Nineteen Eighty (8 page)

Thank you for being a friend
.
This ordinary world –
This whole, empty, forgotten, ordinary world at war.
dirty cow e know this face from somewhere e am sure transmission two the body of joan richards forty five years found in a derelict building of the industrial estate on manor street leeds seven at five past eight today friday the sixth of february nineteen seventy six it is known that the woman has recently been an active prostitute in the chapeltown area of leeds when found she was wearing blue green and red checked overcoat blue and white horizontal striped dress white sling back shoes fawn handbag black knickers brown tights it is known that between the times six ten PM and ten thirty PM thursday the fifth of february nineteen seventy six she was in possession of a white commer van with ladders on the roof motive appears to be hatred of prostitutes the man we are looking for is the type who could kill again assailant may be heavily bloodstained and is believed to be wearing heavy ribbed rubber boots or heavy Wellington boots registration number JRD six six six K vehicle has been found on a car park belonging to the gaiety hotel roundhay road leeds approximately half a mile from the scene of the crime and any sightings of the woman or the vehicle should be notified to this office the deceased suffered severe injuries to the skull consisting of lacerations and a number of small skull fractures believed caused by a hammer and fifty two stab wounds to the lower throat and neck upper chest lower abdomen and back possibly caused by an instrument similar to a philips screwdriver cross pattern type that bordered on the maniacal on one of her thighs the impression of a heavy ribbed rubber boot or Wellington boot was found though there had been no sexual interference to the vagina the brassiere was removed to a position above the breasts and dress and there are several indications that the person responsible for this crime may also have been responsible for the death of the prostitute theresa Campbell at leeds on sixth of june nineteen seventy five he is a sadistic killer and may well be a sexual pervert particular attention should be paid to persons coming into custody for the footwear described who may also have a vehicle containing tools of the type described and will perhaps be a workmans van a search of records for persons convicted of serious attacks upon prostitutes would be appreciated and here the tears we first wept in the black snow knot and cluster and fill the hollow parts around the eyes lord break these hard veils the pain that swells our hearts here in a place in hell called leeds e saw her outside the gaiety in that place and e picked her up and drove her to derelict land at the centre of this evil plain this the place in which we found ourselves parked away from the lights her overwhelming smell of cheap perfume making me feel nauseated and so e had to get her outside so e got her to hold a torch while e raised the bonnet of the car to examine the engine then e took a couple of steps back and aimed two blows at her head with the hammer then e took her into the shadows and pushed her sweater cardigan and brassiere up to expose her breasts and e stabbed her fifty two times in the breasts neck back and low abdomen with a cross ply philips screwdriver and e took a piece of wood and thrust it between her legs to show her as disgusting as she was in possession of a white commer van with ladders on the roof motive appears to be hatred of prostitutes the man we are looking for is type who could kill again assailant may be heavily bloodstained and wearing heavy ribbed rubber boots e drove to my mother in laws with a feeling of justification and satisfaction and next day it was my mothers birthday and e made sure e delivered her card the snowflakes are dancing on the radio a broken
Chapter 5
6:00 a.m. –
Monday 15 December 1980:
Millgarth Police Station, Leeds.
The room next to the Ripper –
The door open, the light on –
‘Helen?’ I say.
DS Marshall looks up from the file on the desk, a hand on her heart –
‘Peter.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘No, I was miles away’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Don’t know,’ she says, looking at her watch.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’
She nods.
‘Me too,’ I say, sitting down. ‘Who let you in?’
‘It wasn’t locked.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault, don’t worry.’
She sits back in her chair, pushing the file away.
‘What are you looking at?’ I ask.
‘Well I got lucky, yeah? 1976.’
‘A quiet one. Favouritism from the Boss.’
‘People will talk.’
I’m blushing: ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, they’ll say you’re sexist. Specially if you don’t even let me precis them.’
‘Me sexist? One murder, one attack; Joan Richards and that Chinese girl? I don’t think so.’
She’s smiling.
‘And,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry about last night. But Bob Craven was …’
She stops smiling: ‘You know she’s dead?’
‘Who?’
‘That
Chinese girl.’
‘Sue Peng? No, when?’
‘77. Suicide.’
Ghosts, more ghosts –
Chinese ghosts
.
‘What?’ Helen Marshall is staring straight through me.
‘Said I didn’t know that.’
‘As good as murdered.’
We sit in silence –
Helen rubbing her eyes, me with that taste in my mouth –
I ask: ‘Have you had any breakfast?’
‘No.’
‘Want some?’
In the canteen we set down our trays on a table, the morning papers abandoned by the last shift –
Headlines hurting:
Ł100,000 Ripper Reward
.
Victim’s Mother in Ripper Plea
.
Women Arm Against Ripper
.
Ripper Telephone Threat Studied
.
That playground taunt, haunting:
Ripper, Ripper –
Hunt, hunt
,
Ripper, Ripper –
Cunt, cunt
.
‘Well, well, well. What have we here?’ says Murphy, joining us.
‘Sorry, John.’
‘Just stand me up, why don’t you?’ he says, winking at Marshall: ‘Watch him, love. He’ll make you all these promises; breakfast at Millgarth, dinner at the Ritz. Then not a dickybird.’
Helen Marshall is looking down at her plate, not smiling.
‘Good night?’ I ask him.
‘A quiet one with your mate Sergeant Bob.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ he sighs.
‘As bad as it sounds?’
‘He’s an odd bloke, isn’t he?’
‘Don’t know. Last time I met him he was in Pinderfields Hospital, wires sticking out of him.’
‘Well they managed to rebuild him; just think they forgot a few bits.’
‘Like?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Just strikes me as odd.’
‘Learn anything?’
‘Well, he certainly isn’t modest, our Bob. Thinks he should have been put in command.’
‘So I take it he doesn’t think much to what’s been going on?’
‘Thinks they’ve wasted a lot of time. Thinks like us, they’ve probably had Ripper in and let him go.’
‘Any names?’
‘Not saying if he has; but he has his theories all right.’
‘Share them with you?’
‘No but I reckon he’s got his finger in a few pies, our Bob. Wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t on his way out; thinking of taking his theories with him, take them to the papers,’ he says, tapping the
Yorkshire Post
.
‘Spying?’
‘Oh aye. Course he is.’
‘Who for?’
‘That’s the question,’ says Murphy, quietly. ‘That’s the question.’
Helen Marshall looks up, nodding at the queue for the food –
Detective Superintendent Robert Craven is asking for extra sausage.
The three of us look at each other, eyes meeting, grins broad, laughing for a moment before we get up to go.
I stand at the door to the Ripper Room, catching the tail end of the morning briefing, the backs of a hundred heads before those walls, those walls with their alien landscapes of wastelands and buildings, tires and tools, of wounds –
The shallows and the hollows, the indentations –
The same shallows and hollows, the same indentations from the walls of my room –
My War Room.
Temporary Assistant Chief Constable Noble is telling the packed room: ‘So that’ll be press conference.’
There’s no cheer. ‘OK. Get to it.’
The room disperses, half of them pushing through the door past me, the others slumped back over their desks, back behind the piles and piles of paper that rise and tower from each one.
I wait until it’s clear and then go over to Noble, huddled with Alderman and Prentice and a couple of his other top men.
They all step back as they see me come, the conversation dead –
‘Morning gentlemen,’ I say.
Nods are all I get.
‘Can I have a word when you’re finished?’ I ask Noble. ‘I was coming next door anyway,’ he says. ‘Yeah?’ I say.
‘Yeah. Going up to Alma Road, if you want another look? Daylight?’
Another look? Daylight?
I let it go, face blank –
‘Thanks,’ I smile. ‘Appreciate it.’
‘Just room for you, mind.’
‘Fine.’
‘Meet you out front in ten minutes?’
‘Right.’
‘I don’t envy you,’ Noble is saying, as the driver pulls off the Ring Road and onto Woodhouse Lane.
‘I never imagined you did,’ I say.
We’re sat in the back, Dickie Alderman up front with the driver.
‘But,’ I add. ‘Can’t say I envy you much either.’
Noble laughs: ‘You wait. You will.’
‘How’s that?’ I smile, glancing at the concrete outside, the grey concrete stained black by the rain.
‘When I catch the bastard.’
‘Feeling lucky are you?’
‘Always. Give me a month.’
‘You should tell the papers,’ I laugh.
‘Piss off,’ he smiles.
The car slips into silence as Woodhouse Lane becomes Headingley.
As we come up to Alma Road, Noble suddenly asks: ‘How you getting on with Bob Craven?’
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Just asking,’ smiles Noble. ‘Just asking.’
That’s the question
.
The car turns right onto Alma Road and pulls up in front of a parked Panda.
It’s raining heavily again.
We get out.
There’s tape around the shrubbery, the bushes.
We walk towards it.
Noble is stood next to me, squinting back down the road through the rain –
‘She got off the bus at nine-twenty,’ he’s saying –
Saying to himself: ‘Crossed the road and walked down here.’
He looks back to the other end of Alma Road –
‘Flat’s just up there,’ he says.
We stand in the rain before the bushes, Noble, Alderman, and me –
‘He come up behind her,’ says Alderman. ‘Hit her on the head and took her behind the bushes.’
No one says anything.
Alderman’s words just hanging there until –
Until Noble turns and we follow him back to the car, the driver stood under a black umbrella smoking.
Inside the car, I say: ‘Been fifteen months, yeah? Since the last one?’
Noble nods, Alderman turning around in the front seat.
I continue: ‘Makes you wonder what he’s been doing?’
‘We’re already running prison checks,’ says Alderman.
‘He’s not done time,’ I say.
Noble looks away from the window: ‘What makes you so certain?’
‘You’d have had him if he had.’
Alderman says: ‘What about the Services? Ireland?’
‘Maybe, but I doubt it.’
Noble agrees: ‘Someone would have said something.’
‘What then?’ asks Alderman.
‘You got a hobby?’ I ask him.
‘What?’
‘What’s your hobby?’ I say again.
‘Shooting. Hunting. Why?’
‘Where do you go?’
‘All over.’
‘Where?’
‘Eccup, that way’
‘How often do you go?’
‘Not as often as I’d like.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Work.’
‘Work?’
‘Aye, work. Because of bleeding Ripper for a start. Why?’
‘But before, before all this, you got out fairly regular?’
‘Yeah, except when kids were right young, yeah.’
‘How about before kids were born?’
‘Oh aye. Every day off I had.’
I nod: ‘That’s my point.’
‘What? What’s your point?’
I say: ‘He’s the same.’
‘Who?’
‘The Ripper.’
Alderman’s grinning: ‘What? He’s into shooting and all?’
Noble’s shaking his head: ‘He means he’s got the same bollocks in his life we all have. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
I nod: ‘When we get him, you’ll see the same patterns we all have, same pressures, rhythms: work, the wife, kids, holidays.’
Alderman: ‘You reckon Ripper’s married with kids? Fuck off.’
‘He’s married, I bet you.’
‘How much?’
‘Whatever you can afford.’
‘That the Ripper’s married with kids?’
‘Married,’ I say. ‘No kids.’
‘A hundred quid says you’re wrong,’ says Alderman, hand out.
We shake on it: ‘Hundred quid it is.’
Noble interrupts: ‘Why you so sure?’
‘You’re the bloke that got Raymond Morris,’ I say. ‘It’ll be the same, Pete.’
Stafford, 1965-67
.
Noble looks away, the rain in sheets down the car windows.
‘What do you mean?’ says Dickie Alderman.
Noble, watching the water come down, whispers: ‘Raymond Morris had alibis from his wife.’
Three little girls, raped, suffocated, dumped
.
His window has misted over, the car stuffed.
Alderman is shaking his head: ‘No-one would cover for this cunt.’
‘She doesn’t think she is doing; doesn’t see him for what he is,’ I say, then: ‘But neither do we.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘No, half that Ripper Room are looking for a hunchbacked Geordie with hairy bloodstained hands, flesh between his teeth and a hammer in his pocket.’
Noble, a face full of fear and sneer: ‘Yeah? So who should we be looking for, Pete?’
I tell him what he already knows – knows in his heart, knows in his head: ‘He’s mobile, has his own vehicle. It must have come up numerous times in the sweeps, so he has to have a reason to be where he shouldn’t be – taxi driver, lorry driver, sales rep …’
Noble: ‘Copper?’
‘Copper…’
‘Fuck off,’ snorts Alderman.
I shrug: ‘He’ll have a good local knowledge as a result of his work and because he’s from round here – lives and works round here.’
Alderman: ‘You can’t say that? If he’s a lorry driver, he could be living any-bloody-where?’
‘No,’ I say quietly, shaking my head and wiping the side-window clean. ‘He’s from round here because he hates it, hates it enough to kill it – so he has to have been around here long enough to hate it, to want to kill it.’
Noble: ‘Go on.’
‘He’ll have a record, however minor.’
Alderman: ‘Why?’
‘Because when he was younger, he couldn’t control the hate like he can now. He’ll have made mistakes …’
‘We’d know,’ says Alderman.
‘Not if you’re not looking.’
‘We’re fucking looking,’ spits Alderman, almost over the seat and at me.
Me, hands up: ‘But for what? An unmarried hunchbacked Geordie with hairy bloodstained hands, flesh between his teeth and a hammer in his pocket?’
‘Fuck off, Pete,’ says Noble.
‘No,’ I tell him. ‘You should go back over every statement where the bloke’s been covered by his wife.’