Private London (Private 4)

‘As far from good as it can get,’ added Sam.

Brendan Ferres was the right-and left-hand man of Ronnie Allen. And Ronnie Allen was a very serious customer. He was the go-to man north of the river for drugs, prostitution, guns, murder. You name it – if it was illegal his fingers were going to be in the pie somewhere. But not kidnapping, so far as I knew.

I picked up the photos, sliding them back into the manila envelope.

‘You see Allen mixed up in this?’ I asked Sam.

He shrugged and finished his drink. ‘Not his usual thing. But then again, we don’t really know what this thing is. We don’t know who has got Hannah Shapiro and as yet we don’t know why.’

He had a point.

Or he did. Until my phone rang, jangling on the Formica-topped table. I looked at the caller ID.

Jack Morgan.

Chapter 37

DI KIRSTY WEBB desperately fancied a cigarette.

She hadn’t smoked in over ten years, but she reckoned she could kill for one now as she watched the forensic pathologist preparing to examine the corpse.

It was supposed to be Kirsty’s weekend off. Fat chance of that now with a girl gone missing, abducted right off the street, and another woman found eviscerated and dumped. Murdered, most likely.

Three weeks earlier Kirsty had been the lead DI called to the Putney rowing club on the Surrey side of the Thames.

Six-thirty in the morning on the first of May, Dr Jonathan Brown, a twenty-seven-year-old academic specialising in medieval hagiography, had been preparing to go on the water. He was a hotly tipped single-sculls hopeful for the 2012 Olympics and pretty much every minute of his spare time was spent training for the event.

As he was putting his scull onto the water that morning, however, Dr Brown saw something that caused him to step back, make the sign of the cross and mutter a prayer to Saint Andrew the Apostle, the patron saint of fishermen. What he was looking at was the mottled arm of a dead woman.

The woman was lying at the end of the ramp running down to the river, looking as though she was trying to pull herself out of the water. Dr Brown looked at the arm, horrified for a moment, unsure what to do. Then, as the tidal waters gently rocked into shore, the body was lifted and turned by the swell.

The medieval scholar saw that her body had been cut open. A gaping wound across her torso. He staggered back, gagging – and for the first time in over five years he didn’t do any training that morning.

Kirsty Webb had been trying to track the identity of the woman ever since.

Chapter 38

THE WOMAN WAS estimated to be in her mid-to late twenties, was naked and had no identifying marks or tattoos on her body.

Her fingerprints didn’t show up on any database. Neither did her DNA but it had taken three weeks for DI Webb to get that information: the report had landed on her desk only that morning. The dead woman’s teeth were intact but were useless for identification purposes – unless they found a candidate to match them against.

The only significant clue apart from the fact that she had had her heart surgically removed was the fact that the third finger on her left hand had been severed at the second knuckle. If she had been married there was no evidence of it now.

The press had run wild with the story. All manner of theories were put forward. The most lurid of which was that the woman had been slaughtered in some kind of blood sacrifice or voodoo ritual.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Kirsty remembered the West African boy that the Metropolitan Police had called Adam. His torso had been found in the Thames. Chemicals in his stomach had been identified as a so-called ‘magic potion’ containing traces of pure gold, a clear indication that his murder had most likely been a ritual killing.

And now, three weeks since the first mutilated woman’s body had been discovered on the banks of the Thames, a second had been found a few miles away in King’s Cross.

Organs removed, wedding-ring finger amputated. Kirsty Webb had no doubt they were dealing with a serial killer.

Or killers. If the same people had taken the young student Hannah Shapiro last night – then the police were definitely dealing with a group of them.

Remembering Hannah made Kirsty think of Dan Carter and his god-daughter, still lying unconscious in an intensive-care room. And thinking of him made her remember that today was their wedding anniversary – and then she really, really did want that cigarette.

Damn the bloody man! Everywhere she turned in London he popped up like the proverbial bad penny. But fingers crossed that all that would change soon. Kirsty was on the shortlist for a new initiative being set up to coordinate worldwide information on serial murder. It was a prestigious job, carrying with it a promotion, a commensurate salary hike and, most importantly of all, it was based in Manchester! About two hundred miles north from Dan bloody Carter as the crow flew.

If she could crack the mystery wide open she had a far better chance of getting the post. The only thing was, of course, that the serial-killer element had taken her off this case as lead. She was just a cog in the machine now.