love with Jasmine, that was the problem. He couldn’t imagine being with somebody else, and even if some miracle happened and he did meet someone he was interested in, wouldn’t the same thing just happen again?
The job isn’t getting any less demanding, the hours aren’t getting any shorter, he thought. How does anyone in this profession manage to hold down a relationship, when work’s so all-consuming? But they do, don’t they? Helena and her wife Charlotte are OK; Frankie’s not seeing anyone right now, but he’s had more than one long-term relationship over the years. Even Mike Slater’s managed to get married, and he seems happy …
‘Here we go,’ Frankie said suddenly, and Devon dragged his attention back to the situation at hand. Up ahead, red tail lights had suddenly flashed on and the traffic slowed.
‘Bugger,’ said Frankie, and braked.
‘Bugger,’ agreed Devon.
He leaned back in his seat, trying to focus on the case again. He didn’t have time to think about relationships at the moment anyway, not if they really had a serial killer on their hands. The theory had definitely gained ground among the team since the discovery of all three men’s profiles on the EHU app; there’d been much talk of historical cases in recent days, and not just those from the UK. The classic serial killer was male, and targeted the vulnerable – the elderly, sex workers, hitchhikers, young women. But there was another, significant group of male serial killers too – those who targeted other men, although they tended to be homosexually motivated murders. Dennis Nilsen, who killed at least twelve men in the UK in the late seventies and early eighties, and the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer who murdered seventeen men and boys, were two of the best-known examples. Although they only had two bodies so far, the thought that they might, just might, now have a serial killer on the loose in Bristol had sent a ripple of horror through the incident room, and the DCI had been quick to quash the theory.
‘Come on, get a grip, guys,’ she’d said. ‘We have zero evidence at the moment that the deaths of Mervin and Ryan are linked, and we don’t even have a third body yet. Yes, the dating app connects the three, but it’s the only thing that does, and that could still be coincidence. Probably is, in fact, seeing as tens of thousands of people seem to be using the flipping thing. So calm down on the serial killer theory, OK? We deal in facts, and facts only.’
Her tone hadn’t been entirely convincing though, and Devon knew Helena well enough to know that, deep down, she was thinking the same as the rest of them. The team had stopped their discussions, but the sense of unease had remained. They all knew, from the latest available research on serial killers, that most had a vision of their ideal victim, and that that was often based on characteristics like gender and physical appearance. In America, the so-called ‘Green River Killer’ chose prostitutes as his victims, because he felt the police ‘wouldn’t look for them as hard as they’d look for other women’. Anders Breivik, the man who killed seventy-seven people at a Norwegian summer camp in 2011, selected victims who had a ‘leftist’ look, in his own words. Was it so far-fetched, then, to think that somebody in Bristol was, for some bizarre and unknown reason, tracking down and bumping off dark-haired, dark-eyed men in their thirties, when they already had two victims who fitted the bill and another who had vanished?
But then again, some of them had argued, would Danny O’Connor really turn out to be victim number three? His disappearance had some distinctly odd elements to it, Devon thought, as he gazed out of the window at the stationary lorry in front of them on the motorway, ‘WASH ME’ smeared in the grey dirt that covered its chassis. Yes, Danny’s disappearance had features that the previous two cases didn’t, and nobody could quite put the pieces together just yet. He’d clearly been up to something in the weeks before he vanished, but what? Why lie to his wife and pretend to be working in a new job when he wasn’t? Where had he been spending his days? And he’d obviously been keeping a very low profile even when he was at home, if both sets of immediate neighbours had never laid eyes on him, and assumed that Gemma had moved in alone.