Without Consent by Frances Fyfield Page B

on legs, Ms Smythe thought, despising him with a clarity of thought which took in the file, too. Her face was red and chubby. It was her turn to get up and pace the room.
    â€˜It wasn’t a file for Ryan’s personal use. It was
ours.
Ours; the product of ’ours and ’ours; oh, he did like a pun. If you’d read further, you’d see.’
    â€˜What would I see?’ he asked gently.
    She sat, but moved again.
    â€˜Oh, I can’t expect you to understand his code. Or to see why there was any sense in him recording these particular women, I mean, or the kinds of places they lived in, what jobs they did. Even Shelley Pelmore’s friend; you see they all had jobs.’
    â€˜Jobs, I presume, they wouldn’t want to lose? By doing silly things like shouting rape for the second time, forinstance? Unlikely, also to report a smiling police officer at the door with a bottle of vino?’
    Sally forced herself to stay calm.
    â€˜Look, you were the one who talked about gut reactions, I didn’t, and he didn’t much. Oh, for Christ’s sake, the gut digests, doesn’t it? Look. What we’ve got on this patch is a serial sexual pervert. He’s been around for a while. He doesn’t have an established way of doing anything, sir, but he rapes without trace, and he may have killed without trace. All the ladies in this file are those who would not, or could not, complete a statement, however long we gave them. They could not, would not, name an assailant. They were blurred in their accounts, they described fantastical things … There was never any forensic evidence …’
    â€˜They were dead ringers for the false allegations you describe. No names, no precision, change of story. Vulnerable ladies. Fantasists maybe; unhappy, maybe. Ideal for a man with his prick out at every traffic light.’
    It was at that point she twisted her left hand into the cord of the awkward venetian blinds of the doll’s house which was the Rape House; regretting politics, regretting everything apart from the fact that if Ryan was going to be done to death on evidence such as this, she had better put the record straight.
    â€˜Look, you sanctimonious, dirty-minded bastard. They weren’t even the prettiest. Can’t you read?’
    â€˜Sometimes,’ Bailey said humbly. She continued at the same speed, well beyond listening, her voice stronger and stronger.
    â€˜This was Ryan’s collection. It has a system, you see. A small collection, you will note, not quite the stuff of a littleblack book. A few witnesses, maybe working alongside, giving evidence of victims’ habits, maybe a link. What we think these girls had in common was one single perpetrator of whom they were ashamed. Some nameless shitface. And Ryan’s got the pathologist he’s spoken to on the file as well. No one would dare seduce her.’
    â€˜I know the pathologist,’ Bailey said. ‘She’s very attractive. And I don’t understand,’ he added, sounding obtuse, a man without visible gut and all too apparent guile. ‘Don’t understand.’
    She took a deep breath, spoke carefully.
    â€˜The ones in this file are the real no-hopers; nowhere to go, no names, no forensic, nothing to toy with.’ She was so close she could have spat in his eye, which was exactly what she wanted to do. ‘But they were the ones we believed. We believed them. You hear me? They had no case and we believed them.’
    The cord from the venetian blinds came away in her hand and she sat down abruptly.
    â€˜The problem is, sir, no one believes
us.’
    â€˜Perhaps I should go and see them. Check the black-book theory.’
    She laughed.
    â€˜You do that, sir. Not a long list, is it? Especially since two of them are dead.’
    T here was a moment, later on, when he sat in a pub, nursing a half pint and mulling over what Sally Smythe had told him, that Bailey missed Ryan so