‘No. They must have … I don’t know. I didn’t take more than two steps towards the … Geoff … the … I could see … I ran straight out of the room, not to the door, because I was thinking, If they’re in here, if they’re in here, I’m next, and I have to tell someone. So I ran into the downstairs toilet, because that’s got a bolt on it, and I slammed it, and thank God I still had my phone on me, and I called Ben at the office. And that’s where they found me.’

Lofthouse nodded in appreciation now. ‘Good for her.’

‘Very good, in the circumstances. The first unit on the scene broke a window to get in rather than try to batter down a front door that was still deadlocked and secure. If she’d gone to the body, if she’d got a single splash of blood on her, she might have already been arrested.’

‘And she might still be, despite, once again, the lack of weapon at the scene.’

‘She also doesn’t seem a likely fit for daubing messages about the Jewish friends she might or might not have. There was CCTV in front of the building. My lot got a look at the recordings, and we saw the same glowing figure leaving the scene. But nothing new.’

‘What about the wording of the message?’

‘It’s spelled differently to the original version and has better grammar, but the records of the time give three different versions of what that message actually said. So it might be that our Jack continues to write exactly the same thing he always did. Or perhaps he writes it in whatever the current vernacular is.’

Lofthouse stood up and went to the window, as if she needed to see some everyday reality. It wasn’t as if, Quill thought, she was used to thinking like this. Whatever her mysterious knowledge was, it hadn’t prepared her. ‘So our … our … suspect: it looks like Jack the Ripper, it leaves the Ripper’s message—’

‘And it kills like Jack the Ripper. The single slash across the neck, followed by multiple incisions in the abdomen, done with some medical precision – that’s pretty much the original Ripper’s MO. Except that in this case the victims are male.’

‘So is this actually what it looks like? Jack the Ripper is back, only this time he’s killing rich white men?’

‘Well, concerning the message, Spatley was Jewish, but Sir Geoffrey was not. But they were both indeed powerful, relatively but not grandiosely affluent, middle-aged white males. That’s certainly the connection the media are making…’

‘Because for them it’s cake every day. Hey, Mr Typical Herald Reader, you could be next!’