Page 11

Get down there, you pillock. Eyes and ears.

I tore back inside the building and shoved through the packed crowd, taking the stairs two at a time, until I reached the ground floor. I found the nearest exit and raced outside, hurtling towards the entrance to our road, following the exact path that I had seen the women run. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I got there. Perhaps part of me was expecting to find the officer attacking the women while they cowered on the ground; maybe he’d be arresting them; maybe they’d have already fled down the side road, and I’d arrive to find nothing except an empty street.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I did find.

I stopped at the entrance to our road, gazing along its length. The three women were nowhere to be seen. I could see only one person now, and that was the police officer, collapsed against the brick wall that formed a dead end beside the front door of Number 89.

I’d never seen so much blood before: it was pooled around where he’d collapsed, gushing over the pavement and trickling between the cobbles to the drain. It was sprayed over the wall behind him in an arc, like a painting of a nightmare.

Only it wasn’t a nightmare, and he wasn’t dead. He was still twitching and gasping for breath. I suddenly remembered myself and ran towards him, falling to my knees and feeling the warmth of the blood soak through the fabric of my trousers. I could see now that his throat was cut from one side of his neck to the other, deep enough to glimpse bone. They’d slit his throat like an animal. His truncheon lay uselessly beside him.

‘Murder!’ I cried. ‘Murder!’

The officer’s hand suddenly snapped up and clamped my wrist. His hands were huge; he must have been twice my size. His face was bone white: his bulging, terrified eyes were fixed on mine. The blood at his throat was foaming, and his lips were moving, and I realized, with horror, that he was trying to tell me something.

It was no good; the effort was too much. His eyes rolled back, and his whole body tensed and then sagged in one long release, and I knew without needing to be told that he was dead.

I’ve seen more bodies than most. If I’m honest, a part of me had even become a little used to it. But this was the first time I’d seen someone die, right in front of me. And let me tell you: when that happens, you don’t move. You stay frozen in place, your breath clutched tight in your chest, because a part of you is convinced that their eyes will suddenly flick back towards you and the corners of their mouths will lift up and they’ll say, ‘Gotcha.’

But that didn’t happen. The officer lay still; the blood stopped gushing from his throat. And, now that it had, I could see that there was something hanging from the gash and trailing down his collarbone.

I did it without thinking. I reached and pulled, and it came out long and heavy and sagging with blood. It was stained deep red, but I knew what its true colours were. After all, I had seen thousands of them, all day long.

A suffragette ribbon, stuffed into the hole in his throat, right after his neck had been slashed from ear to ear. I knelt in shock, watching the ribbon drizzle a trail of blood across the dead officer’s uniform, as the shouts grew louder behind me and I heard pounding footsteps reach me, all too few and all too late.

9

Saturday, 17 June, 10.02 p.m.

Everything happened quickly after that. It helped that half the Metropolitan Police Force were standing around the corner.

That was the sticking point. A police officer had just been killed – slaughtered – in a road lined with dozens of apartments, with a hundred officers and fifty thousand people mere seconds away … And yet no one had seen a thing. Once those fireworks went off, anyone who might have seen something had either raced to the main road to watch them, or was leaning out of the windows on the other side of the building, or was gazing up at the sky. No one was looking at the far end of a shadowed back road where a murder had just taken place.

No one, that is, except for me. Which is how I found myself standing on that same road two hours later, wearing trousers that were turning crisp with drying blood while two officers questioned me for the fifth time.

‘Once more,’ said the first officer, pointing up to the smoking gallery of the Hall. ‘You were standing up there’

‘Just after half past eight,’ I repeated. ‘I saw three women in the quad below me, doing something at the statue –’

‘Three women you can’t give any physical descriptions of,’ said the second officer, checking his notes.

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘They were wearing hats.’

Both officers blinked at me.

‘I couldn’t see their faces!’ I added. ‘But I could see that they were all wearing suffragette ribbons. One was older and one had a big carpet bag. The third was climbing the statue when the policeman appeared and chased them down here; she had a hacking cough.’

The first officer frowned. ‘And you followed them because –’

‘I thought something might happen.’

The second officer chuckled. ‘Well – it did, didn’t it? He had a suffragette ribbon stuffed down his throat, by three women who, you say, ran down here, but who nobody else saw except you, and who have now vanished, all in the time it took you to run down six flights of stairs without anyone seeing you do it.’

‘That’s right, yes,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Tell me this is a bad dream,’ said a voice behind me.

A shadow appeared on the road, and the two officers straightened up. I turned to find myself staring into the eyes of the most exhausted man I’d ever seen in my life. He was in his fifties, with the last of his good hair gripping on for dear life. He was wearing a suit that had probably started the day well enough before life had intervened with other plans.