“Sweet Jesus!” Dillon gasped.
The sight that met their eyes was difficult to describe: grotesque; bizarre; warped; disgusting; reprehensible. All of these adjectives fit, but none of them came close to doing the macabre diorama justice. The victim had been arranged so that she was flat on her back with her limbs extended to form the shape of a star. Her clothing had been cut off and discarded all around her. Her legs had been pulled wide apart, and her decapitated head had been placed between them, its mouth forced open and pressed against what was left of her vagina to create a sickening parody of oral sex. There were multiple incised wounds, some shallow but most penetrating, visible on the front of her torso. In contrast, there were no signs of defensive wounds to the fingers, hands or arms, which indicated that she hadn’t been able to put up any resistance to the barrage of blows. The girl’s skin had turned a mottled grey from the loss of blood, making it impossible to determine what colour it had been in life. For his piece de resistance, the killer had skillfully flayed the skin that had once covered her face. Despite the rainfall that had beleaguered the city over the weekend, blood staining was clearly visible on the floor and across the sides of both lorries.
The photographer ambled over to them, pulling his face mask down. He acknowledged Tyler with a nod. “Hello again,” he said to Dillon. “Guess we’ll both be going back to Poplar tomorrow for the PM. Mind you,” he said, grinning wickedly, “it looks like the Ripper has already done most of the work for the pathologist.” He chortled at his little joke and seemed disappointed when neither of the detectives joined in.
Dillon mentally scratched his head, trying to remember the nerdy looking twat’s name. They had met last week, during the post-mortem on Tracey Phillips. And then it came to him. “Hello, Ned,” he said, forcing a smile.
“Isn’t George here today?” Ned asked.
Dillon recalled that the two sick fuckers had a bit of a bromance going on, which no doubt stemmed from their shared interest in all things gruesome. “He’ll be here shortly,” Dillon told him.
“Good, good,” Ned said, swapping the lens on his camera for a bigger one he’d just removed from his bag. “Well, I’d better get back to work. The body isn’t going to photograph itself.”
“If it did,” Dillon told him, “you’d be out of a job.”
◆◆◆
Sarah Pritchard stood at the edge of the outer cordon, looking in anxiously. She had pleaded with the constable on guard to be allowed inside so that she could speak with the murder squad detectives, but he’d told her she would have to wait until someone came out as he was under strict orders not to let any unauthorised personnel in. At least, when she’d told him that it was really important and that it related to the Ripper murders, he’d allowed her to leave the Mission’s mini-bus parked on a double yellow opposite the warehouse, under the proviso that she would move it straight away if the road got busy.
When Charise had called through to her office forty minutes earlier, to inform her that another Ripper murder had just been reported on the radio, Sarah had immediately feared the worst. What if the victim was Cassandra Newly, the prostitute who had confided in her that Henry Boyden had been roughing her and a couple of the other girls up? What if Boyden was the Ripper and he had murdered her? If that turned out to be so, the knowledge that she might have saved the poor girl’s life by passing the information onto Steve Bull earlier would torture her for the rest of her days. Guilt twisted her insides as she dialled Steve’s office number, praying he would pick up and dispel her fears by confirming that the body wasn’t Cassandra’s. There was no reply, which probably meant he was down at the scene. She wasn’t comfortable speaking to anyone else about this, so she decided the only thing to do was attend the scene in person and find Steve. But how could she when she didn’t even know where it was?
Sarah was an extremely resourceful woman, so it didn’t take her long to come up with a solution. She telephoned her husband, who was having one of his LAG meetings with Charles Porter at Whitechapel this morning. Whatever failings Simon had, and there were many, he was one of the most persuasive people she had ever met; if anyone could find out where the scene was, it was him. Sure enough, Simon had called her back within minutes with the information she sought. The moment she hung up, Sarah grabbed the keys from reception, told Charise to hold the fort, and jumped in the Mission’s green mini-bus. She had driven straight there, determined to find Bull and get some answers, but, so far, she hadn’t had much luck in that department. Sarah had already been standing in the freezing cold, surrounded by a dozen disgruntled workers who had been evicted from the warehouse, for a little over twenty minutes. She had managed to eavesdrop snippets of their conversations, hoping to learn something about the latest murder, but all they seemed interested in was the gossip about Dave from finance shagging a girl from the typing pool, Ada dumping her shit of a boyfriend who, having got her pregnant, was demanding she have an abortion because he wasn’t ready to be a dad, and what the union were going to do about the unpopular changes to working practices that the company had proposed this morning.
Two outside broadcasting units, one from the BBC and one from Sky, had turned up a short time ago, parking on either side of her mini-bus and boxing it in. Before long, the journalists had started circulating amongst the
