As if by Magic Read online

  Still holding George, the policeman answered. ‘This is the man who broke in, miss.’ He glanced at the other policeman. ‘This is the lady from number 19. I was just telling her that her area gate was unlocked when this geezer shot out.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like a criminal,’ said the girl doubtfully. ‘I mean, look how he’s dressed. Are you sure it’s the right man?’

  ‘Perfectly sure, miss. I caught him red-handed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ gasped George. ‘I’m so sorry. I saw the fire and there’s . . . there’s a dead girl. She’s been murdered. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  The girl stepped back. ‘A murder? Where?’

  ‘In the kitchen,’ George managed to say. Her face blurred in front of him and he held his hand to his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘In the kitchen?’ said the girl sharply.

  The policeman holding him coughed. ‘Don’t you believe a word of it, miss,’ he said, adding in a quieter voice, ‘I think he’s a bit of a nutcase.’

  She bit her lip. ‘Perhaps . . . Look, would you mind coming into the kitchen with me? I don’t know what this man’s seen but there might be something.’

  ‘Just as you like, miss,’ said the policeman with the lantern. ‘Come on, you,’ he said to George. ‘Come and show us what you saw.’

  ‘No!’ George struggled weakly in the policeman’s grasp. ‘I’m not going back. I’m not!’ His voice was nearly a sob.

  The policemen exchanged shrugs. ‘You’d better have a look,’ said the man holding George to the other policeman. George continued to struggle. ‘Keep still, will you! You stay here with me.’

  George subsided as the girl and the policeman went off, leaving him with his captor. They were back a few minutes later.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ said the policeman. ‘Just as we thought.’ He gave the girl beside him a long-suffering glance. ‘And this lady says that as nothing was touched as far as she can see, she doesn’t want to press charges. Let him go.’

  The policeman holding him released him and George staggered to the railings.

  ‘He’s ill,’ said the woman in sudden concern. ‘Look at him.’ She reached out and touched George on the forehead.

  ‘Why, you’re burning hot.’

  George blinked. She’d got it wrong. He wasn’t hot, he was cold, deathly cold. Hadn’t she seen the girl in the kitchen? She must have seen her. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she said. ‘You must have imagined it.’

  Imagined it? Could he have done? He gazed at her and tried hard to speak but the words got twisted round. It was gibberish, he knew it was, but he couldn’t help it.

  ‘He’s really ill,’ said the woman.

  Her voice came from very far away. George shut his eyes as the world split up into jerky, unrelated images. Then that intense cold seized him and dragged him off to a faraway Arctic of darkness.

  Jack Haldean, two pints of bitter in hand, negotiated his way through the snug of the Heroes of Waterloo to the table where his friend, Inspector William Rackham, sat waiting for him. Jack liked the Heroes. It was a cheerfully unpretentious pub, minutes round the corner from his rooms in Chandos Row, with a welcoming fire, a resident cat, an agreeable landlady and oak panels which, dividing the snug into cosy little booths, were stained dark by years of London soot and placidly smoked pipes.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, putting down the glasses. He took off his coat and hat, laid them on the oak settle and wedged himself in behind the table across from Rackham. Bill Rackham, a big, untidy man with vivid ginger hair, folded up his newspaper and picked up his beer. ‘Cheers, Jack.’ He took a long drink. ‘My word, I needed that.’

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Jack, offering him his cigarette case.

  ‘Not really. Should there be?’

  Jack lit his cigarette. ‘Not especially. You just don’t look too happy with life.’

  Rackham ran a hand through his hair. ‘It’s nothing. Just work. My sister’s been down from Manchester,’ he added after a pause.

  ‘I know,’ said Jack patiently. ‘The three of us had dinner together, if you remember.’

  ‘What? Oh yes, we did, didn’t we. Sorry. I saw her on to the train before I called for you. I was supposed to be having a few days off but that went up in smoke.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  It was a few moments before Rackham, who was staring moodily at the ashtray, apparently in a world of his own, replied. ‘What? Oh, my sister, you mean. Yes, poor Sue. I had to more or less leave her to her own devices.’ The conversation died down again, then Rackham made an effort. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing much. My cousin Isabelle’s been up for a couple of days. We went to see Hurry Along! on Wednesday. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I took Sue. Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Very much. Isabelle was a bit disappointed because Stephanie Granger’s understudy was on, but I thought she was fine.’

  The conversation lapsed once more.

  ‘She lugged me round the shops yesterday,’ added Jack when it became obvious Rackham wasn’t tempted by a discussion of musical theatre. ‘You know she’s getting married in the spring?’ Rackham nodded abstractedly. ‘I think she must have bought half of Selfridges. I certainly seemed to be carrying half of Selfridges with most of Harrods thrown in by the end of the afternoon. Linen, you know, and so on.’ Jack picked up his beer. ‘She said she needed elephants so we bought three. I suggested a couple of walruses but she insisted on elephants.’

  Rackham gazed past him blankly before saying, after an appreciable pause, ‘Shopping, eh?’

  Jack grinned. ‘I knew it! I knew you weren’t listening. Look, stop pretending there’s nothing biting you and tell me what’s wrong. You look whacked out and worried to death.’

  Rackham half smiled and put his hands behind his neck, stretching his shoulders. ‘All right. I’m sorry, I wasn’t really listening. As I said, it’s work.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ asked Jack with a lift of his eyebrows. He tapped Rackham’s folded newspaper on the table in front of him. ‘I saw you had a naked man in the Thames. I read about it this morning. Is he your pigeon?’

  ‘The naked man? Yes, he’s mine, so to speak, but that’s not the problem. You asked if there was anything interesting. It depends what you call interesting.’ He picked up the paper and tossed it over to Jack. ‘See for yourself. That’s the evening edition. Another dead girl turned up in the Thames this morning. She’d been strangled.’

  Jack unfolded the newspaper and read the headline out loud. ‘Jack the Ripper! The X man strikes again!’ He looked at Rackham. ‘Not another Ripper murder, Bill?’

  Rackham winced. ‘So the press says. Every time an unfortunate, as the press delicately calls these women, gets murdered, the newspapers trot out Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘Well, hang on,’ said Jack. ‘Someone must be killing the poor girls and the comparison with Jack the Ripper is inevitable. I mean, the bloke must be a lunatic.’

  Rackham leaned back. ‘You think so? Don’t get me wrong. I want to nail him as much as anyone, but we’re stuck. Over the past eighteen months or so there have been five unfortunates, to use that word, murdered, whose killer we can’t trace. We know it’s the work of one man because he has the nasty little habit of leaving all his victims marked with a cross, which is why he’s also called the X man. All the women come from different areas of London and it’s a devil of a job to guess where he’ll strike next. We can’t guess. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern in it. One had her throat cut, two were beaten up and two were strangled, including this latest woman, Bridget Flynn. We haven’t had a single sighting that’s of any use to us. We’re being hounded by the press but murder’s far too easy, Jack, when the killer picks his victims at random.’

  ‘And when the only motive is the desire to kill,’ added Jack quietly. ‘
That’s a nasty one. Don’t the victims have anything in common?’

  ‘Not a thing, apart from how they earned their money and the fact that they all end up in the river downstream of Blackfriars. Which,’ added Rackham, reaching for another cigarette, ‘leayes a fair old bit of London to cover. Between the two of us, I can’t see how we’re ever going to catch him. It’s not for want of trying, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Five women,’ said Jack. He sat for a few moments in silence. ‘Didn’t the original Ripper murder five women?’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Rackham. ‘But there, more or less, the comparison ends. We had a visit from Inspector Sagar.’ Jack looked a question. ‘Sagar’s a bit of legend in the force. He played a leading part in the hunt for the original Ripper back in ‘88. It’s a long time ago now, but he’s well worth listening to. You see, Sagar’s Ripper was obviously insane. If we don’t know anything else about him, we do know that. As a matter of fact, Sagar’s convinced that his Ripper was a lunatic who lived in Aldgate. He was put into an asylum and the killings stopped, but from 31st August to 9th November he attacked and mutilated five women. That’s a very short space of time. Now our man has been operating for eighteen months.’ He took a long drink of beer. ‘Eighteen months, Jack. It was only when a bright boy from the Daily Despatch put two and two together about the victims being marked with a cross and screamed Ripper! and the rest of the press took it up, that we realized we had a series of murders on our hands. That was after the third killing.’

  ‘Eighteen months,’ repeated Jack. ‘It’s a dickens of a time.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Rackham. ‘It bothered Sagar, too.’

  ‘Could it be someone who’s only in London every so often?’ suggested Jack. ‘You know, a sailor or someone like that?’

  Rackham shook his head. ‘We don’t think so. According to the experts once this sort of homicidal mania gets hold of a man, it’s like a drug. He can’t stop and we’d expect a series of killings to follow him wherever he goes. There’s nothing to suggest that. No. Sagar reckoned that our man – our very cautious man – isn’t a lunatic at all.’

  ‘He must be,’ said Jack, startled.

  Rackham shook his head. ‘Not in the accepted sense, no. This man knows exactly what he’s doing.’

  Jack felt his throat tighten. ‘You mean he kills for pleasure? Like a treat?’ Rackham nodded. ‘You’ve got to find him, Bill.’

  ‘How?’ demanded Rackham bitterly. ‘I tell you, this bloke’s sane. He doesn’t leave clues. After all, we never found Jack the Ripper and he was barmy. There’s damn all to go on. If you only knew . . .’ He stopped and looked ruefully at his friend. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. It’s just that everyone at the Yard wants this swine stopped and we haven’t a clue how to go about it. That’s the truth but it’s hard to admit.’ He blew out a mouthful of smoke with an irritated sigh. ‘Forget it, Jack. It’s not your sort of case.’

  Jack’s mouth twisted. ‘No, thank God, it’s not. If this bloke really is sane, then the only chance you’ve got is a lucky break and lots of police work.’ He looked at his friend. ‘No wonder you’re looking so done in.’

  Rackham stretched his shoulders. ‘It’s been tough. And, of course, I’ve got my naked man in the Thames.’ He very nearly smiled. ‘At least they can’t blame Jack the Ripper for that one. Not that that’s any help, particularly. So far we haven’t been able to identify him. He had his face battered in very thoroughly. At first sight it looks like the work of a maniac, so what with a possibly insane killer and a probably sane Ripper, us poor beggars at Scotland Yard have got our work cut out. All we actually know is that his body was pulled out of the Thames at Southwark Bridge steps at just gone nine yesterday morning. The doctor thinks he had been dead for about nine or ten hours at that stage, which gets us back to eleven o’clock or midnight at the absolute outside. He didn’t want to commit himself any more definitely than that because of the action of the water retarding the progress of rigor and so on.’

  ‘Could his face have been bashed in to conceal his identity?’

  ‘Well, I thought of that, of course, but his hands are still intact. Mind you, we haven’t got his fingerprints on record, so that doesn’t help much. The odd thing about him is that the surgeon states that the beating he got wasn’t the cause of death. What’s even odder is that the surgeon – it’s Dr Harding, Jack, and you know he’s good – can’t say how he did die. Apparently he had some sort of heart problem so Harding’s put it down as heart failure for the time being and that’s as much as he can tell us.’

  ‘Heart failure?’ questioned Jack.

  Rackham half smiled once more. ‘Technically he’s correct, of course. I can’t say I’ve come across many dead men whose hearts are still up and running. It’s simply medical terminology. Harding knows as well as I do that heart failure doesn’t strip a man naked and cave in his face.’

  ‘What about his teeth?’ asked Jack. ‘Or were they too damaged to help you identify him?’

  ‘He didn’t have any teeth. Presumably he had a dental plate but that’s gone. All we can really say is that he’s a middle-aged man, about five foot eleven and well-nourished, to use the usual formula. He’d eaten well before he died and was killed about eleven o’clock the night before last.’ Rackham picked up his beer. ‘Oh, forget about him, Jack. He’s not your sort of case, either. I imagine what’ll happen is that someone will eventually notice they haven’t seen so-and-so for a time and tell us about it. We’ll match up the description with our Mr X and that’ll be it. It’s a matter of simple police work.’

  ‘And once that happens you can start to look for whoever bumped him off. Which might not be so simple.’ Jack leaned back against the oak of the settle. ‘Haven’t you had any other cases, Bill? Your bodies in the river aren’t much fun.’

  ‘Ghoul,’ said Rackham with a grin. He stood up. ‘Let me get some more beer and I’ll think about it.’

  When Rackham came back from the bar he looked more cheerful. ‘I’ve thought of something,’ he announced, sitting down. ‘It happened about three weeks or a month ago now and it isn’t really a case at all, more of an incident, but it made me think of you. It sounded like one of your stories. I only got to hear of it because one of my sergeants was grumbling that no charges had been pressed.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A man broke into the kitchen of a house in Mayfair. He didn’t steal anything, apart from a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches, which is why the lady of the house didn’t press charges. He was ill, poor beggar, and we ended up carting him off to the Royal Free. The odd thing about him was that he was wearing full evening dress.’

  ‘He sounds a very elegant tramp,’ said Jack. ‘So far, so good. That could be quite a nice point in a story. I suppose the poor devil was actually an out-of-work waiter or musician or something. I don’t suppose he was remotely elegant in real life.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he was – or had been, at least. According to Constable Newland, who nabbed him, the man’s clothes were extremely good quality, if a bit the worse for wear. Newland worked in a gents’ outfitters before he joined the force and knows what he’s talking about. They were tailor-made in . . .’ He frowned. ‘Now where was it?’

  ‘Savile Row?’ suggested Jack.

  ‘No. It wasn’t in England at all. Cape Town, that was it. His name and the tailor’s name were on the label of his tail coat. Anyway, he came up the kitchen steps like a bat out of hell, more or less straight into the arms of Constable Newland. He tried to get away, Newland chased after him, blew his whistle, Constable Thirsk showed up and between them they got him. Anyway, he started gibbering away about a murder he’d seen.’ Rackham took a drink and laughed. ‘He said there was a dead body in the kitchen.’

  ‘And was there?’ asked Jack, hopefully. ‘This is getting really good.’

  ‘Of course there wasn’t. Sorry, Jack. He was making it up. The constables knew he was, but t
he lady of the house insisted that one of the policemen go and look, all the same. There was nothing there, as you’d expect. However, I thought that if there had been, it would make a cracking story.’

  ‘It might,’ said Jack. ‘I like the bit about him being in evening dress, I must say. The lady who owned the house couldn’t know anything about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have insisted on the police inspecting the kitchen.’ He ran his finger round the top of his glass. ‘Kitchens. Who’d leave a body in a kitchen? It’s a rotten place. The servants would trip over it.’ He leaned back. ‘In fact, it’s odd that the servants weren’t there. What sort of body was it? A man or a woman?’

  ‘There wasn’t a body,’ said Rackham patiently. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘Yes, but he thought there was a body and by your account something must have scared him otherwise he wouldn’t have done his bat out of hell impression. Hang on. Did you say he’d seen a murder? That’d scare him.’

  ‘He didn’t see anything, I tell you.’

  ‘I wonder what he did see?’

  ‘Crikey, Jack, I don’t know,’ said Rackham with a short laugh. ‘Nothing but his own imagination, I should think. He wouldn’t go back in the place to show them where his imaginary body was. He was frightened stiff.’

  ‘It must have been some vision. Was he drunk?’

  ‘Apparently not. He was ill, though, as I say. Look, old man, if you’re that interested why don’t you go and ask him? He’s still in the Royal Free as far as I know.’

  ‘I wonder if he’d appreciate a visitor?’ Jack caught Rackham’s expression and grinned. ‘I know, you think I’m wasting my time chasing after some poor bloke and his vivid imagination but he does sound a bit out of the ordinary, you must admit. After all, that’s why you told me about him in the first place. What’s his name?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to remember. Rossiter? George Rossiter? No, that’s not quite right. Lassiter, that’s it. George Lassiter.’