Ella had been spot on. Jack Stanley had been just her type. And, although she had no desire to rekindle any aspect of their relationship, in many ways he still was. She had spent the years since finding herself attracted only to men who shared his traits. That swaggering arrogance and powerful presence that men like Dr Jacques Bernard had by the bucket-load. A fatal flaw that had seemingly made it impossible for her to find anyone to settle down with.
Acting like a man.
Yes, the police force was a male-dominated world, but Stacey truly believed she had made it to Detective Inspector because of her hard work, dedication and ability to close cases. Acting like a man had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
So why did it bother her so much? Acting like a man. The words rebounded around her brain again and again, coming in a steady rhythm, like the beat of a drum. Then something stirred deep within her, a tingling of a sixth sense honed by years of police work, an increasingly powerful feeling that something was very, very wrong.
She sat up, paused for a few moments, then made her way across the room to her briefcase and pulled out the copies of the chatroom transcripts CEOP had provided to all the officers on the case.
It was the same tingling sensation she felt whenever she got a hunch about a case. Who was guilty, where the money was hidden, where the bodies were buried and so on. That sense that someone had not told all they knew, that they were holding back, that they were lying.
There was no magic or smoke and mirrors about it. Like most sixth senses, it was based on experience, on intuition and on good police work. As unlikely as it seemed, Ella’s words had been the spark that had ignited the flame. And now the flames were growing rapidly. A forest fire raging out of control.
She flicked through the pages of conversation, running her index finger along the columns of text, Ella’s words still echoing in her head, driving her forward. She started with the exchanges between Jason Bevan and DreamGirl, the undercover officer from CEOP.
Bevan, posing as a teenage girl called Sally, had tried to sound the part. Mostly he had succeeded but then he gave himself away. It was nothing overtly obvious – it was simply that as the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl, Stacey could see that some of what was being said simply didn’t ring true.
She had heard Sophie chatting on the phone to her friends, occasionally stumbled across the odd text message and more than once peeked sneakily over her daughter’s shoulder as she composed emails or exchanged instant messages over the internet. Teenage girls just didn’t talk that way, not even when they thought their parents were far away.
The differences were small and subtle, and it was only now that she began to study them intently that they came ever more apparent
She hadn’t spotted it right away – and neither had her fellow officers – because they all knew right from the start that they were dealing with an adult male pretending to be a teenage girl. They read his words with that in the back of their minds and thought nothing more of it.
But shygirl351 was different. When whoever was using that screen name wrote about the trials and tribulations of being a teenage girl, they nailed it every single time. Right down to the last detail. And that could mean only one thing.
But it was so absurd, so ridiculous that Stacey could barely bring herself to think about it. Perhaps Anderson was right. Maybe the case was driving her crazy after all. In truth she felt more tired now than she had for years. She desperately needed a break. But something compelled her to go on.
She sat staring at the lines of text, rereading the conversations again and again. And the more she thought about it, the larger the question loomed in her mind. All the victims had been male – some of them strong, powerful men – and that fact had made them jump to conclusions. But was it possible that they had made a terrible error? Was it possible they had all been deceived?
Could shygirl351 be a woman?
Stacey checked the bedside clock – just after midnight – picked up the phone, dialled a number and then thought better of it, putting the phone down before it could connect. This was stupid. This was insane. There were a million and one reasons why it simply didn’t stack up. She couldn’t possibly be right. Someone, somewhere, must have made a mistake and it was probably her. But then again, could it be true? There was only one way to find out.
She picked up the phone again and dialled. The voice that answered was fuddled by sleep. A part of Stacey could not help but smile. She was glad this was not a video phone so no one could see her cheeks turning red.
‘Jacques, it’s Stacey. I’m really sorry to call so –’
She never finished the sentence. She had still been speaking when she had heard the faint but unmistakable sound of a woman’s voice close to Jacques ask, ‘Who is it?’ She sounded young, student young. Stacey reacted not so much out of shock but out of instinct.
‘Is there someone there?’
Jacques’s voice became flustered; she heard him pace rapidly to another part of the room. ‘No, no. I have the television on.’
‘You’re sleeping with the television on?’
‘I must have fallen asleep with it on. I’ve turned it off now.’
There was now a slight echo in the background as Jacques spoke and she guessed that he had moved into the bathroom. She knew he was lying to her about being alone, and she now knew that everything he had said to her over the preceding week had also been part of a cool, calculating ploy to get her to lower her defences. She knew the type only too well. It wasn’t enough for him to have seduced her, to have got her into bed; he wanted to win over her mind as well as her body. He wanted her to fall for him, to be pining for him. And then he could toss her aside like an old pair of shoes.
But she didn’t have time to dwell on any of that now.
‘Whatever,’ she said sharply. ‘Look, Jacques, I don’t give a fuck who you’re fucking right now, I called because I need your help on the case. I need to know if it could be a woman.’
‘If who could be a woman?’
‘The killer. shygirl351. Could a woman be behind all this?’
It seemed to take forever before he began to speak again.
‘It is possible,’ said Jacques, quickly pulling himself together, glad for the chance to talk about anything other than his immediate situation. ‘Anything is possible. I hadn’t considered it before because all the evidence seemed to point towards a male perpetrator. As you know, the vast, vast majority of serial killers are men. Not only that, but female killers tend to focus on elderly victims or children. They kill with poison or by smothering. More often than not, they have been involved in some kind of intimate relationship with those that they kill.
‘Furthermore, they carry out the killings in places where they feel comfortable, relaxed. Homes or the places where they work. Beverley Allitt, the so-called Angel of Death, was a classic example, killing children at the hospital where she was employed. But Aileen Wuornos has rewritten the rules on female serials because she broke every one of them. She killed men because she liked it, attacked total strangers and used a gun instead of poison. Before she came along I would have said no, but, thinking about it again, yes, it is possible. Wuornos is going to inspire a whole generation of psychotic women to go out and commit multiple murders. It’s already happening in the States; it’s only a matter of time before we see it happening here too. What makes you ask?’
‘It’s the transcripts of conversations between Shygirl and Bevan. You can tell he’s a man pretending to be a girl, but she doesn’t make any of the same errors. I think she’s the real thing.’