Now You See Me

by Sharon Bolton

  Smirk gone. I tilted my head back to look him in the eyes. ‘You thought I killed Geraldine Jones?’

  ‘Well, look at it from my point of view, Flint,’ he said, as I realized I was doing exactly that. ‘The Jones woman went to that estate to meet someone and it’s been your regular Friday-night hang-out for a while now. You weren’t on duty when Amanda Weston went missing, or when she was killed. You were late into work the morning Emma Boston’s flat was broken into. Circumstantially, you could have done it. You have a drugs history – yeah, I know, all minor stuff and a long time ago – and you also have a mysterious habit of running round Camden in the small hours.’

  Joesbury thought I’d killed Geraldine Jones? All the time I’d thought he was suspicious of my past, of my minor record with the police, he’d been investigating a potential killer? Who else had thought that about me? And what the hell had they found out?

  ‘Did you tell DI Tulloch?’ I asked, knowing my body had stiffened, my voice had become brittle and that I really couldn’t let him see how much what he’d just said had scared me.

  ‘Yep,’ said Joesbury, who wasn’t too keen to let me edge away. ‘She told me I was nuts, but if I could find any evidence that you’d had any past dealings with the Jones or the Weston families, or Samuel Cooper after he became our most wanted, she’d take me seriously.’

  ‘Did you?’ I asked, wondering when I’d stopped breathing.

  ‘Zilch,’ said Joesbury, his hand firm on my waist, not letting me go anywhere. ‘No evidence at all that Lacey Flint ever came across either family until the mothers were found dead. Or that she ever met Sam Cooper before this evening.’

  His one good hand left my waist and gently touched the underside of my chin. He was tilting my face up towards his. ‘And just so we’re clear,’ he said, when we made eye contact once more, ‘your Camden-based social life will be a problem for me.’

  The door to the room opened. Joesbury raised his head but otherwise didn’t move. I turned. A plump black nurse in green scrubs stood in the doorway. Behind her, a young, uniformed police constable.

  ‘You shouldn’t be up,’ she announced, stepping inside. ‘Come on now.’

  Joesbury let me go and the nurse crossed to the bed, peeling back the covers. She patted the mattress and her expression made it clear she was having no nonsense.

  ‘Say goodnight, big fella,’ she told Joesbury.

  Joesbury looked at his watch. ‘Good morning, beautiful,’ he said. And then he followed the nurse’s pointing finger and left the room.

  48

  Wednesday 19 September

  TWO DAYS AFTER I’D BEEN ADMITTED TO GUY’S, SAMUEL Cooper was pulled out of the river by the Marine Policing Unit. His body had become trapped beneath a pier just beyond the Blackwall Tunnel. I didn’t go anywhere near the mortuary at Horseferry Road where he was taken, but I saw a photograph some days later. The river is rarely kind to those who fall into its clutches and it hadn’t been easy on Cooper. His body had been torn and broken and shredded until it barely resembled a human form. I wouldn’t have known the scared, drug-crazed young man I’d fought with on Vauxhall Bridge just seconds before he nearly killed us both.

  His mother, Stacey, identified him from a small arrowhead tattoo in between his shoulder blades. Fingerprints confirmed that he was Samuel Cooper and the results of a DNA test told us, beyond any doubt, that it had been his semen in Amanda Weston’s pubic hair.

  I learned all this from a succession of visitors. Tulloch came a couple of times, so did Stenning, and a few of the girls from the unit. Emma Boston came the first day and, after clearing it with Tulloch, I gave her a short off-the-record interview.

  An admin officer from Scotland Yard brought me yet another mobile phone. The previous one had been ruined by the Thames but all my old details had been transferred. Gayle Mizon brought me grapes and managed to hold off eating more than half of them. Even DS Anderson came once.

  They told me that, thanks to a tip-off, they’d managed to track down where Cooper had been living, a tiny room three floors above a DVD rental shop in Acton. Amidst the squalor, the remnants of drug use and medication, they found Amanda Weston’s handbag.

  As soon as I heard that, I asked about the woman we’d heard he was living with. No sign of anyone else, I’d been told. Cooper had lived alone.

  They also found two more replica guns. The one Cooper had produced on the night we fell had disappeared, probably for ever, but it seemed a fairly safe bet I’d been right. It hadn’t been real.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Tulloch, when she came to see me. ‘Those things are very realistic.’

  ‘There was a robbery at a dealers in Southwark about six months ago,’ I said. ‘I did all the processing work. It was a Jericho 941, one of the more popular air pistols.’

  ‘It does help explain how he got Amanda Weston to the park,’ said Tulloch. She was perched on the edge of my bed. ‘You remember we saw footage of them walking together along the Grove Road.’

  I nodded, remembering that something about the footage had bothered me.

  ‘It looked as though she was going quite willingly, but if she thought he had a gun, well …’

  Tulloch was right. Most women, threatened with a gun, would do what they were told. Most women would not anticipate the horror that had lain in wait for Amanda in that park shed. Get a glimpse of that, and I think most might take their chances with a bullet.

  ‘Possibly even with Geraldine Jones, too,’ said Tulloch. ‘If he’d said, “Turn around, face that car,” she’d have expected a mugging and done it. I know I would.’

  I was silent for a moment. Tulloch had brought me a white orchid in a pot and I wondered if Joesbury had told her about my plant collection. He hadn’t been back to visit since that first morning, but the next day an anonymous parcel had arrived from a German company called Steiff. Inside I found a brown cuddly toy with a bright-red bow and an impossibly cute face. I had a teddy. I took my eyes away from where it was perched at the foot of my bed to look at Tulloch again.

  ‘He claimed he’d been set up,’ I said. ‘On the bridge, he said it was a fix.’

  ‘They all do, Lacey,’ she replied.

  I guessed she was right about that too. ‘Why did he do it?’ I asked her.

  ‘We may never know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’d been a serious drug user for a long time. The teachers we spoke to from his school report all sorts of behavioural difficulties. He was obviously someone who needed help and didn’t get it.’

  ‘But why those two women, why the Ripper stuff?’

  ‘We found a lot of Ripper books and memorabilia in his flat,’ said Tulloch. ‘Including a ticket for one of the Ripper tours. As to those two women, well, he could have known them. He hung around the school a lot. Maybe he had a big problem with people more privileged than him.’

  I nodded. It made some sense.

  Tulloch pulled a clear evidence bag out of her jacket pocket. There was something inside.

  ‘Lacey, we also found a photograph of you at his flat,’ she said, holding it out for me to see. ‘It’s a snapshot. Do you have any idea where or when it was taken?’

  I looked. I was on a London street, unlocking my car. Something had attracted my attention and I’d looked up. I was wearing a jacket I’d bought two years ago and jeans. I had no recollection of being photographed. I shook my head.

  ‘We’ve got people working on it,’ Tulloch said. ‘Once we pinpoint the location, we can use light and shadows apparently to estimate the time of year. There may even be CCTV footage available. We do need to know when he became fixated on you.’

  I sighed and leaned back against the pillows. ‘It’s really over then,’ I said. ‘We caught Jack the Ripper.’

  Tulloch stood up and smiled. ‘Oh, I think he decided for himself who was going to catch him.’

  Dana Tulloch became something of a celebrity in the days that followed. Against her own inclination but faced with clear
instructions from her superiors, she agreed to most interview requests. She was young, female and not entirely white. She ticked all the boxes. It was even suggested that I be put up for interview. From my hospital bed I refused on the grounds that notoriety so early in my career would be bad for it in the long term. I was commended with unusual wisdom for one so young.

  I was officially convalescing, but when I went into the office to collect some things, the investigation team gave me a standing ovation. I started to cry again and got hugged so much I think the buggers cracked another rib.

  I still looked like the back end of a bus, but most of the time I didn’t mind. Taking medication for the pain, I found myself sleeping better than I had for years. And when I woke up, a brown bear with a red bow was never far away on the pillow.

  On the first Saturday morning after my release from hospital, I made a slow and rather painful bus journey up to the South Bank. In one of the less trendy cafés, not too far from the river, I saw a thin, pale girl with dyed black hair, wearing sunglasses, even though the interior was quite dark. She didn’t look up as I approached her table, but I noticed a group of teenagers near by had spotted her. They were whispering to each other and I wondered how often she had to put up with that sort of crude and insensitive attention. The last couple of days, I’d learned a lot about how it felt to be stared at for the wrong reasons.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, when I was close enough. Emma Boston looked up and pushed her sunglasses on to the top of her head.

  ‘Fuck, you look rough,’ she said. Then she suddenly grinned at me, showing surprisingly white teeth for a heavy smoker.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Join the freak show.’

  I sat. I’d never seen her smile before.

  ‘You OK?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. ‘Getting there.’

  The waitress came over and I ordered coffee and cheese on toast. Emma asked for a refill.

  ‘I liked that article you wrote,’ I said, when we were alone again. I wasn’t bullshitting or flattering her. The piece based on the interview she’d done with me in hospital, and a subsequent one with Tulloch, had appeared in the features section of one of the broadsheets two days after my night in the Thames. It had gone beyond simple reporting to ask some fairly basic questions about what drives men to kill violently.

  ‘I’m a good journalist,’ she said, almost defiantly.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thanks for keeping my name out of it.’

  She gave a little nod. ‘So what’s new?’ she asked me. ‘I take it you didn’t invite me here to become your new best mate. Any progress on finding that woman Cooper was supposedly living with? His mum told me she never met her. Mind you, she hadn’t seen Sam himself for a while.’

  ‘Actually, it’s nothing to do with the Ripper case,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I may have another story for you. If you’re up for a bit of controversy, that is.’

  She gave a slow, sly smile. At that moment I heard the door again and turned round. Three young black girls were looking across at our table. I got up and went to meet them.

  ‘What happened to you?’ asked Rona.

  ‘Fight with a river barge,’ I said. ‘Thanks for coming. Hello, Tia.’

  Rona’s twelve-year-old sister, a smaller, slimmer, even prettier version of Rona herself, smiled shyly at me.

  ‘This is Rebecca,’ said Rona, indicating the other girl. ‘She’s a friend of mine. She’s been through it too.’

  ‘It was good of you all to come,’ I said. ‘Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.

  The piece Emma wrote about Rona and her friends and the problem of gang rape in south London appeared eight days later. The front page of the Sunday Times review section showed a picture of a young black girl staring sadly out across the Thames. It was a library shot – all the girls who’d contributed to Emma’s story remained anonymous – but it spoke volumes about being young, black, female and afraid in London.

  The accompanying story pulled no punches and certainly didn’t make for comfortable Sunday-morning reading. The Met weren’t criticized as such, Emma had spoken to the head of the Sapphire Units and had included her comments, but the article did ask significant questions about whether the authorities were letting down vulnerable sectors of society, simply by refusing to confront uncomfortable truths.

  Shortly after it appeared, Emma phoned to tell me that the Sunday Times had commissioned a follow-up story, this time talking to community leaders and schools. There was even talk of the article being submitted for an award.

  I started to get something of a social life during the last few days of September. The day after the inquest into Amanda Weston’s death, the team insisted I join them bowling and to my amazement I didn’t argue. My ribs weren’t up to active participation but I sat at the side and tried not to laugh too much.

  A few days later, we went for a curry in a little café off Brick Lane where you have to take your own beer. That time Joesbury joined us, his arm still in a sling. He didn’t speak to me all evening, but more than once, when I looked up, I caught his eye. And I couldn’t help wonder whether the brown bear and I might find ourselves with company one of these nights.

  And then, on 1 October, over a hundred years after Elizabeth Stride died in the yard behind Berner Street, my happy new existence came to an abrupt end.

  49

  Monday 1 October

  CHARLOTTE BENN IS LYING ON THE KING-SIZE BED OF THE master bedroom. The wrong way round. Her feet, still in the shoes she was wearing when she answered the door, are on the pillow. Her husband’s pillow. He won’t like coming home and finding it dented. Charlotte had made the bed already, pulling the bottom sheet tight at the corners, smoothing out creases, plumping up the quilt and pillows, folding the throw, arranging the silk cushions carefully. She’s going to have to do it all again when this is over.

  ‘Can I sit up?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ replies the voice.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she says.

  No answer.

  ‘This throw won’t wash,’ Charlotte says. ‘I’ll have to dry-clean it.’

  ‘Nice room,’ says the voice. ‘Did you do it yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Charlotte, although she hadn’t. She’d used a very expensive interior designer that one of her friends had recommended. ‘I chose everything,’ she continues. ‘I spent weeks on it.’

  ‘Nice use of neutrals,’ says the voice in her ear. ‘Are they your favourites? Neutral colours, I mean?’

  ‘There’s money in the house,’ says Charlotte. ‘In the safe downstairs. A couple of hundred pounds, I think. I can tell you the p:204 combination. It’s six, seven, three …’ She can hear a rustling noise directly behind her. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about morality,’ the voice says. ‘Is it absolute, do you think? Or can it shift? Don’t move, or I’ll blow your head off.’

  Charlotte forces herself to remain still. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says. ‘I think you’re confusing me with someone else.’ She’s starting to cry and wonders if mascara will stain the throw.

  ‘If someone you loved committed a terrible crime,’ says the voice, ‘what would you do? Would you stand by them, no matter what the consequences to anyone else?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want with me.’ Tears are trickling down the side of her face, the first has reached her ear. She wants to brush it away but daren’t move.

  ‘This really is a nice room,’ says the voice. ‘Although I’m not fond of neutrals myself.’

  As fingers wrap themselves around Charlotte’s hair, music starts to play, an old-fashioned tune that Charlotte thinks she knows but can’t quite place. In spite of the threat, she starts to pull herself up and then stops. Something is touching her throat. She glances to one side, sees the white-clad arm bent at the elbow.

  ‘I have to be somewhere in an hour,’ whimpers Charlotte, and the knife at her throat tremble
s against her skin.

  ‘Yes, so do I,’ says the voice. ‘And they say time flies when you’re having fun.’

  The knife tip presses deeper. Charlotte is panting. Suddenly her body can’t suck in air fast enough.

  ‘Red’s always been my favourite colour,’ says the voice, as Julie Andrews starts to sing about raindrops. ‘I think what this room needs is a few accents of red.’

  50

  I WAS AT WORK WHEN WE GOT THE CALL. SHORTLY AFTER lunch, I’d gone into the incident room to check something with Mizon. As I approached her desk, the phone rang and she put down her sandwich to take the call. She and I were alone in the room, at least half the other team members had been assigned to new tasks. When she put the phone down, there was a crease line in the centre of her forehead.

  ‘That was Westminster CID,’ she said. ‘They’ve been called out to Victoria Library on Buckingham Palace Road. Someone’s left a clear plastic bag with what looks like a body part in it.’

  I heard all the words clearly enough. I’m just not sure I processed them.

  ‘Is DI Tulloch in, do you know?’ she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she picked up the phone again. I didn’t hear what she said.

  Behind me, the door opened and DS Anderson came in.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said, looking from Mizon to me. Mizon put the phone down and quickly filled him in. He picked up his own phone. Within minutes the room began filling up. Several people looked at me for an explanation. I shook my head.

  Tulloch came in and walked straight to the front of the room.

  ‘Everyone shut up,’ she called. Normally, when spoken to like that, coppers will react. It was a measure of how tense everyone was feeling that they met Tulloch’s order with silence.

  ‘It may be nothing to do with us,’ she said. ‘Cooper was our killer and he is dead.’

  She was right, she had to be.