When I turned back he was standing just inside the doorway, taking in the largest room of my flat, not even trying to hide his surprise at the clean white space, the minimum of furniture and, apart from plants, the complete lack of personal possessions. When I said nothing, he got to work.
First, by checking the front door. It was a Yale lock, ridiculously inadequate by London standards, but it’s not like I have anything to steal. Then he crossed the living room and the small galley kitchen and disappeared. I heard him open the door to the bathroom and pull back the shower curtain. What he was hoping to find in the bathroom cabinet I don’t know, but I heard that open and close too. The sound of wardrobe doors told me he was in the bedroom. Then I heard the creak of the conservatory door. He’d gone outside.
Curious, I followed. I heard the sound of something heavy landing on soft ground, as though he’d jumped from a height. He reappeared just as I arrived at the rear door.
‘Shed key?’ he asked, holding out one hand.
Knowing there was no point arguing, I told him where he’d find it, tucked away on the shed roof. I watched him walk up the path, open the shed and disappear inside. In my head, I was counting, ten, nine. At six he came out again, staring straight at me, his hands raised. The word was hardly necessary, but he said it anyway.
‘What?’
‘Keeps me fit,’ I replied. ‘Davina McCall swears by it.’
I didn’t give him time to point out that Davina McCall probably didn’t dress her punchbag as a man. I turned and walked back through the flat. He’d seen everything. From the living room, I heard him lock the conservatory door. Then he reappeared. He stopped in the archway between living room and bedroom.
‘First of all, I have never seen a woman’s flat like this in my life before,’ he said. ‘Christ, Flint, don’t you even have a teddy?’
He was a senior officer, we were now officially part of the same team and, in his eyes at least, he was doing me a favour. I was going to stay calm. ‘Goodnight, DI Joesbury,’ I replied. ‘Thank you for your help.’ I was standing in front of the hearth. I wasn’t moving till he was out of there.
He wasn’t moving either. ‘Second, you can’t stay here by yourself,’ he said. ‘Tully will have my innards for breakfast.’
Stay calm. ‘I’ve lived here quite safely for five years, the doors will be locked and, in the circumstances, I’d rather you didn’t talk about innards,’ I said.
Joesbury’s lips twitched again. He held up his left hand and with his right started counting off splayed fingers. ‘One, there is a gate leading directly into the alley outside,’ he said. ‘I managed to get over it with a buggered shoulder. Two, the conservatory door has half rotted away and a good push would send it flying. Three, your front door has a Yale lock that I could open with my credit card in ten seconds. You don’t even have a chain on it.’ He stopped, dropped his hands and shook his head at me. ‘This is south London,’ he went on. ‘Even without a maniac on the loose, do you have a death wish?
Probably, was the nearest I could get to an honest answer, but not one I was about to articulate. ‘I’ll put a chair against the door and I’ll sleep with my phone,’ I said. ‘Now, will you please excuse—’
‘I’m going to need that phone,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort you out with a new one tomorrow. Right, have you got a blanket?’
‘What?’
‘I’m sleeping on the sofa.’
‘Over my dead … no, absolutely not, get out of here.’
He crossed to the sofa and began pushing his fists into the cushions to plump them up. ‘Tully can probably have you transferred to a safe house tomorrow,’ he said, picking up two loose cushions and arranging them to act as pillows at one end of the sofa. ‘At least until we can get some decent locks installed here,’ he went on. ‘We can get an alarm rigged up to the station.’
‘Do you not understand the English language?’
‘Any chance of a spare toothbrush?’ he said, pulling off his jacket and sitting down. He was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt and had the faintest vaccination scar just below his right shoulder. Heavily muscled arms.
‘You’re not staying here.’
‘Flint, I’m tired.’ The bastard was actually taking off his shoes. ‘Stop wittering and go to bed.’
‘I can’t sleep if you’re in the next room,’ I snapped back, before I had a second to think about the consequences of admitting something so … oh my God.
Stalemate. Joesbury looked up at me. Then he stood. I took a step back and almost fell over the hearth stones. Oh no. Of all the men in the world, not this one.
‘Any point suggesting I don’t have to be in the next room?’ he asked me in a voice that was barely audible. I wasn’t even going to think about it. I shook my head.
Joesbury continued to stare at me for a moment. Then he looked at his watch and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Didn’t think so,’ he said.
Fifteen minutes later, a woman police constable was ensconced on my sofa, watching television with the volume turned low and drinking coffee. I was in bed, still wet from the shower and wondering when I’d stop trembling.
33
Sunday 9 September
CLASSICAL PIANO MUSIC WAS PLAYING SOFTLY IN THE mortuary of St Thomas’s Hospital. The room was modern, but there was something about the arrangement of so much gleaming steel, the careful placement on the counters of jars and dishes, that looked timeless. For all its grim purpose, it felt like a calm room. And given what we were about to see, calm felt good.
The pathologist, a Dr Mike Kaytes, looked at us across the central worktop. ‘Not too much I can tell you,’ he said. ‘They normally send me a bit more to work with.’
As well as Kaytes and his technician, a boy who couldn’t be much more than twenty, there were four police officers in the room: Dana Tulloch, Neil Anderson, Pete Stenning and me. This was my first post-mortem, Stenning’s too, he’d confided on the way over. Anderson and Tulloch must have attended others but they didn’t seem any more at ease. Didn’t have to guess why.The small piece of flesh lying in the centre of the polished steel worktop looked obscene.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the music for a second. I’m not a great music fan, I’d never think of listening to classical, but there was something about the delicate precision of the notes, the clarity of the sound, that helped.
Kaytes was a tall, barrel-chested man in his late forties. He had thick grey hair and bright-blue eyes. On the third finger of his left hand, beneath the surgical glove, a sticking plaster had been wrapped around where his wedding ring would be. He leaned forward and poked at the upper corner of the specimen. ‘It’s definitely human,’ he said. ‘Look here. See what we’ve got on the fallopian tubes.’ He was pointing to gunmetal-grey, pea-sized objects. ‘These are filshie clips,’ he went on. ‘Not even chimpanzees are that advanced yet; this woman’s been sterilized. And it’s a fresh specimen,’ he finished.
The pianist played a series of notes, pure and clear, interspersed by long silences.
‘Fresh as in … ?’ prompted Anderson.
‘Recently harvested,’ said the pathologist. ‘We’re running tests to see if we can pick up any of the more common preserving solutions, such as formaldehyde, but, frankly, you can invariably smell the stuff. And this has barely begun to deteriorate. I’d say it’s less than twenty-four hours old, fresh as they come.’
As the music started to build in volume and tempo, I imagined the pianist’s fingers running up and down the keys. And I really hoped Kaytes wasn’t going to use the word ‘fresh’ again.
‘Can you tell us anything about the woman it was taken from?’ asked Tulloch.
Kaytes nodded. ‘Adult,’ he said. ‘From the size of it, I’d say she’d had at least one pregnancy of twenty-four weeks or over.’ He stepped away from the worktop and arched his back. ‘The uterus enlarges in pregnancy as the fetus develops,’ he went on, ‘but then very rarely shrinks back completely to its pre-pregn
ancy size until some time past the menopause. So this woman wasn’t elderly. She’d also given birth.’
He beckoned us closer and re-angled one of the lights so that it shone directly on the organ.
‘What you’re looking at now is the cervix,’ he said, extending a gloved index finger.‘And this little hole here is the external os of the cervix, basically the escape route for the emerging infant. Can you see that it’s slit-shaped and a bit distorted?’
I told myself I was back in biology class. I’d never been squeamish then.
‘How is that significant?’ asked Tulloch.
‘Prior to a vaginal birth the os is neat and circular,’ said Kaytes. ‘This isn’t. She’d had at least one vaginal delivery.’
There were pronounced veins on Tulloch’s neck I hadn’t noticed before. The muscles of her jaw seemed tighter than usual. ‘So she was a mother,’ she said. ‘Any idea how old?’
‘Let’s open it up, shall we?’ said Kaytes, taking up a scalpel just as there was a surprisingly cheerful burst of music. Two fingers, tapping down repeatedly on the same keys. I glanced over at Tulloch while the incision was being made. She didn’t flinch.
‘Well, there are some fibroids, but none of them really large enough to distort the uterus,’ said Kaytes. ‘Two or three of them are calcified, which tends only to happen in later life.’
I caught Stenning’s eye. He gave me a tight-lipped smile.
‘I cut a few sections of the vessels before you got here,’ said Kaytes. He stepped away from the table and switched on a microscope on the bench behind him. ‘Bear with me a sec.’
We waited while he adjusted the focus. The microscope was connected to a computer screen and as the screen flickered into life we saw an incomprehensible collage of pink, black and yellow. ‘Here we go,’ Kaytes said, tapping the screen. ‘What you’re seeing now is a segment of uterine artery, with some early signs of atherosclerosis, basically a thickening of the arterial wall. That’s age-driven, although smoking and diet can exacerbate it. The sterilization points to a slightly older subject as well. My educated guess would be that this lady was somewhere from thirty-five to fifty-five.’
‘Is it possible …?’ began Tulloch. ‘Do we … do we have to assume she’s dead?’
At my side, Anderson sucked in a breath. It had never occurred to me that the owner of the uterus might still be … Jesus.
‘Not necessarily,’ replied the pathologist. ‘Hysterectomy is still one of the most common elective operations in this country. But without medical support, there’d be a huge amount of bleeding, the pain would be close to unmanageable and there would be a massive risk of infection.’
It was getting harder, by the second, to persuade myself that this was nothing more than a biology class.
‘Is it possible this was the by-product of a hysterectomy?’ asked Tulloch, who seemed the only one of us with her brain fully engaged. ‘Removed in the last twenty-four hours and then smuggled out of the operating theatre as a joke.’
Kaytes looked bemused. ‘Not even medical students would try that nowadays,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’ said Tulloch. ‘Because the alternative is a whole lot worse.’
Kaytes made a resigned face and bent down to the worktop again. After a few seconds he shook his head. ‘There are no clamp marks across the residual uterine and ovarian vessels,’ he said. ‘Also a surgeon would use diathermy to control the small vessels, particularly around the cervix. There are no coagulation burns to suggest that. The incision around the cervix is by no means neat, in fact I’d say there’s some evidence of pretty amateurish hacking. And you’ve got this piece of tissue here, which is a small segment of the ureter, indicating this was done in a hurry.’ He stood upright again and let the scalpel dangle in his fingers. ‘This wasn’t the result of a legitimate operation,’ he said.
‘But he would still have to know what he was doing, right?’ asked Stenning. ‘I mean, there’s no way I could cut a woman open and take out her uterus.’ He looked round at the rest of us almost defensively. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin. I wouldn’t even know what it looked like.’
Anderson nodded. Tulloch gave Stenning a small half-smile.
‘Well, that’s true,’ replied Kaytes. ‘Whoever did this would need some basic knowledge of anatomy. Maybe someone who’s worked in medicine without actually being a surgeon. Possibly even a butcher, someone used to cutting up large animals.’
Tulloch’s eyes closed and I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking. Exactly the same conjectures had been made about the original Ripper. Someone with rough anatomical knowledge. For a while suspicion had fallen on the numerous slaughterhouse workers who lived around Whitechapel and Spitalfields.
‘To be honest, though,’ continued Kaytes, ‘you can research just about anything on the internet these days. I wouldn’t want to send you off on a wild goose chase, looking for a psychotic doctor when it’s just someone who’s read a couple of textbooks.’
No one answered him.
‘Any truth in what I’ve been hearing?’ asked Kaytes. ‘Have we got a wannabe Ripper?’
Tulloch was about to answer when her mobile beeped. Excusing herself, she stepped to the corner of the room and took the call.
‘What’s the music?’ I asked, after a second.
Kaytes looked at me properly for the first time. ‘Beethoven,’ he said. ‘One of the piano sonatas. Les Adieux, in fact, played by Alfred Brendel.’
‘He saves the symphonies for when the detective superintendent comes down,’ said the technician in a voice that was pure estuary. ‘When we get a bad one, he puts on the Fifth.’
‘Gets him every time,’ agreed Kaytes.
Over in the corner, we heard Tulloch take a deep breath. Then she ended the call, turned back and nodded to the pathologist.
‘Mike, thank you,’ she said. ‘That was very helpful.’ Then she looked at the rest of us and her eyes were gleaming. ‘We have to get back,’ she said. ‘That print they found on Emma’s phone. They’ve managed to trace it.’
I rode back with Stenning. For a while, neither he nor I spoke.
‘It seems clumsy,’ I said at last. ‘Leaving a print behind.’
‘Only a partial print,’ Stenning reminded me.
I nodded. ‘How are the Jones family doing?’ I asked, because I didn’t want to spend the entire trip back obsessing about possible evidence and who it might point to.
Stenning shrugged. ‘Not great,’ he said. ‘The youngest son is home now. He should have gone back to university but he’s put it off a couple of weeks. The au pair thinks they’re still in shock. They want answers, of course. They’re starting to blame us.’
‘We haven’t given up on the family angle though, have we?’ I said, as the lights changed and we pulled away. ‘We’re still talking to them, trying to find any connection she may have had with Kennington.’
‘Yeah, but there isn’t anything there, Flint. No financial motive that we can find, no dodgy goings-on, everyone close to her had a good alibi, husband isn’t having an affair that we know of.’
‘There was nothing on the bag we found the uterus in,’ I said. ‘If he was careful enough to keep that clear, why leave something on the phone?’
‘They get careless,’ said Stenning. ‘That’s how we catch them. If they’d had fingerprinting and forensics back in 1888, they’d have caught the Ripper.’
I didn’t argue, but I wasn’t so sure. Nineteenth-century Whitechapel had been densely populated. Watching eyes were everywhere and at the time of the Ripper murders there was a heavy police presence on the streets. The Ripper had managed to act and escape each time undetected. I was inclined to think that whatever tools the police had had at their disposal, he’d still have stayed one step ahead.
34
‘THE PRINT ON EMMA BOSTON’S MOBILE PHONE HAS BEEN matched, with an 85 per cent degree of accuracy, to a man called Samuel Cooper.’
Twenty people in the inciden
t room seemed to be holding their breath. Everyone was looking at the senior crime-scene officer, a slim, bearded, grey-haired man called Peters. He pressed a key on a small laptop and we were looking at the face of the man who could be our killer. Clean-shaven, fair-haired, long face, large nose, bad complexion. And something not quite right about his eyes.
‘He’s twenty-seven,’ said Peters. ‘Last known address was a squat just off the Tottenham Court Road.’
I leaned closer. Cooper’s pupils were elliptic, like those of some snakes.
‘Eighty-five per cent accuracy?’ questioned Tulloch.
‘Best we can do, I’m afraid,’ replied Peters. ‘It was only a partial print. Look, let me show you.’ Peters pressed another key on the laptop and two fingerprints came up on screen. One whole and perfect, the other about 60 per cent present. He pressed another key and we saw the inner segment of both prints, considerably magnified. ‘What you’re looking at here is a loop,’ said Peters, ‘as opposed to a whirl or an arch, the other two main fingerprint patterns.
‘There’s a short, independent ridge here, in the centre of the loop,’ he went on, pointing with a pencil. ‘You can see it quite clearly on the print we know is Cooper’s and on the print taken from the phone. You can also see what we call a lake, a tiny, free-standing line, just above and to the right of the ridge. The lake, like the short independent ridge, is present on both images. We’ve also got a delta, a sort of convergence of lines, a little way down and to the left. Appears on both images and the ridge count between them is the same.’
‘Looks pretty conclusive to me,’ said Anderson.
‘If we had more to go on than this one partial, I’d be agreeing with you,’ said Peters, pushing reading glasses on to the top of his head and nodding at the sergeant. ‘But nothing on either the shoe or the sunglasses, remember. Of course, 85 per cent won’t be enough by itself to convict him, but it makes him someone you want to take seriously.’
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