The Severed Streets

FOUR

As Costain had driven to Whitechapel, he’d found himself changing channels on the radio a lot. He didn’t like what he was hearing.

‘If one of the biggest coppers in London isn’t safe, then who is?! They should bring in the army! ’Cos the police are shitting themselves!’

‘People are talking as if this is a copycat Jack the Ripper serial killer, but apart from one wrongly transcribed message and the nature of the attacks themselves … Listen, as a Ripper expert…’

‘When you think Jack the Ripper, you think fog and prostitutes, don’t you?’

‘The Jewish community … I can’t speak for a whole community, but “dismayed” would be the word. That someone who committed these unspeakable murders should seek to slander us in the process…’

‘Attacks on two synagogues in the East End, but we’re talking about a few youths daubing paint here; it might be part of the wider disturbances…’

‘True British nationalists say it’s time to stand up to these thugs that are on the streets looting every night, but the police are still obsessing over the content of one scrawled message, because it mentions ethnicity, rather than dealing with the death of their own most senior officer, rather than dealing with what’s in front of their noses, which is that they have lost control and people are demanding a better solution!’

‘Our protest has always been peaceful. We march against spending cuts and corruption, which have killed many more people than Jack the Ripper. We do not condone the murder of anyone. However…’

In the end, he plugged in his iPod to escape the news. He finally switched that off too, frustrated at having run away from what was real. As always now, he was wondering if that running away contributed to his own approaching damnation.

He parked in the first free space he saw in Whitechapel, put his logbook in the window to avoid getting a ticket and closed the car door gently, without slamming it. He would do anything to stay out of Hell. That thought went round his head so often it was like a mantra. He would do anything.

* * *

He found Ross looking at a lurid sign, a woman pictured lying in the gutter, blood dripping from her mouth, and a silhouetted caped figure running away. The sign was propped against a brick wall that looked as if it had been scrubbed clean of centuries of dock slime for the tourists. Or perhaps it was new, built in the old style.

She turned to look at him as if he was something on the Ops Board. ‘Why’d you text me the other night?’

‘And hello to you.’

She frowned at him, but at that point the tour guide arrived and took their money, and others who wanted to go on the tour started to arrive; he was relieved not to have to answer the question.

The tour was called, in dripping red letters, ‘Jack the Ripper Extreme’. Their guide was a Mr Neville Fennix — probably his stage name. He was dressed in a top hat, opera cape and evening suit, and he carried a silver-tipped cane. There were a large party of Italians and their translator, and another group who were talking in what Costain thought might be Korean. There were also quite a few younger people, students, several of whom were wearing what had now become known as the Ripper mask on the back of their heads to shade their necks from the sun. That bloody thing was everywhere now. Previously only a fraction of protestors had worn it; now it was their uniform. He’d seen T-shirts and online banners with the Ripper mask portrayed in those Obama ‘Change’ campaign colours or like Che Guevara, with slogans underneath such as ‘Occupy Hell’. The Ripper had put a face to the summer of blood. He had killed not just an MP, but now one of the most senior police officers in London, right at the point when the Met was creaking under the pressure of lack of resources and government meddling. If they can get to him, they can get to any of us, that’s what a spokesman for the Police Federation had been quoted in the Herald as saying, and the job cuts and the service cuts and every cut make every single one of us more vulnerable. The driver, Tunstall, had been released at the end of his ninety-six hours in custody, the main investigation having convinced a judge that they needed the maximum period of detention. Tunstall hadn’t changed his impossible story, though, and so now the media were also full of the news that he was ‘back on the streets’.

As Fennix took cash from the other tourists, Costain found himself glancing at Ross again. She was still looking interrogatively at him. He wasn’t going to be able to get away from her question.

On the night he’d sent the text message, he’d first been annoyed at her for not getting back to him, then at himself for sending it. It had been exactly the wrong step to take. He’d tried to get to sleep, despite the heat, but he’d kept waking up, not liking how vulnerable he felt in his dreams. So, without thinking about it as much as he should have, he’d reached out. He’d wanted to talk to someone. He told himself now that he’d had his overall objective in mind. He wasn’t sure if that had been true.

Ross hadn’t raised the matter of the text message the next day, and, relieved, he hadn’t either. But Ross wasn’t very good with social interaction and so had saved it up for now because … well, who knew?

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Sorry. I was pissed. You know, you text your mates, ask if they’re up for a pint-’

‘You asked if I had five minutes.’

‘But that was where it was going.’

‘At 1 a.m.?’

‘Like I said, I was pissed.’

‘After last orders?’

‘At home with some cans.’

‘You drink at home alone?’

‘Not often. I’d just got back from the pub.’

‘Open late, was it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You really thought I’d come over for a drink?’

‘Like I said, pissed.’

‘Okay.’ She suddenly nodded as if it was the end of the interview and looked away.

The tour guide returned and began his spiel. ‘Whitechapel today may look harmless, modern, charming even. But mentally replace the sunlight with darkness and fog, and follow me now as we go on the trail of the man who is now once more in all the headlines, the man of the moment … Jack the Ripper!’

He set off and they followed. Costain kept trying to make eye contact with Ross. But now she was having none of it. That was worrying.

* * *

‘Mary Ann Nichols,’ said Fennix, ‘or “Polly” was her trade name.’ He paused for a laugh, which, after a moment of delayed translation, he got. They were standing in a backstreet behind the station, flanked by fenced-off brownfield sites, but there were no vehicles or workers, and they could smell the scent of undisturbed mud baking in the summer heat, suggesting that nothing was actually being built. Costain associated that smell with his childhood because nothing really changed. There were school gates over there, and the map he was looking at on his phone showed a sports centre down the road. House prices would have been shooting up before this latest recession, nice people coming in … and then it had all fallen backwards, as it always did. He glanced over and saw Ross was looking at her phone too.

‘Jewish cemetery round the corner,’ she said under her breath.

‘One thing we should be thinking about,’ said Costain, also in a whisper, struck by a sudden thought, ‘is, if the murders are about Jack the Ripper being remembered, why aren’t they happening right here? Everything we’ve seen like this before — from Berkeley Square to when Losley got powered up — it all stayed put where it was. Or where it was most associated with, like your ships.’

‘Yeah.’ Ross took out one of her enormous rough books and wrote it down.

Costain found himself taking pleasure in that. ‘Ever since we found those files in Docklands-’

She suddenly looked straight at him, as if he’d caught her out, then looked away again, as if she’d revealed too much of herself. Interesting. ‘What?’ she said, finding something else to write.

He drew closer to her and she closed the book, as if to stop him seeing inside it. ‘The Continuing Projects Team were obsessed with architecture,’ he said. ‘Maybe our two victims were just in the wrong place, kind of like deadly feng shui.’

Ross nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. Her face wasn’t giving anything away.

‘Perhaps you’d like to share with the class?’ Fennix had stopped and, having realized that Ross and Costain weren’t going to shut up, had decided to mock them for it. That had got a laugh too.

Get many tips, do you? Costain flashed the man his most generous grin. ‘We’re just fascinated with this stuff, mate. Tell us more. We were just saying there’s a Jewish graveyard round the corner-’

‘Ah, yes.’ The actor nodded solemnly. ‘We’ll be visiting the site of the original eerie message implicating our Judaic friends, found over a piece of a victim’s soiled clothing, later. Was there a Jewish conspiracy involved? Is that conspiracy still afoot in London today, behind two modern murders? Was Jack’s original message a protest about the capitalist excesses of his own times, which resonates in the modern day? Or is it the other way round?’ He quickly looked at his tour party, as if to gauge their sensibilities and/or ethnicities. ‘Is it a conspiracy to blame these terrorist acts on the Jews? Are they to be the fall guys for the New World Order yet again? Were these prostitutes — I mean, these proper young ladies — ’ he paused for the delayed laugh again — ‘slaughtered according to secret religious ceremonies as per the request of the secret rulers of the world, the Illuminati? Perhaps we shall see. Perhaps. But let us begin at our starting point, the bloody scene before us. Imagine it!’ With a sweep of his cape, he walked over to a wall. He pointed to the kerb beside it. ‘How much scrubbing did it take to remove every trace of such a scrubber?’ Perhaps knowing that the line wouldn’t translate, he moved swiftly on. ‘She’d been the wife of a printer’s machinist.’ Costain didn’t know what that was, and suspected, given the ease with which the phrase had come out, neither did this bloke; it was just one of those things that got written down and repeated. It sounded as if Fennix had added his modern conspiracy rhetoric to an older script at the last minute. It was hardly convincing. But the crowd seemed to be lapping it up. He continued, ‘But she was too fond of the bottle, and their marriage broke up when she started turning tricks to supplement her income.’

Costain realized, as he was looking at the spot the guide was pointing to, what he wasn’t seeing here. He looked to Ross, and saw a puzzled expression on her face too. The two of them had started to anticipate seeing all sorts of terrors in London, visions associated with particular places, disconnected from current reality. Ross had taken the team to Vauxhall Bridge Road to see a weird house at the end of the bridge itself that had five chimneys and five coffins. They had all felt that the dust that rose from the coffins would be deadly should they venture inside and stay for any length of time. They hadn’t found out what that was all about yet, despite all their research. But here, at one of the most famous murder sites of all time … Ross nudged him, and he looked around. Oh. There she was. As clear as daylight. But she was actually behind them, in the opposite direction from where Fennix was pointing. The Sight could sometimes be more accurate than history. It was a painful memory of what had really happened, before power had written over it. It wasn’t that the Sight gave you the ability to see every murder victim, just the ones about whom there was … story, Costain supposed, was the way to put it. London seemed to remember the big stuff, the emotional stuff, the memorable stuff, whether or not its people did. But the metropolis also forgot most of what it saw. Otherwise they’d be tripping over phantom bodies with every step.

Here was a young woman in what were actually rags, with a strikingly colourful bonnet on her head. She was emaciated: her legs two bows of muscle, her face marked by disease, a vision of famine in Africa stamped into a British shape. She was looking hopefully at Costain and Ross, like any homeless addict, telling you the lightest generalizations about how great the world is in return for what they needed. What she needed was shockingly beyond their ability to give. She was holding her stomach, her hands pressed back into her skirts, trying to restrain a bloom of blood that actually hung in the air around her, as if she was caught in a single frame of a violent movie. Her need reached into them and made them feel the cold on this sunny afternoon. Her shadow looked like black ice.

‘No silver goo on her,’ Costain whispered to Ross.

‘Noted.’

There was the Ripper himself, the archetypal figure, more of a shadow really: a silhouette that fluttered over all these buildings, like a misfiring advertising logo beamed down at them. His shape was diffuse, remembered hugely but not precisely, glamorously mysterious, while whenever anyone thought of his victims, it was all in the gory details.

‘She left a pub in Brick Lane at half-past midnight, and, lacking four pennies for her lodging — ’ again, Costain heard the familiar lilt in the way the man said it, as if this was a song he’d sung many times, an inaccurate mantra — ‘was thrown out of 18 Thrawl Street, the latest victim of merciless capitalism.’ There was his new narrative, a new geological layer, flung on top for new money, with no thought as to what was underneath. This bloke didn’t care if he contradicted himself; he had no idea, in the end, what he stood for or what he meant. That pricked Costain. These days, he had to be careful about his every action, about everything he said. He only hoped, and he glanced over at Ross again, that didn’t extend to what he thought. He put all that from his mind and went back to listening to this man who had given up all such limitations.

‘She said she’d go and find the money on the streets,’ Fennix continued. ‘It’d be easier that night … she’d just bought a new bonnet. We can only wonder if that was what caught the eye of the man who turned out to be the most important encounter of her life, the man who … made her famous. At 2.30 a.m. she had a conversation with one Nellie Holland at the Frying Pan pub, which is now a balti house. “Polly” told Nellie that she’d made the money she needed three times over, and then drank it all away again. This was late August, a warm, humid night, just like today, in fact. You can imagine “Polly”, a few too many buttons undone, perhaps, beads of sweat on her young flesh, a bit merry, in her new bonnet, chancing down this backstreet, the rumble of the newly built railway station in the background — a station built so the middle classes could go on their holidays, flattening the slums to do so…’ Fennix had spread his hands in the air, his leather gloves flexing like those of a mime artiste. ‘She’d sacrificed herself on the altar of booze and cheap pleasure, turned herself into the perfect brazen victim. Or perhaps she’d been that from birth. And then out he stepped.’ He took a sudden stride towards the crowd, and with a flourish drew a knife. The Italians and the Koreans obligingly gasped and leaped back. The students gave him the gift of their ironic laughter.

Ross was left looking calmly at the end of the weapon pointed at her face. She cocked her head to one side, examining it professionally, as if for traces of blood. Or silver. None was present.

‘I call this my twanger,’ said Fennix, and plunked the end of the rubber blade with his finger to make it vibrate. ‘“Polly” didn’t meet with anything so harmless. She had her throat slit with one blow.’ He turned away from Ross and took two steps forwards, going straight past Mary, who looked towards him with a sudden interest, as if he might be the one to give her money. He slashed across the air nowhere near her, and she looked sadly at him. Costain had half expected her to flinch. ‘Then he lifted up her skirts, cut down her abdomen, and disembowelled her.’ The young woman continued to watch him, oblivious to her own fate. ‘Which shows that perhaps he was a medical man, that perhaps his instincts in this matter were not entirely … natural.’

With that hanging in the air, he led them off. Costain and Ross looked over their shoulders to see Mary continuing to stand there, gazing after them.

* * *

Fennix took them to the next murder site. ‘The canonical five, they call them,’ he said, ‘their names writ in blood in the book of history.’ They arrived in an indoor market, stall owners to either side managing clipped smiles or just avoiding eye contact. There had obviously been no financial arrangement to bring the tour through here, thought Costain, even with Fennix’s increased cash flow. The butcher and pie-maker must feel their business suffering several times a day, with a discussion of human meat nearby, but what could they do about it?

He saw her from a distance this time: what he initially took to be an almost Madonna-like figure, some sort of shawl over one shoulder, her hands spread out. The shape of the Ripper was again a shadow cast all around her. ‘Annie Chapman, slashed across the throat, then had her intestines hauled out and laid across her shoulder like the fur she could never afford.’ Now they were close, Costain could see that she was indeed open, showing off her wounds in silent complaint. Again, there was no silver. ‘Excuse the gynaecological detail, gents, but Jack cut out her uterus and part of her bladder, and took those with him, as well as the brass rings off her fingers.’ Costain watched Ross’ expression grow tremendously calm as she made eye contact with the revenant or recording or whatever you wanted to call it. ‘This place was a yard behind a house then — lots of windows overlooking — brave of Jack to do his business here. Next to her was found a leather apron. Typical attire, as you’ll know, sir,’ Fennix said, looking to Costain, ‘for Jewish tradesmen.’

Also for many other sorts of tradesman, surely? Were all blacksmiths or tanners Jewish? But Costain didn’t give voice to his thoughts. He wasn’t sure if this man would have answers that went any deeper than his script.

They left Annie and the butcher and pie-maker in their aprons behind them.

* * *

They walked to a pair of wooden gates in front of what seemed to be a schoolyard. Against the gates stood a tall washed-out woman with blood spilling down her dress. Her eyes were angry, insistent. ‘“Long Liz” Stride, only slashed across the throat, perhaps because Jack was disturbed.’ There he was, a fleeting glimpse, running. ‘One Israel Schwartz — note that name, sir — saw her having a row earlier with someone he described as “a gentleman”. That is how we know that Jack was, or was pretending to be, a member of the ruling classes, perhaps even royalty. Now, days had separated the previous murders, but this time, perhaps frustrated at not having got what he was after, just forty-five minutes later…’ Fennix let that sentence trail off as he led the party down the street to Mitre Square, where modern offices looked down on a group of benches, across which was sprawled the emaciated remains of a woman, her skirts and legs open, endlessly jerking and juddering, her arms windmilling as if she was in the act of falling, her head just a red lump. Costain wasn’t sure he wanted to move closer, but found himself doing just that.

‘Catherine Eddowes, again a drunk and a whore, again cut with a mighty blow across her throat, then systematically butchered, her intestines pulled out and laid over her shoulder, again her uterus and this time her left kidney taken by Jack. But this time he went further, which is odd, considering that these were all houses around here, and he could have been watched — perhaps was watched — from any one of these windows. He went further in what to us now looks almost like a demonstration, like a work of cruel performance art, like a protest at the conditions that had given birth to him. Her right ear lobe was sliced, a V shape was incised into each of her cheeks, and cuts made into her eyelids. Jack also snipped off the tip of her nose.’ Costain looked into what remained of the woman’s face, a mess of blood, and saw that her eyes, faint as they were, were again pleading. He wondered, not for the first time, what the connection was between what seemed to be people, preserved in time like this, and the Hell he’d glimpsed. Were these just images of people, as all the copies of Losley had been? Or were these somehow still the people themselves? Were they suffering? Was the history of London their Hell? Did they know that what had happened to them had started to happen again? Was this how he might end up, unless he played his cards exactly right?

There was the Ripper, standing all around, hands holding vague trophies.

‘And he took her apron. With two groups of coppers after him, the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police — because that was the case in those days, each police force having its own territory — Jack cannily hopped back and forth over the border between them, hue and cry all around!’ Fennix led them off again, and this time Costain, following on his phone, knew where they were going.

Ross walked calmly beside him.

* * *

‘Here is Goulston Street, ladies and gentlemen, these days, ironically, the location of Petticoat Lane Market, and — ’ he winked at Costain — ‘yes, sir, there’s a synagogue just round the corner.’

‘Storks on roofs,’ Ross whispered.

It took a moment for Costain to remember that that was a metaphor she’d used during the Losley case. There had been an exact correlation, he remembered, between the size of families in Holland and the number of storks that nested on the roofs of their houses. It wasn’t because storks brought babies, but because rich people back then had both bigger roofs and more children.

She’d obviously seen that momentary look of consternation on his face. ‘I mean, Jews were poor, so the slum landscape of the killings of course includes lots of Jewish references.’

‘Are you sure that’s all there is to it? Spatley was Jewish.’

Ross shook her head, as if now annoyed that she’d shared her thoughts. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Here’s where Jack dropped that apron, and then perhaps wrote, on this wall here, his famous message. Depending on whether you believe that any of the letters the police received were really from him, depending on if you believe he even wrote this — perhaps this is all we ever hear in the man’s own voice. The message that calls out to us even now, which was written in blood in the house of a rich man only this week. Here it was written in chalk, and originally the message read…’ Fennix held up a slate, on which was written:

The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.

‘One of the versions, anyway,’ said Costain to Ross. They’d all been reading up on the history of this shit. She just nodded absently. She was looking up at the wall. Costain followed her gaze to where the original message still shone, for just the two of them, in all its different versions, frustratingly, with crossings out and some words faded and some reinforced, as if the memory of London was trying to accommodate all the possibilities, everything remembered, imagined or written about these words. This was merely testimony, Costain thought, as Ross took a photo of it. Not as solid as evidence. Not as reliable. The city continued to be their key witness. But what it told them was subjective.

If enough tour guides kept getting the precise positions of the bodies wrong, as Fennix did, the Ripper’s victims would finally end up there.

* * *

The last murder turned out to have happened forty days after the previous one, in what was now a loading bay beside a multi-storey car park. This time Costain was prepared for his senses to find something terrible, but it took a while. When they finally did, as Fennix gestured wildly around the space, he initially had trouble recognizing what he saw at the foot of the bay as a person. He only got there when Ross stepped over to stare at it.

She was just a pile of meat, swaying like a mirage, her hands still flailing in the air, nothing else left of her able to communicate anything to the few who could see her. She looked like a ragged plant, fronds of blood and gore shifting at the bottom of an ocean of time. Not all of her was flesh. Some of what made up this knot was bedstead and blankets. This woman, Mary Kelly, had been killed at home, in her own bed. Costain slowly walked around her and saw her as an anatomy display, organs orbiting her, entrails endlessly wrapping around her. She was an explosion that continued: silent, hard to see. As with all the others, there was no sign of silver. Costain let himself look round, and nearly stepped back in shock when he found a solid cylinder of sheer Jack right in front of him, a knot of hatred and self-hatred and vomited sanity in the air.

‘Her neighbours heard the cry of “Murder!”, but they heard that every night! A lot of other cries too. Cries of stark passion. Cries of release. Because this was a notorious rookery, the bleak face of poverty and oppression. This time Jack had privacy, and he could take his time. She must have let him in. She must have teased him, tempted him, provoked him. He hacked away her entire face. He attacked her thighs. He opened up her abdomen. He cut out her uterus, her spleen, her liver and kidneys and her breasts and he left them here. But he also managed to do what no other man had done before, for he stole her heart away!’ Fennix spread his arms wide for a theatrical finish. ‘So who was Jack the Ripper? Someone special, that’s for sure. Perhaps the artist, Walter Sickert, who used the case as a subject for his art, including a painting suggestively titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Perhaps Sir John Williams, obstetrician to Queen Victoria’s daughter, looking into the causes of infertility in all the wrong places. Or, the most shocking possibility of all … perhaps it was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Queen Victoria’s grandson, driven mad by syphilis, with an establishment around him willing to indulge in this rich man’s … sport.’

Costain looked over to Ross. Now he could see, and perhaps it was only because he knew her, that she was shaking.

* * *

After the tour was over and Fennix had passed his top hat around to collect tips, and had signed some of the Toff masks, Costain and Ross got away and found a modern pub and a quiet table. The modernity of the establishment wasn’t at all a guarantee that there’d be nothing horrible inside — as they’d just had re-emphasized to them, London was built on horror — but it was a gesture towards control that they both needed right now.

Costain waited silently as Ross updated her notebooks, stopping, flipping back, making tiny notes on different pages as if landing a stack of mental aircraft that had been circling in her head. He knew that feeling, but she did it on a much higher level than he did. It would be so hard to put on a front to her, to fool her. He also knew the comfort that came from translating the chaos of the world into the familiar patterns used by coppers. They shared that. Finally she put her palms on the table and took a last look at the page in front of her. Then she closed the book, picked up the pint so far unattended beside her and took a long drink. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Angry.’

He lowered his voice, indicating that he understood. ‘Yeah.’

‘Because that tour guide made so many baseless assumptions about connections between the killings. The Illuminati conspiracy, my arse. I actually don’t think we can rule out a Jewish or anti-Semite angle, because the differences between the old message and the new are indicative of something. I don’t know of what. But that twat had no idea. I don’t think the message can have been left by the killer at the time. I mean, what, he’s trying to blame the murder on the Jews while actually maintaining that he’s the murderer? Maybe that’s why the grammar got so awkward and there are crossings out. He’s standing there going, “Wait a sec, haven’t thought this through…” But in our case, like you said at the crime scene, it probably is the murderer who wrote it, so what does that mean?’

Costain laughed. ‘When I said it, it was assumption.’

‘It was. But we’ve labelled it as such now. So that’s okay.’

‘But what I meant was … you know, I started to feel pretty shitty about what that tour guide was saying-’

She was shaking her head, angry with him still. ‘You want me to be all touchy feely? Sorry, I thought we were in law enforcement.’

‘I’m just saying-’

‘Right. Four points here, I think.’ Now she was talking at high speed. ‘Firstly, the Jack the Ripper case is a trap for analysts. It feels like there’s a signal there that’s right on the edge of being heard through all the noise. Suspect doesn’t rape them when he has the chance. His interest doesn’t seem sexual. He’s clearly a misogynist, or wants us to think he’s one, but he kills quickly; he doesn’t want to torture them. He likes the thing with the intestines over the shoulder, and what does that mean? It’s completely non-archetypal. Like he’s just following his own ideas, not anything he’s read. He takes organs sometimes, and which ones he takes varies, but, given all the time in the world, he leaves loads of them behind. There are genuine suggestions of medical ability, but also random violence. And all that bollocks is what’s sucked in so many people over so many years. To no end. And it threatens to draw us in even more because, having the Sight, we think we have an advantage. But we haven’t seen a single piece of new evidence today. If we are called upon to solve the Whitechapel murders in order to get traction in these new killings, we will be doing that forever. And I’m thus going to recommend that we concentrate on our new victims and the fresh trail and keep this squarely in the background, while of course being alert to the possibility of connections. Secondly — ’ she raised a finger before Costain could interrupt — ‘my decision there is because I’m not sure there is a signal to be found. I researched the Whitechapel murders before we came here, but I didn’t keep my parameters to anything “canonical” or “written in the book of history” and, you know what? This sort of shit was just business as usual for this neighbourhood. A tourist trail of “Whitechapel violence against women” would tend towards infinity. You get killings and assaults showing many of the “Ripper” aspects, both unsolved and stone-cold solved, culprits put away or hung, for decades before, even during and for quite a few years after. So maybe “Jack the Ripper” is just … a whole culture: blokes and a desperation for money. Maybe that means what we’re dealing with in the modern version really is like those ghost ships I saw, something London thinks should be out there, not specifically created by the will of the protestors or by anyone else. Maybe our Ripper kills all the time, and people only notice when it has — and this is thirdly — changed its MO from killing poor helpless women to killing rich and powerful men. Having seen this end of the background, I’m sure that change is the single biggest data point. If we figure out what that’s about, we can nick him. And the reason I’m sure that is a change, and that we haven’t lost a few lords and dukes over the years without making the connection, is because, fourthly — ’ Ross took a breath and slowed down, and Costain now finally thought he saw, somewhere in the depths of her expression, the emotion — ‘this whole process whereby the horrible deaths of five women get turned into a narrative, where they get pinned to a map of London and displayed … it’s what I do, when I turn violence into evidence and stop feeling anything about it. And I have to do it — we all do. That tour made me start thinking about that process, and, yeah, okay, so I had a bit of a wobble and lost my objectivity for about a minute-’

‘What? I wasn’t saying you were … weak or anything. I felt that too.’

‘Right. Great. Okay, then.’

Costain found himself looking intently at her face, wishing desperately that he knew what was going on underneath all that anger. But he wasn’t going to find out now because he’d set off all her defences. He raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’m really sorry.’

She just shook her head again. As if she was shaking him off her.

* * *

In the car heading back to the nick, Lisa Ross looked out of her side window and tried to keep her expression steady. Costain was an expert at hiding his intentions, at getting people talking. Had he tried today to get her to open up about herself? Right at the moment when she had something she wanted to hide, particularly from him? He’d seemed really awkward about that text message — really awkward, as if it had been an embarrassing mistake, the sort of mistake someone trying to put up a front shouldn’t make.

Or maybe the sort of mistake someone trying to put up a front wouldn’t make.

She sneaked a look across at him driving. Was it just that he fancied her? She was constantly taken by surprise when that happened. She never realized until it was too late. It was always difficult and complicated. She remembered him having stayed with her in the hospital. He’d shown a whole caring side to him that … or, even back then, was that what he’d wanted her to think?

Maybe she was being too hard on him. What had he done, today, really? Just tried to find in her some utterly understandable feelings of being shaken up. Maybe he really had felt the same way. He’d looked as if he had at the time. He’d hit one of her buttons: she could never live with any suggestion that she was being less than professional.

Maybe he’d hit that button deliberately to set her off, to see what it revealed. Had he any inkling what she was up to? Would she ever know, one way or the other? If he did, it was impossible that he wouldn’t act on it, impossible that he wouldn’t start trying to play her. He would have to know for himself what she was finding out. The object she was after was unique, too valuable for him just to ask her about it and risk warning her of any intentions he might have.

Was it just that he fancied her? She wondered if he’d ever do anything else about it, now that she’d behaved the way she had.

Those eyes of his were very useful for an undercover, she decided.

He looked very trustworthy. Even when she knew he wasn’t.