He simply noted in his journal the time, location and manner of the death and wondered – perhaps hoped – whether such a thing would happen again. He had no reason to suppose that it was anything but a solitary happenstance, but instinct told him there would soon be more of the same. His instinct proved correct. Within two months four other murders had come to light. More followed.
The locations of the deaths formed a rough circle, with reports from as far afield as Crawley and Guildford marking its extremities. He never identified Juniper Hall as the precise hub of the wheel, but was unsurprised when he learned the truth. As far as he could tell the events all occurred at weekends, on either a Friday or a Saturday night. Richard recorded them in a calendar and plotted them on a map, and slowly saw the pattern emerging.
And all this might have been spotted by others attempting to investigate the crime had it not been for a series of additional deaths, again with the same wounds to the throat. The difference, and the cause of the confusion, was that in these cases the victims were not men but animals.
Richard was not confused. He knew perfectly well there was no single killer out there, but that the killer of the animals – a dog, several rabbits, a cat and a deer – was a different creature from the killer of the men. He knew it because he had killed the animals. He had taken no pleasure in it – not in the slaughter itself – but it had been a challenge to reproduce with so great a degree of accuracy the neck wounds that were the distinctive trait of the killer.
The first step had been to get a good look at the bodies. There had been no real trouble there. Two of them had been buried in the cemetery of Richard’s father’s own church, and so it was no problem for him to borrow a set of keys and creep into the deadhouse – if the rickety shed beside the church merited such a name – to look closely at the bodies before they were interred. On many occasions, he wasn’t alone. By the age of fourteen he had acquired a number of friends, although his later understanding of human nature led him to question the term. They were the boys who in general chose not to punch him on the way to or from school. Richard soon learned that one way to maintain this peaceful state was to distract them with the sight of something gruesome. A dissected frog or a spider devouring a fly would normally be enough, but a visit to look at a corpse – particularly the victim of a murder – might keep Richard free of their unwanted attentions for a week or more. For his own part, Richard studied the wounds, took notes, made measurements – in short he behaved exactly as his father had taught him. And yet at no level did he feel that in doing so he was being a ‘good boy’. There was no self-delusion that his actions could, through misinterpretation, be justified. He knew that he was twisting his father’s wishes to an end which the rector would not have desired, and the knowledge pleased him.
It was not only the boys from school to whom Richard provided tours of his world of the macabre – there was also a girl. Susanna Fowler was the daughter of Edward and Lucy Fowler, who kept house for Richard’s father. She was a year older than him, and while in their younger days they had lived very much apart, Susanna had for several years been old enough to share much of the housework with her mother, and so she and Richard came increasingly into contact.
They often talked as friends. He would learn from her about the world outside his somewhat cloistered upbringing at the rectory, and he would tell her of his world, reading from his journals and showing her the remarkable diversity of animal life that could be found without venturing outside the churchyard. He even described to her the mechanisms of reproduction, not as handed down to him by his father – that conversation had never taken place – but from his observation of animals. He had seen what dogs and cats did, and what the oxen in the fields did, and learned from the farmers that it led to calves. He