Page 34 of The Trap by Catherine
“What about it?”
“If it was the same guy who did the other three,” Angela said, “that would mean there was a two-year gap between victims one and two.”
“So?”
“So... That seems ages,” she said lamely.
“But we don’t know she’s victim number one, do we? And we don’t know that Tana Meehan is actually number two. There could be more out there we don’t know about. I’m not sure we even know that the three we do have are linked to each other. And I presume that, whoever he is, he got about as much done in 2020 as the rest of us.”
“Right. Yeah.”
They lapsed into silence.
“What about Lena Paczkowski?” Angela asked then. She figured there was no point pretending she hadn’t heard the chatter about her around Harcourt Square; she’d only made it as far as the lift that morning before she overheard her first conversation about it. “I know what she said. To the paramedics. About being taken and held at a place where there were other women.”
Denise gave her a sideways glance. “That all you heard?”
“Yeah. Why? Is there more?”
“Official Secrets Act or no, there’s some things I reallycan’ttell you.”
They both fell quiet again.
“For Jennifer Gold,” Angela said, “the alarm was raised immediately. But it was months before Tana and Nicki’s disappearances were flagged as possible abductions. Lena was gone two weeks and she still hadn’t been. And if there’s more victims like Kerry Long, women we don’t know aboutatall...”
Angela looked to Denise, certain she was about to point out something the other woman had already thought of.
“There’s no telling how many women he’s taken,” Denise finished. “And for all we know, he could have someone right now.”
ICE FALL
What really gets me is when people say things like,She just disappeared off the face of the earth.It was as if the ground opened up and swallowed her whole. Vanished without a trace. The guards, the media, the general public—it seems like no one can understand how a woman can be there one minute and not there the next, and there’s no flashing neon arrow pointing in the direction she went.
Like you, tonight.
It’s the same when someone dies suddenly and you can count on at least one idiot to say, “But I just saw him yesterday!” Bloody hell, you don’t say? You’re telling me that up until the moment his heart stopped working, itwasworking, and he was alive? Mind-blowing!
I guess I just wasn’t expecting the wholemysteryof the thing.
Take my obligatory media moniker, for instance. The Phantom, they were calling me, until that opinion piece about foregrounding the victims and not their killer. Did you read that? It was by that girl—sorry,woman—who wrote that book,The Nothing Man. Which is a bit ironic, don’t you think? She called her book afterherguy. Suppose she’s safe to publicly regret that choice now that it’s sold thousands of copies for her.
Would it have sold even half as much if it were called, I don’t know,Several People Who Were Murdered?
Would it, fuck.
But the Phantom. I mean, comeon. It sounds like a villain in a Marvel movie. A guy with superhuman powers, abilities that no ordinary man has, because he got accidentally pushed into a nuclear experiment with, I don’t know, a fruit fly or some shite.
And look, I get why that happened. I understand that people want there to be some sort of dark magic involved, because they don’t want to think about the ordinariness, the banality, theavailabilityof what is. I have no special skills or superpowers. Theoretically anybody could do what I’ve done, if they wanted to. That’s what’s really terrifying to people, so they prefer to think that some mysterious force is at work.
But it’s just violence.
And speed.
Politeness. Both my own, and my taking advantage of theirs.
I always knew the key to it would be speed. Whatever I did, it had to be quick. A snatch. She couldn’t know what was happening until it already had. She’d have to be caught off-guard. Too stunned to cry out or fight back or think about leaving helpful evidence, and in no position to escape from the car. But most importantly, it had to be fast to avoid there being witnesses.
Before I ever did anything, I spent a lot of time thinking about safety. I would ask myself,When am I safe? When is it OK for me to be seen?
