The Butcher of Whitechapel

by Blake Banner

  “What did I do?”

  He shook his head. “She’s talking about divorce. I’m telling her not to. The kids are at a critical age, twelve and thirteen. We married just after you left. It’s a time when a lot of couples go through a difficult patch. I want us to see it through. We still like each other, you know. We have a lot to fight for…” He paused. We pulled out onto Milbank and headed west. “But she complains about the job, the hours, she has no support… She’s right. She has a point. But what can I do? I can’t be in two places at the same time, and I can’t just magically go into another job that pays double and is half as demanding, can I?”

  He looked at me as though he thought I might have an answer. Dehan’s voice came from the back. “Boy, you are on fire today, Stone.”

  I made a face. “That’s why I married a cop.”

  He didn’t answer. I knew what he was thinking: ‘Not the first time, you didn’t.’ And I wondered, what would have happened to my ideal love affair, to my perfect marriage, if she had lived? If she hadn’t been murdered? Would we have made it? Or would the stresses and tensions of time and work have started to show, and tell? Would children and long hours have come between us? Would that romantic passion of being in love have faded over time and become mere love, and then friendship, and then not even that, but simply the bonds of familiarity—even contempt? Would she have met someone else? Would I have met Dehan? And if I had…

  I blinked. None of that happened, because she was killed. And then I met Dehan—and her attitude. I said, “If you feel it’s worth fighting for, Harry, fight for it. Woo her, romance her, rekindle the fire, sacrifice the job if you have to, get transferred to a nine till five desk. Nothing is more important than your family.”

  I saw him glance in the mirror at Dehan. I heard her say, “He’s right, Harry. Family is where it’s at.”

  And we moved on along the river, toward Whitechapel, and Sadiq Hassan.

  EIGHT

  We arrived shortly before lunch time. He had a small, two story house on the corner of Duckett Street and Bale Road, opposite a large building site that sported a billboard written entirely in Arabic. In the window, there was a large red poster showing a fist clenching a sickle. In black letters it said ‘Whitechapel Marxist Party.’ Harry rang the bell and I saw a figure peer through the window. A moment later, the door opened halfway and a young man in his mid twenties peered out. He looked Mediterranean, with thick black hair, dark eyes and olive skin. He was unshaven and barefoot, in black jeans and a black T-shirt with the same logo as his poster, only in white.

  Harry said, “Sadiq Hassan?”

  “Who are you?”

  He had an accent, but it wasn’t strong. Harry showed him his badge. “Detective Inspector Henry Green, these are Detectives Stone and Dehan, who are accompanying me. Are you Sadiq Hassan?”

  “What if I am?”

  “If you are, then we’d like to ask you some questions, sir.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, sir, if you’re not Sadiq Hassan, that’s none of your business, is it? So once again, are you Sadiq Hassan?”

  Five seconds of silence in a conversation is a long time. He took at least that long to stare at each one of us. He took a couple of seconds longer with Dehan before he answered, and echoed Chiddester’s question, but with a different tone to his voice.

  “Dehan?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, it’s Irish.”

  He opened the door the full way and leaned on the jamb. “I am Sadiq Hassan. So, what?” His eyes strayed to Dehan again and he gave her the once over.

  Harry ignored his manner and asked him, “Do you know a young lady, name of Katie Ellison?”

  He didn’t answer. He looked at Harry’s shoes, then his pants. His face said they were the most disgusting shoes and pants he’d ever seen. Then he looked at his shirt in the same way, and finally at his face.

  “Why you askin’ me about this fuckin’ bitch?” I felt Dehan stiffen and put my hand on her arm. “You come to my house, askin’ about this whore? Why you come to my house askin’ about this whoring bitch?”

  “Why don’t we do something, Mr. Hassan? Why don’t I ask the questions, and you provide the answers? Now, once again. Do you know Katie Ellison?”

  He curled his lip and nodded. “Yeah, I know Katie Ellison. She is a fuckin’ whoring bitch. What else you want to know?”

  Harry pulled out a notebook and a pencil. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Week ago.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “At a meeting of the WMP. The lying bitch said she wanted to be a member and get involved. She was fuckin’ lying, innit?”

  I scratched my chin. “How do you know she was lying?”

  “I looked in her bag. She had a digital recorder, with interviews on it. She’d been recording our fuckin’ meetin’s. She was writin’ some kind of fuckin’ article, innit? Some kind of fuckin’ exposé.” He turned his head and looked Dehan in the face. “Plus she was fuckin’ some Jew. Dirty bitch. How any woman can fuck a Jew, she must be a filthy whore, I tell you.”

  I kept my voice real quiet. “You better keep a civil tongue in your head, Sadiq.”

  He smiled. “Oh yeah? The big American, coming here threatening the Arabs again. What you gonna do? Bomb my house? Fuck you!”

  Harry spoke loudly. “Where was this meeting, Mr. Hassan?”

  “In my house.”

  “Was there an altercation?”

  Sadiq was quiet and still for a long moment.

  “Do you understand the question, Mr. Hassan? Did you have a…”

  “Yeah! I understand the fuckin’ question! I told her to get out! I tried to take her recorder, because I reckon the stuff on it was mine and belonged to me, innit? But she fought me and Bernard, some English piece of shit secretary of the party held me back and she left. That was the last time I seen her. You should go and get the fuckin’ recorder from her, if you was proper police!”

  “Have you got an address for her?”

  “Yeah, Halcrow Street.”

  Harry nodded. “That’s just up the road, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you go and visit her afterwards, to try again to get the recordings back?”

  Sadiq frowned. “No. Why?”

  “We are almost done, Mr. Hassan. Just one more question. Are you familiar with the Butcher of Whitechapel?”

  Sadiq’s eyes narrowed. He spoke cautiously. “Somethin’, why?”

  Harry put the notebook and the pencil back in his pocket. “Why?” he said. “Why? Because Katie Ellison was found raped and murdered yesterday, Mr. Hassan, in her flat on Halcrow Street. And I’m wondering if you would be willing to give us samples of your DNA and fingerprints, so we can compare them with samples found at the scene. What do you say, Mr. Hassan?”

  His face had turned a pasty gray. He was shaking his head. “No, no… No way. This is harassment because I’m a Muslim…”

  Harry sighed. “We will be back with a warrant, Mr. Hassan. If we are going to find your DNA and prints at the scene, you’re better off telling us now and explaining why. Lies won’t help you.”

  His eyes were swiveling from me to Dehan and back to Harry again. “OK, come in, but just the living room. You cannot go anywhere else. That is my family in there. You stay away from them.”

  He led us into a small, dingy living room with a TV, two cheap sofas and a shelf with two books: Islamic Marxism and the Koran. Sadiq sat on the sofa opposite the TV. Harry and I sat on the other and Dehan remained standing with her arms crossed.

  “We was seein’ each other for a couple of weeks, right? So I went to her place a couple of times and we had sex. So you’re going to find my prints and my DNA there, most likely. But I didn’t kill her.” His face kind of twisted and he said, “It would be no crime if I had, in Sharia. And you will incorporate Sharia into British law, you’ll see. She said she converted, but it was a lie, a
nd she was havin’ sex with a Jew while she was saying she was my woman. She deserved to die for that, in the eyes of Allah! But I didn’t kill her.”

  I saw Harry’s face flush. “Unfortunately for you, Mr. Hassan, this country doesn’t operate Sharia law. And under the laws of the United Kingdom, you can convert as often as you like to whatever religion you like, and you can have sex with whomever you please. We’ll leave it to the jury to decide whether you killed Miss Ellison or not.” He stood and I stood with him. “I’ll be back with a warrant for your DNA.”

  He stared at us with wide eyes as we moved toward the door. As we were stepping out, Dehan looked at him like he was crazy. “Do you know anything about Karl Marx?” He just stared. He didn’t answer. “You know he was a Jew, right? You know he created Marxism in the first place to protect Jews against German and Austrian anti-Semitism, right?” She shook her head and stepped out the door, muttering, “Dumb asshole.”

  As we reached the car and climbed in, he shouted from the door, pointing at Dehan. “You’re a racist! You called me an asshole because I am a Muslim!”

  She paused, halfway in the car. “No, I called you an asshole because you’re an asshole, asshole.”

  We climbed in and closed the doors. Harry was on the radio. “I need a twenty-four hour watch on Sadiq Hassan as of now. I want to know where he goes, who he sees, who he talks to, what he eats, drinks, where he shits! Everything!”

  The radio crackled and a girl’s voice said “Literally, boss?”

  “No, not literally, Karen…”

  “Didn’t think so, sir. Everything apart from where he shits, then?”

  “Yes, Karen, everything apart from that.”

  “Right you are, boss.”

  I said, “He didn’t do it.”

  “I know. I wish he had, though, nasty piece of work. But he reacted all wrong to my question about the Butcher…”

  Dehan spoke up from the back. “And if he had killed her, he would have made sure the whole world knew why. The Butcher of Whitechapel has no meaning for him.”

  I sucked my teeth and asked nobody in particular, “So who’s this Jewish guy she was seeing?”

  A dark blue Ford Mondeo rolled past and Harry suddenly fired up the engine and pulled away. “They’re here,” he said. “I need to talk to CID. This whole thing is getting way out of hand. One thing is clear…”

  I glanced at him. “What?”

  “You were right from the start. This has nothing to do with the Butcher of Whitechapel.”

  I made a face and a long, “Hmmmmm…” noise.

  He looked at me sharply. “Don’t tell me you now think it has!”

  I could hear Dehan sniggering in the back. “You are such a pain in the ass, Stone…”

  “The killing was not committed by the same guy. But that is not the same as saying they are not connected. There is a connection.”

  Harry was shaking his head. “No. This is political.” We drove in silence for a while. He chewed his lip, leaning forward slightly over the steering wheel. “That was a purely psycho-sexual motivation: some dark, Freudian need to punish his mother or something equally unedifying. This is political. The motivation is totally different. I’ll drop you back at the hotel.”

  We didn’t talk again until we had arrived at Piccadilly and he’d pulled up outside the hotel. As we were about to climb out, he said, “I’ll be in touch after I’ve spoken to the chaps at CID. Enjoy London for the afternoon. Let’s have dinner soon.”

  We thanked him and he drove away.

  Dehan said, “He’s giving us the shove.”

  I watched his car disappear into the traffic. “Yup.”

  “Do you care?”

  I looked at her and nodded. “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s got it wrong.”

  She shrugged and sighed. “Well, it’s not our case, Stone. So what do you want to do this afternoon?”

  I smiled at her. “In this order, have a pre-lunch martini in the bar, a light lunch in the dining room, and then we’ll go and see Lord Chiddester, probably at his country house in West Sussex.”

  She thumped me on the chest. “Come on, Stone! Give it up!” We started toward the door and the doorman opened it for us. “The first two sound great. The third is dumb. You’ve been told to leave it alone. They’ve got this.”

  We stepped into the cool, elegant lobby and moved toward the cocktail bar. “I am not going to do anything, Dehan, except accept His Lordship’s invitation.”

  “Really?”

  “You shall regret your sarcastic tone. You see if you don’t.”

  We had negotiated to potted palms and were now in the dark cool of the cocktail bar. I signaled the waiter. “Two martinis, very dry…” I smiled. “Shaken, not stirred.”

  Dehan turned her back on the bar and leaned her elbow on it. “OK, Stone, John Stone, what makes you so sure Lord Chiddester is going to invite us to West Sussex?”

  “Because he asked how he could contact us, and he is on his way to Chiddester even as we speak, to be with his wife. He’s a hard man who doesn’t show his feelings, but he is also a passionate man of strict morals who wants his daughter’s killer caught. He believes Muslims are involved, he doesn’t trust Harry to do the job, but he is impressed by you, and our attitude to the case. He also reasons that we are not bound by the police code of conduct. He will have his secretary contact us in the next hour, and probably send a car. Perhaps a Rolls or a Bentley.”

  “In your dreams, pal. Even if you were right, how can you know that he’ll do that in the next hour? You’re showing off.”

  I shook my head. The barman poured the two martinis and I handed one to Dehan and sipped. “He’s no fool. He’s a smart man. He saw how we, and in particular you, made Harry look bad. He knows that before long, Harry is going to thank us politely and send us on our merry ways, so he will be keen to talk to us and see if we can help him before that happens.”

  She made a face and nodded once. “Huh.” Then she shrugged. “We’ll see. You think Harry is right and this is politically motivated?”

  I spent a while bobbing the olive up and down in my glass. Eventually, I said, “The killing is political, but probably with a small ‘P’. I mean that she was not killed because she was right wing, but because she was becoming a threat to somebody’s position. But the killing is also connected to the original murders somehow. I figure our original, genuine, serial killer is either dead or in prison somewhere. I am pretty sure of that. But there is a missing link that somehow connects him to Katie Ellison. That link, between the original killer and Katie, will show us who her real killer is, and why he chose to emulate the Butcher.”

  “What kind of link?”

  I shook my head. “That is where I keep drawing a blank. It’s something obvious, simple…”

  “Hidden in plain sight.”

  “Hidden in plain sight. Exactly.”

  She sipped her martini, then smacked her lips. “Sadiq had plenty of motive. All that hatred and vitriol. It wouldn’t be hard to whip him up into a homicidal rage.”

  I held the thought in my mind for a moment. “His motive was there, but he wasn’t. Given time, he might have done it, but he didn’t.”

  “I bet he can’t spell whiskey.”

  I smiled. My phone rang. I winked at Dehan and she rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, Stone.”

  “Stone, it’s Lord Chiddester here. Look, sorry I wasn’t more forthcoming this morning. That man Green is a hopeless incompetent. No spine, no guts and no balls…”

  “That’s a lot of anatomy he’s missing, Lord Chiddester.” I smiled at Dehan.

  “Quite so. Now, I’d like to talk to you and your partner, Dehan, privately. I am fully prepared to remunerate you adequately. I am sending a car for you at the Ritz. I thought we could have drinks and a chat, with my wife, and then you could dine here with us and I’ll have my driver take you back to London in the morning. Would that be acce
ptable?”

  I raised an eyebrow and held Dehan’s eye. “That would be fine. What time will your driver be here, sir?”

  “Well, I thought after luncheon, in about an hour and a half?”

  “After lunch would be perfect. I look forward to it, sir.”

  “Splendid, I’ll see you later then.”

  “Yup. See you later.”

  I hung up. “Do I look smug?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s because I feel smug.” I turned to the barman and made the victory sign at him. “Let’s have another before lunch.”

  NINE

  We were picked up after lunch by a chauffeur in a uniform, driving a classic, dark blue Bentley S3, from 1965, when Bentleys and Rolls Royces really looked like Bentleys and Rolls Royces. We didn’t so much climb in the back as walk in and take our seats in a small drawing room. As we cruised over the river, Dehan looked around at the walnut panels and the leather upholstery and asked, “Is this what life is going to be like with you, Stone?”

  There was a hint of irony in her smile. I didn’t answer, vaguely aware that it was mainly because of her that we were in that car, going where we were going.

  The drive took about an hour and a half, through green fields, woodlands and hedgerows that would have been nauseating on a chocolate box, but in the real world elevated prettiness to something beyond words. We drove past Arundel Castle, silhouetted against the afternoon sky on the South Downs, skirted by the River Aun and flanked by dense woodlands.

  Finally, as we began to glimpse the misty haze of the English Channel in the south, we turned in through a set of large, crested iron gates and wound through lush parkland down a gravel drive that seemed to be in no particular hurry to reach the magnificent Tudor manor house at the end. It was large, half timbered in parts and red brick in others, with tall chimneypots and cantilevered windows with small, diamond-shaped leaded panes. It was the kind of place, I told myself, I’d go to after I died, if I had been very, very good. I glanced at Dehan.