Free Now You See Me by Sharon Bolton

didn’t have after all this time. I think I was just plucking up the courage to say something when he took a phone call from Tulloch and left. Shortly afterwards, the group broke up.

    And it really hadn’t helped that everyone else seemed to consider him the best thing since Mr Warburton had invented the slicing machine. For most of the evening, he’d been entertaining the group with stories of his undercover work.
    â€˜So there I am,’ he’d been saying at one point, ‘in this police minibus, under arrest with a whole load of Tottenham fans, and I spotted a megaphone on the floor. So I picked it up and started giving it the verbal out the window and what do you think they all said to me: “Shut up, you’ll get us in trouble.”’
    The group had fallen about laughing. I’d forced a polite smile when I realized Joesbury was looking my way and felt yet another stab of guilt. This was a murder investigation. I had information that might be important.
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    After Stenning, who’d insisted on driving me home, roared away, I hurried down the steps. Quick check of the under-stairs space and then inside. The neatly made bed I could see through the open door had never looked more inviting, but it would have to wait. Instead I pulled the blind down, opened my laptop, typed Jack the Ripper murders into the search engine …
    â€¦ and became that teenage girl again, head stuffed with information about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders of the late nineteenth century.
    In 1888, the year after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, a serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, preying upon those least able to protect themselves. Jack’s victims were ‘unfortunates’, if you were Victorian and polite. If you were less so – if you were Jack himself, for example – they were whores. Middle-aged, alcoholic, homeless prostitutes who sold their bodies to strangers several times nightly for the price of a glass of gin.
    There were eleven Whitechapel murders in all, starting in April 1888 and concluding in February 1891. The last few months of 1888, when the majority had taken place, had become known as the Autumn of Terror. At one time, I could have quoted victims’ names, dates of death, details of injuries inflicted and locations of bodies. At ten minutes past one in the morning, I closed my eyes and found I still could.

    Jack had been a killer ahead of his time, I realized that night, looking at the case again with grown-up, professional eyes. In the nineteenth century, someone who struck at random and without motive was something quite new. The police at the time had been close to helpless.
    One reaction I’d had as a teenager remained the same. The most puzzling and the most frightening aspect of the murders had been Jack’s ability to arrive from nowhere and disappear without trace. Many of the murders took place within yards of crowded lodging houses or major thoroughfares, but he moved silently and invisibly.
    Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the murders ceased. Jack vanished, leaving behind one of the most enduring murder mysteries the world has ever known.
    I sat back a while, thinking, trying to make a connection between what had taken place in Victorian London and the murder I’d come close to witnessing twenty-four hours ago.
    To my considerable relief, I couldn’t do it. Married to a wealthy man, with a family, a nice home, a job, Geraldine Jones was the direct opposite of the women Jack had preyed upon. The original victims had been chosen at random, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Geraldine must have been in that part of London for a reason. And Kennington was a long way from Whitechapel.
    Admittedly, Jones’s injuries were very similar to those inflicted on more than one Ripper victim, but 31 August didn’t even mark the anniversary of the