Bailey glanced around the visit hall, leaned forward across the table and lowered her voice.
‘How’s it going with the drugs squad?’
‘They want to know what your new angle is,’ said Frank. ‘They’re really breathing down my neck on it.’
‘You said you’d give me two weeks, right?’
He sighed and rolled his eyes.
She forced an optimistic smile onto her face.
‘I think I might be onto something interesting,’ she said. ‘The Hairdresser. Heard of him?’
Frank creased his brow as he tried to recall the significance of the name. ‘Vaguely. A serial killer who murdered prostitutes up in the Midlands. That was quite a few years back. He was never caught. I think he got his name because he used to—’ He stopped and stared at her in disbelief. ‘Wait a minute, you don’t really think…?’
‘He used to cut their hair off, didn’t he?’
‘And you think he’s now graduated to scalping?’
‘It’s well-documented that serial killers often start out on small animals before eventually moving onto humans. What I’m saying is that as they grow older their tastes evolve. And their methods change accordingly.’
Frank stroked his chin thoughtfully as he mulled over the idea. ‘I see your point. But it’s a little tenuous though. What put you onto this?’
‘There’s this inmate, Mel. She’s what they call a fraggle…’
She proceeded to tell him what Mel had told her, leaving out any mention of duppies. When she had finished, he fixed her with a faintly amused look.
‘A claim about a serial killer coming from an ex-crack whore who you yourself said is a bit…’ he made the ‘crazy’ gesture with his finger. ‘It’s not exactly the strongest of sources to go on. But then again… it would be remiss to disregard it completely.’
‘I did some research on it.’
She took out the book that she had borrowed from the library. A book was one of the few items that inmates were permitted to bring to a visit. She looked around surreptitiously. No one appeared to be paying them any attention.
She put it on the table and slid it over to him.
He picked it up and looked sceptically at the tacky cover with its embossed silver lettering.
‘Cold Cases Volume Three? Looks like the kind of thing some hack knocked out in five minutes.’
‘It was all they had in the prison library. Listen…’
She took it from him, opened it up and started to read to him in a low voice.
‘The Hairdresser. A serial killer who preyed on sex workers in the red-light districts of Wolverhampton and Walsall. He was dubbed the Hairdresser by the local media because of his obsession with cutting off and taking his victims’ hair. Six prostitutes fell prey to his cruel knife. The killings all happened within an eight-month period during 2014 and then stopped abruptly and were never repeated. He was never captured. What happened to the Hairdresser? Did he die? Did he give up? Did he just get tired of it? Or is he waiting for the ruckus to die down so he can strike again?’
‘Cold cases are usually cold for a good reason,’ said Frank. ‘I remember when all that was going on. They had a shitload of police on the investigation. And they didn’t manage to solve it. It turned out to be one big dead-end.’
‘I remember once when I was a kid,’ said Bailey in a soft voice, ‘we went to stay with some friends of my parents who had a smallholding in the countryside. One night we woke up to the most godawful squawking noise. The next morning, we went outside to see what had happened. It turned out that a fox had managed to get inside the chicken coop. There were white feathers and blood everywhere. And dead chickens. Lots of dead chickens. Torn to pieces. Once the fox had got in there, they were…’ She grasped for the right word.
‘Sitting ducks?’ suggested Frank drily.
‘The women in here fit his victim type exactly – ex-hookers… lost women. But this is a group of victims with a difference. They’re all enclosed like chickens in a coop. They’re easy prey.’
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’ he said, eyeing the prison officers making their slow circuit of the visit hall.
She followed his gaze and nodded. ‘Maybe the heat got too much in the Midlands so he decided to move away somewhere else, to lie low for a bit.’
‘And he just conveniently decided to get a job as a prison officer?’ Frank raised one eyebrow doubtfully.
‘It’s a perfectly viable explanation. Decent salary, financial security, and the chance to have access on a daily basis to exactly the kind of women he likes to hunt. Plus he has the protection of a uniform. He’s in a position of trust and authority. It would also explain how he manages to get around the prison so easily and so elusively – he has his own set of keys.’
‘Prison officers are vetted before they can work in a prison. They have to undergo fairly detailed background checks, criminal record checks, that kind of thing.’
‘You know as well as I do that if he was never caught for anything before, then nothing untoward would have shown up in any checks. And even if he had, I’m sure you’re also aware that any dedicated criminal can quite easily source a new identity, a clean identity, which means it’d be no problem getting around those background checks.’
Frank conceded her point with a nod and a raised eyebrow.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘the Hairdresser is a cold case, which means it’s an angle that’s only worth pursuing if you can find something new, something solid, to go on. And at the moment you don’t appear to have anything of the sort. Cheap crime books and crazy ex-hookers don’t make the cut. You should know me by now, Bailey.’
She did indeed know only too well the kind of stringent standards by which Frank insisted on operating.
‘Something solid,’ she sighed. ‘Sure…’
‘And don’t forget,’ he added, tapping his watch. ‘You’re running out of time.’