Christopher shaved his beard off that day, I think. Certainly, by the time he was living in Runcorn more permanently, he was clean-shaven as he had been when he first met Phyllis. A clean shave was not enough to stop the monster though, I think now as I flick through Christopher’s scrapbook. Here, near the back: August 1980, forty-seven-year-old Marguerite Walls, the latest victim. There are articles from The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I picture him cutting them out, gluing them into place. I picture him and wonder what on earth he was thinking about.

I picture him. That’s the problem. I can’t stop the images from forming. I see the Ripper, I see him, the two of them coalescing in my mind’s eye as they did in his. No matter how I try and shake off these visions, they are beyond my control.

I picture him now, returning to Morecambe for what remained of his things. In the loft room he had grown to loathe, he must have packed his clothes, which Margaret had laundered during his short stay; his tapes; his writing set; two old pairs of shoes. He remembered the letter he had written to Phyllis that first Christmas. He had put it in his old school trousers but had neglected to post it. Of his school trousers there was no sign.

Behind him came the clatter of feet on the metal steps and he turned to see Margaret, her shoulders and head at the hatch like a scrawny plaster-cast bust.

‘All ready?’ she said, her face set in the expression of angst he had known all his life.

‘Yes. Almost done.’

She threw a Safeway carrier bag onto the floor of the room, then climbed in after it. She had not, he realised, been up here before – at least not while he was there.

‘I wondered if you had room for these.’ She brought the carrier bag over to the bed and sat down. The hunched set of her spine had a beaten air about it. She looked withered. From the bag she lifted a block covered in thick foil. ‘It’s only a fruit cake,’ she said. ‘Keeps you going, does fruit cake.’

‘Thank you.’ What was it with mothers and fruit cake?

‘Aye, and there’s some pickled red cabbage your father made, and some damson jam. We had a lot this year.’ She looked down into her lap, as if disappointed, or sorry. For what, he did not ask.

‘Thank you,’ he said instead. ‘I’ll write once I get there.’

‘So your digs, is it other student teachers, did you say?’

‘It’s a room in a house,’ he said – a lie of omission, nothing more. ‘It’s near the college. I’ll write my address in the book in the phone table.’ A more deliberate lie; he had no intention of doing so. ‘I can’t find my old school trousers, by the way.’

‘Our Jack’s got them, love. Why, did you need them?’

‘No. No, of course not.’ His brother must have found the letter. Christopher wondered what the chances of him not having read it were. He would catch him before he left this place for good.

‘And you start in September?’ Margaret said, her implication clear.

‘Yes, but I was hoping to find a job in the run-up. A bar job or something. I’ve paid the rent up front so it makes sense to live there.’ He forced himself to stop talking – the deeper into justification he got, the more lies he would weave, and he had already woven so many.

She nodded. ‘Happen you’ve got your car now anyroad.’

‘A car, yes. Such as it is.’ He bit his lip. Why he had said that was anyone’s guess. With his pub savings and a little help from Phyllis, he had paid for driving lessons and bought a third-hand Escort. Starting it was a challenge, but once he got it going, it ran well enough. The words had come out wrong. They sounded like reproach, but he hadn’t meant that. He just didn’t want anything about his new life to appear flash – that was it. Or threatening. Or better.

‘Your brother’ll be pleased anyway,’ she said, looking about her. ‘He’s got his eye on this room.’

Jack Junior, stealer of Scalextric, robber of bedrooms, of graves. ‘I’m sure he’ll love it. Tell him to watch the steps going down.’

‘Aye.’ His mother allowed herself a brief chuckle. ‘I hadn’t realised how tricky they were, them steps. We should have put in a proper staircase.’ She frowned. ‘We should have made you some blinds for the skylight.’

‘It’s fine, Mum, honestly. It’s fine.’

‘Well…’ she began but said nothing more. Her eyes were wet.

He stood, and seeing him stand, his mother stood too. He could not straighten to full height so remained a little stooped under the beams, and it seemed to him that his mother stooped too, though she was smaller today than ever. She dug in the sleeve of her cardigan and pulled out the shrivelled tissue that lived there, in the darkness, like a shrew. She blew her nose, her head bowed, and he was filled with a terrible sadness.

‘Mum,’ he said, and tried to take her stiff and tiny frame in his arms. Her body was rigid under his hands, her arms tucked up in front of her.

‘I prefer you without your beard,’ she said into his chest. ‘I can see your face. You will look after yourself, won’t you?’

‘You needn’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m all grown up now.’

‘You’ll be in Jack’s old room when you come to visit. You won’t have to go up them steps.’

Ah yes, Margaret, you were right. He would never again go up those steps. He left his family there at the door of his childhood home. If he looked back, it was only once, only enough to see the four of them lined up with stiff formality, arms by their sides, small and muted and distant as an old photograph faded in the sun.

---

Did he drive to Phyllis without a thought for the family he had left, this week’s Top 40 in the cassette player? ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, ‘Woman in Love’, ‘Geno’… did he sing all the way?

I don’t know. There are, after all, things I don’t know.

At the sight of the greenish spire of St Edward’s Church, his stomach flipped. He turned left into Langdale Road and pulled up to the house. Phyllis was at the front window. She waved and jumped up and down, had run out onto the driveway in her stockinged feet before he’d got out of the car.

‘You’re here for good,’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She bent her knees and her hands flew to her face.

‘The first day of the rest of my life!’ He threw his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you, Phyllis Curtiss.’

She burst into tears but she was laughing too, and she hugged him. ‘And I love you, Christopher who was Martin. My lost boy. My darling, darling boy.’

And like that, his life as Martin Curtiss, known to his friends and family simply as Christopher or Chris or even sometimes Chrissy, the life he had travelled steadfastly towards since that October day in 1977 when Margaret and Jack had sat him down in the front parlour, began.

Christopher started his teacher-training course in the October of that year, 1980. In November, another Leeds student, Jacqueline Hill, was killed, her body found in the ground of Lupton Residences. Christopher cut out the relevant articles for his scrapbook and studied his old map of Leeds, curious as to where Lupton Residences were in relation to Oxley Hall, the only female halls he had visited in his time at university.

When the Christmas break came around, Phyllis insisted he spend Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day with his adoptive family.

‘I want you here, of course I do,’ she said, stroking his hair back from his face. ‘But they raised you and it’s not right to spend it with us. You’ll hurt their feelings.’ She didn’t know at this point that neither Margaret, nor Jack, nor Jack Junior nor Louise had any idea of her existence.

‘All right,’ he said, for her, for the sake of all that he had to keep hidden. ‘I’ll go.’

‘I’ve made some shortbread for you to take. And a card.’

‘Lovely. Thank you.’

He went. I have no idea what happened to the shortbread and the card. They will have ended up in some rubbish bin in a service station, I should think; like so many things in his life cast aside, forgotten.

---

In January 1981, Christopher took up a placement at a secondary school in Widnes. In the late afternoons, while the twins were out playing football or watching television or doing their homework, he and Phyllis would work together at the kitchen table: she on her marking and preparation, he on his assignments. They had learned to keep an eye on the time, and fifteen minutes before David was due home, Christopher would take his work upstairs and finish it at the desk David had painted for him, while Phyllis would jump up and busy herself with the evening meal.

What reason did either of them give for this, even to themselves?

It was on a Sunday night in January that the announcement came. Like most momentous historical events, everyone can remember where they were when they heard. And for Christopher, that moment was at home at 6 p.m. He and Phyllis and David were sitting in the lounge with their tea on trays on their laps. It was Phyllis who had suggested they have a TV dinner, saying she wanted to catch the news. They were chatting about something or other when from the television Big Ben chimed and what followed shocked them all into silence:

‘A man is charged with a Ripper murder…’

Those were the words. Not the Ripper murders, as we talk about them today, but a murder. I remember that press conference, the atmosphere of euphoria among the high-ranking police officers who had presided over the five-year waking nightmare. I can’t remember what came out during that first broadcast and what came out later, only that feeling: he’d been caught. Finally. It was over.

A fake number plate had given him away. The police had picked him up for routine, nothing more. Saying he needed a piss, he’d tried to stash the murder weapons. He hid another one in the cistern of the toilet at Dewsbury police station. The rest had fallen into place from there.

Confession at last. To every one.

The report finished. Christopher collapsed against the back of the sofa.

‘They’ve got him,’ he said, his voice strange, strangled. ‘They’ve caught him, the monster.’ He had to put his dinner on the floor. He was panting, running his hand over his forehead. David had to go and get him a glass of water.

‘Are you all right, love?’ Phyllis asked, rubbing his back.

‘Here.’ David passed him the water and he drank it down in one go.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Just so glad they got him. It’s such a relief. It’s over.’

Over the days that followed, whether it was the television news, the radio or out on the street, the talk was of nothing else. More came out. Thirteen victims: he had killed them with a ball-peen hammer and a kitchen knife – objects that hung heavy in the mind. On the surface, he was a normal man, living in a normal house with his wife, Sonia.

‘It’s like the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle,’ Christopher said later, once Sutcliffe had confessed in full – once we knew there’d be no going back. ‘I feel free. I don’t know how to explain it, except for that. I feel free.’

He told me then there had been times when he thought that he might be the Yorkshire Ripper. He said he’d looked in the mirror and seen the image released by the police. I couldn’t believe he could think such a thing, although I could see the physical similarity, especially when he had the beard – I could see how he could have compared his face to the sketches released by the police. Being such a sensitive boy, I could see how such gruesome events might get under his skin and I thought that was all it was. Now, of course, I know it was more than that.

---

And this is where I have to get to, what I have been aiming towards and yet avoiding all this time: April 1981. Even now I don’t know if I can get there, but I will try.

It was the Easter holidays. Christopher had turned twenty-two in the March. Working backwards, it must have been the Wednesday, and I know that on that day Phyllis had gone into Liverpool with her sister to buy clothes; that David had taken the twins youth-hostelling for a few days in the Lake District. I know that the plan was for David and the twins, who by then must have been twelve years old, to return on the Saturday in time for Easter Mass on the Sunday. And I know that it was Christopher who answered the door.

I sit here now and I wonder what would have unfolded had Phyllis not gone to Liverpool but had instead stayed at home and opened the door herself. Life is series of moments, of choices, isn’t it? Every moment, every choice could have gone differently, and sometimes that doesn’t bear thinking about. Sometimes thinking about that one thing can drive a person mad – or even to suicide. No one knows that better than me. Regret, if that’s a strong enough word, is a potent force. But listen to me, sitting here pontificating. Not like I’m any great philosopher. I’m only a person – a normal person with nothing special or interesting to say. What happened that day broke Christopher’s world, broke all of our worlds, into pieces.

What else is there to say? What, really?

Perhaps I could add that it was a shame, such a shame, because by this time Christopher really had settled. Phyllis saw it: in the set of his shoulders, the line of his jaw, the way his eyes opened that little bit wider these days, seemed to have lost the anticipation of hurt she had always read there, the expression that had broken her heart a thousand times over when she had first met him and made her want to say, Hey, it’s OK, nothing bad can happen now. You are safe, my love.

Christopher was saving for a flat. He had met a nice girl, a Spanish teacher called Amanda. They’d been out a few times. Phyllis suspected they’d slept together, since Amanda stayed in digs near the college, and besides, Christopher had taken to wearing a wide smile on his face, to whistling around the house. But he hadn’t told Phyllis anything yet and hadn’t asked if Amanda could stay at the house.

‘No reason why she can’t,’ David had said when she spoke to him about it. ‘They’re hardly kids any more.’

‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea,’ Phyllis had replied, with no idea how she would justify this statement. ‘What about the twins?’ was what came to her. ‘And he’s only got a single bed.’

As it turned out, Amanda staying was not something they would ever have to worry about.

It was only later that Phyllis put two and two together and came to the conclusion that somehow, in some strange way, Christopher’s entry into romantic life had some connection with the arrest of the Yorkshire Ripper. The last piece of the jigsaw in place, as he put it, it was as if he could get up from the puzzle and start living in a more complete way than before. Sometimes when we think something, we have no idea how true it is, nor indeed do we realise the implication of that truth until later.

As for Christopher, the knot in his chest had vanished. He was loved. He belonged. And he felt peace.

And writing this now, no matter what happened after, I suppose I have to be grateful for that.