The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  ‘You’ve talked to the wife?’

  Quill recounted his interview with Jennifer Staunce. She had had a terrible expression on her face, not just the grief and horror Quill had seen so many times before, but a dubious and suspicious look that he was starting to recognize: she was shocked that her home, her security, had been violated, but her rational mind still couldn’t see how it could be so. ‘Geoff … had just turned down the sound on the television,’ she’d said. ‘He turned it down, and so we could hear the noise from those … Toffs they call them, outside, chanting from the street. So strange to have them here. Disturbing. He was about to make a phone call. To his brother. He’s in property, in Northampton. They talk about this time every week. That’s what he said he was going to do. He’s a creature of habit: nap every afternoon, he always likes the same things for his dinner. So I went into the kitchen to make some coffee. The percolator is quite loud, I didn’t hear … I didn’t even hear him scream or anything like that, I just heard … some odd noises, sounds of movement. So I went back in and … there he was. Being … hauled around. Already … already obviously … by something I couldn’t see. I didn’t get to see who was doing it. Geoff … must have been in the way. All I could think of was … they’ve got in. They’re in here.’

  ‘They?’ Quill had asked.

  ‘Those protestors. After what happened to Michael Spatley, I’d been thinking that Geoff wasn’t safe on the streets. But in here…! I’ve been a copper’s wife for thirty years, Mr Quill. I thought we were past him being in the line of fire. High office never suited him; he’s had nightmares with every promotion in the last couple of years. I’m rambling. Sorry. I ran, I’m sorry – I just thought of what he’d want me to do, and I was such a coward!’ She’d stopped and visibly steadied herself. She’d known what Quill needed from her. ‘They … say there was … a message? Something about Jewish people?’

  Quill had nodded. ‘Is there anyone of Jewish ancestry in your or Mr Staunce’s family, ma’am?’

  ‘Not that I know of. We have some Jewish friends. Or I think we must do. It’s not something you ask, is it?’

  ‘Thinking back, was there any sign of an intruder?’

  ‘No. They must have … I don’t know. I didn’t take more than two steps towards the … Geoff … the … I could see … I ran straight out of the room, not to the door, because I was thinking, If they’re in here, if they’re in here, I’m next, and I have to tell someone. So I ran into the downstairs toilet, because that’s got a bolt on it, and I slammed it, and thank God I still had my phone on me, and I called Ben at the office. And that’s where they found me.’

  Lofthouse nodded in appreciation now. ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Very good, in the circumstances. The first unit on the scene broke a window to get in rather than try to batter down a front door that was still deadlocked and secure. If she’d gone to the body, if she’d got a single splash of blood on her, she might have already been arrested.’

  ‘And she might still be, despite, once again, the lack of weapon at the scene.’

  ‘She also doesn’t seem a likely fit for daubing messages about the Jewish friends she might or might not have. There was CCTV in front of the building. My lot got a look at the recordings, and we saw the same glowing figure leaving the scene. But nothing new.’

  ‘What about the wording of the message?’

  ‘It’s spelled differently to the original version and has better grammar, but the records of the time give three different versions of what that message actually said. So it might be that our Jack continues to write exactly the same thing he always did. Or perhaps he writes it in whatever the current vernacular is.’

  Lofthouse stood up and went to the window, as if she needed to see some everyday reality. It wasn’t as if, Quill thought, she was used to thinking like this. Whatever her mysterious knowledge was, it hadn’t prepared her. ‘So our … our … suspect: it looks like Jack the Ripper, it leaves the Ripper’s message—’

  ‘And it kills like Jack the Ripper. The single slash across the neck, followed by multiple incisions in the abdomen, done with some medical precision – that’s pretty much the original Ripper’s MO. Except that in this case the victims are male.’

  ‘So is this actually what it looks like? Jack the Ripper is back, only this time he’s killing rich white men?’

  ‘Well, concerning the message, Spatley was Jewish, but Sir Geoffrey was not. But they were both indeed powerful, relatively but not grandiosely affluent, middle-aged white males. That’s certainly the connection the media are making…’

  ‘Because for them it’s cake every day. Hey, Mr Typical Herald Reader, you could be next!’

  ‘That seems to be about it. One was money, the other was law. They had met, but only at the times you might expect them to: cabinet meetings about security issues around the Olympics, official functions – that sort of thing. We’re sifting through the related correspondence between them, but so far it’s pretty anodyne. They share no schools, housing, jobs or friends outside government circles, at least not that we’ve been able to uncover yet.’

  Lofthouse toyed with her charm bracelet for a moment, her fingers finding the key. That made Quill frown once again about what he wasn’t being told.

  FOUR

  As Costain had driven to Whitechapel, he’d found himself changing channels on the radio a lot. He didn’t like what he was hearing.

  ‘If one of the biggest coppers in London isn’t safe, then who is?! They should bring in the army! ’Cos the police are shitting themselves!’

  ‘People are talking as if this is a copycat Jack the Ripper serial killer, but apart from one wrongly transcribed message and the nature of the attacks themselves … Listen, as a Ripper expert…’

  ‘When you think Jack the Ripper, you think fog and prostitutes, don’t you?’

  ‘The Jewish community … I can’t speak for a whole community, but “dismayed” would be the word. That someone who committed these unspeakable murders should seek to slander us in the process…’

  ‘Attacks on two synagogues in the East End, but we’re talking about a few youths daubing paint here; it might be part of the wider disturbances…’

  ‘True British nationalists say it’s time to stand up to these thugs that are on the streets looting every night, but the police are still obsessing over the content of one scrawled message, because it mentions ethnicity, rather than dealing with the death of their own most senior officer, rather than dealing with what’s in front of their noses, which is that they have lost control and people are demanding a better solution!’

  ‘Our protest has always been peaceful. We march against spending cuts and corruption, which have killed many more people than Jack the Ripper. We do not condone the murder of anyone. However…’

  In the end, he plugged in his iPod to escape the news. He finally switched that off too, frustrated at having run away from what was real. As always now, he was wondering if that running away contributed to his own approaching damnation.

  He parked in the first free space he saw in Whitechapel, put his logbook in the window to avoid getting a ticket and closed the car door gently, without slamming it. He would do anything to stay out of Hell. That thought went round his head so often it was like a mantra. He would do anything.

  * * *

  He found Ross looking at a lurid sign, a woman pictured lying in the gutter, blood dripping from her mouth, and a silhouetted caped figure running away. The sign was propped against a brick wall that looked as if it had been scrubbed clean of centuries of dock slime for the tourists. Or perhaps it was new, built in the old style.

  She turned to look at him as if he was something on the Ops Board. ‘Why’d you text me the other night?’

  ‘And hello to you.’

  She frowned at him, but at that point the tour guide arrived and took their money, and others who wanted to go on the tour started to arrive; he was relieved not to have to answer the question.
>
  The tour was called, in dripping red letters, ‘Jack the Ripper Extreme’. Their guide was a Mr Neville Fennix – probably his stage name. He was dressed in a top hat, opera cape and evening suit, and he carried a silver-tipped cane. There were a large party of Italians and their translator, and another group who were talking in what Costain thought might be Korean. There were also quite a few younger people, students, several of whom were wearing what had now become known as the Ripper mask on the back of their heads to shade their necks from the sun. That bloody thing was everywhere now. Previously only a fraction of protestors had worn it; now it was their uniform. He’d seen T-shirts and online banners with the Ripper mask portrayed in those Obama ‘Change’ campaign colours or like Che Guevara, with slogans underneath such as ‘Occupy Hell’. The Ripper had put a face to the summer of blood. He had killed not just an MP, but now one of the most senior police officers in London, right at the point when the Met was creaking under the pressure of lack of resources and government meddling. If they can get to him, they can get to any of us, that’s what a spokesman for the Police Federation had been quoted in the Herald as saying, and the job cuts and the service cuts and every cut make every single one of us more vulnerable. The driver, Tunstall, had been released at the end of his ninety-six hours in custody, the main investigation having convinced a judge that they needed the maximum period of detention. Tunstall hadn’t changed his impossible story, though, and so now the media were also full of the news that he was ‘back on the streets’.

  As Fennix took cash from the other tourists, Costain found himself glancing at Ross again. She was still looking interrogatively at him. He wasn’t going to be able to get away from her question.

  On the night he’d sent the text message, he’d first been annoyed at her for not getting back to him, then at himself for sending it. It had been exactly the wrong step to take. He’d tried to get to sleep, despite the heat, but he’d kept waking up, not liking how vulnerable he felt in his dreams. So, without thinking about it as much as he should have, he’d reached out. He’d wanted to talk to someone. He told himself now that he’d had his overall objective in mind. He wasn’t sure if that had been true.

  Ross hadn’t raised the matter of the text message the next day, and, relieved, he hadn’t either. But Ross wasn’t very good with social interaction and so had saved it up for now because … well, who knew?

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry. I was pissed. You know, you text your mates, ask if they’re up for a pint—’

  ‘You asked if I had five minutes.’

  ‘But that was where it was going.’

  ‘At 1 a.m.?’

  ‘Like I said, I was pissed.’

  ‘After last orders?’

  ‘At home with some cans.’

  ‘You drink at home alone?’

  ‘Not often. I’d just got back from the pub.’

  ‘Open late, was it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You really thought I’d come over for a drink?’

  ‘Like I said, pissed.’

  ‘Okay.’ She suddenly nodded as if it was the end of the interview and looked away.

  The tour guide returned and began his spiel. ‘Whitechapel today may look harmless, modern, charming even. But mentally replace the sunlight with darkness and fog, and follow me now as we go on the trail of the man who is now once more in all the headlines, the man of the moment … Jack the Ripper!’

  He set off and they followed. Costain kept trying to make eye contact with Ross. But now she was having none of it. That was worrying.

  * * *

  ‘Mary Ann Nichols,’ said Fennix, ‘or “Polly” was her trade name.’ He paused for a laugh, which, after a moment of delayed translation, he got. They were standing in a backstreet behind the station, flanked by fenced-off brownfield sites, but there were no vehicles or workers, and they could smell the scent of undisturbed mud baking in the summer heat, suggesting that nothing was actually being built. Costain associated that smell with his childhood because nothing really changed. There were school gates over there, and the map he was looking at on his phone showed a sports centre down the road. House prices would have been shooting up before this latest recession, nice people coming in … and then it had all fallen backwards, as it always did. He glanced over and saw Ross was looking at her phone too.

  ‘Jewish cemetery round the corner,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘One thing we should be thinking about,’ said Costain, also in a whisper, struck by a sudden thought, ‘is, if the murders are about Jack the Ripper being remembered, why aren’t they happening right here? Everything we’ve seen like this before – from Berkeley Square to when Losley got powered up – it all stayed put where it was. Or where it was most associated with, like your ships.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ross took out one of her enormous rough books and wrote it down.

  Costain found himself taking pleasure in that. ‘Ever since we found those files in Docklands—’

  She suddenly looked straight at him, as if he’d caught her out, then looked away again, as if she’d revealed too much of herself. Interesting. ‘What?’ she said, finding something else to write.

  He drew closer to her and she closed the book, as if to stop him seeing inside it. ‘The Continuing Projects Team were obsessed with architecture,’ he said. ‘Maybe our two victims were just in the wrong place, kind of like deadly feng shui.’

  Ross nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. Her face wasn’t giving anything away.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to share with the class?’ Fennix had stopped and, having realized that Ross and Costain weren’t going to shut up, had decided to mock them for it. That had got a laugh too.

  Get many tips, do you? Costain flashed the man his most generous grin. ‘We’re just fascinated with this stuff, mate. Tell us more. We were just saying there’s a Jewish graveyard round the corner—’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ The actor nodded solemnly. ‘We’ll be visiting the site of the original eerie message implicating our Judaic friends, found over a piece of a victim’s soiled clothing, later. Was there a Jewish conspiracy involved? Is that conspiracy still afoot in London today, behind two modern murders? Was Jack’s original message a protest about the capitalist excesses of his own times, which resonates in the modern day? Or is it the other way round?’ He quickly looked at his tour party, as if to gauge their sensibilities and/or ethnicities. ‘Is it a conspiracy to blame these terrorist acts on the Jews? Are they to be the fall guys for the New World Order yet again? Were these prostitutes – I mean, these proper young ladies –’ he paused for the delayed laugh again – ‘slaughtered according to secret religious ceremonies as per the request of the secret rulers of the world, the Illuminati? Perhaps we shall see. Perhaps. But let us begin at our starting point, the bloody scene before us. Imagine it!’ With a sweep of his cape, he walked over to a wall. He pointed to the kerb beside it. ‘How much scrubbing did it take to remove every trace of such a scrubber?’ Perhaps knowing that the line wouldn’t translate, he moved swiftly on. ‘She’d been the wife of a printer’s machinist.’ Costain didn’t know what that was, and suspected, given the ease with which the phrase had come out, neither did this bloke; it was just one of those things that got written down and repeated. It sounded as if Fennix had added his modern conspiracy rhetoric to an older script at the last minute. It was hardly convincing. But the crowd seemed to be lapping it up. He continued, ‘But she was too fond of the bottle, and their marriage broke up when she started turning tricks to supplement her income.’

  Costain realized, as he was looking at the spot the guide was pointing to, what he wasn’t seeing here. He looked to Ross, and saw a puzzled expression on her face too. The two of them had started to anticipate seeing all sorts of terrors in London, visions associated with particular places, disconnected from current reality. Ross had taken the team to Vauxhall Bridge Road to see a weird house at the end of the bridge itself that had five chimneys
and five coffins. They had all felt that the dust that rose from the coffins would be deadly should they venture inside and stay for any length of time. They hadn’t found out what that was all about yet, despite all their research. But here, at one of the most famous murder sites of all time … Ross nudged him, and he looked around. Oh. There she was. As clear as daylight. But she was actually behind them, in the opposite direction from where Fennix was pointing. The Sight could sometimes be more accurate than history. It was a painful memory of what had really happened, before power had written over it. It wasn’t that the Sight gave you the ability to see every murder victim, just the ones about whom there was … story, Costain supposed, was the way to put it. London seemed to remember the big stuff, the emotional stuff, the memorable stuff, whether or not its people did. But the metropolis also forgot most of what it saw. Otherwise they’d be tripping over phantom bodies with every step.

  Here was a young woman in what were actually rags, with a strikingly colourful bonnet on her head. She was emaciated: her legs two bows of muscle, her face marked by disease, a vision of famine in Africa stamped into a British shape. She was looking hopefully at Costain and Ross, like any homeless addict, telling you the lightest generalizations about how great the world is in return for what they needed. What she needed was shockingly beyond their ability to give. She was holding her stomach, her hands pressed back into her skirts, trying to restrain a bloom of blood that actually hung in the air around her, as if she was caught in a single frame of a violent movie. Her need reached into them and made them feel the cold on this sunny afternoon. Her shadow looked like black ice.

  ‘No silver goo on her,’ Costain whispered to Ross.

  ‘Noted.’

  There was the Ripper himself, the archetypal figure, more of a shadow really: a silhouette that fluttered over all these buildings, like a misfiring advertising logo beamed down at them. His shape was diffuse, remembered hugely but not precisely, glamorously mysterious, while whenever anyone thought of his victims, it was all in the gory details.