Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

Neither had we publicly released the information that Karen Curtis’s head was still missing, but it was only a matter of time. We’d had to warn our colleagues around London that a severed human head was likely to turn up any day now, probably at a prominent Victorian location. It was the sort of news that was going to leak pretty quickly.

At six the day shift ended and people started to drift away. Soon just Mizon, Stenning and I were left in the incident room. Anderson arrived back at six thirty, just as we were about to give up on him and Tulloch.

‘How’d it go, Sarge?’ Stenning asked him.

‘Blood bath,’ said Anderson. ‘Everyone else gone?’

‘Anything you need, Sarge?’ asked Mizon. ‘Or shall we get off?’

‘The boss has asked us all round for dinner,’ said Anderson, looking uncomfortable. ‘Only if you’re free, she says, nothing formal.’

Stenning and I raised eyebrows at each other. ‘Dinner?’ said Stenning. ‘As in, at her place?’

Anderson shrugged. ‘Must be a gender thing,’ he said. ‘You get a bloke DI, he invites you down the pub. A woman asks you to dinner.’

‘Are we supposed to bring flowers?’ asked Stenning.

Dana Tulloch lived in a modest-sized terraced house in Clapham, but when she opened the door to us there was nothing modest about its interior. The walls were a soft smoky cream and the wooden floors walnut. The pictures on the walls were limited-edition prints and even one or two that looked like originals.

Her living room had three matching sofas in pale green and a large, square rug patterned in squares of green, rust and oatmeal. A real fire was burning in the hearth. As Dana took our coats, we could hear someone moving around in the kitchen and my heartbeat stepped up a pace. A few seconds later, I was disappointed. It seemed safe to say, though, that Anderson and Stenning probably weren’t.

The blonde woman smiling at us was tall and athletic, with a perfect oval face, a clean jawline and brown, puppy-dog eyes. She was older than Dana, possibly around forty, but you only had to look at her to know she would probably look much the same at fifty.

‘I’m Helen,’ she said. ‘Dana’s partner.’

Dana’s partner? Where had I been?

The six of us ate around the table in Dana’s dining room and I found myself shy as a child. I was sitting next to Helen, who, it turned out, was Detective Chief Inspector Helen Rowley from Tayside police in Scotland. Fortunately, none of the others were quiet and no one seemed to notice I wasn’t saying much. When all the plates but Dana’s were almost empty, Helen put down her glass just a little more heavily than she needed to. We all looked her way.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everybody ready to talk?’

Tulloch sighed and shrugged.

Helen’s smile didn’t falter. ‘Or are we just here for the pleasure of our company?’ she asked.

‘Always,’ Tulloch replied.

Helen gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, well no offence, you lot, but I didn’t fly down from Dundee for the fun of meeting my girlfriend’s new team.’ She turned to me. ‘Dana says you’ve got a good feel for what’s going on. You think it’s Victoria Llewellyn?’

A little surprised to be singled out, I nodded. ‘I think it has to be,’ I said. ‘What’s happening now has to be linked to the rape. Her sister and her mother are both dead. No other family that we know of. She’s the only one left.’

‘And she’s going for the mothers because she thinks that’s the best way of getting back at the boys,’ said Helen.

‘Well, the mothers will be a softer target,’ I said. ‘Those boys are big blokes now; they all look like they can handle themselves. The mothers will be a different story entirely.’

Around the table, Anderson and Stenning were nodding to themselves. Mizon was watching me carefully. Dana’s eyes were going from me to Helen.

‘And, yes, I think if maximum revenge is what she’s going for, she’s got it right,’ I went on. ‘When those boys know for certain that what they did eleven years ago caused their mothers’ deaths, and that they died so horribly, I think it will eat them up.’

‘And the Ripper business was only ever just a smokescreen?’ asked Helen, who seemed happy to ignore the others.

This was where I had to be careful. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I think she wanted us thinking Ripper from the word go. A real copycat, on the other hand, would have stuck more rigidly to the historical trail, letting us cotton on gradually.’

Helen’s eyes didn’t leave mine.

‘By sending the Dear Boss letter to a journalist, she made sure London got Ripper fever,’ I said. ‘Everyone was counting down to the next murder.’

‘I’ll say. Whitechapel was like the first day of the Harrods sale on 8 September.’ That was Anderson.

‘She was playing with us,’ I said. ‘She let the whole day of the 8 September go by with nothing happening until the evening, when she staged a fake call to get the team out to Southwark and, using Emma Boston’s phone, she tricked me into going to the swimming pool.’

‘To find the uterus,’ said Helen. ‘Nice touch. And a day later, she sends you out to Victoria Park to find the rest of Amanda Weston. She does have a bit of a thing about you, doesn’t she?’

‘She chose her second victim quite carefully,’ said Tulloch. ‘By going for the one mother who’d moved out of London, who didn’t have any contacts with the capital, she slowed down the process of someone making the connection between the first two victims. It was days before we realized the school was the key to it.’

‘She sounds like someone who knows how the police operate,’ said Helen.

The others fell silent for a moment, as they all thought about that one. I kept my eyes down.

‘How do you think she got Amanda Weston to London?’ Helen was still talking to me.

‘I’m not sure we’ll ever know,’ I said, glancing up. ‘But her accomplice, Sam Cooper, used a replica gun. Those things can be quite convincing, especially if you’re not used to weapons.’

‘And after the second body was discovered, it became open season for Ripper hunters,’ said Helen.

‘She made sure of that,’ I said. ‘A hundred years ago, the press seriously got in the way of the police investigation. Reporters got to witnesses first, they bribed them, they ran stories that were just pure invention. Almost as much time was spent dealing with the effects of press speculation as it was hunting the Ripper. I think our killer wanted that happening with this investigation too.’

‘But all the publicity worked against her as well,’ said Mizon. ‘She had every mother connected with that school on full alert.’

‘Yes, but she had a plan for that too,’ I said. ‘Before we really cottoned on about the school, she gave us Cooper. We’d seen him at Victoria Park, we had a DNA link to the semen on Amanda Weston’s body. He was a slam-dunk suspect and we caught him. Because she let us.’

‘Do you think he was involved in the actual killings?’ asked Helen.

I shook my head. ‘The last thing he said, before he pulled me off that bridge, was “This is a fucking fix.” He realized he’d been set up.’

‘And we all thought it was over,’ said Anderson, leaning back in his seat.

‘She’d killed two more women before we even knew there was still a threat,’ I said. ‘But she knew we’d figure it out then. She knew that one of the husbands, if not all of them, would talk.’

‘So why is she still ripping?’ said Mizon. ‘That’s what I don’t get. Why all the dramatics with the entrails and the heart and Karen Curtis’s missing head? If she knows we know, why bother?’

Outside, I thought I heard a car pull up.