Chapter Twenty-One
Ritual helps. We are woken at seven on the dot – we have breakfast. Nurse brings me my meds and makes me walk around the yard. She links my arm. She chats about nothing. She has a son still living at home. Her daughter is pregnant. I’m still on suicide watch. Yesterday Nurse asked if I felt ready to put on some nice clothes.
I brought my jeans out of the wardrobe and held them against me. They were far too big, of course. I mimed a belt and raised my eyebrows in question.
She laughed. ‘Nice try, my darling. But Nursie wasn’t born yesterday. Come on, let’s get you outside.’
One pill, two pills, whee, down the throat. A tour around the yard. Coffee time. Routine, order, ritual.
Ritual helped Christopher get through that second Christmas over at Margaret and Jack’s. Ritual gave him checkpoints, milestones to tick off; he only had to keep going until the next one. Midnight Mass, the exchange of gifts (he knew better than to try anything fancy this time and stayed away from politically explosive choices such as yellow cocktail mixers), Christmas dinner: No, the turkey’s lovely, not dry at all. He spent much of the time in the loft, where, after all, he said, they had put him, hadn’t they? It was no use staying downstairs. He barely spoke to his sister, and his brother, well, most of the time he just wanted to strangle him.
On Boxing Day he left, pleading a heavy workload, and travelled to Runcorn. To her – Phyllis. It occurred to him that he should invite Adam, whose home life was so unhappy, to come and stay with Phyllis and the boys, but he did not. Back then he would have said this was because he didn’t want to impose. I know now it was more likely out of fear. Adam was so charming, so good with the ladies, and Christopher could not have borne anyone replacing him in Phyllis’s affections.
Christopher’s luck with women did not improve. As the academic year progressed, Adam still invited him out with the boys, still gave him pep talks while he, Adam, still scored more often than Kevin Keegan on a roll. A little before Easter, Adam announced that he had found a two-bedroom house for the third year, did Christopher want to share?
‘Of course,’ Christopher said.
‘It’s further down towards Armley but still Leeds 6,’ said Adam. ‘Two bedrooms. Easier to stick to just the two of us, isn’t it?’
By then Christopher was supplementing his grant by working at the Hyde Park pub, up on Woodhouse Lane. Adam had talked his way into a job at the Warehouse club down on Somers Street and planned to stay in Leeds again over the summer. Christopher agreed that he would do the same, although he expected to spend a lot of time with Phyllis.
One evening at the beginning of April, a pub customer ordered a pint of Tetley’s and, before Christopher could put out his hand for the money, followed it with: ‘Another victim.’
‘Oh yes?’
The man dropped the coins into Christopher’s palm. ‘Building society clerk. Not just the prozzies now apparently. Only nineteen, poor cow.’
There had been no news of the Ripper over the last few months, and the talk at the bar had been that he had committed suicide.
Clearly he had not.
The next day, Christopher bought The Telegraph and scoured its pages, but the kind of information he wanted was not to be found. If the girl was not a prostitute, there would have been no financial transaction, surely? Had she agreed to sex, he wondered, and then changed her mind? Was that what had happened this time? Had she initiated sex, only to tell him to stop? He cut out the article and stuck it in his scrapbook.
I could see that Christopher had become obsessed – that his preoccupation with the Ripper was more acute than it was for the rest of us. But I didn’t know about the scrapbook then. If I had, I would have worried more. Much as I loved him, if I’d known, I might even have contacted the police. But thinking about it, maybe I wouldn’t have, since it wasn’t too much later in the year that the famous tape made it onto the news and sent everyone in a different direction entirely.
Christopher was in the library when he overheard two women whispering behind the bookshelf: They’re saying it’s him. He wrote those letters, now he’s sent them a tape. It’s been on the news. He packed up his books and hurried to the television lounge in the Union in time to catch the 5 p.m. bulletin. The lounge was full; he had to stand at the back, peer through the heads. The Ripper tape was the top story. The newscaster announced it gravely. The message appeared to be intended for Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was leading the investigation. The police were appealing to anyone who recognised the voice to come forward.
The newscaster paused. The silence in the room intensified, was replaced by the breathy background noise from the cassette. And then the voice: ‘I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they?’
The tape finished. Christopher bolted from the room, his heart pounding in his chest, his forehead slick with sweat. He headed for the Union bar, ordered a pint of Bass and drank half of it in one go. He was breathing heavily, almost panting. He downed the rest of his beer and ordered another, found his cigarettes and lit up. That voice. The Tyneside accent, the pitch, something in the way he phrased the question at the end.
Adam.
‘No,’ he muttered to himself. It couldn’t be.
But he had been questioned by the police. And his girlfriend or whatever she was had gone missing the night he was supposed to meet her, found dead near Oxley Hall soon after. Christopher remembered him joking about how getting laid was guaranteed, since that was apparently all she wanted him for.
‘I’m her bloody sex toy, man,’ he had joked, and Christopher had felt the burn of humiliation. Sophie wouldn’t change her mind halfway through, he had thought at the time. Sophie knew what she wanted, and Adam knew how to give her that very thing.
But of course now she was dead, along with the others. And in one of the many crude pictures that had been shown on the news and in the papers, the Ripper had been drawn with reddish hair. Adam pulled women to him without a thought. And he was often out late at night – had been since Christopher had known him. This last year, when the Ripper had gone quiet, corresponded to when he and Adam had worked together in the Fenton. Adam would not have been able to get away so easily. And now, now when only the month before last the Ripper had struck again, Adam had taken a job at a club – unsociable hours, every reason not to get home until long after Christopher was asleep in bed.
Adam didn’t go home in the holidays, he had a troubled relationship with his father, had once bragged that he could go from conversation to copulation quicker than it would take most men to eat a bag of chips. All his shared confidences – what if they were not real? What if they were an act, designed to manufacture intimacy, trust, so better to pull the wool over Christopher’s eyes? He had always wondered why Adam would choose him, Christopher, so dull and studious when he himself was so sociable, so full of chutzpah. Christ, he had even got Christopher to be his alibi! Was it possible that this whole time, Adam had been out there, in the dark, murdering women – women on the game and sometimes innocents, as they were called?
He tried to stop his thoughts but could not. It was Adam who had suggested that just the two of them share a house. Fewer housemates – fewer witnesses. Adam had chosen Christopher not despite but exactly because of how he was, because he knew that Christopher would never twig what was really going on: too dim, too wrapped up in history and books, often absent at weekends. And the name – Jack. Where had he got that from? Why that name in particular if not because he had heard it from Christopher?
‘No,’ he said again, into his beer. ‘No, no, no.’
That evening, Christopher found the customary message on the table: Gone to work. Don’t wait up. See you in the morning. Adam didn’t even bother to write a note any more. He simply pulled this envelope out from the cutlery drawer where it now lived and threw it onto the table whenever he needed it. Christopher picked it up and put it back in the drawer, out of sight.
He made tea with three teaspoons of sugar and took it upstairs to bed. The sweet heat soothed him, but he was still preoccupied. Perhaps bed would be the best option – go to sleep; forget about it. Things would look different in the morning.
He got into bed but his eyes stayed open as if pinned. Above him, on the slant of the roof over his bed, Stevie Nicks looked down from on high. Ah, Stevie. He got out of bed, slid Rumours from its sleeve and placed it carefully on the turntable. To the opening bars of ‘Second Hand News’ and with the album cover in his arms, he crept back across the room and lay once more in the darkness. The second track, ‘Dreams’. Stevie Nicks took him always to Phyllis, to that first meeting, to her car, to the two of them listening to that fragile, throaty voice. Stevie Nicks would lead you by the hand into the darkness – she would lay down her coat and have you lie on it with her. She would not tell you no when you were too far gone to stop. She would pull back her waistcoats and her skirts, she would unbutton her blouse made of cotton and shake her long wavy hair, and she would sing in that low voice with all its promises close in your ear, Stay with me a while…
He set the album sleeve down; let it slide onto the bedroom floor.
At 3 a.m., he woke. Something had disturbed him. A noise then: it sounded like a shoe dropping to the floor. Adam. Christopher lay for a moment, his insides knotted in angst, before throwing off the covers. Better to face him now, if only to reassure himself. Not as if he would sleep anyway. He crept downstairs. The smell of toast sailed up from the kitchen. Adam was whistling softly, tunelessly, all but hidden behind the kitchen wall but for the serving hatch. By the angle of his head, Christopher could tell he was spreading butter on his toast. He looked up, eyed Christopher through the frame of the hatch.
‘Why aye, Christopher Robin. What’s the matter – couldn’t sleep?’
‘No,’ said Christopher, inwardly reeling at the north-eastern accent – although it was possible the pitch was not as deep as the voice on the tape. You are no nearer catching me now… He pulled his dressing gown tight and tied the belt.
‘You look worried, man,’ said Adam, appearing now at the door of the kitchen, one red-socked foot on the step that led up to the living room.
‘I’ve been thinking. I’m not going to stay in Leeds over the summer this time,’ Christopher said.
Adam frowned, bit into his toast. A blob of strawberry jam landed on his chin. He pushed it off with his middle finger and sucked it clean. ‘That’s a shame. How come?’
‘I think I’m going to move in with Phyllis. With my family.’
‘But we’ll have a much better time here, you know that, don’t you? God knows, you might even get laid for a legendary second time.’
Adam – always thinking of sex. He was predatory all right, but enough to follow a woman late at night? Enough to take what he wanted then kill her – or kill her if she didn’t give him what he wanted?
‘Late shift?’ Christopher managed to ask.
‘Finished at two. Had a pint after with the others.’
It was a little after three. If he’d caught a bus or walked up the back way, the timings worked.
‘So. Did you hear the tape?’
Adam’s eyes widened. ‘The Ripper? Yeah. Fucking hell, we listened to it on the radio.’ He shook his head. ‘Here’s us all thinking he’s a Yorkshireman and he’s from my neck of the woods. He sounds like my Uncle Pete. Tell you what, I’m glad that tape hadn’t come out before poor Sophie was taken. What with me a bloody Geordie. Enough to send shivers down your spine, isn’t it?’ His eyes were still wide. He slurped his tea and took another bite of toast. ‘Sorry, did you want a brew?’
Christopher sighed. His head was spinning. He pressed his hands to his knees.
‘Are you all right, man? You gone dizzy or something?’
‘I’m all right. Light-headed. Must’ve got up too quickly or something.’
‘Can I get you some tea?’
Adam wasn’t the Ripper. Of course he wasn’t. Christopher had been ridiculous even to think it. The murders had started before any of them had come to Leeds. Adam wouldn’t even have passed his driving test back then. Adam was funny and kind and loved women. He loved them. It was impossible.
The last fraught hours disintegrated in his mind. There was nothing left now but a shaky residue of shock.
‘Please, yeah,’ he said, drawing himself up straight again. ‘Tea would be great. I might have some sugar in it actually. I seem to have gone back to having sugar in my tea today.’ He reached over and took Adam’s toast, bit it, gave it back. Relief cut through him. He felt easy, light, as if the world were after all a place where he could be, as if this problem that had existed in him so urgently had in vanishing washed away all others with it. If Adam was his friend, and was not the Ripper, if the Ripper could be caught and locked away, if Phyllis loved him, then everything else would fall into place. He would finish his degree, move in with Phyllis and start the rest of his life.
But on 1 September, just before Christopher began his third year, the Yorkshire Ripper struck again: Barbara Leach, not a prostitute but another student, this time from Bradford University. Christopher documented her death in the usual way, felt its sordid details run over his skin like sweat. He waited and watched for news of more attacks. At night, he looked out for anyone who fitted the description, stared at couples walking arm in arm, became alive to the rare sound of females on the street. But there were no more murders reported that academic year, which in the end went much as the second year had.
Christopher studied hard, worked his shifts, went out sometimes with Adam and the boys. He listened to Adam’s tales of his romantic conquests with a mixture of amusement and confusion and spent his nights alone with his right hand and his dreams of Stevie Nicks. He did not see Angie – at the thought of her, guilt flooded into him like coffee too hot, too bitter, and so he tried not to think of her at all. Phyllis he did think of, all the time, even when he was studying. He visited her as often as he could, and when he went to her his lungs filled with air, though it felt like something more than oxygen that swelled his chest and made him run the last yards to her front door. Whatever it was, it was enough to fray the rope that for so long had tied itself too tightly around his heart. Without that rope, he could breathe.
One evening a week or two before the final exams, Adam burst through the front door, which gave directly onto the kitchen of the two-bedroom back-to-back terrace they had rented in Autumn Avenue, and said: ‘Christopher. Mate. I’m in love.’
He mock-staggered across the thin scratchy carpet and collapsed onto the sofa, where Christopher had been reading Progress and Poverty The Industrial Revolution. Adam threw his feet over the edge of the sofa and laid his head on Christopher’s lap. He blew at the pages of Christopher’s book, tried to put his nose in the gap between the spine and the cover.
‘Christopher,’ he sang. ‘Chri-i-i-istophe-e-er.’
With a shake of his head, Christopher put his book aside.
‘Mate,’ said Adam, the smell of ale on his breath.
‘Well?’
Adam closed his eyes and knotted his hands over his chest, the pose like the stone lid of a knight’s tomb.
‘She is heaven, man,’ he said.
‘What’s her name, then, this heavenly creature?’
‘Stephanie.’
‘Stephanie, I see.’
‘I am going to marry her.’
‘I say, she must be an angel,’ said Christopher.
‘She is.’
‘So how did this meeting come about?’
But Adam was asleep. Christopher had to slide from under him, holding his head and laying it on a cushion as he stood. He made for his bedroom to fetch a blanket but had only got as far as the living-room door when his friend called to him.
‘Where are you going, man? Don’t you want to know the details?’
Adam had met Stephanie at the Headingley Arms and had fallen into conversation after she had dropped her earring, which had wedged itself between two floorboards.
‘I dug it out with a paper clip,’ he said, smiling toothlessly like an idiot. ‘She said I was her knight in shining stationery.’ He laughed. ‘That’s not her best joke. She’s funny and clever and sexy as hell.’
‘She sounds marvellous.’
‘She is, man. Bloody marvellous with a capital M. And beautiful. I love her. I’m in love with her. I’m going to marry her. She is the one, I’m telling you. She is. The one.’
Despite Adam’s relative indolence until the eleventh hour compared with Christopher’s relentless diligence, both graduated with a 2:1. Christopher applied for and was accepted onto a teacher-training course in Aigburth, which he had chosen for its proximity to Runcorn – he would live with Phyllis and the family and look for work nearby once he qualified. Adam got a job as a junior electronic engineer with British Aerospace and planned to move down to the outskirts of Stevenage.
‘Stephanie’s agreed to come and live with me,’ he said when they came to say goodbye to each other and to the tiny house they had shared. ‘Give me six months to work on her. You’ll be my best man when the time comes.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
Adam had already loaded his cases, his record player, his guitar and his mirror into the Mini. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he stepped up onto the pavement, where Christopher was waiting to wave him off. The moment of parting had arrived and it silenced them. They stood in the grey Leeds light and said nothing. They had felt this moment coming these last weeks, and now here it was. The memories of all they had shared flashed through Christopher’s mind: Adam’s silly entrance into their shared room in halls that very first day, the first time Christopher had witnessed his room-mate’s virtuoso skills as he smooth-talked Alison, his pep talks – chutzpah, mate, that’s what you need – their conversations late at night before the hissing gas fire, both tired but neither willing to go to bed. Most of all, he would miss Adam’s kindness, how like a light it was. This was what it meant to be loved: to feel the light of another person shine on you, a light under which you could grow. Adam had this light. Phyllis had this light. But he could never tell Adam all that he meant to him, could never put it into words. If he did, Adam would tell him to fuck off.
Instead, he met his friend’s eye and smiled. ‘So this is it.’
‘Come here, you lanky bugger,’ said Adam.
The two men held each other, slapped each other’s backs.
‘You’re my best friend,’ Christopher said, his voice choked, his mouth close against Adam’s left ear.
‘And you mine, mate,’ said Adam. ‘And you mine.’
Once Adam had gone, Christopher found himself alone in the house. He had been alone in the house before, of course, but now without Adam, without the promise of his return, it felt emptier, lonelier. He went upstairs to pack the rest of his things. His clothes were already in the grotty suitcase where he had found the blanket and the note three years earlier. The thought took him back to the dark attic space behind his loft room. What had he felt? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not then. Everything he had felt about that note had come later, over years. In those first moments there had been only numbness, then in the weeks that followed action, action almost without thought.
In his chest of drawers was the Ripper scrapbook he had made. The thing bulged with articles he had cut out over the years, and yet they still hadn’t caught him. The north of England was in a state of paranoia. Someone knew who it was. Or did they? He was a Geordie. Or was he? What if he had put on an accent on that tape? What if he was not from Wearside but from Barnsley or Lancaster or even Scotland? What if he was from Morecambe? Did his wife, his sister, his mother know it was him? Did the Ripper himself even know it was him? What if even he, the monster, didn’t realise he had murdered those women? He might have killed them in some blind and frenzied act, only to black it out from his mind.
Was that possible – to do something so heinous you buried it deep, deep, deep until you didn’t believe you’d done it at all?
Christopher flipped through his scrapbook and found the police-issue picture of the Ripper.
Do you know this man?
With the scrapbook still in his hands, he went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. His black hair, his black beard. He removed his glasses and leant into his reflection. He looked like, could pass for that picture. Yes, he looked like him. Craig - or was it Darren? – had said so when they were in Anglesey – out of the mouths of babes… A memory: himself, washing his hands, weeping over a sink, the water trailing brown into the plughole. Brown: not red, not blood. But even so, when was this? It was something he had not remembered before – only now when he had trained his mind to it had it come up. Were there other memories, down, down with that one, memories yet to surface? Was it possible that he, Christopher, was him? Was he the Yorkshire Ripper?