Strangers: The unforgettable crime thriller from the #1 bestseller

Nehwal glanced at her watch, as if this itself was an imposition. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

Priya Nehwal was a thirty-year veteran and ace thief-taker, a status for which she’d been decorated many times. She was now one of the most senior investigators in Greater Manchester’s Serious Crimes Division, having solved many more high-level offences – like murder, rape, robbery and arson – than anyone else currently serving. She was something of a poster-child for the women entering the job, especially Asian women.

Lucy hurried to finish getting dressed, and left the building through its side personnel-door, rucksack on her back, crimson motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. The aptly named Robber’s Row wasn’t just a police station but the N Division’s administrative HQ, and as such a massive multi-floored redbrick monstrosity of a building, which occupied an enormous plot of land running alongside Tarwood Lane, the main thoroughfare into Crowley from Salford. It shared a forecourt with the local fire station, though when Lucy walked out there, nobody was waiting for her. She checked in the personnel car park at the rear of the nick, and even around the garages and in the vehicle pound, but again it was no dice. She finally found Nehwal some ten minutes later, in the small park on the other side of Tarwood Lane, where she’d unwrapped a plastic bag and was breaking up a squishy cheese-barm, fragments of which she scattered for the ducks clustered at the pond’s edge.

She didn’t bother looking round when Lucy approached.

‘Ma’am?’ Lucy finally said, feeling strangely self-conscious.

At a slim five foot eight, physically fit, with long black hair and handsome, feline looks as yet unlined by her years of police service, Lucy was aware that she cut quite a dash, especially when kitted out in the leathers she wore to ride her gleaming red Ducati Monster M900. But the presence of a living legend like Priya Nehwal, however much a ragamuffin she was in appearance, made Lucy feel gawky and awkward. It didn’t help, of course, that Nehwal had blazed a trail for female detectives though many decades of impressive work, and that Lucy had completely ruined her own CID chances in the very first week.

‘Heard you had a good lock-up last night?’ Nehwal said.

Lucy shrugged. ‘Common sense bobbying, ma’am.’

‘And now you’re the woman of the moment.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, ma’am.’

Nehwal brushed crumbs from her hands and scrunched the plastic wrapper into her coat pocket. ‘Neither would I … but when you’re back on Division you’ve got to talk the talk.’

She pulled on a pair of fingerless woollen gloves. It was October 15

, and though it had been a mild month so far, this particular morning was fresh to the point of chilliness.

‘Is this something important, ma’am?’ Lucy asked. ‘Only I’ve just finished a double-length shift …’

‘Ready for bed, are you?’

‘Well … the armchair. No point going to bed when I’m not actually on nights, but a couple of hours can’t hurt.’

‘Yes, well … sorry to rain on your parade, PC Clayburn, but sleep may not come so easily after this. Even so, it’ll be your call.’ Nehwal produced a morning paper, unrolled it and offered it to her. ‘What do you think?’

Lucy gazed at the front page, which in a massive banner-headline, read:

JILL THE RIPPER!

Underneath it, colour photographs depicted two side-by-side images. One was of a rural lay-by with a silver-black Lexus LS 430 parked in the middle, CSIs in Tyvek unspooling incident tape around it. The second one, clearly shot from a helicopter, displayed woodland from a high angle, with a red circle indicating an only partly visible forensics tent erected beneath the cover of the trees, and more diminutive Tyvek-clad figures.

An equally eye-catching sub-header read:

Police bosses admit Lay-by Murders could be work offemaleserial killer

Beneath that, a tower of grainy, black-and-white headshots portrayed mass murderesses from former decades: Myra Hindley on top, with Beverley Allitt and Joanna Dennehy underneath. The opening paragraph to the sensationalist lead read:

In a stunning turnabout,senior detectives investigating the brutal sex-murders of four men are considering what might at one time have been unthinkable – that the perpetrator could be a woman!

The recent Lay-by Murders have been occurring across the north-west of England at a rate of one a month, with the latest victim, Ronald Ford (48), a garage owner from Warrington, found dead last week off a secluded road near Abram in Greater Manchester. All had been brutally beaten and repeatedly stabbed …

Lucy glanced up. ‘So you’re not looking for a gay suspect anymore?’

Nehwal shrugged as she fiddled with her iPad. ‘I never thought we were, if I’m honest. None of the victims were known or even suspected to be homosexuals. I know some men lead double lives, but four of them one after another without a hint of it in their background? Seemed progressively less likely the more we were able to put names to their emasculated corpses.’

‘So you’re now looking for a woman? Seriously?’

‘Shocking thought, eh? That there are girls out there as badly behaved as the boys.’

‘But this is correct, ma’am? You’re hunting a female sex murderer?’

‘We’re hunting a lunatic, PC Clayburn. The fact it’s a woman is no more a problem for me that if it was a man. Evil knows no gender.’

‘I get that, but it’d be a rarity … surely?’

‘First time for everything.’ Nehwal turned the iPad around. A grainy video was playing. ‘Couple of days ago, we recovered this CCTV footage from the slip road connecting a filling station outside Atherton to the A579.’

At first, the moving picture wasn’t easily distinguishable. The camera was clearly located some distance from the slip-lane, but the image had been enhanced sufficiently to display a vehicle cruising down it, and slowing and stopping just before it reached the main drag. Here, a female figure – female because it had longish, fair hair under a beret-like hat, an hourglass shape and, by the looks of it, was wearing a tight skirt or dress, and high heels – approached from the verge, spoke to the driver through an open passenger window, and then climbed in. After that, the car sped away.

‘Lexus 430,’ Lucy observed.

‘Correct,’ Nehwal said. ‘Belonged to Ronald Ford, the last victim – the next time anyone saw him, apart from the murderer, he was lying dead with his skull bashed in and his dick and balls severed.’

Lucy pondered that. It certainly matched the MO. So far, the APs had all been found in isolated locations but close to busy roads. In each case they had been beaten with a blunt instrument like a hammer, which was thought to have rendered them semi-conscious. They had then had their genitals cut away. Most had died from the subsequent blood loss, though one had also suffered a severely fractured skull, and might already have been dead when he was mutilated.

Though these horrible eviscerations were widely known about inside the police, the taskforce had deliberately been vague with the press, publicising that in all cases death was caused in the same way: first, blows to the head to weaken the subject, and then knife-wounds to the lower abdomen to finish him off. That latter detail wasn’t untrue of course, but they’d withheld it that the sexual organs had been removed in order to weed out any serial confessors, of whom there had already been several since the news had broken that a new killer was on the loose.

There were lots of questions here, though.

‘Gave the nice old lady who was out for an early morning walk with her poodle a turn that she’s never likely to recover from,’ Nehwal added conversationally.

Lucy said nothing as she watched the video play through a second time and a third.

‘You look doubtful,’ Nehwal said.

‘It’s nothing, ma’am … just, wasn’t the second victim a big heavy bloke?’

‘That’s right. Larry Pupper, a lorry driver. Weighed in at about twenty-five stone. We found him just off the East Lancs, near Worsley.’

‘And yet I seem to remember reading that he’d been dragged something like a hundred yards before being dumped in some thickets.’

‘You’ve been following the case, PC Clayburn?’

‘You can’t get away from it. It’s all over social media.’

‘Well, wait till this story hits Facebook. Jill the Ripper, eh? You can’t beat a novelty, even where serial killers are concerned. Anyway, yes … that lorry driver thing was easier to understand when we thought we were looking for a bloke, but there are as many oddities in this case as there are theories.’

‘Could the killer be a cross-dresser maybe?’

‘Got a good figure if he is.’ Nehwal closed the iPad. ‘It isn’t a bloke, though. There’s been no semen found at any of the murder scenes. Okay, that isn’t uncommon with sex crimes these days given the public’s knowledge about DNA evidence. But killers are rarely as careful as they like to think they are. More telling is the footprint we identified.’