24

Friday 7 September

‘DETECTIVE INSPECTOR TULLOCH, HOW CERTAIN CAN you be that the killer won’t strike again tonight?’

‘I can’t be certain of anything,’ Tulloch replied, in the measured tones we’d all come to be wary of. ‘But, for the third time in ten minutes, there is no reason at this stage to believe we are likely to see another incident like the one on the 31 August.’

We were at New Scotland Yard for the latest press conference. Tulloch was at the front with Southwark’s borough commander, Chief Superintendent Raymond Puller, and her immediate boss on the Murder Investigation Team, Detective Superintendent David Weaver. They’d had to admit that the team were following up no solid leads in the Geraldine Jones killing. Hours of tramping around the Brendon Estate and endless conversations with Geraldine’s family and friends had turned up nothing we could work on. Pete Stenning had even taken the Jones’s au pair out for a drink, hoping to catch her off guard. Everything had been meticulously inputted on HOLMES. Nothing.

‘DI Tulloch, how ready are you to head up an investigation of this magnitude?’ called a voice from the floor. ‘Given the events of last year …’

The two men on the platform exchanged glances and the chief superintendent stood up. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘As the investigation into the death of Mrs Geraldine Jones continues, we will release information as it becomes appropriate.’

Tulloch and Weaver both got to their feet and followed the chief out. Those of us at the back filed out before the reporters could collar us.

Since Emma Boston had run with her Ripper copycat story just three days ago, the investigation had been bombarded by media interest. And the public had caught Ripper fever with a vengeance. Attendance at the nightly Jack the Ripper tours around Whitechapel had increased fourfold. Tulloch had even been invited to appear on Good Morning Britain to discuss the nation’s new-found interest in Ripperology. She’d declined.

I had one reason to be grateful to Emma. I was referred to, in the papers, as ‘an unnamed young detective’.

By the time we got back to Lewisham, daylight was fading. Stenning, Anderson and I had all gone to the press conference in one car. As we approached the rear door of the station, I caught sight of a green Audi with Mark Joesbury at the wheel pulling into the car park. He hadn’t been at the press conference. In fact, he and I hadn’t spoken, had barely seen each other, since our encounter outside my flat four days ago.

The two men went ahead as Tulloch’s silver Mercedes pulled up behind Joesbury’s car. She climbed out and, without speaking, walked over to him. When she got close enough, he pulled her towards him and she dropped her head on to his shoulder.

Feeling like a peeping Tom, I spun round, dived along the corridor and headed for the stairs. At the top, I walked straight into a young Polish girl who works in the cafeteria. She’d been carrying a tray overfilled with dirty crockery.

‘Watch where you’re going,’ I snapped, above the sound of shattering cups and saucers.

The girl’s eyes opened wide with shock and she dropped to her knees.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ I knelt down beside her, feeling like a real heel. ‘It was my fault,’ I said. ‘I was going too fast, look, let me …’

By the time we’d cleaned up the mess, the rest of the team were settled in the incident room.

‘Good of you to join us, Flint,’ said Tulloch. She seemed to have shrunk. The press conference had taken a lot out of her. As had the frustration of the past few days.

‘OK,’ she went on, as I perched on a desk at the back. ‘Can someone confirm what extra uniform presence we’ve got out tonight?’

‘Just about every constable available has been drafted in,’ replied Anderson. ‘The section heads will be along shortly for a briefing. We’re going to concentrate activity on and around the Brendon Estate. All the CCTV cameras are in working order and we’ve got extra staff monitoring them.’

‘What about in Whitechapel?’ asked Tulloch.

‘They’ve increased their numbers as much as they can,’ the sergeant replied. ‘They’re going to have a bigger headache than us, though. They’ve already got bozos hanging round the sites of the original murders.’

‘He won’t strike in Whitechapel,’ said Stenning. ‘Not knowing half the local population’s out looking for him.’

‘We don’t know he’s going to strike at all,’ sighed Tulloch.

There was movement behind me as the section heads of the various uniformed divisions arrived for their briefing. Tulloch thanked them all for coming and, a second later, I was called to the front. Still not allowed officially to join the investigative team, I’d spent the past few days doing little other than brush up on everything I’d once known about the Whitechapel murders. An urgent online order had delivered just about every book on the murders currently in print. By this stage, I could have given a Ripper tour myself, and the team had been drawn together now to hear what I had to say about the second canonical Ripper murder.

‘Annie Chapman was in her mid forties, short, overweight and missing several of her teeth,’ I said, spotting Mark Joesbury at the back, his eyes on his shoes. Around the room, all other eyes were travelling from me to the blown-up photograph of Annie Chapman in the mortuary. It showed a plump, plain face surrounded by dark, curly hair.

I didn’t need to look at my notes. I told them the story of the last night of Annie Chapman’s life, of the killer who’d struck without making a sound or leaving a trace. Twice while I was speaking, Joesbury glanced up, caught my eye for a split second and looked back down. When I mentioned that she was last seen alive at five thirty a.m., I saw several people looking at the clock. Five thirty a.m. was less than ten hours away.

‘Any truth the Ripper was a member of the royal family?’ someone called from the back. Tulloch and I shared a look. She nodded at me to answer.

‘You’re talking about Prince Albert Victor,’ I said. ‘He was a grandson of Queen Victoria and in direct line to the throne. There are two theories relating to Prince Albert. The first is that he was suffering insanity brought on by syphilis and that he went on a murderous rampage of the East End. It doesn’t really stack up because, as a member of the royal family, his whereabouts at the time are a matter of public record. It’s pretty much impossible that he carried out the murders himself.’

‘What’s the other theory?’ prompted Tulloch, and I got the feeling she wanted me to speed up.

‘The second involved a Masonic conspiracy,’ I said. ‘According to this one, Prince Albert entered into a secret marriage with a young Catholic woman and had a baby daughter. The woman was locked up in an asylum but the child’s nursemaid, Mary Kelly, escaped with the child to the East End and told what she knew to a group of prostitutes, who then hatched a plot to blackmail the government. The prime minister at the time was a Freemason. He brought in a few of his Mason buddies and the story goes that they lured the women into the royal carriage, where they were murdered in accordance with Masonic rituals.’

‘Is it possible?’ asked one of the uniformed sergeants.

‘Unlikely,’ I said. ‘For one thing, the women were killed where they were found. The amount of blood at the scenes and the lack of any in the surrounding area make that pretty clear. And the attacks just don’t seem like calculated executions, they were done in a frenzy, by someone barely able to control his rage.’

‘OK, OK.’ Tulloch was on her feet now, looking at her watch. ‘Thanks, Lacey, but we can talk about Ripper suspects all night and I’m not sure it’ll take us anywhere. Let’s get out there, shall we?’

Quickly, the station cleared. As groups made their way out of the building I could almost see the tension hovering above them. Waiting for something bad to happen; it was always so much worse than actually dealing with it.

*

‘Anything in particular you’re looking for?’ one of the CCTV operators asked me.

I’d gone back to my old station at Southwark, covertly following the rest of the MIT, and had made for the room where all the CCTV cameras across the borough are monitored. Thirty television screens are permanently broadcasting live footage. The operators can zoom in on any particular image in seconds and the detail is impressive. Look at people sitting outside a pub and you can see the ice gleaming in their drinks.

‘DI Tulloch just wants me to watch for a while,’ I lied. ‘See if it jogs my memory about last week. Can you see any of our people?’

They began switching screens and we spotted several members of the MIT, parked in cars on street corners, wandering past pubs and shops. Mark Joesbury’s car was parked about two hundred yards from the murder site. The driver door opened and he got out. Then DS Anderson appeared from the passenger side. As I watched the two men disappear into the estate, I wondered, for the hundredth time, about Joesbury’s threat to have me investigated. And whether he’d actually followed it up.

A figure in a blue coat caught my eye on a screen higher up. Dana Tulloch was crossing the square outside Southwark Cathedral.

If Joesbury had done the most cursory of searches, he’d have found out that I joined the police aged twenty-six, a little over three years ago after a spell in the RAF reserves, that I got good marks on all my training courses, had studied for a law degree in my spare time and was accepted on to the detective programme the first time I applied.

If he’d accessed my personal records – unlikely, but if he had – he’d know that I’d studied law at Lancaster University, but had dropped out before completing my second year. He’d know that when I was fifteen I was cautioned on the street for having a half-smoked joint in my pocket, and that a year later, I was admitted to hospital having taken too much GHB in a nightclub. On my release the next day, I’d been given another police caution.

I watched Tulloch pull open the main doors of Southwark Cathedral and step inside. I stood up, thanked the two operators and left the room.

If Joesbury had really gone to town, he might have learned that I was born in Shropshire, that I never knew my father, and that my brother and I were raised by grandparents, and occasionally in care, after my teenage, drug-addict mother found the responsibilities of parenthood too great to deal with. He might know that after my grandparents died and my own drug problem escalated, I’d spent several years just drifting, living off the grid. He might even know that my brother lived in Canada and that he and I hadn’t spoken in years.

That had to be it. I hoped.