48

Wednesday 19 September

TWO DAYS AFTER I’D BEEN ADMITTED TO GUY’S, SAMUEL Cooper was pulled out of the river by the Marine Policing Unit. His body had become trapped beneath a pier just beyond the Blackwall Tunnel. I didn’t go anywhere near the mortuary at Horseferry Road where he was taken, but I saw a photograph some days later.

The river is rarely kind to those who fall into its clutches and it hadn’t been easy on Cooper. His body had been torn and broken and shredded until it barely resembled a human form. I wouldn’t have known the scared, drug-crazed young man I’d fought with on Vauxhall Bridge just seconds before he nearly killed us both.

His mother, Stacey, identified him from a small arrowhead tattoo in between his shoulder blades. Fingerprints confirmed that he was Samuel Cooper and the results of a DNA test told us, beyond any doubt, that it had been his semen in Amanda Weston’s pubic hair.

I learned all this from a succession of visitors. Tulloch came a couple of times, so did Stenning, and a few of the girls from the unit. Emma Boston came the first day and, after clearing it with Tulloch, I gave her a short off-the-record interview.

An admin officer from Scotland Yard brought me yet another mobile phone. The previous one had been ruined by the Thames but all my old details had been transferred. Gayle Mizon brought me grapes and managed to hold off eating more than half of them. Even DS Anderson came once.

They told me that, thanks to a tip-off, they’d managed to track down where Cooper had been living, a tiny room three floors above a DVD rental shop in Acton. Amidst the squalor, the remnants of drug use and medication, they found Amanda Weston’s handbag.

As soon as I heard that, I asked about the woman we’d heard he was living with. No sign of anyone else, I’d been told. Cooper had lived alone.

They also found two more replica guns. The one Cooper had produced on the night we fell had disappeared, probably for ever, but it seemed a fairly safe bet I’d been right. It hadn’t been real.

‘How did you know?’ asked Tulloch, when she came to see me. ‘Those things are very realistic.’

‘There was a robbery at a dealers in Southwark about six months ago,’ I said. ‘I did all the processing work. It was a Jericho 941, one of the more popular air pistols.’

‘It does help explain how he got Amanda Weston to the park,’ said Tulloch. She was perched on the edge of my bed. ‘You remember we saw footage of them walking together along the Grove Road.’

I nodded, remembering that something about the footage had bothered me.

‘It looked as though she was going quite willingly, but if she thought he had a gun, well …’

Tulloch was right. Most women, threatened with a gun, would do what they were told. Most women would not anticipate the horror that had lain in wait for Amanda in that park shed. Get a glimpse of that, and I think most might take their chances with a bullet.

‘Possibly even with Geraldine Jones, too,’ said Tulloch. ‘If he’d said, “Turn around, face that car,” she’d have expected a mugging and done it. I know I would.’

I was silent for a moment. Tulloch had brought me a white orchid in a pot and I wondered if Joesbury had told her about my plant collection. He hadn’t been back to visit since that first morning, but the next day an anonymous parcel had arrived from a German company called Steiff. Inside I found a brown cuddly toy with a bright-red bow and an impossibly cute face. I had a teddy. I took my eyes away from where it was perched at the foot of my bed to look at Tulloch again.

‘He claimed he’d been set up,’ I said. ‘On the bridge, he said it was a fix.’

‘They all do, Lacey,’ she replied.

I guessed she was right about that too. ‘Why did he do it?’ I asked her.

‘We may never know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’d been a serious drug user for a long time. The teachers we spoke to from his school report all sorts of behavioural difficulties. He was obviously someone who needed help and didn’t get it.’

‘But why those two women, why the Ripper stuff?’

‘We found a lot of Ripper books and memorabilia in his flat,’ said Tulloch. ‘Including a ticket for one of the Ripper tours. As to those two women, well, he could have known them. He hung around the school a lot. Maybe he had a big problem with people more privileged than him.’

I nodded. It made some sense.

Tulloch pulled a clear evidence bag out of her jacket pocket. There was something inside.

‘Lacey, we also found a photograph of you at his flat,’ she said, holding it out for me to see. ‘It’s a snapshot. Do you have any idea where or when it was taken?’

I looked. I was on a London street, unlocking my car. Something had attracted my attention and I’d looked up. I was wearing a jacket I’d bought two years ago and jeans. I had no recollection of being photographed. I shook my head.

‘We’ve got people working on it,’ Tulloch said. ‘Once we pinpoint the location, we can use light and shadows apparently to estimate the time of year. There may even be CCTV footage available. We do need to know when he became fixated on you.’

I sighed and leaned back against the pillows. ‘It’s really over then,’ I said. ‘We caught Jack the Ripper.’

Tulloch stood up and smiled. ‘Oh, I think he decided for himself who was going to catch him.’

Dana Tulloch became something of a celebrity in the days that followed. Against her own inclination but faced with clear instructions from her superiors, she agreed to most interview requests. She was young, female and not entirely white. She ticked all the boxes. It was even suggested that I be put up for interview. From my hospital bed I refused on the grounds that notoriety so early in my career would be bad for it in the long term. I was commended with unusual wisdom for one so young.

I was officially convalescing, but when I went into the office to collect some things, the investigation team gave me a standing ovation. I started to cry again and got hugged so much I think the buggers cracked another rib.

I still looked like the back end of a bus, but most of the time I didn’t mind. Taking medication for the pain, I found myself sleeping better than I had for years. And when I woke up, a brown bear with a red bow was never far away on the pillow.

On the first Saturday morning after my release from hospital, I made a slow and rather painful bus journey up to the South Bank. In one of the less trendy cafés, not too far from the river, I saw a thin, pale girl with dyed black hair, wearing sunglasses, even though the interior was quite dark. She didn’t look up as I approached her table, but I noticed a group of teenagers near by had spotted her. They were whispering to each other and I wondered how often she had to put up with that sort of crude and insensitive attention. The last couple of days, I’d learned a lot about how it felt to be stared at for the wrong reasons.

‘Hi,’ I said, when I was close enough. Emma Boston looked up and pushed her sunglasses on to the top of her head.

‘Fuck, you look rough,’ she said. Then she suddenly grinned at me, showing surprisingly white teeth for a heavy smoker.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Join the freak show.’

I sat. I’d never seen her smile before.

‘You OK?’ she asked me.

I nodded. ‘Getting there.’

The waitress came over and I ordered coffee and cheese on toast. Emma asked for a refill.

‘I liked that article you wrote,’ I said, when we were alone again. I wasn’t bullshitting or flattering her. The piece based on the interview she’d done with me in hospital, and a subsequent one with Tulloch, had appeared in the features section of one of the broadsheets two days after my night in the Thames. It had gone beyond simple reporting to ask some fairly basic questions about what drives men to kill violently.

‘I’m a good journalist,’ she said, almost defiantly.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thanks for keeping my name out of it.’

She gave a little nod. ‘So what’s new?’ she asked me. ‘I take it you didn’t invite me here to become your new best mate. Any progress on finding that woman Cooper was supposedly living with? His mum told me she never met her. Mind you, she hadn’t seen Sam himself for a while.’

‘Actually, it’s nothing to do with the Ripper case,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I may have another story for you. If you’re up for a bit of controversy, that is.’

She gave a slow, sly smile. At that moment I heard the door again and turned round. Three young black girls were looking across at our table. I got up and went to meet them.

‘What happened to you?’ asked Rona.

‘Fight with a river barge,’ I said. ‘Thanks for coming. Hello, Tia.’

Rona’s twelve-year-old sister, a smaller, slimmer, even prettier version of Rona herself, smiled shyly at me.

‘This is Rebecca,’ said Rona, indicating the other girl. ‘She’s a friend of mine. She’s been through it too.’

‘It was good of you all to come,’ I said. ‘Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.

The piece Emma wrote about Rona and her friends and the problem of gang rape in south London appeared eight days later. The front page of the Sunday Times review section showed a picture of a young black girl staring sadly out across the Thames. It was a library shot – all the girls who’d contributed to Emma’s story remained anonymous – but it spoke volumes about being young, black, female and afraid in London.

The accompanying story pulled no punches and certainly didn’t make for comfortable Sunday-morning reading. The Met weren’t criticized as such, Emma had spoken to the head of the Sapphire Units and had included her comments, but the article did ask significant questions about whether the authorities were letting down vulnerable sectors of society, simply by refusing to confront uncomfortable truths.

Shortly after it appeared, Emma phoned to tell me that the Sunday Times had commissioned a follow-up story, this time talking to community leaders and schools. There was even talk of the article being submitted for an award.

I started to get something of a social life during the last few days of September. The day after the inquest into Amanda Weston’s death, the team insisted I join them bowling and to my amazement I didn’t argue. My ribs weren’t up to active participation but I sat at the side and tried not to laugh too much.

A few days later, we went for a curry in a little café off Brick Lane where you have to take your own beer. That time Joesbury joined us, his arm still in a sling. He didn’t speak to me all evening, but more than once, when I looked up, I caught his eye. And I couldn’t help wonder whether the brown bear and I might find ourselves with company one of these nights.

And then, on 1 October, over a hundred years after Elizabeth Stride died in the yard behind Berner Street, my happy new existence came to an abrupt end.