69
Thursday 4 October
THE AFTERNOON OF GERALDINE JONES’S FUNERAL WAS A perfect autumn day. Bright and clear, with just a smattering of leaves in the gutters to remind us that summer was beating its retreat. Most of the MIT went along. Afterwards, Tulloch and Anderson went to a press conference at New Scotland Yard. The rest of us returned to Lewisham.
I spent the afternoon at my desk, pretending to be working. We were notified that Joesbury was following up a lead on the Llewellyns, but we heard nothing from him directly.
Time had picked up speed, it seemed to me. Every clock, every watch in the room was running fast. Options were disappearing like ice on a griddle and I had no idea what to do next.
It was still only twenty-four hours since the body – albeit incomplete – of Karen Curtis had been discovered and the world’s press were having a thoroughly good time with the story. The new Ripper had claimed his fourth victim, he’d managed to stage a double event, and the country was revelling in gleeful outrage.
He was still being referred to as a he.
So far, the public had been told nothing about the alleged rape in a Cardiff park that might just have been the catalyst for everything. The photograph and descriptions of the Llewellyn girls had been sent to every police station in the country and Victoria had temporarily become the most wanted person in the UK. We just hadn’t said why.
Neither had we publicly released the information that Karen Curtis’s head was still missing, but it was only a matter of time. We’d had to warn our colleagues around London that a severed human head was likely to turn up any day now, probably at a prominent Victorian location. It was the sort of news that was going to leak pretty quickly.
At six the day shift ended and people started to drift away. Soon just Mizon, Stenning and I were left in the incident room. Anderson arrived back at six thirty, just as we were about to give up on him and Tulloch.
‘How’d it go, Sarge?’ Stenning asked him.
‘Blood bath,’ said Anderson. ‘Everyone else gone?’
‘Anything you need, Sarge?’ asked Mizon. ‘Or shall we get off?’
‘The boss has asked us all round for dinner,’ said Anderson, looking uncomfortable. ‘Only if you’re free, she says, nothing formal.’
Stenning and I raised eyebrows at each other. ‘Dinner?’ said Stenning. ‘As in, at her place?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Must be a gender thing,’ he said. ‘You get a bloke DI, he invites you down the pub. A woman asks you to dinner.’
‘Are we supposed to bring flowers?’ asked Stenning.
Dana Tulloch lived in a modest-sized terraced house in Clapham, but when she opened the door to us there was nothing modest about its interior. The walls were a soft smoky cream and the wooden floors walnut. The pictures on the walls were limited-edition prints and even one or two that looked like originals.
Her living room had three matching sofas in pale green and a large, square rug patterned in squares of green, rust and oatmeal. A real fire was burning in the hearth. As Dana took our coats, we could hear someone moving around in the kitchen and my heartbeat stepped up a pace. A few seconds later, I was disappointed. It seemed safe to say, though, that Anderson and Stenning probably weren’t.
The blonde woman smiling at us was tall and athletic, with a perfect oval face, a clean jawline and brown, puppy-dog eyes. She was older than Dana, possibly around forty, but you only had to look at her to know she would probably look much the same at fifty.
‘I’m Helen,’ she said. ‘Dana’s partner.’
Dana’s partner? Where had I been?
The six of us ate around the table in Dana’s dining room and I found myself shy as a child. I was sitting next to Helen, who, it turned out, was Detective Chief Inspector Helen Rowley from Tayside police in Scotland. Fortunately, none of the others were quiet and no one seemed to notice I wasn’t saying much. When all the plates but Dana’s were almost empty, Helen put down her glass just a little more heavily than she needed to. We all looked her way.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everybody ready to talk?’
Tulloch sighed and shrugged.
Helen’s smile didn’t falter. ‘Or are we just here for the pleasure of our company?’ she asked.
‘Always,’ Tulloch replied.
Helen gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, well no offence, you lot, but I didn’t fly down from Dundee for the fun of meeting my girlfriend’s new team.’ She turned to me. ‘Dana says you’ve got a good feel for what’s going on. You think it’s Victoria Llewellyn?’
A little surprised to be singled out, I nodded. ‘I think it has to be,’ I said. ‘What’s happening now has to be linked to the rape. Her sister and her mother are both dead. No other family that we know of. She’s the only one left.’
‘And she’s going for the mothers because she thinks that’s the best way of getting back at the boys,’ said Helen.
‘Well, the mothers will be a softer target,’ I said. ‘Those boys are big blokes now; they all look like they can handle themselves. The mothers will be a different story entirely.’
Around the table, Anderson and Stenning were nodding to themselves. Mizon was watching me carefully. Dana’s eyes were going from me to Helen.
‘And, yes, I think if maximum revenge is what she’s going for, she’s got it right,’ I went on. ‘When those boys know for certain that what they did eleven years ago caused their mothers’ deaths, and that they died so horribly, I think it will eat them up.’
‘And the Ripper business was only ever just a smokescreen?’ asked Helen, who seemed happy to ignore the others.
This was where I had to be careful. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I think she wanted us thinking Ripper from the word go. A real copycat, on the other hand, would have stuck more rigidly to the historical trail, letting us cotton on gradually.’
Helen’s eyes didn’t leave mine.
‘By sending the Dear Boss letter to a journalist, she made sure London got Ripper fever,’ I said. ‘Everyone was counting down to the next murder.’
‘I’ll say. Whitechapel was like the first day of the Harrods sale on 8 September.’ That was Anderson.
‘She was playing with us,’ I said. ‘She let the whole day of the 8 September go by with nothing happening until the evening, when she staged a fake call to get the team out to Southwark and, using Emma Boston’s phone, she tricked me into going to the swimming pool.’
‘To find the uterus,’ said Helen. ‘Nice touch. And a day later, she sends you out to Victoria Park to find the rest of Amanda Weston. She does have a bit of a thing about you, doesn’t she?’
‘She chose her second victim quite carefully,’ said Tulloch. ‘By going for the one mother who’d moved out of London, who didn’t have any contacts with the capital, she slowed down the process of someone making the connection between the first two victims. It was days before we realized the school was the key to it.’
‘She sounds like someone who knows how the police operate,’ said Helen.
The others fell silent for a moment, as they all thought about that one. I kept my eyes down.
‘How do you think she got Amanda Weston to London?’ Helen was still talking to me.
‘I’m not sure we’ll ever know,’ I said, glancing up. ‘But her accomplice, Sam Cooper, used a replica gun. Those things can be quite convincing, especially if you’re not used to weapons.’
‘And after the second body was discovered, it became open season for Ripper hunters,’ said Helen.
‘She made sure of that,’ I said. ‘A hundred years ago, the press seriously got in the way of the police investigation. Reporters got to witnesses first, they bribed them, they ran stories that were just pure invention. Almost as much time was spent dealing with the effects of press speculation as it was hunting the Ripper. I think our killer wanted that happening with this investigation too.’
‘But all the publicity worked against her as well,’ said Mizon. ‘She had every mother connected with that school on full alert.’
‘Yes, but she had a plan for that too,’ I said. ‘Before we really cottoned on about the school, she gave us Cooper. We’d seen him at Victoria Park, we had a DNA link to the semen on Amanda Weston’s body. He was a slam-dunk suspect and we caught him. Because she let us.’
‘Do you think he was involved in the actual killings?’ asked Helen.
I shook my head. ‘The last thing he said, before he pulled me off that bridge, was “This is a fucking fix.” He realized he’d been set up.’
‘And we all thought it was over,’ said Anderson, leaning back in his seat.
‘She’d killed two more women before we even knew there was still a threat,’ I said. ‘But she knew we’d figure it out then. She knew that one of the husbands, if not all of them, would talk.’
‘So why is she still ripping?’ said Mizon. ‘That’s what I don’t get. Why all the dramatics with the entrails and the heart and Karen Curtis’s missing head? If she knows we know, why bother?’
Outside, I thought I heard a car pull up.
‘She’s keeping the pressure on,’ said Tulloch. ‘She wants us focusing our attention on where the head’s going to turn up, so we take our eye off the ball.’ She turned to Stenning. ‘And don’t think I don’t know you bozos have a sweepstake running.’
Stenning blushed bright pink. ‘Just a bit of fun, Boss,’ he muttered to the table. ‘To relieve the tension.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Helen.
‘My caring young DCs are taking bets on where the head is going to turn up,’ said Tulloch. ‘They’ve narrowed it down to twenty well-known Victorian sites around London.’
Helen smiled. ‘What odds will you give me for the Albert Memorial?’ she asked Stenning.
‘It’s not funny,’ said Tulloch. ‘All she has to do is get to Jacqui Groves and she’s beaten us.’
A knock sounded at the door. Helen got up and left the room.
‘She can’t get to her,’ said Anderson. ‘Jacqui Groves has got round-the-clock bodyguards and no one knows where she is.’
‘Hey, gorgeous,’ came the familiar voice from the hall.
I straightened up in my seat before I realized what I was doing. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tulloch watching me. And smiling to herself.
‘You’re late,’ we heard Helen say, as the front door closed.
‘Save me any grub?’ Joesbury appeared in the doorway and glanced round the table. ‘Evenin’ all.’
He took Helen’s seat, next to me, as Helen left the room. He reached across the table, brushing his left shoulder against me as he helped himself to the water jug.
‘Do you want a beer?’ offered Tulloch.
He shook his head. ‘I’m off in a minute,’ he said. ‘Anybody here still sober?’
‘Why?’ asked Tulloch. ‘What have you found?’
‘Tell you in a sec,’ he said, as Helen reappeared with a plate piled high with risotto. She put it down in front of Joesbury and then walked round the table to perch on the side of Dana’s chair. Joesbury shovelled several forkfuls into his mouth while we all sat and waited. My shoulder was still tingling.
‘Be great with a bit of chicken,’ he said eventually, putting down his fork and refilling his glass.
‘If you’ve nothing sensible to say, eat up and go,’ said Helen. ‘We’re about to convene the poetry club.’
‘I may have found Tye Hammond,’ said Joesbury.
Helen, Mizon and Anderson looked puzzled. ‘The survivor of the river-boat fire,’ Stenning said as Joesbury carried on eating. ‘The one in which Cathy Llewellyn died.’
‘Where is he?’ asked Tulloch.
‘Living in a warehouse just east of Woolwich,’ said Joesbury. ‘It was sold off to developers who went bust. It’s sitting empty while the lawyers fight over it, and a couple of dozen low-lifes – sorry, Flint, street people – have moved in. Word has it that if we pop along in the next hour, we might just find him at home and coming down from one of his highs. He might be able to tell us more about Cathy. He might even remember Victoria.’
‘Contact,’ said Joesbury mysteriously, continuing to eat.
Tulloch glanced up at Helen. The older woman shrugged. ‘We can have pudding later,’ she said.
‘Should we call out uniform?’ asked Anderson.
Tulloch was looking at Joesbury.
‘Your call,’ he said. ‘But personally, I’d keep it nice and low key for now. If you send the numpties in you could have every morning paper running with the story that we suspect one of London’s homeless is the Ripper. That’s not going to make for good community relations.’
Tulloch stood up. ‘Just you and me then,’ she said to Joesbury. ‘Helen can stay with the others.’
‘No,’ said Anderson, getting to his feet. ‘No disrespect, Boss, but you’re not going down some semi-derelict doss house at this time of night with a one-armed man. Pete and me are coming too.’
Joesbury was looking down at his injured arm, wriggling his fingers as if to make sure it was indeed still working. He looked up at Mizon and winked. She smiled back and then let her eyes drift to me.
‘You’ll be less threatening with more women in the party,’ I said to Tulloch. ‘These people that DI Joesbury calls low-lifes are easily scared.’
‘I want to come too,’ said Mizon, pushing back her chair.
A moment’s silence. Helen and Joesbury were the only ones still sitting.
‘Well, you’re sure as hell not leaving me with the washing-up,’ said Helen.