17

I WALKED INTO THE NAG’S HEAD TO FIND STENNING AND a few others from the MIT crowded around a fruit machine. I recognized Tom Barrett, the DC who’d sat and watched footage with me for several hours earlier that day. Stenning spotted me and came over, nearly sending a table filled with drinks flying.

‘Shit, Flint,’ he said, when he was close enough. ‘What did you do to yourself?’

Men! I’d loosened my hair, put on a bit of make-up and changed into jeans and a top that fitted me properly. I’d done very little, in fact, but I learned when I was a teenager how tiny the difference can be between a woman nobody notices, and one whom everybody does. Most of the time, especially at work, I prefer to be invisible. Plain clothes worn a size too big, no make-up, heavy glasses that I don’t actually need and hair swept tightly back. I don’t speak without something to say and, until I became an unwilling player in a murder investigation, I’d have bet most people at Southwark nick wouldn’t have had a clue who I was. When I go out in the evening, I look very different.

I wouldn’t normally have made any sort of effort to meet work colleagues. Hell, I wouldn’t normally meet work colleagues socially, but I’d changed earlier in readiness for a night out and after Emma’s visit and the whole Jack the Ripper stuff I’d been too keyed up to stay indoors any longer.

‘Did you just get back from Chiswick?’ I asked, when we were settled at the bar. ‘Was she definitely Geraldine Jones?’

‘Officially, we still haven’t confirmed identity,’ he replied.

‘Unofficially?’

‘Unofficially, there were photographs in the house,’ he said. ‘It’s her. And the au pair says she hasn’t seen Mrs Jones since Friday morning. She thought perhaps she’d changed her mind and gone away with Mr Jones and his eldest son. They’re on a golf weekend near Bath. Or at least they were. They should be back by now. DI Tulloch stayed behind to talk to him when he arrived.’

‘And take him to identify the body?’

Stenning nodded.

‘Any idea what she was doing in that part of London?’ I asked, as the pub door opened and a familiar tall figure came in. Shit.

‘We did a basic search of the house,’ Stenning was saying. ‘The au pair couldn’t tell us much, she seemed pretty freaked out having so many police in the house. But nothing out of the ordinary that we could see. No plastic bags of cocaine in the cistern. On the surface, it seems to be a perfectly ordinary, upper-middle-class London family. He’s something senior in insurance, she worked part-time at a gallery. Two sons, one a junior doctor, the other at university.’

‘What about the youngest son?’ I said. ‘If the oldest is with his dad, where’s he?’

‘He’s travelling,’ said Stenning. ‘Due back in a couple of days, just in time to go back to uni.’

Joesbury was on his way over. Shit and corruption.

‘Evening, Flint,’ he said, as he reached the bar and walked further than he needed to in order to stand at my side. ‘What’ll you both have?’

Two hours later, I still hadn’t mentioned my visit from Emma Boston. On the one hand, I knew I really had to. On the other, the most senior officer present was Joesbury and I was very reluctant to get into wild and wonderful theories abut nineteenth-century serial killers in front of him until I was a bit more sure of my facts. If he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, he’d want details I didn’t have after all this time. I think I was just plucking up the courage to say something when he took a phone call from Tulloch and left. Shortly afterwards, the group broke up.

And it really hadn’t helped that everyone else seemed to consider him the best thing since Mr Warburton had invented the slicing machine. For most of the evening, he’d been entertaining the group with stories of his undercover work.

‘So there I am,’ he’d been saying at one point, ‘in this police minibus, under arrest with a whole load of Tottenham fans, and I spotted a megaphone on the floor. So I picked it up and started giving it the verbal out the window and what do you think they all said to me: “Shut up, you’ll get us in trouble.”’

The group had fallen about laughing. I’d forced a polite smile when I realized Joesbury was looking my way and felt yet another stab of guilt. This was a murder investigation. I had information that might be important.

After Stenning, who’d insisted on driving me home, roared away, I hurried down the steps. Quick check of the under-stairs space and then inside. The neatly made bed I could see through the open door had never looked more inviting, but it would have to wait. Instead I pulled the blind down, opened my laptop, typed Jack the Ripper murders into the search engine …

… and became that teenage girl again, head stuffed with information about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders of the late nineteenth century.

In 1888, the year after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, a serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, preying upon those least able to protect themselves. Jack’s victims were ‘unfortunates’, if you were Victorian and polite. If you were less so – if you were Jack himself, for example – they were whores. Middle-aged, alcoholic, homeless prostitutes who sold their bodies to strangers several times nightly for the price of a glass of gin.

There were eleven Whitechapel murders in all, starting in April 1888 and concluding in February 1891. The last few months of 1888, when the majority had taken place, had become known as the Autumn of Terror. At one time, I could have quoted victims’ names, dates of death, details of injuries inflicted and locations of bodies. At ten minutes past one in the morning, I closed my eyes and found I still could.

Jack had been a killer ahead of his time, I realized that night, looking at the case again with grown-up, professional eyes. In the nineteenth century, someone who struck at random and without motive was something quite new. The police at the time had been close to helpless.

One reaction I’d had as a teenager remained the same. The most puzzling and the most frightening aspect of the murders had been Jack’s ability to arrive from nowhere and disappear without trace. Many of the murders took place within yards of crowded lodging houses or major thoroughfares, but he moved silently and invisibly.

Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the murders ceased. Jack vanished, leaving behind one of the most enduring murder mysteries the world has ever known.

I sat back a while, thinking, trying to make a connection between what had taken place in Victorian London and the murder I’d come close to witnessing twenty-four hours ago.

To my considerable relief, I couldn’t do it. Married to a wealthy man, with a family, a nice home, a job, Geraldine Jones was the direct opposite of the women Jack had preyed upon. The original victims had been chosen at random, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Geraldine must have been in that part of London for a reason. And Kennington was a long way from Whitechapel.

Admittedly, Jones’s injuries were very similar to those inflicted on more than one Ripper victim, but 31 August didn’t even mark the anniversary of the first Whitechapel killing. The death of Polly Nichols that day had been the third murder. The first, that of Emma Smith, had been early in April 1888 and the second, Martha Tabram, on 7 August.

Something was still bothering me though. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Determined to leave no stone unturned, I checked whether there’d been other murders in London earlier in the year, specifically the first two weeks of April and August. I couldn’t access the Met’s computers from home but I searched the various news sites that cover events in and around the capital.

Nothing. There’d been a shooting on 5 August but the man in question, a nineteen-year-old of Grenadian origin, was recovering in hospital. Nothing in early April. There was no connection. So why couldn’t I just go to bed?

Even the similar mode of death meant nothing. The original Ripper hadn’t stuck to one modus operandi, his methods had evolved, even changed completely. There was no copycat. The letter sent to Emma Boston was a daft prank, possibly even the work of Emma herself to get an inside track on the investigation. I’d had it.

I printed off a couple of pages of summary information that I could use to brief the team the next day, closed the laptop and double-checked the front door. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I probably needed a stronger lock on it. Not something I’d ever worried about before. I picked up the printed sheets, meaning to put them in my bag ready for the morning. I was halfway across the bedroom when I caught site of the sub-heading halfway down the first page. A single word that stopped me in my tracks. Canonical.

Eleven Whitechapel murders. Few people, if any, believed them all to have been the work of Jack the Ripper. Experts argued endlessly about who had and who hadn’t been a true Ripper victim. Emma Smith, almost certainly not. Martha Tabram, the jury was still out on. Personally, I was inclined to think probably not. Her injuries, multiple stab wounds from some sort of bayonet, were very different to the murders that followed. Polly Nichols, on the other hand, number three, nobody doubted. Killed on the last day of August 1888, she’d been the first victim that just about everyone agreed was a true Ripper killing. She had been the first of the canonical five.

The bedside clock told me it was three o’clock in the morning. I’ve said already that London is never quiet. It was then. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not the traffic outside, not people in the flats upstairs, not even the sound of my own breathing.

The 31 August, the night Geraldine Jones had been killed, marked the anniversary of the first, undisputed Ripper murder. I checked the notes. Her injuries were practically identical to those inflicted on Polly Nichols and whoever killed Geraldine had disappeared without a trace.

I was going to have to wake up Tulloch and Joesbury, probably with the same phone call. Wasn’t that going to make me popular?