by Mark Romain
Jack’s Back
Murder returns to Whitechapel
Mark Romain
Dedication
For my wonderful wife, Clare, and our two amazing children, Mitch and Lauren – you guys are my raison d’être.
And also, for our first grandchild, little Archie, who arrived in January 2018, bringing so much joy and love with him.
Acknowledgments
Edited by Yvonne Goldsworthy
Cover design by Woot Han
And I’d like to say a special thank you to my little team of test readers, Clare, David and Martin, for all the feedback you provided while I was writing this story.
BE AFRAID.
THIS IS ONLY THE START...
JACK’S BACK.
Contents
Jack’s Back
Dedication
Acknowledgments
BE AFRAID.
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
EPILOGUE
The Hunt For Chen
Glossary of terms
Author’s note
About the author
Turf War
Chapter 1
DCI Tyler Thriller series
PROLOGUE
20th December 1995
Connie Williams – or Willow as she was known in the trade – led the punter she’d just picked up along a narrow, cobbled alleyway just off Shacklewell Lane in Hackney. The place smelled rank, but at least it was out of the biting wind and away from prying eyes. Despite the bitter cold, the twenty-four-year-old, leggy brunette wore a lightweight coat over a low-cut black silk blouse, which was so thin it was almost see through. A red leather mini-skirt, a laddered pair of black fishnet stockings, and a pair of ridiculously high heels that she could barely walk in, completed the tacky outfit.
The night air was so cold that her breath came out as a thick cloud of vapour every time she exhaled. The bookies were giving great odds on it being a white Christmas, but only a mug would take that bet – she had never known it snow in London over the festive period.
Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled seductively at the gormless pervert who was blatantly ogling the curves of her arse. Seeing the lust that burned brightly in his beady eyes and the bulge that stretched the fabric of his stained trousers, Connie laughed. “Be patient, sweetheart,” she told him, exaggerating the sway of her hips for his benefit.
The punter, an unshaven Turk with a thick moustache, leered in anticipation of what was to come. Even from a distance, she could smell the alcohol on his breath.
It was the wrong side of midnight, and business had been painfully slow for most of the evening. It was probably a knock-on effect from the sting operation that Stoke Newington police had recently carried out to target the area’s kerb crawlers and working girls. She had read all about it in the latest edition of the Hackney Gazette. In the article, the neighbourhood policing Sergeant had boasted about the fifty-three arrests his team had made in response to local residents and businessmen complaining about the prostitution problem that was blighting the lives of decent law-abiding citizens. Yeah, right. Would that be the same citizens who regularly used her services because their fat, whingeing wives were either mind-numbingly boring in bed, or had gone off sex altogether and were no longer willing to lay there, legs apart, pretending to enjoy themselves while their inconsiderate husbands selfishly satisfied their own carnal urges?
Luckily, business had picked up during the last hour and she now had enough money to buy the crack she needed to get her through the coming day. Her teeth started chattering, and she decided to call it a night once she relieved this creep of his money.
Willow wondered what he would ask for once they were alone: a hand job, a blow job or a quick knee trembler. Her money was on the latter. She stopped by a line of garages at the far end of the alley; it was as good a place as any to rock his world.
Less than five-minutes later it was all over, and she was following Mr Pump-Pump-Squirt back out of the alley. She had been right about the knee trembler.
The Turk hesitated at the mouth of the alley, glancing around furtively before stepping onto Shacklewell Lane. It was funny how they didn’t care about being seen on the way in - when all they could think about was getting their end away. Now that his wallet and his ball-sack were both a little lighter, and he was thinking with his brain again, and not his dick, the punter was keen to leave the red-light district without being seen by someone who might recognise him or – worse – being stopped by the Old Bill. Perhaps he had read the article in the Gazette as well?
“Hello,” a voice behind her said, startling her. Willow spun around to see a white male in his early forties standing a few feet away, half concealed by the shadows. “Don’t be alarmed,” he reassured her, seeing the uncertainty that crossed her face. “I’m not with the police.” He sounded educated, unlike most of her usual clients, who either had local or foreign accents.
“What do you want?” she demanded as he emerged into the light. The man was clean shaven, and of medium height and build. She could see wisps of dark hair poking out from beneath the old-fashioned Fedora he wore upon his head. The collar of his long grey coat was turned up, successfully masking the lower part of his face, and a pair of expensive looking black leather gloves protected his hands from the cold. “I want you to do for me what you just did for him,” he said, indicating the receding figure of her last client with a jut of his chin.
Willow relaxed. A copper would never have propositioned her like that; it would have amounted to entrapment. She had planned to call it a night, but in her game, you never looked a gift horse in the mouth. Besides, he didn’t look like the type of man who would know what the going rate was, and she sensed there might be some scope to squeeze a few extra quid out of him. Smiling, Willow waved him towards the alley. “Why don’t we step into my office, where we can discuss your needs in more privacy,” she suggested, rubbing her arms briskly to keep warm.
She led him back down to the garages. The full moon had broken through the clouds and was now bathing them in a silvery glow. It was almost romantic, she reflected. Well, apart from the freezing cold, the cluster of bins overflowing with trash and used condoms, the smell of urine and the sound of two Tomcats hissing and spitting at each other as they had a bit of a ding-dong on the garage roof.
The punter wanted to do her standing up, but not from behind. “Okay, but I don’t do kissing,” she told him. It was better to get that straight, right from the off.
He pulled a face. “I have absolutely no interest in kissing you,” he assured her in a derisory tone that implied he found the thought repugnant. “I just want to be able to se
e your face.”
“Fair enough,” she said, holding out her hand for payment. “We can do that.”
He handed over the money and they got straight down to it – she had charged him fifteen pounds over the odds and, to her delight, the naive fool had actually coughed up the cash without batting an eyelid.
Willow tried to make him hard by using her hand, but after several unsuccessful minutes of tugging, she grew impatient. “Is there a problem?” she demanded, irritably. Her hand was growing tired and she was getting bored, but at least all the yanking had warmed her up.
“I’m just a little cold,” he told her, but she could tell he was lying.
“Are you having trouble getting it up?” she asked, raising an accusing eyebrow. If he was, she had no intention of giving him a refund.
“No,” he said, a little too quickly. “It’s just that…well…perhaps we could play a little game to help get me in the mood.”
An alarm bell went off inside Willow’s head. Some of the other girls were willing to indulge the perverts with so-called ‘special needs’, but she had never been into that. “I don’t do kinky,” she told him, releasing his flaccid tool and taking a step backward. “I’ll fuck, suck or wank you off, but that’s where I draw the line. There are plenty of other girls who are willing to play rough or whatever, but I’m not one of them.”
His demeanour changed abruptly, and he lunged forward, grabbing her arms aggressively. “Don’t you dare start acting all virtuous with me,” he warned, slamming her back against the garage door with such force that it made her bones rattle. Willow gasped as the air was knocked from her lungs. She opened her mouth to scream, but he had anticipated that. The punter clamped a leather gloved hand across her mouth and squeezed so hard that she thought her lower jaw was going to break. He smiled at her pain, and there was a spiteful glint in his eyes that told her that the sadistic bastard was getting far more pleasure out of her fear than he had from her hand. “Make a noise and I’ll kill you, do you understand?”
Willow nodded, terrified. Her heart was beating so fast that she thought it might explode inside her chest; this was every sex worker’s worst nightmare, and she knew that her survival might depend on keeping calm and doing whatever he said, even if it meant remaining passive while he roughed her up.
He was studying her dispassionately, the way that a cat toying with a mouse does just before killing it. “I like to say and do certain things when I fuck,” he explained, as though that made the way he’d just manhandled her okay. “You know: things that I can’t say or do when I’m with my wife.” Their eyes locked for a moment and she thought she detected a glimmer of sadness in them, but then his face contorted into a mask of hatred. “And I’m going to do all those things to you, right now.” The words were spat out with such malevolence that Willow nearly wet herself with fright.
The punter’s wife had been raised as a strict Catholic. For her, sex was an unpleasantness that married couples indulged in purely for the purposes of procreation; it was always done in the missionary position and never – ever – with the lights on. He respected her views because he loved her, but love or not, he still had needs, and when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to satisfy them, he quickly found an alternative outlet. He’d happily used the services of prostitutes in his younger years, and it seemed a better solution to his predicament than taking a lover. After all, when you thought about it, having sex with a prostitute was no different to relieving yourself with your hand; it was basically just another way of masturbating.
The trouble was, he wanted to do more than just fuck them; he wanted to hurt and abuse them. He wasn’t sure why, but the desire to beat up one of the working girls had finally become too powerful to resist, which was why he had travelled here tonight, to an area where he was unknown. He was finally going to act out his secret fantasy.
“Here’s how it’s going to work,” he told her, grinning with a maniacal intensity that she found terrifying. “You’re going to stand there and take whatever I do to you without complaint, and when it’s over you’re going to go down on your knees and thank me. Do you understand me?” Before she could respond he removed the hand from her mouth and slapped her violently across the face. Willow cried out in pain. Suddenly his hands were fastened around her throat, cutting off all sound, and she could feel him thrusting his shaft against her stomach. He was hard now, aroused by her pain and fear.
“You filthy harlot, I’m going to fuck you till you bleed, and if you ever tell anyone about what I’ve done I’m going to come back and slice your nose off, and then your eyelids and then your lips.” His voice was quivering with excitement, and she suddenly felt him enter her. No! Wait! She wanted to cry out. You’re not even wearing a condom! But he was too far gone to care. “And then I’m going to slit your worthless throat from ear to ear,” he panted, his eyes bulging with excitement as he approached climax, “and watch you bleed out as I fuck the hole in your neck.”
Unable to breath, Willow lashed out in terror, at first clawing at his face and then trying to gouge his eyes out, but he was far too strong and he simply swatted her feeble efforts aside.
She could feel the life being squeezed out of her. As she vainly fought to pull his hands away from her throat, tiny yellow spots flickered before her eyes and the world began to swim. Within moments, her hands fell to her sides and her legs buckled underneath her.
And then he had finished, and she was lying on the floor gasping for breath as he stood over her, trousers around his ankles, wiping his manhood with a handkerchief.
“Now thank me,” he told her, breathing heavily from his exertions.
Willow struggled into a sitting position on the cold floor, rubbing her bruised and bloody neck. As she gulped down air, the world slowly came back into focus.
She was still alive!
When she didn’t immediately comply with his instruction, the punter reached down and grabbed her hair savagely. Using both hands, he dragged her to her feet, ignoring her cries of pain. “I told you to thank me,” he snarled.
“Thank you?” Willow sobbed uncontrollably. “What for, raping and half-killing me? You sick fuck, just get out of my sight before I call the police.” As she spoke, Willow tried to back away from him, but the punter had no intention of allowing that. He yanked her hair upwards, forcing her onto the tips of her toes. Despite the searing pain in her scalp, Willow shoved him hard in the chest with both hands, sending him tottering backward in a series of penguin-like steps.
She kicked off her shoes and tried to run past him, but the punter rugby tackled her to the ground, landing on top of her chest with a heavy thud.
His brain was on fire as he pinned her writhing form to the floor. As she struggled to break free, something inside his mind snapped and he lunged for her throat, hands outstretched like grotesque claws.
The punter continued to wring Willow’s scrawny neck long after she was dead. At some point during the attack, he couldn’t remember when exactly, he battered the back of her skull against the dirty cobbled floor, cracking her head open like an eggshell.
Afterwards, as he sat astride her body, perspiring and gulping air down hungrily, the seriousness of the situation began to sink in. Staggering to his feet, Willow’s killer wiped his bloodstained, shaking hands down the sides of his coat and hurriedly pulled his trousers up.
“My God, what have I done?” he asked himself, hardly recognising the sound of his own voice. In a moment of pure madness, he had done something utterly reprehensible.
Taking a last look at the unmoving form on the cobbled floor, the man who had ended Willow’s life so prematurely turned and ran down the alley.
CHAPTER 1
Saturday 30th October 1999
Although the pale-yellow glow from the brass table lamp illuminated his lap and most of his torso, it was nowhere near strong enough to reach his face, which remained firmly ensconced in shadow.
Beyond the small pool of light, the darkness
that filled the rest of the room was cold and foreboding. From deep within it came the steady tick-tock of a large clock, providing the heartbeat of an otherwise silent house.
The man sitting motionless in the red Chesterfield opened the thick, leather-bound tome in his hands and began reading.
…As it is written in the heavens above, so it is reflected on the mortal plain below. This is a fundamental truth that lies at the heart of all occult teachings...
“As above, so below…” He voiced the magician’s motto with reverence. The maxim comes from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus (meaning Hermes the Thrice Greatest). Also known as the Smaragdine Table, the Tablet’s cryptic message is considered one of the bedrocks of Hermeticism.
The Tablet was purportedly discovered by Alexander the Great in a cave at Hebron, which contained the tomb of Hermes. The short work contained thirteen sentences in Phoenician characters, and these are considered to be the basic principles of alchemy.
In essence, ‘As above, so below,’ is an esoteric proclamation that the Microcosm – oneself – and the Macrocosm – the universe – are fundamentally one and the same, and an understanding of one leads to a greater understanding of the other. According to Hermetic doctrine, there are no autonomous strands in our existence; all things on heaven and earth originate from a single source and they remain forever dynamically interconnected. From the individual quarks, protons, neutrons, and electrons that populate an atom to the largest galaxies that make up the limitless universe, all things are joined.