Early 80s, Huddersfield

I’ve arrived. Proper working girl now–no, not that type. Posh office in the centre of town. Articled clerk, and you should see my principal – though I’m not talking ethics. Yes, too old for me and married but what a lovely guy. I’m their first female trainee and the latest town grapevine gossip. I dress all professional, pinstripe jacket with my hair in a sort of Purdy cut meets New Romantic. My dad says it looks like what they used to do with a pudding bowl but he’s a fitter at an engineering works, so hasn’t a clue.

Somehow I’ve done it – sneaked across the tracks uninvited. It’s a man’s world, whether down at the court room or in big-bucks-at-stake meetings, and I love it. I’m a novelty – a young woman, blonde with brain cells. Even get on with their best client, some WWII Italian refugee since turned Midas-touch property developer. We tramp around derelict mills together before he puts in his offer, which they never refuse. The office joke is I’m his ‘moll’, but of course not. Besides he has a son in the business, unmarried with those dark eyes and Latin looks that burn so hot on drizzly Northern days. I’d like a few completion meetings with him, that’s for sure. Of course, it won’t come to anything. They’ll all soon rumble me and the part of Leeds I come from. Impostor syndrome is an occupational hazard for women.

So it seems is getting murdered. Five years and 12 women killed. Let’s hope he never makes a baker’s dozen. But then he’s more of a butcher. There was one near here in Huddersfield a couple of years back. Then later one over in Halifax. Quiet middle-class area. 19 year old bank clerk. That made the police ramp it up. Even they recognise a ‘respectable’ corpse, when they find one.

We’re all listening for footsteps these days. But if a man says, ‘Ow do?’ or ‘Cheer up, love, it may never happen’ in a Yorkshire accent, you’re alright. No hint of Geordie , so he can’t be Wearside Jack. That’s who they’ve decided it is, those men in charge of investigating dead women. The tapes are played on the radio. Yet who knows? They used to say it was only prostitutes.

The presence grows. It doesn’t matter who we are, where we come from, how well we do or what dreams we have. You’re still just there for the taking. Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Huddersfield, Halifax…. The north or any direction you choose. You just have to watch out. But we’re hardly Peregrine Falcons who can keep our heads turning 360°. We’re just sparrows. ‘There is a special providence in the fall…’, Hamlet said but it’s death all the same.

Headingly feels so haunted. We try to fly through it, swift as Bede’s sparrow through the mead-hall, from winter to winter.

Late 1980, I’m signed up for a criminology evening class at Leeds Uni. That’s technically Woodhouse, but it bleeds into Headingley and his catchment area. Let’s face it, it’s all his catchment area now. I get in at the station after work. Into the dusk. Deep into autumn term and darkening nights. I’m all suited and booted these days, carry a briefcase now not a satchel. I stride confident over City Square and up to the Headrow, passed smoke-darkened stone buildings, marked by ancient industry suddenly dying under Thatcher. The streets are well-lit and crowded, but most people are going in the opposite direction. I pass the infirmary, sighing at the memories it always breathes over me, my tonsils out at 10, my grandma’s illness when I was 19, visiting her the last time after I’d just been to see ‘Star Wars’. I still don’t get it, this dying thing, people being taken away. Perhaps I never will.

But tonight I’m determined it won’t be me he gets. No cosh to the head and stomach slashed for me, Sunshine! Adrenaline turns me into a sprinter and I run, remembering the footsteps and how it’s never ‘not me’. Panting over paving slabs and flower beds along the quiet campus. Too quiet. Sinister and indifferent. There are no lights still on, so I run, a ball of fear on legs. Whether he’s there or not, he’s got me, caught in the terror he’s jacked off over every woman in the city. I arrive, exhausted with panic, at the old neo-Gothic building which houses the Continuing Learning Centre, then shrug off the threat of true urban grit violence to enter some comical Castle of Otranto.

The class itself is even more surreal. There’s me as the only lawyer, a few academics, a detective inspector and loads of prison wardens. The latter understand more about psychopaths than the tutor. One tells me that for them, killing is just like enjoying a roast dinner and slicing the meat just how they want it. He may be just trying to impress me (in his own gruesome way), as he is one of several men there keen to offer me a lift home, because of course no woman can walk alone at this time of night any more. Unfortunately he’s right, but I turn down the screw and accept a lift from the DI instead. On the way, he takes me for a Turkish kebab from a street vendor he’s friendly with, probably one of his sources. But there’s no information tonight, just shavings of fatty meat cut from a skewered joint that turns endlessly on a spit, salivating its drippings. I’m polite and eat it, but vomit later when I get home.

In November, there’s another body. She’s found in Headingley, a student at the university.

5 January 1981, Huddersfield

New year hang-over suddenly lifts. All the way from the kiosk where I buy Polos to slithering into the office lift, everyone today wears a jittery ‘dare we?’ smile. No one talks about the weather. Only the same three words are spoken by us all, with the nervous glee of teenagers whispering their first ‘I love you.’ But our three words are, ‘They’ve got him!’

The accounts guy from Sheffield who smokes too much, brags about ‘super-efficient South Yorkshire police.’ We laugh because it was all on a technicality, license plates or something. We don’t care. ‘They’ve got him!’

And between women everywhere there slips in a secret smile, subtle as the Mona Lisa’s, not jittery but a ‘we dare’ smile. A smile of safety and defiance. We have come through six years of shuddering in the shadows, being stalked and hunted. Now we are wild animals, reclaiming our night.

Today 2022, anywhere

But do the ghost footsteps ever die?

Didn’t I still hear them that night in the car park, when the firm’s swanky top client followed me from the dinner, pressed me against the wall, knowing I’d never talk in case I lost my job. At least, until ‘no, no, no…’ turned into so many screechy tears, he seemed to decide it wouldn’t be much fun anyway and went home to his wife and kids.

Didn’t they also echo later in my warnings to my own teenage daughter, who a generation on rolled her eyes at her mother’s histrionics? It will never be the same for them as for us, we who grew up always just one silent street away from being ‘ripper women’.

Perhaps I heard them even years down the line on a ‘Me Too’ march. Then again in the news headlines of the missing daughter of my colleague Jeremy Everard, kindest of men.

Maybe I still hear them now, as we all do, walking a dark quiet street, when the guy ahead who side-steps into shop doorway, waiting for you to come past. So you swerve across the road, dialling anyone on your phone, jabbering loudly about where you are, how soon you’ll be back, anything to deter, just in case.

They say that on one day over 300 women will be raped in the UK. If it’s a good day, 190 will be reported. 3 of those may end up in court.

So yes, the footsteps are still there, pacing down the dark, dingy tunnel to my girlhood. But inside a voice is still shouting that same instinctive if petrified female battle cry - ‘Ger off us!’