The walker, p.13
The Walker, page 13
‘Very. Probably happened about an hour ago, while we were admiring his art work further up the street,’ said Steve. Looks like he meant to take the heart but it was a bit too ambitious for a rush job. Basic butchery is all he managed. Had enough?’ And, without waiting for an assent, he steered her firmly out again into the sunshine, towards a low wall on the other side of the yard, where she sat down obediently. There was cold sweat on her forehead again.
‘Hello. You look like I feel,’ said Jimmy, walking towards them and taking his seat on the wall next to her. ‘There’s more dirty work over in the Spitalfields church, apparently. They got in there a few minutes ago and the boss’s just been called over, which means I’ll be wanted as well. More excitement than a day at the races, isn’t it? Oh, now, here they come.’
A siren was audible in the distance, then another. As they grew to a crescendo, it sounded like six sirens, the ambulance screaming over the top of the police chorus.
A camera flash went off to the right of them and Briony turned to see two pressmen being physically restrained from entering Creechurch Lane. They were taking pictures constantly, even as they were manhandled back around the corner to make way for another ambulance that was turning into the yard. Steve swore and got up to talk to the driver.
‘We’ve already got an ambulance,’ he said. ‘It’s through on the other side.’
‘We’re back-up,’ said the driver.
‘I don’t see how one body can use two ambulances.’
But the team were already getting out. A female paramedic wearing a formidable arrangement of shoulder bags with red crosses on them came across and looked pointedly at Briony.
‘Anyone need treating for shock?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Briony tonelessly.
‘What’s the treatment?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Would I like it?’
The ambulance officer crouched in front of Briony and took her wrist in one hand while she held a stopwatch in the other.
‘Not good,’ she pronounced and Briony found herself being frog-marched into the ambulance, an officer on either side of her. They made her lie down, then looked in her eyes with a torch, examined her tongue, put a tourniquet around her upper arm and took her pulse again. After that came a string of questions: what’s your name, what day of the week is it, where do you live, date of birth, when did you last eat, have you any history of asthma, diabetes, blood pressure problems, is there any history of heart disease in your family, are you on the pill? When they had scribbled their way through an elaborate set of printed forms, they gave her tea in a yellow plastic cup and allowed her to sit up and drink it. Briony felt confused one minute and irritated the next, but the irritation soon won out. While she was stuck here talking about what day it was, Jimmy and Steve would have gone back to the church and, yet again, she’d have to follow up like some kid who’d been left out of the game.
‘I need to go now: the said firmly. ‘I’ve got work to do. I’m on the investigation team and we’ve just heard there’s another incident.’
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ said the nurse. ‘To keep you on your feet. You haven’t blacked out or anything, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Take these.’ She handed Briony two shiny blue pills, and poured more tea into her cup. ‘You’ve got low blood pressure, did you know that? See your doctor about it as soon as you can. I suppose you won’t feel like eating right now, so I’ll give you some glucose sweets. Keep one in your mouth all the time.’
‘I have to go now,’ Briony repeated, as if to herself this time.
Another ambulance officer holding an intercom appeared in the doorway.
‘When you’re ready,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to move again. They want us up the other end of Commercial Street.’
‘I guess we’re all going to the same place, then,’ said the nurse, taking the cup from Briony’s hand. ‘Sit tight.’
The crowd had been moved back from around Mitre Passage and were lining Aldgate High Street, pushing up towards the steps leading into the churchyard entrance. A string of uniformed police were holding them back, and Brushfield Street opposite now looked like a police parking lot. Here she managed to lose the ambulance officers, who met up with two of their colleagues patrolling the spectators. Cameras were flashing intermittently and Briony was careful to keep her face turned away from them. Jimmy was standing at the church door adjusting the settings on his own camera. She gave him a glucose sweet.
‘Oh. What have I done to deserve that, then?’
‘It’s part of the shock treatment,’ said Briony. ‘The rest is just third degree interrogation. So what’s happened in there?’
‘Some bloke been strung up over the pulpit. I wouldn’t go in if you don’t have to.’
‘Of course I have to.’
The lock on the church doors had been removed completely, leaving big holes in the wood, which was being brushed for fingerprints. She stepped through into a cavernous space with a small floodlit area at the far end and recognised Macready and Latham amongst the small inner circle of police gathered there. They had their backs to her and seemed deep in discussion, but she had a clear view of the body. In the centre of the floodlit area was a heavily built canopied pulpit, raised about four feet off the ground and there, apparently standing in it, was an elderly man with his hands resting on the pages of a Bible propped up on the lectern, as if to start reading. Except that his mouth was wide open and thick dark blood had poured from it all over his text.
21
The shoes felt fine when Nell put them on in the morning, but by the time she’d got to the end of a day spent running errands over three floors of a large office building, they felt like instruments of torture. Apart from giving her blisters on both heels, they pinched her toes and forced her to tense up her arches to keep them on when she went up and down stairs. It was stupid to borrow other people’s shoes, she told herself repeatedly through the morning. She should have known it was a bad idea, but Rita insisted she couldn’t go to her new job in her old lace-ups. She’d intended to go out at lunch time and buy some smart sandals, but she found that it was part of a Girl Friday’s job to collect the lunches from the cafe down the road, so that just meant more blisters.
Was it worth all this for eleven pounds Fifty a week, Nell asked herself as she hobbled down the stairs of Leicester Square tube station with the rush hour crowds at the end of the afternoon. Mum had sent a twenty pound cheque for books, so if she lived on cheese sandwiches for the next three weeks until her grant came through, she probably wouldn’t need to get a job at all. But Julie had been determined to help her at Brook Street Bureau and Rita was planning a budget wardrobe that would set her up for the winter term.
Besides, here she was pushing her way into a tube train, just taking it as part of the day’s work. Maybe it was a good thing to have no time or energy for qualms. Hanging onto the strap in the middle of the carriage, she tried to read the back of someone’s newspaper, but he was holding it at the wrong angle. When she got out at Gloucester Road, she was surprised to find that the news-stand had sold out of evening papers.
Rita had Mondays off, so she was at home already after her afternoon’s shopping, watching Doctor Who. Nell thought the twins watched far too much TV, but she did like to see the six o’clock news and was quite taken aback when Rita suddenly switched it off.
‘So. How was your day?’
‘Fine. Can’t we watch the news?’
‘What, after your first day at work? You’re supposed to be full of news yourself. Tell me about it while I make some supper in the kitchen. I’m going to do a tuna pie which has to go into the oven for half an hour, so I’d better start now.’
An hour later, when Julie came home, Nell switched on the television assuming that they would watch it as usual while they ate, but Rita switched it off again.
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ she said, giving Julie a funny look.
Then while Nell was doing the washing up, it was obvious the twins were having some kind of argument in the sitting room. Suddenly, the penny dropped. There was something on the news that they didn’t want her to see. Something had been in the evening papers, sensational enough to cause a sell-out. Deciding to tackle the issue head-on, she dried her hands and went through.
‘So what’s happened? Is it a bomb somewhere?’ The twins glared at each other. Obviously they’d disagreed about what to say or not to say.
‘Just a horrible story in the paper,’ said Julie. ‘You don’t need to know anything about it. It’ll only upset you. By the way, Rita says you were complaining her shoes hurt. Why don’t you try those clog sandals of mine? They’re not the most elegant things, but they’d be better than your lace-ups.’
‘I think part of the problem is that my feet are bigger than yours. They’re broader, anyway. So what’s happened?’
‘Somebody got murdered,’ said Julie. ‘But it was right over the other side of London, in the East End.’
Next morning, the twins walked Nell to the tube station, frog-marched her, practically, one on either side, hurrying her past the placards saying ‘Whitechapel Murder — latest’ and ‘Ripper Rides again’. But once she’d got on the train, Nell was on her own, surrounded by people carrying newspapers, holding them up in her face so the headlines stared her in the eye. And when she got to the office, everyone was talking about it.
‘He cut her heart out,’ she heard one girl say, although that wasn’t quite true, ‘like Jack the Ripper. We’ll be scared to go home from work now.’
Nell picked up the incoming mail and began to sort it, as she’d been shown the previous day. Before she’d finished distributing it, another delivery came with four big boxes of stationery, which she had to stack in the cupboards, checking it off against the order sheets. If she kept moving, she could keep out of the conversations around her and luckily Julie’s clogs were a lot less uncomfortable than Rita’s shoes, so she could get around faster.
The most difficult moment in the day came at lunch time, when she went to collect the sandwiches.
‘Sorry, love,’ said the woman behind the counter, ‘I’m a bit behind this morning. Should be ready in a few minutes.’ She continued steadily buttering bread, laying on slices of meat and lettuce, or cheese and tomato and making a diagonal cut through each round with an unnecessarily large knife.
‘Well, I’m glad I don’t live in the East End,’ she said. ‘My brother’s over that way, working for the National Westminster in the Mile End Road and my sister-in-law’s that worried about the children. She was crying on the phone last night. Awful, isn’t it? In broad daylight, can you believe it? You have to wonder about which way the police were looking, don’t you? I just hope they catch him, that’s all. It’s dreadful to think of someone like that running round on the loose. Makes your flesh creep.’
‘Yes,’ said Nell. ‘I hope they catch him. Shall I come back in five minutes?’
‘Make it ten. Sorry love. It’s just been one of those mornings, you know?’
Nell slipped back out into the sunshine and began walking round the block. I hope they catch him, said a voice in her head. I hope they catch him. I hope they catch him. The words chimed in with the pace of her footsteps as she walked faster and faster, scaring off the city birds that were pecking at invisible things on tile footpath around her. She passed a newsagent and, on second thoughts, doubled back to buy a copy of the Guardian. There was going to be no hiding from this story, so she might as well read the facts from a reliable source. She found a bench in the shade and stared at the headline: ‘Double Murder in Whitechapel.’
In what seems like an eerie replay of one of the darkest episodes of the Jack the Ripper story, two people were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel area yesterday morning. The mutilated body of journalist Caroline Staines was found in a passageway off Mitre Square just after 9.30 am, and by 10.30 police had discovered a second body, that of the Reverend Burroughs, the rector of Christchurch in Spitalfields.
Miss Staines was reporting on a recent episode of vandalism at the church and left her office at the Evening Standard first thing yesterday morning to keep an appointment with the Reverend Burroughs. A grotesque painting found on the side wall of the church this morning shows a mutilated body in the style of Hogarth’s The Reward of Cruelty.
Like the Ripper, this is a killer who works quickly and with great skill. Police have declined to release details of the mutilations. A press release from Vine Street Police Station, where the investigation is headed by Detective Superintendent Macready, states that the police are ‘keeping an open mind’ about possible connections with the Gower Street murder committed on 14th August, but they believe the killer has professional medical knowledge and may have links with the West country.
Professional medical knowledge. What did that mean? She remembered those very words being used by a fat sergeant in Plymouth, when one of her interminable interviews with the police had stalled again and they started arguing among themselves.
She turned to the inside pages, where the report continued. Anyone who saw anything suspicious in the areas of Spitalfields, Whitechapel or Aldgate yesterday morning or on Sunday night is asked to contact the police on…She wrote the phone number on the inside of her wrist. An article on page four headed ‘The Dark World of Hogarth’ was accompanied by a photograph of the painting that the killer or killers had copied on the church wall.
Nell was surprised at how calm she felt. For years, she realised, she had wanted to talk to the police again. Talking to counsellors just made it all seem like something inside your head, but what it was really about was catching the killer. The police in Plymouth had interviewed her at length, but she couldn’t tell them what they needed to know and they never told her anything about their investigation. Once the newspapers had dropped the story, no one spoke of it again, except her counsellor, and by then it had become Nell’s problem, something that had taken up residence in her head, instead of something that had actually happened out there in the world.
Maybe there was no connection. Why should there have been? Maybe the police would have no interest in her story; but the feeling of calm meant something. She always knew it was going to happen again and not knowing where or when was what spooked her.
22
Vine Street on Tuesday morning seemed to be in complete chaos. Some of the staff had been drafted to the incident room in Spitalfields, but Macready had decided to base himself in his own office and was giving tasks to people right, left and centre. Briony didn’t know where she was supposed to be based herself, so she looked for an opportunity to catch Macready and get a couple of things sorted out.
Seeing the stenographer leave his office at around ten, she knocked on the door.
‘I’m busy,’ he called. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Williams, sir.’
The door was flung open and Macready stood there in his shirt sleeves, glaring at her in a way that almost made her turn and run.
‘You are better, then? Come in. Sit down.’ He closed the door sharply after her.
‘I need to get one or two things clear, sir.’
‘I expect you do. I am very sorry you are in this situation, Williams. This is no case for a young woman. It has taken a turn that none of us could have anticipated and I have decided it would be much better if you were assigned to some other investigation, where your considerable abilities would be more suited—’
‘No it wouldn’t.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sir — even if I am a novice, I’ve worked as hard as anyone on this case. I’ve found some good leads already and I can find more, but I feel as if I’m constantly being excluded.’
‘On the contrary, Williams. The mistake was to include you in yesterday’s expedition when it was clearly too much for you.’
‘It’s up to me to say what’s too much for me, sir. I was taken ill, that’s all, and if you and Latham hadn’t been so rude as to keep your backs turned to me all the time, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a sudden shock to you.’
Macready looked stunned.
Both sat in silence, until there was a knock at the door.
‘Go away!’ barked Macready and footsteps could be heard scuttling off down the corridor. He raised an eyebrow and looked sideways at Briony.
‘How is that for rudeness, Detective Inspector Williams? As you can see, I specialise in it. Do you have any further reprimands to deliver?’
‘No, sir, but I have a request. I need a warrant to go back through the records at Senate House. I’m convinced that the man Greg Kendrick described was Mathew Quin, but I need your endorsement to make the enquiries to establish that.’
There was a further silence.
‘It is against my better judgment,’ Macready said, ‘to licence such independent action on the part of a junior team member in a serious investigation, but I will allow you to pursue that line of enquiry provided you keep me informed of your progress on a daily basis. If your sense of independence exceeds the bounds of propriety, you will be removed from this case without further discussion. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And your other activities on this case will in future be restricted to interviews, as directed by me or Inspector Palgrave. You will not be involved in any further crime scene work. Is that also understood?’
Briony took a bit longer to answer this time.
‘Is that understood, Inspector Williams?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She got up to leave.
‘Oh, and Williams — you are fully recovered, are you?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir. Completely.’
‘I was actually rather distressed by what happened. So was Latham. I am very sorry.’
Briony found parts of this conversation replaying in her head for the rest of the day and reacted to them by turns with seizures of embarrassment and renewed surges of indignation. Palgrave delivered the warrant to her after he returned from Whitechapel in the afternoon, but didn’t seem inclined to discuss it with her.
