Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

Actually, I was never truly alone. Joesbury had got clearance for two of his colleagues from SO10 to take turns shadowing me. ‘Your guys stand out like sore knobs,’ he’d told Tulloch when she said she’d prefer her own people to do it. ‘Any villain worth his salt will clock ’em a mile off.’

Whoever Joesbury’s people were, they were good. Even I hadn’t spotted them yet. Occasionally, at a distance, I’d see someone I knew from Lewisham. Tulloch was taking no chances.

Tulloch phoned me often, Stenning almost as much. I heard that the latest press conference had been painful and that it had been plain that Tulloch’s superiors were distancing themselves. If the killer wasn’t caught soon, she’d carry the can.

There had been no talk around the station about her leaving the inquiry.

Thanks to Stenning, I got a full report of the post-mortem carried out on the woman we found in Victoria Park. Death had been the result of massive blood loss following extensive damage to the victim’s abdominal cavity and organs. She’d been tortured prior to death by the infliction of fourteen shallow cuts around her breasts. The broken-off piece of wooden fencing had been rammed into her vagina while she was still alive. The internal damage had been extensive, but the presence of semen caught in her pubic hair suggested she’d been raped.

The semen, I learned, showed traces of a common spermicide. He’d used a condom. Frustratingly, Samuel Cooper’s prior arrests had been before the taking of DNA samples from suspects had become routine, so we would need to catch him before we could prove categorically that it was him. But we would catch him. His photograph was everywhere. I saw it several times a day, on television and in the national papers.

Then, at the end of the fourth day, we identified our victim.

44

Friday 14 September

DARYL WESTON OF STOCKBRIDGE IN HAMPSHIRE ARRIVED home from a ten-day business trip to the Philippines to find his house strangely deserted. His wife, Amanda, was nowhere to be seen, his cat was half starved and his answer-machine completely full. Some of the calls were from his two children, the son who lived in Bristol, the thirteen-year-old daughter at a boarding school in Gloucestershire. Most of the rest were from Amanda’s friends, who’d seen sketches of a murder victim on the news that bore a remarkable resemblance to her and who had just wanted to check she was still with us. Ha ha.

After he’d listened to the fourth such message, Daryl Weston was struggling to see the joke. He phoned his wife’s parents in Sussex and her closest friends. Then he phoned us.

Forty-six-year-old Amanda Weston had been married for four years. Daryl was her second husband, her two children were from her first marriage. She had no enemies, according to her husband. She worked part-time as a nurse in a local hospice for terminally ill cancer patients.

Daryl Weston had loved his wife. He wept like a child when he saw her body. He was still crying when he arrived at Lewisham to give a statement. Tulloch and Anderson took him into the interview room, a room we keep for talking to people who aren’t suspects in any sort of crime. They may be victims, family of victims or important and vulnerable witnesses. The room is furnished comfortably and there’s a discreet video camera in one corner. As Tulloch and Anderson talked to Weston, the rest of us gathered round a screen in the incident room to watch the conversation.

‘Mr Weston, I know you want to be getting back to your children,’ said Dana, when she’d taken him through the basics, ‘but I do need to ask you a few more questions. Is that OK?’

Weston nodded, without raising his eyes from the hands clasped on his lap.

‘Can you think of any reason why your wife might have been in London last Saturday?’

Weston shook his head. ‘She never comes to London,’ he said. ‘She hates it.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

He thought for a second. ‘Tuesday night,’ he said. ‘I asked her what time it was in England and she said just after eight.’

‘How did she sound?’

He shook his head. ‘Normal. Tired. She’d been at work but she didn’t have to go in again until Saturday. She was looking forward to the rest.’

‘Did she have any plans?’ asked Tulloch.

‘Sort the garden out for the winter. Help Daniel pack his things up. He’s supposed to move into a new flat next week. Jesus …’ He put his head in his hands.

‘Daniel is twenty-five, is that right?’

There were too many people crowded round the screen. It was starting to feel uncomfortably hot. I edged back a little and looked at my watch. I’d arranged to meet the local Sapphire Unit at a nearby school in twenty minutes.

‘Mr Weston, we have reason to believe that whoever killed your wife may have killed another woman, just over a week ago. Did you hear about that case?’

Weston looked up and shook his head. ‘I’ve been out of the country.’

‘Of course, you did say. The other woman was a similar age to your wife. Her name was Geraldine Jones. Does that name mean anything?’

He shook his head again.

I really had to go now. I took another step back and came up against Joesbury. I hadn’t even known he was in the room. Keeping my eyes on the screen, I edged my way around him and left.

For several days I carried on going through the motions, trying to lure Samuel Cooper out into the open. People like Stenning and Mizon filled me in on anything important.

Like the fact that Geraldine Jones and Amanda Weston could have known each other. So far no member of either family remembered the two women being friends, but when she’d been married to her previous husband, Amanda and her children had lived in London. They and Geraldine’s kids had attended the same private school in Chiswick. Shortly after that, we learned that Cooper’s mother, Stacey, had worked at the school as a cook and that Cooper himself had been known to visit it. It was looking as though the killings weren’t random. There was a purpose behind them.

In the meantime, Cooper continued to elude us. And the cranks had really come out of the woodwork. Every day we were deluged with telephone calls and Ripper letters; every day, we took a hammering in the press. POLICE CLUELESS. MET’S INCOMPETENCE. COUNTDOWN TO NEXT KILLING. The headlines got more and more judgemental. We started hiding them from Tulloch.

Then, on the eighth day after the discovery of Amanda Weston’s body, we found him.

45

Monday 17 September

‘THE FLOWER MARKET. TEN MINUTES. COME ALONE.’

A soft click and the line went dead. I pressed the button that would end the call. My bedroom was in darkness. The luminous digits of the alarm clock showed ten minutes after four in the morning. I crossed to the wardrobe and dressed quickly. Jogging pants, trainers, sweatshirt and the jacket SO10 had issued to me just a few days ago. It had four large plastic buttons. Two of them really were buttons. The third was a tracking device that I swivelled to activate. The last contained a tiny recorder.

The second I left the flat, the cameras outside would spot me. Even if I didn’t activate the jacket button, my new mobile phone sent a constant signal back to a control room in Scotland Yard. If I left my flat at this hour, someone monitoring would spot that it wasn’t normal behaviour and both my team and SO10 would be alerted. They’d make contact with the unmarked car parked somewhere in my street, who would be told to follow me discreetly.

Once outside, I carried my bike up to street level and headed for the Wandsworth Road. On the other side, the streets were busier. Traffic starts building up early around here.