1977

But what I got was the fuck of my life in the back of an unmarked police car and my first taste of her, licked off her lips, off her nipples, out of her cunt, out of her arse, off the lids of her eyes, off the tips of her hair.

And that night I went home to Louise and Bobby and watched them sleeping, the cot squeezed in beside our bed.

I’d had a bath to wash her off but ended up drinking down the water just to taste her again.

And later that night I’d woken up screaming that Bobby was dead, rushing to the cot, checking he was still breathing, the sweat stinking the room out, then lying in the bath again, hard, wanking.

And it never stopped:

From that night on I thought about her every second, flying through arrest sheets, asking questions I shouldn’t, combing the streets, pulling files, knowing one wrong word and the whole thing’d come tumbling down.

So I learnt to keep secrets, to lead two lives, to kiss my son with the same lips I kissed her with, learnt to cry alone in overlit rooms while all three of them slept, learnt to control myself, to ration, knowing there’d be famine and drought, worse plagues than this, learnt to kiss three sets of lips.

Under the kitchen light, between the fridge and the washer, thinking:

She’s twenty-two, I’m thirty-two.

She’s a half-caste prostitute and I’m a white Detective Sergeant, married to the daughter of one of the finest Yorkshire coppers there ever was.

I have an eighteen-month-old baby boy called Bobby.

After me.

And then, when I can think no more I go upstairs.

She’s lying on her side, wishing I was dead.

Bobby’s in the cot, and later he’ll wish I were dead too.

She swears in her sleep and rolls over.

Bobby opens his eyes and looks up at me.

I stroke his hair and bend down into the cot to kiss him.

He goes back to sleep and, later, I go back downstairs.

I walk through the dark house, remembering the day we moved in, the first Christmas, the day Bobby was born, the day he came home, the times the house was all lit up.

I stand in the front room and watch the cars drive past, their empty seats and their yellow headlights, their drivers and their boots, until each one becomes just another punter back from the red lights, back from Janice, their motors just another way to transport the killer from A to B, just another way to carry the dead back and forth, just another way to take her away.

And I swallow.

I walk back into the kitchen, legs weak, stomach empty.

I sit back down, tears on the evening paper and tears on Bobby’s book and I open up his little book and I stare at the picture of the frog in galoshes but it doesn’t help a bit because I don’t live in a little damp house among the buttercups at the edge of the pond, I live here:

Yorkshire, 1977.

And I wipe my eyes but they won’t dry because the tears won’t stop and I know they’ll never stop until I catch him.

Until I catch him.

Before he catches her.

Until I see his face.

Before he sees hers.

Until I say his name.

Before he says hers.

And I turn over the Evening Post and there he is, one step ahead, waiting for us both:

The Yorkshire Ripper.

Part 2. Police & thieves

The John Shark Show

Radio Leeds

Friday 3rd June 1977

Chapter 6

Jubela…

Twice. He hit me twice, right on the top.’

Mrs Jobson leant forward, parting her grey hair to reveal the indentations in her skull.

‘Go on, feel them,’ urged her husband.

I reached across the room to touch the top of her head, the roots of her hair oily beneath my fingertips, the dents huge and hollow craters.

Mr Jobson was watching my face. ‘Some hole isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

It was Friday, going up to eleven, and we were sitting in Mr and Mrs Jobson’s homely front room at the bottom end of Halifax, sipping coffee and passing round photos, talking about the time a man hit Mrs Jobson twice on the head with a hammer, lifted up her skirt and bra, scratched her stomach once with a screwdriver and masturbated across her breasts.

And in amongst the photos, in amongst the ornaments, between the postcards and the empty vases, beside the pictures of royalty, there were bottles and bottles of pills because Mrs Jobson hadn’t left the house since that night three years ago when she met the man with the hammer and the screwdriver coming back as she was from her weekly lasses’ night out, lasses who’ve also stopped going out, lasses who got beatings from their husbands when the police suggested that Mrs Jobson liked to make a bit of pin money by sucking black men’s willies down the bus station on her way back home from her weekly lasses’ night out, Mrs Jobson who hasn’t left the house since that last lasses’ night out in 1974, not even to scrub the graffiti off the front door, the graffiti that said she liked to suck black men’s willies down the bus station, graffiti that her husband, bad back or not, graffiti Mr Jobson painted over and had to paint over a second time, the same graffiti that made their Lesley never go to school because of all the things they were saying about her mum and the black men down the bus station, and it got to the point where Lesley came right out and asked her mum if she’d ever been down the bus station with a black man, standing there in her nightie at the bottom of these stairs having wet the bed for the third time that week and like Mrs Jobson said that night and many times since has said:

‘There’s times, times like that, when I wish he’d finished me off.’