Early Bird

If a killer awakes before dawn and puts his boots on – to paraphrase a famous song – you know it means trouble. If the killer happens to be the Slough Slasher, then it's ‘Trouble’ with a capital 'T'.

No one knows who the Slough Slasher is, naturally. If they did, then they’d call him by name. But the newspapers like to give serial killers a dramatic moniker. I don’t know which paper coined this one – most probably The Sun or some other tabloid – but it soon caught on and now it’s on everyone’s lips.

Especially those belonging to the poor residents of Slough itself, twice hapless: (i) because so many of their number have fallen victim to the Slasher; (ii) because they live in Slough.

And if you think I’m being unkind to a town of over 150,000 people, I would refer you to the British Poet Laureate in the 1970s and ‘80s, Sir John Betjeman, who invited ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the place.

I think even those from Slough – the Sluffs – would agree that there’s not a lot going for it, apart from its proximity to Windsor, with its castle, Great Park, pretty streets, river, tourists… The only tourists that would ever visit Slough would do so by mistake, perhaps taking a nap on the train out of London towards somewhere more interesting (and even Reading, for example, is more interesting than Slough), waking, being confused, panicking, and jumping off too soon.

It really is such an awful place that I wouldn’t be surprised if some Sluffs might, deep down, welcome a visit from the Slasher, just to put them out of their misery! But I jest, of course.

Before we go any further, though … and there we have it: for those who are not from the UK, ‘Slough’ isn’t pronounced like ‘though’; it isn’t pronounced like ‘through’; it isn’t pronounced like ‘thought’; it isn’t pronounced like ‘cough’; and it isn’t pronounced like ‘rough’ (although Sluffs are, and ‘rough’ is, of course, a perfect adjective to describe it). No, ‘Slough’ is pronounced like the British English ‘plough’, or ‘plow’, as the Americans would have it.

In fact, Betjeman might have written instead: ‘Come friendly plough and dig up Slough’. The sentiment would have been the same, and it would have rhymed.

More about Slough: it’s around 22 miles (35 kilometres) due west of London; it’s in the county of Royal Berkshire; the original version of the television comedy ‘The Office’ was set in the town; it’s where the Mars chocolate bar was invented; and 63% of its people are white, 26% Asian.

On that last point, and going back to the Slasher, one important thing to note is that he isn’t particular about race, ethnicity, gender, age, size, sexuality – all are fair game. Nor can a pattern be deduced from the scene of the murders. And for these reasons, the police are scratching their heads: the Slasher’s attacks appear to be completely random.

All the police have figured out is that other aspects of his modus operandi are constant. He always strikes very early in the morning. He never strikes where there might be CCTV cameras – in fact, all the 13 murders attributed to him so far (there have been more, but it’s been found that they were committed by so-called ‘copycat murderers’) have happened in secluded parts of the town: a quiet side-street, behind a factory on the industrial estate, on a football pitch in a wind-swept park, in a wood, in an abandoned multi-storey car park, in a field. His tool of preference is a Stanley knife (what the Americans would call a ‘box-cutter’). The fatal cut is to the jugular, from behind.

What theories do the police favour regarding the profile of this ‘animal’, as the media would describe him?

Well, they’ve decided it’s a man and not a woman, because the fairer sex are statistically far less likely to be serial killers in the first place, and also because the method of killing – holding the victim from behind with one hand while slashing their throat with the other – suggests a masculine strength. Which is not to say that a woman couldn’t be strong enough, just that, once again, statistics point to a man.

The police love statistics. They’ve worked out there’s an eighty per cent chance the man is from Slough itself. The twenty per cent allows for the possibility that it’s someone who lives within killing distance and commutes in to do the deeds. What is probable is that he knows Slough like the back of his hand; those secluded locations couldn’t be selected unless he were very familiar with the town, otherwise he’d be running all sorts of risks.

As for age, the consensus is that he’s in his 30s or 40s. Any younger and he wouldn’t have the astuteness or the maturity to meticulously plan his forays. Any older and he might not have the strength to hold people while he killed them.

There’s been a media campaign – encouraged by the police – to try to discover anyone who might know the Slasher, and a reward’s been offered for information leading to his arrest. They think that he might be a family man with a terrible secret, but that his wife or partner, or relatives, or children, might suspect something. Or that his workmates might have noticed his absence from work on the days or at the times of the murders.

Of course, this has inevitably led to a wave of collective paranoia, with people pointing fingers, marriages being tested, friends falling out. The police have received countless phone-calls from people convinced their neighbour is the Slasher. If they – the police – could transfer all the man-hours used in chasing up the deranged accusations to actually working on the case, they might get closer to catching their man.

And then we come to the question of ‘why?’. Why would anyone commit such gruesome crimes against innocent people?

Once again, the tabloids have gone over the top with their theories, ‘insanity’ being the most suggested. The police have kept their cards close to their chest in this regard; if they start calling the man insane, he’s likely to feel insulted and simply up his tally to get his own back.

So let me posit a theory of my own. Say the man is far from insane; rather, he’s an exceptionally intelligent and rational human being. Say he planned a small number of murders initially, one of them targeted, the rest intentionally random. Say the targeted murder was to rid himself of a love that wronged him, the others to obfuscate.

Perhaps the problem is that he got a taste for it, a taste for the jeopardy, a taste for the planning (and the killings do need that, however haphazard they appear), a taste for seeing the life ebb from his victims, a taste for a job well done. And when I say ‘problem’, I mean for the people of Slough; this man has no problem with continuing his spree. In fact, the police will have noted that the frequency of the murders is increasing – a sure sign that the man is becoming addicted to killing, just as one might fall under the spell of heroin, for example.

And he can’t stop. He won’t stop. The people of Slough – the erstwhile hometown of his love, the venue for his revenge, now the ground for his glorious rampage – will not rest easy, not until the Slasher makes a terrible mistake and is caught. And I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.

But there’s the first birdsong of the morning. Dawn’s on its way. Must get my boots on.

After all, and as we know, it’s the early bird that catches the worm.