Less than a week ago when she’d come in to report her husband missing, she’d looked well groomed, smartly dressed, face neatly made-up, even though she’d clearly been distraught. On Thursday, when they’d confronted her with the photographs from Chiswick, it had been like looking at a different person, her hair greasy and pulled back off her face, eyeliner smudged, clothing creased. On this most recent meeting, she’d looked even worse, a pale, exhausted shadow of the Gemma O’Connor they’d first met just days ago. Grief over her missing husband, or guilt because she knew exactly what had happened to him? Helena couldn’t decide, but there was just something.
‘I agree, I do think there’s something extremely weird about her story,’ Devon was saying. ‘But I thought her reaction seemed genuine. When we asked her about the other murders, I mean. She looked … dumbfounded.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘You sound a tad sceptical, boss.’ Devon looked amused. ‘Tea?’
‘Yeah, go on. Thanks.’
He gave her a thumbs up sign and headed for the door. Helena stopped swinging and tilted her head backwards, staring at the grey ceiling tiles and thinking. When she’d asked Devon after their last team briefing to check and see if there’d been any similar, unsolved murders in London recently, she hadn’t really been expecting him to come up with anything. When he’d rushed over to her desk just half an hour later, a tingle had run along her spine before he’d even shown her what was on the piece of paper he was excitedly waving.
‘Shit! Look at this!’ he’d said. ‘Look at these pictures!’
She’d looked, and then looked again. Two photographs, two men. Two men with thick dark hair, dark eyes. One clean-shaven, one with a small goatee beard. Two men who looked to be in their thirties. Two men with a striking resemblance to Mervin Elliott, Ryan Jones, and Danny O’Connor.
‘You’re not serious? In London?’
‘In London. This one …’ he tapped the left-hand picture, ‘was found in Richmond Park pretty much exactly a year ago, in early March. He died from a head injury inflicted with a blunt object, and his killer has never been found. He was a user of dating apps, although we don’t know if he used EHU. It wasn’t on his phone when he was killed, at any rate, just like our Bristol victims, and as the company seems to have lost all its data now we won’t be able to find out if he used it or not unfortunately. This one …’ he tapped the second photograph, ‘was murdered in the car park of Hounslow West tube station a few weeks later. April last year. Similar injuries. He wasn’t a dating app user though, had a long-term girlfriend. Again, nobody ever done for it. There are cameras in that car park but the body was found in a blind spot unfortunately. The Met say they didn’t link the two cases at the time, didn’t have any reason to, but in the light of our two here and the similarities in appearance and cause of death, they’re going to have another look at the files. They’ll let us know if they come up with anything.’
Helena let out a long, low whistle.
‘Wow. Devon, I’m starting to think that EHU app thing is leading us down the wrong path. If tens of thousands of people use it, it doesn’t mean much. There must be some other way our killer is finding lookalike victims. I mean, look at these two new ones! There has to be a connection with our three here, there has to be. And Richmond and Hounslow? Both west London. Neither very far from Chiswick in fact. Not far at all from Gemma O’Connor’s former home. Well, well, well.’
‘Crazy, eh? Do you really think it could be her, though? I just can’t see her being able to … well, to kill four, or five or whatever young, fit men, can you? She’s not a big woman. And why? What on earth would be the motive?’
Helena had shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But this is potentially huge, Devon. Christ, if we do have a serial killer on our hands, and if it’s a woman, after all …’
They had stared at each other then, Devon slowly shaking his head. Female serial killers weren’t unheard of, but they were much less common than the male variety; if a hundred serial killers were put into a room, only around seventeen of them would be women, Helena had told Devon, a fact she remembered