51

‘WILL THEY TAKE DI TULLOCH OFF THE CASE?’ I ASKED Anderson, as we pulled into the car park at St Thomas’s Hospital and he stopped in a bay reserved for ambulances.

‘She should be so fucking lucky,’ he replied, opening his door and climbing out. ‘They’ll keep her on the case till the bitter end. She’s the one they’ll hang out to dry when it all goes pear-shaped.’

Anderson was walking too quickly as we went into the hospital through the main reception and took the lift one floor down to the mortuary. I kept up as best I could. Last time I’d been here, it had been to view a human uterus; I wondered if Kaytes would complain that we never sent him anything complete to work on.

His young assistant met us and helped us gown up. When we went into the examination room, Kaytes was leaning over a desk completing a form. He put the pen down and turned to face us.

‘Never-ending paperwork,’ he said. ‘Your package arrived ten minutes ago. See to the sound system, will you, Troy?’

Troy crossed to Kaytes’s iPod and, smiling to himself, switched it on.

A grey bag lay in the middle of the central worktop. Kaytes pulled on some gloves and unzipped it, just as the music started.

‘No DI Tulloch today?’ he said, as he extracted the clear plastic bag we’d seen at the library from out of the grey one. ‘Right, let’s see what we’ve got.’

Kaytes opened the bag and let its contents pour out on to a large, shallow stainless-steel tray. The soft glooping was one of the most disgusting sounds I’d ever heard and I had to force myself to concentrate on the music for a few seconds. It was an orchestral piece this time, sweeter, more harmonious than the piano sonata I remembered. Kaytes turned round and took up tongs. He began spreading the various pieces of viscera around the tray to get a better look. ‘Well, it’s fresh, whatever else it is,’ he said.

‘How can you tell?’ asked Anderson.

‘Smell it,’ invited Kaytes. Anderson and I looked at each other. Neither of us moved any closer to the worktop. ‘Yep,’ continued the pathologist, ‘that’s a heart.’

The orchestral music gained in volume as the heart in question was gently moved to one side of the tray. It was a pale-pink piece of muscle, about the size of my fist. Two large, roughly truncated vessels full of clotted blood emerged from the wider, upper part.

‘Is it human?’ asked Anderson. Without the boss around to be impressed, his bullishness seemed to have diminished.

‘Could be,’ replied Kaytes. ‘It’s certainly about the right size, but we’ll have to run the tests.’

Kaytes lifted something with the tongs. I took a step back. ‘This is, though.’ He held it closer to the light. It was almost circular, about the size of half a grapefruit.

‘Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,’ said Anderson.

Kaytes was still looking at the object in the tongs. ‘As far as I know,’ he said, ‘humans are the only animals with recognizable breasts, as opposed to teats, that don’t have heavy hair growth around the nipple.’

Anderson turned to me. ‘Did he do that? The Ripper? Did he cut off …?’

‘He did,’ I said, feeling something sticky in the back of my throat. ‘Mary Kelly’s breasts were both cut off. He didn’t take them, though. They were left at the scene.’

‘Jesus,’ repeated Anderson.

‘There’s something else here,’ said Kaytes, pushing more bloodstained tissue out of the way. He lifted it away from the tray. ‘This isn’t organic,’ he said.

Anderson and I both waited while Kaytes crossed to a sink at the side of the room. A piano started to play, its notes light and clear, and yet sounding so incredibly sad. Kaytes had turned on the tap. A second later he came back and put something down on a clean part of the worktop. Anderson and I had no choice but to step closer.

Rinsed of gore, the tiny piece of jewellery was gleaming under the lights. It was silver, a simple, inexpensive necklace. Most of it was chain, and the part intended to sit on a woman’s collarbone was made up of nine interlocking letters that formed a girl’s name.

Elizabeth.

‘We never released the fact that he was naming his victims,’ said Anderson, running a hand over his face. ‘We kept quiet about his clothes and about that. Fuck a duck, he’s still out there, isn’t he?’