John McShane - The Night Stalker. The True Story of Delroy Grant, Britains Most Shocking Serial Sex Attacker

I t was October, so by quarter-past nine that Sunday evening in 1992 it had already been dark for several hours. The old lady decided it was time for bed. She prepared herself in the way that women of her generation did: grooming and washing, brushing and cleaning. Half an hour later, she was in her cream and grey floral pyjamas and under the bedclothes. She had not said good night to anyone: there was no one to say good night to. The old woman had never married and ten years earlier had moved in with her then recently widowed sister; it seemed the natural thing to do. But her sister had died a few months earlier and since then the old woman had lived alone her other sister was also dead in the bungalow that was her home. It was her haven, her refuge. A safe place to spend the remaining years of her life.

The bay-windowed bedroom she slept in, with its grey curtains, dark-blue carpet and pink-patterned wallpaper, was at the front of her house. Her home, with its typical white lift-up garage double-doors, overlooked a neat lawn and carefully trimmed garden which sloped gently towards a hip-high brick wall. On the other side of the wall was a broad pavement and a busy road that would be packed in a few hours with suburban traffic as it was every Monday morning: men and women hurrying to work or on their way to dropping off children at school, lorry drivers already behind schedule, angry men at the wheels of white vans hoping to cross the nearby intersection before the lights changed. Beyond those traffic lights lay a small collection of shops; a chemist, newsagents, grocers and Indian and Chinese take-ways. They were in that hinterland in Shirley, Croydon, where south London, Kent and Surrey merge into one. It was suburbia personified, the kind of place where nothing much ever seemed to happen.

The womans room was small, about 11ft by 11ft, with the bed in the middle and a chair on one side of it. In the room was a 2ft-high black safe, opened by a key, not a combination. Her bedside lamp gave off just enough light to enable her ageing eyes to see at night. Reading for a short while was usually all it took to help her get to sleep a few pages and she would drift off. Thats what happened most nights, but this was not to be an ordinary evening. She heard a sound of some sort, a knocking she thought, but was unable to discern exactly what it was. Living by a bustling road, she thought no more of it. Perhaps, as it transpired, it was a terrible mistake to make. Because she could not settle, she decided a drink was needed, and went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Afterwards, a look at the kitchen clock told her that it was now 10.30pm, so she returned to bed and decided to read for a few minutes more. It was late for her, it was time to sleep. She was, after all, 89 years old.

In 1903, when she was born, Queen Victoria had only been dead two years and the sun still never set on the British Empire. A young man by the name of Winston Churchill had recently become an MP, Wilbur and Orville Wright had yet to take to the air for the first manned flight, and the Titanic had not even been built, let alone sunk in its icy grave. It was all so long ago and so many things had happened in the years since she was born: two world wars, the invention of television and the discovery of penicillin were still decades away. What times she had lived through. She deserved a good nights sleep, a rest. At that age, it was the least that she was entitled to.

What she didnt know and how could she? was that someone was watching that anonymous bungalow where she lived. He was watching that night as he had watched many nights before. Those cold, merciless, calculating eyes were taking everything in. Days too: he was relentless in his observations. The homes he was to target had to be occupied by the elderly and they had to live alone.

He looked for handrails near the front door, ramps for easier access, solitary milk bottles on doorsteps, the elderly moving gently inside and possibly slowly outside the building or nervously answering callers through a front door opened just a few inches to protect against possible intruders. He didnt want to make any mistakes so he noted everything as he waited for his moment, the right time to strike.

He wanted to be sure of his ground, that the victim had no means of resisting him, that no one else would be in the house. No other occupant, no other visitor. No young, healthy, strong, relative paying an unscheduled overnight visit who might emerge from a spare bedroom and challenge him in the darkness he would create in the 16ft-long hall that ran through the heart of the bungalow. There had to be only one person there. They had to be old and frail. They had to be defenceless. They had to be at his mercy. That would make everything he intended to do so much easier. Perhaps too it made it all that more thrilling, knowing that he was the one with the power and they were incapable of self-defence.

The 89-year-old lady in that bungalow was exactly the type of victim he had in mind. She fitted the bill to perfection. Whatever he did to her, however heartless and cruel he was to be, she had no escape. No danger of any resistance or retaliation for him to overcome, no one to hear her cries of help, her pleas for leniency or restraint. The aged voice appealing for decency would go unheard.

Everything would be in darkness. The terrifying blackness of the night would be relieved only by the light from the torch in his gloved hand. He would be in control of that too: he had the power of light and dark, night and day, all at the touch of one of his fingers. That was how he liked it. There would be no phone to reach for and, with trembling, wrinkled fingers, dial for help, even if she were capable of doing so. The telephone line had been cut. The only person who could free her would be her attacker himself, a strong young man in his thirties, and that release would only come if and when he showed her compassion. And he was not in the mood to show clemency. That wasnt what he did that night nor in nearly two decades of brutality and perversion that followed. His victims were always defenceless. Always old, always someone he had power over. Elderly women and men whose physical frailty and mental confusion meant that he had the upper hand in the darkness. He would be in control. He always had to be in control.

Back in bed, the old woman tried to sleep, unaware of the terror which was so soon to come into her life and was to stay with her for the rest of her days. After a few minutes, the door to the small bedroom slowly opened and there was the figure of a man in the doorway. The nightmare was to begin for her as it was for so many more in the years to come.

The man in the doorway moved swiftly to her bedside and told her to be quiet. He was wearing a grey pullover, a dark jacket and dark trousers. Over his head was a balaclava which meant that the only part of him that could be seen were his eyes.

What are you doing here? she asked. It was a question that many more were to ask him. Some used those same words; others might vary the phrase slightly. Some merely thought it to themselves. Deep in their hearts, however, even as they uttered the words, they knew the answer. Or at least they thought they did.

Placing a gloved hand over her mouth he told her, Be quiet.

Eventually, the terrified woman was able to ask him, What do you want? Money?

He said nothing, but she opened her purse and gave him all the money that she had in it, two 10 notes and one 5 note. He wasnt satisfied; he wasnt the type to be so easily dismissed. With one hand he took the money, and with the other he grabbed her handbag. They told me you had a lot of money.

All she could reply was: No, thats all Ive got. Shed still had enough wits about her to take the safe keys out of her handbag and put them underneath the mattress as she sat up in the bed.