The Ripper

by Carmelo Anaya

  I pull out my gun. And put the barrel in his mouth.

  - 'Tell me who it is. You might be mental, but you're not stupid. You know I'm going to shoot you. You know the most important thing in the world to me is catching him.'

  He focuses his weeping eyes on mine, which must look crazy, crazier than anything he could have imagined, because he finally speaks, even if the words aren't what I want to hear.

  - 'I - don't - know! I don't know.... I never.... I never saw him!' he wails, bursting into tears.

  Outside, there are noises, shouts.

  - 'Go and help Lopez.'

  Malasana races out.

  - 'Tell me. I won't tell anyone. I promise the world will hear your message. I just want to know. No one else will know. Just me.'

  Pascua sobs and sobs. 'I don't know... I don't know,' he mumbles on and on, protecting his head with his arms again like a frightened child. I put the gun away and fall into the chair opposite him. I believe him. He doesn't know a thing. The poor crazy fucker was manipulated so the killer could have us all fooled. The killer wouldn't have taken a chance on a mentally unstable man who could have given him away at any time.

  - 'Commissioner! How dare you?'

  Diaz bursts in, face burning with indignation, anger in every muscle of his body.

  - 'I order you to leave immediately. This isn't going to help your case. 'I'll be reporting you. You beat and tortured a detainee!'

  He looks at me as if I've gone completely mad. He doesn't know the half of it. I feel completely insane. I get up and stretch out a hand towards Pascua, still hunched over, afraid. I stroke him lightly on the head.

  - 'I'm sorry.'

  I leave the room. A group of officers is outside watching the whole thing. Menendez is telling Lopez off, Lopez lying about not having recorded it.

  - 'Let's go,' I say shortly to Lopez and Malasana. They follow me like lambs to slaughter - the slaughter of an unpaid suspension for both of them, no doubt.

  Evil is a religion

  For the chosen ones

  The anointed ones

  Ha ha ha ha ha...

  I love it

  Cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting

  Opening, opening, opening, opening

  Slashing, slashing, slashing, slashing

  Slitting, slitting, slitting, slitting

  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

  34

  I send them over to speak to the pathologist and check the results of Javier Macias's autopsy. Lopez gets ready to go while Malasana stands still for a minute, frowning. But at last he gets in the car and they leave together.

  As soon as they're out of sight, I make for the exit. I bump into Galan in the corridor as she starts climbing the stairs.

  - 'You've got no principles,' she says, without preamble.

  I ignore her and get the car from the garage.

  I drive through the streets alongside other cars in no rush, delivery vans stopping willy-nilly and pedestrians strolling across streets wherever they feel like, no thought to zebra crossings or the green man.

  At Land Registry, I find out he owns a flat in the Tower of Babel and a house near Mojacar. He purchased the flat twelve years ago and inherited the house. I go looking for his inheritance.

  I leave the city, traffic at a standstill as people come and go, finishing up their shifts at the industrial estates or just starting them. Lopez calls: according to the autopsy, the cause of death is craneoencephalic trauma.

  - 'Could it have happened before the accident? Did you ask?'

  - 'Of course I asked, boss. I'm not stupid. You sent me here to ask that. He says there's no way of knowing, the body is... well, practically in bits.'

  - 'Fine. You can both finish up there.'

  - 'I'm on my own. Malasana left.'

  - 'Where'd he go?'

  - 'Don't know. He didn't want to come.'

  I tell him I'll check in with him later and keep driving until I get to Turre. I turn left, heading out towards Mojacar, out on the hill, lazy as a cat in the sun.

  The narrow road connecting Turre and Mojacar is dotted with sleepy properties on either side, yellow earth, neatly-groomed gardens, eucalyptus, palm trees, pines and thickets.

  I drive around in circles before I locate the house, crawling along dirt paths to find the ones furthest from the road, but I just can't find the twenty-odd thousand square foot farm. I get out of the car and walk around, peering at the houses, but most of them look neglected, as most summer houses do in winter here.

  - 'Looking for something?'

  His English accent is so strong it takes a few seconds for the question to click. The old man emerges from behind a beech tree, a pair of pruning shears in his gloved hands. I ask about the house I'm trying to find. After removing his gloves, he points an arthritic finger towards a hill, the slope just under where Mojacar's narrowest, steepest streets begin.

  I get in the car and finally find a tall metal fence. It's tucked away in a nook in the mountain, not far from the first row of houses, but as private as a secret. I clamber up a eucalyptus to look over the wall and see a two-storey stone house, a ceramic tile next to the front door. The Laughing Clown. A clown with a grotesque smile on very red lips, a thick red line stretching from ear to ear. A reference to The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy's terrifying novel. The woman tortured to the brink, murdered, disembowelled and cut in two. A shiver runs down my spine. I know this is the house where the women were kept until they were killed. The place he plotted everything.

  The place where he may have left a trace. Proof of his guilt.

  A car drives down the nearby road. A faraway shout. A whistle. I fear being spotted and fear leaving, as if I were leaving behind a secret that might never be uncovered if I don't act now.

  I hide the car and go back to the house on foot, crossing a meadow and then a field overgrown with undergrowth and tiny palm trees struggling to grow. A carob tree casts some shade and I scramble up it to the top of the wall. Birdsong. A cool breeze stirs the dry foliage and tree branches in the garden. The far-off sounds of a sleepy village going about a lazy morning.

  I jump down from the wall into the garden.

  The sound of water running. Stone-paved paths wind between bushes and trees. Eucalptus, pines, cypresses, willows. On the right, a huge pool surrounded by flagstones. The house is exposed stone. It doesn't look like a farmhouse - more like a luxury townhouse in the middle of the countryside, incongruously. A veranda with two imposing columns, holding up a terrace. Next to the door, the ceramics with the sinister clown. Big windows sweep along the side wall, and the lights of a semi-basement blink at ground level. Then a massive garage door. Big enough for a van to enter. At the back of the house, a courtyard, walled-in, but without a roof. I leap and try to grasp the top of the wall, but then something catches my eye in the garden. Behind a gentle rise, ringed with bushes, is a very different part of the garden. A stone next to a deep hole and a hoe. Eight stones like dried droppings set in the ground. The first five make a circle. They're black: slate, engraved with a number from 1 to 5. And carved next to the number, the symbols he carved on the bodies. A rush of pure terror turns my sweat to ice.

  A shrine. One stone per crime. The five murdered women.

  And next to the five stones, three more: the woman killed in Almerimar, Robot and Javier Macias. His stone, number 8, hasn't been set in the ground yet. In the middle of the circle is a slab of immaculate white marble. It can't be anything else. I get my phone out and text Malasana. Keep watch over Pascua. He's going to attempt suicide.

  Malasana answers immediately, asking what's going on. I leave it and put my phone away.

  I go back to the house and leap over the wall into a small courtyard with a tiled floor, open shower and sink. Gardening tools and clotheslines. The door into the house is wood, swollen in places and soft with damp. The lock gives, but the door doesn't open; there's a lock
on the other side. I swear under my breath and clamber back onto the wall, then up to the terrace where I land with a thud. I go at it harder this time and the terrace door falls open.

  The hall leading onto the terrace houses a crowded bookshelf, a few hammocks and a garden table. The rest of the floor is bedrooms and a bathroom, all with an air of old noblesse going to pot.

  I pad carefully down the stairs, creeping like a thief. The ground floor is filled with spacious, elegant rooms, minimalist in design, lending it a cold, refined air. Booksheleves. Books. Literature. History. Some philosophy. A stereo system. Nothing in the chest of drawers. At the back is a roomy kitchen, its sweeping window overlooking the pool. A pantry. Then more bedrooms and another bathroom. The house of a solitary man. Like in my own home, there's a tangible lack of warmth, the mess and clutter of family. We are both solitary men, he said.

  In the garage is an old raft in bad disrepair, a 1000cc off-road Yamaha, more gardening tools and drip irrigation gears and cleaning products for the pool, alongside some old tyres. I look through the whole house, but there seem to be no personal documents to be found. Just a few invoices for basic repair work on the garage door and upkeep of the garden.

  The door to the semi-basement is located between the pantry and garage. A narrow staircase leading down to a vast room, the size of the entire house. More doors at the back. One leads to a small toilet, the other to a wine cellar full of dusty bottles and spiderwebs.

  I turn on the torch and check the floor for stains. Nothing. In one corner, under an enormous floor lamp, a table with a laptop on it.

  Just then there's a metallic squeak. The front gates opening. A motor purring. Footsteps. A key turning in the lock and a door being slammed. Footsteps overhead. My blood turns to ice. Then, suddenly, the sound of a violin. I hear doors opening and closing. Someone whistling along to the music. And the basement door being opened. Fuck. I turn off the torch, footsteps on the basement stairs. The music slows to a crawl in that insultant and I feel my limbs turn to jelly, my movements slow and clumsy as if trying to move through the swampy waters of a bog. I creep into the cellar and pull out my Glock. Footsteps very near, the whistling coming closer. He goes into the toilet. Six feet from where I'm hiding. Water running. The man washes his hands as he whistles the melody. Just when I think he's about to come into the cellar, the steps move off. I watch him as he moves over to the table. Picks a book up, leafs through it and then puts it down. He dusts off the table.

  I could kill him now. Or beat a confession out of him. Threaten to kill him if he doesn't confess. But it would be no use. All it would take would be his silence or denial for me to be back to square one: absolute certainty with absolutely no proof.

  A sigh. More whistling along to the music. He hums. Lights up. Sits down at the table, relaxing. Like someone coming home after finishing off a hard day's work. His back is to me, but his movements are unmistakable. One hand moving in tandem with the music, like a contained orchestra conductor. The other holding his cigarettes as he smokes slowly, luxuriating in it. He reaches for a book and leaves it open on the laptop, as if to come back to it later. Then he gets up, stubs out his cigarette and says,

  - 'Well, well, well.'

  He makes his way back up the stairs and closes the door. I wait. Footsteps overhead again. Then the front door slams and the car rumbles off. That same metallic grinding as the front gates open. The music he left on finishes in a crescendo of violins.

  I creep out of the cellar towards the table, my eyes immediately falling on the book he left on the laptop. Human Hunters.

  Is it a message? Does he know I'm here? Or is he just feeding into his dark and morbid passion, revelling in the macabre feat he's accomplished?

  All the books on the table are on the same subject: manifestations of madness; serial killers; Jack the Ripper... in Spanish and English. Ten books. All of them underlined, creased, worn with use. And Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, a paperback with dog-eared corners.

  I open up the laptop. It doesn't even have a password. I see folders filled with articles on criminality and sociology, one called The Ripper. Newspaper articles. The history of his crimes in the press. Podcasts discussing the crimes.

  By the time I leave, I know I've found the Beast's lair.

  But I also know I have not one iota of proof.

  Agustin Gomez answers my call politely. But he's alarmed when I tell him I know he was at the Caravan Hotel.

  - 'Commissioner,' he says weakly, trying to justify himself..

  When I change the subject, he relaxes and tells me the whole story. 'They were lovers, this man and Rita Oehlen. Great relationship, for a while at least.' He tells me he wasn't in it for the love of it. 'Never does anything that isn't for his own benefit. Then she got bored of him. She said he was bad in bed and terrible at what he did. The last time they crossed paths, at one of the holding conferences, she ridiculed him in front of more than three hundred people. He never forgave her.'

  I hang up. The last missing link: his friend Damian asking for help. He needs money to get the Romanians off his back.

  He gives him the cash. But he wants something in return: an invite to the parties. And they do it in style. The Ripper pastiche must have been his idea. A macabre game.

  He meets Cristiana Stoicescu there.

  Robot's back not long after. More problems with the Romanian girl. And in that moment it all starts to come together in his mind. The thread that connects Cristiana Stoicescu to his real, true target: Rita Oehlen. He can't kill her just like that; he'd be suspected immediately.

  And he crosses paths with the mentally unstable Abdón Pascua.

  Remembers the Ripper tape. A series of crimes and a madman. No one will suspect, especially if she's the last. And since he wants her to get the special treatment, the Ripper crimes are ideal: the last murder, the jewel in the crown, Mary Kelly.

  Just one drawback. Robot might suspect him. But Robot's a criminal. Two possible solutions: bribes or death.

  Everything was set.

  Looking at it now, some of the leads we followed were beyond laughable. Dead dogs. Pig farms. We suspected everyon around us: Geoffrey Hunt, Vilar the private eye, Carlos Arribas, the psychiatrist, the Romanians, Sisi.

  And there he was by our side all along. You can seek, but you won't find, he said. And he kept his word.

  The only man we never suspected. El único que nos lo ha dicho siempre, en nuestra cara. Now I remember his messages. And now I know, I understand that this long way down to the deepest recesses of human nature - where crime, exploitation, abuse and pain are expressed in the purest, most primitive way - has led me, once again, to come face to face with Evil. Evil, which has always been and will always be. The true forbidden fruit is human flesh: Thou shalt not eat thy neighbour. The only true Commandment. Evil keeps society going, someone once said.

  I have no hope left. Not after seeing this. Not after seeing innocent people blown to bits just because someone wanted to take a stand. After you see that, there's nothing you can believe in.

  The sea glares at me like an enemy. And a voice from the deep tells me not to hold onto false hope. This is not a battle between good and evil. It's a battle that's already over. No one cares anymore. The voice tells me I'm not representing good in this battle. It's just my job. Don't blow it out of proportion, the voice goes on. The world is a nightmare. That isn't going to change just by finishing the Ripper.

  I'm scared of him, the way unhappy people are scared of the successful. He lives his life. I merely put up with mine. But everything in his life and in him is a lie. What's left? The truth: he's a killer. The truth: death. In the end, only the truth will stand the test of time. Hard as a diamond. It takes centuries to come together. You can bury it in stone, in mud, in lead, in concrete. But there it still is at the end of it all. Blinding us when we at last find the courage to look it in the face.

  I wonder if the women will appear to their kil
ler in dreams, as they do in mine. Diana Carolina Mieles was a cleaning lady and carer. She bathed the elderly, picked rubbish off the ground, worked hard. She was deserving. Cristiana Stoicescu, Naima Medari, Sandra Okeke, Rosario Minguez -- none of them knew anything in this life but exploitation. Their flesh was eaten.

  I know my life would be meaningless if I didn't stand up for every Cristiana Stoicescu, every Diana Carolina Mieles, Naima Medari, Sandra Okeke, Rita Oehlen and Rosaria Minguez.

  The law is like a dam. Sometimes it saves you; sometimes it drowns you. It needs vents so justice can get through. We can't see it all. We can't know it all. If we knew about every horror happening around us, every minute of every day, we wouldn't be able to stand it. It's not a limitation; it's relief.

  Then I remember the killer's hand in Rita Oehlen's house, on film. The fingertips coming together, then bursting apart like a flower in bloom: aaahhh.

  The only person who knew told us, but we couldn’t see it. You're a sneaky bastard.

  Tenth floor of a skyscraper in the City. As I go up in the outside lift I see that the next building over belongs to the Oehlen corporation. He saw her every day, far off, feeding into his hate, plotting the pleasure of her gory end.

  She'd humiliated him. And she had to pay.

  The slow ascent in the lift, the panoramic views, lend a messianic, almost religious air to my task here. I see the earth and horizon unfolding before me as if I'd just arrived in the Promised Land. The entire coast laid out before me at my feet, the immense serenity of the Mediterranean stretching away to the horizon, as my body ascends, bringing me closer to hell; not buried under the earth, like in the stories they told, lyng to us innocent children - but high above the ground, where the gods play at our expense. I'm not ascending to heaven. I'm ascending to hell.