The Ripper

by Carmelo Anaya

  There are too many similarities to put it down to coincidence. I'm still trying to convince myself that's all this is: vague conjecture, unfounded hypotheses. But as I leaf through the book and Cristiana Stoicescu's autopsy report I become more and more convinced. There seems to be no other explanation, just as the only choice I have is to put together the raid on the eighth of September and send my officers out to ask questions. If I report back on the prostitucion ring, the Chief Commissioner won't want to wait.

  September eighth: T-7 I wonder if the killer will strike again. He must know we're all on high alert. His first crime was so daring, opposite the town's busiest club, that there is no doubt in my mind.

  Someone knocks at my door and I just manage to slip the book into a draw as Martin sticks his beleaguered face round the door. He hasn't put any gel in his hair this morning and his messy tufts of hair are a departure from his usual neat, well-groomed air.

  - "I've got something, chief," he says, coming in with a file in hand.

  He stands next to me and shows me his notes.

  - "Since there are no reports on animal disembowelment in the county, I thought maybe the cases weren't reported and the Guardia Civil and local police never got wind of them, so I contacted the animal rescue services in every town."

  He points at a line in the report, his nails trimmed short and polished, with a trembling finger.

  - "And I found this. Look..."

  I gesture to the chair in front of my desk. Martin sits, leaning so far forward he's practically lying on the desk.

  - "Ten disembowelled dogs, throats slit, just this summer. Four in Almeria, three in Roquetas de Mar, two in Almerimar and one in El Ejido. The local animal rescue picked them up. The reports were filed in the local courthouses.

  Photos. Descriptions. All breeds, colours and sizes, throats cut and bodies entirely slit open. Some with their innards hanging out."

  - "You're going to have to go out there. Check the dates they were found. Speak to the animal rescue staff and vets in each location. Check how they were disembowelled."

  - "He was getting ready, boss. That's why he was so sure of himself with the girl. He'd been practising."

  - "Don't get carried away just yet."

  He shoots me a glare.

  - "It was him," he says stubbornly, refusing to admit any doubt.

  - "Confirm it. Dates. Places. You'll have to go door to door where they were found. Do you have the exact locations?"

  My phone suddenly starts ringing shrilly: The Mojacar police (municipal) have arrested Cristiana Stoicescu's killer.

  He's confessed to her murder and a bloody handkerchief in his possession has been found.

  I curse the traffic as we move stiltedly through the streets, behind foreigners in convertibles who believe Spain is paradise and delivery vans. When we finally get to Mojacar, there's nowhere to park, so I leave the car at a crossroads and head for the police station, buzzing like a beehive. A few officers stand around talking to journalists taking falsely casual notes. Others look me up and down scornfully. A narrow corridor lined with cheap, unvarnished wooden doors. Bare rooms, austere as cells or halls in a monastery, like every other police station and barracks in the country. Tables, chairs, file cabinets, computers.

  - "No one-way mirror here," says an officer. "They're in there," he adds, pointing to one of the doors.

  Three heads turn as I open the door: the head of the police unit, sweating with nerves as though he'd just stepped out of the shower, and two other officers, one standing next to the table and one in front of a computer ready to take their suspect's statement. A narrow-shouldered man, slumping in a chair. Dirty reddish hair and a shirt crusted with age, worn threadbare, almost see-through. The boss motions at me to come in. The officer next to the table hands me a document certifying seventy-five per cent intellectual disability.

  I haven't even seen his face and I already know this is a false alarm.

  I lean back against a window, light streaming through to illuminate the young man's snarling face. Age thirty, slight build, skin and bones, in need of a wash. I read his illness in his facial expression. Intellectual disability and psychotic breaks, according to the file. He notices me and I see that his mind cannot seize on anything intelligible. He has a bony face, his expressions distorted by unusually prominent cheekbones and sunken cheeks, wispy stubble on his chin. He drools slightly and his eyes are so deep-set that they look like doll's eyes. He smells of rank sweat and dirty feet in old sandals.

  - "Come on, Chumbo, tell us how you did it," says the officer standing by the table.

  Chumbo shrugs.

  - "I want a cigarette," he says thickly.

  The officer gives him a Fortuna and a light. Chumbo drags so deeply his cheeks hollow out even more and the room fills with smoke when he exhales.

  - "Tell me, Chumbo, where did you see the girl?"

  - "The whore?"

  - "Yes, the whore."

  He seems to be thinking it over, but then he shrugs.

  - "Out on the road."

  - "Yeah. But which road?"

  - "The hotel road."

  - "Which hotel?"

  He shrugs again.

  - "How did you get her to come with you?"

  - "She came with me," says Chumbo.

  - "In the car?"

  - "Yes."

  - "But Chumbo, you can't drive. You don't own a car," says the boss.

  Chumbo stays quiet for a minute or two, jaw clamped shut.

  - "But did you kill her?" asks the officer by the table. "Did you use a knife, Chumbo? Do you own a knife?"

  - "Of course," says Chumbo, gazing at the officer with a look on his face that says he cannot comprehend why anyone would ever ask such an obvious question.

  The boss looks at me and shakes his head. "Me too.

  - That's not how these guys kill," whispers the boss.

  Now Chumbo looks straight at me. But he doesn't say a word.

  After a two-hour grilling in which he smokes half a packet of cigarettes belonging to the jolly officer who thinks he's made the arrest of the century, Chumbo has admitted to picking the girl up on the road, only to then deny it, saying he saw her at the beach. Then he says he garrotted her; after which he knifed her, but he doesn't know where his knife is, patting his empty pockets. Then he lifts his questioning face, wondering about his knife, and the jolly officer plucks a rusty, grimy old farmer's Swiss knife from a drawer. There's no way it's the weapon.

  Suffocating with heat, the boss and I go to his office, leaving Chumbo with the happy officer and the quiet one, trying to type up the statement but sighing when a split second later Chumbo denies it all again with a different story.

  The boss stands under the AC unit in his office, seeking out the cool flow of air.

  - "Two hours ago I would have sworn it, chief," he says glumly. "At four in the morning, falling down drunk, he started shouting about how he killed the prostitute in the middle of the street. A couple of officers went out and arrested him and then he showed them the knife and the bloody handkerchief and said they were his. They got me out of bed and I rushed over and sent a team over to his house to see whether he had an alibi or he was in cloud-cuckoo-land. His parents and brother confirmed that he wasn't at home on the night of the thirty-first. This guy, just going outside, he gets lost, you know? His parents can't keep an eye on him because they're getting on and his brother's given up, he's sick of the whole situation."

  I nod, understanding him. He opens his arms. His armpits are stained dark with sweat.

  - "And I thought... well... why not? Whoever killed that poor girl is a madman. Sometimes they lose it, don't they? Maybe he bumped into her there and wanted her to service him, and she refused, who knows!"

  At the end of his tether, he flings himself down into his desk chair desperately. I offer him a cigarette and we smoke in silence.

  -
"She was taken away in a dark van, boss. Tell your men to look for it when we clean this mess up."

  He looks me straight in the face.

  - "I didn't know."

  - "It doesn't matter. I've only just found out.

  - We don't have the number plates, of course."

  - "Of course."

  He sighs and takes a breath. His wobbly chest heaves.

  - "Like you said, this isn't the way a madman kills, is it?" he says, thinking out loud.

  - "Not ours, I don't think, no."

  - "Who would do this, chief? I saw... it's madness."

  - "But a different kind of madness.

  - Either way, we have to follow the protocol."

  I stub my cigarette out in an ashtray. The boss is slowly getting back to normal and breathing less heavily, wiping his flushed face with a handkerchief. His chest, stocky and losing the vigour of youth, expands and contracts like a bellows, his shirt stuck to his skin, belly sticking out.

  - "It's not him." "But you did what you had to do, if that's any consolation."

  - "I know. But after all the excitement this morning... I was more nervous than on my bloody wedding night." "And now the disappointment."

  - I'm afraid it won't be the last time we're disappointed on this case.

  More than three hundred phone calls. More than three hundred dead ends. Any leads that weren't completely crazy have gone up in smoke. The men on the switchboard are running out of steam. I order them to keep going.

  I read the Ripper book over and over. I dig information up online. I'm stunned to find out that the Ripper has fan clubs, feathered out all over the world and revering him online. I can't bring myself to believe it, so I keep digging to make sure. Dazed, I wonder what this means. Just how sick is this world?

  Now I know the Ripper's story backwards. I have to, to stay one step ahead. My gut tells me our man will follow loyally in Jack's footsteps, though there may be no logical reason behind it. But if he's already decided to kill like the Ripper, why wouldn't he go on the same way? If he suspects we've uncovered his secret he might suddenly stray from his path, or change the dates. But hasn't he proved his arrogance and audacity, slaying his first victim in plain sight?

  Every time I turn it over in my mind it makes more sense, until I'm almost sure.

  I spend the rest of the day scouring the net for serial killer sites. Just in the USA, an estimated 150 serial killers are on the prowl at any given moment. And their numbers are creeping up. In the past twenty years there have been more serial killers in Spain than in the previous hundred years.

  I fall down a rabbit hole of unbelievable evil. It almost seems unreal. So extreme it's incomprehensible. The Son of Sam; Ted Bundy; the Monster of Machala; the Butcher of Rostov; the Milwaukee Cannibal; the Boston Strangler; the Killer Clown; Ed Kemper; the Vampire of Dusseldorf; Henry Lee Lucas; the Green River Killer; BTK; the Yorkshire Ripper; the Lisbon Ripper; the Strangler of Vienna; the French Ripper; Yang Xinhai... The list is endless.

  And that's not including the serial killers who hide behind a smokescreen of politically motivated killings. Some call them terrorists.

  Just when I thought I had left all this behind me.

  I go back to Jack the Ripper. I trawl through his history, comparing it to the other data online. Thinking through combinations, comparing, imagining, sensing...

  Perhaps the crime with the most information is the fifth murder, the killing of Mary Kelly, since it happened in a private room and the murderer had all the time in the world to ravage the body.

  But in the here and now... this first crime has to be the one that gives us the most clues. But we haven't found a thing. Not a thing!

  I draw up a memorandum for the team to investigate the Ripper fan club sites. We have to check with the Cyber Crime Squad can detect connections in the area.

  I leave the lugubrious place my office has become and set off for Mojacar.

  I need to breathe the same air the killer breathed. The air Cristiana breathed before she died. I try to block out the pain. Imagine how she blocked it out.

  I inspect the dry ravine he drove through. The building next to it is sleepy in the fading afternoon. Behind it, the lonely fields stretch into countryside, leaving the asphalt behind. I imagine the killer and Cristiana in the night, alone. No one about, though the crowd is near. The killer took the risk of a couple hiding out in the bushes. He didn't care. The earth was hard and dry and we haven't found any tyre tracks.

  Strains of music from Club Mandala drift in the evening air. It smells of dry earth. Dry bushes and reeds on one side. I walk up the hillside. It's easy. I could do it with a woman's body over my shoulder. There are prickly pears on one side, big enough to hide a man. Once I'm at the top, palm trees, eucalyptus, pines. Bushes that have never been pruned into submission, as tall as me. I cross the plot of land. A faded trail which must have been a path between two gardens. Enough for him. The house on one side, standing silent under lock and key. No one in there who could have seen or heard anything. The owners have been contacted. None of them were in the area on those dates. The houses aren't being rented out. No trace of squatters.

  The camping site has been combed through top to bottom. The campers staying on the date of the murder have been investigated. Nothing.

  I move towards the wall. Too low to hide him. But the bushes offer cover. That's where he killed her. Then all he had to do was drag her still-warm body to the curb, so everyone could see it: Here. Look upon my work.

  Club Mandala opposite. The mandala symbol. I scroll through my smartphone: a spriritual and ritual symbol of the macrocosmos and microcosmos, used in Buddhism and Hinduism. Mandala is a Sanskrit term. Other cultures also use the mandala symbol, often used in spiritual representations: the mandorla in medieval Christian art, labyrinths in Gothic churches, glass roses... just like Sebastian Rodriguez said....

  Its pattern, usually concentric in nature, suggests perfection and the line encircling it may suggest the eternal return of Nature's cycles. In magic rirtual it is common to clearly separate sacred space from profane space. To achieve this, pentagrams have traditionally been used in the Western occult; the sacred space is held within the pentagram, which in this case is used in the same way as the Eastern mandala. According to Karl Gustav Jung mandalas were expressions of our collective subconscious. The centre of the mandala represented the self, which the subject tries to reach through the process of individuation...

  The mandala carries so many different meanings that it's impossible to focus on just one. An ancient symbol. Interpreted anew in every culture and every epoch in a different way.

  A bloody hieroglyph.

  Reggaeton beats tonelessly out from club Mandala. A few cars drive up. People get out and all gesture towards the field where the crime was committed.

  Not that that'll get in the way of their fun.

  Finally we get a call that's not completely useless. Cristiana Stoicescu was spotted in a few places in the area in the months leading up to her death.

  Malasana reads through the list as I drive:

  - "In mid-July she was seen in Atrio, a local restaurant, with a man. Then on another day at that crappy Desfiladero hotel with a pimp. And at Noom with an old codger flashing the cash."

  A garden awash with the soft sound of babbling fountains. Tall tables for having a drink outside. A tealight burning inside a red glass holder on every table. Romantic. Strains of classical music. Wealthy, polished atmosphere. Tucked away up on Carboneras Hill.

  A waiter dressed immaculately in all white greets us. He's thrown when we flash our badges and calls over the owner, a short, neatly dressed man who hurries to offer us a seat. His bald spot gleams in the low lights. He's as contained and precise as an orchestra director. He glances briefly at his watch, anxious for our interview to finish up before his first patrons arrive.

  We show him a photograph of Cristiana Stoicescu.

&n
bsp; - "Of course," he says, gently picking up the picture, "A real beauty. Such a shame. We phoned in. In case it was important. You never know."

  He gestures at the picture.

  - "She was here in July. We remembered her because of how beautiful she was. It was midweek."

  He shakes his head sadly.

  - "Who was she with?"

  - "We don't know him. We discussed it before you arrived. A man, fortysomething. Salt and pepper hair. Tall. Slim. Really nice guy. They complimented us on their meal. They really enjoyed it. And they liked the restaurant too. Though there wasn't much going on that night, not too busy. But that was better for them."

  - "Why?"

  - "He was married."

  He smiles and we know we don't need to ask.

  - "He was wearing a ring," he waves his left hand. "And it was obvious she wasn't his wife."

  - "Did he pay by card?"

  - "We've checked. He must have paid in cash. There were no card payments that night."

  - "Did you see his car?"