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.