The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey

them. And leaving them for us to find as he wants us to find them,’ I risked.
    ‘Controlling how we see them.’ Godley nodded. ‘The hair depersonalises them. Maybe that’s what he wants. It’s a pretty powerful signifier of femininity. Cutting it off, dressing them in white, lighting candles, women who have sworn off men – what does that say to you?’
    ‘Becoming a novice.’
    ‘A bride of Christ,’ Godley said.
    ‘You know, He wasn’t on my list of suspects up to now.’
    It was a joke, but Godley didn’t laugh. ‘That’s rather the trouble. There doesn’t seem to be a list. These three women – nothing overlaps.’
    ‘There’ll be something,’ Hanshaw said, lifting a glistening object out of her chest and placing it into a bowl to be weighed. ‘He’s not picking them at random.’
    ‘What makes you say that?’ Godley asked.
    ‘I saw how he left the others. He’s a perfectionist. He wants conformity. So they’ll have something in common that attracted his attention, even if you can’t see it yet.’
    ‘I never thought I’d wish for a common-or-garden murderous rapist,’ Godley said. ‘At least it’s easy to understand what motivates them.’
    ‘But if we can understand what he’s trying to do with the way he leaves the bodies, we should be a lot closer to finding him,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s the common-or-garden murderous rapists who go undetected for years because they just do their straightforward raping and killing and fade away into the night. This guy is making it complicated, which gives us more to go on.’
    ‘How do you know he hasn’t been killing for years? Decades, even?’ Godley’s voice was cold. ‘Kirsty Campbell is the first one we can link to him directly, but she won’t be the first of his victims. He’ll have done something to someone before that, even if it wasn’t murder. And you should know that, Maeve.’
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hanshaw glance at us, then share a look with his assistant. Not you too …
    I kept the hurt out of my voice. ‘That’s why I wanted to look at the CRIS reports. He’s specialised in his MO to the point where we should be able to find a pattern and watch him escalate. He’s making that easy for us.’
    Godley’s jaw was tight. ‘He’s making it a hell of a lot more complicated. If you knew—’ He stopped.
    ‘If I knew what?’
    ‘Not now. Not here.’
    I knew better than to argue with a superior officer so I shut up and watched the completely routine remainder of the post-mortem while I tried to think of a polite way to tell him everyone thought we were shagging and could he please stop making cryptic remarks all the time as it was making a bad situation worse.
    I failed.
    When the PM was over, Godley went back to the office but sent me in the opposite direction to Anna Melville’s place of work in the City, so I was alone with my thoughts and several hundred strangers on the Underground. It was a long, dull journey. The train was slow, held up by signal problems way up the line, and we stopped between stations. I tested how much I could find out just by looking at my fellow passengers. What they read, and what they carried, and what they wore. Work ID cards were a gift: name, job title, office address … what more could you need? It was the perfect environment for hunting, proximity allowing fleeting intimacy. And it was so easy to follow someone without being noticed in the surge of people coming and going through the maze of corridors and escalators at every station. I wondered if that was all the killer had needed to do – sit on the train and wait. Look for the feminine, submissive kind of woman, the sort who stood back to let others get on first. The ones who blushed if you stood beside them. The ones who read books about falling in love. The ones who couldn’t help staring at kissing couples wistfully, when everyone else in their immediate environment was trying not to yak. The ones who would make