The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes by Roger Wilkes

anxious not to say anything which the detective did not want said, looking to him constantly for approval before speaking to me. Is that . . .? Britton would say. Yes, that’s fine, Short would reply. The meeting made me think again of Janet Brown; the remoteness of her life and the elusive, troubling horror of her death. No one, except of course the person who was there with her when it occurred, could say exactly how she had come to die or why it had to happen. As Britton readily conceded, the skills or wisdom of offender profiling could never be a science of precision. He too had noticed how little there was to know about Janet Brown. It was very important, he said, to know about her. But what you had was a tight picture with very little detail available. It was not a question of the detail being concealed so much as it simply not being there at all.
    When it came to the incident itself, Britton did not know what to make of the means of entry. The person had come prepared to do what they did. “You saw time, you saw effort and application, but you also saw a woefully inadequate appreciation of what was required to complete the task.” It was as if somebody was mirroring the real methods of a housebreaker without actually knowing how to do it.
    This was not, he said, a situation where somebody had broken into a house to steal and panicked on seeing the occupant and hit her and rushed out again. Janet Brown had been fully controlled by her killer and she had little opportunity or inclination to resist. People did not just use handcuffs to control, they used fear as well. And it wasn’t only the victim who had been controlled; the assailant had very much been in control of his own feelings too. Britton singled out the fact that he would have had to step over Mrs Brown’s body to go upstairs afterwards, and step over her again when he came back down.
    With regard to the alarm, and whether it had been triggered by Mrs Brown or by the killer, Britton said he could not decide between the two possibilities. But, if it was Mrs Brown, it would be an interesting person who could do all this while the alarm was ringing full blast. He also pointed out that, with the curtains open downstairs and the lights on, it would have been possible for a passer-by to look in and see some of what had gone on. It was a quiet area, of course, but the assailant must still be a risk-taker.
    Both Short and Britton believe the killer is likely to be a local man, or at least, a man who is familiar with the area and they both believe this man will be known to a wife, partner or parent. They think this person might have noticed some change in behaviour, or be suppressing their own fear that a person they know could be involved.
    Britton speculated that the killer would have had a relationship that had failed or be in a relationship that was failing now. He would not have gone around boasting about it, after killing Janet Brown, but the change in his demeanour would have been observable. He might have become very agitated, or more agitated, preoccupied and withdrawn or he might have shown disproportionate interest in the reporting of the killing, with an elevation in his mood from the buzz of achievement.
    Imagine, Britton said, a person who had crossed a threshold and knew they could never go back. It was an awesome thing to have done and there would be the awareness of the police investigation and the fear of the knock at the door.
    By now, the case had become defined for me by what it was not about. The removal of the more feasible possibilities was pushing it towards an altogether darker place. This could not simply be a burglary gone awry. It was not a killing with a domestic motivation. It had nothing to do with the family or a lover or anything like that. There was nothing in Janet Brown’s life, or in her past, that could suggest a motive for murder. It would have made sense as a sexually motivated crime, except that there was no physical