Hands of the Ripper Read online

  ‘Well,’ John settled back against the thin windowsill, trying to get comfortable, ‘I wouldn’t say it was a conversation exactly but it was certainly interesting.’

  ‘She a crook?’

  John didn’t really doubt the answer to that but his innate politeness made him pause before answering. ‘I’d say so,’ he admitted, ‘she used a lot of the usual tricks, misleading replies, Barnum statements …’

  ‘Barnum whats?’

  ‘“There’s something for everyone”, more accurately called the Forer effect. Phrasing statements in such a manner that they seem specific and yet could actually apply to lots of people. Astrologists are particularly fond of them.’

  ‘Well now,’ Ray smiled, ‘you just don’t believe in anything, do you?’

  ‘I’d like to,’ John admitted, ‘but nothing has presented itself just yet.’ Nothing except the constant presence of your long-dead wife, said a voice in his head, let’s not forget that.

  ‘That’s the problem with thinkers, they’re never satisfied. So you won’t be going again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ John admitted, picking at the flaking paint of the windowsill.

  ‘If she’s a fake then what’s the point?’

  ‘I’m intrigued by part of the act, a stooge she uses … think she uses.’

  ‘Well, if you need someone to hold your hand and buy drinks for then I’m happy to help.’

  John smiled and nodded. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Ray pressed the tip of his cigarette against the wet glass, painting it with a spiral of black ash. ‘Make sure you do.’

  He turned and walked back across the courtyard, the rain splashing off his waterproofed body, causing a fine spray that made him appear to be smouldering.

  John sprinkled the pieces of loose paint he’d picked out of the open window, feeling absurdly like a naughty child. He closed out the rain and returned to his desk to sip at a lukewarm mug of coffee and try and get his head straight.

  He had pretended to be uncertain as to whether he intended to visit Aida Golding again, which wasn’t in the least true. He planned on attending another of her ‘demonstrations’ that evening, alone this time; he was critical enough of his own behaviour without having Michael assist. Or Ray, for that matter. As sympathetic as he was he couldn’t bear the idea of the technician thinking he was just a pathetic old man mooning after a broken girl. Because it was more than that, wasn’t it? What was the word he had used when talking to Ray? Ah yes … intrigued.

  He finished his coffee trying to wash away his own self-deception with the last sugary mouthful.

  The rain still hadn’t stopped by the time he left his office. He tugged a bright yellow rain-slicker over himself, straddling his pushbike and yanking the ends of his waterproofs over the handlebars. Jane had used to laugh to see him ride up the driveway, ‘like a cheese on wheels’ she had announced, stepping back to let him clamber through the door.

  These days there was nobody to greet him but his vaguely insolent cat, Toby Dammit, a light-coloured Maine Coon that had always put John in mind of Terence Stamp, so wild was his hair and vacant his expression. Toby was not impressed at the intrusion of rainwater into his front hall and sauntered through to the kitchen to wait for food.

  John hung the waterproofs on a hook by the door and pulled off his soggy shoes. The hallway was dark and felt horribly empty and unwelcome. He looked out at the distorted reflections of streetlights through the frosted glass and gathered the strength to make the house his own.

  Houses need warming up emotionally. When left to chill they become soulless places of cool brick and isolation. John knew this only too well now he lived alone. He worked his way through the downstairs, turning on lights and drawing curtains. He inserted a CD, wanting to beat away the silence. He walked into the kitchen, paying off Toby with a couple of scoops of cat meat so that he could open a bottle of wine in peace. Just one glass, he decided, to warm him up and wash down dinner. Not that he had much time to eat. He’d need to leave the house again in three-quarters of an hour and he foolishly felt the need to wash away the rain with a warm shower before heading out in it once again. He found pasta leftovers and sipped at his wine while he watched the cling-filmed bowl revolve beyond the glass door of the microwave. Tonight’s ‘demonstration’ was not far away at a small venue somewhere behind Euston Station, on a pleasant day it would have been an enjoyable walk.

  His letterbox rattled and he stepped into the hallway to see what had been dropped through. The floor was empty. He decided it must have been the wind. Above him the stairs creaked and he glanced up through the balusters.

  ‘Jane?’ The word was out of his mouth before he had even thought about it and he pressed his hand to his lips as if shocked by their thoughtlessness. He shared the house with nobody else, of course, but still, he was not so deluded as to think it was his wife making the boards creak. He definitely couldn’t catch her shape in the dark shadow that gathered towards the roof. Couldn’t imagine her feet, pale blue veins running underneath the white skin, as they descended into the light, the only part of her that would dare to do so. He could see nothing of the sort. And just to make sure of the fact he went back into the kitchen where the microwave switched itself off with an earthly ‘ping’. He drained his wine, poured another and refused to imagine that his dead wife was descending the stairs and making her dry and creaky way towards his turned back.

  He ate quickly, shaking off his fears and nerves with every hot forkful. He was a silly, over-imaginative old man and he should know better. Had Jane taken every rational part of him with her when she died?

  He forced himself upstairs, refusing to turn the light on until he reached the landing. He wouldn’t be scared in his own home.

  Turning on the shower he stripped off and caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror.

  How ridiculous age makes us, he thought, looking at his pale, stodgy body. And not just the flesh, he admitted before stepping into the shower.

  He turned on the water to as hot as he could bear, which stung and his skin glowed pink. It made him growl as he frothed his hair into a plume of foam. If only everything could be scrubbed away by hot water and soap. He rinsed the shampoo from his head and rubbed at his eyes, opening them to see something move beyond the steamed-up, frosted plastic of the shower cubicle. He froze, staring at the indistinct shape a couple of feet away. It was still now but he was sure he had seen it sway. It was a game of statues, the thing had been advancing on him while his eyes were closed but now, while watched, it was as immobile as he was, waiting for his attention to move away so it could creep forward again. But his attention wouldn’t fade. He didn’t dare allow it to. The shower continued to dowse him and he was grateful for the noise it made. He didn’t want to know what the shape sounded like as – heedless of the fact he was watching – it began to move closer. He backed against the wall as it pressed its face up against the cubicle, a pale, grey face, split into bars by the distortion of the plastic. He could imagine her skin, dead but damp, like the soft white flesh of a verruca, ready to be pulled from the bone. One eye watched him, the other was a dark hollow, empty, he guessed, a passage for beetles, worms or whatever else made its home in a body as decrepit as this.

  ‘Jane?’ he asked. ‘Jane, why are you doing this?’

  His back nudged the water control and suddenly the heat was gone, replaced with a torrent of icy cold. He gave a startled cry, yanking the water tap off. The body outside the cubicle was gone, the bathroom empty.

  He sat on his bed slowly drying himself off. The stress of losing Jane was considerable, no wonder it had caused side effects. Were these apparitions the sign of a guilty conscience? Certainly he had grown to wish her dead during the last couple of months. There had been so little of the woman he loved in the brittle, bed-bound creature that had shared his home. It had breathed with all the desperate agony of a woman near-drowned, each breath of air snatched from the suffocating room as if it migh
t be her last. Her eyes had looked on delirium. She had rarely known him, thanks to the painkillers. The doctors at the hospice had assured him that everything was designed to help ease her passing but it had taken little time for him to realise that there was no dignity left for the woman he loved. Just a descent into madness and living death.

  And still she wouldn’t let go.

  He dressed quickly, not wanting to spend any longer in the house than necessary, and soon he was back out in the rain, hiding from ghosts in the company of those who professed to be surrounded by them.

  This formed the pattern of his life for some time. He made a point of visiting every demonstration Aida Golding offered that was within easy commuter distance. This in itself was no great challenge as there was enough business in London to keep her occupied five nights a week.

  He watched her in public halls, gymnasiums, fringe theatres and the back rooms of pubs. She moved easily between them, from the chilly pretension of art-house stages to the beer-soaked velvet and dark wood of ancient taverns. And in every room her powers appeared on form, she passed on messages of love, advice and even recrimination from deceased loved ones, her audiences always willing to take what she offered. He found himself often seeing the same faces, eager for the next instalment from beyond the grave. Henry’s widow was a regular feature, forever dismissing the venues as beneath both her and her long-suffering husband. Despite his natural reservations, John found himself talking to her about Jane, though the older woman was, of course, far more interested in talking than listening. Alasdair was there of course, taking tickets and dealing with unruly guests (which, like the panicked Trevor on the first night John had seen Golding perform, were not unusual).

  And then there was Sandy. Despite the fact that he had become increasingly convinced that there was very little true about the girl’s story – including her name, he had no doubt – John was just as drawn to her after repeated meetings. The only thing about her that he believed real were the tears on her cheeks and the scars on her arms, though as to the underlying cause for these symptoms he couldn’t begin to say.

  Every now and then he came close to talking to her but was embarrassed to find that, like a nervous schoolboy, he clammed up as soon as he got near.

  But then, what exactly did he have to say? ‘Hello, I’ve become unhealthily obsessed with you and was just wondering if you would do me the kindness of telling me what really drove you to self-mutilate?’ Hardly.

  So what did he expect to gain from all this? What insight could he possibly achieve other than the rather obvious one that desperate people will do anything in order to find comfort?

  He certainly couldn’t afford to keep attending with such regularity, at ten pounds a ticket it was an expensive folly as well as a pointless one.

  Yes, all very logical, and yet still he went. Observing from the darkness as the grieving and the greedy exchanged business. It occurred to him one night, as he watched an elderly woman weep over the death of her mother some twenty years earlier, that he was no better than Jane at letting go.

  Three

  Lying in the Dark

  ‘CAN WE MEET up?’ asked Michael. ‘I could do with some advice.’

  John shuffled the mobile from one ear to the other. ‘Let me guess, you’re gay?’

  ‘That’s it precisely. How about a sandwich or something? I can tell you all about it.’

  ‘I’m free at one, that do?’

  ‘Fine, I’ll meet you at Verano.’

  Verano was a little cafe just across the road from the main university building. The sort of student-orientated place that offered soup and sandwiches at a price they could nearly afford. John didn’t eat there often as he always felt he was intruding into their world, crossing some indefinable line between student and lecturer. Still, he and Michael could always grab something to take away, better that than try and talk in the middle of this rugby scrum for cheese and pickle.

  ‘Oh, hey sir,’ John found himself face to face with Shaun Vedder, the student that had given Golding’s flyer to Ray.

  ‘Hi Shaun, all good?’

  ‘Yeah, well, they’ve run out of vegetable tikka wraps so, no, lunch sucks but I’ll get over it.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘You ever go see that medium?’

  John was thrown by that, it had never occurred to him that Ray might have mentioned his interest. ‘Medium?’ he replied, more to buy time than out of any confusion.

  ‘Yeah, Ray told me you might look into it. Writing some kind of paper or something?’

  ‘Oh …’ John feigned casual remembrance, aware that he was doing it badly, ‘yes, something like that.’

  ‘Only, if you need any help I’m kind of into that sort of thing myself. Be cool to do some coursework on it.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see … I’m not sure if I—’

  ‘No problem.’

  John could see Shaun was upset. He was the sort of kid that always wanted to impress, determined to make friends with every member of the faculty.

  ‘I’m just not a hundred per cent on where I’m going with it yet,’ John insisted, ‘but I’d definitely give you a shout if—’

  ‘Cool.’ Shaun clearly wasn’t fooled and left the cafe with a false smile firmly fixed in place. In the doorway he almost collided with Michael.

  ‘Hi,’ Michael said, once he had picked out his father’s face from the crowd, ‘have I picked the most popular place to eat in the city?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ John smiled. ‘Let’s grab something and then take it back to my office, we’ll have some peace and quiet that way.’

  *

  John’s office had long since ousted human comfort in favour of expanding quantities of paper. Books lined the walls, student reports and Internet printouts slithered between magazines and journals. The whole room rustled.

  ‘Years since I’ve been in here,’ said Michael while he waited for his dad to clear a place for him to sit.

  ‘Years since anyone’s been in here except me,’ John admitted, dumping back issues of The Psychologist onto the floor so as to free up a small chair that had been hiding beneath them. ‘I tend to conduct interviews in the canteen, it’s cleaner and serves coffee.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Michael, sitting down and carefully unwrapping his beef and horseradish sandwich.

  ‘So,’ said John, ‘what was it you wanted to talk about?’

  Michael, mouth full of sandwich rolled his eyes and chewed.

  ‘In your own time,’ said John, ‘I mean, some of us have jobs to do but …’

  Michael kicked his father’s shin and swallowed. ‘Git,’ he said, ‘lunch first, talk later.’

  ‘All right,’ his father agreed, picking at a pasta salad. He had no enthusiasm for his lunch, too impatient to eat. His life seemed to be stuck in a state of anticipation and unease, his evenings filled with confrontations he wanted and yet feared. Now Michael, the most laid-back son one could imagine, ‘wanted to talk’. He imagined it would be something to do with work. John wasn’t blind to the fact that Michael hadn’t seemed to have had any for some time. It was a subject on which he never pried, knowing that Michael’s pride would put him on the defensive as soon as the subject came up. His son had been a jobbing actor for the last twelve years, having jacked in a promising career in law in order to ‘follow his dream’. John had always supported the decision – life was miserable enough at times without doing a job you loathed – but he would be a liar if he didn’t admit that he wished a more stable lifestyle for his son. The work, when it came, was reasonably paid but the long periods between jobs sapped Michael’s confidence and John hated seeing the morose and uncommunicative man he sometimes became as a result.

  ‘You know I said about Laura and I getting a place together?’ his son said after finally finishing his food.

  John speared a particularly slippery piece of red pepper with his fork and nodded.

  ‘Well, in truth I’ve been suggesting it because of
money more than anything else. It seemed to make sense that we chip in for one place rather than paying for two. Thing is, she’s talking about buying a place but you know what my life’s like, I just can’t afford to commit to a mortgage. But how do I tell her? I don’t want her to think that I’m having cold feet, don’t want to panic her about the lousy proposition she’s taking on either …’

  ‘Laura’s not worried about that sort of thing.’

  ‘She should be, everyone should be these days, nobody’s got any money and things are getting worse not better.’

  ‘As true as that might be she still isn’t going to run a mile because you’re not Rockefeller.’

  Michael smiled. ‘I don’t even know who Rockefeller is.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, just being old … you get my point though.’

  ‘I guess. Still doesn’t solve the problem though does it? And to make things worse, Laura has to move. The landlord’s selling the place off, wants to go and open a restaurant in Spain or something.’

  ‘Any chance she could get a waitressing job?’

  ‘Be serious, Dad! I’m worried.’

  ‘I know, sorry.’ John gave up on his pasta salad, slowly sealing the plastic tub closed again and tossing it into the wastepaper bin. ‘What about my place?’ he asked finally.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I don’t need a three-bedroom house, do I? Your mother and I always promised each other that we’d sell up and get something smaller. Once you’d left we rattled around the place. We just never seemed to get around to it. Of course, once she got ill it was the least of our concerns.’ He took a sip of his tea, wanting to wash away the mental image of Jane lying in bed, wilting under the sheets like rotting vegetation. ‘We could split the place up, maybe. I could take the downstairs, turn the dining room into a bedroom, you could have upstairs.’

  ‘It’s your home.’ Michael was shocked by the idea, uncertain of what to say.

  ‘Wouldn’t be any less so if I shared it with you, would it? Of course I know it’s not ideal, you and Laura would want your privacy, that’s why I think we should turn it into two flats, give each other our space. It wouldn’t be difficult. Or that expensive.’