Page 25 of The Tapes

The Prince Estate is a modern-day maze. Boxy red-brick houses have been built on top of one another, each with a postage-stamp back garden, plus a single parking spot at the front.

The surrounding roads are dotted with vehicles parked in front of signs saying no ball games are permitted.

Each cramped block of houses is linked to another by a complex web of cut-throughs and alleys that all look the same.

Or perhaps it’s just me. An outsider’s take.

I pass a small green scarred by motorbike wheel marks, then check my phone to make sure I’m on the right street.

Lorna Smilie opens her front door with a quick glimpse to her watch to make the point that I’m five minutes late – although she’s too polite to say so.

She’s in jeans and a green-grey top, a woman of leisure since retiring a few years back.

She does the pocket pat – keys, wallet, phone – then closes her front door and leads me back to the green.

‘This is where the factory entrance was,’ she tells me, indicating the nearest block of houses. ‘I worked there thirty years. When they closed the factory, I ended up buying one of the houses. My wife says I couldn’t quite leave the place – and I guess she was right.’

Lorna was the only female foreman at Prince Industries though lost her job when the site was closed in the early 2000s.

The factory produced shoes on this very spot.

It’s the sort of manufacturing that rarely exists in modern times: certainly not so close to a town centre.

Prince Industries still survives to a degree – but the shoemaking has been outsourced, with the product now imported back into towns like Sedingham.

More than a hundred jobs disappeared when Prince Industries closed – Lorna’s among them.

She was in her early fifties, with decades of manufacturing experience.

But nowhere wanted those skills. Even if there was a demand for them, there would be a new generation of workers with GNVQs and apprenticeships, who would work for less.

There wasn’t a large demand for a skilled woman already in her fifth decade.

Lorna and her then girlfriend downsized, to this house, while topping up her income with shifts behind the bar in the local social club. Takings were low, profit margins small, but there was just enough to get her through to retirement.

It wasn’t the finish to her working life that Lorna envisioned – and now, barely across the road from her front window, is a constant reminder of a life that once was.

But at least she still has hers.

One of the biggest problems with catching the Earring Killer is that police always struggled to link the victims. For a while, they were unsure which victim came first; whether a missing earring was something to do with the killer, or an accidental connection.

What is not now in question is that Carly Nicholson was a victim of the Earring Killer – and likely the first.

A criminologist told me that killers, including serial killers, rarely start with a random victim. They might graduate to that – but the first victim is usually connected in some way.

Carly worked on the production line at Prince Industries, with Lorna as her direct line manager.

‘It was a normal Thursday,’ Lorna says. ‘People would be talking about what they were going to do at the weekend, maybe even organising a night out immediately after shift the next day. Carly was meticulous about the time and never late. It’s one of the reasons I liked her – she was so reliable.

She was really quick to learn as well. If you showed her something once, you wouldn’t need to again.

I thought she was going to go a really long way, regardless of what she wanted to do.

’ She waits a beat. ‘If I’m honest, I liked her because she was a woman, too.

I reckon ninety per cent of the people on the floor were men. We had to look out for each other.’

Lorna tugs at her top, looks up to where the factory would have once been and I have the sense she does this most days. Not many people spend so much of their lives within a single one hundred metre radius.

‘I was a bit jealous of her, if I’m honest,’ Lorna says. ‘She liked tattoos at a time when women were looked down on for such a thing. She had them on her arms and once showed me her back. They were beautiful and she had such an eye for what suited her.’

From nowhere, Lorna rolls up her sleeve to reveal a four-leaf clover on her upper arm.

‘I got this because of her. I told her I really liked the way she had her own style and look. That she didn’t care what people thought.

She said I should just go for it, get a tattoo as well.

I was older than her but always remember that talk because it was like she was the wise one.

It’s supposed to be us old farts telling the kids to follow their dreams and not be scared – but it was the other way around.

I got this done a few months after she, well… you know.’

I do know.

Carly Nicholson was walking somewhere near the canal when she disappeared. Her story is so similar to the other victims that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the whos, whats, wheres, and especially the whys.

She said goodbye to her workmates, then set off to walk back to her flat.

The last time anyone saw her was a bus driver, who says he watched her use the zebra crossing while he waited.

Carly waved in gratitude and then headed into an alley.

She lived by herself but never turned up for work on the Friday.

‘I knew right away there was something wrong,’ Lorna says. ‘She was never late. Never. Even on the odd days she was ill, she’d call the office and leave a message. It was all landlines then, so I called her flat but nobody picked up. I almost went over…’

Lorna lets the sentence slip away – but it would have already been too late.

‘Her parents were on holiday,’ Lorna adds. ‘She didn’t have a boyfriend. I suppose I’ve always thought about that since – because anyone who knew her would’ve known that. There wouldn’t have been a better time.’

The police definitely considered that.

Carly was an optimal target killed at the optimal moment. The next time anyone saw her was in a shallow grave in the remote hills outside town. It was the middle of the following week and a couple walking their dog stumbled across the grim sight.

Police treated it as a murder immediately.

The fact Carly was wearing just one earring was noted in the autopsy, though not a particular focus until the body of Janine Bailey was discovered four months later.

By the time a third victim was killed almost exactly a year later, the words ‘serial killer’ were being spoken about seriously.

Lorna knew none of that at the time of Carly’s disappearance, of course.

‘I just couldn’t get over what a waste it all was,’ Lorna says.

‘I assumed the police would find someone but they never did. Then there was another victim, then another. Suddenly we were all making sure everyone had a safe way home. Women would go out of their way to ask other women what their plans were, things like that. Maybe that was a positive – but nothing made up for Carly.’

We’re back in Lorna’s house now. It’s shoes off at the door, rows of family photographs on the walls and up the stairs. A pair of comfy sofas face the television, with the window above – and the ghosts of a factory long since gone.

‘I went to the funeral,’ Lorna says. ‘Carly doesn’t come from round here.

She’d moved for a boyfriend and when they broke up, she stayed around.

I went to her hometown and met her mum and dad, plus loads of her old school friends.

Nobody had a bad word to say about her. Her friends said she was smart and fun.

They all assumed she’d end up running something, or creating something.

Just one of those people who got on with everyone. ’

Lorna stops, stares through the window into the invisible abyss. ‘It’s such a waste,’ she says. ‘Even now, years later, it’s such a waste.’