43

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I WAS THE POSTER GIRL FOR THE caring face of the Met, or as Stenning and one or two of the others insisted on calling me, Ripper-bait. I spent less than an hour a day in the station. The rest of the time I was out, visiting schools, youth clubs and community centres around south London. I linked up with the Sapphire Units and helped them give talks to groups of girls about keeping themselves safe and the importance of reporting incidents. I met Rona and her sister, Tia, over a burger lunch and was hugely relieved to find that nothing had happened yet, and that both girls were being very careful.

Other times, I was out on the streets, buying endless cartons of soup, directing people to hostels, advice centres, sometimes just talking. The days can get very dull when you have nothing to do and nowhere to go.

At lunchtime I went swimming. In the evenings, I sat in pubs and cafés, pretending to read a newspaper. I stayed out as late as I could bear, just waiting for the phone call, for the tall, thin figure of Samuel Cooper to appear in the distance. I even went to Camden on the second night, mainly to wind up Joesbury, and discovered there was a limit to how much I wanted to rile him. I went home alone.

Actually, I was never truly alone. Joesbury had got clearance for two of his colleagues from SO10 to take turns shadowing me. ‘Your guys stand out like sore knobs,’ he’d told Tulloch when she said she’d prefer her own people to do it. ‘Any villain worth his salt will clock ’em a mile off.’

Whoever Joesbury’s people were, they were good. Even I hadn’t spotted them yet. Occasionally, at a distance, I’d see someone I knew from Lewisham. Tulloch was taking no chances.

Tulloch phoned me often, Stenning almost as much. I heard that the latest press conference had been painful and that it had been plain that Tulloch’s superiors were distancing themselves. If the killer wasn’t caught soon, she’d carry the can.

There had been no talk around the station about her leaving the inquiry.

Thanks to Stenning, I got a full report of the post-mortem carried out on the woman we found in Victoria Park. Death had been the result of massive blood loss following extensive damage to the victim’s abdominal cavity and organs. She’d been tortured prior to death by the infliction of fourteen shallow cuts around her breasts. The broken-off piece of wooden fencing had been rammed into her vagina while she was still alive. The internal damage had been extensive, but the presence of semen caught in her pubic hair suggested she’d been raped.

The semen, I learned, showed traces of a common spermicide. He’d used a condom. Frustratingly, Samuel Cooper’s prior arrests had been before the taking of DNA samples from suspects had become routine, so we would need to catch him before we could prove categorically that it was him. But we would catch him. His photograph was everywhere. I saw it several times a day, on television and in the national papers.

Then, at the end of the fourth day, we identified our victim.