by Blake Banner
THE BUTCHER OF WHITECHAPEL
Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
EPILOGUE
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
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ONE
Our American Airlines flight was due to depart from London Heathrow at five in the afternoon. We had decided to be there two hours earlier so that we could have time for a martini in the bar before boarding. That meant we had booked our taxi to the airport for two. So at one forty-five, we were in the lobby of our hotel on Picadilly, settling our bill, while our luggage was taken out to await the cab, when my phone rang. The screen told me it was Inspector John Newman, the chief at our precinct in the Bronx.
I thumbed green and he spoke before I did.
“John, it’s John. I hope you’ve had a great honeymoon.”
“Thanks, we have. Not what we expected, but interesting[1]. We’re just…”
“I imagine you’re just about heading for the airport, are you…?”
“Yup. That’s what we’re doing. Planning to have a…”
“Here’s the thing, John. How would you feel about staying on a few days?”
I blinked at Dehan, who was watching me without expression, then I held up a hand to the concierge and said into the phone, “Um…”
“I realize it’s short notice…”
“I just settled the bill, sir.”
“I think you’ll find the reservation has been extended, as a courtesy…”
I stared a moment at Dehan, then at the concierge, who was frowning at his screen. “Our reservation has been extended…?” I said, not quite sure whom I was asking.
Dehan screwed up her face and mouthed, ‘what?’ and the concierge looked at me with raised eyebrows and nodded.
“What’s this about, sir?”
“Your friend, Detective Inspector Harry Green, he’s asked Scotland Yard to request you as a special consultant.”
“A consultant? On what, sir?”
“Well, I’d better let him explain that. I think you’ll find he’s sent a car for you. Keep me posted, John. Enjoy your extended, um, honeymoon…”
The line went dead. Dehan gave me a ‘what the hell’ shrug and the concierge said, “Shall I have your luggage taken back up, sir? It seems you are in the honeymoon suite for another week…” He raised an eyebrow. “Courtesy of Scotland Yard!”
“Yes, please. It seems we are.”
Dehan smiled and raised both her eyebrows dangerously high toward her hairline. “Do I get a say in this?”
“Apparently not. That was the Inspector. Harry has a car on the way. He will explain more fully when we see him, but it seems we are consulting for Scotland Yard, my dear Watson.”
“Super.”
We didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later, a guy in his mid-twenties with short, fair hair and dark glasses came in, scanning the foyer as he walked. His eyes fell on us where we were sitting and he approached, removing his glasses and smiling without his eyes. “Mr. and Mrs. Stone?”
We stood. “Are you the man from Scotland Yard?”
We shook. “Detective Inspector Green asked me to come over and fetch you. My car is outside.” He glanced around. “Nice. We don’t usually put people up at the Ritz.”
Dehan grunted, “Yeah, it’s a long story. Any idea what this is about?”
“I think DI Green had better explain that, ma’am.”
New York, like all American cities, was designed on purpose by men imbued with the ideals of the Age of Reason and empirical logic, who thought, for better or worse, that it made sense to lay out the roads in a grid.
London was not designed on purpose. It grew organically over more than two thousand years, and the roads, lanes and streets—or at least most of them—follow paths laid down first by nomadic hunter-gatherers, then by cattle herders and farmers bringing their goods to market, and after that, by the increasing ebb and flow of people, drawn to the docks that send out ships and adventurers to the world’s greatest empire, and received its bounty in return; and to the narrow, cobbled streets and dark taverns of Westminster, where men plotted on how to relieve the Spanish of their ill-gotten gold, and how to squash upstart French emperors. The streets of London reflect all of that to this day.
We wound and wove and wended our way among an extraordinary mismatch of buildings that comprised the ultra modern in glass and steel and the ultra ancient in crooked timber and plaster and all kinds of stuff in between, including ’30s functional and post-Blitz hideous. We eventually came out onto Whitechapel Road, which is long and dreary and ugly and seems to go on forever, until finally, we turned right at a large intersection into New Road. From there we made a left into Newark Street and right into Halcrow Street and stopped outside a dark blue door with a brass knob and a brass number 1 on it.
The street was just seven houses long, and most of it was taken up with the police presence: There were a couple of uniforms outside the door in reflective yellow jackets, white police tape had been deployed across the length of the house, and there were two patrol cars, an unmarked VW, a crime scene van and an ambulance, all blocking the road.
The driver smiled at us in the mirror, without making it look like a smile, and said, “DI Green will be inside. Have a good one.”
We thanked him and climbed out. A uniformed sergeant approached with curious eyes that didn’t quite conceal a mixture of hostility and amusement. “Help you, sir, madam?”
I didn’t hold it against him. I could imagine how the boys and girls at the 43rd would feel if a guy from Scotland Yard was shipped in to ‘consult’ for us on one of our cases. I smiled. “I don’t know. We were boarding a plane and DI Green sent for us. I have no idea what this is about.” I nodded at the door. “I believe he’s inside.”
He nodded. “Your names, sir, madam?”
“John Stone, this is my wife, Carmen Stone.”
I said, “We’re supposed to be on holiday.”
He grinned. “Not anymore, you’re not. Right at the top. Heads up: it’s not pretty.”
We stepped through the door into a narrow hallway. The staircase ascended the left wall and on the right, a passage led past two doors to a small kitchen at the back. We climbed the stairs to a small landing on the top floor. There, a woman in a white, plastic suit frowned at us and said, “Who are you?”
“John and Carmen Stone. DI Green sent for us.”
“Oh,” she said. “The Americans. He’s in there. Try not to throw up, at least not in the room. It’s a crime scene.”
She squeezed past us and we stood back to let her by. Harry appeared at the door and stepped out to shake our hands. “John, Carmen, let me prepare you before you come in and have a look.”
I nodded. “I’d appreciate that. What’s going on, Harry? We were on our way to the airport.”
He nodded and sighed. “I know, and I do apologize, but it will all become clear. John, I think you could be a real help to us on this.” He glanced at Dehan. “No offense intended at all. But John has seen this before. He knows all about it. Go on in and have a look, John. Be prepared. It’s not pretty.”
The Brits have a genius for understatement. ‘Not pretty’ was a young woman in her mid twenties, naked, laid out with her hands nailed to the wooden floor. Her legs were spread, suggesting she had been raped, there was the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from her left, fifth intercostal where she had been stabbed through the heart and her belly had been cut open from her solar plexus to her pubic bone, post mortem. There was also a piece of paper over her face with the end of a meat skewer sticking out of it.
The crime scene guys—the Brits call them SOCO—were dusting, examining and photographing the room. I had a quick look around. There wasn’t much to see at first glance. A white IKEA sofa, a chair to match, a coffee table and a large, flat screen TV. She was lying between the sofa and the TV. A door beside the sofa appeared to lead to a bedroom. I approached her head and hunkered down to look at the paper. The meat skewer was stuck through it, apparently into her eye. Somebody said, “Don’t touch that, please.”
I looked up at Harry. He was leaning on the doorjamb. Dehan was standing next to him, frowning at the body. I said, “The eyes were perforated?”
He nodded. “Both eyes.”
“Post mortem?”
“Yup.”
There was writing, something printed on the paper. I knew there would be, and I had a pretty good idea of what it would say, but I had to inch around to read it. Harry said, “It says what you think it says.”
I read aloud, “And them good ole boys were drinking whisky and rye…”
I frowned, sighed and stood. “Who is she? Is she an American?”
“Don’t know. No idea who she is.”
Dehan jerked her head toward the bedroom door. “What about her ID?”
I smiled at her. “The Brits don’t carry ID.”
She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “No shit?”
Harry gave a small laugh. “Not since the ’50s. They keep trying to force us, but we love to be awkward. So far, we have no indication of who she is. We’re tracking down the landlord…”
“Who called it in?”
“Neighbor downstairs, noticed her mail and her milk hadn’t been collected.”
She nodded, then, after a moment, shrugged. “So what’s the deal?” She looked at me. “You’re asking if she’s American. She has part of the chorus to American Pie stuck to her eye… why are we here? More to the point, why is he here?” She pointed at me.
Harry went to answer and I said, “Let’s go downstairs.”
Harry nodded. “Yeah, come on, we’ll go to the Blind Beggar.”
Dehan winced at him. “Really?”
He glanced at the girl nailed to the floor. “Yeah, sorry. The beer’s better than the White Hart. Let’s go.”
We followed him down the narrow stairs and out into the late August afternoon. Overhead, heavy clouds were beginning to gather. He pointed to the unmarked VW and we climbed in, slammed the doors and headed at speed down Sidney Street, back toward Whitechapel Road.
“You probably don’t notice it,” he said as he drove. “You haven’t been here for what, fifteen years? The capital is changing. Everybody’s leaving.” I looked out the window. It seemed to me that London’s eight million inhabitants were all out at the same time.
Dehan spoke from the back seat. “Are you sure about that?”
He laughed as he pulled up at the lights. “There are far fewer Europeans, and fewer refugees too. They’re leaving in droves because of Brexit. And a lot of the Muslim population, they’re worried that a far right government, hostile to Muslims, might come to power. They are seeing France and Germany as more welcoming, and Spain.”
The lights changed and we crossed over and parked beside an old red brick Victorian pub with white stone embellishings, tall chimneystacks and elaborate scrolls around the date 1894 right at the top.
The door rattled and clanged as we pushed inside. The public bar was almost empty. The walls were paneled in dark wood, there was an open fireplace, a long, highly polished bar with rows of big, wooden beer pumps, and a ginger cat sitting beside them, licking its paws.
We found a table and Harry went to the bar to get three pints of bitter. Wile he was gone, Dehan gave me a once over and said, “If this were something normal, you would have told me about it by now. Why the big mystery?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slow through puffed cheeks. “It’s what you’ve been asking me about since we got here, and what I have been avoiding talking about. Not…” I looked her in the eye. “Not because I don’t want you to know about it, but because it is hard for me to talk about. But I guess now we are going to have to, whether I want to or not.”
She frowned. “OK…”
Right on cue, Harry returned with the pints and set them on the table. He glanced at us both as he did it and said, “I’m assuming, John, that you have already told Carmen about The Butcher of Whitechapel…”
I sucked my teeth and shook my head.
His jaw sagged a little. “Nothing at all…?”
I shook my head again.
He looked at me with meaning. “Nothing…?”
“Nothing, Harry. Nothing at all.”
Dehan sighed. “OK, guys, I think we have understood that I have been told nothing at all about the Butcher of Whitechapel. How about we set that right and somebody starts telling me?”
Harry picked up his glass, raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Over to you, me old mucker.”
I nodded.
“This was about fifteen, sixteen years ago, around the time I came over. There was a series of killings, all in Whitechapel. They were all young women in their early twenties, all blonde, pretty, between five foot five and five eight. There were four of them, Cindy Rogers, Amy Porter, Sally-Anne Sterling and Kathleen Dodge. Kathleen Dodge was Canadian, the other three were American. They all worked at the Royal London Hospital, in Whitechapel.”
I paused and took a pull from my pint. As I set the glass down, I went on. “Each one of them had been crucified on the floor in her own apartment. They had been stabbed in the heart with a large kitchen knife, they had each had their womb removed, without skill, and each one had had her eyes perforated post mortem. All the mutilations were post mortem. Each of the women showed signs of having been raped, but presumably he used a condom, because there was no trace of semen. And, each one had a note stabbed into her left eye with a meat skewer, with that same line from American Pie.”
Harry was staring at me. I avoided his eye.
Dehan said, “I’m guessing you didn’t catch him.”
I nodded again. “The guys who were in charge of this end of the exchange progr
am figured we have a lot more serial killers in the States than they have over here, which is true, and so they thought I should be on the task force. So Harry and I worked it together. We had a suspect…”
I hesitated, staring at Harry. He shook his head. “John was never convinced. It was an American chap, Brad Johnson. He was one of those white supremacy militia types. We have them over here too, but we haven’t got any Rocky Mountains where we can lose them and let them play Rambo. God alone knows what he was doing over here, but we’d been keeping an eye on him because he was hooking up with a few radical far right groups, and we were worried about possible terrorist attacks.”
I took over. “It turned out he knew Sally-Anne Sterling. They had met on a dating site. Apparently, after the first date, she didn’t want to know, and he got mad. He sent her a few ugly messages. When we found the emails, we went and had a talk with him. He mouthed off a lot, he was an ugly customer, but I never liked him for the murders. Harry and the rest of the team disagreed. The evidence was inconclusive. In fact there was no forensic evidence—or very little…”
Harry said, “We found Johnson’s prints at the scene, and traces of his DNA on her bed sheets…”
I nodded. “The forensics connected him to her, but we already knew that they were connected. What it didn’t do was connect him to the crime, or to the other girls. He could conceivably have known them, he had no alibi for the nights of the other three killings, he was in London at the time and he lived in the area. But none of that was enough, it was just ifs and maybes. He lawyered up, got a solicitor and a barrister, and shortly after the last killing, he returned to the U.S. After that, the killings stopped, and I returned to New York.”
Harry was staring hard at me. After a moment, he grunted and said, “But he’s back now.”
I frowned at him. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly. We’ve been keeping an eye on him, but as of today I’m going to request a twenty-four hour a day watch. He’s been here for just over three months, promoting some business he’s in or something. You were deeply invested in that case, John. You had a real feel for it.”
I sighed and shook my head. “We are not going to agree, Harry. I still don’t believe he’s our man.”