Jack's Back

by Mark Romain

  Clutching his side, he stumbled out of the van and started to head for the road. And that was when he saw her, standing beside the bonnet of the little blue car he’d crashed into, swaying like a drunk.

  “You!” he said, shocked to see the whore who had been with his wife when he returned from reconnoitring the warehouse. “What are you doing here?”

  Kelly turned to face him. She had to squint to make him come into focus because her vision had gone all blurry. At the moment, there seemed to be two people standing in front of her, but then they merged into one. Why are your words so slurred, she wondered, feeling very confused, “and how are you making your voice echo like that? To her, he sounded like one of the Clangers from the children’s TV show.

  Simon Pritchard realised that she was badly concussed and that he was unlikely to get any sense out of her. “Oh well,” he said reaching for the Finnish skinning knife, “I haven’t got time to get to the bottom of this, so you’ll just have to die without revealing your secrets.” He advanced towards the whore, realising that she had no idea of the danger she was in. “This shouldn’t take a second,” he said, moving behind her so that he wouldn’t be caught in the arterial bleed. Pritchard yanked her hair back roughly and raised the knife to slit her throat. It was a pity he didn’t have the time to establish which sign of the Zodiac she had been born under. Ah well, those were the breaks.

  As he was about to slice open her throat, he became aware of people running towards him, panting from their exertions. “What now?” he snarled, pulling her close to him, in case he needed to use her as a shield. “Stay where you are,” he shouted at the two figures that had just appeared out of the mist. “If you come any closer, I will kill her.”

  The figures slowed down, but they continued to walk forward, warily. As they stepped into the light, Pritchard immediately recognised the first as his nemesis and the second as his oversized colleague.

  As battered as they looked, it was pretty obvious that there was still plenty of fight left in them. “What have I got to do to make you stay dead?” he asked Tyler.

  “It’s over, Pritchard,” Jack growled. “Put down the knife.”

  Pritchard grinned nastily, exposing blood stained teeth. “Oh, I’m only just warming up,” he promised. As he spoke, he began backing away, dragging Flowers with him. He needed to get to the main road and flag down a car.

  “Let the girl go, Simon,” Jack said. “If you do, we won’t pursue you from here. If you kill her there’s no way you’ll get away. You know that.”

  “What? You’re just going to let me walk away, are you?” The Disciple smirked. “You must think I was born yesterday.”

  Jack shook his head emphatically. “We’ll catch you, whether it’s today or tomorrow. All I’m offering you is a chance for it to not be today. What do you say?”

  Pritchard considered the offer, and he was sorely tempted. Tyler was right, if he killed the girl there was very little chance that he would get away. But, if he let her live, and if Tyler kept his word, there was still a chance that he would be able to complete the ritual. If he did that, it wouldn’t matter that they knew his name – he would be invincible. They would never be able to find him, and after things died down, he would be able to come back for the third bitch responsible for ruining his life. He licked his lips nervously. “How do I know I can trust you?” he asked.

  As Jack was about to speak, the sound of approaching sirens reached their ears. From the sound of it, there were a lot of emergency vehicles en route.

  Pritchard sneered. “I knew it was a trick,” he snarled. “You were just biding your time until reinforcements arrived. You have no intention of letting me go, do you?” He yanked Kelly’s hair back, causing her to scream out in pain. The blade of the knife moved towards her throat, and Jack could tell from the look in the madman’s eyes that he was going to kill her out of spite.

  “No! Please!” he begged, raising his hands in surrender. “They’ll do what I tell them to,” he said, taking a step forward. Beside him, Dillon crouched, ready to pounce.

  Pritchard’s face darkened as he came to a conclusion. “I’ll take my chances without your help,” he hissed. Taking a deep breath, his grip tightened on the engraved handle of his favourite knife and he pressed the blade against Kelly’s flesh. “Say goodbye to the whore,” he told them.

  The sound of the rock smashing into the back of Simon Pritchard’s head reminded Jack of the noise a dropped egg makes. Pritchard’s eyes went wide with pain and shock, and then they flickered and closed. The knife slipped out of his limp hand, falling on the floor with a clank. Pritchard followed it down, sinking to his knees and then falling face forward into the dirt.

  As he released her, Kelly staggered forward, falling onto her knees.

  Sarah Pritchard stepped out of the shadows, holding the bloodstained rock in her left hand. “I had to do it,” she cried. “He was going to kill her.” She stared at the rock as though it would bite her, and then, with a tearful shudder, released it, allowing it to join Pritchard and his knife on the floor.

  Ignoring the killer, Tyler ran over to Kelly Flowers, pulling her close to his chest. Then he held her at arm’s length and checked her over for injuries. She had cuts and bruises, and a nasty bump on the right side of her forehead, but her pupils were evenly dilated and her throat was in one piece. To his enormous relief, it looked like she was going to be okay.

  Tyler looked over to Dillon, who was kneeling beside Simon Pritchard, taking his pulse.

  “How is he?” Tyler asked.

  Dillon shook his head. “Not good, Jack.” Pritchard’s skull was caved in. Mass and velocity equals kinetic energy, and in this case, the rapid deceleration of the rock had left the kinetic energy with nowhere else to go, other than into the back of the killer’s skull.

  The sirens were getting louder. “Either Kelly managed to get through to the Yard or someone’s called the explosion in,” Tyler speculated.

  “Not me,” Kelly told him, groggily. “I couldn’t get a signal.”

  “It must be Trumpton,” Dillon said. An explosion as powerful as the one at the warehouse would have been seen and heard for miles around. The entire London Fire Brigade was probably on its way.

  Tyler put a protective arm around Flowers and helped her to her feet. “We’ll get you straight to hospital and have you checked out,” he promised.

  “Will you come with me?” she asked, longingly.

  He shook his head sadly. “I’d like to, but I can’t,” he told her, squeezing her shoulders affectionately. “I’ve got to stay and sort this mess out, but I promise I’ll be there as soon as I can get away.”

  After what she had been through, he suspected that Kelly would be kept in for overnight observations at the very least.

  ◆◆◆

  Within minutes, the scene was awash with fire engines, ambulances, and uniformed cops. Dillon had been right: the LFB had been inundated with calls about the four explosions, which had been heard from as far as two miles away.

  At least half of the 80-metre long building was being hungrily consumed by flames, and a thick black cloud of foul-smelling smoke was now polluting the night sky. Twelve pumps had been dispatched to the scene, but Tyler wasn’t sure if that would be enough. The Senior Fire Officer had ordered that a twenty-five-metre exclusion zone be put in place. Fortunately, the warehouse was in a remote location and could be cordoned off without the need for mass evacuations.

  Simon Pritchard had been taken to hospital on blues and twos, with a Traffic car providing an escort. His chances of survival were regarded as slim, and even if he pulled through, there was a good chance he would end up as a vegetable. Personally, Tyler hoped that he would do the decent thing and die. The case had been solved, and he saw no reason to waste tax payers’ money on a convoluted, and very expensive, trial – or on keeping a monster like Pritchard locked up for the next thirty odd years.

  Kelly seemed to be feeling much better, and she was prot
esting about going to the hospital. “I want to stay here and help out,” she insisted.

  Tyler resorted to pulling rank. “DC Flowers, you’re unfit for duty through injury, and you will go to hospital and have a check-up,” he told her in a mock stern voice. And then he smiled warmly. “If the quack clears you, you can come back in tomorrow. If not, relax and enjoy a few days off. You’ve earned it after tonight.”

  “I’m sorry about wrecking the car,” she told him. “I hope the Traffic skipper who reports the collision will take pity on me.”

  “The way I see it, Pritchard deliberately rammed you to get at his wife, who you were in the process of driving away from danger. And, as you were on the main road, and he was joining it, you had right of way.” It wasn’t quite how it had happened, but it was close enough to satisfy a garage sergeant’s curiosity.

  Kelly smiled. “Oh yeah, I didn’t think of it like that.”

  “Go and get checked out,” Tyler told her. “I’ll come up after, and we can grab a coffee – if you want to, that is?”

  “I want to, very much,” she told him, smiling. “Tell me,” she asked, studying him inquisitively. “Was I dreaming, or did you kiss me earlier, when I was lying on the floor after the killer ran off?”

  Tyler blushed. “Well, I…that is…”

  Luckily, he was spared any further embarrassment by the appearance of George Holland. “So, is it true?” The DCS asked, leading him to one side. “Have we finally got him?”

  Tyler nodded. “We have,” he said. “And we have all the evidence we could ever need to put him away for the rest of his natural, not that he’s likely to live very long.” Tyler then talked Holland through the rather harrowing events of the last couple of hours.

  ◆◆◆

  Dillon found Sarah Pritchard sitting in the back of an ambulance, receiving treatment from a paramedic. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “My shoulder is in agony,” she said, grimacing. “I dread to think how much damage that bastard did when he hit me with a hammer.”

  Dillon winced at the mental image of Pritchard attacking his wife in the back of the van. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, softly. “How are you feeling after – you know – having to do what you did?”

  She gave him a wan smile. “I don’t really know. Numb, I suppose.”

  “It’s understandable,” he told her. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re an incredibly brave woman. You saved Kelly’s life tonight. Without your intervention, she would be dead.”

  “Am I going to get into any trouble?” Sarah asked. “You know, for hitting Simon on the head with a rock.” She mimed the act, just in case Dillon hadn’t understood the question.

  “Don’t worry, Sarah,” he said, taking her hand. “You won’t get in any trouble. In fact, you’ll get a bloody medal, if I have any say in the matter.”

  “It all feels so unreal,” she said. “My life has been a sham. The man I thought loved me was a monster. How do you move on from that?”

  Dillon shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but you’re a strong woman and I’m confident that you will find a way.”

  As he waved the ambulance off, it occurred to Dillon that the majority of the team was still out searching for Pritchard, and probably had no idea what had been happening here. He pulled out his phone to update them, but there was no signal. He supposed he should be grateful it still worked at all after his recent dunking in the Thames. Feet squelching with every step, and shivering from the cold, he set off to find a car with a Main-Set. He would have to radio the SCG Reserve and get them to ring each of the skippers to give them the news.

  There was still a ton of work to do before the case was match fit for court – if Pritchard survived long enough to stand trial, but with a bit of luck, the team might actually get a day off this weekend.

  EPILOGUE

  Saturday 13th November 1999

  For most of the team, the weekend was one to remember for solving one of the most challenging homicide investigations the Metropolitan Police Service had been faced with in a very long time.

  The van had contained Pritchard’s murder kit, including the lambskin parchment and a thick notebook explaining how he planned to kill his victims and consume their organs. It also contained a lot of information about Alice Pilkington, who he referred to as The Infector; Geraldine Rye, who he referred to as The Blackmailer, and Sarah Pritchard, his wife, who he referred to as The Controller. Finally, they understood his motive.

  At the hospital, a set of keys had been found in one of Pritchard’s coat pockets, and the fob had the address for a lockup at a railway arch in Three Colts Lane written on it. That morning, DS Susan Sergeant had obtained a search warrant for the venue, and had taken a POLSA team over to pull it apart. The initial results were staggering. They found the missing underwear from each of the killer’s first four victims hidden in a duffle bag. They found traces of blood in an old chest freezer – no doubt this would match Geraldine Rye’s. They discovered make-up props and a variety of disguises, including a long wig, a droopy moustache and a pair of George Harrison style glasses.

  The lock up was steeped in mysticism; ranging from an inverted crucifix hanging over the door to a chalk-drawn circle containing a pentagon and a host of symbols that no one understood. There were also some very interesting occult books on ritualistic sacrifices. It would take some time to go through all the evidence the lockup contained, but Susie was confident this little hoard would solve any remaining gaps in the mystery behind the killer’s motivation, and provide a clear link between him and each of his victims.

  At the mortuary, a dead set of his fingerprints and a sample of his DNA had been taken, and these would be sent to the Yard and the FSS respectively, but it was only a formality now. Lastly, to no one’s surprise, Pritchard’s name had been on the list that Chris Deakin had prepared of people using the ATM in Whitechapel.

  ◆◆◆

  For Sarah Pritchard, it was the day that her husband, the monster – a psychotic serial killer who had dubbed himself ‘Jack the New Ripper’ – died.

  Pritchard had never recovered consciousness. Upon arrival at the Royal London Hospital, he had undergone a CT scan and been rushed straight into theatre. In spite of the best efforts of the neurological surgeon and his highly specialised team, Pritchard expired on the table.

  Sarah had been kept in due to her injuries, and when she had awoken after being operated on to repair her shoulder, the first thing she saw was Charise sitting at her bedside, filing her nails and eating the last of the grapes that she had brought up for Sarah.

  ◆◆◆

  For Terri Miller, it was a day where record numbers of the London Echo were sold, all thanks to her exclusive story about the New Ripper. His capture, and subsequent demise created an overwhelming demand for her to do more TV and radio interviews – and not just news bulletins this time; there were even offers to appear on morning talk shows and breakfast TV.

  From her perspective, things couldn’t have gone any better – she was suddenly a household name and an important reporter for the paper. There had already been a couple of calls from rival rags, to sound her out in case she was interested in taking a position with them. Giles Deakin, being the wily old sod that he was, had offered to make Julie Payne a permanent staffer, but only if she was going to be working with Terri.

  It was amazing how much influence she suddenly had, and even the piss takers who ran her down at every opportunity were suddenly treading warily around her now, sensing that the wind had changed.

  Even her father, who never praised anyone but himself, had called to say how proud he was of what she had achieved. “You get that determination to succeed from me,” he’d had the gall to tell her.

  ◆◆◆

  For Rita Phillips, it was the day that she received a telephone call informing her that the man who had murdered her daughter had finally been identified, and that he had died at the hands of a woman he was trying to mu
rder. The evidence against him, she was assured, was overwhelming.

  Rita was delighted to hear that justice had been done – not just for Tracey, but for all the victims and their families – although a part of her felt cheated at not getting the chance to see the vile creature responsible for her baby’s death stand trial before his peers and receive a life sentence in prison when he was properly convicted by a jury of twelve.

  Her sense of relief was, of course, massively tempered by the staggering loss that she felt all day, every day. She would never forget her daughter, and she would never stop loving her. She only wished that she could have told Tracey these things on the fateful night that she had stormed out of the flat, never to return.