by Blake Banner
Harry was nodding. “Precisely so. So shall we go and see if her flatmate can tell us?”
I said, “Was she English?”
“Yes.”
I nodded and raised a finger, indicating he should wait. I reached across the table and took hold of the bottle of Bushmills. Harry smiled, but there was the faintest hint of irritation in his eyes. I said, “Don’t worry. I haven’t become an alcoholic.” I put the bottle in front of Dehan and pointed to the label where it said, ‘Single Malt’ and beneath it, ‘Irish Whiskey’.
She nodded, then shook her head. “What?”
I turned the bottle and showed it to Harry, who was frowning. Then I took the scans of the messages pinned to Cindy Rogers, Sally-Anne Sterling, Kathleen Dodge and Amy Porter and laid them out. I said, “Are they all the same?”
They both leaned forward and stared at them:
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye…
Dehan shrugged. “Yeah, why?”
Harry got to his feet, bending over them with his fists on the desk. He looked up at me. “What are you getting at, John?”
I dropped the note that was pinned to Katie on top of the others. “How about this one?”
And them good ole boys were drinking whisky and rye…
They stared at it in silence. Dehan muttered, “Holy cow…” Harry closed his eyes and sat slowly down.
I scratched my chin. “It was the first thing I noticed. The Scots, the Canadians and the English spell whisky like that, without the ‘e’. We spell it the Irish way. And in Don McLean’s song, American Pie, it’s spelled the way it’s spelled in those four notes, with an ‘e’. Harry, I hate to be a pain in the ass, but the guy who killed Katie Ellison, if that’s who she is, is English. They guy who killed the other four isn’t.”
He sighed, nodded slowly, then gave his head a shake. “God, you’re an awkward bugger.”
I put my cell on the desk. “That song is central to those murders. He pinned it to their eyes. You don’t get much more central than that. He was telling us, back then, ‘This phrase is what it’s all about’. This phrase is why I am killing these women. So it’s a fair bet that Don McLean means something to the killer. Do we agree on that?”
He spread his hands. “It is, as you suggest, self-evident.”
“This is Brad Johnson, on the subject of Don McLean. Please remember, over the last fifteen years I have studied Brad Johnson in some depth. He is a white supremacist who believes that gays and Jews have a special place in hell.”
I pressed ‘play’.
“OK, Brad, we’re going. Just one question before we do.”
“What?”
“You know Don McLean’s song, Pride Parade?”
“What?”
“Don McLean. You know who Don McLean is?”
“Yeah, I know who fuckin’ Don McLean is. What I don’t know is what the fuck you are talking about. You want to get the hell out of here? I’m trying to promote my business.”
“Bear with me, Brad. Don McLean recorded a song in 1972 called the Pride Parade.”
“So what?”
“What did you think of it?”
“Nothing. I didn’t think anything of it. I don’t know the fucking song. Pride Parade? What is he, gay? I know he married a fuckin’ Jewess and he has Jewish fuckin’ kids! Now stop wasting my fuckin’ time and get the hell out of here!”
“Thanks Brad, Catch you later.”
I switched it off and held up the phone. “This man is not obsessed with Don McLean or his song.” I pointed at the scans. “He did not write those notes.” I sat back in my chair. “He killed Hattie, but he did not kill those girls.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and noisily. “Let’s follow the evidence and see where it leads us.”
“You got my vote.”
We stood. He stared at me a moment, then said, “If you’re right, and I am not saying that you are, but if you are, it means we have three killers. Brad Johnson, who killed Hattie, an unknown killer who killed those four American girls, and Katie’s killer, also unknown, who is trying to frame the original killer.”
I nodded. “That is the way I see it, Harry.”
“It’s a nightmare. I doesn’t bear thinking about.”
I smiled. “But thinking about it is exactly what we are going to have to do. It has many implications. It gets complex, Harry, very complex. Listen, can you email me the original Butcher file?”
He nodded and picked up his internal phone. “Have a copy of the Butcher of Whitechapel case sent to Detective Stone’s email address. Thanks.” He hung up. “Right, let’s go.”
We stepped out of his office and in among the cubicles and partitions where the ordinary detectives worked. We crossed the large room and took the elevator down to the parking garage. As we descended, we stood in silence, each in our own thoughts. Then, as the elevator stopped and the doors opened, Dehan said, “We need to know what details of the original crimes were given out to the press. Did you hold anything back?”
We crossed through the semi-dark toward Harry’s car. The lights flashed and the beep echoed through the underground caverns. He pulled open the driver’s door and stood biting his lip.
Dehan said, “Right now, we have a pool of suspects of at least eight million people, maybe more. But if there was something repeated in Katie’s murder that was not public knowledge, then that narrows it right down to anyone involved in the investigation.”
I leaned on the roof. “Or intimately acquainted with the killer.”
She nodded, looked at me, and nodded again. As we pulled out onto the Victoria Embankment, Harry wedged his phone into a cradle on the dash and said, “Patel!”
We heard it ring over the sound system, then a voice said, “Hi, boss, ’sup?”
“I want you to look up every article that was published on the Butcher of Whitechapel. I want to know exactly what was released to the press.”
“Am I looking for anything in particular?”
“Yeah…” He looked at Dehan in the mirror. “Consistencies between Katie and the original four that were not reported. Do you understand?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Patel said, “So we are saying that this is a different killer?”
“Bright boy. But, Pat? Keep this under your hat. If I find anyone has got wind of this, I’ll skin you alive and feed you to my children, understood?”
“Gotcha, boss. I’m on it.”
Dehan was quiet for a moment, then asked, “So, you have nice kids, huh?”
With no trace of humor, Harry replied, “Keep’em hungry, keep’em keen.”
We made a big loop, then drove down Whitehall to Milbank, past Parliament Square and the Palace of Westminster, and followed the river Thames for twenty minutes in a steady flow of heavy traffic. Gradually, the trees and gardens became more abundant and the buildings became smaller, and soon we turned right, in among residential streets of elegant, Georgian houses with stoops and sash windows that were vaguely reminiscent of parts of New York.
Eventually, we pulled up outside a large, red brick house, with the first floor painted in brilliant white and a large, rubber plant tree shading a short path to the front door. We followed Harry down that path and he rang the bell. It was opened after a moment by a blonde, young woman in pink shorts and bare feet, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt and a worried expression.
“Are you the police?”
He showed her his badge. “Detective Inspector Harry Green, miss, and these are Detectives Stone and Dehan from New York. They are accompanying me in this investigation. May we come in?”
“Of course.” She stepped back and pointed to an invisible door. “Through there. Would you like some tea?”
She showed us through to a big, airy living room with calico sofas and armchairs and plates, mugs and pizza boxes on the floor. She hastily started gathering them up while fingering un-brushed hair from her face. “Grab a seat, I’ll put the kettl
e on, sorry…!”
She left the room. I saw Dehan glance at her watch. It was six PM, but still bright outside. We heard water gushing into a kettle, and a moment later, the blonde girl came back and sat next to Dehan on the sofa. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. It’s a bit worrying, isn’t it?”
Harry smiled like a kind uncle. “Are you Sarah Hamilton?”
“Oh, yes, sorry! Should have said. Not really myself…”
Dehan observed her through slightly narrowed eyes. “You are Katie’s roommate?”
“No! Heavens no! We share the whole house. I’m more of a housemate. I mean, it’s her house. He father bought it for her. But I help to cover the bills, and the council tax is just awful!” She looked at Harry and muttered, “We’ve been friends forever.”
Dehan smiled. “That’s nice. Have you got a photograph of her?”
“Gosh, yes!”
I had already seen them. There were four of them on the bookcases that had been built into the alcoves on either side of the fireplace. Two were with Sarah and some guys, one was with an older man who looked like her dad, and another with an older woman I figured was her mother. It was Katie, who was now lying at the morgue.
She got up and grabbed the largest of the framed photographs and handed it to Harry. He looked at it without expression and handed it to Dehan. Sarah was watching her face with anxious eyes. I should have left it to Harry, but I knew that however bad the truth is, not knowing is worse. So I said, “Sarah, I’m afraid we have bad news for you. You might want to sit down.”
She went very pale and sat carefully on the sofa. Her eyes were already welling up.
“I’m afraid Katie has been killed.”
Her lower lip curled in and the tears spilled from her eyes. Dehan, in that weird, paradoxical way she has, edged closer and put her arms around her. Sarah sobbed, shaking silently, with her face buried in Dehan’s neck. After a moment, we heard the click of the kettle in the kitchen. Harry stood and said quietly, “I’ll make some tea,” and walked out on quiet feet.
I sat a moment in the large armchair, where Katie must have sat a hundred times, looking out at the quiet, leafy street, thinking about Freud’s words, ‘…we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object, or its love.’ And I wondered about those people who go through life believing they have the right to destroy other people’s lives, and rob them of their loved ones.
Harry returned, carrying a tray with a teapot and four colorful mugs. I made room on the littered coffee table and he set it down. There followed a bizarre ritual in which he poured out the tea and asked each of us in turn if we wanted milk and sugar, and we told him which and how much of which. It had a strangely calming and sobering effect on Sarah. By the time he got to her, she had stopped convulsing and was able to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. Harry handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose, then told him a cloud of milk and one sugar.
Tea and the British is a thing that not even they understand, but it’s real. After a moment, Harry returned to his chair and sat.
“Sarah, I know this has been a terrible shock. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”
She nodded. “I’ll do my best. What happened? Was she mugged or what?”
He sighed. “That’s what we’re trying to understand. Did she, to the best of your knowledge, Sarah, did she have another flat somewhere?”
Her face, slightly puffy and red, registered surprise and confusion. “Only Chiddie’s place. I mean her daddy’s house, in Sussex.”
“Can you think what she would have been doing in a flat in Whitechapel?”
“Whitechapel?” She actually laughed. You might as well have asked the debutante daughter of a Boston Brahmin if she had an apartment in Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. “Good Heavens, no! Katie? Never!” She shook her head, confused. “Are you sure this isn’t some ghastly mistake? Katie wasn’t even in London. She’s been away on holiday.”
FIVE
I set my mug down carefully on the hearth beside me and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. “Where did she say she was going on holiday, Sarah?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” She blew her nose and mopped her eyes. “She didn’t. She was very excited about it, but couldn’t tell me where she was going. It was all very hush-hush and I supposed it was to do with her work.”
Dehan sipped her tea. “She had a job?”
“Sort of. She was a reporter on the local paper. You know the sort of thing: Mrs. Henshaw had to call the local fire brigade to rescue her kitten, Mittens, from the sycamore at the end of her garden. Protest over awning at landmark corner shop. Sometimes she did the horoscope too, under the name Madam Stardust. She was awfully good. And of course the social pages: who was in town, who was away. She knew everyone, so that was easy for her. But what she really wanted to do was to be a proper reporter…”
Dehan cut her short. “So, in what way, Sarah, do you think that her holiday was connected to her job? You said it’s a local paper, so why would they send her away to report on somebody else’s kittens?”
She smiled and Sarah laughed. It sounded a bit like a braying donkey and was kind of infectious. Dehan started laughing too and Sarah leaned back and put her fingertips on Dehan’s arm. “No! Silly! Sorry! Silly me! I should have explained. Katie’s daddy is frightfully important and he has all sorts of connections, and Katie was tapping him for information she could use in a feature which she was going to offer, as a scoop, to the Telegraph. She was frightfully clever like that.”
Dehan had stopped laughing. She looked over at me and her face said we had been here before[2].
I asked, “Who’s her father?”
“Lord Chiddester.”
Harry’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, Katie Ellison! Charles Ellison, Lord Chiddester’s daughter.”
Sarah gazed at him with glazed eyes. “Yes… Sorry. I thought you realized that.”
Dehan was frowning like she was getting a headache. “So is it Ellison or Chiddester?”
I said, “It’s a complicated system.” I looked at Sarah. “What is he, a marquis?”
“Yes, the Marquis of Chiddester.”
I turned back to Dehan. “Chiddester is a place in West Sussex. Charles Ellison is the Marquess of Chiddester, so he is known as Lord Chiddester.” I smiled. “His close friends probably call him Chiddester or Chiddie, though his given name is Charles and his surname is Ellison. His daughter didn’t have a title yet, so she was plain Katie Ellison. If she had inherited her father’s title, she would have become the Marchioness, Lady Chiddester.”
She nodded for a while and Sarah started to cry quietly again. Dehan reached out and took her hand. “So Katie’s dad is a marquis, and she was pumping him for information for an article—a scoop—that she was planning to sell to a major paper?”
Sarah nodded.
I asked her, “Have you any idea what the article was about? Did she tell you anything at all about it?”
She shook her head. “No. She was very tight-lipped about it. It was a huge adventure for her. Everything was. And she loved being secretive and mysterious. It’s going to be so strange without her around.”
“Have you got a telephone number where we can contact Lord Chiddester?”
She reached in the pocket of her pink shorts and pulled out an iPhone. She looked through her address book and found his private cell phone. Harry made a note and so did Dehan.
While they typed, I asked her, “What about her romantic life, Sarah? Did she have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know.”
I was surprised and my face told her so. She gave a small laugh. “She had been going out with Mark, but that was nothing serious and they just stopped seeing each other a couple of months ago. She was getting more involved in what she called ‘her work’ and I think they just got bored of each other…”
I could sense there was more, so I asked her, “But…?”
>
“Well she had gone out on a few evenings recently, a bit more togged up than usual.”
Dehan looked at me. “Togged up?”
“Dressed up, looking smart.”
She nodded, then turned back to Sarah. “So you think she was meeting a guy?”
“Why else would you tog yourself up?”
Dehan shrugged and made a face. “To meet an editor?”
“It’s possible, but it was rather late at night and she was definitely going for sexy rather than motivated journalist. She’d also had a few phone calls that involved a lot of muttering and giggling, and she wouldn’t tell me afterwards who they were from, and when I tried to check her mobile, she was frightfully cross.”
“When was the last time you heard from Katie, Sarah?”
“Day before yesterday. She telephoned to say she was coming home. I was thrilled. I was beginning to miss her. She’d been away almost two weeks.”
“Did she say exactly when she was coming home?”
Sarah thought for a moment. “Well, she said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ but she didn’t say what time or anything like that.”
Dehan nodded like she understood and asked, “Do you mind if we have a look around in her room?”
She told us she didn’t and we climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. It was clean but in the kind of mess you would expect from a young, single girl sharing a house. We found pretty much what I had expected to find, nothing. Anything of any interest would have been in the apartment. While Harry and Dehan snooped around, I stepped onto the landing, where Sarah was leaning with her back against the wall, crying silently.
I put my hand on her shoulder and she blinked tears at me. “Sorry.”
“Where did she work, Sarah?”
She pointed to the end of the landin,g where there was a small box room with a desk and a computer. I stepped in and had a look around. There was a tall, narrow bookcase against the wall beside the desk. I scanned the titles. There were a few on journalism, mostly relating to libel and how to avoid it, but the bulk of the titles were on political philosophy, the European Union, economic liberalism, Communism, the rise of the Far Right and Islam.