Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

‘Gov, it still makes a bollocks of the whole Ripper business.’ Anderson raised his voice and spoke directly to Joesbury over several heads. ‘Unless you’re telling us that was just a giant smokescreen right from the start.’

Joesbury was watching me again. ‘Oh, it was a bit more than that,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Flint?’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Tulloch as, around the room, eyes went from Joesbury to me and back again.

‘Let’s go back to the original murders,’ he said, and it could almost have been just the two of us in the room. ‘In a place as densely populated as Whitechapel, how come nobody spotted a man covered in blood? Not once?’

‘It was dark,’ someone offered.

Joesbury didn’t even turn his head. ‘More to the point,’ he said, ‘how come five streetwise prostitutes, more than accustomed to dealing with aggressive punters, allowed a bloke with a knife to get close enough to slice them open?’

‘They had to take risks,’ said Mizon. ‘If they didn’t, they didn’t eat.’

‘Not long before Polly Nichols was killed, there were two violent murders in Whitechapel,’ said Joesbury. ‘Nothing to do with Jack, but I’ll bet every working girl in the city was on her guard. After Polly, definitely after Annie, they’d all have been jumpy as crickets. Yet he managed to kill three more times. Silently and invisibly. You’re our undisputed Ripper expert, Flint. How did he do that?’

‘What has this got to do with Lacey?’ asked Tulloch, stepping a bit closer to me and frowning at Joesbury.

‘Good question,’ he replied.

Tulloch turned to me again, saw the look on my face and took a small step back.

Joesbury, quite deliberately, had dropped me completely in it. Everyone was waiting for me to speak and now I had no choice but to tell them what I’d kept back so far. My own pet theory about who Jack the Ripper had been, exactly as I’d told my classmates all those years ago. My favourite character from history? Jack the Ripper, of course, because Jack kept his secret, right to the very end.

‘What DI Joesbury is driving at,’ I began, surprised at how calm my voice sounded, ‘is that Jack the Ripper was a woman.’

62

4 September, ten years earlier

T YE HAMMOND IS COMING DOWN FROM A HIGH AND, WHEN that happens, he likes to sit on deck and watch the lights bounce across the river. Somehow, they always manage to soothe him, to make the transition from bliss to the pressing crush of real life a bit more bearable .

As he climbs the steps of the houseboat, he thinks perhaps he hears someone calling out his name. When he reaches the cockpit the boat rocks against its mooring. He isn’t alone on deck .

‘What’s up?’ he asks the fair-haired girl at the port stern. Her back is to him, she’s clutching the guardrail. Her head twitches round, then back again, too fast to make eye contact .

‘ The bow rope’s been cut,’ she calls. ‘This one’s loose too. I can’t catch hold of it .’

It takes a second for the words to sink in. Then Tye sees that the bow of the boat has swung away from its mooring. The current has caught hold of it and is pointing it directly downstream. Only the rope at the stern is keeping them against the bank now. Unsteady on his feet, he stumbles over to where Cathy is still reaching out for the cleat the boat had been tied up to .

Tye is taller than Cathy. He throws himself against the rail and leans over. His fingers brush the cold steel for a split second before the boat drifts too far away. The rope is still wrapped around the cleat but not tied. It’s slipping, only the friction of wet rope against steel is preventing the boat from spinning away at speed. He has to leap to the bank. Cathy can throw him the rope and he can catch the boat before the momentum gets too strong. He straddles the rail just as Cathy grasps hold of his leg .

‘ It’s too far,’ she says. ‘You’ll go in .’

She’s right. Already they’re two metres away, three. But they have to go in. There’s no engine on the boat, no way of steering or stopping it. They cannot be loose in the river, at night, without any means of controlling the boat .

‘ We have to jump,’ he says, taking hold of her arm. ‘We’re still close enough to swim .’

Cathy’s eyes are wide and pale with fear. ‘The others,’ she says, looking down towards the cabin. ‘Jen and Al are asleep. There’s four people down below.’

‘ I’ll get them,’ he says. ‘You jump .’

Tye turns his back on Cathy and heads for the hatch. Four people. He’d thought five. Jen and Al, Rob and Kit, and that new girl who pitched up a day or so ago. That made five, seven with him and Cathy. But Cathy thinks four and she’s never wrong. He hears Cathy cry out behind him and spins round for a second to see her striding towards the bow. ‘We’re on fire,’ she calls. ‘The boat’s on fire.’

The explosion throws him high into the air, burning into his skin, sucking all the air from his body. When he hits the river, it feels like a relief .

Part Four

Catharine

‘The most agonizing of the East End mysteries is that of the utter paralysis of energy and intelligence on the part of the police.’

Daily News , 1 October 1888

63

Wednesday, 3 October

‘THIS THEORY MIGHT SEEM A BIT WILD, BUT IT CERTAINLY isn’t new,’ I said. ‘It was the inspector in charge of the original investigation, a chap called Frederick Abbeline, who first suggested that the Ripper might not actually be a man after all.’

‘On what grounds?’ asked Tulloch.

I glanced over at Joesbury and said, ‘You’ve just heard. When the whole of London was looking for a suspicious male, Abbeline couldn’t understand how a man with bloodstained clothing could make his way around the streets without being spotted.’

Faces around me were a mixture of sceptical and interested. I decided I might as well sit down, I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

‘Abbeline talked it over with colleagues,’ I went on, as I perched on a desk. ‘They came up with the mad-midwife theory. In later years it became known as the Jill-the-Ripper theory.’

Some small sounds that might have been titters.

‘Keep going,’ said Tulloch. All eyes were still on me. Sceptical or not, everyone wanted to hear what I had to say.

‘They asked themselves who could get up and go out in the middle of the night without arousing suspicion in their own households,’ I said. ‘Who wouldn’t attract attention if seen walking the streets in the small hours.’

Heads were starting to nod. Across the room a phone rang.

‘Who could even appear heavily bloodstained without anyone thinking it out of the ordinary,’ I said. ‘The answer they came up with was a midwife. Or an abortionist. Quite a few women were both.’

‘A midwife would have the anatomical knowledge to locate things like the uterus, the kidneys and so on,’ said Mizon. ‘Better than a butcher, at any rate.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joesbury leave the desk he’d been sitting at and approach the TV screen. The phone was still ringing. Tulloch signalled for someone to answer it.

‘That was also part of the argument,’ I said to Mizon. ‘Another thing being that if prostitutes were approached by a woman, especially one they knew to be a midwife, they wouldn’t be alarmed. It would explain why no one heard a scream or a struggle. The women weren’t scared until it was too late.’