Horned Killer’s pitchfork attacks on women

The Horned Killer’s pitchfork attacks on women become a mounting public emergency, but the novel presents them chiefly at a distance: through television footage, newspaper images, and reports that reach Bunny and Bunny Junior in ordinary settings. The killer’s apparent southward progress turns scattered incidents into a threatening trajectory, while the repeated images make the violence feel both widely witnessed and still difficult to comprehend.

First Sightings and the News Image

Bunny first encounters the figure on muted black-and-white CCTV footage from a shopping mall in Newcastle. Bare-chested and wearing tracksuit bottoms, the man weaves among terrified shoppers with his mouth open in a soundless scream. Plastic-looking devil’s horns and a large dark object, which appears to be a stick, give the image an uncanny, incomplete quality. Bunny curses, loses his energy, and switches the television off; the footage has interrupted the scene around him rather than remaining distant news.

The threat returns in print. In a full-page CCTV image, the man appears with body paint, joke-shop horns, and a trident. The headline’s sensational language makes his appearance into a public spectacle, while Bunny struggles to read the article and feels physically unwell. The newspaper does not merely provide information: its image and headline bring the crime into the dining room, where Bunny’s attempt to treat the morning as routine gives way to alarm.

Fatal Attacks and a Southbound Pattern

A later television report establishes the first specific fatal attack in the sequence. In Leeds, the killer follows Beverly Hamilton, a young office worker, into an underground car park and murders her with a Garden fork. The report describes hundreds of stab wounds, then recounts a separate public appearance: later that day, the killer parades in front of CCTV cameras at a nearby shopping mall before disappearing. The police are described as baffled. Bunny asks whether his son believes the report, and Bunny Junior answers that he does not, registering the news as frightening rather than as a story to accept uncritically.

The attacks continue in Birmingham. A television turns on accidentally while Bunny is on a sofa, showing upside-down footage of the Horned Killer terrorising shoppers in a Tesco car park. A news ribbon reports that earlier that day he entered shared accommodation in Bordesley Green and killed two young nurses as they slept, again using a Garden fork. The report places the killings within a wider state of panic in the Midlands and repeats that the police remain baffled. Watching the footage, Bunny concludes that the killer is only beginning and is coming their way. His reaction converts the reported geography into a personal expectation of danger.

A further report, shown on a café television in Western Road, describes the murder of a young mother in her home in Maida Vale. The attack is reported as so vicious that authorities initially have difficulty identifying the victim’s sex. That same afternoon, the killer appears on CCTV at a shopping complex in Queensway, then vanishes again. The repeated pairing of a killing with a public camera appearance makes the sequence seem deliberate and performative, although the evidence does not explain the killer’s motive. A stylised map of England marks the reported route with a red line moving south; Bunny sees in its shape a cartoon rabbit without ears and senses that the pattern concerns him, without knowing why.

Public Fear, Capture, and Uncertainty

Across the reports, recurring footage, abrupt disappearances, and the police’s continued bafflement give the attacks the form of an unresolved national crisis. The cameras repeatedly record the killer among shoppers, but surveillance has not, in these reports, prevented further violence. News travels from Newcastle through Leeds and Birmingham to reports that point toward the south, carrying the threat into places Bunny visits and making television a persistent source of dread.

Later, a tabloid photograph shows the Horned Killer shirtless, red-painted, handcuffed, and flanked by two policemen; its headline announces that he has been caught. The image supplies a visible reversal after the repeated reports of disappearance, but another claim immediately unsettles any sense of certainty. A receptionist points out a report saying the killer’s horns are real rather than fake. The novel presents this as something the newspaper is saying, not as an independently confirmed explanation. The attacks therefore culminate in a reported capture, while the media image preserves an element of the uncanny that the arrest does not resolve.

Narrative Significance

The attacks reach the reader through mediated fragments rather than through a sustained account of the killer’s actions: silent CCTV, a newspaper photograph, a scrolling news ribbon, and maps or headlines. This form makes the public’s knowledge vivid but partial. Viewers can see the figure and hear where he has struck, yet the reports repeatedly leave his motives and movements unexplained. The contrast between constant visibility and continued bafflement is central to the sequence’s unease.

The southbound map also gives the reports a narrative momentum. Each new incident appears to extend the killer’s route toward Bunny’s part of the country, and Bunny responds to that direction as though it were aimed at him. The resulting dread belongs partly to the crimes themselves and partly to the way their repetition reorganises his sense of ordinary space: a television in a café, a newspaper at breakfast, or a screen switching on by accident can each deliver the next warning. The later image of an arrest offers temporary closure, but the reported claim about real horns keeps the boundary between criminal spectacle and something more disturbing uncertain.