88

I’D TOLD JOESBURY THE TRUTH WHEN I’D SAID I WAS CLOSE to Waterloo station. I’d lied about getting on a train. The London Underground network is riddled with CCTV and finding me would be too easy. Instead I jumped back on the bike and headed east, following the course of the A202 but avoiding the main road. I kept my hood up and my head down and pedalled steadily.

Seventy minutes later, I was high above the city, watching southeast London idle its way through a Sunday. At the entrance to Greenwich Park I’d bought coffee and sandwiches. I ate and drank now, watching the weak sun trying to cast reflections on the river, keeping an eye on anyone who got too close. The sky was getting cloudier all the time and the park wasn’t overly busy. A few dog-walkers, kite-flyers and some families over at the children’s playground. Overnight, the temperature had dropped.

It must have been the proximity of the Greenwich Meridian Line, the centre of the world’s time, that made my sense of time running out so very strong now.

The team I’d walked out on would have two priorities. First, they’d want to find Joanna Groves and Victoria Llewellyn, who it seemed reasonable to assume were in the same place. Their second objective would be me. Already my photograph would have been sent around every police station in London. Every CCTV control room, every copper in uniform, every patrol car, every police community support officer, would have been told to look out for me. I could expect to see myself playing a leading role on the lunchtime news. Then everyone in London who cared would be looking for me too.

And so would Llewellyn. She had my phone number. She would tell me where I was expected to go. All I had to do was avoid being picked up for long enough to give her the chance.

So I sat, and tried not to get too cold, as the hour went past. At twelve fifty-five, the great red time-ball rose halfway up the mast on the top of Flamsteed House. Three minutes later it floated to the top, and at one p.m. it sailed back down again. I waited half an hour more and then pulled out my mobile. No messages.

Switching off the phone, I got back on the bike. I had to assume Joesbury and the MIT now knew I was in Greenwich. Time to move on.

I cycled out of the park and found a market stall that sold cheap clothes. I bought a waterproof blue jacket and a baseball cap and put both on. Then I made my way to the glazed dome entrance of the Greenwich foot tunnel. I pushed the bike through, keeping my head down in case there were cameras inside. On the north bank, I found another bench close to the river and sat, staring at the ornate Wren-designed buildings of the old Greenwich Hospital until another hour had gone by. By this time rain was starting to fall. I switched on my phone again. Nothing.

By mid afternoon I was freezing. I cycled up the Isle of Dogs and found a small internet café that was open on a Sunday. Keeping my head down to avoid CCTV cameras, I went in and found a vacant computer. Then I started making my way through the various news websites.

Joanna Groves’s abduction was on every site I pulled up. She was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, slim girl, not quite pretty but far from plain. She lived in a flat on the ground floor of a house in Wimbledon and worked at the local primary school. She’d left the school at three thirty on Friday afternoon and disappeared. As I flicked through site after site, my insides started to twist themselves into knots.

There was nothing about me. Even on the Met’s own website. Nothing.

My hour wasn’t up, but I couldn’t stay here any longer. Tulloch’s computer skills were legendary and it was perfectly possible that she’d know I’d been on the Met’s website and be able to trace the computer I was using. I got up and left the café in a hurry. The MIT were doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to. I needed them to be looking for me, damn it, and I needed it to be public knowledge. How else would Llewellyn know I’d gone AWOL?

OK, think, think, think. I cycled for fifteen minutes and found another café with internet access. When a machine became available I typed ‘Ripper’ into the search engine and pressed go.

Run a Jack the Ripper search and you can expect to see several million results. Search for his twenty-first-century copycat and it’s not quite so many. Just under forty-three thousand. Still a pretty impressive performance for someone who’s only been around a matter of weeks. I started making my way through the sites, looking for blogs. On each one I left a message.

Cardiff Girl: Call me. L.

It was risky. Officers in the team had been monitoring the various websites since the case had started. When they spotted my posts, they’d start tracing them. I left and found a small, half-empty branch of Starbucks. After forty minutes, I switched my phone on. Nothing. And I was getting paranoid. A woman had entered the coffee bar shortly after me. Three-quarters of an hour later, she was still there. It almost certainly meant nothing, she was probably just another Londoner with too much time to kill, but I didn’t like her being close.

I found another café, this time with a TV, and asked permission to change to the twenty-four-hour news channel. I watched for twenty minutes and saw several references to Joanna. None to me. I switched my phone back on. Still nothing. Move on.

Shit, this was not what I’d planned. Panic was rising inside me like milk coming to the boil. Llewellyn didn’t know I was out here. She wouldn’t contact me.

And my sense of paranoia was growing too, because everywhere I went I had a sense of people looking at me. It was impossible; I’d kept my phone switched off, I’d stayed on the move, I’d avoided cameras, the attention I was getting had to be down to my still-bruised face. But as every minute went by, the sense of being watched increased.

I could just run.

But if I did that, Joanna Groves would die. There had to be another way. I knew this woman. I knew how she thought. Where would she take Joanna?

She’d killed Geraldine Jones in a south London housing estate. She’d cut Amanda Weston to pieces in a park. Charlotte Benn had been murdered in her own home, Karen Curtis at her mother’s house. There was no pattern.

I left the café, unchained my bike and just pushed it along the street, forgetting even to watch out for cameras. For the first time that day I had no plan, no idea where to go next.

Llewellyn had sent me a knife. She wanted me to kill Joanna Groves. That meant she had to believe I’d find her. I passed a newsagent’s, a children’s clothes shop, a second-hand record shop. I’d stopped walking, was staring at my reflection in the record-shop window. On the pavement, people were having to make their way around me, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes off the stack of vinyl recordings of old musicals. The Sound of Music wasn’t there, but it didn’t have to be. I’d got it.

Of course there was a pattern, there had been all along. It was me. It was all about me and my favourite things. Because a couple of times, I’d played that game with someone else. We’d had long lists, that other girl and I, but one day, we’d narrowed our choices down to just five each. We’d laughed because I’d tried so hard to make my five all begin with P, but it didn’t matter how much time we spent, we couldn’t think of another word for zoo that began with P.

So my list was the (P) zoo, Parks, Pools, Public libraries and Ponies.

Geraldine Jones had been killed where I would be bound to find her, to make sure I became involved from the outset. Amanda Weston had been murdered in a park I visited, part of her body left for me in one of my favourite swimming pools. Charlotte Benn’s heart had been found in the children’s section of a Victorian public library, on top of one of my favourite books. We’d been sent on a wild goose chase to London Zoo to find Karen Curtis’s head. Parks, libraries, pools and the zoo. Four out of five boxes had been ticked. One left.

Ponies.

Finally, I knew where they were. Poor terrified Joanna Groves and the Llewellyn woman who was holding her hostage, waiting for me to arrive and draw a knife across her latest victim’s throat.

When I’d told Joesbury the story of two young women sharing cardboard walls and body warmth in a derelict London building, I hadn’t been specific. The exact location of that half-forgotten, freezing-cold place hadn’t seemed significant. And, of course, it didn’t take a genius to spot that when I mentioned a particular London district to Joesbury his eyes had a habit of narrowing and his jawline of becoming that bit tighter. When it came to me – and Camden – Mark Joesbury had a bit of a blind spot.

I’d wanted him listening and sympathizing, not getting mad. So I hadn’t mentioned that the place where I’d met and lived with the other young runaway had been less than half a mile from where I now regularly – to use his words – go shagging.

But it made perfect sense that Llewellyn would choose Camden. I’d lived there for months, knew it well, and although much of it had changed beyond recognition in recent years, the entire development had been themed around that other favourite of mine. Ponies. Llewellyn was holding Joanna somewhere around Camden Stables Market. Almost certainly in the Camden Catacombs.