She was sure that was probably bollocks but, God, she wanted to see those files. If only she had the million pounds that would be needed for a starting bid.
None of these Ripper items would have been illegal to own, although probably illegal to obtain originally. But they were hidden away on here, furtively removed from the righteous wrath of public opinion. Here they could be bought and sold without judgement. Except maybe the judgement that approved of it.
Each succeeding item sickened her more than the one before. Both the murders and murderers they were associated with and the trade in them. It was a cesspit.
She put in ‘Scotland’ and searched. And wished she hadn’t.
Manuel. Atto. Tobin. Child killer Robert Black. Archibald Hall, the monster butler. Angus Sinclair, the World’s End killer. Personal items, victims’ clothing, even bloodied murder weapons. Things she never knew existed, even though she’d been involved in cases involving two of them.
She knew her pulse was throbbing and her stress levels were going through the roof. The pains at her middle were biting hard and often.
There was a listing that was selling items relating to an ‘Unknown White Male in West Lothian, aged mid-30s, living rough and probably alcoholic’. The price was low because no one even knew the man had gone missing.
Some of this stuff couldn’t be in circulation without the complicity or incompetence of cops, lawyers or court staff. Much of the rest could only be coming from people with direct – very direct – links to the killings. She couldn’t take much more. She had to log out.
Her finger was above the exit door, her head swimming and her emotions choking, when she saw it. Queen Street Station.
Her finger was quicker than any misgivings she might have had. One click and she was in. Immediately, the words surged at her from the screen, nearly drowning her: ‘Aiden McAlpine. Clothes. Photograph. Murder. Hanged. Best offer.’
The missing clothing. Aiden McAlpine’s socks and underwear. It was here and it was for sale. And it was made very obvious that this time it was genuine.
CHAPTER 44
THE ACCOUNTANT
The interest had always been there as far as he could remember. He hadn’t thought of it as anything unusual, far from it. He couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be fascinated with it.
If it started with anything, it was with watching the movie 10 Rillington Place. Maybe it wasn’t the movie a fifteen-year-old boy should have been watching, but the address wasn’t too far from where he lived in East Acton, and that had grabbed his attention. Once he started watching, he couldn’t stop.
Richard Attenborough as John Christie and John Hurt as poor, stupid Timothy Evans. Murders, sex, lies. And it was all real. That was what captivated him. It was real.
Christie murdered eight people, all in that house, just two miles away. It made him feel close to it. It made him feel it. The Accountant had such a young and impressionable mind and the impression was made.
He sought out everything he could find. Books by the dozen, other movies when he could. Reading, watching, immersing. British killers were his thing and, pretty soon, he knew them all and he knew all about them. By the time he was eighteen he could reel off dates, birthplaces, nicknames, names and ages of victims, sentences, judges, arresting officers. He became a walking encyclopedia of murder.
John Reginald Halliday Christie, born in Northowram in the West Riding of Yorkshire on the 8th of April 1899. Executed by hanging in Pentonville Prison, London, on the 15th of July 1953 by Albert Pierrepoint. Victims: Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Eady, Beryl Evans, Geraldine Evans, Ethel Christie, Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney, Hectorina MacLennan.
Thomas Neill Cream. The Lambeth Poisoner. Born in Glasgow on the 27th of May 1850. Executed by hanging in Newgate Prison on November 15 1892. Victims: Nathan Stott, Ellen ‘Nellie’ Donworth, Matilda Clover, Alice Marsh, and Emma Shrivell. Probably more.
John George Haigh. The Acid Bath Murderer. Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on the 24th of July 1909. Executed by hanging in Wandsworth Prison on the 10th of August 1949 by Albert Pierrepoint. Victims: William McSwan, Donald McSwan, Amy McSwan, Dr Archibald Henderson, Rose Henderson, Olive Durand-Deacon. Three others, full names unknown.
Those were his favourites but he could do the same for Mary Ann Cotton, Peter Manuel, John Straffen, George Joseph Smith and many more. It was history the way it was never taught to him in school. History, real history, wasn’t about battlefields or kings: it was about real people and how they lived. And how they died.
He first went to Rillington Place the day after watching the film at the cinema. It had been renamed Ruston Close by then but no one thought of it as anything other than what it had been. He stood and stared. Such an ordinary, ugly little house with its white door, grey walls and crooked downstairs window, right up against the wall that cut the street off from the world. It had all happened in there.
The people in the three other flats in the building had refused to move out for the filming of the movie but were all soon to be evicted, anyway, as the motorway was coming through. It was just so convenient that it was also going to turn Rillington Place into rubble.
He stood in the cold with his collar up and his eyes fixed on the ground-floor flat, his mind working overtime as it processed images of Christie and Evans, their wives and the other victims. His heart was thumping with the truth of it all and his head swam with excitement. Suddenly, he was across the road and through the white door before he knew it. There was an awakening as he realised he was inside and staring at the grubby door that had been Christie’s. He ran his hand over its wooden surface and squeezed the handle. At his feet was a small, thin square of old red-and-blue-patterned carpet that served as a doormat. Moments later, he was back on the street and hurrying away, the carpet rolled up and under his jacket.
He didn’t go back until the days of the demolition. There were plenty of gawkers then and plenty, too, who were taking advantage of it. One local, a builder, was selling bricks for a pound a time, mainly to American tourists. The same guy used to sell front doors that he found in skips just by getting the numbers one and zero from the local Woolworth’s and screwing them on. Fifty quid a time he got for those.
The Accountant just laughed at them. He’d already got his own keepsake and it was the real thing. Sure, there had been nearly twenty years between Christie living there and his taking it, but that didn’t matter. It was where it came from.
Now, he still sometimes drove round and parked on the new Bartle Road, maybe just looking from his car or, on drier days, getting out and strolling to the spot where the old house stood. Every now and again there were tourists there, except most didn’t really know where the house had been. If he felt like it, which wasn’t often, he’d point out the spot. There, he’d say, yes, there, that patch of St Andrew’s Square. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you smell it?
Sometimes they got it and sometimes they didn’t. He always did.
CHAPTER 45
Aiden McAlpine’s missing clothing was marked at a starting bid of seven thousand pounds. Low morals came with a high price.
There was a photograph to accompany the sale. The one Tony had taken at the crime scene, the shadow of the body swaying over the abandoned clothes.
‘This item has extra value owing to having gained worldwide publicity.’
Tony. His bloody picture had made this thing worth money by going viral. Although she’d no doubt that was the killer’s intention all along.
The provenance was guaranteed. Not least it seemed because the seller’s reputation assured it. His name, given simply as Big Sleep, was enough for anyone on Abbadon to know they could trust it was what it said it was.
Clearly, Big Sleep had sold before. He’d delivered and they knew he’d deliver again. The authenticity was not in dispute.
Something spoke to the back of her mind and her fingers moved back to the listing for the presumably murdered homeless man in West Lothian. Had she seen it or wa
s she imagining it? She wasn’t sure which answer she wanted to be right.
Unknown White Male. West Lothian. For sale: Boots, jeans, jacket, bloodstained shirt, penknife, torn photograph of a woman, signed medical prescription. Offered as a lot but separate sales considered. Seller Big Sleep. Provenance guaranteed.
The clothes he was murdered in and the little he had on him. Who could have them other than the person who killed him? Big Sleep.
She tried to slow down and think, not rush past the obvious in the pursuit of other conclusions. The same person selling Aiden McAlpine’s clothes was selling this murdered homeless guy’s few possessions. And what else?
She searched. It took a while and her heart sank every time she found something. Some of it was present, still for sale; other items were archived. There was more, far more, than she’d expected or wanted.
It was like peeling layers off a rancid onion and finding more and more poison beneath.
An unnamed, probably unknown, young woman whose last location was given as Avonbridge, south of Falkirk. A female hitchhiker plucked from the M9 near Linlithgow, her name given as being ‘probably’ Annie Townsend. A Dutch student named Piet Dreese, who’d been walking the path of the Forth and Clyde canal. A woman, said to be in her sixties, who was described as vulnerable and who went unnamed.
The items for sale included clothing, possessions, murder weapons and even body parts. Two of the lots offered the victims’ hair, as they’d been scalped.
Annie Townsend and the Dutch student she’d heard of; the others she ached to search for information on. There would be something, online or in police files. She’d go there, officially or not, but she wouldn’t leave these people without a name. She couldn’t let this go.
It wasn’t all being sold by Big Sleep, though. Some things were being sold by others but still attributed, still linked to whom she took to be the killer. She could only guess that they were being resold, most probably for a profit.
The results spread across the central belt of Scotland like a cancer, each return making her more fearful of the scale of what she was seeing. And, worse still, she was sure she was only scraping the surface.
She made notes and pulled a map up on her laptop, sticking torn slices of Post-its on the screen until the pattern emerged. Every item she found relating to Big Sleep was inside the boundaries of the three main roads that cut through the centre of the country.
The M8 ran west to east, from Glasgow to Edinburgh, and from each end the M80 and the M9 ran diagonally northwest and northeast to form a raggedy triangle right in the heart of Scotland. If what she was seeing made any sense at all, if she had the brains left to decipher it, that triangle was where it had all happened.
She knew the area well enough to know there would be countless places there where you could hide a body and be confident that it would never be found this side of Doomsday. There were lochs and reservoirs, thick woods and deep forests, rivers, bogs and quarries, all served by back roads far from the prying eyes of CCTV.
Shit! What the hell was out there?
A killer and God knew how many victims. Or was she seeing things that weren’t there? Was she seeing bogymen in the blue walls and not able to tell reality from the crazy crap she was forcing herself to wade through online?
She wanted to trust herself, back her judgement and her gut and her experience, but she couldn’t. She was the crazy woman who played Charles Manson music and searched for dead people’s things. She was the cow who put her own baby at risk by doing what she knew she shouldn’t.
An unknown serial killer who ploughed a furrow through the green belt between the cities? Fields and forests and lochs that had become graveyards for the missing? She was seeing too much and seeing nothing because of it. She couldn’t process this, couldn’t make sense of it.
She sensed the pains coming before the first one bit. They came in waves, each one faster and deeper and more painful than the one before. They made her gasp and bend double, made her baby curl and hide. They made her scream and cry.
No one could hear her and no one could help. She’d brought it on herself and all she could do was lie there, thinking, hurting, wondering, and waiting for it to pass.
CHAPTER 46
THE LIBRARIAN
He’d never set out to be a collector and sometimes he still didn’t think he was one. He was an accidental gatherer. A hoarder more than a buyer and seller. That was what he told himself.
He had issues with it and always had done. He accepted that the morality of it was indeed questionable and never tried to defend that to the few people who knew of his pieces. Their view was what it was and it was neither his place nor his inclination to change that.
If he defended it to himself it would be to say that the things he accumulated existed whether he acquired them or not. Any hurt, any associated stress or bad taste, would have been there anyway. If not him then someone. You might think that a convenient position, and he wouldn’t argue.
He wouldn’t be the first person to do something he knew was wrong and he would be far from the last. The smoker with lung disease who takes one more cigarette. The problem drinker who has one more vodka. The addict who takes just one more hit. Just one more won’t make any difference; just one more, then I’ll stop. Just one more.
So he bought one more item. Then another. Every time he’d die inside a little, immediate regret and self-loathing that lasted as long as it took for him to want something else. And he always did.
But it was more about completion than want. If there was a gap, then it had to be filled. If there was an omission it had to be rectified. It was obsessional and compulsive. It couldn’t have been ignored even if he’d chosen to ignore it.
The thought of someone else having something filled him with genuine dread. He knew that was irrational, but knowledge changed nothing. If someone had something of his it felt like theft. He hated the idea of someone owning or touching any item that ought to be his. On the very few occasions he lost out to someone else in an auction, or if someone got to a piece before he did, it would drive him crazy and he’d then do or pay whatever it took to get it for himself.
They didn’t deserve to own these items because they didn’t understand. Not as he did.
These things were special. They had such history to them and should not, must not, be in the hands of people who didn’t fully get that. They’d be better off burned or buried than with someone who wanted them only for the thrill or to make a quick buck.
Crazy? Sure, why not? He’d accept that. But weren’t all great passions based on a degree of madness? Whether it was love or compulsion, obsession or desire, they were all founded on a part of our brain that involved loss of control. They all swam in some form of lunacy, however mild. He’d happily admit to being as crazy as the next nut. At least he knew it.
CHAPTER 47
She was talking to people on Abbadon. People she didn’t know and couldn’t see.
Some of them were sellers, some collectors, some as crazy as she was. Maybe all of them were all of those things. She knew she shouldn’t just as much as she knew she couldn’t stop. It was her job, whether she was signed off or not. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could walk away from, it was who you were.
But, more than that, she was in quicksand. The more she tried to climb out, the faster it sucked her back in. Abbadon was a nightmare that she couldn’t wake from.
Some of them were questioning her. Suspicious of a new face, yet boldly unworried by any threat. They were anonymous, safe in their shadows, masks pulled down tight. They were the worst kinds of coward. The brave kind.
‘Who told you about this place? Make sure you keep it to yourself. If you’re not kosher, you’ll be out.’
‘I won’t be dealing with you till I know you can be trusted. If you don’t like that, then too bad. You’re welcome to leave.’
Others just wanted to boast.
‘I’ve got stuff you wouldn’t believe. It would put me in
prison but I don’t give a fuck. It’s not hurting anyone but why would I care anyway.’
‘Don’t listen to what the rest say. If you have good items, bring them to me. I pay top dollar, guaranteed. I have the cash and I’ll take the best of what’s out there.’
‘The cops will never break this place. You can buy whatever you want. Christ, if people only knew.’
She asked questions. Slowly, drip-feeding them, then accelerating when she hit the straight.
‘I’ve got some stuff but I want more. I want something from Big Sleep, whatever there is. How do I make sure I can get it before anyone else does?’
‘Have you bought from Big Sleep? Can I trust he will deliver?’
‘How does he get away with it?’
‘Does anyone know who he is?’
The answers were varied but rarely helpful. Some were short and to the point. Immediately suspicious, immediately guarded, they just told her to get lost. Others gossiped but knew little. What little there was, she grabbed with both hands.
Big Sleep was prolific. He was death. He could be relied on to provide what he said he would and it was highly advisable to pay on time. No one was known to ever have met him, no one had as much as seen him. He worked predominantly in the central belt but had been known to venture north and occasionally across the border into northern England.
Buying from him was not easy, though. It seemed you had to be quick, loaded or connected. Particularly the last.
‘He sells mainly to them. No one else gets a look-in.’
‘Good luck trying to buy some. I’ve tried for years but they snap everything up.’
‘Those bastards are a cartel. A bunch of us should get together and see how they like it.’
‘It’s the Four. They’re all over Big Sleep’s stuff.’
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