Tulloch stared at him for a moment, then said, ‘Mark, can I talk to you for a second?’
He stood and started to follow her out of the room, before stopping and looking down at me. He took his time, taking in my lace-up brogues, pale chinos that I always wore a little too big, and the loose white shirt. My hair, as usual, was tied back at the nape of my neck and plaited. I wore my dark-rimmed glasses. No make-up or jewellery. Exactly how I always look at work.
‘You certainly scrub up well,’ he said at last.
‘Mark!’ Tulloch was at the end of her patience with both of us. Without another word, he joined her and they left the room.
I gave them a two-minute head start and then followed. I was feeling the need for caffeine. I walked the length of the corridor towards the drinks machine at the far end. I stopped just before I reached it.
The deep voice with its distinctive south London accent had already become unpleasantly familiar. Joesbury was feet away, just out of sight around the corner. ‘All I’m saying is, keep an eye on her,’ he said. ‘You can do that a lot better if she’s close. And let me make a few discreet inquiries.’
‘And this has nothing to do with the fact that she’s gor—’
Joesbury didn’t let Tulloch finish. ‘Let’s just say my spider sense is tingling,’ he said, in a voice I could barely hear above the gurgling of the drinks machine. ‘Indulge me on this, sweetheart, OK?’
Back in the incident room, I sat alone, waiting. If I transferred to Lewisham I could stay in contact with Rona and her friends on the estate, and I’d get to see how the murder investigation panned out. The woman had died holding my hand. I couldn’t help but be curious. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to be surrounded by people who knew how badly I’d screwed up last night. And I still wasn’t sure what to make of Joesbury and his antics.
I moved to a desk and, using a remote access password, opened up the Met’s website and keyed in SO10.
Which was no longer SO10, I learned, but had been renamed the Specialist Crime Directorate, or SCD10 for short. Informally and colloquially, though, SO10 had stuck. I read that it had been formed in the 1960s to collect information on organized crime and prominent criminals. Due to advances in technology, the website claimed, the command had become a recognized world leader in covert policing methods.
So, I’d attracted the attention of a senior officer from a division with a worldwide reputation for specialist investigative techniques. Well, wasn’t that a result?
After an hour, one of Tulloch’s team, a good-looking black bloke in his late twenties who introduced himself as Tom Barrett, asked me to come and look at the CCTV footage from the murder site. Barrett and I crossed the small inner courtyard to another wing of the station and a tiny windowless room with a TV screen. For the next three hours I watched seemingly endless recordings of people and traffic around the estate where the murder had taken place. I saw myself, driving my black Golf along the Camberwell New Road and turning off towards the car park.
‘What’s that?’ I asked a few minutes later. Thirty minutes or so after I drove my car into the car park, another vehicle – one decidedly out of place on an inner London council estate – went the same way.
‘We’ve already spotted that,’ replied Barrett, glancing down at some scribbled notes. ‘It’s a Lexus LS 460, Tuscan Olive in colour, retails at upwards of sixty grand. We can only make out the last couple of letters on the registration so it’ll take time to track it down, but it’s definitely of interest.’
‘It’s the sort of car she would have driven,’ I said.
Barrett agreed with me and we got back to work. By three o’clock I was ready to slit my own wrists. There had been nothing, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary and I wasn’t sure quite what we’d expected. A wild-eyed madman, perhaps dripping with blood, staggering down Camberwell New Road?
At ten past four we watched the last recording and I had a sense of freedom looming. I’d go home, draw the blinds, put on a film and curl up on the sofa. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t wake till morning.
It wasn’t to be. We hadn’t even switched the machine off when the door opened to reveal Tulloch, a blue cotton trench coat loose around her shoulders. This time, she was alone. She nodded at Barrett and then turned to me. ‘Looks like I’m stuck with you, Flint,’ she said. ‘You’re based here until further notice and you’ll bring your ongoing projects from Southwark with you. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home. We can talk on the way.’
14
‘WE’VE FOUND THE VICTIM’S CAR,’ TULLOCH TOLD ME as we pulled out of the car park.
‘The Lexus?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘We’ll keep it under surveillance for a couple of days,’ she said.
It was standard procedure. Plain-clothes officers would watch the car, see if anyone approached it. Anyone who showed a particular interest could well have some bearing on why the woman had been in that part of London. On the other hand …
‘Sixty grand’s worth of luxury vehicle on that estate won’t go unnoticed for very long,’ I said.
‘Probably not,’ agreed Tulloch. ‘We found the keys as well. Behind a wall not far from where you found her.’
‘So how … ?’ I began.
‘We think whoever killed her took the keys, meaning to drive away in her car,’ said Tulloch. ‘The dogs tracked someone to the alley you emerged from, but then he backtracked.’
‘He heard me coming,’ I said.
‘Makes sense,’ said Tulloch. ‘You’d cut off his escape route so he had to change his plans. He ditched the keys, ran further down the block, round the rear of the buildings and made for the A3. The dogs lost him at Kennington Tube.’
‘You must know who she is by now,’ I said. ‘The car would have been registered.’
She nodded. ‘We have a pretty good idea.’
I waited. ‘Are you allowed to tell me?’ I asked, after a moment.
Tulloch sighed. ‘It’ll probably be on the news tonight,’ she said. ‘The car was registered to a Mr David Jones. Lives in Chiswick, married to Geraldine. We’ve got officers round there already, but only the au pair’s at home. I’m on my way over now.’
Geraldine Jones. The name meant absolutely nothing. ‘Can I come?’ I found myself asking.
‘Absolutely not,’ she replied, glancing sideways at me. ‘You should try and get some rest. You look like you need it.’
I couldn’t argue with her on that one. We were silent for a while. There was something I wanted to say to her, I just didn’t know how to start. So she drove and I looked at my fingernails. When I glanced up again, we were on the Wandsworth Road, not far from my flat.
‘I heard there was something unusual about the murder weapon,’ I said, knowing I was chancing my luck.
‘That will definitely not be on the news tonight,’ she replied, with a tiny half-smile as she turned into my road and pulled up against the kerb. I put my hand on the door handle and opened the door. Now or never.
‘I’m sorry I screwed up,’ I said. ‘I know if I’d had my wits about me, she probably wouldn’t have died.’
Tulloch took both hands off the wheel and twisted round in her seat to face me properly. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
‘If I’d seen the attack, I could have stopped it,’ I said. ‘Even if it was too late for that, I could have identified who did it.’
She nodded her head slowly. ‘Yes, that’s possible,’ she said. ‘Or I might have two dead women on my hands right now and Southwark would have lost an officer.’
She turned the ignition key and the engine died. ‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘the dogs tracked the killer to the alleyway you came out of, remember? He heard you coming and backtracked. He’d killed her and left her to die before you got anywhere near.’
She was right. I hadn’t thought of that. Oh thank God.
‘Lacey, you’re not responsible for what happened to Geraldine Jones,’ Tulloch went on. ‘If t
hat’s what’s been going through your head, forget it. And get some rest.’
It hadn’t been my fault. Geraldine Jones hadn’t died because of me. I got out of the car and thanked Tulloch for the lift. She told me to turn up at Lewisham first thing on Monday morning and drove away the minute I closed the car door. I watched the silver Mercedes turn on to the main road and felt strangely left out.
Nothing I could do. I was a witness, not an investigating officer, and finally I was home. Tulloch was right, I should rest.
But all around me life was going on and the evening was filled with that golden light September is so often blessed with. It really wasn’t an evening for staying at home alone. Even if you were me. I went inside and jumped in the shower. Thirty minutes later I was on my way out, determined to make up for lost time.
Or maybe not. The top step leading down to my basement didn’t normally have a scruffy-looking girl in a pink jacket standing on it, as though she couldn’t quite make up her mind whether to approach my door or not. She started when I appeared, then moved back and waited for me to join her at pavement level.
‘Lacey,’ she said, to my surprise, because I knew I’d never seen her before. ‘Can I have a word? About the murder last night? There’s something you really need to know.’
15
‘DO I KNOW YOU?’ I ASKED.
The girl was in her early twenties and, whilst I don’t like myself for saying this, not the sort of person it’s easy to look at. Her dyed black hair was slicked back with some greasy-looking substance and she’d tried, and failed, to cover a crop of spots around her chin with too much make-up. I counted six studs in her left ear. She didn’t have a right ear. The burns scars around her lower jaw and the right side of her neck were dreadful.
‘I’m Emma Boston,’ she said, in a voice that might have belonged to an elderly smoker. ‘I’m working on last night’s murder. I’ve got information for you. Can we go inside?’
‘What do you mean, you’re working on the case?’ I asked, trying to remember if I’d seen her at Lewisham or even Southwark.
Boston was wearing large sunglasses, the sort that make it impossible to see the eyes behind them. I wondered if her eyes had suffered fire damage too. ‘You were the one who found her,’ she was saying. ‘I heard she was still alive. Is that true?’
This woman wasn’t a police officer. ‘I’m going to ask you one more time, then I’m going to ask you to get off my step. What exactly are you doing here?’
Boston was about to respond when she broke into a fit of coughing. ‘Did she say anything before she died?’ she managed, when she got her breath back. ‘Do you know who she is yet?’
Light dawned. ‘Are you a reporter?’ I asked.
Her lips hardened. She was used to people not responding well to her. ‘Look, we both have jobs to do,’ she said. ‘I just think we can help each other.’ She looked round the street. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ she went on. ‘I really do have some information.’
‘Detective Inspector Tulloch is heading up the investigation,’ I said. ‘She’s based at Lewisham police station.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had a letter that could be from the killer, and seeing as how it mentions you by name, I thought you’d be interested. My mistake.’
She pushed past me and walked up the street towards Wandsworth Road. I watched her go, fairly sure she was lying, but …
I caught up with her ten metres from the corner. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
The lips relaxed and she glanced towards the pub on the corner. ‘Want to buy me a drink?’ she asked.
It was Saturday night and the pub was busy, but we went out into the beer garden and found an empty stretch of wall to lean against. Boston pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. I sipped my Diet Coke and waited. She coughed again and caught me looking at the packet.
‘I shouldn’t smoke,’ she said, ‘but my lungs are fucked up anyway, so I figure, what’s the difference?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Everything was relative. My life wasn’t much to write home about, but it would be a whole lot worse if I looked like she did.
‘Anything you tell me can be off the record,’ she said, when she’d drawn deeply on her cigarette. ‘I wouldn’t quote you or anything.’
‘I understand,’ I said, knowing officers lost their jobs and their reputations for talking off the record to the press. Emma Boston hadn’t taken out a notepad and I wondered if she was recording the conversation. She’d placed a scuffed canvas bag very close to me. ‘But it sounds like you know more than I do right now,’ I went on. ‘I’m not part of the investigation.’
‘But you found her?’
I nodded.
‘Did she say anything?’
‘You said you had a letter?’ I asked. I couldn’t afford to tell Boston more than I should because I felt sorry for her. ‘A letter that mentioned me,’ I went on. ‘If that was a trick to get me here, I’m going home now.’
She reached into her bag and took out a thin, clear plastic folder with paper inside.
‘No one’s touched it but me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize what it was till I pulled it from the envelope, but then I put it in a folder straight away. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?’ She seemed to want my approval now.
‘Was it posted?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘No. It was pushed through the door of my house sometime last night. I found it this morning.’
‘Can I see it?’
She handed it over. Inside the plastic was a sheet of fawn-coloured paper, the standard size for personal stationery. It had been folded down the middle lengthways and then twice horizontally. The fold marks were quite distinct. The handwriting was neat and legible. In red ink. There was something disturbingly familiar about it. I read it quickly. Before I was halfway through, I could feel a tingling in my cheeks.
Dear Miss Bosston
I keep on hearing Saucy Jacky is back. How I have laughed. Is it true? If it is, I hope the police are clever and on the right track.
Ask DC Flint for me – did the lady squeal? No time to clip her ears but plenty more time for funny little games.
Yours truly
A f(r)iend
Hope you like the proper red stuff.
I handed it back. ‘It’s gibberish,’ I said. ‘Some nutter’s idea of a joke.’
Boston inclined her head, as though behind the dark sunglasses she was looking at me more closely. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘You’ve gone very pale.’
I made a mental note that Boston probably shouldn’t be underestimated.
‘Actually, a joke is what I thought at first,’ she went on. ‘But then I found out you were with her when she died and it made me think twice. Not many people would know that.’
I was more bothered than I wanted to admit that my name was being bandied about by people I didn’t know. But not nearly as bothered as I was that I knew I’d seen that letter, or something very like it, before. ‘Well, if you found it out, it can’t have been that hard,’ I said, playing for time.
‘We listen in to police radio transmissions,’ she said, as if daring me to object. ‘My boyfriend made a recording of last night’s activity. Most people don’t have the equipment to do that. But what really rung a bell with me was that reference to Saucy Jacky.’
I took it back and read the first couple of lines again. Dear Miss Bosston, I keep on hearing Saucy Jacky is back. How I have laughed.
‘Who’s Saucy Jacky?’ I asked, as two things happened at once. My mobile beeped, letting me know I had a text message, and I remembered who Saucy Jacky was.
‘Try Googling it,’ Boston was saying. ‘You’ll find thousands of references. Saucy Jacky is one of the nicknames given to—’
‘Jack the Ripper,’ I finished for her. ‘He called himself Saucy Jacky, didn’t he? In letters he sent to the police.’
‘And to the press,’ sai
d Boston, as I realized I was staring at her rather too hard. I pulled my phone out of my bag. The text was from Pete Stenning, letting me know that he and some of the others were heading to the Nag’s Head in Peckham if I wanted to join them. Seeing me twice in twenty-four hours must have made him think of old times. Maybe he’d forgotten I’d never once accepted an invitation to go drinking with him.
‘I know very little about Jack the Ripper,’ I said, not sure why I was lying. ‘Didn’t he kill prostitutes?’
‘Yes, he did,’ Boston replied. ‘A lot of them. Generally speaking, he cut their throats and then mutilated their abdomens. Just like what happened to that woman on Friday night. His first victim, a woman called Polly Nichols, was on 31 August 1888, but there were others after that. I think you might have a copycat on your hands.’
‘Can I keep this?’ I asked, indicating the letter.
‘What can you tell me in return?’ she replied.
I shook my head.
‘No, then,’ she said.
I held the letter out for her to take, and realized my hand was shaking. ‘I’ll look into what you’ve told me,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it tonight. And if I think it stacks up, I’ll arrange for you to meet with DI Tulloch. It’ll be up to her what she tells you, but if you hold off publishing anything until you’ve seen her, she’ll be much more likely to cooperate.’
Boston was carefully putting the plastic folder back into the envelope. ‘I need to meet her tomorrow,’ she said, ‘or I’m running with this.’
‘Do you have access to scanning equipment?’ I asked. When she nodded, I scribbled down my email address at work and gave it to her. I had to hope it would automatically be re-routed to Lewisham. ‘Scan it and send it to me,’ I said. ‘And don’t let anyone else touch the original. Now, how can I get in touch with you tomorrow?’
Now You See Me Page 5