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

the 5 per cent of Alzheimer’s sufferers who contracted the disease at a young age. It not only affected the sufferer’s mind, but would progress until the body could no longer fight a disease or an infection like pneumonia.

There were times Thompson’s frustrations boiled over, but it was understandable, and he was a decent enough man to apologise for his outbursts once he’d calmed down.

Beth filled them in on what she’d learned from Dr Hewson and sketched out what she’d learned from Forster as well. She could see her own disgust at the killer reflected on each of their faces. O’Dowd in particular looked repulsed.

Thompson stood and walked to the whiteboard they used to collate the pertinent details. He wiped off the press’s moniker of ‘the Lakeland Ripper’ from where suspects would be listed and wrote ‘Justin’. When he returned to his seat, most of his anger seemed to have been replaced with a schoolboy smirk.

O’Dowd pointed at the whiteboard. ‘Would you care to explain?’

‘What do you call a man with a one-inch cock?’ Thompson nodded at the whiteboard. ‘Justin.’

Unthank giggled like a child despite O’Dowd’s scowl. Beth knew the ‘what do you call a man’ jokes well. Her father had told them to her for years. This hadn’t been one he’d shared, but then, he’d never told anything which even approached being a dirty joke in her presence.

Unthank stood to address the room. ‘What do you call a man with a car on his head?’

‘Jack.’ The answer was out of Beth’s mouth before O’Dowd could launch her stapler at Unthank.

‘I give up.’ The stapler was put back down and a folder lifted which O’Dowd used to point at Thompson. ‘I’m off to see if I can persuade Mannequin to do his own dirty work instead of getting you to do it. Make sure that name isn’t on the whiteboard when I get back or I’ll personally dob you in, do you understand me?’

‘Yes, boss.’ Thompson’s reply was automatic, but there was no contrition in his voice.

It was typical in their line of work that black humour would be present. Not only did they work in a tight-knit group, they had to deal with subjects and sights which the general public couldn’t begin to imagine. The Justin moniker was tame compared to a lot of things that had been said, and had O’Dowd not been so frustrated at their lack of progress, she would have been the first to laugh at Thompson’s joke.

So far as Beth was concerned though, calling and thinking of the killer as Justin showed disrespect to his victims and belittled what they suffered before they were strangled. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name out loud, and to counter any tendency to go with the name Thompson had bestowed on the killer, she made a mental effort to only think of the killer as ‘the Lakeland Ripper’.

Beth listened as first Unthank then Thompson shared what little they’d learned.

Unthank had concentrated his attentions on each of the snatch sites. The Lakeland Ripper had chosen well: none of the areas was properly covered by a CCTV camera and all were secluded enough to afford him the opportunity to grab his victims.

By far the boldest of the abductions had been Harriet’s, but she’d been taken in the early hours of the morning when the streets would have been all but deserted.

Where the Lakeland Ripper’s first three victims differed from Felicia Evans was the fact they were all in good health and had all been snatched from a public place seemingly at random, whereas it seemed Felicia had been abducted from the sanctity of her own home. To Beth’s mind this showed that the Lakeland Ripper was refining his methods and getting bolder.

How he’d enticed each of the women to him was a mystery. None of their blood samples had shown traces of any drugs, although Beth knew that date rape drugs such as Rohypnol and GHB were absorbed by the body within a few hours.

Nor had the women shown any signs of head trauma synonymous with them being knocked out.

If they weren’t knocked out or drugged they must have been overpowered in some way.

Christine Peterson was a frail-looking woman, but while Joanne Armstrong was slim, she was a dedicated hillwalker, therefore she’d have muscles honed by hours of trekking up slopes. It was unlikely that she’d been snatched easily.

Harriet Quantrell was a different matter altogether; she was two stones past voluptuous. She wouldn’t have been easy to manhandle. Even if she’d been drugged or knocked out, she would have been an awkward and heavy load to move.

With these options ruled out, that left only two more: trickery or coercion. While it was possible that a drunk Harriet had been tricked somehow, she didn’t believe the other two women would have fallen for a ruse, so Beth’s money was on coercion.

Unthank had pored over the statements taken from those in the vicinity of the abductions, but he’d found nothing of note. Nobody had seen anything untoward or heard any screams.

Thompson’s conversations with the investigating officers had yielded the same lack of results. When he’d heard about the details not highlighted in Christine Peterson’s post-mortem his face had twisted into an anguished grimace. Those were often the type of details which could make all the difference during an investigation. As good as the investigating officers may have been, they couldn’t do their job with half the facts and due to the time that had passed, it was unrealistic to expect them to recall every detail of their case.

All of the people he’d spoken to had given him a fair response without ever providing a good answer, the truth lost by either backside covering, or the sands of time.

The idea Beth had had at the hospital now seemed like a waste of time, but she voiced it anyway.

‘Don’t laugh at me, but you know how women have boob jobs, what if the Lakeland Ripper has looked into having a penis extension?’

‘Don’t you