61

WHEN I GOT BACK UPSTAIRS, THE INCIDENT ROOM WAS quieter. Several people had left; there was no sign of Tulloch, Anderson or Stenning. Joesbury was still on the phone.

‘The boss has ordered the five boys to be brought in,’ Mizon told me. ‘They don’t all live in London, so it will take a while. And we’ve traced Karen Curtis, you know, mother of Thomas, the fifth member of the rowing team. She lives in Ealing. Stenning’s on his way over there with one of the new recruits.’

‘Where’s the boss?’ I asked.

‘She and the sarge are still with DS Weaver.’

‘Still can’t see it,’ said one of the older sergeants, whose voice was never pitched low and who now seemed determined that the whole room hear him. ‘Two young Taffy girls get it a bit rougher than they bargained for and ten years later someone starts slicing up mothers? Gotta be coincidence.’

No one answered him. Three dead women seemed to be stretching coincidence for most people. Joesbury was talking into the phone again, but he was too far away for me to hear what he was saying.

‘Those guys were ashamed of themselves,’ said Mizon to me. ‘None of them wanted to talk about it. They were defensive from the word go. I’ll bet they pulled some serious muscle with the Cardiff force.’

We heard footsteps and saw Tulloch and Anderson making their way along the corridor. The door opened and they came in.

‘I need somebody to get on to Cardiff,’ Tulloch said. ‘Find out their version of events. We need to know who the girls were.’

‘Their name was Llewellyn,’ said Joesbury, as we all turned to the corner of the room. He’d put the phone down. ‘They were sisters,’ he went on. ‘The eldest had just turned sixteen, the younger one was fourteen. I spoke to the records clerk at Cardiff Central. She couldn’t give me much, just that an accusation had been made and investigated. Two days later the girls withdrew their complaint.’

‘Which you might expect them to do if the accusation was spurious in the first place,’ said Anderson.

‘Or if enough pressure was applied by people they were scared of,’ said Mizon.

‘Our killer can’t be a woman,’ insisted Anderson. ‘Women don’t rape and they don’t slice up other women. It’s men who get up close and personal with a knife in their hands.’

Across the room, turquoise eyes fixed on me.

‘Couple of other things you should all know,’ said Joesbury, when he finally let himself blink. ‘The alleged rape we’ve just heard about took place on Saturday 31 August. The date of Jack the Ripper’s first murder. And the date someone got up close and personal with Geraldine Jones.’

‘What else?’ Tulloch asked.

‘The younger girl was called Cathy. The older one was Victoria.’

He waited for us all to think about it.

Tulloch pursed her lips and blew out a long, slow breath. ‘Victorian locations,’ she said. ‘Victoria Park, Victoria House, the Victorian swimming pool.’

‘Gov, it still makes a bollocks of the whole Ripper business.’ Anderson raised his voice and spoke directly to Joesbury over several heads. ‘Unless you’re telling us that was just a giant smokescreen right from the start.’

Joesbury was watching me again. ‘Oh, it was a bit more than that,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Flint?’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Tulloch as, around the room, eyes went from Joesbury to me and back again.

‘Let’s go back to the original murders,’ he said, and it could almost have been just the two of us in the room. ‘In a place as densely populated as Whitechapel, how come nobody spotted a man covered in blood? Not once?’

‘It was dark,’ someone offered.

Joesbury didn’t even turn his head. ‘More to the point,’ he said, ‘how come five streetwise prostitutes, more than accustomed to dealing with aggressive punters, allowed a bloke with a knife to get close enough to slice them open?’

‘They had to take risks,’ said Mizon. ‘If they didn’t, they didn’t eat.’

‘Not long before Polly Nichols was killed, there were two violent murders in Whitechapel,’ said Joesbury. ‘Nothing to do with Jack, but I’ll bet every working girl in the city was on her guard. After Polly, definitely after Annie, they’d all have been jumpy as crickets. Yet he managed to kill three more times. Silently and invisibly. You’re our undisputed Ripper expert, Flint. How did he do that?’

‘What has this got to do with Lacey?’ asked Tulloch, stepping a bit closer to me and frowning at Joesbury.

‘Good question,’ he replied.

Tulloch turned to me again, saw the look on my face and took a small step back.

Joesbury, quite deliberately, had dropped me completely in it. Everyone was waiting for me to speak and now I had no choice but to tell them what I’d kept back so far. My own pet theory about who Jack the Ripper had been, exactly as I’d told my classmates all those years ago. My favourite character from history? Jack the Ripper, of course, because Jack kept his secret, right to the very end.

‘What DI Joesbury is driving at,’ I began, surprised at how calm my voice sounded, ‘is that Jack the Ripper was a woman.’