- 'Natalia! Natalia! Natalia!'
A light at the end of the hall. We run into the room as if our lives depended on it. Then I see her.
Standing in the bathroom door. Wearing pyjamas I once removed with my own hands. Such fear in her face that she seems tiny. I put my arms around her, scanning the flat. Malasana's methodically diving into each room, checking them.
- 'What's going on?' she cries, terror in her voice.
I try to speak but the fear and anxiety have completely dried my mouth out and I can't even swallow. All that comes out is a strangled sound.
Malasana comes back, gun in hand.
- 'Are you all right?' he asks her.
- 'Of course. What's going on?'
For the first time in a very long time, I hear the soft outlines of Natalia's native tongue in the Spanish words. Natalia, who speaks Spanish better than I do.
- 'What is it?'
- 'Nothing to worry about,' says Malasana, standing up slightly, suddenly more formal for some reason. 'It was a false alarm.'
Natalia looks at me, her eyes full of questions.
- 'Did you think that man...?'
'Why didn't I think of it before? How could I be so stupid?' Just because she's my lover doesn't mean she doesn't have a past. I should have provided protection, as we did for all the other girls. Did no one mention it just to spare my feelings? 'Boss, you want to protect every sex worker in the city and you forget Natalia?' I feel like shooting myself in the head. If something had happened to her...
- 'I'm fine. The door is locked. Everything is fine here. Nothing happened,' she says, comforting me.
I see my face in the mirror. I don't look anxious. I look insane. The killer has driven me mad. He's won. He can take more than I can. He's been playing with me. Whatever brief flicker of hope I may have felt earlier on is now gone. Now I know for sure I'm wrong, that he's out there doing unspeakable things to some innocent woman, and it could be anywhere.
- 'Call Jose Luis,' I say to Malasana.
While he phones, she asks who Jose Luis is.
- 'A friend. He'll stay with you tonight.'
I don't even hear her protests. I go into the bathroom, leaving my gun on a shelf. I run the tap and stick my whole head under the cold water. It wakes me up as I hear the voices of two officers coming into the flat. Malasana tells them it's a false alarm, best if they go back out.
I look up and see myself in the mirror: a desperate old man. It's only an instant, but it stretches as wide as the whole of time. It terrifies me. I can barely breathe. I'm suffocating. What am I good for, in all my violence, if I can't stop the monsters? I wonder whether I should kill him. See myself on my deathbed... Yes, I must.
I can bear the truth, even if it tears me apart. But I can't bear this uncertainty. I'm like a rat in a lab. In a maze, the killer's maze.
Natalia comes in quietly and places her hand on my back. When I dry my hair, I feel a tiny flicker of relief. But at least she's alive. She's whole. I touch her. I wrap my arms around my waist and hug her whole body close to mine, running my hand over her body as if inspecting something for sale. I need to feel all of her skin, all her limbs. Then I study her face. I don't need to say anything. We both know what's passed between us tonight. Her mouth lifts in a smile. She knows how dear she is to me and that I'm too much of a coward to tell her so.
Malasana moves further down the hall, discreetly.
I kiss her as if the world were just beginning.
Jose Luis takes stock of Natalia's lodgings like a beggar in a deserted royal court, greed shining in his eyes. He doesn't bother to hide the looks he's shooting at us both, teasing us.
- 'Don't even thinking about making him coffee,' I say to Natalia before I leave.
We get back in the Golf, which looks like a beaten beast. It's still going, despite everything it's been through tonight.
We go back to the station. It's unnervingly quiet. Not a peaceful quiet, a hysterical one. There are almost no officerd around, since they're all still out patrolling or protecting the sex workers. More reports of drunken brawls, clashes between neighbours, violence at a local club, a car accident. A quiet night. The quietest night of the year. Unsurprising, with every officer and more out on the streets.
The Madrid team are sitting at a table, empty coffee cups in front of their drained faces.
- 'What happened?' asks Galan, already knowing the answer.
I ignore her and go into my office. But she follows me.
- 'You left your duty station to go and see your... partner,' she says.
- 'Get out,' I say. No doubt another charge to add to the already very long list.
- 'You left without alerting anyone to a possible threat.'
- 'It was a personal matter. I've been suspended from the inquiry thanks to your lot, or don't you remember?'
- 'But you've never really taken that seriously, have you? You've been working on it all along, on your own. You were never happy having us here, nosying in.'
- 'Now you say that, I didn't mind, in the beginning. I actually thought you were a valuable member of the team. But seeing what you've actually done for the inquiry, now I think you might as well have stayed in Madrid.'
- 'Idiot!'
I don't respond. The wholesale market is waking up for the day, lights coming on. The usual swarm of reporters is hunkered under the arches waiting for the scoop. Dawn comes all at once, violent red light streaking across the sky and blinding them.
- 'First you turn a blind eye to the possibility of a friend of yours being the killer. And now you leave the command post to go and protect a...'
Rage surges through me, but when I turn to look her in the face all I feel is pity. She's just taking her frustration at her failure out on me. So as not to carry the full weight of it alone. If I wasn't here she'd probably be completely depressed, inert. I understand that it's all her powerlessness and impatience pouring out. 'I feel the same.' 'That's no consolation to me.
- Your officers lost track of their suspect,' she complains.
- 'As did the COU team.'
I take a deep breath and light my millionth cigarette of the night. I Google Jack the Ripper's fifth murder, just to torture myself. The police took the clearest photo of every image we have of the original crimes.
I don't want to think about what our man may have done.
I close my eyes. The details barely show up on the black and white images. But it's lasered onto my eyes. The sun comes up fully and the light clear away the shadows in my office. As if there were nothing terrible under the sun.
I feel a slight vibration and open my eyes: Malasana, sleeping in an armchair facing me.
Galan must have gone somewhere else to lick her wounds.
Mojacar. Five minutes
It's Lopez. I lean over and nudge Malasana.
- 'Let's go and have breakfast.'
He stretches, looks at me and understands no one's going to be eating even a single bite. We leave the office and pad through the room where the Madrid team is sleeping next to their phones.
- 'Sure you don't want to have breakfast with us?' I say to Galan as I walk past her. She's so anxious her eyes are open.
Dry and wide, like a scared doll. Almost catatonic. She needs something to wake her up, I think remorsefully.
Out in the car, Lopez is on the line.
- 'Rita Oehlen, boss!'
His words make my blood run cold. He tells us the way. My foot is back down on the accelerator. We slam around every curve, tyres singing. The locals don't know what to make of this half-ruined car racing through the streets. As we wind our way through streets lined with villas and luxury flats we wonder what Rita Oehlen has to do with all of this. She knew Cristiana Stoicescu. But she doesn't fit the profile of the victims.
Lopez is waiting for us outside a wrought-iron gate. His face is shaken.
- 'I couldn't
manage to go in on my own,' he says.
We crunch through the gravel to the house. The mansion looms over us blindly.
- 'The gardener starts work at eight. He noticed the door was open and thought it was odd. So he went in. He fainted. I phoned an ambulance.'
Lopez is out of breath. We go up a sweeping marble staircase and get to a solid, white wooden door, standing wide. Next to it, sitting on the floor, a man is hunched over. We cross the minimalist front hall and run down corridors that are wider than the offices at the station. Lopez leads us to a door and says:
- 'I can't, boss.'
He's on the verge of tears. His face is crumpled, shoulders shaking.
Far away, sirens are blaring, very faintly still.
We take a deep breath and look at each other. Malasana sighs. We push the door open.
And enter hell.
The room is still plunged in darkness, which explains why the gardener had to get so close to the scene to make out what the shape on the chaise longue was, next to the wall. The drawn curtains block out the light. It smells of blood. It smells of death. Although I try and brace myself for what I know we'll find, my legs are trembling. Malasana's voice breaks.
- 'Should I open the curtains?'
- 'Wait,' I say, after three attempts at swallowing, my mouth completely dry, my saliva like cement.
The light spilling into the room from the corridor is enough to give us a glimpse of the horror of the scene. A sudden flash of heat makes me avert my eyes and I see a fireplace the coals should be glowing in. I know what I'll see there. The murderer will have burnt the woman's clothes, as Jack the Ripper did with Mary Kelly's.
Malasana can't put it off any longer. He wants to get this over and done with.
- 'Shall I?' He gestures at the curtains.
And draws them back to reveal a scene no one of us will ever forget.
The early morning light rushes in, illuminating the body on the chaise longue. Each of us lifts a hand to our mouths. Each of us retches, shaking, the sound seeming to echo through the room. Steps behind us. I want them to come in, I want this room filled with voices, steps, human movement, anything to blot out what is on the chaise, which is anything but human. A human hand has transformed a living body into a heap of bloody flesh.
The woman's head rests placidly on the chaise, her hair fanned out around her like the rays of the sun. Her hair is the only thing about her that seems to have once been alive.
She lies on her back, her legs spread and bent at the knee. A brutal cut to the neck leaves her spine exposed. Ears and nose have been slashed. The rest of her face is a shredded bloody mass that is barely recognisable as once having been a human face. The bones of her skull are visible. Her eyeballs have been slashed open and the eyelids cut away, staring into some terrible, infinite abyss.
The blood has dripped from the chaise to the floor, and we stand at the edge of a vast, deep black sea. None of us dares to step into it, so we stand there in silence, none of us capable of uttering a single word. The killer emptied her abdominal cavity. Slit the body open and removed every single one of her organs. The womb and genitals, shredded to piece, are set to one side. Her cut-off breasts and liver on the other. He flayed her right leg, exposing the femur. On the table he moved next to the chaise are the intestines and the kidneys. A great bloodstain spreads over the wall.
- 'Where's the heart?' I ask, looking round.
- 'It must be somewhere in that pile of... flesh,' says Malasana, his voice toneless.
There are stains at the end of the chaise longue as if the killer had wiped his knife clean on it. Someone comes in behind us.
- 'Christ!'
The most squeamish officers look on from the door. No one's coming in for the sake of it, that's for sure. Only Diaz and Galan are brave enough - or maybe it's the call of duty. Diaz retches so hard he bends over. He covers his mouth with a handkerchief.
Galan takes a few steps forward, stopping at the edge of the puddle of blood. Her eyes sweep over the terrible scene.
Then we all look at the pathologist. He's just joined the Legal Institute of Medicine and I've never met him before. The veterans will have washed their hands of this one and let him take the hit. He's small and slight, his face almost childlike, strange for a man whose job is to analyse dead bodies.
- 'It's a perfect replica!' says Galan.
The pathologist stops short.
- 'It's too much!' he mutters so quietly it takes us a long time to make out the words.
Galan moves over to the fireplace. I can feel her body trembling from here. She wants to fake fortitude, power through it, but the facade always slips. Our words falter, our breathing gets shallower, our hearts beat faster.
- 'The painting,' says Galan, looking at the wall.
- 'What?'
- 'There was a print in Mary Kelly's room, The Fisherman's Widow.'
- 'This is The Ripper's Room, by Sickert,' I reply.
- 'Yes. Yes, it was to be expected,' she says.
The pathologist takes a deep breath and moved towards the body.
- 'Oh, my God! Oh, my God!'
He'll never forget his trial by blood. He walks around the chaise longue without taking his eyes off the body, hypnotized by the horror.
- 'My God! My God!'
His face suddenly crumples, as if stricken with an impossible pain.
- 'Take your time,' I say.
He runs out, bursting into tears and covering his mouth.
I feel the now-familiar buzz of an incoming message. I know what it is. I know what it means. I sense what the message will say before I even read it.
- The biggest whore of all, Chief.
More than a hundred journalists have gathered in the grounds. Our officers haven't been able to hold them back and they're lined up from the front gate to the door.
It's a glorious day and the sun beams down, indifferent to the suffering and destruction inside. We hear shouts, people calling our names, journos hustling for a scoop. Some neighbours have come along to find out what all the fuss is about.
The house overlooks the Mediterranean and the views are breathtaking. Below us, the sea stretches out impossibly blue, the sun sparkling on the waves, so peaceful it almost makes you believe the bloodbath inside is a bad dream. The lines of the coast flowing smoothly, lush with greenery and thrumming with life, like a beating heart. Nature, contained and groomed to mimic the splendour humankind has been destroying from the start.
The treachery of horror fills our hearts and we silently curse as we try to avoid the crowds baying for blood.
We hide in a side room as the news comes in. Some officers say they found a back door with a broken window. They take us there and we see a service door leading onto a back courtyard used to store gardening tools. The courtyard door into the house has a broken window, the inside lock scraped back.
- 'This is where he came in,' says the officer showing us the door.
- 'Not much security for a house like this,' I say, thinking about loud.
Saying a few ordinary words helps me calm down. As if I was taking a tiny step, leaving behind the horror chilling me to the bone. I look up at the sky, so bright and blue, the sun incandescent, but feel cold inside, as if nothing could warm me up now.
- 'The glass was shattered really small, boss. Look at these tiny bits. But there are no prints. No scratches on the ground.'
Malasana's right again. If someone had gone through the door they would have had to step on the tiny shards of glass, which would have been crushed into the soles of their shoes and the floor.
- 'She let him in,' I say, voicing Malasana's thoughts.
We let the officers continue their search of the grounds and house.
A moment later, we hear shouting. A group of officers is trying to get the journos and locals to move along. They're blocking a spot on the road.
- 'There'
s a tyre print on the hard shoulder, boss,' says one of the officers, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that I feel sorry for him.
- 'Get them out of the way even if you have to push them down the hill to do it.'
Lopez has refused to go home. The cook makes him some chamomile tea. She's in a bad way herself, and tears stream down her face as she brings the other officers some coffee. Lopez sits in a corner in stony silence, white as a sheet, his face looking like a building that's been bombed. We go over and see him. He's chain-smoking and breathing heavily.
I tell him to go home, but he shakes his head.
- 'I knew her,' he says.
He drinks some of his steaming tea.
- 'We're... we were the same age. But she went to a private school and then back to Austria for uni. Since her dad was from there. And then... we weren't friends really. But I'd always wave hello when I saw her.'
- 'She knew the killer,' I say quietly, out of earshot of the rest of the officers milling about. 'Can you tell us more about her?'
He goes to say something, but just then the Madrid team comes in. I tell him to go on, but Inspector Galan makes a beeline for us.
- 'She was... well, I don't like to speak ill of the dead... She wasn't a good person. Didn't treat people very well. They say she was a shark when it came to business. She had a lot of enemies.'
The Ripper Page 38