Foster sighed. 'The pattern is all over the place.
First victim looks like he was kidnapped two months before he was killed; the second barely two hours before he was killed. The second and third have had body parts removed, the first didn't. The second's hands are still missing, the third's eyes turn up the same morning as the body. The only thing that's constant is the reference and the fact that the place and time accord with the murders of 1879.'
The door handle turned. Perry emerged from the room. 'Let's get on with this,' he said.
Nigel had done all he could do to occupy himself that day, but no matter what he did -- opened a book, retreated into the past as his usual method of escape -- he was unable to expunge the image of the dead woman, her sightless eye sockets, her alabaster skin punctured with holes like black moons.
Towards the end of the afternoon, as he lay wide awake in bed seeking sleep he would never get, he heard the sound of his telephone. Thinking, hoping, it might be Foster and Jenkins, he scrambled out from the tangle of sheets and found it. The voice on the other end was familiar but unwelcome.
'Hello, Nigel.'
Gary Kent.
'What do you want?' he snapped. Knowing exactly what.
'Dammy Perry.'
'What?'
'The young woman whose body you stumbled across, if that's the right phrase, this morning. Was wondering if there's anything more you can tell me?'
'I'm not saying anything,' Nigel said, preparing to put the receiver back in its cradle.
'What, got another student in your bed, have you?'
Nigel froze. Unable to react.
'Two hours on a university campus can teach you many things. Hardly national news, but I'm sure I could get it placed somewhere.'
'Are you blackmailing me?'
Kent ignored his question. 'What's this about the cops getting the wrong tube station?'
How did he know that?
'Goodbye, Gary.'
He put the phone down, then picked it up and laid it off the hook. His hand trembled; Kent had shaken him. Dammy Perry, he had said the name was. At least Nigel now had a name to go with the face. He did not know what to think about Kent's revelation that he knew what had happened at the university. Should he tell Foster and Jenkins? He decided against it.
He dressed. He needed to go out, to walk and expend some energy. In the back of his mind he knew where he was going, but didn't yet want to ask himself why. Something was drawing him back there.
The early-evening air was fresh; it was still light and the streets around the Bush were crowded. He headed straight past the Green towards Holland Park, under the roundabout gridlocked by traffic even at the weekend. From there he headed up Holland Park Avenue, turning left into Princedale Road, past the silent garden squares overlooked by enormous stucco townhouses. Soon he was in the warren-like streets of Notting Dale. It was as if the air was different, less clear. He passed the old brick kiln on Walmer Road, the only relic of the time when the Dale was famous for three things: remorseless poverty, brick-making and pigs. Once, when the police came in to settle an altercation, the locals rose up against them, forming bricks out of the dried pig shit that covered the ground and hurling them at the cops. Dickens had written about this area, describing it as one of the most deprived in London, amazed that such squalor existed in the middle of such elegance.
The brick kiln was now a converted flat. Worth half a million pounds.
At the top of Walmer Road he cut through the corner of a council estate, arriving at Lancaster Road.
He could feel his throat tighten as he neared the scene. What he expected to find when he got there, he didn't know. He walked to Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, following the same route as the previous night. There were fewer people but still the same throb of energy and life; it felt strange to him, as if the whole area should be in shock and mourning.
At the opening to the alleyway a solitary policeman stood sentinel. Behind him Nigel could see tape flapping in the wind; the scene was still closed. There was no way through. He walked up Ladbroke Grove, taking the first left down Cambridge Gardens, then a left on to St Mark's Road. As he turned he saw a police car blocking the entry, behind it more tape fluttering forlornly. Part of him was relieved; he wasn't sure what his reaction would have been if he'd been able to visit the scene.
He looked around: it was an anonymous part of town, nestling in the lea of the overhead motorway and a raised railway line. A light under the Westway glowed in the half-light, illuminating three recycling bins with broken glass scattered on the floor around one bin. He decided to make his way back home, perhaps stop off for a recuperative pint.
He passed under both the Westway and the tube line. A train rattled overhead, shaking the structure.
He crossed over, past a newly built close of houses.
And stopped.
He walked a few steps back. He read the name of the street once more: Bartle Road. It was not much of a street; on one side were beige-bricked bungalows, on the other were private parking spaces bordered by an old stone wall that backed on to the arches of the railway, where a garage had made its home. Nigel felt his heartbeat quicken. So this is where it was.
He walked down the street, counting off the houses. One, two, each of them identical. After number nine he stopped: between it and the next building was an incongruous gap. Visible over the top of the wall was a tangled bush, little else. The next house after the gap was number 11. It was true, he thought; there is no number 10. When Rillington Place was bulldozed in the 1970s, it was rebuilt and renamed Bartle Road. But, obviously, the developers had decided to take no chances and had left a hole where number 10 should have been.
These sordid stories of London's past delighted him; dark secrets that offered a glimpse behind the city's net curtains. Ten Rillington Place was the home of John Christie, a post-war serial killer who strangled a string of young women he had lured back to his rotting, soot-soaked little Victorian terraced house.
He had sex with their lifeless corpses before either burying them in the garden or, as he did with his wife's remains, stowing them in a cupboard. He was hanged for his crimes, though only after Timothy Evans, a barely literate neighbour of Christie's, had been wrongly executed for murdering his wife and child. The real culprit, Christie, had been chief prosecution witness at Evans's trial.
Nigel stood staring at the gap. He had come to revisit one murder scene, only to encounter another.
Little more than a hundred yards away from this scene of horror, another serial killer was writing his name into London legend. When he was eventually brought to justice, would they bulldoze any of the buildings in which this killer had struck? Nigel knew such efforts were futile. The past cannot be erased so easily. You can knock something down; you can change names; you can try all you want to wipe these acts from history, he thought. But the past seeps back through the soil, like blood through sand. Or lingers in the air. Always there.
He pulled his brick of a mobile from his pocket and dialled Foster.
Seeing his sister's mutilated corpse had broken Simon Perry. After nodding to indicate it was her, his legs had crumpled beneath him. Foster helped him to a side room and summoned a doctor. He was sedated and taken home. After making sure he was all right, Foster returned to the corpse. The cleaned, livid wounds across her breasts spelled out the reference.
Closer inspection of the body also revealed several track marks in her arm that suggested drug use. Her internal organs displayed no sign of damage from heavy use.
He and Heather returned to the incident room in Kensington. Waiting for them was Nella Perry's boyfriend, Jed Garvey. He turned out to be the sort of Trustafarian fool for whom Foster had nothing but disdain. With no need to make a living between dates, dealers and dinner parties, these people, he imagined, flitted from one job to another, alighting on something that would fill their time, give them a cachet, until it became financially unviable and they were either bailed out or moved on to a horse of a different colour.