The last of the three red threads finished at a group of photocopies that the curator of Scotland Yard’s criminal museum had made for him. The grainy images of two of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, bore frighteningly similar hallmarks to the St George’s killings: throats savagely cut, strange triangular marks carved into the cheeks, eyelids lacerated.
A series of chilling questions rose up in his mind. Was this some type of copycat killing? Not only were the victims’ horrific injuries similar, but St George’s also stood in the East End just next door to the Ripper’s killing grounds of Whitechapel. Would he kill again? The Ripper had killed five times before he suddenly stopped the carnage, Eddowes being the last and most horrific of his attacks. But this time the police knew the murderer. It was now a straight manhunt.
The top of the collage was given over to the first page of Enoch Hart’s arrest report. Although the mug shot was much smaller than the other images, Hart’s eyes seemed to bear down on Blake from the wall. Only those eyes knew the meaning of the secret connections; only those eyes had witnessed the horror of the killings.
Blake suddenly felt a shiver ripple down his back. He raised his heavy leg out of the water and eased open the hot tap with his foot. Letting the piping hot water surround his legs, he felt the heat permeate into his muscles.
As the steam rose from the tap, his brain strained to understand the connections. Cracking a difficult crime was about getting just the right distance from the case. But now his mind felt caught, like a bird in a tree, unable to spread its wings against the cage of branches. He scratched at his damp hair, his eyes framed with a frown.
After a shake of his head, he submerged his body under the water and sent a wave lapping over the side of the bath. The hot water enveloped his head and shoulders. For a long while, he lay motionless apart from the intermittent escape of bubbles from his nostrils. He felt something just out of reach in his subconscious. Something significant, something blinking on and off, deep within his memory. If he could just wait long enough, his conscious mind might hem the thought in. Blake tried to slow his breathing, but his chest began to tighten.
Blake’s head erupted from the water, sending cascades onto the bare wooden floorboards. Gasping for breath, he gripped the side of the bath, his eyes blinking. After taking several lungfuls of air, he hauled himself out of the water and picked up a damp towel from the floor. Drying himself, he caught his naked reflection in the mirror on the far wall. He turned his back towards the mirror. The scarring on his back looked more pronounced with his body pink from the heat of the bath. The skin from an inch above his waist to the nape of his neck was a patchwork of scars from the multiple skin grafts he had endured as a boy. The burns had left his back almost completely numb, but the recollection of that night had been seared into his memory like a brand.
His happy childhood was shattered when the family antique bookshop was deliberately set on fire. The arson attack resulted in the death of his father and left his mother seriously injured. If it hadn’t been for Blake’s courageous dash back into the burning building, his mother would have surely perished too. The culprits had never been found.
Blake suddenly stopped drying himself and listened intently. There it was again, the sound of scampering. Something moved in Blake’s peripheral vision. He turned, his eyes tracking to the direction of the bathroom door. There was nothing there. He strained to detect the origin of the sound before he saw it, its tiny head appearing from behind the doorframe. A mouse scurried forward several inches across the floorboards and then looked up at Blake. The two of them regarded each other silently for several seconds, Blake with a cocked eyebrow and the mouse with twitching whiskers. The mouse finally broke the standoff and a moment later disappeared out of sight.
Chapter 24
It had taken nearly a year for Joyce Khumalo to make it this far. Would London become her home? If it was part of God’s plan, she thought. She had fled war-torn Sierra Leone in search of safety after the murder of her family. Her father had taken a stand, and he and the other members of her family had paid the price. Before his death, her father had often talked fondly about his trip to England as an exchange student. Until you’ve seen the green fields of Richmond Park, you really haven’t seen the colour green, he would say. He had given her a scarf on her nineteenth birthday, saying it was the closest shade to the colour he had remembered. She had carried it with her ever since.
Joyce made the journey alone. First through neighbouring Guinea, then through Bamako and Gao in Mali, Tindouf in Algeria, then Casablanca and onto the barbed-wire fences of the Moroccan-Spanish border circling the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Despite the fence being twenty feet high and guarded by video cameras and patrol dogs, she had managed to scale it as part of an organised assault on the barrier by hundreds of migrants. As she climbed for her life, dozens of people either side of her dropped like stones from the onslaught of Spanish rubber bullets and live Moroccan gunfire. After stowing onto a sea freighter, she finally landed in France. It wasn’t long before she had reached the makeshift camp known as ‘The Jungle’ on the outskirts of Calais and joined more than 3,500 other illegal migrants hoping to cross the Channel. She had taken her chance and hidden away in a container lorry heading for England. That was three months ago.
A street team working for the Servant Church of London’s outreach programme had spotted her sleeping rough in a shop entrance in Whitechapel. After giving her hot soup and clean blankets, the team leader invited her to attend one of the church’s nightly services. Their gentle kindness was like cool refreshing rain hitting her face after a thunderstorm in her native Freetown.
Joyce eagerly accepted the invitation and, from that point onwards, the church’s presence in her life was a daily gift bestowed on her by God Himself. It was undeniable proof that God had been with her all along, at her side during every step of her perilous journey.
After a few weeks, one of the church elders took pity on her and offered her a small room in the shelter. The facility provided accommodation and support for more than twenty female clients, mostly women fleeing abusive relationships or on the streets due to substance addiction. The Servant Church of London not only fed and clothed her, but gave her a cleaning job in the church’s shelter. With God’s grace, she had dared to hope that she could now build a life in London.
Today, the evening meal for the shelter’s twenty clients had taken a little longer than usual to tidy up. After loading up the industrial-sized dishwashing machine, she collected an orange from the kitchen larder and hurried to her bedroom to read her bible in anticipation of the rapidly approaching blood moon eclipse. She wasn’t going to miss it for the world.
Last Sunday’s church service focused on the Book of Joel, chapter 2, verse 31. Sitting upright in her bed she easily found the verse, the specific page bookmarked by a sheet of neatly handwritten notes. She had taken so many that morning that her handwriting became visibly smaller the further down the page she had gotten, as she utilised every inch to record the nuggets of biblical knowledge that were being imparted to her. With her finger tracking underneath the line, she read the verse out aloud in a strong African accent.
The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
She had marked the top of her page of notes with the title ‘Four Blood Moons’. It was double underlined in red ink. As she read her handwritten notes, she remembered what the senior pastor had preached last Sunday to the congregation. His sermon had amazed and excited her in equal measure. Faith had brought her to believe in the literal truth of the scriptures. She knew them to be true in her heart. But hearing that the astronomical facts surrounding the four blood moons had been verified by no less than NASA was scientific proof that God had His hand on all things, even the motion of the planets and stars themselves.
Joyce had listened dumbfounded to the pastor. Up until then, she had never heard of the
term ‘blood moon’ or heard of their significance to the Holy Scriptures, but after listening to the preacher she understood they were a sign from heaven. A moon turned blood red during a lunar eclipse, when the earth moves between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow on the moon’s surface. She didn’t really understand why it turned red; something about all but the red light being filtered out by the earth’s atmosphere. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the significance of the tetrad, or four consecutive blood moons. This was very rare. And what the pastor said was quite astronomically rare is when a blood red moon tetrad occurs on the Jewish biblical feast days, which had happened only eight times in the last 2,000 years.
Just thinking about these celestial alignments made her pulse quicken. Each of these occurrences had coincided with times of great peril for the Jewish people. These were messages from God, coded into the very motion of the planets, announcing times of tears and tribulation. Joyce was lost in thought as she read through her notes. Three blood moon tetrads had occurred in the last 500 years.
The tetrad of 1493-94 occurred on the Jewish feast days of Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles and coincided with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain ordering the Jews to be driven out of the country and its territories. For over a millennium, Spain had been considered a second homeland for the Jews.
The four blood moons of 1949-50 again appeared on the Jewish Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles and occurred during the first Arab-Israeli war just after the rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948. Seven Arab nations declared war on Israel almost immediately after it announced statehood. The war lasted some 15 months and claimed over 6,000 Israeli lives (nearly one percent of the country’s Jewish population). The holy city of Jerusalem was divided, with Jordan controlling the east of the city (including the Old City) and Israel, the west.
The next blood moon tetrad occurred less than twenty years after, between 1967-68, again on the Jewish Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles. This coincided with the Six-Day War, when Israel was again in great peril. Convinced that its neighbouring states were preparing to destroy the Jewish state, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, eventually recapturing Jerusalem.
The occurrence of four blood moons was of prophetic significance. It was clear for all to see, and tonight would be the second blood moon of the tetrad, the last tetrad for 400 years. She glanced at her watch. In a few minutes’ time, she would see it glowing blood red over the streets of London, a celestial signal like no other, warning God’s people of impending danger.
She grabbed her coat and bible and made her way out to the garden. Settling herself onto an iron garden seat next to a sweet-smelling rhododendron bush, Joyce cast her eyes up to the large moon hanging in the sky. The eclipse would be any moment now. She picked up her bible and flicked through her notes. Reading by the light through the kitchen window, she noticed she had written another bible verse at the bottom of the page, this time from Luke 21: ‘There will be signs in the sun and in the stars … Now when these things begin to happen, lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near’. When she had finished reading, Joyce followed the instructions of the bible verse and tilted her head back. She detected a strange scent in the air; not the familiar smell of rhododendron but something else. Joyce took a sniff and held the breath in her lungs. The smell was strong and sickly and instantly transported her back to a distant but powerful memory of childhood. For an instant, she was sitting in a dentist’s chair in Freetown, her mother holding her hand telling her not to be afraid.
Suddenly a black shape shifted in the margins of her vision. From behind, a hand clamped around her throat pulling her backwards, the force of the attack lifting her feet clear off the ground. Something hard hit the bridge of her nose. Then it was around her mouth, smothering her face. Joyce gasped, drawing a chestful of thick, sickly air deep down inside her lungs. She tried to fight back, her arms flailing at her side, her feet kicking against thin air. A relentless pressure began to build in her body, like a coil getting tighter. The world began to spin. As her head was yanked backwards, Joyce caught a glimpse of a man. His face was sheened with sweat and he had the blackest eyes she had ever seen, like the eyes of the devil.
Chapter 25
‘The MO is identical, just in a different church,’ said DCI Milton as he waited impatiently for Blake to zip up his forensic overalls. ‘We’ve just got an ID on the victim. Her name was Joyce Khumalo, from Sierra Leone. She worked here.’
‘And what’s this place?’ said Blake nodding up to the large unremarkable red-brick office building that was reminiscent of a 1970’s university campus.
‘It’s the headquarters of the SCL, the Servant Church of London. They’re a church charity that organises accommodation and soup runs in the city. There’s a shelter at the back. The victim worked in the kitchen and had a room in the shelter.’
Bracing himself, Blake followed Milton into the portable crime scene tent. The white structure was positioned tight against the tired-looking office building. The back wall of the tent had been removed so that the canopy enclosed the exterior of the office building.
Blake’s face dropped at the sight of the blood bath. Wild lines of crimson were sprayed across the exterior of the office wall. The concrete perimeter surrounding the church was slicked with a large area of blood. In the centre of the carnage lay the body of a naked black woman, her throat had been savagely cut. Blake inched closer. The woman’s face had been lacerated. ‘Same type of triangular wounds to the cheeks,’ Blake said finally, forcing the words out.
‘And the eyelids have been cut, just like the St George’s church killing,’ replied Milton.
Blake circled the body. The corpse’s features were locked into a contorted expression of dread, like those of a child looking up at something truly frightening. As he did so he couldn’t help but imagine the horror that those utterly empty, unblinking eyes had witnessed.
‘Jeez,’ Blake said shaking his head. ‘You know it was a common belief during Victorian times that an image of the final thing a victim saw was imprinted on the back of the retina, like a photograph.’
Milton cleared his throat. ‘Whatever this poor woman saw, it wasn’t pleasant.’
Blake pinched his eyes in thought.
‘Seen something?’ asked Milton.
‘Maybe. There is something at odds here. There’s blood everywhere,’ Blake gesticulated. ‘It’s almost like the killer wanted to cover everything in blood. It’s sprayed on the walls and all over the ground. It’s wild and brutal. And yet …’ Blake trailed off as he registered a pronounced demarcation line running through the construction of the office wall, the lower parts seemingly built of large blocks of pale cut stone, the upper sections of red brick. His eyes carried on upwards towards two holes about head height in the wall. They looked fresh, with the entrance to the holes edged with brick powder.
‘There’s a bullet in this one,’ said Blake, angling his head close to one of the holes. ‘Yes, they’re bullet holes.’
‘Bullet holes? Shit,’ said Milton, annoyed by the fact that his forensic officers hadn’t spotted them earlier. ‘We’ll get them checked. You were saying something else before you saw the holes?’
‘What?’ said Blake. ‘Oh yes, look at the orientation of the body.’ He motioned in the direction that the body was lying. ‘It’s been repositioned in a very controlled way after the killing. The arms have been neatly tucked back against the side of the body. The legs are perfectly straight. It was the same at St George’s. The victim’s body had been reoriented after the murder. This looks like premeditated behaviour, following some kind of ritual.’
‘Maybe. So what kind of ritual is Hart following?’
‘Last night was the second blood red moon eclipse out of a series of four. With the murders coinciding with the eclipses and the repositioning of the bodies, I believe Hart is killing to a predetermined plan.’
Blake sat on his haunches. ‘There are no earrings, no w
atch, no metal jewellery at all. They have all been removed.’ Blake’s eyes travelled down the naked corpse to a two-inch slit in the victim’s skin below the navel. The skin adjacent to the cut was stretched tight in a raised circular plateau. ‘Another coin inserted under the skin?’ said Blake as he lifted his chin towards the DCI.
Milton was already searching through his crime scene evidence briefcase. ‘Let’s find out.’ The police officer easily located what he was searching for within the well-ordered forensics briefcase. Holding two pairs of tweezers and a plastic evidence bag, Milton nodded over to the large flashlight standing upright on the folding table in the corner of the tent. ‘Can you do the honours with the light?’
Blake picked up the flashlight and switched it on. He dropped to his knees and shuffled to one side of the DCI. Directing the powerful beam of light onto the incision mark beneath the victim’s navel, Blake watched as his friend superficially examined the wound. ‘Let’s see.’
With one pair of tweezers, the police officer very carefully opened up the aperture in the skin and eased the second pair of tweezers into the gap. Both men heard the gentle tapping sound of the tweezers as they connected with something solid. Milton reoriented his arm and flattened the angle of the tweezers in relation to the victim’s body. His fingers tightened around them. Holding his breath, he gently tugged at the object within the tweezers’ jaws. At first, it wouldn’t come, stuck in place by the congealed blood.
‘Come on, come on,’ Milton grumbled through clenched teeth as he moved the tweezers from side to side. He tugged again, and this time there was movement. Gently, he eased the circular object out from under the flap of skin and held it up.
The Devil’s Architect: Book Two of the Dark Horizon Trilogy Page 9