I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron give me such fits. I am down on whores and I won’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope. Ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp. I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
Mark Joesbury picked up a pink highlighter pen from Tulloch’s desk and started highlighting words and phrases on the letter Emma Boston had emailed to me earlier that morning. I keep on hearing … How I have laughed … clever … on the right track … lady … squeal … clip … ears off … funny little games … proper red stuff.
In the short note pushed through Emma’s front door in the early hours of Saturday morning, twenty-two words had been directly lifted from the original letter. When he’d finished going through it, Joesbury drew a big circle round the misspelling of Emma Boston’s name. Dear Miss Bosston.
‘Christ,’ muttered Tulloch.
‘Bastard’s sent us a Dear Boss letter,’ said Joesbury, in case one of us hadn’t got it. From the look on Tulloch’s face, and the ache at the back of my jaw that usually means I’m about to vomit, it seemed fair to say we both had.
Tulloch looked at me. ‘Do you have her address?’ she said.
I nodded, fished around in my bag for the note I’d made and handed it over. Tulloch headed for the door.
‘Dana, you don’t have to go yourself,’ Joesbury began.
Tulloch turned, glanced at me and then spoke to Joesbury. ‘Do not let her out of your sight,’ she told him, before disappearing.
19
FOR A FEW SECONDS NEITHER OF US SPOKE. JOESBURY WAS right behind me, close enough for me to hear his breathing. To get out of the room I’d have to leap over the desk and run for it, or turn and face him. I think I was half bracing myself for the jump when he spoke.
‘If you were on my team, you’d be on suspension by now.’
Maybe if I didn’t move, didn’t speak, he might get bored and leave himself.
‘You had that note at eight o’clock last night,’ he said. ‘You were in the company of half the officers on the case for three hours after that. It’s nearly four a.m. now and we’ve lost eight hours. You know how critical that is.’
He wasn’t being fair. High-profile murder cases always attract crank calls and anonymous notes, weird conspiracy theories and attention-seekers. To follow up on all of them would require resources no investigation team could dream of. We make judgement calls. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes not. I’d half suspected Emma of writing the letter herself to get my attention and trick me into revealing some juicy detail.
Which might still be the case. Emma could have copied the original Dear Boss letter. I found myself really hoping she had. In the meantime, I had to get out of the room with some shred of dignity. I turned.
Joesbury’s tan seemed to be fading. Maybe he was just tired. The scarring around his eye looked more livid, if anything. He was wearing a loose blue cotton shirt and he’d rolled up the cuffs. The hairs on his wrist were a soft golden brown.
‘What’s the Polly connection?’ I asked, without thinking. ‘The name Polly meant something to you and DI Tulloch. What?’
He shook his head. He still hadn’t shaved. Like most British men, his beard stubble was a mixture of brown, blond and red. There were even tiny grey hairs.
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I said. ‘You can’t insist I have nothing to do with the investigation, then give me a right royal bollocking because I don’t respond to something immediately. If I’d known about the Polly thing, whatever it is, I would have said something earlier. Although, admittedly, I’d have missed the very great pleasure of dragging you and DI Tulloch out of bed.’
A flash of something that could have been anger, but actually looked more like surprise, crossed his face.
‘Shut the door,’ he said.
Suddenly nervous, I did what he said and stayed right up against it.
‘The knife that killed Geraldine Jones was a bog-standard kitchen knife, the sort you can buy in cooking shops and department stores just about everywhere,’ he said. ‘The team are trying to trace it back to where it was bought, but as several hundred seem to be made and sold every week, they’re not too hopeful.’
I nodded, with no clue where this was going.
‘The knife was unusual in one respect,’ he went on. ‘Five letters had been etched into the blade, along the cutting edge, just a centimetre below the handle. Five letters making up a name.’
‘Polly,’ I said.
He inclined his head. ‘And if you repeat it to anyone I will throttle you myself.’
An hour later I’d bitten my tongue so many times I could taste blood. Joesbury had decided, in Tulloch’s absence, that we had to know as much as possible about the original Ripper murders and that I would be in charge of research.
We were in the incident room and he’d cleared one of the walls for Ripper information. I’d been told to have a file ready on each of the victims, paying particular attention to post-mortem reports of their injuries.
To his credit, I suppose, he was helping. He’d found a massive street map of Whitechapel and had fixed eleven small flags to indicate the locations of the original murders. The canonical five were red, the others yellow. He’d printed out internet photographs of the victims, all of them taken after death. These too had been put on the wall and I found myself looking, for the first time in years, at Polly Nichols. She’d been forty-five, small, dumpy, scruffily dressed and in poor health. It was hard to imagine two women more different than she and Geraldine Jones.
When I’d questioned the point of the map, given that Geraldine Jones hadn’t been killed anywhere near Whitechapel, Joesbury said he wanted me to give a presentation on the Ripper murders to the whole team as soon as they got in.
As the night drifted away and the sun dragged itself up, people began to arrive. News of a breakthrough spread quickly and the incident room filled up. Joesbury’s mortuary photographs proved something of a hit. I was halfway through a compilation of the various eye-witness reports (surprisingly few, given how heavily populated nineteenth-century Whitechapel had been) when Tulloch and Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson came in.
‘That is one ugly-looking woman,’ muttered Anderson, before crossing to the coffee machine. ‘If I’d had breakfast I’d have brought it up.’
DS Anderson was no oil painting himself, with thinning red hair and a receding chin line. And a personalized programme at the local gym wouldn’t have hurt. I looked down quickly when he caught me watching at him.
‘The letter sent to the freelance journalist Emma Boston has gone over to Forensics,’ Tulloch said, speaking to the team at large. ‘They’ve promised to give it top priority. Neil and I have had a good chat with Miss Boston, but she hasn’t been able to tell us anything new. The letter arrived some time early yesterday morning. She and her boyfriend went through recordings of our conversations on Friday night and realized DC Flint was directly involved in the murder. She ferreted out her home address and approached her last night.’
‘Is she still here?’ I asked.
Tulloch nodded. ‘I don’t want her going home until we’ve had chance to properly turn over her flat. She’s not happy, but I can live with that.’
An avuncular-looking s
ergeant I remembered from the pub the previous night, who seemed to be called George, had been looking at Joesbury’s artwork on the walls. ‘Are we taking this Ripper business seriously then?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it’s just the date, that’s all.’
‘Let me be very clear,’ said Tulloch, in a voice you could probably strip paint with. ‘I don’t want anyone even thinking the name Jack the Ripper outside this room until we have the forensic report on the letter. In the meantime, we need to know as much as we can about what we’re dealing with.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ said Joesbury. ‘Because DC Flint’s been working on a presentation since the small hours. Take it away, Flint.’
I turned to him in dismay. ‘It’s nowhere near ready.’
‘We’ll take a work in progress,’ he said.
I realized how tempting it could be, in certain circumstances, to stick a knife in someone’s gut.
‘Tell us what you can, Lacey,’ said Tulloch. ‘Just take your time.’
Everyone was looking at me. There was no getting out of it. And this might be my best chance to win back some credibility, with Tulloch at least. So I took a deep breath, went over to the flip chart, and told my new colleagues the story of the most notorious killer who ever lived.
20
‘JACK THE RIPPER WAS A REAL MAN,’ I BEGAN. ‘BUT HE’S become a myth. And that makes summarizing the case hard because the first thing you have to do is separate the known facts from the legend.’
Tulloch pulled a chair out from under a desk, Joesbury crossed the room and stood behind her. I was suddenly conscious that I was still in the ‘look at me’ clothes I’d worn to go to the pub the night before. And that the entire MIT was now doing exactly that. So much for low-profile girl.
‘It’s been over a hundred years since the murders took place,’ I went on, ‘and thousands of people all over the world have been drawn into the puzzle. Going right back to the time of the murders, facts got misreported, quite often by the press, sometimes by the police, but then those mistakes were repeated until they became accepted as facts.’
Chairs were being scraped across the tiled floor as people settled themselves down. Over twenty officers, all senior to me, listening to what I had to say.
‘Over the years, books were written based on errors, and then more books, based on the flawed books,’ I said. ‘Senior police officers who’d been involved with the case got to the end of their careers and wrote memoirs. To make them sell, they’d include their own pet theories about who Jack might have been. But quite often, these theories bear no relation to what the officers who worked on the cases actually thought.’
Tulloch wrote something down on a notepad.
‘Misunderstandings have been perpetuated time and time again,’ I said. ‘There are thousands of websites dedicated to the murders, dozens of books, films, documentaries. Tourists go on guided walks around Whitechapel, looking at the sites of the murders and hearing someone describe what happened.’
‘I’ve been on one of those,’ said Tom Barrett from the back of the room. ‘I had a girlfriend loved that sort of thing. I couldn’t wait to get to the pub.’
I smiled at him, grateful for the interruption. It gave me a chance to get my breath. Since I’d started speaking everyone in the room had been listening hard. Even here, I realized, amongst people for whom murder and violence were regular occurrences, Jack could still weave his spell.
‘So, if you’re going to make any sort of accurate analysis of what went on,’ I said, ‘you have to ignore all these secondary sources and go right back to the original documentation. The reports of the constables and the police surgeons who were there at the time, the inquest reports, witness statements, photographs. There isn’t much to go on, but unless you focus on the primary-source information alone, you’re going to go wrong. Does that make any sort of sense?’
‘Perfect sense,’ said Tulloch and I saw a couple of other people nodding their heads.
Slightly encouraged, I went on. ‘There were nine murders in Whitechapel in 1888 and early 1889,’ I said, turning to Joesbury’s wall map. ‘A couple more a few months later. The victims were all prostitutes, most were middle-aged and in very unfortunate circumstances. They weren’t good-looking, they weren’t even healthy. They were the most vulnerable of all because they were the ones no one really cared about.’
Only DS Anderson wasn’t looking at me, he was leaning back in his chair and gazing at the wall. He was listening, though, I could tell by his stillness.
‘Mainly because of the injuries inflicted on the victims,’ I went on, ‘people generally agree that just five of the murders were definitely the work of one man. The first of these took place on 31 August 1888.’ I stopped. The air conditioning in the room was quite harsh and my throat was starting to feel uncomfortable.
‘Go on, Lacey,’ said Tulloch, with something like impatience in her voice. Joesbury moved out of my line of sight.
‘Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly Nichols, was found at 3.40 a.m. in a dark alleyway called Bucks Row,’ I said. ‘She was probably still alive when she was found, but she’d died by the time a surgeon arrived. She was taken to the mortuary, where a post-mortem was carried out. There were two deep incisions on her throat. Both carotid arteries and tissue down to the vertebrae had been cut. The cuts were made with what the police doctor called a strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp and used with great violence. There were also several incisions on her abdomen, made by a knife stabbing violently downwards.’
I stopped and swallowed hard.
‘The doctor thought that the attacker must have had some anatomical knowledge because he attacked all the major organs,’ I said. ‘This, incidentally, is the almost throwaway remark that led to the theory that Jack was a surgeon. The doctor concluded that the murder could have been committed in just four or five minutes.’
Around me several eyebrows raised. Then Joesbury appeared in front of me with a glass of water in his hand. Without making eye contact, he held it out and I took it.
‘One of the phrases you’ll hear often about the Ripper,’ I said, after a couple of gulps, ‘is “without a trace”. Because that’s how he worked.The police at the time searched the area around Bucks Row thoroughly and found nothing. There were people sleeping yards from where Polly was killed and they didn’t hear a sound. When she was found, she was still alive, even with those terrible injuries, so the killer could only just have left. Nobody saw anything.’
‘Sounds a hell of a lot like what happened on Friday night,’ said Stenning from his desk by the window.
For a moment no one spoke.
‘On the other hand, Kennington is a long way from Whitechapel, Geraldine Jones was not a prostitute and she wasn’t killed in the small hours,’ said Mark Joesbury. ‘Let’s not get carried away just yet. When did he strike again, Flint?’
‘Hold on a second,’ said Tulloch. ‘Can I just—’
There was knock on the door. Everyone’s head turned. I didn’t know the man who was standing on the other side, but Tulloch got up and nodded at him.
‘We’ll take a break,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Lacey.’
Back at the temporary desk I’d been assigned, I tried to find out a bit more about Emma Boston. None of the online directories of journalists listed her. She wasn’t a member of the National Union of Journalists, nor could I find her byline in the archives of any of the national or bigger regional papers. I did, though, find several references to her on the unofficial and anonymous police blogging community.
Emma Boston had upset more than one of my colleagues in her short career as a journalist in the capital. According to Dave of Dagenham, a much-followed police blog, she was a loose-tongued bitch, as physically repulsive as she was morally repellent, who lied for a living and would sell her granny’s puppy if it earned her a few quid. Another blogger suggested she had a drugs habit and recommended regular raids of the slum she called home.
The clock crept towards noon a
nd Stenning popped his head round the door to say that the team were off to the nearby pub for a late breakfast/early lunch. I shook my head when he asked me to join them, mainly because I’d caught sight of Joesbury leaving the building with the others. There was just something about that man that unsettled me.
Instead I bought sandwiches, crisps and bottled water from the canteen before making my way down to the interview suite.
‘Hi,’ I said, as I pushed open the door.
‘How long are you going to keep me here?’ Time in police custody had done nothing to improve Emma Boston’s appearance. She seemed to have lost even more colour from her skin and her spots stood out red and livid. She still wore her sunglasses, even though the room had no daylight.
‘It’s necessary,’ I said, sitting down and offering her first choice of the sandwiches. ‘We need to find out who wrote that letter. If he left any trace at your flat, we need it.’
‘He pushed it through the letterbox,’she answered.‘Any trace he left would be on the front door. You’re trying to prove I wrote it myself.’
No point arguing. ‘Well, we need to rule that out,’ I said. ‘Did anyone offer you lunch?’
‘I didn’t write it.’
‘I know,’ I said, realizing that I really didn’t think Emma was a liar. ‘But if it’s genuine, you have to be very careful. Whoever killed Geraldine Jones picked you out. He knows where you live.’
We both thought about that for a second.
‘Have a sandwich,’ I said.
‘Actually, somebody did …’ Boston shrugged and pulled a wrapped tuna sandwich towards her, looked at it and screwed up her nose.
‘The canteen’s not at its best at the weekend,’ I said, just as the door opened behind me. I turned my head to see Joesbury in the doorway, a large Prêt A Manger bag under one arm. He gave me a sharp look that lasted a nanosecond and then turned to Emma. Who’d taken off her sunglasses to look directly at him. She had the most beautiful hazel-brown eyes.
Now You See Me Page 7
