, freight trains rush through stations without stopping, slow and stop at signals. At night, the landscape is illuminated with points of light – lights at the stations, lights where the roads run near to the track – but there are dark places too where the track runs through unlit expanses, the trains briefly lighting up the night and vanishing, leaving silence behind them.

       The Christmas shoppers are out in force now. They crowd the stations. An InterCity express thunders through the small station at Meadowhall, as the tannoy warns travellers to stand back from the edge as a fast train is approaching. These places are dangerous. A station is a first step across the threshold. A train is a doorway. The train is the doorway, with its exit miles, maybe hundreds of miles, away. The threshold ends at the destination. But things can happen in places that are no places, places that are doorways hundreds of miles long. Such places are dangerous.

       He can’t settle. He needs to do something. He looks at the paper again. He frowns. When he first saw it, he’d been quite upset. They were saying, they were implying, that he’d made a mistake, and he hadn’t made a mistake at all. It was all a matter of timing. He knew the other Thursday woman would be there. He’d arranged it so that he was gone by the time she arrived. Of course he’d had to go back. He needed to check that he hadn’t left anything behind. He liked to prolong, to savour the moment, to delay just a little. He’d had the forethought to make sure that the light was dim on the other platform. He would have done something about her if he’d needed to. In fact, he can see that it might all be working out for the best. He gets his scissors out and carefully cuts around the photograph. This is the first time he’s had a such good photograph of before. The others are most unsatisfactory. The photographs of after are better. If you want a job doing well …

       He knows why he can’t settle. He’s been given the sign. He needs to hunt again, and time is getting short. This one is a good one. She goes to places where he can hunt, he knows