Webber answers his phone after the first ring.
“Adam?” He doesn’t sound surprised to hear from me. “I was going to call you.”
“Two questions for you,” I say without preamble. “Something I should have asked you yesterday.”
“Go on.”
“The surviving partner of this serial killing pair, the sidekick, the follower, whatever you want to call them. More likely to be a man, or a woman?”
He exhales heavily, as if he’s puffing on his vape.
“Good question. Typically, in a relationship like this you’d have a dominant partner who calls the shots, and a secondary or subservient partner seeking their approval. And so in this case, when the dominant partner died, the follower just stopped. Without the motivation, cunning, and aggression of the dominant half, they didn’t have the drive to continue on their own. They can’t operate alone.”
“So, basically there’s an active leader and a more passive follower.”
“Exactly. Both feeding off each other: the charismatic, dominant partner to show his control while the role of the submissive is to encourage, to praise, to enable. In some cases to copy the other partner. You’ll also see the secondary partner sometimes being used as a lure, to make that first contact with the victim—either because they’re female, or younger, or less physically imposing than the alpha.”
“Like… Ian Brady and Myra Hindley?”
He gives a grunt of approval. “You see something similar in the partnership of Fred and Rose West, various examples of the same thing across the pond. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, Debra Brown and Alton Coleman, the list goes on.”
“Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Sure. You get the picture.”
I compile a quick mental list of all the women over forty who had come into our lives since we moved in. Eileen Evans, the next-door neighbor who could easily have had a key to our house in the past. Maxine, whose husband had vanished. But it was Helena who fit the profile most closely, who ticked more of the boxes than any of the others. Being a cleaner was the perfect cover, with access to the house and time to look around in the course of her work.
“So,” I say, “we’re looking for a woman?”
“I think it’s more likely to be a female, yes. With the Moors Murderers, Brady was the dominant partner but it was Hindley who lured many of the victims into the car—because they didn’t perceive a threat from a young, attractive female. And yet, on her own, it’s possible she might not have gone down a criminal path at all. It was only when she came into Brady’s orbit that that side of her was unlocked.”
“You think if Brady had died before they were caught, Hindley might have gone back to some kind of normality? She might have just resumed a normal life, like a switch being turned off?”
“Hundreds, thousands of concentration camp guards did exactly that in 1945.”
“But that was different, that was—”
“Was it? It was still murder. The same rationalizing process, justification for it, dehumanizing of victims. And then somehow, they slotted back into their old lives, despite what they’d done, what they’d seen, all the crimes in which they’d been complicit.”
“Lots of them were caught, eventually.”
“Not enough.” He pauses to take another drag on his vape. “Just to be clear, I believe it’s more likely to be a male–female dynamic but I still wouldn’t rule out other alternatives, either.”
“Two men?”
“Or two females,” he says. “The psychology works in a similar way in any two-person partnership. You said you had two questions—what’s the other one?”
I picture Tobias, an unremarkable man who Helenaclaimedwas her cousin.
“I might be completely off target here,” I say. “But might this person potentially seek out another partner to try to recreate that relationship again? Only this time, they would be in charge, the alpha?”
“Hard to say. It’s possible, if the circumstances were right. Have you got something to tell me, Adam?”
“Not sure yet,” I say. “Maybe.”
“I’ll be in touch in a few hours. I’m putting a plan together.”
I ring off and switch back into WhatsApp.
