Paul Cornell - The Severed Streets

There was a noise from beside her. A text message. She was startled to see it was from Costain. He was wondering if she ‘had five minutes’.

What? At this time in the morning? He’d never texted her before. He was probably drunk. Or was this meaningful? Was this the start of the sort of activity on his part that she’d told herself to watch out for? Whatever. She put the phone back down without replying.

Costain was the one from whom she especially needed to keep this work secret.

* * *

Quill was once again hauled awake by the sound of his phone. His dreams had been full of something reaching towards him, reaching into him. But he couldn’t remember it now. Jessica, unwoken by the sound of the phone, was lying across his head.

‘Would you please answer that,’ said Sarah, ‘and tell them to — ’ she looked at her daughter and gritted her teeth — ‘go away?’

Quill saw that the call was again from Ross, and said so.

‘Getting over her now,’ said Sarah.

He picked it up. After listening for a few moments, he quickly got out of bed and started getting dressed.

‘What?’ moaned Sarah.

‘Another one. It’s police.’

* * *

The slightly portly middle-aged man lay across the sofa. He was still dressed in a blue towelling robe, the now-familiar silver fluid splattered across him and all over the room. The robe was open, and so was he. A livid red trail led from what remained of his abdomen, across the polished wooden floor, and finished in an explosion of blood against the far wall, next to a Jack Vettriano. The expression on the victim’s face was an almost comical extreme of horror and incredulity. His eyes were open, glassy.

Quill’s team stood in the doorway, feeling — if Quill himself was anything to go by — like anything but an elite unit at this hour of the morning. Forensics had just finished with the crime scene and were packing up. Uniforms were filling just about every available inch of the building.

What they were staring at was enormous. Bigger, even, than the death of a cabinet minister.

‘Sir Geoffrey Staunce, KCBE, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Ross, keeping her voice low as a uniform made her way past.

‘They got him,’ said Quill. ‘That’s what the papers are going to say tomorrow. With a strike looming, the protestors killed London’s most senior copper at his home in Piccadilly.’

‘There were indeed Toffs in the area last night, making a nuisance of themselves,’ said Ross, looking up from the report she’d been given on entering. ‘For this sort of address that’s pretty incredible.’

‘The connection is also the locked room and the MO,’ said Quill.

‘Plus, from our point of view, the silver goo,’ added Sefton.

‘And,’ said Costain, ‘the wife is talking about an invisible assailant.’

They paused for a moment, taking in the scene. Quill’s team’s speciality was now being tested against a very mainstream, very high-profile, series of murders.

‘This is going to set London on fire,’ said Costain. ‘I mean literally.’

‘Where’s this message they were talking about?’ Stepping carefully, Ross followed the trail of blood across the room. She got to the enormous splatter of it across the far wall and stopped. Quill and the others joined her. She was pointing at the fine detail that the chaotic enormity of the splatter concealed. Among the blood was written, in awkward, blocky characters:

THE JEWS ARE THE MEN WHO WILL NOT BE BLAMED FOR ANYTHING.

‘What is that?’ said Sefton. ‘I recognize that.’ He started to tap at his phone.

‘So this is almost certainly from the killer,’ said Costain, ‘but-’

‘Making assumptions,’ said Ross.

‘You said we could-’

‘Only when we remember to mark them as such. This is me doing that. Yes, it could be from the killer, but there might also have been person or persons unknown here, associated with the killer or otherwise, who might have left what they regarded as a useful, or just anti-Semitic, message for the many Londoners who will read it when they get a news camera in here.’

‘Next time you make an assumption, I’ll make sure I mark it.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘Would you just bloody finish the sentence you originally started?’ Quill asked Costain.

‘Just that it’s really weird,’ said Costain, ‘to use “are the men” in what’s otherwise a natural-sounding phrase. It feels like … pretence to me. A front.’

‘You’d know,’ said Ross.

‘I would. There’s the fingerprint.’ He pointed to the very end of the words, where the fingers that had daubed the message had paused for just a moment, leaving a single smeared print.

Ross took a photograph of it. ‘I’ll ask to hear from the investigation about the comparison of that to the prints found in Spatley’s car.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Sefton. ‘“The Jews are the men”!’ He held up his phone as the others clustered around. He read from it, keeping his voice down so the uniforms all around couldn’t hear. ‘Those words, or something like them, were what was written on a wall in a place called Goulston Street in Whitechapel, in 1888.’

‘So?’

‘It’s the message left by Jack the Ripper.’

‘Jack … the Ripper?’ Sarah Quill slowly lowered her cup of coffee to the kitchen table.

‘Such is my glamorous existence,’ said Quill. ‘Celebrate my diversity.’

‘What does that even mean?’

‘I don’t know, I just say these things.’

‘I mean, is it that the Ripper’s … ghost has started to attack people?’

‘We don’t know anything beyond the message, not yet. But it makes sense of the shape of the attacker. That Toff image of the protestors is also very like the archetypal image of the Ripper. And, thanks to the press-’

‘Ahem.’

‘Present company excepted. Thanks to them, everyone thinks the protestors have now started murdering people, though they can’t quite work out how. The original version of what’s become the Toff mask was, so the people at the factory tell us, part of their “Jolly King” costume. That costume company have gone from employing a publicity person for the first time, and neither condoning nor condemning the protestors, to slamming the doors and hiding behind press releases.’

‘Royalty? Like in some of the mad Ripper theories? Could that be a thing? One of your lot will have said that, right?’

Quill loved it when she deduced something. She didn’t do analysis exactly in the way his team did, but like the news editor she was, always casting around for a lead. ‘Sefton. He’s been reading up on this stuff. Ross said that when she first got the Sight, she felt a certain gravity from the direction of Buckingham Palace. I bloody hope this Ripper business doesn’t take us there.’

‘Jack the Ripper. God, Quill, I wish I could have this story. Can I have this story?’

‘No. Because you and I have a deal-’

‘I know, I know: you all need to have someone you can talk to about this stuff. But, bloody hell, of all journalists, only I know that there’s a connection between these two incredibly high-profile murder cases. Only I know about the message on the wall. And I’m going to go back into my office this afternoon, and my editor’s going to ask how you are, and I’m going to say, “He’s fine, he expressed sympathy about the ongoing decline of the Enfield Leader and the redundancies that are bound to start happening soon-”’

‘Love-’

‘Fuck, I could string this story to the Mail or the Herald or something. I could make a fortune. They still give people who dob in for them serious money.’ She made grim eye contact with him again. ‘I’m only having you on. Really. No, I am.’