Page 10 of The Tapes
I’m on the canal bank when the pair of lads call across from a slowing narrow boat.
They’re sitting on the edge, legs dangling, each wearing tracksuits, baseball caps and bright, white trainers.
The sort of teenagers certain tabloids insist are running around stabbing one another in absence of anything better to do.
‘You got a light?’ one of them asks. He can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen and it strikes me I’ve never associated canal boats with young men in tracksuits.
When I first got into reporting, an old editor told me I should always carry three things: a notepad, a pen, and a lighter.
‘You never know the conversations you’ll get into with people who need a light,’ he said.
I always took the advice to hand, so, back on the canal bank, I fished around before tossing the lighter across the small gap in the water to the boat.
It only occurred to me later that the boys might have been too young to smoke but the pair of them each lit a cigarette.
Then, with a grin that I found impossible to resist, the taller of the two asked if he could keep it.
The cheek of it all was enough for me to tell him it was fine – and off they went in their boat, chugging along at a few miles-per-hour as I trailed on the towpath.
I had long since improved my old editor’s advice by always carrying two lighters.
The Sedingham Canal runs almost through the centre of town, with the path providing something of a shortcut to get from one part to another for anyone not in a vehicle.
I joined the path at the back of the cricket club where I met Harry Bailey.
It’s a nicer day today: crisp in the morning but warm by the afternoon.
The sky is a perfect, endless blue. As I follow the canal, I’m passed by couples on bikes, kids on BMXs, plus that curious breed of people in hiking boots who chug along at a serious clip, while never seeming to draw breath.
The Sedingham Canal is a mix of tracksuited teenagers on canal boats, bumming a light with a cheeky smile; plus middle-aged men in expensive boots barrelling along as if they’re training for the Olympic towpath-walking competition.
It wasn’t always like this.
Laura March left work at a couple of minutes after six on a spring evening where the sun was low and the shadows long.
The police later followed her route via a series of shop CCTV cameras, which is why they know she stopped to talk to a Big Issue seller at 6:11 p.m. He told the police she asked whether he was hungry, before volunteering to pop into the Tesco Express to buy him something.
He insisted he was fine, so, instead, she gave him a fiver and said she didn’t need a magazine.
There’s a moment in which the cameras catch Laura stop on the corner of the high street, look both ways, and then make a decision that cost her life.
If it had been a little wetter, or a little colder; if she’d been in more of a rush, or got trapped at work for longer than expected, she would have almost certainly turned left.
That would have taken her down the hill, towards the bus stop outside the Ladbrokes bookmaker.
There, she would have caught the number nineteen bus, and taken the twenty-three-minute ride back to where she lived on the Glenhills Estate.
It was the same bus she caught every day that week.
Instead, Laura paused. Even from the CCTV, a viewer can sense that indecision. She glances up, then looks to her watch, before making her choice.
Laura waited for a silver Toyota to pass, and then crossed the road. She’s next seen by a jogger who was doing laps of the cricket club field. She watched Laura head around the back of the clubhouse, following the trail down to the canal.
From there, it was a forty-minute walk in something close to a straight line until she’d reach the Lock Inn pub, where she’d follow a gravelly path to the Glenhills Estate.
It’s a different time of day and year as I follow that same route. If anyone was asked whether they’d seen me, there would be those two lads on the canal boat; the couples in their walking gear; those on bikes. The path is a vibrant part of town life.
Only one person saw Laura on the towpath that day.
Alan Ilverston lives in a cottage that overlooks the canal.
For large parts of the year, the trees at the back of his property are a vibrant green, teeming with life that obstructs any view of the water.
On the day Laura passed, the branches were in the early stages of returning to their summer glory.
‘I keep trying to think whether I saw someone else behind or in front of her,’ he told me from the bench at the back of his house.
He’s made a pot of lemon tea and we sit together, drinking from dinky china cups and saucers that he says only come out for visitors.
‘I think about Laura probably every day,’ he adds.
‘I wish I had a better answer, that my memory was clearer, or that I’d had some sort of camera back then.
All I know is that I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up.
The window overlooks the back and I watched a woman in a green coat walk along the canal path.
She must have noticed a flicker of movement, something like that, because she turned towards me and we sort of nodded to one another.
You know, like you do when you catch a stranger’s eye.
Just a way of saying “hello”. That was it.
A second, two at the most. I didn’t know then I’d be the last person to ever see her. ’
Laura’s body was found three days later in a drainage ditch at the side of a crumbling unremarkable country road that leads into town. The town had a problem with fly-tipping in the area, and a driver stopped, thinking her body was a dumped bin bag.
Except it wasn’t.
Laura March was forty-three years old. She was found with her throat slit and a single peacock-shaped earring in her ear.
At that time, it was 1998 and the World Cup was beginning.
David Beckham was about to be sent off and become a national figure of hate.
But as football fans burned effigies, here, in Sedingham, the police had far bigger worries.
Laura was the Earring Killer’s fourth victim in three years – and if there had ever been any doubt, there wasn’t any longer.
The town had a serial killer.