93

Friday 9 November

ON FRIDAY 9 NOVEMBER, A LITTLE OVER ELEVEN DECADES after Mary Kelly was hacked to pieces in a small, rented room off Dorset Street, I followed a line of people along a brightly lit, yellow-painted corridor. We’d all travelled some distance, waited for what felt like hours. The people around me all appeared to be used to it. I wasn’t.

It was the first time I’d visited a prison.

In the five weeks since I’d been carried out of the catacombs, the young woman who’d abducted Joanna Groves had made a full confession. Starting that night at Lewisham police station, she told Dana Tulloch and Neil Anderson the full story of how she was raped at knifepoint as a teenager by a group of boys high on drugs, alcohol and arrogance. She remembered every threat, every taunt, every insult, with the screams of her sister ringing in her ears the whole time. She told them she’d genuinely believed, at one point, that she’d died, that this was hell, and that it was never going to end. There were times, she said, when she still thought that.

I heard from colleagues that DS Anderson left the interview room unusually pale and spoke to no one for several hours.

Giving information that only the killer could have known, she freely admitted murdering Geraldine Jones, Amanda Weston, Charlotte Benn and Karen Curtis. She signed the confession Victoria Llewellyn.

At the end of the prison corridor, a door led into a large, high room. The windows were way above our heads, but they had bars across them all the same. Twenty or so small tables were evenly spaced around the floor. Already, people ahead of me in the line were settling themselves down on spare chairs.

In the hours they spent talking to her, Llewellyn told Tulloch and Anderson that she’d gone abroad after her sister’s death, that she’d learned how to fight with knives and guns, and had returned several years later. She came with no papers, no passport, nothing to indicate her identity or her home country. It’s quite commonly done, I learned. If people arrive in the UK with nothing to prove where they’ve come from, we can’t send them back.

After a few tough months, she’d been granted leave to stay and apply for a work permit. She’d worked her way into the west London community around St Joseph’s as a nanny, an au pair, even a house-sitter and a dog-walker. She’d been hardworking and reliable. The families had liked her. She’d come across Samuel Cooper and, spotting a future use for him, had become his lover, feeding him drugs and sex in equal measure.

I looked over at the last line of tables. Closest to the far door sat a young woman in her own clothes. Unconvicted prisoners don’t have to wear prison uniform. The bright-blonde hair dye had begun to grow out and at her roots I could see a centimetre of the soft toffee brown I remembered. Exactly the same colour as my own. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She didn’t need to. She was still one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.

That pretty girl had insisted, several times, that she’d had no contact with me since she’d returned to the UK and that I’d taken no part in any of the abductions or murders. She was determined that I would carry no blame for what she’d done.

She saw me and smiled, watched me make my way towards her table and sit down. I glanced round. Those people in earshot were chattering away, intent only on themselves. No one would hear us talk.

‘Hey, Tic,’ she said.

I hadn’t heard that nickname in a very long time. Certainly not coming from the girl who’d given it to me in the first place, when her plump toddler’s mouth hadn’t been able to form the four syllables of my real Christian name. My baby sister hadn’t been able to manage ‘Victoria’, so she’d called me Tic.

‘Hello, Cathy,’ I replied.