Sandra Lawton. Age: 33. Stalker.
Helen scanned the file. Sandra Lawton was a romantic obsessive who when spurned turned nasty. She already had three convictions for putting a person in fear of violence by harassment. Safe to say her treatment didn’t seem to be working and her belief that smart, educated men in positions of authority secretly wanted to sleep with her was as strong as ever.
Helen scrolled on to the next one. Sandra was nuts, but she wasn’t violent.
Isobel Screed. Age: 18. Cyber stalker. Again, Helen rejected her. This girl was a slip of a thing, who spent her life abusing soap actresses via text and Twitter. She threatened to cut their wombs out and so on, but by the looks of it never left her bedsit, so she could be ruled out. The classic cyber coward.
Alison Stedwell. Age: 37. Possession of an offensive weapon. ABH. Multiple harassment charges. This was more promising. A serial, experienced offender who had attempted to fire a crossbow at a co-worker she’d been stalking, before she was arrested and later sectioned. She was out in the community again now, under supervision apparently, and hadn’t offended for several months. Was she capable of putting something like this together? Helen slumped in her chair. Who was she kidding? Alison might be a nasty piece of work, but she wasn’t exactly subtle in her techniques – her stalking was visible and deliberately so – nor was she a looker. Peter Brightston’s description of a raven-haired beauty could in no way apply to the gappy-toothed blob that stared back at Helen from the screen. Another one to scratch off the list.
She’d been using HOLMES2 for hours now, searching out every British female stalker convicted in the last ten years. But it was fruitless. The individual they were hunting was exceptional, a far cry from the clumsy stalkers Helen was looking at now. Their stalker must have shadowed her victims for weeks, so as to discover Amy and Sam’s propensity for hitching, as well as the ins and outs of Ben and Peter’s weekly trips to Bournemouth. To have plotted their abductions in ways that allowed them to be executed on remote roads, in areas with no mobile phone reception, was impressive. But also to find locations to hold them in where they wouldn’t be found or heard, where they could go slowly mad with hunger and terror, was something else. Such an individual wouldn’t be buried away in the bowels of HOLMES2, she would be a living legend already, the regular subject of police seminars and literature.