29

HORRIBLY CLOSE TO PANIC, MY EYES WERE DARTING round like those of a terrified mouse. I was in a large space that had once been an office. Desks and chairs were still scattered around. In the centre of the room, dividing one half from the other, stood a row of lockers. I moved quickly across and stepped into the shadows behind them. From somewhere in the building I could still hear Emma’s mobile ringing, but if I tried to stop it now, the beeping sound my own phone would make would give me away. Sometime in the last few seconds I’d stopped breathing. Softly, I made myself exhale.

Whoever was coming up the stairs was making more noise than I had. A heavier person. I heard the gentle swish of two pieces of wood sliding together as the door was pushed open. A footstep inside. Then another.

Silence. He was listening, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Any second now he’d see Emma’s shoe, spot the trail in the dust I’d made when I’d moved it. He’d know I was here. The footsteps started again, more softly this time. He knew where I was.

A black shape appeared from behind the row of lockers. In the darkness it looked massive. Then it stepped into a pool of light and I thought I might die of relief.

‘I’m here,’ I whispered.

Joesbury shot round as I hurried over to him, surprisingly pleased to see someone I thoroughly disliked. Even feet away he was still little more than shadow, but his eyes were shining at me. Not in a friendly way.

‘There’s someone here,’ I told him, ‘I heard a scream. He’s inside somewhere. We have to—’

Joesbury held a finger to his lips and then raised his radio. ‘She’s here,’ he said into it. ‘Yeah, toss you for who throttles her when we get out. Can you hear a phone?’

I couldn’t catch Anderson’s reply, but a second later Joesbury was moving towards the furthest door of the room and beckoning me to follow. At the door he stopped and listened, then pulled it open and stepped through.

I did the same. We were in the gallery that runs almost the full circumference of the larger of the two pools. In the old days, when swimming had been strictly segregated, it had been known as the men’s plunge. Up in the gallery there was still bench seating from when schools had competed here and proud parents had needed somewhere to sit. Joesbury made his way slowly down the wide, shallow steps of the gallery, peering along each row of benches. He was carrying a torch, but he hadn’t turned it on. The ringing sound of Emma’s phone had become louder.

Looking back to check I was still with him, Joesbury made his way to the side of the gallery where we could get down to ground level. We passed dead rodents and take-away wrappers. I stepped over broken glass and what looked horribly like human excrement. When we emerged at the bottom of the stairs, DS Anderson appeared through an archway at the far end of the hall. From memory I thought it led to the smaller of the two pool halls, the one reserved for women back in Victorian times. Anderson saw us and shook his head. He’d found nothing. Joesbury had moved to the pool, his feet just touching the edge of the carved stone that rimmed it.

Without water the cavity looked vast. It was nearly thirty yards long and fifteen wide. In the old days, the pool had had a five-yard-high diving board and the deep end had been very deep. Since then, the cavity had been used for dumping. Cafeteria chairs, lifebuoys, lifeguards’ seats, even part of the old diving board had been thrown in.

Joesbury was looking at a huge canvas sheet that bulged upwards from the floor of the pool. The ringing sound was coming from beneath it. Realizing my phone was still making the call, I reached into my pocket and switched it off.

‘That was me,’ I explained in a quiet voice, when both men looked surprised. ‘It’s Emma Boston’s phone. I was calling it. I followed the sound inside.’

Joesbury switched on his torch and shone it down. Even with light it was impossible to say what lay beneath the canvas.

He turned to Anderson. ‘Any possibility of back-up?’ he asked.

Anderson spoke into his radio for a few seconds. Then he looked up. ‘About five minutes away,’ he said. ‘The boss has called out the Ninjas too. They’ll be here in ten.’

Ninjas is Met slang for CO19, the armed police division. Tulloch must be seriously concerned to have requested their presence.

‘Tell them to contain the building,’ Joesbury instructed, speaking in a low voice as Anderson had done. ‘Four entrances, including the fire escape. And make ’em come in carefully. I think it’s safe to say this is a crime scene.’

As Anderson stepped away to pass the instructions on, Joesbury turned back to me. ‘Call her again,’ he said. My hands were shaking but I did as I was told.

From beneath the canvas Emma’s mobile resumed its shrill ringing tone and Joesbury muttered the sort of word you wouldn’t use in front of your granny. Putting his torch on the floor, he crouched low and jumped down.

‘Switch it off, Flint, it’s doing my head in,’ he called back as he stepped closer to the canvas. Once again, I did what I was told. It had been doing my head in too. Soft footsteps on the tiles told me Anderson had moved closer.

‘Hold on, Boss,’ he said, before jumping down beside Joesbury. I stepped closer to the edge. Both men kept their torches on the anonymous shape in front of them. Neither seemed able to go any closer.

‘For God’s sake, she could still be alive,’ I said, jumping down to join them and striding towards the canvas. Joesbury’s hand shot up and caught me square in the chest. I stopped moving as he bent down, took hold of two corners of the canvas and pulled it back.

A moan escaped Anderson a second before we realized what we were looking at. The human form before us lay on its back, its sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. Its left arm lay across its chest and both legs had been drawn up and splayed apart. Fair hair spread out around its head. A human form, but not human.

It was an old-fashioned rescue-training dummy, the sort I’d used myself when I’d trained for my life-saving award years ago. The fair hair was a cheap wig. Other people coming across this might have laughed, if only to release tension. We didn’t. We all knew enough about Ripper case lore by this stage to know that the dummy had been left in the exact position Annie Chapman’s body had been found in. Emma Boston’s mobile phone lay by the mannequin’s feet, just as Chapman’s personal effects had been left by the original Ripper. Above the dummy’s right shoulder was a clear plastic bag. Joesbury was staring at the bag. I don’t think he was even blinking. I glanced towards Anderson. Same. Then Joesbury cleared his throat.

‘OK, Flint, you’re our expert on all things Ripper-related,’ he said. ‘Our man took trophies, didn’t he? Body parts cut out of his victims that he sent to the police to taunt them?’

It was hardly the time to get into the various theories about what had happened to the Ripper victims’ entrails, so I just nodded as Joesbury took a step closer to the plastic bag. He shone his torch and then crouched down to get a better look.

‘Weren’t you telling me one of the victims was missing her kidneys?’ he said.

‘That isn’t a kidney,’ said Anderson, who’d also stepped closer. ‘Kidneys aren’t that shape.’

In the bag was a piece of muscular tissue, roughly triangular, about eight centimetres long and around five centimetres at its widest point. It was surrounded by traces of clotted blood. I didn’t need to get any closer to know what it was.

‘Annie Chapman still had both kidneys,’ I said. ‘She was missing her uterus.’