Only Darkness. Danuta Reah

to establish. She’d almost certainly walked to the station, despite the bad weather. It only took five minutes. She hadn’t called a taxi and there wasn’t a bus. Could she have accepted a lift? The people who worked with her were pretty certain: not Julie, she was far too careful, only with someone she knew. (And how often was it someone they knew, someone they trusted?) It was no distance to the station, anyway, she’d almost definitely gone there. But her train had been cancelled. She would probably have seen that on the screen as she arrived, but it had also been displayed on the platform screen. Could she have caught an earlier train? No, the earlier one had left over half an hour before, at eight-thirty-three, and yes, it had been running on time. So what had she done? Had she decided to wait for the next train? That seemed unlikely as it was over forty minutes before the next train was due. She would surely have gone for a bus or a taxi. Was she so broke she couldn’t afford to? Or so tight-fisted? He made some notes and thought on.

      She hadn’t been at the station at nine-forty, according to the statement Deborah Sykes had given. So – leaves work at nine-twenty, at the station by, what, between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty. By nine-forty, she had gone. He reached for Deborah Sykes’s statement again. Who’d taken it? McCarthy. Everything should be there. Right. No one had come out of the station as the Sykes woman had come in. She hadn’t passed anyone on her way to the station. If Julie had left the station as soon as she saw the first display screen, she would almost certainly not have been on the road by the time Deborah Sykes came past. If she’d gone down to the platform before seeing her train was cancelled, then Deborah should have seen her walking back. He needed some more timings. He needed to know how long she’d been in that station.

      Lynne Jordan was on the train to Sheffield. She’d taken to using the train when time permitted. Like most of her colleagues, she knew the roads of the area so well she could drive them with her eyes shut, predict the level of traffic for any time of day, say which roads the joy-riders were likely to choose to career their purloined cars around, tyres screeching as they performed their antics. But she didn’t know the trains. When the team pored over the maps, when they looked at the places the victims had been found, she saw pieces of landscape, not a seamless whole.

      Today, she had made a mistake. She was spending an evening in Sheffield, and it had seemed a golden opportunity. But of course, by the time she got on the train, it was dark. It was after eight-thirty, and the line outside the carriage window was invisible. She contented herself with getting a feel for her fellow travellers. There was a young man behind her, whose Walkman leaked a penetrating metallic beat. Somewhere further back in the carriage, there was someone with a loud and persistent sniff. A group of youths had piled on to the train at Meadowhall, shouting and nudging each other, sprawling over the seats, shoving their heavy trainers on to the upholstery. They brought the distinctive smell of young male into the carriage with them.

      Lynne tried to see out of the window. The interior of the carriage reflected darkly back. She could see the empty crisp packet that lay on her table, the pool of liquid spilled from a soft drink container. She held her hands up to shadow her eyes. She could see light glinting off the tracks. She put her face closer to the window, then recoiled as something flashed past so close it seemed about to hit her.

      They were passing a train. It wasn’t another passenger train – it seemed to consist of low, flat trucks with piles of long thin objects strapped to them. Her train slowed briefly, and she realized the other train was stationary, or moving very slowly. She saw the lights and tunnel ahead that meant they were nearly into Sheffield. The train came to a standstill. The freight train crawled past. She sighed and looked at her watch. She was going to be late.

      Debbie came home from the police station as worried as she had been before she went, maybe a bit more worried. Talking to the police made it seem more real, that maybe she had seen the killer. Going out and getting drunk seemed like a very good idea.

      So that night she went clubbing. She called Fiona, a university friend who was trying to make a career as a jazz musician and singer, but Fiona had a gig that night. ‘Try Brian,’ she suggested, naming the third member of their trio from student days. Brian was free, and so were some of the others, so Debbie enlisted them for a night out. She drank too much, danced a lot, drunkenly snogged Brian in the dark shadows of the club, and then later even more drunkenly snogged a beautiful stranger who appeared and then disappeared through the gaps in her memory. Her friends took her home and steered her through the front door. She must have got herself to bed, because she was there, alone, when she woke up the next morning with her head throbbing, her stomach heaving and her shoes still on. And nothing was any better.

       The music is loud and invasive, and he purses his lips with judicious annoyance, then closes his window. He likes to keep the window open because there is a slightly sweet, sickly smell in the room that, he must admit, he finds a bit unpleasant. He can still hear the music, though not so loudly. The young man in the basement flat downstairs has no consideration for others. He really doesn’t approve of that. He decided that morning to let himself have the day off, but already he’s getting a bit restless. He’s the sort of person who likes to be doing things. He wonders if he deserves an hour with his trains – he has been working very hard, after all. Yes.

       He pulls down the loft ladder, the loft being the feature that made the house so attractive to him when he looked at it. It was worth all the noise and disturbance he had to put up with by letting rooms. And after all, it wasn’t the worst kind of noise and disturbance. No one paid any attention to him. Everyone left everyone else alone. That was the way he’d been brought up by his mother, to approve of things like that. Live and let live.

       The loft is truly magnificent. The roof is high above his head. The floor joists have been boarded over so that he can walk around without fear of putting his foot through the ceiling of his room below. He wired it himself so that he has all the power he needs, but no heating. He doesn’t need heating up here. But there is a small freezer in one corner, and a computer in another. He has all the facilities he needs. What is even better is its size. It stretches over the whole roof area of the house, and, as he found out one day, has access to the roof space of the house next door. The house next door is the first one of a block of three terraces, each one just like his, that have been converted into flats. It is a very simple matter to crawl through, and then climb out on to the fire escape at the back. No one notices one more person using those stairs that serve for every flat in the block.

      He turns on the light that hangs from the roof joist – just a bare bulb, no need for anything fancy – and looks with some pleasure at his railway. He’s tried to make it as realistic as possible, to include the other landscape features, the hills, the river, the canal way. When he planned it, he decided to use n-gauge track so that the layout didn’t become too big – even so, it’s a close thing. He gets his map out. Even though it isn’t a working day, there’s no harm, surely, in just looking. After all, he needs to start planning another hunt.

       4

      The story appeared in the local paper that Monday: ‘I SAW THE FACE OF THE STRANGLER’ the headline declaimed, above a photograph of Debbie. The article, which was on the third page, was part of a big spread about the murders the paper ran that day. Details of the victims were given again, some quotes from the bereaved relatives and comment from the police. An editorial chided the investigation team – more in sorrow than in anger, it was true. Everyone knows the difficulties of the task these men and women face, and the Standard does not underestimate these. But the women of South Yorkshire are entitled to travel freely without fear … The article about Debbie began: Teacher Debra Sykes, 26, had a chilling encounter the night the Strangler struck. The attractive brunette told our reporter, ‘I just knew there was something wrong. There was something terribly wrong at the station that night.’ The article went on to give the basic details of Debbie’s story, including the broken lights, and the way the man had apparently tried to approach her. The police were quoted as saying that they were aware of the story but had no reason at present to think that Ms Sykes’s experience had anything to do with the killing. The quote rather