him (or her) in but Tess’s family had been adamant that she wouldn’t have done that once she was settled down for the evening.
The police seemed to think that this was a stranger killer preying on young women and issued a warning to those living on their own to keep a chain on the door and not to let anyone in they were not absolutely sure about. There was even some lurid press speculation about the existence of a ‘Salford Ripper’ that linked some violent and unsolved attacks in with Tess’s murder that had occurred in and around the Quays over recent years.
To Dan’s admittedly unprofessional eyes the links looked very tenuous and the other attacks very dissimilar to the attack on Tess – indeed they all looked to be different from each other, the only common thread was that women were always the victims.
The last article he read solved another mystery and saddened Dan more than any other: It was a follow-up article on Tess’s family that was dated in February, some two months ago. It reported the death of Jill Johnson from cancer. She had been in remission after chemotherapy that had been carried out some five years before but then the disease had returned suddenly and more virulently and had killed her in just a few brief, painful weeks. Her daughter said that she had no fight left in her when the cancer came back.
Her only surviving daughter, Annie. Tess’s sister, for Jill Johnson was her mother, divorced and remarried, hence the change in name. The newspaper article was sympathetic and considerate but ended with a simple statement that Dan felt must be true; ‘Sadly, it seems that the Quay’s killer has claimed a second victim’.
Jill Johnson, The estate of the late J Johnson, the name on the probate forms.
It was as he sat back from this article that he glanced at the time. He had spent over an hour on the search and he hadn’t even touched his whisky.
He needed a sip now though.
He mulled over what he had found out. Had he got any further? Well he did no more, things that he hadn’t known before. That had to suggest that he wasn’t going mad.
But did it? Did he not perhaps know all of this before? He thought he had remembered some of the articles, couldn’t he have known more? He had come back to Manchester at Christmas, long after most of these articles had been published. Most but not all though, that was the point. He did not normally buy the M.E.N. but he had a few times when he was looking for a flat and a job. He’d seen copies of the paper around the office too; Steve got it for both the football and the commercial property section. It was just possible that he’d read all of it. The brain was a complex, delicate thing. It could be deceived, and deceive itself. It was how hypnotism and tricks of illusion worked after all. So had his brain, stressed as it was from all that had happened to him – marriage, work, relocation…drinking too much and sleeping too little, yes he had to admit that to himself– oh, and why not admit everything - loneliness and solitude too, had it constructed Tess from half-remembered facts?
Possibly.
That was inescapable, it was possible. But then surely the fact that he was going through all this research, wasn’t that proof that he was functioning fine and that he was sane and hadn’t made Tess up. Wasn’t that enough to establish his sanity?
Dan shook his head. Just thinking about this was enough to make it spin, maybe enough in its own right to tip him over the edge. He took another sip of the whisky. He had put the rough Co-op blend to the back of the cupboard for emergency/last resort use only. He had forgotten his overdraft and treated himself to a single malt. He held the glass up to the light, watching the oily swirls as the straw coloured liquid mixed with the water he had let it down with.
He stopped.
There was a face reflected in the glass, the face of someone stood silently behind him. His enigma, his muse, his construct? Well whether she was real in his mind or real in reality, did it really matter? She was real to him and, within the walls of his flat or within the bones of his head, surely that was all that was important.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hello,’