27
Saturday 8 September
THE NEXT DAY, THE MOOD AT THE STATION WAS TIRED BUT upbeat. Five thirty a.m. on 8 September had come and gone and no real disturbances had been reported. I’d arrived late, but even so I was one of the first. The rest of the team drifted in, yawning and bleary-eyed, towards midday. I saw nothing of Tulloch, but if she’d resigned from the investigation, it wasn’t yet public knowledge.
During the afternoon, Emma Boston sent me several texts, wanting to know whether there was any news. I replied each time in the negative, but politely. Since Emma had come up with an original angle on a recent murder, her stock with the national press had shot up, and she still had the ability to plaster my name, and possibly my photograph, all over the papers.
The day shift came to an end and still no one wanted to go home. We could relax at midnight, when 8 September was over, and not before. I wandered through to the incident room and no one told me to leave. People started sending out for food. At nine twenty I was about to make yet another trip to the coffee machine when the call came through from the control room.
Anderson took it, rising to his feet and motioning the room to quieten down. Someone leaned across and switched off the TV just as he replaced the receiver.
‘Pete – get the boss,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a call from a bloke on the industrial estate by Mandela Way. Half hysterical, by all accounts. Screaming down the phone about a mutilated body.’
I watched the last of the cars leave the yard just as another text came in from Emma.
Can u meet me Forest Hill Swm Pls? Urgt info on G Jones case.
She wanted me to meet her at a swimming pool? I checked my watch. At half past nine? I didn’t need to look up Forest Hill. I knew exactly where it was, on the Dartmouth Road between Dulwich and Catford. When I was younger, swimming had been one of the few things I was really good at and Forest Hill, one of the old-fashioned Victorian pools, had reminded me of pools I’d visited as a child. I’d used it until it closed down. I couldn’t imagine what Emma was doing there, or what it could possibly have to do with Geraldine Jones.
There was no answer from Emma’s mobile number, even though she’d just sent me a text. I sat for a second, thinking. Did I really want to start driving around London this late? Then another text flashed up on my phone. Emma again. As I read it, something cold crept down between my shoulder blades.
Don’t phone. Just come. Please.
This needed some very careful handling. Everyone on the team had just been called out to what could be the next murder site and I was being summoned in the opposite direction by someone with a known connection to the killer.
I picked up the desk phone and told the control room where I was going and who I was planning to meet. They agreed to pass the information on to a member of my team just as soon as they could. As I left the building, Mark Joesbury was coming down the stairs. He stopped when he saw me. I was sure he was about to speak when the door behind him opened and Anderson appeared. I turned and hurried out of the station.
Driving down the Bromley Road, I told myself I was taking no risks. I was just going to be close by. In case. When I was about ten minutes away I had a radio call from Tulloch wanting to know where I was. I filled her in quickly.
‘Lacey, I’m sending a team after you,’ she said. ‘Do not get out of your car until they’re with you. Do you understand?’
‘Well, yes, but—’
‘Don’t argue with me, Flint. The callout to Mandela Way was a hoax. There’s no body here. And I do not like the fact that you are on your own on the other side of London.’
She and I both.
‘OK, understood,’ I said. ‘I’ll get to the pool and wait for you.’
‘Mark and Neil will probably be with you first. They never actually left the station.’
I parked a little way down the street from the pool and looked up and down the road. Traffic was still constant. The street was well lit. Nothing out of the ordinary. But no sign of Emma.
I pulled my mobile out of my bag. No new texts, which didn’t feel right. If she was here, she’d be looking out for my car, she’d have seen me arrive. If she hadn’t approached it was because something was wrong.
On the other hand, I’d made faster time than I’d expected. She was probably still on her way. Then the phone beeped. Just two words this time.
Help me
28
I WAS OUT OF THE CAR. STILL NO ONE IN SIGHT.
‘Emma!’ I’d intended to shout, but not much sound came out. I leaned back in through the driver door, hating the moment my back was to the street, and pulled out the hand-held radio. Shoving it into my pocket and holding my mobile tightly, I stepped away from the car.
Help would be here any second and I certainly wasn’t going far. I just needed to look. I half ran down the street until the massive and elaborate red-brick building soared above me. Plenty of shadows. I reached the steps that led to the front door.
‘Emma,’ I tried again. I climbed the steps, looking round continually, telling myself my car was close. I could be safely locked inside it in minutes.
Geraldine Jones’s killer hadn’t needed minutes.
At the top of the steps I found the front door locked. Where the hell was everyone? Conscious that minutes had past since Emma’s last message, I ran back down to the street.
The Ripper hadn’t needed minutes.
At the side of the building, I remembered an old metal fire escape led up to the first floor. It was still there. What I didn’t remember from my last visit was the pair of sunglasses, their frames wrapped around the metal rail. They looked a lot like Emma’s.
‘DC Flint to Control.’
A moment’s pause while I listened to static. And something loud and steady that I thought might be my own heartbeat. Then, ‘Go ahead, DC Flint.’
‘DC Flint requesting immediate back-up,’ I said. ‘Serious injuries, maybe fatalities, suspected.’
I backed away from the metal steps and looked up. At the top a window had been broken and the door wasn’t quite closed. Someone was inside.
Tulloch didn’t want another woman’s death on her conscience. Shit, neither did I. And I was a whole lot closer to the action.
On the first two steps up my legs were shaking, the way legs do when you’ve spent too much time on the treadmill. By the fifth step they were on autopilot, taking me steadily upwards, and the stairs creaked with every step.
I reached the top and risked taking my eyes off the building for a second to scan the street. I was going to kill Anderson. I would knock Joesbury to the ground and stamp on his head. Where the hell were they?
Knowing I was taking a risk, but unable to do nothing, I took my mobile from my pocket and speed-dialled Emma’s number. Then I pressed my face close to the broken window and listened. On the street, cars went by. Somewhere in the sky there was a helicopter. Hardly a second of silence. Then one came and I could hear the ringing. Faint but clear. Emma’s phone was somewhere inside this building.
Then the ringing was completely drowned out by a loud and terrified scream. When it stopped I was on the other side of the door.
There is something so unnerving, even at the best of times, about buildings out of context. A school at night will be spooky. A department store, once the customers have gone home, even more so. This place, that I remembered so well from years ago, seemed unable to leave its past behind. As I peered forward into the darkness I could almost hear the squeals and splashes of children playing, and those strange rhythmic echoes that you only hear in buildings with large spaces and water.
I swear I could still smell the chlorine.
A few feet away a streetlamp was shining in through a window. In its soft, orange glow lay a shoe. On tiptoe, I walked up to it and bent down. There was no dust on it. This shoe hadn’t been here long. It was Emma’s. I knew it.
Breadcrumbs, yelled the voice of common sense. This is a trail of breadcrumbs. He’s lea
ding you in.
Common sense won. I was out of there. I took a step back towards the door just as I heard the fire escape creak. Outside, someone had stepped on it.
Not a trail then, a trap.
29
HORRIBLY CLOSE TO PANIC, MY EYES WERE DARTING round like those of a terrified mouse. I was in a large space that had once been an office. Desks and chairs were still scattered around. In the centre of the room, dividing one half from the other, stood a row of lockers. I moved quickly across and stepped into the shadows behind them. From somewhere in the building I could still hear Emma’s mobile ringing, but if I tried to stop it now, the beeping sound my own phone would make would give me away. Sometime in the last few seconds I’d stopped breathing. Softly, I made myself exhale.
Whoever was coming up the stairs was making more noise than I had. A heavier person. I heard the gentle swish of two pieces of wood sliding together as the door was pushed open. A footstep inside. Then another.
Silence. He was listening, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Any second now he’d see Emma’s shoe, spot the trail in the dust I’d made when I’d moved it. He’d know I was here. The footsteps started again, more softly this time. He knew where I was.
A black shape appeared from behind the row of lockers. In the darkness it looked massive. Then it stepped into a pool of light and I thought I might die of relief.
‘I’m here,’ I whispered.
Joesbury shot round as I hurried over to him, surprisingly pleased to see someone I thoroughly disliked. Even feet away he was still little more than shadow, but his eyes were shining at me. Not in a friendly way.
‘There’s someone here,’ I told him, ‘I heard a scream. He’s inside somewhere. We have to—’
Joesbury held a finger to his lips and then raised his radio. ‘She’s here,’ he said into it. ‘Yeah, toss you for who throttles her when we get out. Can you hear a phone?’
I couldn’t catch Anderson’s reply, but a second later Joesbury was moving towards the furthest door of the room and beckoning me to follow. At the door he stopped and listened, then pulled it open and stepped through.
I did the same. We were in the gallery that runs almost the full circumference of the larger of the two pools. In the old days, when swimming had been strictly segregated, it had been known as the men’s plunge. Up in the gallery there was still bench seating from when schools had competed here and proud parents had needed somewhere to sit. Joesbury made his way slowly down the wide, shallow steps of the gallery, peering along each row of benches. He was carrying a torch, but he hadn’t turned it on. The ringing sound of Emma’s phone had become louder.
Looking back to check I was still with him, Joesbury made his way to the side of the gallery where we could get down to ground level. We passed dead rodents and take-away wrappers. I stepped over broken glass and what looked horribly like human excrement. When we emerged at the bottom of the stairs, DS Anderson appeared through an archway at the far end of the hall. From memory I thought it led to the smaller of the two pool halls, the one reserved for women back in Victorian times. Anderson saw us and shook his head. He’d found nothing. Joesbury had moved to the pool, his feet just touching the edge of the carved stone that rimmed it.
Without water the cavity looked vast. It was nearly thirty yards long and fifteen wide. In the old days, the pool had had a five-yardhigh diving board and the deep end had been very deep. Since then, the cavity had been used for dumping. Cafeteria chairs, lifebuoys, lifeguards’ seats, even part of the old diving board had been thrown in.
Joesbury was looking at a huge canvas sheet that bulged upwards from the floor of the pool. The ringing sound was coming from beneath it. Realizing my phone was still making the call, I reached into my pocket and switched it off.
‘That was me,’ I explained in a quiet voice, when both men looked surprised. ‘It’s Emma Boston’s phone. I was calling it. I followed the sound inside.’
Joesbury switched on his torch and shone it down. Even with light it was impossible to say what lay beneath the canvas.
He turned to Anderson. ‘Any possibility of back-up?’ he asked.
Anderson spoke into his radio for a few seconds. Then he looked up. ‘About five minutes away,’ he said. ‘The boss has called out the Ninjas too. They’ll be here in ten.’
Ninjas is Met slang for CO19, the armed police division. Tulloch must be seriously concerned to have requested their presence.
‘Tell them to contain the building,’ Joesbury instructed, speaking in a low voice as Anderson had done. ‘Four entrances, including the fire escape. And make ’em come in carefully. I think it’s safe to say this is a crime scene.’
As Anderson stepped away to pass the instructions on, Joesbury turned back to me. ‘Call her again,’ he said. My hands were shaking but I did as I was told.
From beneath the canvas Emma’s mobile resumed its shrill ringing tone and Joesbury muttered the sort of word you wouldn’t use in front of your granny. Putting his torch on the floor, he crouched low and jumped down.
‘Switch it off, Flint, it’s doing my head in,’ he called back as he stepped closer to the canvas. Once again, I did what I was told. It had been doing my head in too. Soft footsteps on the tiles told me Anderson had moved closer.
‘Hold on, Boss,’ he said, before jumping down beside Joesbury. I stepped closer to the edge. Both men kept their torches on the anonymous shape in front of them. Neither seemed able to go any closer.
‘For God’s sake, she could still be alive,’ I said, jumping down to join them and striding towards the canvas. Joesbury’s hand shot up and caught me square in the chest. I stopped moving as he bent down, took hold of two corners of the canvas and pulled it back.
A moan escaped Anderson a second before we realized what we were looking at. The human form before us lay on its back, its sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. Its left arm lay across its chest and both legs had been drawn up and splayed apart. Fair hair spread out around its head. A human form, but not human.
It was an old-fashioned rescue-training dummy, the sort I’d used myself when I’d trained for my life-saving award years ago. The fair hair was a cheap wig. Other people coming across this might have laughed, if only to release tension. We didn’t. We all knew enough about Ripper case lore by this stage to know that the dummy had been left in the exact position Annie Chapman’s body had been found in. Emma Boston’s mobile phone lay by the mannequin’s feet, just as Chapman’s personal effects had been left by the original Ripper. Above the dummy’s right shoulder was a clear plastic bag. Joesbury was staring at the bag. I don’t think he was even blinking. I glanced towards Anderson. Same. Then Joesbury cleared his throat.
‘OK, Flint, you’re our expert on all things Ripper-related,’ he said. ‘Our man took trophies, didn’t he? Body parts cut out of his victims that he sent to the police to taunt them?’
It was hardly the time to get into the various theories about what had happened to the Ripper victims’ entrails, so I just nodded as Joesbury took a step closer to the plastic bag. He shone his torch and then crouched down to get a better look.
‘Weren’t you telling me one of the victims was missing her kidneys?’ he said.
‘That isn’t a kidney,’ said Anderson, who’d also stepped closer. ‘Kidneys aren’t that shape.’
In the bag was a piece of muscular tissue, roughly triangular, about eight centimetres long and around five centimetres at its widest point. It was surrounded by traces of clotted blood. I didn’t need to get any closer to know what it was.
‘Annie Chapman still had both kidneys,’ I said. ‘She was missing her uterus.’
30
HALF AN HOUR LATER, TULLOCH PULLED UP OUTSIDE THE row of run-down terraced houses in Shepherd’s Bush where Emma lived. Other than a terse ‘What part of “Stay in the car” was difficult to understand, Flint?’ she’d barely said a word to me since she’d arrived at the pool. It was pretty clear I was with her now
so she could keep an eye on me, not because of anything useful I might have to contribute.
The flickering blue lights of two patrol cars had been waiting for us, their occupants watching the front and rear of the house until we could get here. As the car engine died, I saw Joesbury making his way towards us from where he’d parked down the street. Tulloch turned to me and opened her mouth.
‘I had a text message saying “Help me” and I heard screams,’ I said. ‘What would you have done?’
‘I’d have done what I was bloody well told,’ she replied, her eyes darting from me to Joesbury.
Well, I could hardly call a DI a liar to her face. ‘We’re the police,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to help people.’
Tulloch’s eyes narrowed. She reached for the door handle. ‘Do I need to say the words?’ she asked me.
‘Consider me glued to the seat.’
As she got out of the car and went to join Joesbury, I pressed the button that would open the passenger window. She hadn’t said I couldn’t listen. She and Joesbury walked up the short path to the door.
In the tiny front garden dustbins overflowed with rubbish. An animal, probably a fox, had broken into one of the bin liners. The whole area stank of rotting food.
Joesbury banged hard on the door, making it shake in its frame. Then he bent down and pushed open the letterbox.
‘Police!’ he called. ‘Open this door.’
Joesbury banged again, then stepped back and looked up at the house. ‘Don’t have a good feeling about that,’ he said, indicating the camera he’d arranged to be positioned above Emma’s front door. Sometime since it had been installed, someone had hurled a brick at it.
Now You See Me Page 10