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The alternative made me sick to my stomach.

Yet, I couldn’t ignore the pieces of the puzzle I’d begun putting together.

A week ago, while I was traveling, something happened that finally made me face a nagging suspicion I’d had for months.

Last summer, the national media covered the news story that Britain had a new serial killer. Months passed, and more information about the killings came to light in trickles, some of it leaked. The media called him the Iron Ripper because he used a branding iron to brand his victims with an image of a serpent.

A week ago, I was gathering the courage to come home, to get over a fantasy I’d been holding on to for decades and start living my life.

Then something happened and I began researching a little.

And if my evidence wasn’t just circumstantial, if I was right …

I knew who the Iron Ripper was.

3. Cameron

Having tossed and turned through the night, I was up before the crack of dawn, and I couldn’t sit still. This had been my life for the past week. Barely sleeping. Agitated. Distracted. It was easy to indulge in those behaviors while I was off island, but now that I was home, my family and friends would pick up on it if I didn’t regulate myself.

Keeping my curtains closed because people passed by the front window of my small, terraced home all the time, I mirrored my laptop to my TV.

For months, even as I enjoyed traveling from city to city, I’d looked forward to the day I would again be in my house. The rows of terraced one-and-a-half-story fishermen’s cottages dated back to the Victorian era, so I’d decorated the house with that period in mind. A kind of modern coastal Victoriana with statement walls of bold Audubon-esque wallpapers, painted half paneling, mixed metals of brass and black steel, and touches of natural wood everywhere. Rattan lampshades, rattan rugs, oak side tables, and flooring. Layers were key to making a room feel homey and lived in and not like it had been staged for a photograph. My house might be small, but it was stylish and cozy. It was me and I’d anticipated returning to it.

Yet I’d walked in the door and couldn’t feel that sense of coming home. I couldn’t feel anything but turmoil. I didn’t have delusions of grandeur, nor did I consider myself some kind of amateur sleuth. In fact, the first time I felt any familiarity about the Iron Ripper murders, I laughed off my suspicions. I rationalized my concerns away. Because there was no way I, Cameron McQuarrie, an ordinary woman who lived on a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, had cracked a case that police forces across the country had not.

However, a week ago I was in Northern Germany. I’d visited Hamburg and Berlin on the first leg of my trip and wanted to see the northern part of the country on my way back home. While in the small, picturesque town of Flensburg on the border of Germany and Denmark, I received a text from an acquaintance. The acquaintance who had triggered my first, seemingly laughable suspicions about the murders. He explained he’d just been to Copenhagen and encouraged me to visit, dropping friendly suggestions for bakeries and attractions.

I didn’t think anything of it.

Until on a train ride into Denmark, my phone picked up the Danish headlines. There’d been a murder in Copenhagen three nights before, and while it had not been connected to Britain’s serial killer because there was no iron brand detail in the case, the woman fit the description of the Iron Ripper victims.

I was chilled to the bone by the realization, and I knew I couldn’t ignore it anymore. At first, piecing together the digital pinboard now displayed on my TV screen was a way to convince myself that my imagination was wilder than I knew, and that I was being a melodramatic idiot.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

One of the major headlines in the Iron Ripper cases was the leaking of crime scene footage onto the web. As horrifying as it was, I went looking for those images, and I will never get them out of my mind, ever again. One of the photographs showed the branding on a victim’s body, and I was ninety-nine percent sure it matched the iron brand I’d once picked up and held in my hand.

But that alone was not enough to urge me to go down this rabbit hole.

Nausea roiled in my gut as I stared at the timeline of events I’d pieced together.

I was the kind of person who dealt with a slow phone if it meant I could hoard my text conversations and voice messages. When I arrived in Copenhagen, I downloaded our text threads for the past three years. I hadn’t left the hotel room for two days as I meticulously read through every single text, checking the time and date stamps.

There had been six murders in the UK. The first happened outside Aberdeen, and there was no brand on that victim, which is why it took the police a while to match it to the next murder, which happened in Birmingham six months later. My acquaintance and I had met each other about a year after the first murder took place.

There had been six murders overall in the UK that they believed were the work of the Iron Ripper. He chose women between the ages of eighteen and forty years old, and chillingly … women who all looked like me. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed. All the victims had been raped, stabbed multiple times in the torso, had their throats slashed, and their hair shorn to the scalp. His grand finale was to brand their inner thigh with the serpent.

These were horrific, psychopathic, brutal murders that reeked of misogyny. A huge part of my brain couldn’t connect them to the person I knew.

I mean, how could anyone be that wrong about someone?

But our text messages placed him in the same cities as three of the murders in the last four years.

Even more horrifying, once I connected the murder in Copenhagen to the British murders, I’d looked at the text messages where he’d relayed his location abroad, and I researched those cities for murders.

He was in Prague two and a half years ago. An unsolved murder there fit the description and took place at the same time as his visit.

The last time I’d seen him was two years ago at his flat in Aberdeen. It was the only time I’d been there. He’d gone out to pick up a takeaway from around the corner, and as mentioned previously, I was a nosy bugger, so I’d snooped. There was a cupboard in his bedroom, and I’d accidentally knocked over some fishing gear, and it had caused items in the lower back half of the wardrobe to spill out. Among the items was a branding iron. I picked it up and looked at the serpent, thinking it was weird, but nothing else beyond that.