‘My career is over,’ I said, knowing that Joesbury would be instigating the trace as I spoke and scribbling notes to colleagues to get the nearest uniform here. ‘Any talk of damage limitation is just bullshit, so let’s cut to the chase.’
‘Which is?’
‘Joanna Groves is still alive,’ I said, turning away from the traffic.
‘How the fuck—’
‘Listen! The minute I know for certain where she is, or where Llewellyn is, I will call you, so keep your phone close. Until then, the best thing you can do for her is let me get on with it.’
I could almost hear a whole bunch of expletives bursting to get out of Joesbury’s mouth. Somehow he managed to keep it together. ‘Flint, we have spent weeks searching London’s underclass,’ he said in controlled tones. ‘She isn’t living on the streets any more, you won’t find her.’
‘I don’t expect to,’ I said. ‘She’ll find me.’
A sharp hissing sound. Then the noise a chair makes when it’s being pushed roughly over the floor. ‘Lacey, you are going to get yourself killed.’
‘Least of my worries,’ I said. ‘Now, one more thing.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘When you go to my flat, you’ll find something that was delivered early this morning. It’s a rectangular package and inside is a knife. The name Mary is scratched into the edge of the blade.’
‘Jesus, fuckin—’
‘Shut up. The knife is perfectly clean. It hasn’t been used. Joanna is still alive.’
I gave him a second to think about it. Only a second, though. I really had to hang up. Already I was looking nervously up and down the street.
‘It makes no fucking sense,’ he said. ‘Why send you a weapon that hasn’t been used?’
I almost smiled at that. ‘It’s lucky you’re cute, Joesbury,’ I said, ‘because you have shit for brains. The knife is squeaky clean because I’m the one who has to use it. I have to kill Joanna.’
87
‘THOSE WOMEN YOU KILLED, THE BOYS’ MOTHERS,’ SAYS Joanna. ‘My mother, too. Do you blame them for what happened? Do you think it’s their fault their sons did that to you?’
The girl has begun spending time with her, as though she too feels the loneliness of this place. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they just sit in silence, listening to each other breathing.
‘They brought them up to believe they could have anything they wanted,’ answers the girl. ‘Anything that took their fancy and to hell with the consequences.’
‘Is that why you did it?’ asks Joanna, after a moment.
‘The next day, when they met us at the police station,’ says the girl, ‘their dads were embarrassed, they couldn’t look at us. They were ashamed of their sons. They didn’t want them facing charges, I’m not saying that, but they weren’t trying to make out it was all our fault, that we’d asked for it.’
‘And the mothers did?’ asks Joanna.
She hears the hiss of a sharp breath. ‘Those women weren’t prepared to consider, even for a second, that their precious baby boys could do anything wrong,’ the voice says. ‘So we had to be the evil ones, my sister and me.’
Joanna thinks for a moment. There is something she wants to say. It feels like a horrible betrayal, but it’s her life at stake. ‘I understand that,’ she says. ‘But the people who really hurt you and your sister, they’re getting away with it.’
She hears a soft laugh, then the girl leans in closer again. ‘No, Joanna,’ trickles a voice into her ear. ‘Killing them quickly – which is what I would have to do – would be letting them get away with it. They wouldn’t even see it coming. This way, they’ll suffer for the rest of their lives. Just like me.’
88
I’D TOLD JOESBURY THE TRUTH WHEN I’D SAID I WAS CLOSE to Waterloo station. I’d lied about getting on a train. The London Underground network is riddled with CCTV and finding me would be too easy. Instead I jumped back on the bike and headed east, following the course of the A202 but avoiding the main road. I kept my hood up and my head down and pedalled steadily.
Seventy minutes later, I was high above the city, watching south-east London idle its way through a Sunday. At the entrance to Greenwich Park I’d bought coffee and sandwiches. I ate and drank now, watching the weak sun trying to cast reflections on the river, keeping an eye on anyone who got too close. The sky was getting cloudier all the time and the park wasn’t overly busy. A few dog-walkers, kite-flyers and some families over at the children’s playground. Overnight, the temperature had dropped.
It must have been the proximity of the Greenwich Meridian Line, the centre of the world’s time, that made my sense of time running out so very strong now.
The team I’d walked out on would have two priorities. First, they’d want to find Joanna Groves and Victoria Llewellyn, who it seemed reasonable to assume were in the same place. Their second objective would be me. Already my photograph would have been sent around every police station in London. Every CCTV control room, every copper in uniform, every patrol car, every police community support officer, would have been told to look out for me. I could expect to see myself playing a leading role on the lunchtime news. Then everyone in London who cared would be looking for me too.
And so would Llewellyn. She had my phone number. She would tell me where I was expected to go. All I had to do was avoid being picked up for long enough to give her the chance.
So I sat, and tried not to get too cold, as the hour went past. At twelve fifty-five, the great red time-ball rose halfway up the mast on the top of Flamsteed House. Three minutes later it floated to the top, and at one p.m. it sailed back down again. I waited half an hour more and then pulled out my mobile. No messages.
Switching off the phone, I got back on the bike. I had to assume Joesbury and the MIT now knew I was in Greenwich. Time to move on.
I cycled out of the park and found a market stall that sold cheap clothes. I bought a waterproof blue jacket and a baseball cap and put both on. Then I made my way to the glazed dome entrance of the Greenwich foot tunnel. I pushed the bike through, keeping my head down in case there were cameras inside. On the north bank, I found another bench close to the river and sat, staring at the ornate Wren-designed buildings of the old Greenwich Hospital until another hour had gone by. By this time rain was starting to fall. I switched on my phone again. Nothing.
By mid afternoon I was freezing. I cycled up the Isle of Dogs and found a small internet café that was open on a Sunday. Keeping my head down to avoid CCTV cameras, I went in and found a vacant computer. Then I started making my way through the various news websites.
Joanna Groves’s abduction was on every site I pulled up. She was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, slim girl, not quite pretty but far from plain. She lived in a flat on the ground floor of a house in Wimbledon and worked at the local primary school. She’d left the school at three thirty on Friday afternoon and disappeared. As I flicked through site after site, my insides started to twist themselves into knots.
There was nothing about me. Even on the Met’s own website. Nothing.
My hour wasn’t up, but I couldn’t stay here any longer. Tulloch’s computer skills were legendary and it was perfectly possible that she’d know I’d been on the Met’s website and be able to trace the computer I was using. I got up and left the café in a hurry. The MIT were doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to. I needed them to be looking for me, damn it, and I needed it to be public knowledge. How else would Llewellyn know I’d gone AWOL?
OK, think, think, think. I cycled for fifteen minutes and found another café with internet access. When a machine became available I typed ‘Ripper’ into the search engine and pressed go.
Run a Jack the Ripper search and you can expect to see several million results. Search for his twenty-first-century copycat and it’s not quite so many. Just under forty-three thousand. Still a pretty impressive performance for someone who’s only been around a matter of weeks. I started making my
way through the sites, looking for blogs. On each one I left a message.
Cardiff Girl: Call me. L.
It was risky. Officers in the team had been monitoring the various websites since the case had started. When they spotted my posts, they’d start tracing them. I left and found a small, half-empty branch of Starbucks. After forty minutes, I switched my phone on. Nothing. And I was getting paranoid. A woman had entered the coffee bar shortly after me. Three-quarters of an hour later, she was still there. It almost certainly meant nothing, she was probably just another Londoner with too much time to kill, but I didn’t like her being close.
I found another café, this time with a TV, and asked permission to change to the twenty-four-hour news channel. I watched for twenty minutes and saw several references to Joanna. None to me. I switched my phone back on. Still nothing. Move on.
Shit, this was not what I’d planned. Panic was rising inside me like milk coming to the boil. Llewellyn didn’t know I was out here. She wouldn’t contact me.
And my sense of paranoia was growing too, because everywhere I went I had a sense of people looking at me. It was impossible; I’d kept my phone switched off, I’d stayed on the move, I’d avoided cameras, the attention I was getting had to be down to my still-bruised face. But as every minute went by, the sense of being watched increased.
I could just run.
But if I did that, Joanna Groves would die. There had to be another way. I knew this woman. I knew how she thought. Where would she take Joanna?
She’d killed Geraldine Jones in a south London housing estate. She’d cut Amanda Weston to pieces in a park. Charlotte Benn had been murdered in her own home, Karen Curtis at her mother’s house. There was no pattern.
I left the café, unchained my bike and just pushed it along the street, forgetting even to watch out for cameras. For the first time that day I had no plan, no idea where to go next.
Llewellyn had sent me a knife. She wanted me to kill Joanna Groves. That meant she had to believe I’d find her. I passed a newsagent’s, a children’s clothes shop, a second-hand record shop. I’d stopped walking, was staring at my reflection in the record-shop window. On the pavement, people were having to make their way around me, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes off the stack of vinyl recordings of old musicals. The Sound of Music wasn’t there, but it didn’t have to be. I’d got it.
Of course there was a pattern, there had been all along. It was me. It was all about me and my favourite things. Because a couple of times, I’d played that game with someone else. We’d had long lists, that other girl and I, but one day, we’d narrowed our choices down to just five each. We’d laughed because I’d tried so hard to make my five all begin with P, but it didn’t matter how much time we spent, we couldn’t think of another word for zoo that began with P.
So my list was the (P) zoo, Parks, Pools, Public libraries and Ponies.
Geraldine Jones had been killed where I would be bound to find her, to make sure I became involved from the outset. Amanda Weston had been murdered in a park I visited, part of her body left for me in one of my favourite swimming pools. Charlotte Benn’s heart had been found in the children’s section of a Victorian public library, on top of one of my favourite books. We’d been sent on a wild goose chase to London Zoo to find Karen Curtis’s head. Parks, libraries, pools and the zoo. Four out of five boxes had been ticked. One left.
Ponies.
Finally, I knew where they were. Poor terrified Joanna Groves and the Llewellyn woman who was holding her hostage, waiting for me to arrive and draw a knife across her latest victim’s throat.
When I’d told Joesbury the story of two young women sharing cardboard walls and body warmth in a derelict London building, I hadn’t been specific. The exact location of that half-forgotten, freezing-cold place hadn’t seemed significant. And, of course, it didn’t take a genius to spot that when I mentioned a particular London district to Joesbury his eyes had a habit of narrowing and his jawline of becoming that bit tighter. When it came to me – and Camden – Mark Joesbury had a bit of a blind spot.
I’d wanted him listening and sympathizing, not getting mad. So I hadn’t mentioned that the place where I’d met and lived with the other young runaway had been less than half a mile from where I now regularly – to use his words – go shagging.
But it made perfect sense that Llewellyn would choose Camden. I’d lived there for months, knew it well, and although much of it had changed beyond recognition in recent years, the entire development had been themed around that other favourite of mine. Ponies. Llewellyn was holding Joanna somewhere around Camden Stables Market. Almost certainly in the Camden Catacombs.
89
‘YOU CAN SEE ME, CAN’T YOU?’ SAYS JOANNA. ‘I DON’T know how you do it, but you can see in the dark.’ She’s had her suspicions for some time now. The girl moves softly and silently around the dark space, never stumbling. Joanna has never seen her use a torch.
‘Yes, I can see you,’ the girl replies. ‘I have night-vision equipment. Gives me a headache after a while, but it’s useful down here.’
‘Please,’ says Joanna, ‘can we have some light? Just a torch. I already know what you look like, it can’t make any difference.’
‘We can’t, I’m afraid,’ says the girl. ‘We’re waiting for someone, you see. And I need to know exactly when she’s coming.’
90
IT WAS ALMOST SIX O’CLOCK BY THIS TIME. IN A HARDWARE shop I bought a torch and a large pair of pliers and then it took me nearly two hours along the back streets to reach Camden. Once there I found somewhere to chain my bike and jogged down to the towpath that runs alongside Regent’s Canal.
Mention the Camden Catacombs and few people in London, even those who know Camden, will have any idea what you’re talking about. But they exist, all the same: a buried network of underground chambers and tunnels, constructed nearly two centuries ago as part of the railway development. In recent years, lots of old tunnels have been opened up and developed as part of the Stables Market. Not all of them.
On the lock side of the railway bridge, built into the wall that edges the canal, is a solid black-metal door. I stopped in front of it. This was the time to phone Joesbury. He, Tulloch and the team would stand a much better chance of getting Joanna out than I would alone.
On the other hand, if I was wrong, they’d arrest me. I’d never get away again, and Llewellyn wouldn’t keep Joanna alive indefinitely. Having me kill her might be the icing on the cake, but when people are hungry enough, they’ll usually eat their cakes without icing.
The padlock on the door looked new. After a quick glance around I pulled out the pliers. Copying Joesbury’s actions in Victoria Park a few weeks earlier, I pushed them beneath the curved lock and pulled them sharply apart. The padlock fell to the ground. When I opened the door, I’d be inside an old tunnel that would take me to a vast underground structure called the Stationary Winding Engine Vaults.
In the old days, the noise made by trains travelling up the steep hill from Euston to Camden had driven wealthy residents bananas. That was before you got on to the subject of smoke. So, to avoid noise and smoke pollution, the trains at this point were pulled up by two steam-powered winding engines and a very long circular rope. The winding engines, the driving wheel and other large sheaves and pulleys were housed in a huge, vaulted underground space, nearly 200 feet long and 150 feet wide, that still sits directly beneath the main railway line. Up until the mid nineteenth century, two tall chimneys indicated the building’s position. These days, practically nothing of this massive cavern can be seen from the surface; very few people even know it’s there. Ten years ago I and a few dozen others had called it home. And this rickety piece of black metal had been my front door.
The best plans are the simple ones, they say. All I had to do was find Joanna without Llewellyn spotting me, guide her out of the vaults to safety and then get the hell out of London. Simple.
Except, when I tried the door
it didn’t budge. There was no handle as such, just the metal clasps that the padlock had held together. I tried inserting my fingers into the gap between door and frame and pulling, but nothing happened. Somehow it had been locked or jammed from the inside.
What the hell was I supposed to do now? Knock?
There were two other entrances to the Engine Vaults that anyone who knew about the catacombs would be aware of. I left the towpath and climbed back up the steps to railway level. At the top I stopped dead. I’d seen someone, something, dart out of sight not twenty yards away. I stepped into the shadows and waited.
After five minutes nothing had happened, so I took a pedestrian path that brought me past a development of terraced waterside houses. I walked the path’s full length until I reached the huge wooden gates that prevent casual access to one of the more extensive tunnels, known as the western horse tunnel. The adjoining railing gave me just enough height to leap over the gates.
The door to the tunnel was padlocked shut, and breaking this padlock didn’t help either. The door held as firm as the metal gate had done. Time to check out entrance number three.
This time I took the main road through a housing estate called Gilbey’s Yard and then climbed the boundary wall between the estate and the railway. Graffiti all along the other side of the wall suggested I wasn’t the only one to make this journey in the last ten years. It wasn’t easy underfoot but there was enough light, mainly from Morrisons supermarket not too far away, for me to see where I was going. The third ‘official’ way in was a narrow spiral staircase in the north-eastern corner of the vaults. Whether I actually went down it was another matter; for now, I was simply going to look.
Ahead of me was the fencing that surrounded the staircase. As I drew closer, I could see that two upright struts had been broken, creating a gap that someone of my size could easily squeeze through. So I did.
Now You See Me Page 33