“And I need the rest of it too,” he says, more forcefully. “I needallof it, to make a compelling case. Everything you found in that room. Anything short of that is not enough—you know that as well as I do. You’ve already tried to get the police involved. Have they shown the slightest interest in reopening anything from twenty-three years ago?”
I put my coffee cup down and push it away. “Well, no, not exactly.”
“They’re barely treading water as it is, dealing with the workload they have day to day let alone restarting an old case that’s been stone cold for more than two decades. Have they even come back to you on that number plate you gave them?”
“Not yet. But it was only last night.”
“Let me see what I can do,” he says. “I’ve still got a few contacts, could pull in a favor or two.”
I select the camera roll on my phone and show him the image of the Volvo’s registration, which he jots down in a small black notebook.
There is an intensity in his eyes, a look that I’ve recognized all too often in myself: a desire to know. To find the answer. To solve the puzzle.
“Why this case?” I say. “You say it was your first murder, that it was never solved, but why this one in particular?”
He takes another hefty swallow of his pint, which is already almost half gone. Putting it down on the table between us, he glances over at the other customers.
“Because it wasn’t just one case, it was only the tip of a very dark iceberg.” He leans in closer. “What I’m about to tell you is confidential, for background only. It was never official, never confirmed.”
“OK.” Unconsciously, I find that I’ve leaned in closer too, my arms crossed against the warm wooden table.
“There was circumstantial evidence linking this case to others.” He lowers his voice. “Fibers found on Stiles’s body that potentially linked him to the death of another man the year before, a 39-year-old recovering alcoholic by the name of Dean Fullerton. Then there was an eyewitness thatpossiblylinked Fullerton’s death to the case of a teenage runaway nine months before that. But it was never enough; it was all circumstantial, like I said. Nothing that we could use to identify a suspect in those or a number of other disappearances and unsolved murders over a thirty-four-month period between 1998 and 2001.”
“I don’t remember ever hearing about any of this.”
“That’s because they were never formally linked, not by us, not by the media, not by anyone. I always believed there were connections but the top brass didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to frighten the public with talk of a serial killer on the loose. Of course, it didn’t help poor old Edward Stiles that his body was found not long after 9/11, when people’s attention was elsewhere. He never really got the attention he deserved, poor bugger. None of them did, if I’m honest.”
“And no one was ever even arrested?”
His features cloud for a moment. “Plenty of arrests. Never a conviction.”
“And your colleagues never accepted that there was a link between the cases?”
“The killer was way ahead of us for a long time. He was smart. A couple of victims here in Nottinghamshire, then Stiles over the border in Derbyshire, plus at least one on the coast in Lincolnshire, Fullerton down near Market Harborough. No pattern in place or weapon or motive, minimal forensics, no real similarity between the victims that we could ever establish. Basically, your worst nightmare as a detective. Different police forces, different teams, and trying to get cooperation just slowed everything down to a crawl. Fullerton’s death was prosecuted as a domestic situation—his ex-wife’s new boyfriend got fourteen years, served two before the conviction was overturned on appeal. Another one was treated as a suicide at first and by the time it was reinvestigated months later, the cremation had already taken place and any leads had gone stone cold.”
I tell him about Adrian Parish while he takes notes, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes.
“So what happened?” I say. “With your theory? Your boss wouldn’t listen?”
“He was more interested in toeing the party line. You have to understand that it took a long time to connect the dots, start linking these killings. I was on my own—my colleagues thought I was wasting my time. By the time Stiles’s body was discovered, by the time I’d finally made some progress, I started to realize something else about the killer.”
“What?”
“At a certain point not too long after that,” Webber says, “he just stopped.”
59
It took a while, Webber explains, before he began to believe that the killer had stopped his murderous three-year spree around the region.
“At one point I even thought he might have emigrated,” he says. “So I went through visa applications and passport data for everyone from the East Midlands who left the country in the year that followed. Took me the best part of six months on my own time to plow through every single one of them, profile them, and eliminate them all.”
I shrug. “Perhaps he went to jail for something else?”
“No. We’d have linked him through DNA recovered from a couple of the scenes. We’d have picked him up onsomethingin the last twenty-three years.”
“Or maybe he just changed,” I say. “Realized the suffering he was causing.”
“People like that don’t change: it’s in their nature, right at the essence of who they are. It’s like saying the color of your eyes could change, or your fingerprints. It’s an impossibility.” He swirls the remaining beer slowly in the bottom of his glass, before taking another swig. “No. It’s far more likely the pattern was disrupted in a fundamental and permanent way: that the person in question is dead. And that’s why the killings stopped. I started working through the death records too but you’re talkingthousands across a large swath of the Midlands and I was reallocated to other cases before I could really get anywhere.”
