‘Yeah.’ Ross took out one of her enormous rough books and wrote it down.
Costain found himself taking pleasure in that. ‘Ever since we found those files in Docklands-’
She suddenly looked straight at him, as if he’d caught her out, then looked away again, as if she’d revealed too much of herself. Interesting. ‘What?’ she said, finding something else to write.
He drew closer to her and she closed the book, as if to stop him seeing inside it. ‘The Continuing Projects Team were obsessed with architecture,’ he said. ‘Maybe our two victims were just in the wrong place, kind of like deadly feng shui.’
Ross nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. Her face wasn’t giving anything away.
‘Perhaps you’d like to share with the class?’ Fennix had stopped and, having realized that Ross and Costain weren’t going to shut up, had decided to mock them for it. That had got a laugh too.
Get many tips, do you? Costain flashed the man his most generous grin. ‘We’re just fascinated with this stuff, mate. Tell us more. We were just saying there’s a Jewish graveyard round the corner-’
‘Ah, yes.’ The actor nodded solemnly. ‘We’ll be visiting the site of the original eerie message implicating our Judaic friends, found over a piece of a victim’s soiled clothing, later. Was there a Jewish conspiracy involved? Is that conspiracy still afoot in London today, behind two modern murders? Was Jack’s original message a protest about the capitalist excesses of his own times, which resonates in the modern day? Or is it the other way round?’ He quickly looked at his tour party, as if to gauge their sensibilities and/or ethnicities. ‘Is it a conspiracy to blame these terrorist acts on the Jews? Are they to be the fall guys for the New World Order yet again? Were these prostitutes — I mean, these proper young ladies — ’ he paused for the delayed laugh again — ‘slaughtered according to secret religious ceremonies as per the request of the secret rulers of the world, the Illuminati? Perhaps we shall see. Perhaps. But let us begin at our starting point, the bloody scene before us. Imagine it!’ With a sweep of his cape, he walked over to a wall. He pointed to the kerb beside it. ‘How much scrubbing did it take to remove every trace of such a scrubber?’ Perhaps knowing that the line wouldn’t translate, he moved swiftly on. ‘She’d been the wife of a printer’s machinist.’ Costain didn’t know what that was, and suspected, given the ease with which the phrase had come out, neither did this bloke; it was just one of those things that got written down and repeated. It sounded as if Fennix had added his modern conspiracy rhetoric to an older script at the last minute. It was hardly convincing. But the crowd seemed to be lapping it up. He continued, ‘But she was too fond of the bottle, and their marriage broke up when she started turning tricks to supplement her income.’
Costain realized, as he was looking at the spot the guide was pointing to, what he wasn’t seeing here. He looked to Ross, and saw a puzzled expression on her face too. The two of them had started to anticipate seeing all sorts of terrors in London, visions associated with particular places, disconnected from current reality. Ross had taken the team to Vauxhall Bridge Road to see a weird house at the end of the bridge itself that had five chimneys and five coffins. They had all felt that the dust that rose from the coffins would be deadly should they venture inside and stay for any length of time. They hadn’t found out what that was all about yet, despite all their research. But here, at one of the most famous murder sites of all time … Ross nudged him, and he looked around. Oh. There she was. As clear as daylight. But she was actually behind them, in the opposite direction from where Fennix was pointing. The Sight could sometimes be more accurate than history. It was a painful memory of what had really happened, before power had written over it. It wasn’t that the Sight gave you the ability to see every murder victim, just the ones about whom there was … story, Costain supposed, was the way to put it. London seemed to remember the big stuff, the emotional stuff, the memorable stuff, whether or not its people did. But the metropolis also forgot most of what it saw. Otherwise they’d be tripping over phantom bodies with every step.
Here was a young woman in what were actually rags, with a strikingly colourful bonnet on her head. She was emaciated: her legs two bows of muscle, her face marked by disease, a vision of famine in Africa stamped into a British shape. She was looking hopefully at Costain and Ross, like any homeless addict, telling you the lightest generalizations about how great the world is in return for what they needed. What she needed was shockingly beyond their ability to give. She was holding her stomach, her hands pressed back into her skirts, trying to restrain a bloom of blood that actually hung in the air around her, as if she was caught in a single frame of a violent movie. Her need reached into them and made them feel the cold on this sunny afternoon. Her shadow looked like black ice.
‘No silver goo on her,’ Costain whispered to Ross.
‘Noted.’
There was the Ripper himself, the archetypal figure, more of a shadow really: a silhouette that fluttered over all these buildings, like a misfiring advertising logo beamed down at them. His shape was diffuse, remembered hugely but not precisely, glamorously mysterious, while whenever anyone thought of his victims, it was all in the gory details.
‘She left a pub in Brick Lane at half-past midnight, and, lacking four pennies for her lodging — ’ again, Costain heard the familiar lilt in the way the man said it, as if this was a song he’d sung many times, an inaccurate mantra — ‘was thrown out of 18 Thrawl Street, the latest victim of merciless capitalism.’ There was his new narrative, a new geological layer, flung on top for new money, with no thought as to what was underneath. This bloke didn’t care if he contradicted himself; he had no idea, in the end, what he stood for or what he meant. That pricked Costain. These days, he had to be careful about his every action, about everything he said. He only hoped, and he glanced over at Ross again, that didn’t extend to what he thought. He put all that from his mind and went back to listening to this man who had given up all such limitations.
‘She said she’d go and find the money on the streets,’ Fennix continued. ‘It’d be easier that night … she’d just bought a new bonnet. We can only wonder if that was what caught the eye of the man who turned out to be the most important encounter of her life, the man who … made her famous. At 2.30 a.m. she had a conversation with one Nellie Holland at the Frying Pan pub, which is now a balti house. “Polly” told Nellie that she’d made the money she needed three times over, and then drank it all away again. This was late August, a warm, humid night, just like today, in fact. You can imagine “Polly”, a few too many buttons undone, perhaps, beads of sweat on her young flesh, a bit merry, in her new bonnet, chancing down this backstreet, the rumble of the newly built railway station in the background — a station built so the middle classes could go on their holidays, flattening the slums to do so…’ Fennix had spread his hands in the air, his leather gloves flexing like those of a mime artiste. ‘She’d sacrificed herself on the altar of booze and cheap pleasure, turned herself into the perfect brazen victim. Or perhaps she’d been that from birth. And then out he stepped.’ He took a sudden stride towards the crowd, and with a flourish drew a knife. The Italians and the Koreans obligingly gasped and leaped back. The students gave him the gift of their ironic laughter.
Ross was left looking calmly at the end of the weapon pointed at her face. She cocked her head to one side, examining it professionally, as if for traces of blood. Or silver. None was present.