A Body in the Lakes by Graham Smith (great books of all time .TXT) 📕

the post-mortem commentary, there’s again no mention of the anal tears bleeding. He also mentions that the tears are minor and do not indicate vigorous penetration.’ Hewson looked up at her with expectation on his face, but Beth didn’t know what she was supposed to be surmising.

Beth splayed her hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I’m sorry but you’re going to have to spell it out to me.’

‘Whoever raped this woman was a pervert, that much is a given. However, what the report doesn’t spell out, and bloody well should, is that the damage to the victim’s vagina and anus is minimal and doesn’t go very deep.’

‘What, you’re saying he had a small?…’

‘I’d say his penis was smaller than average, yes.’

This news cast a whole new light onto the rapist. Not only was he in possession of a twisted set of desires, he wasn’t well endowed.

The possible implications of this on the rapist’s psyche were numerous. If he’d been mocked by women it could have made him bitter. Had he not been able to ever satisfy a lover, maybe he’d felt diminished as a man and that had bred resentment against women and fostered his desire for superiority. Both of these traits – failure to conduct normal relationships, and a desire for superiority – were often found in rapists, and more than anything else, they’d make the man more likely to continue forcibly sating his desires.

Beth’s mind whirled and then locked onto something else the doctor had mentioned.

‘You said the tears to Christine’s vagina had bled but not the ones to her anus. Would I be right in saying that he raped her, killed her and then raped her anally?’

‘That’s what the evidence suggests to me. Why that idiot didn’t spell this out for the investigating team I’ll never know, but that’s what I think happened.’

‘I don’t understand why the rapist would do the final rape after she’d died.’

Hewson’s face adopted the world-weary understanding of a kindly grandfather. ‘You’re young, both in name and years. As women age, and particularly after they have children, their pelvic floor muscles weaken. It’s where incontinence troubles stem from. With his undersized penis, a woman of the victim’s years may not have been a good, er… fit. The tearing is minimal and the report mentions traces of lubricant synonymous with condoms. If there wasn’t enough friction to bring him to orgasm, it was a failed attempt. He’d be angry and probably that’s why he strangled her.’

Beth picked up the narrative. ‘Once she was dead, he was still aroused, so rather than try vaginal sex again, he tried anal in the hope that he’d be able to orgasm.’

‘Correct. That just makes him even more despicable, doesn’t it?’

Beth nodded her agreement. That the killer had been compelled to add necrophilia to his crime went a long way past despicable. It was bad enough that he’d violated Christine in life before killing her. To continue with his debasing actions in death made him worse than filth. Beyond even an animal.

To Beth the rapist was a monster, preying on the vulnerable and taking his sick pleasures from them. She imagined the rapist leaning over his victim, her clothes strewn around them. His hands fastening on her throat and squeezing her airways closed.

For the victims it would have been all their nightmares come true at once. Their bodies invaded. Then the steady inexorable pressure on their throats.

Had he looked into their eyes as he’d killed them?

Had he drunk in their fear?

Perhaps he’d spoken to them, insulted them or told them he was in love with them.

However the women’s final moments had passed, they would have been filled with abject terror.

‘Interesting.’ Hewson looked up from the report he was reading. ‘Joanne Armstrong would appear to have had a quite different end.’

Beth looked at Hewson and rolled a hand for him to continue.

‘I’m not an expert on the subject, but I would suggest that Miss Armstrong was raped on more than one occasion. I think that her attacker was the same small-appendaged beast who defiled Mrs Peterson. Not only are the internal wounds very similar, but so was the depth of wounding. However there was considerable tearing to both Miss Armstrong’s anus and vagina; therefore in my opinion the rapist had attacked her on more than one occasion.’

Beth ran a hand over her face. ‘Shit. This just keeps on getting worse, doesn’t it?’

‘It does. The final victim is someone I remember meeting on my table. I recall all the details as if the post-mortem was yesterday. Her injuries were more extreme than either of these earlier attacks. Now that all three women have been connected, it’s not hard to see how our rapist is warming to his theme.’

‘It’s all too clear.’

Every word Beth spoke was pushed out through gritted teeth. Catching this rapist and murderer before he struck again was far more important than protecting the mayor from any potential future harassment. Even her own private plan to work out what Forster was hiding was insignificant when viewed in big-picture terms.

‘All three were strangled. Is there a way to determine if they were all strangled by the same person? And could it be the same person who attacked Felicia Evans?’

‘DC Protégé, you really do think up the most interesting, and hard to answer, questions.’

Hewson leafed through the folders until he found the relevant pages and the accompanying photographs.

‘Right, pay attention. All three women had their hyoid bone broken, which is synonymous with 30 to 50 per cent of strangulations depending on which set of statistics you believe.’ Hewson pressed a hand against his stomach making Beth worry his wife’s cooking was about to affect him again, but he removed it after a few seconds. ‘So the statistics tell me that at least one of them shouldn’t have had their hyoid broken, but all three did. However, the bruising on their necks is technically higher than the optimum position which is why the strangulations all resulted in broken hyoid bones. To my mind, the