Nine Lives by Anita Waller (best english books to read .txt) 📗

of Beth’s hand, and walked down to the hospital entrance. Lee was waiting, and drove her back to headquarters.

Ivor was waiting for Erica. ‘Her name is Tanya Lacey. Twenty-four, and her prints are on record. Minor drug offence five years ago, non-custodial sentence but obviously prints taken. Nothing since that. I’m running a tox screen as we speak to see if she still imbibes.’

Erica sat down at his desk, facing him. ‘Thanks, Ivor. I’ve come from seeing Beth – traumatic. She looks lifeless. There’s a machine breathing for her, and she’s bandaged around her head.’

‘Give it two or three days,’ he said gently, recognising the stress showing on her face. ‘There’ll be a noticeable difference.’

He passed across the report that indicated the name of the new arrival in his autopsy suite and remarked she was another beautiful girl.

‘And there was no sexual activity?’

He shook his head. ‘No, little fingertip missing, and VIII carved into her palm. You considering a profiler?’

‘I am. Or at least I’m considering asking if we can have one. This has escalated so fast. Four bodies in a week. It was over five months back in twenty-fourteen, and Beth had been doing some work on prisoners who’ve been locked up and released since the last of those four murders, but from what I can see of her report, it’s leading nowhere. So what else could have given us a five-year hiatus? A change in lifestyle? He or she fell in love? Possibly got married but is currently going through a rough time? An illness? Something serious that stopped the killing but is now much improved and the urges have risen again?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m no profiler, Erica, but it strikes me that if this was an ex-con doing this, something would already have been highlighted. HOLMES throws all sorts of oddities at you, and you would have picked up on it. This is somebody who stopped for a reason back in twenty-fourteen. Did he fall in love with someone? Was he unhappy then happy? Minds are strange things, as you know, and I suspect his mind is stranger than most. Something happened to trigger the first one and he gained a lot of satisfaction from it, so he didn’t stop until the fourth. Where did he come across the fifth? Was she special to him?’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t, but I started to think, as you can tell. All these beautiful girls I’m doing post-mortems for, it’s so wrong, Erica. So wrong. But of one thing I am sure – he venerates them. He wants people to see how beautiful they are unclothed.’

‘You’ve studied psychology?’

‘I have a degree in psychology, but my real love was forensics, so I acquired a second degree.’

She stood. ‘I have to go. Now that we have a name for this latest victim, I have parents to inform before something is leaked to the press. Please keep thinking, Ivor. You’ve opened up my mind, even though I’ve no idea how to track down this one person. But we will do it. I don’t want them falling in love with the next victim and stopping all over again. This time we get him and lock him away for ever.’

Tanya Lacey had two younger sisters and a mother and stepfather living in Peterborough who adored her. She had rung them from her small flat in Sheffield to say she was going to the gym to escape the constant knocks of the ghosts and fairies, and she’d see them at the weekend. They had no idea she was missing, believing her to be at work in an office in Sheffield, where she was training to be an accountant.

Officers from the Peterborough force had notified the family, and explained they would take them to Sheffield to formally identify the body of their daughter.

Tanya’s whole family was devastated. They had heard of the ongoing spate of murders in the steel city, but as with everything in life, had assumed it could never happen to them. Yet it had.

Erica sat at her desk and woke up her computer. She pulled up all witness reports, friends’ statements, anything she could find – there was a niggle in the back of her mind.

The piece of A4 paper looked too pristine, so she turned it around to landscape it and drew four lines top to bottom. Then she headed each column with the names Susie, Clare, Imogen, and Tanya. There had to be a link and she was going to find it, or find a suggestion of it.

She scrolled carefully through everything they had on Susie, but almost from the beginning saw slight differences. Susie was the practice model. Susanna Roebuck hadn’t remained in situ, she had been swept downriver by the torrent that was the Porter in its current state. The killer had become more careful in his, or her, positioning after that.

Susie had been picked up and that pick-up had an almost accidental feel to it, an opportunistic move on the part of the killer.

The other three shared a noticeable link once everything was written down on the paper. A gym.

Was it the same gym? Clare Vincent had tried to escape the horror of her girl-friend’s murder by going to the gym for a couple of hours, but according to Starlite Gym had never arrived. That information had been treated as a dead end in view of the fact that she had never arrived.

Imogen Newland had gone to the gym – the same one – for a girly night out, confirmed by Starlite, and Tanya Lacey had rung her family to say she was going to the gym to escape the Halloween visits. The same gym? Could the Starlite Gym be the link between the last three victims?

One other factor linking all four was that none of them had used a car, and in fact only Tanya had owned one, although hadn’t used it, on the night of her abduction.

Did the killer know this? Did this mean that Tanya Lacey was a second