Page 36 of The Tapes

The man in the silk waistcoat looks up at the concrete block to our side. There’s pebble-dashing across the top, then an exposed set of stairs with a metal railing at the side. Bomb shelter chic.

‘I doubt we’ll last the year,’ the man tells me. ‘It used to be full of students but they were different times. We’d offer membership discounts and some kids would spend entire afternoons in here. Two quid a pint, unlimited snooker or pool, but now they have other things.’

‘Like what?’ I ask.

Marlon has been the manager of Green’s Snooker and Pool for the past twenty-one years.

It sits on the top floor of the bomb shelter building and has been resident for more than three decades.

He smooths the front of his waistcoat and shakes his head.

‘Phones, I guess. No point in playing snooker for real if you can do it on your phone.’

He has a point, if not about phones then the changing times.

He takes me up the stairs, which doesn’t help the appeal of the place.

He says the lift stopped working more than a year ago but that the landlord won’t pay to fix it.

I’m out of breath as we reach the top step, but the inside of the snooker hall is warm and welcoming.

‘We did everything up about eighteen months ago,’ Marlon says. ‘Didn’t make a difference.’

The bar area is a wash of soft reds and blacks. Each corner has a television showing a different sport, while the bar is stocked with the usual array of drinks. A blackboard is advertising happy hour chips and gravy for ￡1.50.

Marlon and I sit at the bar and he picks up a beer mat that he twirls on the end of his finger.

‘I knew Kirsty fairly well,’ he says. ‘If I’m honest, it probably wasn’t a great time to be a woman here in the 2000s. Something like ninety-five per cent of our membership was men and some of them were a bit, well… laddish.’

I point out this might have been down to the two quid pints, which Marlon concedes is likely.

‘Kirsty didn’t seem bothered by any of that,’ he adds.

‘I remember asking her once why she worked here and she was baffled by the question. Her dad was a publican, so she found the work familiar and easy – except she’d seen what it was like in a pub.

She said there was none of the late-night nastiness here.

It was just a few clumsy advances from students.

She thought it was hilarious that she was old enough to be their mum. ’

It had been four years since Ophelia Baron was killed when her car broke down on the way home from hockey practice. Before that, there had been a three-year gap since Laura March disappeared on that canal bank.

Those now familiar rumblings that perhaps the police were mistaken had returned.

There had been four killings in three years, then only one in the following three.

Four deaths in three years felt like a serial killer; five in six was more like the police were reaching.

During that period, the HAVE FUN messaging had broken through – but women had started to come up with their own ways of seeking safety.

A movement had taken off to simply not wear jewellery, especially earrings.

Maybe that worked? Maybe that explained the single killing in seven years?

Maybe.

‘I think people forgot,’ Marlon says. ‘But maybe that’s me looking back with modern eyes.

People shouldn’t have to adapt their behaviour and it is victim blaming, really.

If someone wants to wear earrings, why should they stop?

But there was this thinking from some people that if you did that, you were asking for trouble.

That you’d deserve anything that happened.

Maybe that’s just what it was like in the 2000s, especially for women? ’

Marlon pauses and puts down the beer mat with which he’s been fiddling throughout our conversation. He bows his head a fraction and turns towards the bar.

‘One of our regulars was in a day or two after it all happened and he said something like, “Well, she was wearing earrings, wasn’t she?” – as if it was her fault.

I don’t think I said anything. I didn’t agree with him but I didn’t say he was out of line, either.

I just sort of went with it – and I think about that all the time, even though it’s years later. It’s like I let her down.’

Kirsty McIntosh worked five days a week behind the bar of Green’s Snooker and Pool.

She often volunteered for Friday nights because it meant she could take off the Saturday.

It was late on a Friday that she wound down for the evening, ushering out the snooker and pool players, then locking the doors to give herself half an hour to clean up.

She left a note for whoever was on shift the next morning, saying that they needed to reorder some crisps, because stocks were low, then set off for her car.

It was the same short walk she made five nights a week, every week.

Except, that Friday night, Kirsty never made it.

Her boyfriend had been waiting up and ended up driving himself into town a little after two in the morning.

He found her car parked in its usual spot, untouched and locked; the small plush Minnie Mouse was still dangling from the mirror.

He walked across the car park, down the stairs, across the plaza and through a pair of alleys until he reached this bomb shelter of a building, where he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

The lights were off and nobody answered, because nobody was inside.

It was then he called the police to report his girlfriend missing. The search didn’t take long. Early on the Sunday evening, not even forty-eight hours later, the body of Kirsty McIntosh was discovered in woodland a few miles outside town.

A triangular green earring was in one ear, while the other was bare.

Police were careful at first. It had been four years after all. Was the Earring Killer back, or was it some sort of copycat? Could it be a coincidence? Perhaps Kirsty had lost an earring earlier in the evening?

But while the authorities sat on that information, trying to find truth among whispered assumptions, something else happened. Something that had never occurred before among the lore of the Earring Killer. Something nobody, least of all the police, expected.

A few miles from the snooker club, and the running track at the back of Sedingham Secondary School is a sand-coloured gravel path.

I walk a loop and the soles of my shoes end up covered in a chalk-like dust. There are hockey goals at either end of the grass in the middle of the track, with a shot-put and discus net in another corner.

I stick to the third lane, leaving space inside for a sinewy man in short shorts and a loose white vest to run laps. He checks his watch at regular intervals, while crouching to grab a bottle from the grass. He sips the water, then drops the bottle a few metres further on, barely breaking stride.

Just three days after the body of Kirsty McIntosh had been discovered, Sarah Graham was running laps on this track.

She was training for the Great North Run and would run the mile and a half from her house to this track.

Four laps is approximately a mile, and she’d run anything from twenty to forty before looping back to where she lived.

The first part is an overgrown path around the back of the school.

It passes a graffiti-covered, old school bike shed before reaching the main road.

A largely deserted pavement tracks the next couple of hundred metres with a steady stream of traffic lining up from a set of traffic lights.

Three drivers saw Sarah as she jogged past them, her own water bottle clamped in her hand.

From there, Sarah would have passed through a series of chicane-like alleys, with varying degrees of gates and barriers to stop motorbikes cutting through. She would have emerged in a cosy cul-de-sac before heading around a bend, through two more lanes and then onto her own road.

Michael Graham is sitting on a wall close to a corner shop.

His sleeves are rolled up and the top button of his shirt is undone, showing whispers of greying hair.

He’s stubbly, at the stage where it could be the beginnings of a beard, or perhaps he’s one of those men who skips a day with a razor and ends up with what looks like a week’s growth.

We shake hands and he points across to the lane from which Sarah would have emerged.

‘Sarah had never really run before,’ he says.

‘Athletics wasn’t her thing at school but she’d always been fit in the sense that she looked after herself.

I think Paula Radcliffe had won Sports Personality of the Year before, something like that.

Sarah and I watched it together and she’d decided she wanted to run the London Marathon.

It was all a bit out of the blue but I wanted to support her.

I bought her a pair of training shoes that Christmas. ’

I point out that the running track feels a bit Iron Curtain and Michael laughs.

‘Sarah used to complain about that all the time. She’d say it was slippery, especially when it had been raining.

Except it’s the only track in town and it meant she could just run.

She didn’t have to worry about crossing roads, or dodging people who were walking on pavements. That’s why she liked it.’

I ask if Michael ever ran with his wife and that draws another laugh. ‘Not my thing,’ he says. ‘I played a bit of football when I was younger but I don’t think I could handle that monotony. Lap after lap, you know? You have to be a certain type of person for that.’

He thinks a second and there’s a distant gaze.

‘She really did want to run a marathon but she was working up to it. 5k, 10k, then a half. She had a whole training plan that she’d worked out herself. That last run was one of the longer ones. I think she might’ve done nine or ten miles.’

Those three drivers were the last people to ever see Sarah alive. She never completed that final mile of her run – and it was almost seventy-two hours later that her body was found near a lay-by a short distance outside town. She’d only been wearing stud earrings – but one had been removed.

This time, the police did not hesitate as they released an urgent alert regarding safety for women in the local area.

There was vicious criticism in the coming weeks, especially in regards to the murder of Sarah.

If they’d only been upfront after the discovery of Kirsty, then perhaps Sarah would still be alive.

Perhaps those detractors had a point, except it’s easy to say after an event.

In any case, Sarah’s husband didn’t see things that way.

‘She’d have gone running anyway,’ Michael says. ‘She wanted to train and to run. It was her way of unwinding. You have to live your life, don’t you?’

He’s right, of course. If it wasn’t Sarah, it would have been someone else. People want to live their lives.

But, by then, things had become very clear. After five killings in six years, then none in three, Sedingham had seen two in five days.

Seven dead women.

Seven missing earrings.

The Earring Killer was very much back.