82

IN MY ROOM, I SAT IN DARKNESS FOR A LONG TIME, STARING out at the water. One by one lights across the bay went out, and as each one disappeared, a tiny chunk of time seemed to be slipping away. Eventually, all movement ceased and the bay settled down for the night.

At one o’clock in the morning, I knew I couldn’t play a waiting game any longer. I had to get back to London. More importantly, I had to get Mark Joesbury off my back.

Against all odds, coming to Cardiff had helped, I realized. I’d got through the various traps he’d set and he was starting to get some measure of trust back. Not enough, though. It was time to take a huge gamble.

I was going to have to tell him the truth.

Not giving myself the chance to chicken out, I left my room and walked barefoot to the lift. I’d changed after getting back and was dressed in loose jogging pants and a running vest. At the door of his room, I knocked gently.

When he opened the door, he was bare-chested, with brightly coloured, button-up cotton trousers slung low on his waist. The way he was squinting at the bright corridor lights told me I’d dragged him from a pretty deep sleep. When he registered that it was me, the look in his eyes became a mixture of bewildered, curious and hopeful. I didn’t give him chance to open his mouth.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I said.

He rubbed both eyes and then turned and walked back into the room. I followed, letting the door swing shut behind me.

Joesbury’s room was even bigger than mine, with two double beds. As he switched on a reading lamp, I saw that the bed he’d been sleeping in had a pillow laid lengthways and that it was dented. He’d fallen asleep hugging it.

On the other bed, glossy pages from a souvenir book of the Ripper mystery had been spread across the counterpane. I had a copy of the book myself. As a reference work it had been close to useless, but it did have perfect reproductions of much of the original documentation, including the mortuary photographs of the five victims. Joesbury, who I guess had fallen under the Ripper’s spell like so many do, had spread them out across the bed in chronological order. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes and Mary Kelly.

He walked the full length of the room. I picked up the photograph of the mutilated Mary Kelly and moved it further up the bed, before perching on the corner.

‘Want a drink?’ he offered. I shook my head.

The huge windows were open a fraction and the room was cold. The night air was goose-pimpling the skin on his shoulders and I found myself shivering. I watched him walk to the bathroom, reach inside and bring out a large, white towelling robe. He wrapped it round himself and then, from a pile of clothes over a chair, found a sweatshirt and threw it across.

‘Central heating at night gives me a headache,’ he said.

I pulled the sweatshirt over my head. It was the one Joesbury had been wearing all day. It was cool, like the room, but its smell made me think of a warm body, moving closer. When I could see again, he was pouring himself a drink from the minibar. More awake now, he sat in an armchair in front of the window and looked at me.

I took a deep breath. ‘I know this is something I should have told you before,’ I said. ‘But I think you’ll understand why I didn’t. At least, until I was sure there was no alternative.’

A glass with about two centimetres of amber-coloured liquid was in his left hand. He brought it to his lips.

‘You remember me telling you I lived on the streets for a while?’ I asked him. He inclined his head and the glass went down on the table beside him with a soft clink. ‘And you know I had a drug problem once?’

Another nod from him. Another deep breath from me.

‘The truth is, I was a complete mess,’ I said. ‘Completely addicted to heroin for nearly two years. It was far, far worse than I told the Met’s selection process.’

One eyebrow went up.

‘What I told them was that I’d had a problem in the past,’ I went on. ‘That it had been the main reason why I didn’t finish my degree, but that I’d been clean for several years before I applied to join the police.’

Joesbury’s eyebrow relaxed. His eyes hadn’t left mine.

‘They did lots of tests,’ I said. ‘And they found out that as far as that part was concerned, I was telling the truth. I was completely clean when I applied. I’d been lucky in that I’d always managed to avoid any serious trouble with the police. If I’d had a record of any kind I wouldn’t have got past first base, I know that. But when I applied, they were broadening their admissions criteria. The fact that I knew so much about what you call London’s low-life was seen as an advantage. They thought people like me would bring something new to the service.’

I could see from Joesbury’s expression what he thought about the Met’s relatively recent relaxation of its selection procedures. ‘They’ll let anyone join these days,’ was a refrain heard a lot around stations.

‘I had to be routinely tested all the time I was going through training,’ I said. ‘And I had to see counsellors. The Met didn’t take any stupid risks. But I kept my nose clean and I got good marks in all my exams.’

‘So they let you through,’ said Joesbury.

‘They let me through,’ I agreed. ‘But if they’d known the truth, it would never have happened. When you report what I’m about to tell you – and I know you have to – I’ll be finished in the force.’

I stopped, giving myself a moment.

‘I have no family,’ I went on, after a second. ‘And as you’ve probably seen for yourself, not much of a social life. My career is everything and I couldn’t give up on it until there was no choice. Can you understand that?’

‘Consider it understood,’ said Joesbury. ‘But you haven’t really told me anything yet.’

‘My home life was abusive,’ I began. ‘You don’t need the details. I went to live with my grandparents, but they couldn’t cope. So I spent most of my childhood in and out of children’s homes and foster care.’

‘Sounds like someone we know,’ said Joesbury.

‘By the time I was sixteen I was smoking weed, using cocaine when I could get it, experimenting with all sorts of weird cocktails. Cocaine and meth was a popular one at the time. For all that, I was pretty bright and I managed to hold things together enough to get a university place. But on a campus it was all so easy to get hold of. By the end of my first year, I barely knew what day it was. I was thrown off the course, naturally. I had nowhere to go. My grandparents were both dead by this time and the State stops looking after you when you’re eighteen.’

‘You went to London?’ Joesbury said.

I nodded. ‘It seemed as good a place as any,’ I said. ‘I found a group of kids in north London who taught me the ropes. We used to sleep in abandoned buildings, until we were moved on. Then we’d look for the next one.’

‘Where did the drugs come from?’ asked Joesbury.

This was the bit I was going to struggle with. I dropped my eyes to the carpet.

‘Were you on the game?’ he asked me.

I kept my eyes down and nodded. ‘There was a boy called Rich,’ I said. ‘He was Jamaican. Young, but big and nasty with it. He was … my pimp … I suppose. He had a few other girls working for him as well. He’d take us out, sometimes to clubs or bars, sometimes just street corners and derelict buildings, and send the punters to us.’

I risked looking up. Joesbury’s eyes seemed to have lost all their colour.

‘I never saw any money,’ I said. ‘None of the girls did. We did tricks and then we got the gear. There was a brief window every day when we were just about functional. Rich would collect us, take us to places where we could get cleaned up and fed, and then we’d go out. By the time the business was over, we were desperate. All we could think about was the next hit and just being able to forget.’

Joesbury’s empty glass made contact with the table.

‘Sometimes, Rich would just turn up wherever we were sleeping with some of his mates,’ I said. ‘He didn’t even charge them. They just took turns until they’d had enough. That’s why I want to work with the sex-crimes unit. Because of what happened to me.’

Joesbury got up and poured himself another drink.

‘I think it would have gone on like that,’ I said, ‘until one day I took the wrong stuff or just too much of it and didn’t wake up any more.’

‘So what happened?’ he asked me, sitting down again.

‘I met a girl,’ I said.

Joesbury sat a little more upright in his chair.

‘I’d been on the streets for a few months when she just turned up one day,’ I said. ‘She was about my age, maybe a year or so younger, and completely naive about street life. But she was different somehow. She was focused.’

Joesbury put his drink down. ‘Focused how?’

‘She didn’t take drugs,’ I said. ‘She had nothing to do with Rich and his friends. She wasn’t – I don’t know how to put it, really – she wasn’t hopeless.’

‘Go on,’ said Joesbury.

‘She was looking for someone,’ I said. ‘Another girl. She had a photograph. She spent her days just making her way around London, around all the places where homeless people gather, showing the photograph, asking around.’

‘Did she tell you who it was?’

I shook my head. ‘Never,’ I said. ‘She really didn’t talk much about herself. I knew she’d grown up in care, like me, and that she had nowhere else to go, like me.’

‘What was her name?’

‘I called her Tic.’

He frowned at me. ‘Tic?’ he said.

‘People on the street don’t use their real names,’ I said. ‘Most of them are hiding from something or someone. They use nicknames, made-up names, several names. She told me to call her Tic and I did.’

‘Do you think she was Victoria Llewellyn?’ asked Joesbury.

I nodded. ‘I think she must have been,’ I said. ‘But you have to believe me, she looked nothing like that photograph we have. Her hair was much longer, for one thing, and she was fair, not blonde exactly, but close. She wore practical, sensible clothes and no make-up. Ever. And she had, I don’t know, a sort of poise about her. There was no way she was some screwed-up Welsh teenager.’

‘Welsh accent?’

‘Possibly.’ He raised his eyebrows, gave me an incredulous look. ‘Look, I was a total sleepwalker, I couldn’t have told you about my own accent most of the time. I remember a lovely, soft voice. That’s all.’

‘OK, OK, calm down. What happened to her?’

‘I think – I have problems remembering time frames, I was out of my head so much of the time – but I think she found the girl she was looking for and it wasn’t good.’

He leaned forward. ‘She was dead?’ he said. ‘Well, that would fit. We know Cathy died round about—’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I remember getting back one night and Tic was like all the fire had gone out of her, but it didn’t seem like grief somehow. After that, she stopped going out, she just hung around all day, brooding. When I tried to cheer her up, to say there were other places we could look, she just said there was no point, that some people just didn’t want to be found.’

‘Maybe she got tired of looking.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I think if that had been the case, the change would have been more gradual. This happened instantly. I think she found her – Cathy – and it wasn’t a happy family reunion.’

Joesbury sighed. ‘You know, it would really help if you could put a timescale on this,’ he said.

‘Ten years ago. End of the summer,’ I said. ‘August, maybe September. I remember because we knew the place we were living in wouldn’t be suitable when the weather got colder, we knew we’d have to find somewhere else.’

‘The houseboat accident when Cathy died was 27 August,’ said Joesbury. ‘What happened to her, this Tic girl?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I do know that she saved me.’

‘How so?’

‘She started talking about leaving,’ I said. ‘Saying that there was no point staying on the streets any longer. I’d got so dependent on her by that stage. I just couldn’t face the thought of being on my own again.’

‘So?’

I ran a hand over my face. A decade later, this was still a memory I struggled with. ‘So I took too much stuff one night,’ I said. ‘Maybe it was just corrupted shit, I don’t know. When I came round the next morning, I was in hospital.’

‘She took you there?’ asked Joesbury.

I nodded. ‘She managed to get me to the main street. It was the middle of the night and there was no transport. She couldn’t find a phone either. So she stole a car and drove me to hospital. I’d have died if she hadn’t.’

‘Then what?’

‘When I was well enough, she took me to a private clinic and gave them enough money for me to stay there for a month. I’d no idea she had money, but suddenly she produced thousands.’

‘Her grandfather’s house,’ said Joesbury.

I nodded. ‘She told me this was my one chance to sort my life out and I shouldn’t blow it. Then she went.’

‘Did you ever see her again?’

I shook my head. ‘Never. But I stayed at the clinic. It was hell, but I got through it. Social Services arranged for me to go to a hostel as long as I stayed clean. After a few months I got a job. Then my own place. I got accepted in the RAF reserves and found I quite liked the discipline, the camaraderie. A couple of years later, I started thinking about applying to the Met. I know she’s a monster, but she saved me.’

‘OK,’ said Joesbury, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. ‘I can buy that you came across the Llewellyn girl when you were an out-and-out and that the two of you hung out together for a while. I can even just about accept that you didn’t recognize the photograph. But what I’m struggling with is why she’s fixating on you after all this time. Why involve you in her little revenge games? You had nothing to do with what went on in Cardiff.’

‘No, but she knew what was happening to me in London,’ I said. ‘About all the punters I was expected to service, about Rich and the gang rapes. It made her furious. She kept begging me to put an end to it, to get myself out. I was a victim, just like she’d been.’

Joesbury leaned back in his chair, a frown line running down the middle of his brow.

‘I only knew her for a few months, but she was the closest I’d ever come to someone I really cared about,’ I said. ‘We lived together, if you can call a few square feet of concrete floor surrounded by cardboard any sort of home. I think this thing that she’s doing now, this revenge business, killing the boys’ mothers – in some weird way, I think she’s doing it for me too.’

Seconds ticked by. I took deep breaths, hoping my heartbeat would slow down.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before,’ I said. ‘But even now, I still can’t be sure that it’s her. And I had so much to lose.’

Joesbury gave a deep sigh, then stood up. He turned his back on me and pulled open the window. The room hadn’t been warm, but the air coming in felt like it was straight from the Arctic. I tucked my knees up inside his huge sweatshirt and watched him walk to the balcony rail and lean over. When the Ripper photographs started to blow around the room I got up too and stepped to the open window. He was looking across the bay, directly out to sea.

‘That’s it,’ I said to the back of his head. ‘Everything. And I’m dead on my feet. Can we pick this up again in the morning?’

He nodded without turning round. I waited another second, then went back into the room. As I walked past the bed, I caught sight of the photograph of the butchered Mary Kelly. The one Ripper killing still to be replicated.

The lift was about fifteen metres away along the corridor. I’d raised my hand to press the call button when the last piece of the jigsaw fell into place.

Oh Christ.