Now You See Me

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘We’ll go calmly and quietly,’ she went on. ‘Three cars – mine, Anderson’s and Stenning’s. The rest of you wait here and be ready to come over if we need you.’

  Victoria Library. Oh no. No.

  ‘Lacey.’

  I made myself look at her.

  ‘You’d better come with me.’

  She left the room first. The men waited for me to follow and then came along behind us. Getting into Tulloch’s low-sprung sports car wasn’t easy but it didn’t seem the moment to complain. We drove out of the station and along Lewisham High Street in silence.

  ‘Body part,’ I said, when we turned on to the A2. ‘What body part exactly?’

  ‘It’s a heart,’ she replied, without taking her eyes off the road. ‘Among other things. I spoke to Westminster CID before I came downstairs.’

  ‘Mary Kelly’s heart was taken,’ I said.

  ‘Mary Kelly didn’t die until November,’ she snapped. ‘And mammalian hearts are very similar in structure. I have that on extremely good authority. It could be a pig’s heart, a sheep’s, anything.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ve been expecting something like this,’ she said. ‘I sent emails round the rest of the force. The anniversary of the double event. I knew it would be too much for someone to resist. There are some very sick people out there.’

  Once she started talking it seemed Tulloch couldn’t stop. Pigs’ hearts are readily available from any butcher. It was someone’s idea of a joke. Maybe the press wanted to keep the story alive. She kept it up until we got to the library. I didn’t say a word. I was too busy praying she was right.

  The Victoria Library is beautiful from the outside: built of cinnamon-coloured bricks, with tall rectangular windows edged with pale stone. Tulloch pulled over at a bus stop, had a quick word with the attending uniform about keeping an eye on her car, then went into the library through the very non-Victorian automatic doors. I followed more slowly. The fast drive over had done my ribcage no good and besides, something had gone wrong with my legs. They weren’t working the way they were supposed to.

  Tulloch’s opposite number in Westminster CID, a tall, fair-haired man who introduced himself as DI Allan Simmons, was waiting for us inside. He looked at me in surprise (I still bore a strong resemblance to the rear of public transport) and then spoke to Tulloch.

  ‘Left on one of the desks just before one o’clock,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t been touched. There were only three adults in the room when it was spotted. I’ve got them all detained and we’re taking statements. No one’s left the library.’

  ‘What about footage?’ Tulloch asked as we moved through the entrance hall, strode over police tape and through a doorway marked Lending Library. This was a large, rectangular room with an upper gallery running along three sides of it. A massive, arched skylight let in lots of natural daylight. Simmons was steering us towards the far side of the room, to where an arch was labelled Children’s Library. We walked under it.

  ‘Cameras picked up everything,’ Simmons said. ‘Someone came in here, picked up a book from one of the shelves and then carried it next door. Back we go.’

  We followed him back through the Lending Library and into another set of rooms on our left. We passed a space where several people had been working on PCs, then through double doors into another large room. Black railings with a rose motif circled the raised gallery and there was a cast-iron, spiral staircase in one corner. A huge potted palm in a steel bin sat in the centre of the room, and beyond that a police photographer was blocking our line of sight. Then he moved and the three of us stepped closer to the low table.

  We were looking at a clear plastic bag, fastened tight at the top end. Its contents were part solid, part gloop, mainly crimson in colour and shining in the strong overhead lights. Tulloch didn’t hesitate. She walked straight up and knelt on the carpet so her eyes were on a level with the bag.

  It was on top of a book, presumably the one that had been taken from the children’s section. I moved closer, saw the elaborate Celtic typeface and the image of a tall man in silvery white robes on the front cover. I got closer still and could see the title. A classic children’s fantasy story I’d read many times. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

  I pulled off my jacket, the room was far too hot, although no one else seemed to have noticed. A swimming pool. A park. A flower market. Now a public library. And Jack the Ripper. Dear God, who was doing this?

  DI Simmons walked up behind Tulloch. He handed over a yellow Biro. ‘Use this,’ he said. Tulloch took the pen and pushed the bag gently. Most of what we could see looked like red mush, but there were stringy bits of tissue and something decidedly more dense. Then she stood up and turned round. Her eyes went above my head.

  ‘Was that camera turned on?’ she asked Simmons.

  He nodded. ‘We need to go down to the admin office to view it. Are you happy for me to get this thing taken away?’

  ‘It needs to go to St Thomas’s,’ Tulloch replied. ‘Dr Mike Kaytes is expecting it.’

  Stenning and Anderson arrived as we got back to the main entrance. Tulloch put Stenning in charge of taking witness statements and then Anderson joined the two of us in the lift. We went down to the basement. Simmons had already seen the footage in question. He stepped back to allow us the best view.

  ‘Shit a brick,’ muttered Anderson, as the tape started playing.

  Tulloch and I didn’t say a word as we watched, from above, the automatic double doors to the library open and Samuel Cooper walk in. Wearing loose jeans, a large black jacket with coloured symbols on it and a tight black cap, he walked into the Lending Library and through to the children’s section. He disappeared from view and then reappeared after a few seconds with a book in his hand. Without lifting his eyes from the floor, he walked out of shot.

  Simmons fiddled with the tape for a second and then we saw Cooper cross the reading room. He pulled a plastic bag from an inside jacket pocket and put both book and bag on the table. He turned and kept his head down as he left the room. Not once had he let the cameras catch a glimpse of his face.

  ‘We didn’t release any details of what Cooper was wearing,’ said Tulloch. ‘If someone on our team has leaked that, I will …’ She didn’t finish.

  ‘Cooper’s our killer, Boss,’ said Anderson. ‘He had Weston’s bag in his room. We found his spunk on her …’

  What had Cooper said on the bridge, just before he and I fell? This is a fuckingfix.

  ‘How did you find his room?’ I asked. I’d been in hospital when this had all taken place. ‘He was pulled naked from the river. How did you know where he lived?’

  ‘Tip-off,’ said Anderson. ‘Anonymous. Boss, it’s a wind-up, it has to be. For one thing, there was no attempt to involve Flint here.’

  Oh, you think?

  ‘Mark my words, Boss, there’ll be a pig’s liver at the Royal Albert Hall and an ox tongue at Madame Tussauds before the day’s out.’

  I think I could almost have grown fond of DS Anderson.

  ‘Is Madame Tussauds Victorian?’ asked Tulloch, in a soft voice.

  ‘In this country, yes. Trust me, I took Abigail there just the other week.’

  Tulloch’s phone was ringing again. She excused herself and stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘Why is he always wearing the same clothes?’ I asked. ‘He keeps his head down, so we can’t see his face, but wears identifiable clothes. It’s like he doesn’t want us to be in any doubt we’re looking at Sam Cooper.’

  ‘No disrespect, Flint,’ snapped Anderson, ‘but Cooper’s in the fucking morgue at Horseferry Road. Six feet of dead flesh in a fridge.’

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Why? What part of fucking morgue at—’

  ‘No. The bit about him being six feet tall,’ I said. ‘That’s what’s been bothering me. Cooper was five foot eleven. The man we saw on camera taking Amanda Weston into Victoria Park didn’t look as tall as that to me. The bloke DI
Joesbury chased out of the park the next day did, but not the one on camera.’ I turned from the screen to Anderson. ‘I just assumed it was a funny camera angle or that Amanda Weston was wearing very high heels, but it might not have been Cooper who took Amanda Weston into the park that night.’

  As Anderson’s eyes narrowed, the door opened again and Tulloch stood there.

  It might not have been Samuel Cooper who’d killed her.

  ‘I have to get back to Lewisham,’ Tulloch said to Anderson. ‘Can you go to St Thomas’s? Take Flint with you. Let me know as soon as—’

  This is a fucking fix.

  ‘No problem, Boss. And don’t take any crap. It’s a wind-up, I’m telling you.’

  Tulloch gave him one of her tiny half-smiles and nodded at me. Then she was gone.

  51

  ‘WILL THEY TAKE DI TULLOCH OFF THE CASE?’ I ASKED Anderson, as we pulled into the car park at St Thomas’s Hospital and he stopped in a bay reserved for ambulances.

  ‘She should be so fucking lucky,’ he replied, opening his door and climbing out. ‘They’ll keep her on the case till the bitter end. She’s the one they’ll hang out to dry when it all goes pear-shaped.’

  Anderson was walking too quickly as we went into the hospital through the main reception and took the lift one floor down to the mortuary. I kept up as best I could. Last time I’d been here, it had been to view a human uterus; I wondered if Kaytes would complain that we never sent him anything complete to work on.

  His young assistant met us and helped us gown up. When we went into the examination room, Kaytes was leaning over a desk completing a form. He put the pen down and turned to face us.

  ‘Never-ending paperwork,’ he said. ‘Your package arrived ten minutes ago. See to the sound system, will you, Troy?’

  Troy crossed to Kaytes’s iPod and, smiling to himself, switched it on.

  A grey bag lay in the middle of the central worktop. Kaytes pulled on some gloves and unzipped it, just as the music started.

  ‘No DI Tulloch today?’ he said, as he extracted the clear plastic bag we’d seen at the library from out of the grey one. ‘Right, let’s see what we’ve got.’

  Kaytes opened the bag and let its contents pour out on to a large, shallow stainless-steel tray. The soft glooping was one of the most disgusting sounds I’d ever heard and I had to force myself to concentrate on the music for a few seconds. It was an orchestral piece this time, sweeter, more harmonious than the piano sonata I remembered. Kaytes turned round and took up tongs. He began spreading the various pieces of viscera around the tray to get a better look. ‘Well, it’s fresh, whatever else it is,’ he said.

  ‘How can you tell?’ asked Anderson.

  ‘Smell it,’ invited Kaytes. Anderson and I looked at each other. Neither of us moved any closer to the worktop. ‘Yep,’ continued the pathologist, ‘that’s a heart.’

  The orchestral music gained in volume as the heart in question was gently moved to one side of the tray. It was a pale-pink piece of muscle, about the size of my fist. Two large, roughly truncated vessels full of clotted blood emerged from the wider, upper part.

  ‘Is it human?’ asked Anderson. Without the boss around to be impressed, his bullishness seemed to have diminished.

  ‘Could be,’ replied Kaytes. ‘It’s certainly about the right size, but we’ll have to run the tests.’

  Kaytes lifted something with the tongs. I took a step back. ‘This is, though.’ He held it closer to the light. It was almost circular, about the size of half a grapefruit.

  ‘Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,’ said Anderson.

  Kaytes was still looking at the object in the tongs. ‘As far as I know,’ he said, ‘humans are the only animals with recognizable breasts, as opposed to teats, that don’t have heavy hair growth around the nipple.’

  Anderson turned to me. ‘Did he do that? The Ripper? Did he cut off … ?’

  ‘He did,’ I said, feeling something sticky in the back of my throat. ‘Mary Kelly’s breasts were both cut off. He didn’t take them, though. They were left at the scene.’

  ‘Jesus,’ repeated Anderson.

  ‘There’s something else here,’ said Kaytes, pushing more bloodstained tissue out of the way. He lifted it away from the tray. ‘This isn’t organic,’ he said.

  Anderson and I both waited while Kaytes crossed to a sink at the side of the room. A piano started to play, its notes light and clear, and yet sounding so incredibly sad. Kaytes had turned on the tap. A second later he came back and put something down on a clean part of the worktop. Anderson and I had no choice but to step closer.

  Rinsed of gore, the tiny piece of jewellery was gleaming under the lights. It was silver, a simple, inexpensive necklace. Most of it was chain, and the part intended to sit on a woman’s collarbone was made up of nine interlocking letters that formed a girl’s name.

  Elizabeth.

  ‘We never released the fact that he was naming his victims,’ said Anderson, running a hand over his face. ‘We kept quiet about his clothes and about that. Fuck a duck, he’s still out there, isn’t he?’

  52

  ‘OUR LATEST VICTIM WAS FOUND BY HER HUSBAND TWO hours ago,’ Tulloch was saying as I opened the door to the incident room. ‘He’d come home from work early to get changed for an evening function. Which I suppose we should be grateful for, because otherwise one of her kids would have found her.’

  DS Anderson had been right. He was still out there. We’d arrived back at the station to learn that a fourth body had been reported. Anderson had gone straight to the scene. I’d stayed behind waiting for news.

  Now, it was just after seven o’clock and most of the team were back from the house in Hammersmith where the murder had taken place. I spotted a vacant seat and headed for it.

  ‘The police doctor who attended the crime scene believes she was killed some time early this morning,’ Tulloch said. ‘There were no signs of a forced entry or of a struggle. Apart from the master bedroom, the like of which I hope I never see again in my life, the house was untouched.’

  Tulloch pressed a button on a nearby computer and we were looking at a photograph of the crime scene. A woman with short, dark hair was lying on a large bed. Her feet were on the pillow, her head at the foot of the bed. As far as the rest of her was concerned, I couldn’t have said anything for certain.

  The door opened and Joesbury came in. He’d taken off the sling since I’d last seen him.

  ‘We think the killer made her lie, face up, on the bed,’ said Tulloch. ‘Possibly, like our friend Cooper, he uses a gun, real or replica. He approached from behind, took hold of her by the hair and pulled her head back. He cut her throat from left to right, indicating he’s probably right-handed. We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to be sure, but it looks as though he made several cuts.’

  The room in the photograph looked like someone had taken a spray can to it.

  ‘Most of the blood appears to have come from her severed throat,’ continued Tulloch. ‘Which suggests he waited for her to die before beginning the mutilation. No obvious sign of rape or torture this time.’

  ‘Different killer,’ Stenning suggested, sounding more hopeful than certain.

  ‘Possibly,’ agreed Tulloch. ‘She had an easier death than Amanda Weston. On the other hand, the extent of the post-mortem mutilation is the worst we’ve seen so far. Large areas of skin were removed from the abdomen and legs, most of her internal organs were cut out and left lying around the bed. Her ribcage was smashed with something like a hammer and then forced open. Her heart was taken out and both breasts were severed. One was found at the scene. The other made its way to the children’s room at Victoria Library.’

  Low murmurs around the room.

  ‘Sorry, Dana, I didn’t catch her name,’ said Joesbury, who was rubbing his left arm as though it was still bothering him.

  I hadn’t heard it either. I’d spent the afternoon in a different room to most of the team.
/>   ‘Benn,’ said Tulloch, glancing down at her notes. ‘Charlotte Benn. Married to Nick, a criminal barrister.’

  Tulloch’s voice started to fade. ‘Two sons,’ I thought I heard her say next. ‘Felix, aged twenty-six, and Harry, aged twenty-two. Madeleine, her daughter, is seventeen and still at … Lacey, what the …? Christ, someone catch her.’

  There was a sudden rush of movement around me. Someone – Stenning, I think – was holding me upright. I heard the sound of a chair being dragged and felt myself being lowered into it. The black cloud in my head started to thin out.

  I was on the other side of the room from where I’d been sitting, close to the door, without any recollection of getting up and crossing the office. Mizon was in front of me, holding out a plastic cup of water. Automatically, I took it. Tulloch had crouched down beside Mizon. I kept my eyes firmly on the floor.

  ‘I’ll get someone to take you home,’ Tulloch said.‘You are back on sick leave until I say otherwise.’

  ‘No,’ I said, louder than I’d intended. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. ‘I’m fine. Just give me a minute, please. I’ll find a quiet room.’

  Tulloch opened her mouth to argue, then looked at her watch. She didn’t have time to nursemaid me. ‘Go and sit next door,’ she said. ‘Pete, go with her.’

  I found I could stand up. I fixed my eyes on the door and made it that far. Stenning was at my side.

  ‘Now, it shouldn’t surprise anyone too much to hear that Charlotte Benn’s children went to St Joseph’s School in Chiswick.’ Most heads had turned to face Tulloch again. Not Joesbury though. He was still watching me.

  ‘There is a connection between these families,’ Tulloch went on. ‘Something that goes beyond children at the same school. We have to find out what that is. I’ve asked Gayle to take the lead on that.’

  The door closed behind us and Stenning and I walked the few metres along the corridor to the next office.

  ‘What can I get you?’ he asked me, once I was sitting at my own desk.

  I shook my head and gestured to the door. ‘Nothing, I’m fine. You need to get back in there.’