‘Everyone else cares about what’s happened to these women, even if you don’t,’ Charlie told Gibbs, feeling ashamed of him. Sam Kombothekra had frowned at the ‘dog’ comment. Charlie didn’t blame him.
‘Did I say that?’ Gibbs challenged her. ‘I’m just saying, Kelvey’s not especially ugly. So there must have been another reason to leave the mask on throughout.’
‘Just think before you speak,’ Charlie snapped. ‘There are better and worse ways to put things.’
‘Oh, I’m thinking, all right,’ Gibbs said ominously. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. More than you lot.’
Charlie had no idea what he meant.
‘Do we have to listen to you and Gibbs squabbling, Sergeant?’ said Proust impatiently. ‘Continue, Sergeant Kombothekra. I apologise on behalf of my detectives. They don’t usually brawl like toddlers.’
Charlie made a mental note to forget to remind the Snowman of his wife’s forthcoming birthday. Sam Kombothekra smiled apologetically at her, on Proust’s behalf, she suspected. Instantly, he went up in her estimation. When he’d first arrived, she’d written him off as what, aged fifteen, she and her friends would have called a cuboid. She amended her snap judgement now; Sam Kombothekra was simply polite and well behaved. Later, if they got a moment alone, she would apologise to him for Proust’s rudeness as well as Gibbs’s callous remark.
‘Prue Kelvey estimated that she was in the car for about an hour, give or take,’ Kombothekra went on.
‘She lives where?’ asked Simon.
‘Otley.’
Proust looked irritated. ‘Is that a place?’ he said. A bit bloody rich, thought Charlie, coming from a man who lived where he did. What did he think Silsford was, Manhattan?
‘It is a place,’ said Kombothekra. Another of his habits that had annoyed Charlie when she first met him: answering questions with ‘It is’ and ‘I am’, rather than simply saying, ‘Yes.’
‘It’s near Leeds and Bradford, sir,’ said Sellers, who was originally from Doncaster, or ‘Donnie’ as he called it.
Proust’s slight nod indicated that the answer was acceptable, but barely.
‘Sandy Freeguard said it could have been an hour or as much as two hours that she was in the car,’ Kombothekra said. ‘She lives in Huddersfield.’
‘Which is near Wakefield,’ Charlie couldn’t resist adding. She kept her face totally straight; Proust would never be able to prove she wasn’t being genuinely helpful.
‘It sounds as if this theatre where the women were attacked is nearer to where Kelvey and Freeguard live than to Rawndesley, where Naomi Jenkins lives, then,’ said Proust.
‘We don’t think Kelvey and Freeguard were attacked in the same place as Jenkins and survivor number thirty-one,’ Simon told him. ‘There was no stage or theatre mentioned in either Kelvey’s statement or Freeguard’s.’ Kombothekra nodded at this. ‘Both described a long, thin room with a mattress at one end and the audience standing at the other. No chairs, no dinner table. The spectators at Kelvey and Freeguard’s rapes were drinking alcohol but not eating. Freeguard said champagne, didn’t she?’
‘A significant difference, then,’ said Proust.
‘There are more similarities than differences,’ said Charlie. ‘The line about warming up before the show—that’s consistent across all three cases. Kelvey said the room she was in was freezing cold, and in Naomi Jenkins’s statement, she says her rapist made a point of leaving the heating off until the audience arrived. He taunted her with it. Freeguard was attacked in August, so it’s no surprise she didn’t mention cold.’
‘Sandy Freeguard and Prue Kelvey both said the room they were in had a strange acoustic.’ Kombothekra consulted his notes again. ‘Kelvey said she thought it might have been a garage. Freeguard also said the room didn’t seem domestic. She thought it might have been an industrial unit of some kind. She said the walls didn’t look real. The one she could see from the mattress wasn’t solid—she said it was covered with some sort of material, thick material. Oh—there were no windows in the room Freeguard described.’
‘Jenkins mentioned a window in her statement,’ said Charlie.
‘You thought it was safe to assume Kelvey and Freeguard were attacked in the same place?’ Proust asked Kombothekra.
‘I did. The whole team did.’
‘Jenkins was attacked somewhere different,’ said Simon with certainty.
‘If she was attacked at all,’ said Proust. ‘I still have my doubts. She’s an habitual liar. She could have read those other two survivors’ stories on the rape websites, both posted before hers, and decided to adopt a similar experience as a fantasy. Then later she met Haworth and wove him into the fantasy, first as rescuer, then later, when he understandably got fed up of her and dumped her, as rapist.’
‘Very psychological, sir,’ Charlie couldn’t resist saying. Simon grinned and it made her want to cry. Sometimes the two of them shared a joke nobody else understood, and a sense of tragedy that they were not together and probably never would be overwhelmed Charlie. She thought about Graham Angilley, whom she’d left dissatisfied and confused in Scotland, promising to ring him. She still hadn’t. Graham was too silly ever to make her cry. But perhaps that was a good thing, perhaps a less intense relationship was what she needed.
Kombothekra was shaking his head. ‘There are details in Jenkins’ statement that correspond with details in Kelvey’s and Freeguard’s, things she couldn’t have known about from reading the stories on the Internet. For example, Jenkins says she was made to describe her sexual fantasies in detail and list her favourite sexual positions. Both Kelvey and Freeguard were ordered to do the same. And they were made to talk dirty, talk about how much they were enjoying the sex that was being forced on them while it was happening.’
Colin Sellers groaned in disgust. ‘I know none of the rapists we meet are real charmers or anything, but this guy’s about the worst I’ve heard of.’ Everyone nodded. ‘He’s not doing it out of desperation, is he, because he’s a sad, screwed-up fucker? He’s planning it from a position of strength, like it’s his favourite hobby or something.’
‘He is. Albeit an imagined position of strength,’ said Sam Kombothekra.
Simon agreed. ‘He has no idea how sick he is. I bet he’d rather be labelled evil than sick.’
‘It’s not about sex for him,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s about humiliating the women as much as possible.’
‘It is about sex,’ Gibbs contradicted her. ‘Humiliating them’s what turns him on. Or else why do it?’
‘For the show,’ said Simon. ‘He wants to draw it out, doesn’t he? Act One, Act Two, Act Three . . . making the women talk about sex in between the actual rapes, a verbal as well as a visual spectacle. It’s all more stuff to pad out the performance. Are these paying audiences, or invited friends?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Kombothekra. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know. It’s one of our biggest and most demoralising failures, not getting this guy. You can imagine how Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard feel. If we can get him now . . .’
‘I’ve got a theory,’ said Sellers, looking brighter suddenly. ‘What if Robert Haworth raped Prue Kelvey and Sandy Freeguard, then told both Juliet and Naomi that he’d done so. That’d explain how they both knew the MO.’
‘Why did Jenkins lie, then, and say he’d raped her?’
‘For the reason she admitted,’ Charlie suggested. ‘She didn’t think we were looking for him hard enough. Once we found him, she planned to withdraw the accusation and she thought the whole thing’d go away. She didn’t bank on us finding out about Kelvey and Freeguard.’
Simon shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. Naomi Jenkins is in love with Haworth—there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Juliet Haworth might be able to stay with a man who rapes other women, either for fun or profit, but Naomi Jenkins wouldn’t.’
Proust sighed. ‘You know nothing about the woman, Waterhouse. Don’t be absurd. She’s lied from the word go. Well? Hasn’t she?’
‘Yes, sir. But I think she’s a fundamentally decent person, lying only in desperation . . . Whereas Juliet Haworth . . .’
‘You’re being contrary for the sake of it, Waterhouse! You know nothing about either of them.’
‘We’ll see what happens with Robert Haworth’s DNA sample, whether it matches up,’ Charlie intervened diplomatically. ‘The lab are on it at the moment, so we should have a result by sometime tomorrow. And Sam’s got a copy of the photo of Haworth to show the two West Yorkshire women.’
‘Another similarity between Jenkins’ account of her rape and Kelvey and Freeguard’s accounts is the invitation to a member of the audience to join in,’ said Kombothekra. ‘A man called Paul, in the case of Jenkins. Kelvey said her rapist extended his invitation to join in to all the men present, but he was particularly keen for a man named Alan to get involved. He apparently kept saying, “Come on, Alan, surely you want a go?” And the other men encouraged this, also egging on this Alan character. Same story with Sandy Freeguard, except the man was called Jimmy.’
‘And? Did Alan or Jimmy partake?’ asked Proust.
‘They didn’t, neither one,’ said Kombothekra. ‘Freeguard told us that Jimmy said, “I’ll play it safe, I think.”’
‘When you hear about men like these, you start to mourn the absence of the death penalty,’ Proust muttered.
Charlie pulled a face behind his back. The last thing they needed was a diatribe from the Snowman about the good old days of hanging. He seized upon any excuse to lament the abolition of capital punishment: a theft of some CDs from HMV in town, nocturnal fly-posting. The inspector’s readiness to wish death upon random civilians depressed Charlie, though she happened to agree with him about the man who had raped Naomi Jenkins, Kelvey and Freeguard, whoever he was.
‘Why the differences, then?’ she wondered aloud. ‘It has to be the same man . . .’
‘His method evolves with each rape?’ Sellers suggested. ‘He likes his basic routine, but maybe a bit of variety within that makes it more exciting for him.’
‘So he made Kelvey and Freeguard undress in the car,’ said Gibbs. ‘To make the drive more fun.’
‘Why the change of venue, for Freeguard and Kelvey, and why take the elaborate dinner out of the equation?’ The Snowman barked impatiently. Charlie had been expecting his mood to deteriorate. When there were too many uncertainties, he usually grew ratty. She noticed that Sam Kombothekra was suddenly very still. He’d never met Proust before, never experienced one of his invisible ice installations, and was no doubt wondering why he felt unable to move or speak.
‘Maybe the theatre became unavailable,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe the panto season started and the stage was needed for
Jack and the Beanstalk.
’ She spoke in a deliberately relaxed way, trying to diffuse the atmosphere; she knew from long experience that she was the only one of the team who could. Simon, Sellers and Gibbs seemed to accept it as inevitable that they would all congeal in the Snowman’s disdain for hours, sometimes days. ‘In Jenkins’ statement, she says her attacker was serving the food as well, in between sexual assaults on her. Survivor number thirty-one alludes to the same thing.’
‘So you’re saying he decided to streamline his operation?’ asked Simon.
‘Maybe,’ said Charlie. ‘Think of what Naomi Jenkins described. That must have taken it out of him, don’t you reckon? A kidnap followed by a long drive, multiple rapes, serving a posh dinner to more than ten guests, then a long drive back.’
‘It’s possible our man moved to West Yorkshire between the Jenkins rape and the Kelvey rape,’ said Kombothekra. ‘That could explain the change of venue.’
‘Or he always lived in West Yorkshire, since Jenkins said her drive was much longer,’ said Sellers.
‘Maybe that was a red herring, though, and another part of what made this scrote’s “act” too tiring to sustain long term,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe he lived in Spilling—and that was how he knew Jenkins, or knew of her—and he drove her round and round in circles to make her think the site of the attack was at the other end of the country.’
‘This is just pointless speculation,’ Proust murmured in disgust.
‘Has he got a day job?’ asked Gibbs. ‘Does he take time off to kidnap his victims?’
‘There’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet,’ said Charlie.
‘That sounds unlikely,’ Proust grumbled.
She ignored him. ‘All the women say their kidnapper knew their names and numerous details about them. How? We need to find out if these women have got anything in common other than the obvious: they’re all successful, middle-class, professional. Naomi Jenkins makes sundials. Sandy Freeguard is a writer—she writes children’s books. Prue Kelvey’s an asylum and immigration lawyer.’
‘Was,’ Sam Kombothekra corrected her. ‘She hasn’t worked since the attack.’
‘We can’t be sure in the case of survivor number thirty-one,’ Charlie went on, ‘but she writes like an educated person.’
‘Jenkins, Kelvey and Freeguard all say that their rapists asked them how it felt to be successful career women, so we’ve got to assume that’s a motivational link,’ said Kombothekra.
‘But then there’s the survivor story from the SRISA website, Tanya from Cardiff,’ Simon reminded him. ‘She’s a waitress, and her written English is poor. I’m not convinced her rape’s part of the same series.’
‘Chronologically, she was the first one,’ said Sellers. ‘Do you think she was the trial run, and then the rapist thought, That was great, but I’d prefer it with a posh bird and an audience?’
‘Possibly,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe—’ She broke off, thinking.
Proust emitted a leaden sigh. ‘Are we about to embark upon a flight of fancy?’
‘The two men Tanya described were in the restaurant where she worked, having a curry. She was the only member of staff there, the men were both drunk, it was late. Maybe that was the first attack, a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment one. One of the men forgot all about it, or saw it as a one-off, but the other found he’d acquired a taste—’
‘Enough, Sergeant. You’re not—what do they call it?—
pitching
to Steven Spielberg. Now, if there’s nothing else . . .’ He rubbed his hands together.