Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

‘I don’t expect to,’ I said. ‘She’ll find me.’

A sharp hissing sound. Then the noise a chair makes when it’s being pushed roughly over the floor. ‘Lacey, you are going to get yourself killed.’

‘Least of my worries,’ I said. ‘Now, one more thing.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘When you go to my flat, you’ll find something that was delivered early this morning. It’s a rectangular package and inside is a knife. The name Mary is scratched into the edge of the blade.’

‘Jesus, fuckin—’

‘Shut up. The knife is perfectly clean. It hasn’t been used. Joanna is still alive.’

I gave him a second to think about it. Only a second, though. I really had to hang up. Already I was looking nervously up and down the street.

‘It makes no fucking sense,’ he said. ‘Why send you a weapon that hasn’t been used?’

I almost smiled at that. ‘It’s lucky you’re cute, Joesbury,’ I said, ‘because you have shit for brains. The knife is squeaky clean because I’m the one who has to use it. I have to kill Joanna.’

87

‘THOSE WOMEN YOU KILLED, THE BOYS’ MOTHERS,’ SAYS Joanna. ‘My mother, too. Do you blame them for what happened? Do you think it’s their fault their sons did that to you?’

The girl has begun spending time with her, as though she too feels the loneliness of this place. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they just sit in silence, listening to each other breathing.

‘They brought them up to believe they could have anything they wanted,’ answers the girl. ‘Anything that took their fancy and to hell with the consequences.’

‘Is that why you did it?’ asks Joanna, after a moment.

‘The next day, when they met us at the police station,’ says the girl, ‘their dads were embarrassed, they couldn’t look at us. They were ashamed of their sons. They didn’t want them facing charges, I’m not saying that, but they weren’t trying to make out it was all our fault, that we’d asked for it.’

‘And the mothers did?’ asks Joanna.

She hears the hiss of a sharp breath. ‘Those women weren’t prepared to consider, even for a second, that their precious baby boys could do anything wrong,’ the voice says. ‘So we had to be the evil ones, my sister and me.’

Joanna thinks for a moment. There is something she wants to say. It feels like a horrible betrayal, but it’s her life at stake. ‘I understand that,’ she says. ‘But the people who really hurt you and your sister, they’re getting away with it.’

She hears a soft laugh, then the girl leans in closer again. ‘No, Joanna,’ trickles a voice into her ear. ‘Killing them quickly – which is what I would have to do – would be letting them get away with it. They wouldn’t even see it coming. This way, they’ll suffer for the rest of their lives. Just like me.’

88

I’D TOLD JOESBURY THE TRUTH WHEN I’D SAID I WAS CLOSE to Waterloo station. I’d lied about getting on a train. The London Underground network is riddled with CCTV and finding me would be too easy. Instead I jumped back on the bike and headed east, following the course of the A202 but avoiding the main road. I kept my hood up and my head down and pedalled steadily.

Seventy minutes later, I was high above the city, watching southeast London idle its way through a Sunday. At the entrance to Greenwich Park I’d bought coffee and sandwiches. I ate and drank now, watching the weak sun trying to cast reflections on the river, keeping an eye on anyone who got too close. The sky was getting cloudier all the time and the park wasn’t overly busy. A few dog-walkers, kite-flyers and some families over at the children’s playground. Overnight, the temperature had dropped.

It must have been the proximity of the Greenwich Meridian Line, the centre of the world’s time, that made my sense of time running out so very strong now.

The team I’d walked out on would have two priorities. First, they’d want to find Joanna Groves and Victoria Llewellyn, who it seemed reasonable to assume were in the same place. Their second objective would be me. Already my photograph would have been sent around every police station in London. Every CCTV control room, every copper in uniform, every patrol car, every police community support officer, would have been told to look out for me. I could expect to see myself playing a leading role on the lunchtime news. Then everyone in London who cared would be looking for me too.

And so would Llewellyn. She had my phone number. She would tell me where I was expected to go. All I had to do was avoid being picked up for long enough to give her the chance.

So I sat, and tried not to get too cold, as the hour went past. At twelve fifty-five, the great red time-ball rose halfway up the mast on the top of Flamsteed House. Three minutes later it floated to the top, and at one p.m. it sailed back down again. I waited half an hour more and then pulled out my mobile. No messages.

Switching off the phone, I got back on the bike. I had to assume Joesbury and the MIT now knew I was in Greenwich. Time to move on.

I cycled out of the park and found a market stall that sold cheap clothes. I bought a waterproof blue jacket and a baseball cap and put both on. Then I made my way to the glazed dome entrance of the Greenwich foot tunnel. I pushed the bike through, keeping my head down in case there were cameras inside. On the north bank, I found another bench close to the river and sat, staring at the ornate Wren-designed buildings of the old Greenwich Hospital until another hour had gone by. By this time rain was starting to fall. I switched on my phone again. Nothing.

By mid afternoon I was freezing. I cycled up the Isle of Dogs and found a small internet café that was open on a Sunday. Keeping my head down to avoid CCTV cameras, I went in and found a vacant computer. Then I started making my way through the various news websites.

Joanna Groves’s abduction was on every site I pulled up. She was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, slim girl, not quite pretty but far from plain. She lived in a flat on the ground floor of a house in Wimbledon and worked at the local primary school. She’d left the school at three thirty on Friday afternoon and disappeared. As I flicked through site after site, my insides started to twist themselves into knots.

There was nothing about me. Even on the Met’s own website. Nothing.

My hour wasn’t up, but I couldn’t stay here any longer. Tulloch’s computer skills were legendary and it was perfectly possible that she’d know I’d been on the Met’s website and be able to trace the computer I was using. I got up and left the café in a hurry. The MIT were doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to. I needed them to be looking for me, damn it, and I needed it to be public knowledge. How else would Llewellyn know I’d gone AWOL?

OK, think, think, think. I cycled for fifteen minutes and found another café with internet access. When a machine became available I typed ‘Ripper’ into the search engine and pressed go.

Run a Jack the Ripper search and you can expect to see several million results. Search for his twenty-first-century copycat and it’s not quite so many. Just under forty-three thousand. Still a pretty impressive performance for someone who’s only been around a matter of weeks. I started making my way through the sites, looking for blogs. On each one I left a message.

Cardiff Girl: Call me. L .

It was risky. Officers in the team had been monitoring the various websites since the case had started. When they spotted my posts, they’d start tracing them. I left and found a small, half-empty branch of Starbucks. After forty minutes, I switched my phone on. Nothing. And I was getting paranoid. A woman had entered the coffee bar shortly after me. Three-quarters of an hour later, she was still there. It almost certainly meant nothing, she was probably just another Londoner with too much time to kill, but I didn’t like her being close.