The Murder Bag (22 page)

I closed my laptop and we looked at each other. Sergeant Caine folded his heavy arms. Then he nodded once.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re probably right.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome. What’s the problem?’

‘The problem is they’re chucking everything they’ve got at Bob,’ I said. ‘All of our resources are being poured into looking for Bob the Butcher, serial killer of the year. Operation Fat Boy is being led up a dead end.’

A spasm of pain travelled up my spine and I ground my teeth together, arching my back until it passed.

‘You want to find whoever messed up your back,’ Sergeant Caine said.

‘I want to find the killer.’ I took a breath and let it go. ‘And you can help me.’

‘How can I do that?’

‘I want to see the From Hell letter,’ I said.

He looked away, then looked back at me. Suddenly he was angry.

‘The From Hell letter? Do you know what you’re asking? The From Hell letter was lost.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think it’s here. I think it’s somewhere in this room. I think it’s in your possession.’

‘What do you know about the From Hell letter, detective?’

‘I know that it was also known as the Lusk letter,’ I replied. ‘It was a letter posted in 1888 by a person unknown who claimed to be Jack the Ripper. What made the police think it was the one genuine correspondence from Jack the Ripper was that it arrived with part of an internal organ from a human body.’

‘Where do you think you are,’ Sergeant Caine said, shaking his head with disbelief, ‘Madame Tussaud’s? This is a training facility for officers who put themselves in harm’s way. Not a freak show.’

‘I just want to see the letter.’

‘What makes you think it’s here?’

‘I just don’t believe it was lost. I can’t believe that. The only letter from Jack the Ripper? Come on. I think it would have been filed, saved, preserved.’

‘Why lie about it?’

‘Don’t want the public getting too excited about some unholy relic, do we? Don’t need them turning a serial killer into a bigger cult hero than he is already. But I think we would have saved it.’

‘We?’

‘The law. The Met. The good guys. And I think that if it is anywhere in London, then it will be in some secret corner of the Black Museum.’

He laughed. ‘I suppose you might just make a detective one day. But why do you want to see it – assuming it’s in my power to show it to you?’

‘I want to see what the real thing looks like.’

He moved towards the door and I thought he was going to call for some help and have me kicked out. But Sergeant Caine wouldn’t have needed any help to kick me out.

I watched him lock Room 101.

‘There were hundreds of letters claiming to be from Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘The Dear Boss letter. The Saucy Jacky postcard. The Openshaw letter. What made the From Hell letter different was that, as you say, it came with a small box containing half a human kidney.’

I watched him remove a calendar from the wall that said MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE METROPOLITAN POLICE.

There was a safe in the wall.

‘Turn away, detective,’ he said, and I turned my head as he tapped some numbered keys. ‘It was addressed to George Lusk, the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. You can turn back now.’

There was a dark green folder on his desk.

He opened it. Inside the folder was a plastic envelope. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, rust-coloured with age, as brittle as something scorched, like something pulled from the fire at the very last moment.

Large red letters, a dozen lines, words written quickly, words written in a fever.

‘Somebody slung out the kidney,’ Sergeant Caine said. ‘Sorry about that.’

From hell

Mr Lusk

Sor

I send you half the

Kidne I took from one women

Prasarved it for you tother piece

I fried and ate it was very nice, I

may send you the bloody knif that

took it out if you only wate a whil

longer.

Signed

Catch me when

You Can

Mishter Lusk

‘It’s real, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You can tell. It’s from him. It’s from Jack the Ripper.’

Caine nodded. ‘It’s at a much lower literacy level than the other letters they received, but back in the day they thought that was deliberate. What’s fake about it is the pretence of illiteracy. Look. He apparently can’t spell to save his life but he manages to observe the silent “k” in knife and the silent “h” in while. Unlike all the other letters, he doesn’t sign it “Jack the Ripper”
.
And I’ll say this for him – he did include a human kidney.’

‘He was sick of the fakes,’ I said. ‘He was tired of all the nutcases claiming credit for crimes they didn’t have the skill and the madness to commit. And it’s going to be the same this time. Sooner or later, the real killer will show himself.’

Sergeant Caine watched me staring at the letter.

‘Bob the Butcher is not real,’ I said. ‘But this is real. May I touch it?’

The keeper of the Black Museum stared at me.

‘Be careful,’ he said.

20

‘
ONE MURDER IS
a tragedy,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Swire. ‘Two murders are a tragic coincidence. And three murders are prime-time entertainment.’

The call from the chief super had come just as Mallory was about to start the morning briefing at West End Central. Fifteen minutes later we were in a conference room on the top floor of New Scotland Yard. This high up the brass had a picture-postcard view of either St James’s Park or the Thames. This room overlooked the park. But nobody noticed the view.

The death of Guy Philips had put Operation Fat Boy on all the front pages. Bob the Butcher was being called a serial killer and treated like a national celebrity. The popular press were going wild, but with a sneaking regard for Bob’s dysfunctional social conscience. BOB THE BUTCHER – FEARED BY THE RICH, LOVED BY THE POOR? asked the
Sun
. The unpopular press saw Bob as the embodiment of the seething resentments at the rotten core of an unfair society. BUTCHER BOB – IS HE A ONE MAN RIOT?
pondered the
Guardian
, as if all Bob was doing was kicking in store windows and stealing plasma TVs.

The chief super was not happy. And DCS Swire had a genius for registering her displeasure. She was a fifty-year-old woman with a ferocious blonde haircut, hair sprayed as stiff as a Spartan helmet. Swire looked like Mrs Thatcher’s recently exhumed corpse, but with slightly less human warmth.

She considered DCI Mallory with dead eyes.

‘You initially expressed doubts that Bob the Butcher was the perpetrator,’ she said.

‘That’s correct, ma’am.’

‘So have you eliminated him from your enquiries?’

‘Not yet, ma’am,’ Mallory said.

‘Not yet, ma’am,’ she said, her tone so caustic you could have used it to strip paint.

DI Gane spoke up, his voice shaking just a little. He talked about anonymity networks, onion routers and layers of encryption.

Swire cut him off with a short jerk of her head.

‘Let’s skip the tech talk, shall we?’ she said. ‘But tell me this: how likely is it that the average social network psycho would have security architecture that elaborate?’

‘It would be . . . unusual,’ Gane answered.

Swire may not have cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. But that was the impression she gave.

‘Only unusual?’ she said quietly. ‘Really? No more than that?’

‘It would be unprecedented, ma’am.’

Swire nodded, as if we were at last getting somewhere.

‘What’s the latest on prints?’ she said. ‘Are we working the prints?’

Mallory’s fingertips brushed his SIO policy book. He cleared his throat.

‘The situation is unchanged, ma’am. We have no prints at any of the crime scenes.’

Swire stared hard at him.

‘You mean you have smooth glove prints?’

‘No prints, ma’am. No smooth glove prints, no partials – no prints at all. The absence of prints remains . . . unexplained.’

Swire let this sink in.

‘So he’s a ghost?’ she said.

The base of my spine pulsed with pain.

‘He’s no ghost,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

She nodded, as if she had only just decided something.

‘We’re rebooting Operation Fat Boy,’ she said. ‘I’m bringing in three new bodies.’

Swire was flanked by two men who had remained silent throughout the meeting, avoiding eye contact with the incompetent Murder Investigation Team from West End Central: a young East Asian in glasses with digital geek written all over him, and a much older man, about sixty, with soft white hair who couldn’t possibly have been a part of the Met because he was wearing a suit but no tie.

Now they stirred.

Swire nodded curtly at Mallory and told him, ‘You will remain as SIO for the time being. But I’ll be sitting in at the morning briefings and you will be reporting directly to me.’

Gane and Whitestone exchanged a look. Mallory’s time was passing. He was still senior investigating officer but this no longer felt like his investigation. Operation Fat Boy now felt like it was being run from Broadway, SW1 – New Scotland Yard – not 27 Savile Row.

Mallory was a good man, but the world was beating him down. Suddenly his authority felt like a fragile thing that could be taken away by one gesture from the woman at the top of the conference table. I saw that Gane and Whitestone could not look at him.

Swire gestured to the digital geek on her left. ‘This is Colin Cho of the Police Central e-crime Unit. As you know, the PCeU is jointly funded by the Home Office and the Met to provide a national response to the most serious incidents of cyber-crime. Bob the Butcher comes under their remit.’

‘Hopefully we might be able to show you a few new tricks,’ Cho said to Gane, his accent somewhere between Hong Kong and London.

Gane said nothing.

‘I want Bob flushed out,’ Swire said. ‘I want him dragged out from behind his firewall. I want him taken
seriously
. We’re becoming a laughing stock.’ She nodded sharply at me. Her hair did not move. ‘Especially after DC Wolfe’s recent stroll in the country.’

‘We
have
taken Bob seriously, ma’am,’ Mallory insisted.

She did not slap the table. She did not need to. She fixed Mallory with a look cold enough to give a snowman hypothermia.

‘Not seriously enough,’ she said. ‘The MP for Hillingdon North is highly thought of in Whitehall and Westminster.’ She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. ‘I am receiving phone calls.’

So that was it, I thought. The murders were too close to Ben King, and Swire had the full weight of Downing Street and Whitehall pressing on her back.

She turned to the older man on her right. ‘And this is Dr Joe Stephen of King’s College London. Introduce yourself, Dr Stephen?’

‘I’m a forensic psychologist and I’m here to give assistance in any way I can,’ Dr Stephen said. He had the smooth sing-song vowels of a Californian who had lived in London for twenty years. The Hollywood Hills meets Muswell Hill.

‘What can you tell us so far?’ Swire asked.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Forensic psychology is more art than science. All I can do is look at the evidence, and estimate what kind of individual would commit these crimes.’ There was a file before him and he glanced down at it without, I sensed, really needing to. ‘To apprehend the unsub – sorry, the unknown subject – you need to understand that he is re-ordering the world. When women kill, they almost always kill someone they know. When men kill more than once, it’s almost always strangers. Serial killers are invariably male.’

Gane folded his arms. ‘So we’re looking for a man?’ he said. He smirked at Whitestone but she wouldn’t return his look, or his smile. ‘That narrows it down,’ he muttered.

Dr Stephen stared at him. ‘A white man,’ he added.

‘And why’s that?’ said the black DI.

‘Because the dead men are all white,’ Dr Stephen said, ‘and serial killers almost always kill within their own race. That’s not universal, but close enough to be considered a given.’

He looked a little rattled. He had come in wanting to be our friend and he was being forced to defend himself.

‘What kind of white man, Dr Stephen?’ Whitestone said, far friendlier than Gane. ‘Any guess as to age, motive, social group?’

‘A white man who is trying to right some perceived wrong,’ Dr Stephen said. ‘A man who is punishing his victims. These are all planned attacks. Very carefully planned attacks. These are not confrontational homicides, these are revenge homicides. The unsub is trying to right a wrong by the only means at his disposal – extreme violence. He is the product of a place where violence is the means of achieving your aims.’

The resentment was coming off Gane like steam, but to me Dr Stephen was making sense. I thought of the terrible neatness of those carotid thrusts and the ease with which they opened arteries that could never be closed again. It was the work of a man who was remaking the world.

‘Maybe he’s just a nutter,’ Gane said.

Dr Stephen smiled at him with a kind of embarrassed pity. ‘Then he is a nutter – your term, detective, not mine – who is restoring control over what he perceives to be a mad world. Honour. Power. Control. That’s what matters to him. And when you find him, as you no doubt will, you will find a man who needs to control other men, a man who needs that more than anything in the world.’

‘So you don’t really know anything about him at all?’ Gane persisted.