Cut You Dead (Dr. Samantha Willerby Mystery #4) - A J Waines Page 0,13
had found signs of grandiose delusions behind the Ripper’s killing spree, back in 1888. As the first murderer to be named a ‘serial killer’, it seemed like a good place to start.
I’d got myself embedded in a labyrinth of tangential links involving his victims when Prue turned to me. ‘Just got an email. They were expecting you on Monday. You’re authorised now.’
I patted her arm with a smile and ran the pass through again.
‘Geronimo,’ I said and got my head down.
Although I’d been given access to the cold case database, I hadn’t had any instruction about how to use it. Perhaps that was also lined up for me on Monday. I didn’t want to disturb Prue again, so I simply put the word ‘delusion’ into the search bar. Over five hundred individual results came up, so I started with the first one to see what kind of information I’d selected. A police report filled the page. It described a victim of a hit and run in Liverpool who’d suffered delusions before her death. It was about the victim, so wasn’t of any use to me. It also wasn’t in London during the last two decades. I applied London as a filter and restricted the dates, reducing the results by half.
The first of this new list referred to a statement where a witness had complained of persecutory delusions the night before someone stabbed her brother to death. Still, the wrong angle.
I sat back. The delusions I wanted to examine needed to be those of the killer, not those of victims or witnesses. Terry and I had touched on this the day before, but I hadn’t actually narrowed down the main problem. Now the whopping spanner in the works was plain to see. It was unsolved murders I was looking into. Investigators didn’t know about any delusions that may have been involved, because the killers had never been found. The search term ‘delusion’ was useless.
So how on earth was I going to find delusional behaviours? I was stuck in a catch twenty-two.
I rapped my fingernails on the desk and found my thoughts winding back to the report on Terry’s laptop. Professional hairdressing scissors had been found in Hazel Hart’s pocket. As an experiment, I typed the word ‘scissors’ in the search box. Numerous files came up, but as I trawled through I found they were all cases where scissors had been used as the murder weapon.
It was going to be a long day. I needed to rethink this whole process.
I decided to try something completely different and put in the word ‘hair’. Over 800 results came up. After looking at the first two selected files, I realised my mistake. Of course, the word ‘hair’ would get countless mentions in the reports; it would be linked to DNA found at a crime scene.
I put in ‘disturbance to hair’ and got no results at all. The wording was too obscure. Then I tried ‘haircut’.
Two records came up. At last. I punched the air and almost whooped with joy. I was getting the hang of it. Then it occurred to me. Of course. I was going to have to look for clues in the methodology; find traits in the ways in which murders were carried out. Either that, or find common themes in the backgrounds of the victims involved, or common themes in the way victims were selected. My euphoria dissipated like a flat tyre. It was still going to be like finding matching needles in a very large haystack.
I gritted my teeth and turned to the first record. It involved the murder three years ago of Charlotte Walsh, aged twenty-two. She was a dental receptionist in Primrose Hill and was suffocated in her flat with a pillow.
There were chic ante-mortem photographs on the file and what struck me immediately was the similarity between Charlotte and Hazel. Both had been dazzlingly pretty and had unusually long hair, both down to their waist. The one difference was that she was dark-haired, not blonde.
The photo of Charlotte given to the media showed it tied into a ponytail, but there was a mortuary photograph that sent an icy chill down my spine. It wasn’t just the sight of this young woman’s corpse, lying blotchy and purple on the steel table.
Charlotte’s hair was much shorter in the picture.
The post-mortem didn’t mention it, but a witness statement revealed she’d had a dramatic haircut only days before she was killed. Just like Hazel.