Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

‘Lacey, what are you doing?’ he whispered.

I didn’t even look at him. I’d made my choice. I just needed to get it done. I strode across, dropped to my knees, and took hold of Joanna Groves by the hair. The poor girl was too terrified even to scream.

‘Lacey, don’t you dare.’

I couldn’t help but turn then. He was slipping away, right in front of me. Flesh seemed to have fallen from his face, his body had shrunk.

‘I can’t live if you don’t.’

That’s what I tried to say. Whether any of the words came out I don’t know, I think I might have been crying too hard. Just do it. I leaned back so that I was holding Joanna’s head at arm’s length. Then I took a firmer grip on the knife and brought it down. At the second it made contact with flesh, I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth together and made the cut with every ounce of strength I had left.

Three screams rang out around the vaults. None of them had been mine. I’d neither the breath nor the energy. The pain beating a tattoo against my brain was too intense and all I could do those first few seconds was to live through it. I’d let go of Joanna’s hair. She sprang away from me, her face covered in blood. Mine. Hearing movement behind, I passed the knife into my left hand and placed the knife edge, gleaming scarlet in the cold light, against my right wrist.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said, stopping Llewellyn in her tracks. She’d been diving towards me but she stopped now. Her eyes dropped from mine to the blood that was pumping in waves from the gash on my left wrist. I’d slashed vertically down the artery, as determined suicides always do. It had been seconds since I’d made the cut but already I was starting to shiver.

‘How long do you think it takes to bleed to death?’ I asked her. ‘Ten minutes? Twenty?’

She stared at me for another second.

‘Tick tock,’ I said.

For a moment she looked angry. Then she shuddered. Finally, she smiled and it was still the sweetest face I’d ever seen. She bent down, and when she stood again, she wasn’t holding the gun but something that looked like a towel. She came towards me, crouched down and wrapped it tightly around my wrist. The pressure of it eased the pain just slightly. I still didn’t trust myself to move. I just watched her, as she reached inside Joesbury’s pocket for his radio and held it out to me. Mark’s eyes were still open, still focused on me, and there was a gleam on his left cheek that looked like a diamond. Or a tear.

Hold on, Mark, hold on.

I expected her to run. I never, for a moment, thought she’d give up. But she just sank down on to the ground next to Joesbury.

I picked up the radio.

‘I love you,’ I told her, just before I made the call for help.

93

Friday 9 November

ON FRIDAY 9 NOVEMBER, A LITTLE OVER ELEVEN DECADES after Mary Kelly was hacked to pieces in a small, rented room off Dorset Street, I followed a line of people along a brightly lit, yellow-painted corridor. We’d all travelled some distance, waited for what felt like hours. The people around me all appeared to be used to it. I wasn’t.

It was the first time I’d visited a prison.

In the five weeks since I’d been carried out of the catacombs, the young woman who’d abducted Joanna Groves had made a full confession. Starting that night at Lewisham police station, she told Dana Tulloch and Neil Anderson the full story of how she was raped at knifepoint as a teenager by a group of boys high on drugs, alcohol and arrogance. She remembered every threat, every taunt, every insult, with the screams of her sister ringing in her ears the whole time. She told them she’d genuinely believed, at one point, that she’d died, that this was hell, and that it was never going to end. There were times, she said, when she still thought that.

I heard from colleagues that DS Anderson left the interview room unusually pale and spoke to no one for several hours.

Giving information that only the killer could have known, she freely admitted murdering Geraldine Jones, Amanda Weston, Charlotte Benn and Karen Curtis. She signed the confession Victoria Llewellyn.

At the end of the prison corridor, a door led into a large, high room. The windows were way above our heads, but they had bars across them all the same. Twenty or so small tables were evenly spaced around the floor. Already, people ahead of me in the line were settling themselves down on spare chairs.

In the hours they spent talking to her, Llewellyn told Tulloch and Anderson that she’d gone abroad after her sister’s death, that she’d learned how to fight with knives and guns, and had returned several years later. She came with no papers, no passport, nothing to indicate her identity or her home country. It’s quite commonly done, I learned. If people arrive in the UK with nothing to prove where they’ve come from, we can’t send them back.

After a few tough months, she’d been granted leave to stay and apply for a work permit. She’d worked her way into the west London community around St Joseph’s as a nanny, an au pair, even a house-sitter and a dog-walker. She’d been hardworking and reliable. The families had liked her. She’d come across Samuel Cooper and, spotting a future use for him, had become his lover, feeding him drugs and sex in equal measure.

I looked over at the last line of tables. Closest to the far door sat a young woman in her own clothes. Unconvicted prisoners don’t have to wear prison uniform. The bright-blonde hair dye had begun to grow out and at her roots I could see a centimetre of the soft toffee brown I remembered. Exactly the same colour as my own. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She didn’t need to. She was still one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.

That pretty girl had insisted, several times, that she’d had no contact with me since she’d returned to the UK and that I’d taken no part in any of the abductions or murders. She was determined that I would carry no blame for what she’d done.

She saw me and smiled, watched me make my way towards her table and sit down. I glanced round. Those people in earshot were chattering away, intent only on themselves. No one would hear us talk.

‘Hey, Tic,’ she said.

I hadn’t heard that nickname in a very long time. Certainly not coming from the girl who’d given it to me in the first place, when her plump toddler’s mouth hadn’t been able to form the four syllables of my real Christian name. My baby sister hadn’t been able to manage ‘Victoria’, so she’d called me Tic.

‘Hello, Cathy,’ I replied.

94

FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE A LONG TIME, CATHY AND I DIDN’T speak. Then she laid a hand across mine on the tabletop. Wrapping her fingers around my bandaged wrist, she turned it over.

‘Will you be all right?’ she asked.

I gave a little shrug. ‘Well, you know those piano lessons I talked about having one day? Turns out I might have to give up on that idea.’

She put my hand down and smiled again. ‘I’m sorry about what I did,’ she said, and she might have been apologizing for scratching one of my CDs.

‘For killing those women?’ I whispered.

‘Lord, no. I’m not sorry about that,’ she said, with an odd little shudder. ‘I’m sorry about trying to make you kill the Groves girl. I should have known that would never happen.’

I had nothing to say back to her.

‘When you sent the warnings to the Curtis and Groves women, I should have known you wouldn’t play ball,’ she went on. ‘I told those detectives I sent them, by the way – that I was trying to stop. I think they believed me.’

‘They did,’ I said. I’d been careful when I’d sent the notes to Karen Curtis and Jacqui Groves, there was no way they could be traced back to me. I might as well have not bothered. My warning hadn’t saved Karen, and Jacqui had never been a target anyway.