Boston wrote down her address and phone numbers for me. I took a last sip of Coke and left the pub. I went home, and some dozen years back in time.
16
MY BEDROOM AS A TEENAGER WAS NOTHING LIKE THE plain, half-empty room I sleep in now. My old room was piled high with books: crammed into shelves, balanced on chests, falling off the wardrobe, even stuffed under the bed. I’d owned so many books at one time, lots of them crime novels, most of them accounts of true crime. If I’d ever appeared on Mastermind, violent crime could have been my specialist subject.
I’d been home only a few minutes, but my flat seemed to have grown warmer, and too small. As if the walls had moved a few inches closer together. I needed air. Outside, I walked to the jasmine that pours over the wall from the neighbouring garden. I breathed in deeply, sucking in the soft, sweet scent as though it might clear my head a little, bring me back out of the past.
It wasn’t working. I’d gone back twelve, maybe fourteen years, to a history class at school. I’d been bored, doodling in my exercise book, whispering to the girl next to me. I remember the teacher fixing me with a weak-eyed stare. She’d been a little afraid of me, that teacher, but every now and again she’d get the urge to face her demons. ‘So do you have a favourite character from history?’ she’d asked me.
I’d been listening with half an ear, I’ve always been able to do that, and I’d heard my classmates name Oliver Cromwell, Leonardo da Vinci, Elizabeth the First, Einstein.
‘Jack the Ripper,’ I’d replied without missing a beat and the class had fallen about laughing. The teacher had blinked twice and, with more courage than normal, had made me explain why. So I did. I told her and the class about the arrogance and the misery of Victorian London and about a killer who’d changed the way we think about human evil. I told them about the fear that spread through the East End like a Victorian pea souper and the glee with which people watched the helplessness of the police.
And I told them my own particular theory about Jack. How, if I were right, over a century later, the killer (or the killer’s ghost) was probably still laughing at us.
I’d wiped it all out of my mind until now. I’d honestly forgotten that, once, I’d named my favourite character from history as Jack the Ripper. And now a letter, signed with one of his pseudonyms, had linked me with Friday night’s murder.
17
I WALKED INTO THE NAG’S HEAD TO FIND STENNING AND A few others from the MIT crowded around a fruit machine. I recognized Tom Barrett, the DC who’d sat and watched footage with me for several hours earlier that day. Stenning spotted me and came over, nearly sending a table filled with drinks flying.
‘Shit, Flint,’ he said, when he was close enough. ‘What did you do to yourself?’
Men! I’d loosened my hair, put on a bit of make-up and changed into jeans and a top that fitted me properly. I’d done very little, in fact, but I learned when I was a teenager how tiny the difference can be between a woman nobody notices, and one whom everybody does. Most of the time, especially at work, I prefer to be invisible. Plain clothes worn a size too big, no make-up, heavy glasses that I don’t actually need and hair swept tightly back. I don’t speak without something to say and, until I became an unwilling player in a murder investigation, I’d have bet most people at Southwark nick wouldn’t have had a clue who I was. When I go out in the evening, I look very different.
I wouldn’t normally have made any sort of effort to meet work colleagues. Hell, I wouldn’t normally meet work colleagues socially, but I’d changed earlier in readiness for a night out and after Emma’s visit and the whole Jack the Ripper stuff I’d been too keyed up to stay indoors any longer.
‘Did you just get back from Chiswick?’ I asked, when we were settled at the bar. ‘Was she definitely Geraldine Jones?’
‘Officially, we still haven’t confirmed identity,’ he replied.
‘Unofficially?’
‘Unofficially, there were photographs in the house,’ he said. ‘It’s her. And the au pair says she hasn’t seen Mrs Jones since Friday morning. She thought perhaps she’d changed her mind and gone away with Mr Jones and his eldest son. They’re on a golf weekend near Bath. Or at least they were. They should be back by now. DI Tulloch stayed behind to talk to him when he arrived.’
‘And take him to identify the body?’
Stenning nodded.
‘Any idea what she was doing in that part of London?’ I asked, as the pub door opened and a familiar tall figure came in. Shit.
‘We did a basic search of the house,’ Stenning was saying. ‘The au pair couldn’t tell us much, she seemed pretty freaked out having so many police in the house. But nothing out of the ordinary that we could see. No plastic bags of cocaine in the cistern. On the surface, it seems to be a perfectly ordinary, upper-middle-class London family. He’s something senior in insurance, she worked part-time at a gallery. Two sons, one a junior doctor, the other at university.’
‘What about the youngest son?’ I said. ‘If the oldest is with his dad, where’s he?’
‘He’s travelling,’ said Stenning. ‘Due back in a couple of days, just in time to go back to uni.’
Joesbury was on his way over. Shit and corruption.
‘Evening, Flint,’ he said, as he reached the bar and walked further than he needed to in order to stand at my side. ‘What’ll you both have?’
Two hours later, I still hadn’t mentioned my visit from Emma Boston. On the one hand, I knew I really had to. On the other, the most senior officer present was Joesbury and I was very reluctant to get into wild and wonderful theories abut nineteenth-century serial killers in front of him until I was a bit more sure of my facts. If he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, he’d want details I didn’t have after all this time. I think I was just plucking up the courage to say something when he took a phone call from Tulloch and left. Shortly afterwards, the group broke up.
And it really hadn’t helped that everyone else seemed to consider him the best thing since Mr Warburton had invented the slicing machine. For most of the evening, he’d been entertaining the group with stories of his undercover work.
‘So there I am,’ he’d been saying at one point, ‘in this police minibus, under arrest with a whole load of Tottenham fans, and I spotted a megaphone on the floor. So I picked it up and started giving it the verbal out the window and what do you think they all said to me: “Shut up, you’ll get us in trouble.”’
The group had fallen about laughing. I’d forced a polite smile when I realized Joesbury was looking my way and felt yet another stab of guilt. This was a murder investigation. I had information that might be important.
After Stenning, who’d insisted on driving me home, roared away, I hurried down the steps. Quick check of the under-stairs space and then inside. The neatly made bed I could see through the open door had never looked more inviting, but it would have to wait. Instead I pulled the blind down, opened my laptop, typed Jack the Ripper murders into the search engine …
… and became that teenage girl again, head stuffed with information about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders of the late nineteenth century.
In 1888, the year after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, a serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, preying upon those least able to protect themselves. Jack’s victims were ‘unfortunates’, if you were Victorian and polite. If you were less so – if you were Jack himself, for example – they were whores. Middle-aged, alcoholic, homeless prostitutes who sold their bodies to strangers several times nightly for the price of a glass of gin.
There were eleven Whitechapel murders in all, starting in April 1888 and concluding in February 1891. The last few months of 1888, when the majority had taken place, had become known as the Autumn of Terror. At one time, I could have quoted victims’ names, dates of death, details of injuries inflicted and locations of bodies. At ten minutes past one in the morning, I closed my eyes and found I stil
l could.
Jack had been a killer ahead of his time, I realized that night, looking at the case again with grown-up, professional eyes. In the nineteenth century, someone who struck at random and without motive was something quite new. The police at the time had been close to helpless.
One reaction I’d had as a teenager remained the same. The most puzzling and the most frightening aspect of the murders had been Jack’s ability to arrive from nowhere and disappear without trace. Many of the murders took place within yards of crowded lodging houses or major thoroughfares, but he moved silently and invisibly.
Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the murders ceased. Jack vanished, leaving behind one of the most enduring murder mysteries the world has ever known.
I sat back a while, thinking, trying to make a connection between what had taken place in Victorian London and the murder I’d come close to witnessing twenty-four hours ago.
To my considerable relief, I couldn’t do it. Married to a wealthy man, with a family, a nice home, a job, Geraldine Jones was the direct opposite of the women Jack had preyed upon. The original victims had been chosen at random, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Geraldine must have been in that part of London for a reason. And Kennington was a long way from Whitechapel.
Admittedly, Jones’s injuries were very similar to those inflicted on more than one Ripper victim, but 31 August didn’t even mark the anniversary of the first Whitechapel killing. The death of Polly Nichols that day had been the third murder. The first, that of Emma Smith, had been early in April 1888 and the second, Martha Tabram, on 7 August.
Something was still bothering me though. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Determined to leave no stone unturned, I checked whether there’d been other murders in London earlier in the year, specifically the first two weeks of April and August. I couldn’t access the Met’s computers from home but I searched the various news sites that cover events in and around the capital.
Nothing. There’d been a shooting on 5 August but the man in question, a nineteen-year-old of Grenadian origin, was recovering in hospital. Nothing in early April. There was no connection. So why couldn’t I just go to bed?
Even the similar mode of death meant nothing. The original Ripper hadn’t stuck to one modus operandi, his methods had evolved, even changed completely. There was no copycat. The letter sent to Emma Boston was a daft prank, possibly even the work of Emma herself to get an inside track on the investigation. I’d had it.
I printed off a couple of pages of summary information that I could use to brief the team the next day, closed the laptop and double-checked the front door. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I probably needed a stronger lock on it. Not something I’d ever worried about before. I picked up the printed sheets, meaning to put them in my bag ready for the morning. I was halfway across the bedroom when I caught site of the sub-heading halfway down the first page. A single word that stopped me in my tracks. Canonical.
Eleven Whitechapel murders. Few people, if any, believed them all to have been the work of Jack the Ripper. Experts argued endlessly about who had and who hadn’t been a true Ripper victim. Emma Smith, almost certainly not. Martha Tabram, the jury was still out on. Personally, I was inclined to think probably not. Her injuries, multiple stab wounds from some sort of bayonet, were very different to the murders that followed. Polly Nichols, on the other hand, number three, nobody doubted. Killed on the last day of August 1888, she’d been the first victim that just about everyone agreed was a true Ripper killing. She had been the first of the canonical five.
The bedside clock told me it was three o’clock in the morning. I’ve said already that London is never quiet. It was then. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not the traffic outside, not people in the flats upstairs, not even the sound of my own breathing.
The 31 August, the night Geraldine Jones had been killed, marked the anniversary of the first, undisputed Ripper murder. I checked the notes. Her injuries were practically identical to those inflicted on Polly Nichols and whoever killed Geraldine had disappeared without a trace.
I was going to have to wake up Tulloch and Joesbury, probably with the same phone call. Wasn’t that going to make me popular?
18
Sunday 2 September
‘WHY DIDN’T YOU MENTION THIS EARLIER?’ ASKED Joesbury. It was an hour later, just coming up for four in the morning, and he was standing behind Tulloch’s desk, leaning over her shoulder, both of them staring down at the letter that Emma, true to her word, had scanned and emailed to me at work.
‘I wanted to be sure,’ I replied, knowing how feeble an excuse it sounded. ‘I needed time to do some reading.’ Feeble as hell, but still a whole lot better than ‘I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself in front of you.’
Tulloch looked like she was struggling not to yawn. ‘Did you see the original?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘The handwriting is red?’ she asked. ‘Please tell me it’s somewhere safe.’
‘Emma wouldn’t give it to me,’ I answered. ‘But she seems to be looking after it. She has it in clear plastic. Saved the envelope as well. And I’m pretty certain the writing is in red ink.’
‘That smudge on the bottom corner doesn’t look like ink,’ said Joesbury. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us about this in the pub?’
‘Mark, back off,’ sighed Tulloch. ‘You know as well as I do the switchboard’s been jammed with crank calls since Friday night.’ She looked at me again. ‘I know nothing about Jack the Ripper,’ she said. ‘What did you say the five murders were called? The ones that are supposed to be the work of the Ripper?’
‘Canonical,’ I said.
‘What does that mean? It sounds religious.’
‘Conforming to the established order,’ replied Joesbury. ‘Reducing things to their simplest form.’
Tulloch looked blank. ‘I still don’t …’
‘Nobody really knows why they’re called that,’ I said. ‘It’s just tradition among people who describe themselves as Ripperologists. Five of the murders, between August and December, are called the canonical five.’
Joesbury raised an eyebrow. His right eye was still bloodshot. ‘How do you know so much about Jack the Ripper?’ he asked.
I didn’t tell him Jack was my favourite character from history. Somehow, I doubted that would go down too well. ‘I told you I’m interested in criminals,’ I said. ‘I always have been. Isn’t that why lots of people join the police?’
‘And the first of the canonical five was called Polly?’ Tulloch asked. ‘Are you sure about that?’
I nodded. ‘Strictly speaking, her name was Mary Ann,’ I said. ‘But everybody knew her as Polly.’
Tulloch shot a glance at Joesbury. He stared back at her for a second and then shrugged.
‘Why is that …?’ I began.
Tulloch waved me to be silent as she picked up the phone and dialled an internal extension. ‘Find the record of all calls coming into the switchboard since Friday,’ she ordered. ‘Have somebody do a count-up of how many mention Jack the Ripper. Yes, you heard me, Jack the Ripper. I need it now.’
She put the phone down and looked at me again. She opened her mouth, but Joesbury got in first.
‘Didn’t the original Ripper send letters?’ he asked. ‘Taunted the police with them, from what I can remember.’
‘Lots of letters were sent at the time,’ I said. ‘Not just to the police, but to newspapers as well. Even private citizens. They’re generally believed to be fakes. Not actually from the killer.’
‘I saw a film once. Didn’t one have a body part in it?’ asked Joesbury. He was leaning back against the window ledge now. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘the Ripper turned out to be Queen Victoria’s grandson.’
‘Someone did send a human kidney to the head of one of the vigilante groups,’ I said. ‘In a letter described as coming “From Hell”. And one of the victims was missing a kidney. But at the time, there was no way to es
tablish whether it was really hers or just another prank.’
‘Geraldine Jones wasn’t missing any body parts,’ said Tulloch.
‘Whoever killed Geraldine Jones didn’t have time to take souvenirs,’ replied Joesbury. ‘DC Flint saw to that. I think we need to see these letters. Come on, Flint, you seem to be our resident Ripperologist, find us a website.’
It wasn’t easy with Tulloch and Joesbury breathing down my neck, but after a few false starts, I found the site I was looking for. It dealt specifically with the hundreds of Ripper letters.
Text at the top explained what I’d already told Tulloch and Joesbury, that most of the ‘Ripper’ letters were considered fakes, either the work of journalists trying to stir up a story or of fools intent on wasting police time. Just three, according to the site, may have been genuine.
The first of these, the infamous Dear Boss letter, had been sent to the Central News Agency on 27 September 1888 and had been the first to use the term ‘Jack the Ripper’; the second was a postcard, in similar handwriting to the Dear Boss letter and referring to details of the crimes that, supposedly, only the killer would be in a position to know; the third had been the From Hell letter that accompanied the human kidney.
The phone rang just as I was pulling one of them up on the screen. As Tulloch answered it, her face seemed to tighten. She muttered her thanks and put the phone down.
‘Six callers mentioned the date as that of one of the Ripper murders,’ she said.
‘You need to see this, Tully,’ said Joesbury, who’d been staring at the screen. He lifted my hand from the mouse and enlarged the image. Written in rather elegant copperplate hand, it was the letter of the 27 September 1888, the one sent to The Boss of the Central News Agency. We read it together, Joesbury speaking the words in a just audible voice. Before we were halfway through, I was feeling sick.
Dear Boss
Now You See Me Page 6
