Now You See Me

by Sharon Bolton

  I carried on talking but my mind was wandering. I had leave due and it was too long since I’d taken a holiday. Tiredness, and shock, had been playing some very strange tricks with my head the last couple of weeks. Then the door opened and Mark Joesbury walked in. He was in a business suit, dark grey with the faintest of pinstripes. His shirt was white and his tie was dark-red silk and I’d lost my thread.

  It took me a moment to find it again. ‘Dutfield’s Yard was overlooked by a Jewish Socialist Club,’ I said, after a few seconds glancing through my notes. ‘It was full on the night in question. Would have been noisy. At one a.m., fifteen minutes after Elizabeth was last seen, the steward of the social club arrived home and saw a woman lying on the ground with her throat cut. He later described the wound as a great gash, over two inches wide.’

  Joesbury took a seat next to Tulloch. He’d shaved.

  ‘He went inside to get help and the police were called,’ I said, as Joesbury whispered something in Tulloch’s ear.

  ‘In the Elizabeth Stride case, three aspects are of interest. The first is the mystery of how the killer managed to incapacitate her in the way he did.’

  ‘He strangled his victims first, didn’t he?’ chipped in a man at the back.

  ‘It’s believed so,’ I agreed, glad of someone else to concentrate on. ‘But there were no signs that Elizabeth was strangled. No bruising around the throat or face. Yet the surgeon was convinced her throat had been cut from left to right, while she was prostrate on the ground.’

  ‘She thought she was about to have sex,’ said Anderson. ‘Women do that on their backs, in my experience.’

  Titters from various men in the room.

  ‘It had been raining heavily,’ I replied. ‘The yard was covered in mud, and maybe you need to be a bit more adventurous, Sarge,’

  More titters, rather more feminine in tone this time.

  ‘She wouldn’t have lain down voluntarily,’ I said. ‘There were lots of people near by, but no one heard any sound of a struggle. And she kept hold of a small packet of sweets while she was forced to the ground. He got her down quickly and without a fuss.’

  ‘These women all drank, didn’t they?’ said Joesbury. ‘Was she intoxicated?’

  ‘The pathologist said not,’ I replied, keeping my eyes on my notes. ‘He checked her stomach contents and found no evidence of alcohol abuse or narcotics. The police at the time were completely mystified as to how he got her on the ground.’

  A car horn sounded outside. Several heads turned to the window.

  ‘Another reason Elizabeth Stride stands out is that she wasn’t mutilated in any way,’ I went on, anxious to get to the end now. ‘The wound on her throat was the only mark on her body. No other part of her was touched.’

  ‘He was interrupted,’ said Stenning.

  ‘In the drama I watched,’ said Gayle Mizon, popping a cashew nut into her mouth, ‘only one murder took place on 30 September. Elizabeth Stride was discounted as being one of the Ripper victims.’

  ‘That’s the third thing I was going to mention,’ I said, giving Mizon a quick smile. ‘Not every expert believes the Ripper killed Stride. Some people argue that because there was no sign of strangulation and because she wasn’t mutilated, her killer was a different man.’

  ‘The opposing argument being that because he was interrupted, the Ripper had to abort plan A and then took out his frustration on his next victim,’ said Tulloch.

  ‘Yes, that’s another possibility,’ I said. ‘The fourth canonical victim of the Ripper was Catharine Eddowes.’ I pressed the keyboard again and the post-mortem photograph appeared on the screen. It was taken of Catharine’s naked body and showed a massive scar running down the length of her torso. Her facial injuries were appalling.

  ‘At one forty-five in the morning,’ I said, ‘PC Watkins of the City Police found Catharine’s body in Mitre Square.’

  ‘Hang on, we’re talking less than an hour after Stride was murdered in Whitechapel,’ said Barrett.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Catharine’s throat had been cut, almost back to the spine. The police doctor referred to death being due to blood loss from the left common carotid artery. Her abdomen was ripped open from her breast down to her pubic bone. Several of her internal organs were damaged. Others, including the uterus and the left kidney, were removed. Some of her organs were left strewn around her body, almost as though he was looking for something.’

  The mood in the room had changed. People were listening again.

  ‘For the first time with Eddowes, the Ripper attacked his victim’s face,’ I said. ‘He used his knife to make incisions on her cheeks and eyelids. The lobe of one ear was cut off and also the tip of her nose.’

  My colleagues seemed transfixed by the picture of Eddowes’s face. Horrible scars showed where her facial wounds had been stitched during the post-mortem examination. Beneath the damage, though, it was still possible to see that at one time she would have been a pretty woman. She’d had a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones and a smooth, clear brow, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had just been coincidence that the loveliest of the Ripper’s victims had inspired his greatest violence.

  43

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I WAS THE POSTER GIRL FOR THE caring face of the Met, or as Stenning and one or two of the others insisted on calling me, Ripper-bait. I spent less than an hour a day in the station. The rest of the time I was out, visiting schools, youth clubs and community centres around south London. I linked up with the Sapphire Units and helped them give talks to groups of girls about keeping themselves safe and the importance of reporting incidents. I met Rona and her sister, Tia, over a burger lunch and was hugely relieved to find that nothing had happened yet, and that both girls were being very careful.

  Other times, I was out on the streets, buying endless cartons of soup, directing people to hostels, advice centres, sometimes just talking. The days can get very dull when you have nothing to do and nowhere to go.

  At lunchtime I went swimming. In the evenings, I sat in pubs and cafés, pretending to read a newspaper. I stayed out as late as I could bear, just waiting for the phone call, for the tall, thin figure of Samuel Cooper to appear in the distance. I even went to Camden on the second night, mainly to wind up Joesbury, and discovered there was a limit to how much I wanted to rile him. I went home alone.

  Actually, I was never truly alone. Joesbury had got clearance for two of his colleagues from SO10 to take turns shadowing me. ‘Your guys stand out like sore knobs,’ he’d told Tulloch when she said she’d prefer her own people to do it. ‘Any villain worth his salt will clock ’em a mile off.’

  Whoever Joesbury’s people were, they were good. Even I hadn’t spotted them yet. Occasionally, at a distance, I’d see someone I knew from Lewisham. Tulloch was taking no chances.

  Tulloch phoned me often, Stenning almost as much. I heard that the latest press conference had been painful and that it had been plain that Tulloch’s superiors were distancing themselves. If the killer wasn’t caught soon, she’d carry the can.

  There had been no talk around the station about her leaving the inquiry.

  Thanks to Stenning, I got a full report of the post-mortem carried out on the woman we found in Victoria Park. Death had been the result of massive blood loss following extensive damage to the victim’s abdominal cavity and organs. She’d been tortured prior to death by the infliction of fourteen shallow cuts around her breasts. The broken-off piece of wooden fencing had been rammed into her vagina while she was still alive. The internal damage had been extensive, but the presence of semen caught in her pubic hair suggested she’d been raped.

  The semen, I learned, showed traces of a common spermicide. He’d used a condom. Frustratingly, Samuel Cooper’s prior arrests had been before the taking of DNA samples from suspects had become routine, so we would need to catch him before we could prove categorically that it was him. But we would catch him. His photograph was everywhere. I saw it several tim
es a day, on television and in the national papers.

  Then, at the end of the fourth day, we identified our victim.

  44

  Friday 14 September

  DARYL WESTON OF STOCKBRIDGE IN HAMPSHIRE ARRIVED home from a ten-day business trip to the Philippines to find his house strangely deserted. His wife, Amanda, was nowhere to be seen, his cat was half starved and his answer-machine completely full. Some of the calls were from his two children, the son who lived in Bristol, the thirteen-year-old daughter at a boarding school in Gloucestershire. Most of the rest were from Amanda’s friends, who’d seen sketches of a murder victim on the news that bore a remarkable resemblance to her and who had just wanted to check she was still with us. Ha ha.

  After he’d listened to the fourth such message, Daryl Weston was struggling to see the joke. He phoned his wife’s parents in Sussex and her closest friends. Then he phoned us.

  Forty-six-year-old Amanda Weston had been married for four years. Daryl was her second husband, her two children were from her first marriage. She had no enemies, according to her husband. She worked part-time as a nurse in a local hospice for terminally ill cancer patients.

  Daryl Weston had loved his wife. He wept like a child when he saw her body. He was still crying when he arrived at Lewisham to give a statement. Tulloch and Anderson took him into the interview room, a room we keep for talking to people who aren’t suspects in any sort of crime. They may be victims, family of victims or important and vulnerable witnesses. The room is furnished comfortably and there’s a discreet video camera in one corner. As Tulloch and Anderson talked to Weston, the rest of us gathered round a screen in the incident room to watch the conversation.

  ‘Mr Weston, I know you want to be getting back to your children,’ said Dana, when she’d taken him through the basics, ‘but I do need to ask you a few more questions. Is that OK?’

  Weston nodded, without raising his eyes from the hands clasped on his lap.

  ‘Can you think of any reason why your wife might have been in London last Saturday?’

  Weston shook his head. ‘She never comes to London,’ he said. ‘She hates it.’

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  He thought for a second. ‘Tuesday night,’ he said. ‘I asked her what time it was in England and she said just after eight.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  He shook his head. ‘Normal. Tired. She’d been at work but she didn’t have to go in again until Saturday. She was looking forward to the rest.’

  ‘Did she have any plans?’ asked Tulloch.

  ‘Sort the garden out for the winter. Help Daniel pack his things up. He’s supposed to move into a new flat next week. Jesus …’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Daniel is twenty-five, is that right?’

  There were too many people crowded round the screen. It was starting to feel uncomfortably hot. I edged back a little and looked at my watch. I’d arranged to meet the local Sapphire Unit at a nearby school in twenty minutes.

  ‘Mr Weston, we have reason to believe that whoever killed your wife may have killed another woman, just over a week ago. Did you hear about that case?’

  Weston looked up and shook his head. ‘I’ve been out of the country.’

  ‘Of course, you did say. The other woman was a similar age to your wife. Her name was Geraldine Jones. Does that name mean anything?’

  He shook his head again.

  I really had to go now. I took another step back and came up against Joesbury. I hadn’t even known he was in the room. Keeping my eyes on the screen, I edged my way around him and left.

  For several days I carried on going through the motions, trying to lure Samuel Cooper out into the open. People like Stenning and Mizon filled me in on anything important.

  Like the fact that Geraldine Jones and Amanda Weston could have known each other. So far no member of either family remembered the two women being friends, but when she’d been married to her previous husband, Amanda and her children had lived in London. They and Geraldine’s kids had attended the same private school in Chiswick. Shortly after that, we learned that Cooper’s mother, Stacey, had worked at the school as a cook and that Cooper himself had been known to visit it. It was looking as though the killings weren’t random. There was a purpose behind them.

  In the meantime, Cooper continued to elude us. And the cranks had really come out of the woodwork. Every day we were deluged with telephone calls and Ripper letters; every day, we took a hammering in the press. POLICE CLUELESS. MET’S INCOMPETENCE. COUNTDOWN TO NEXT KILLING. The headlines got more and more judgemental. We started hiding them from Tulloch.

  Then, on the eighth day after the discovery of Amanda Weston’s body, we found him.

  45

  Monday 17 September

  ‘THE FLOWER MARKET. TEN MINUTES. COME ALONE.’

  A soft click and the line went dead. I pressed the button that would end the call. My bedroom was in darkness. The luminous digits of the alarm clock showed ten minutes after four in the morning. I crossed to the wardrobe and dressed quickly. Jogging pants, trainers, sweatshirt and the jacket SO10 had issued to me just a few days ago. It had four large plastic buttons. Two of them really were buttons. The third was a tracking device that I swivelled to activate. The last contained a tiny recorder.

  The second I left the flat, the cameras outside would spot me. Even if I didn’t activate the jacket button, my new mobile phone sent a constant signal back to a control room in Scotland Yard. If I left my flat at this hour, someone monitoring would spot that it wasn’t normal behaviour and both my team and SO10 would be alerted. They’d make contact with the unmarked car parked somewhere in my street, who would be told to follow me discreetly.

  Once outside, I carried my bike up to street level and headed for the Wandsworth Road. On the other side, the streets were busier. Traffic starts building up early around here.

  The New Covent Garden Flower Market is the place where florists throughout London and the South-East go for their stock. Hundreds of thousands of blooms arrive here every day from overseas and all corners of Britain. Close to the Thames and nestled between Nine Elms Lane and the Wandsworth Road, it’s housed in a massive warehouse and opens most days at three a.m.

  Although primarily aimed at tradesmen, the Flower Market is open to the public. Friday and Saturday mornings in particular will see a fair scattering of the bargain-hunters and the curious. Tourists who can be bothered getting up early enough; wealthy women from north of the river planning fancy parties; brides with dreams of filling their churches with blooms. And, sometimes, me.

  Often, when I can’t sleep, I cycle or walk down here and just wander among the stalls. Flowers have always been one of my favourite things.

  I left my bike against some railings then went into the warehouse through the main cargo doors. The sticky, cloying scent of lilies was all around me. The stall to my right had hundreds of them: white, pink, yellow and the fabulous orangey-gold of the tiger lily. I moved on, heading deeper into the market, past towers of roses, cascades of daisies and boxes of blooms I could never have named. The scent of the flowers fought with that of fast food. It’s an odd combination – roses and grease – but one I rather like. The place was busy. The market does most of its business between five and six a.m. and we were approaching the busiest time.

  There he was.

  Forty feet away from me, on the other side of a small ornamental forest of potted bay trees. He was dressed just as he had been in the park. Loose trailing jeans, black jacket with orange and lime symbols, black beanie. In the harsh electric light of the flower market, it was easy to recognize the pinched features and large nose of Samuel Cooper. A week ago, in the park, he’d been much further away and I hadn’t been sure. Now I was.

  He seemed to sway, then to lean closer towards me. Forty feet away and yet the way he moved seemed menacing and I had to tell myself to stand my ground. As we stared at each other, I tried to remember how many ex
its to the market there were. My colleagues, thanks to Joesbury’s tracking devices, would know exactly where I was. Once they got here, they would surround the building. Only when confident all exits were secure would they venture inside. If I kept him in here long enough, just staring at each other across the ornamental trees, we’d get him.

  Seconds ticked by and I could sense an uncertainty in him. Those odd eyes began to flicker from side to side.

  It was still too soon. There might be a few officers outside, but not nearly enough. I needed my radio. So far, I hadn’t turned it on, but now I needed to hear where the others were. As slowly as I dared, I moved my hand towards my jacket pocket. Cooper took a step back. I froze.

  Stale-mate. If I moved, he’d run.

  ‘Help you, love?’

  The holder of the stall I was standing by had approached. I shook my head without taking my eyes off Cooper.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ muttered the man I could only see out of the corner of my eye. ‘You’ll have to move, though, I’m putting some stuff down there.’

  ‘I’m with the police,’ I said, knowing the chances of his believing me were slim. I was in casual clothes and still wearing my bicycle helmet. ‘Give me a minute, please.’

  The stall-holder was silent for a moment. ‘Why don’t you show me some ID?’ he asked.

  I ignored him.

  A hand grabbed my arm. ‘I’m talking to you. If you’re the—’

  I had no option but to turn. I saw an overweight man in his early forties. He’d made me look away from Cooper and got the full brunt of my frustration. ‘Back off, now!’ I hissed at him.

  ‘I’m calling Security,’ he announced.

  Cooper was gone. I shook the hand off my arm and set off after him. Dodging a trolley, I pulled out and switched on my radio.

  ‘DC Flint chasing suspect,’ I called into it, using the verbal signal guaranteed to get me attention on the airwaves. ‘Urgent assistance needed.’ I wove my way in and out of the crowds, trying not to send anyone flying. I caught sight of the doors. ‘Exit 10,’ I called. ‘Suspect heading for Exit 10.’