After making two mugs of strong coffee — one to gulp down immediately and one to sip after — Wendy spent the evening going through the various reports she’d been handed. The first was from the officer who’d listened to the 999 call reporting the third body. It seemed as though the voice had somehow been distorted or made deliberately deep, which made it practically impossible to identify. The accent was a local one, which wasn’t all that surprising, but it still couldn’t be ruled out that it was being put on.
CCTV in the area had been checked, but there wasn’t anything found. The cameras on the front of the shops showed nothing, and the one which covered the stairs to the upstairs flats over the shops didn’t have anything on it either, which told Wendy that the caller had crossed the road earlier to walk up to the phone box. Had he done this deliberately to avoid the cameras?
Wendy had almost lost her temper when the council had told her that there were no CCTV cameras in the Alexandra Square area other than one covering the doorway of — and alleyway to — the nightclub on the corner of Alexandra Square and the High Street. Of course, it wasn’t possible to cover every single inch of the town with CCTV but what disturbed Wendy was that it seemed their killer had taken great care in discovering where the cameras were and working out a route which would avoid them all. A fourth time.
DNA results from the first two bodies had shown no trace of any DNA in the database. They’d been unable to trace anything which was clearly from the killer, which showed his victims had not put up much of a fight. There was no skin or fibres under any of their fingernails, which was particularly rare and was only ever really seen when the victim trusted their killer or knew them very well. What had been discovered, though, was dust from latex gloves. This had also been found on the two most recent bodies, but DNA results wouldn’t be ready for a little while yet.
She’d also been provided with more information about the lives of Emma Roche and Marla Collingwood. Their nexts of kin had been traced and interviewed, and subsequently all confirmed as not being suspects. Marla had been born in Cannock — not a million miles from Wolverhampton at all — and had been a fairly heavy drinker. She’d apparently had kidney stones a few months back but nothing more serious than that, and certainly nothing that would be the modern day equivalent of Bright’s Disease.
Emma, on the other hand, had been born in Sweden as Emma Lundstromm. She moved over with her parents at a young age and had been married but separated. Her husband had apparently been very keen to help with the investigation where he could, as he and Emma had parted on good terms, but he now lived back in Ireland, where he had been born, having moved to England for work at the age of twenty.
All of these pieces of information seemed to tie up with their Victorian counterparts in at least some ways, which, in Wendy’s mind, further backed up the theory that they had a Ripper copycat on their hands.