Hands of the Ripper Read online

  He didn’t quite know how to respond so just stood there as she stepped back into the room and closed the door behind her.

  He stood on the landing for a moment, listening to her move around the room, then went into the spare bedroom and undressed for sleep. Lying in bed he listened to the noises beyond the wall and finally admitted to himself that it was far nicer to be haunted by someone who was alive.

  ‘And where the hell have you been?’ cried a woman’s voice from the bedroom.

  Llewellyn Probert sighed, flung his overcoat on a chair and crept manfully towards the whisky decanter. He had been craving a drink for hours. Now, just as he could almost taste it on his lips, he had to endure an earful from the vicious creature he had the misfortune of sharing a marriage with. When would the Almighty give him a bloody hour off?

  ‘I’ve been at the police station,’ he shouted, pleased at the shocked response he knew such an answer would cause.

  ‘You’ve been where?’ The partition doors that sealed the main bedroom off from the rest of the Probert’s open-plan apartment rattled apart and his wife stood, wild-eyed between them.

  He looked at her, ruffled hair, silk gown awry and – most importantly – a face on her that could make a Dobermann flinch. God, he thought, I could almost fancy the volcanic sow. He knew better than to pursue that thought. A sane man didn’t try to sleep with Kathleen; she’d emasculate them with a single bite of her sex. Mistresses, that was the safe way forward.

  Which made him think of Thana calling for her Helly, and his mood soured yet further.

  He took a sip of his drink. A large one. Then added a dash of water. All of which prevarication served only to make his wife more furious.

  ‘Well? What’s wrong with you, you silly man? Out with it!’ Normally her attempts at such English phraseology amused him, given her origins across the Atlantic. The one thing Kathleen tried to hide the most was her heritage.

  ‘I have been helping the police with their enquiries after having had the misfortune of witnessing a man commit suicide.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ she pushed him out of the way and poured a drink for herself. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Just that,’ he replied, going some way towards finishing his drink, eager for a crack at another. ‘I was at a dinner party – as I told you – when one of the guests, a priest no less, decided he could no longer go on and opened his throat with a carving knife.’

  ‘Absurd!’

  ‘Quite, he didn’t even have dessert.’

  ‘Oh! How could you? What have you really been doing?’

  ‘All flippancy aside, my dear,’ he eased his way back alongside the decanter and made a solid use of its services, ‘I’m telling the truth. I know it’s shocking but there you go. The man obviously had a screw loose, he was involved in that East End Ripper case years ago, do you remember it?’

  ‘East End Ripper? Oh Llewellyn, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Never mind, it was a big murder investigation back in the eighties. Lunatic went around eviscerating women. The point is, this priest, Father Goss, knew the murderer. He’d been talking about it, in a rather unhinged manner. The chap got more and more excited until he just snapped, right there at the dinner table. He topped himself. Horrendous. Of course, being of some influence, I did everything I could to help.’

  ‘To hell with helping, wait until the press get wind of it. Oh Lord … like we haven’t had enough of their attention lately.’

  ‘I haven’t been in the papers for well over a year, dear, you do exaggerate. Anyway, I rang Howard and got him on the case. He assures me that there won’t be a peep from anyone about it. On pain of a court date and sufficient damages to rupture a small country.’

  ‘Do stop posturing.’

  Probert sighed. ‘Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,’ he muttered.

  ‘What? It’s not all about you, you know, I’ve been awake all night wondering where the hell you’d got to.’

  ‘How terrible for you.’ He drained his drink. ‘Well, now you’ve found me might I suggest you get some sleep. A bit of peace and quiet would do us both some good.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, slamming her glass down and storming back to the bedroom, ‘let’s not spare a thought for my feelings. They hardly matter. I’m only the one whose money keeps you afloat!’

  She dragged the doors shut behind her and Probert refilled his glass and raised it after her. ‘That’s it,’ he muttered, ‘don’t forget to bring up the money, and don’t – whatever you do, my contemptible little darling – choke on your poisonous tongue in the night.’

  But the image of his wife’s dead body, purple and bloated, only served to remind him of Thana again.

  ‘You miss me,’ he could imagine her saying, ‘don’t you, Helly?’

  He remembered the smell of her, closed his eyes and – just for a moment – imagined how it would feel were she to walk up behind him now, just as she had done countless times in the past, place her hands on his shoulders and kiss him on the nape of his neck. He imagined he could hear the creak of leather and the rustle of plastic. He imagined what she might say as she whispered in his ear.

  ‘They took my eyes, Helly, why did you let them take my eyes?’

  He shook in his chair, looking around to thoroughly dispel the unwelcome thought that his dead mistress was somehow in the room with him. After that he decided to drink enough scotch that imagining – or indeed any thought at all – became difficult.

  Davinia Harris could barely find the energy to step through her own front door.

  Tonight had been a strange mixture of elation and heartbreak. My life to a tee, she thought, hanging up her coat and making her way through into the kitchen. She wanted a hot drink and then to sink into a chair and let the night’s stresses slowly peel away. She also wanted to stop thinking about John Pritchard.

  ‘Silly man,’ she said, ‘he seemed so nice.’

  She looked around as she so frequently did, looking for a sign of her Henry, a vague glimmer perhaps, a shadow deeper than the others. ‘It just upset him,’ she decided, ‘that’s what it was. And who can blame him? It was very upsetting. I shan’t rest easy for days.’

  She dropped a teabag in a mug and stood close to the kettle, stealing away some of its warmth. The central heating was on a timer and had long since turned off. In an hour or so it would reignite and begin to ease the chill from this old house of ghosts. Now it was at its coldest, icy and unwelcoming in the dead of the night.

  ‘Did you see it, Henry?’ she asked. ‘Did you actually see it happen? It would be a relief to know … if only you could tell me. If only you would say.’

  She found she was crying, which only served to make her angry with herself. ‘There’s no time for that sort of nonsense,’ she said, ‘and if you were a better husband you certainly wouldn’t have stood by and let me be in the same room as something like that. See what I’m reduced to, just following you around? Just for a few words of comfort …’

  She made her tea and took it through into the lounge.

  She sat down in one of her floral easy chairs, the cushions giving as deep-throated a sigh as she did herself.

  ‘I’m sure he must have killed himself,’ she said. ‘That’s what you’d tell me if you could, isn’t it? Because there’s no other explanation, is there? It can’t be that … it can’t be that …’

  She placed her tea on the small table beside her, rather that than let her nervous hands drop it on the floor.

  ‘It can’t be that one of them who killed him …’

  Aida ‘Granny’ Golding didn’t wait for Alasdair to put the car away in the garage. She went straight through the front door and headed upstairs. Downstairs was for guests, every room carefully stage-managed so as to give exactly the impression she wished. Upstairs was lighter, more modern, less obsessed with the cosy and the quaint.

  She shrugged off her coat and flung
her cardigan on the back of a chair. Grabbing a packet of cigarettes from the sideboard she lit up and went on the hunt for something to drink. Tonight … no, this morning was definitely a time for giving in to one’s addictions.

  As she laid her hands on a half bottle of vodka she heard the front door close downstairs and Alasdair’s feet on the stairs. She decided the vodka would be best with the remains of a bottle of Coke she found in the fridge. When he entered she was filling her glass with roughly half of each.

  ‘Make me one,’ Alasdair said.

  She grunted but poured him a distinctly smaller measure and handed it over.

  ‘What a night,’ he said, before drowning the redundant statement with a mouthful of his drink. ‘You think it’ll be all right?’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t spent this many years grubbing around church halls and sports centres to see things fall apart now.’

  ‘People won’t like it if they hear something like this has happened at one of your sessions.’

  ‘No, Alasdair,’ she replied with venom, ‘they fucking wouldn’t. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, this is something the adults can fix.’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that. Besides, you’d be in a right state without me so maybe you ought to remember that before having a pop.’

  ‘Alasdair, darling, do shut up and let me think.’

  Alasdair opened his mouth to argue but decided against it, storming off with his drink.

  Aida smoked her cigarette with single-minded devotion. Once finished she lit another and topped up her drink. She wanted to pollute herself, to rub out the precise, puritan pretence that was ‘Granny’ Golding and be herself for the few hours that remained between now and sleep. She had been so busy of late. Trapped so long in the cardigans and wool-mix, soft and inoffensive beneath the tight perm. She had been ‘Granny’ Golding so long that the sweet old dear had become as real as her, perhaps even more so.

  She looked at her reflection in the glass of the window and tried to picture the real woman beneath. She couldn’t, the possession was too strong, the real Aida was no more than a ghost.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked a young voice.

  Never, thought the medium, has a more important question been asked.

  She turned to see young James stood in the doorway, eyes hooded, pyjamas tugged long in both the arms and legs. A tired little man that wanted to bury himself away in the soft cottons of sleep.

  Aida stubbed out her cigarette and swooped him up in a hug.

  ‘Nothing you need to worry about,’ she told him, carrying him out of the kitchen and straight across the landing to his room. It was dark but for the swirling starlight that spilled out from his night-light. She laid him down beneath this ever-moving night-sky and lay next to him for a while, watching the shapes dance across the ceiling. Five pointed stars, Saturn and her rings, the crater-pocked moon. All child-like representations of things so much bigger than a human mind could really understand. All we ever do, she thought, as little James fell asleep next to her, is sketch the universe and try and make it small enough to hold in our hands and our heads. All we want to do is make things small.

  ‘To hell with infinity,’ she muttered. ‘Give me cold, hard reality every time.’

  ‘Mmm?’ James turned in his sleep, half hearing her.

  ‘Nothing, darling boy,’ she replied, ‘sleep.’

  Eventually, they both did.

  Outside, still very much awake, Trevor Court watched the lights turning off in Aida Golding’s upstairs rooms.

  ‘Night, night,’ he said, sucking the tips of his fingers. He cut the nails too short, wanting to keep them free from dirt. It was a thankless task, as often the pink tips would bleed and then he’d have to pick away the scabs, always trying to reach the pure, unblemished skin underneath. But picking them only made them bleed again. How he wished he could leave his wounds alone. Wounds like Aida Golding. They made him so sore. And there was always so much blood.

  But sometimes you just had to.

  Seven

  The Division

  JOHN WOKE TO the first dry skies for weeks. It wasn’t only that that made him happy.

  ‘What a stupid old man you are,’ he told the distended reflection in the chrome surface of the toaster, but felt no more conviction than his double did remorse.

  He poured himself a bowl of cereal and ate it while looking out of the window at his small garden. It had the hunched and tired demeanour of a man that has been beaten up and is hoping to avoid worse. The flowers had had the petals slapped from them, the bushes bent their backs and cowered like dogs, the cypress hedge needed to comb its hair, stray branches splayed at all angles. He didn’t care. It was green and fresh and would soon be back on its own feet if the rain stayed away. Not that the presenter on the radio seemed convinced that was likely. ‘Enjoy the break from the rain,’ he said, with all the earnestness of a man giving advice to a favourite child, ‘the forecasters say it’ll be back soon enough.’

  ‘Perhaps we should build an ark!’ suggested the chirpy producer who seemed determined to muddle up his job description by being as ever-present on air as the DJ who had been employed by the studio for the purpose. ‘At this rate we’ll all be washed away.’

  Something the news then had the unfortunate timing to confirm as it ran with the lead story of an elderly couple drowned in flooding.

  John turned off the radio, conscious that it might wake Anna. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he should wake her. Was he really proposing to let a stranger – who he knew had been in the employ of a woman who wished him ill – have the run of his house? Did he expect to return to find his belongings in place? Surely she would be on the phone to Alasdair or Glen the moment he was past the front gate, encouraging them to come round and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down before trashing the rest. What proof did he even have that she had left Aida Golding’s influence?

  ‘None whatsoever,’ he announced, putting on his bicycle clips, grabbing his bag and heading out of the door.

  He found not caring incredibly uplifting.

  The bike ride to the campus continued his good feeling. It seemed to him that London was picking itself back up after a war. People mopping the floors of their shops, pedestrians glancing at the sky as if unable to believe such good fortune, umbrellas furled, heads dry.

  He pulled into the college campus, narrowly avoiding Shaun Vedder, who was shuffling aimlessly around the place as usual. Not that this was unusual behaviour for any of the students, often you couldn’t get a complex sentence structure from them until mid-afternoon. Vedder spun around to watch John ride towards his office and managed a slow wave once he realised who it was.

  ‘Stoned out of his tree,’ John chuckled, swinging the bike around the corner of the science block and heading the last few feet towards his office.

  Dismounting, he carried his bike inside the building. He’d used to chain it up outside but after a spate of robberies a few months back nobody dared leave their bikes in plain sight. He’d taken to shoving his in the nest of AV cable and stale tobacco that was Ray’s office. If the technician nicked it, it would only be so he could get to the corner shop and back quickly because he had the urge for a pasty.

  ‘Morning!’ he announced cheerily as he barged through the door.

  ‘Jesus!’ Ray had thrown his roll-up down the back of the desk thinking it was some less-forgiving member of the faculty. ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you drunk? How dare you come in here smiling at this time of term.’ He dropped to his hands and knees and went on the hunt for his cigarette before it burned the desk down.

  ‘I’m sure all the joy will be knocked out of me by lunchtime,’ John admitted. ‘I’m just glad to see it’s stopped raining.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Ray muttered from somewhere behind a cat’s cradle of power leads, ‘nobody looks as happy as you do without sex or narcotics, which is it?’

  ‘I can’t remember the
last time I enjoyed either, though our friend Shaun Vedder certainly seems to have had his fair share of the latter this morning.’

  ‘Nah … poor sod’s mum’s dead, isn’t she? I heard someone talking about it in the canteen.’

  ‘Oh,’ John sat down, his good mood dented. ‘Poor lad, is he heading home?’

  ‘Not sure. From what I gather she brought him up on her own so he’s not got much to go home to. He’s not in a good state though, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’ll try and talk to him maybe, offer him a bit of support.’

  ‘You do that.’ Ray reappeared, cigarette between his lips, ‘I’m sure that’ll make all the difference.’

  ‘You’re a jaded old git, you know that?’

  ‘Just a realist. You mean to tell me a chat from someone you didn’t know would have helped you after Jane? It’s just something you have to get through, isn’t it?’

  John nodded, though even Ray, for all his blunderbuss sensibilities, knew that John was still a long way from having ‘got through’ it. ‘I’ll still try, I wouldn’t want him to feel he has no support.’

  ‘Such a pinnacle of kindness. Why don’t you help me more often? I need a shoulder to cry on too, you know.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how little I’m getting laid.’

  ‘Bye, Ray.’

  ‘Get out you heartless bastard, you’re no friend of mine.’

  Under normal circumstances, John would have expected to see Shaun Vedder that very morning. Though when the young man didn’t show for his lecture he wasn’t surprised.

  Talking on autopilot, John realised his heart wasn’t in it. He looked out at the audience of students, some taking notes, some just staring into their own thoughts, and realised there was nothing worse in education than going through the motions.

  ‘Psychology,’ he said, completely changing the tack of his speech, ‘is the science of understanding why the mind disagrees with itself. Why it will constantly fly in the face of logic and reason.’ It was proof that he had been boring them that only a couple seemed wrong-footed by his sudden gear-change. ‘We are at the mercy of our automatic triggers, our hang-ups and phobias. We are constantly doing the wrong thing because our minds give us no option.’ He paused and then decided to go for broke.