19
FOR A FEW SECONDS NEITHER OF US SPOKE. JOESBURY WAS right behind me, close enough for me to hear his breathing. To get out of the room I’d have to leap over the desk and run for it, or turn and face him. I think I was half bracing myself for the jump when he spoke.
‘If you were on my team, you’d be on suspension by now.’
Maybe if I didn’t move, didn’t speak, he might get bored and leave himself.
‘You had that note at eight o’clock last night,’ he said. ‘You were in the company of half the officers on the case for three hours after that. It’s nearly four a.m. now and we’ve lost eight hours. You know how critical that is.’
He wasn’t being fair. High-profile murder cases always attract crank calls and anonymous notes, weird conspiracy theories and attention-seekers. To follow up on all of them would require resources no investigation team could dream of. We make judgement calls. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes not. I’d half suspected Emma of writing the letter herself to get my attention and trick me into revealing some juicy detail.
Which might still be the case. Emma could have copied the original Dear Boss letter. I found myself really hoping she had. In the meantime, I had to get out of the room with some shred of dignity. I turned.
Joesbury’s tan seemed to be fading. Maybe he was just tired. The scarring around his eye looked more livid, if anything. He was wearing a loose blue cotton shirt and he’d rolled up the cuffs. The hairs on his wrist were a soft golden brown.
‘What’s the Polly connection?’ I asked, without thinking. ‘The name Polly meant something to you and DI Tulloch. What?’
He shook his head. He still hadn’t shaved. Like most British men, his beard stubble was a mixture of brown, blond and red. There were even tiny grey hairs.
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I said. ‘You can’t insist I have nothing to do with the investigation, then give me a right royal bollocking because I don’t respond to something immediately. If I’d known about the Polly thing, whatever it is, I would have said something earlier. Although, admittedly, I’d have missed the very great pleasure of dragging you and DI Tulloch out of bed.’
A flash of something that could have been anger, but actually looked more like surprise, crossed his face.
‘Shut the door,’ he said.
Suddenly nervous, I did what he said and stayed right up against it.
‘The knife that killed Geraldine Jones was a bog-standard kitchen knife, the sort you can buy in cooking shops and department stores just about everywhere,’ he said. ‘The team are trying to trace it back to where it was bought, but as several hundred seem to be made and sold every week, they’re not too hopeful.’
I nodded, with no clue where this was going.
‘The knife was unusual in one respect,’ he went on. ‘Five letters had been etched into the blade, along the cutting edge, just a centimetre below the handle. Five letters making up a name.’
‘Polly,’ I said.
He inclined his head. ‘And if you repeat it to anyone I will throttle you myself.’
An hour later I’d bitten my tongue so many times I could taste blood. Joesbury had decided, in Tulloch’s absence, that we had to know as much as possible about the original Ripper murders and that I would be in charge of research.
We were in the incident room and he’d cleared one of the walls for Ripper information. I’d been told to have a file ready on each of the victims, paying particular attention to post-mortem reports of their injuries.
To his credit, I suppose, he was helping. He’d found a massive street map of Whitechapel and had fixed eleven small flags to indicate the locations of the original murders. The canonical five were red, the others yellow. He’d printed out internet photographs of the victims, all of them taken after death. These too had been put on the wall and I found myself looking, for the first time in years, at Polly Nichols. She’d been forty-five, small, dumpy, scruffily dressed and in poor health. It was hard to imagine two women more different than she and Geraldine Jones.
When I’d questioned the point of the map, given that Geraldine Jones hadn’t been killed anywhere near Whitechapel, Joesbury said he wanted me to give a presentation on the Ripper murders to the whole team as soon as they got in.
As the night drifted away and the sun dragged itself up, people began to arrive. News of a breakthrough spread quickly and the incident room filled up. Joesbury’s mortuary photographs proved something of a hit. I was halfway through a compilation of the various eye-witness reports (surprisingly few, given how heavily populated nineteenth-century Whitechapel had been) when Tulloch and Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson came in.
‘That is one ugly-looking woman,’ muttered Anderson, before crossing to the coffee machine. ‘If I’d had breakfast I’d have brought it up.’
DS Anderson was no oil painting himself, with thinning red hair and a receding chin line. And a personalized programme at the local gym wouldn’t have hurt. I looked down quickly when he caught me watching at him.
‘The letter sent to the freelance journalist Emma Boston has gone over to Forensics,’ Tulloch said, speaking to the team at large. ‘They’ve promised to give it top priority. Neil and I have had a good chat with Miss Boston, but she hasn’t been able to tell us anything new. The letter arrived some time early yesterday morning. She and her boyfriend went through recordings of our conversations on Friday night and realized DC Flint was directly involved in the murder. She ferreted out her home address and approached her last night.’
Tulloch nodded. ‘I don’t want her going home until we’ve had chance to properly turn over her flat. She’s not happy, but I can live with that.’
An avuncular-looking sergeant I remembered from the pub the previous night, who seemed to be called George, had been looking at Joesbury’s artwork on the walls. ‘Are we taking this Ripper business seriously then?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it’s just the date, that’s all.’
‘Let me be very clear,’ said Tulloch, in a voice you could probably strip paint with. ‘I don’t want anyone even thinking the name Jack the Ripper outside this room until we have the forensic report on the letter. In the meantime, we need to know as much as we can about what we’re dealing with.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ said Joesbury. ‘Because DC Flint’s been working on a presentation since the small hours. Take it away, Flint.’
I turned to him in dismay. ‘It’s nowhere near ready.’
‘We’ll take a work in progress,’ he said.
I realized how tempting it could be, in certain circumstances, to stick a knife in someone’s gut.
‘Tell us what you can, Lacey,’ said Tulloch. ‘Just take your time.’
Everyone was looking at me. There was no getting out of it. And this might be my best chance to win back some credibility, with Tulloch at least. So I took a deep breath, went over to the flip chart, and told my new colleagues the story of the most notorious killer who ever lived.