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  Wheeler stared at them both, his mouth open but unable to speak, confusion writ large across his ruddy complexion as though he’d been slapped about the face.

  ‘Complicity,’ Honor enlightened him. ‘Your actions after the fact have delayed an investigation that could otherwise have saved lives, meaning that you potentially caused the loss of a victim’s life. It’s called manslaughter.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything!’ Wheeler yelped.

  Honor, still leaning forward on the table, fixed Gary Wheeler with her most dispassionate gaze.

  ‘Your alibi was provided by work colleagues, who stated that they were with you the night of the murder of Sebastian Dukas until eleven at night, upon which time you went home. Sebastian Dukas died somewhere between eleven at night and six the following morning. In that time, we have no idea where you were.’

  ‘I was at home,’ Wheeler gaped, ‘I went to bed and was up at seven in the morning.’ ‘So you say,’ Danny uttered. ‘Do you have any evidence to support that assertion?’

  Wheeler performed a rapid mental calculation, then his expression changed and he leaned back and folded his arms. ‘I can’t disprove a negative.’

  ‘Do I look like the kind of mug who’s going to buy that?’ Green snarled. ‘You’re looking at several charges, right up to manslaughter itself, if we find that your lies led to the death of Amber Carson!’

  Danny yanked open the file between them and tore out a glossy, high–resolution photograph of Ambers’ concrete–entombed corpse. He shoved it in front of Wheeler, who stared down at Amber’s horrific death mask, one hand moving to cover his mouth as his defiance withered once more. Honor watched the big man carefully as Danny slid another image in front of him, this time the pair of shots of a tall, well–built man in the bars where Dukas and Carson had last been seen.

  ‘Taken the night Dukas died, and the night Carson died,’ she said as she pointed to the images. ‘Tall guy, big build,’ she observed, ‘not unlike yourself. Same hooded top, too.’

  Wheeler stared from one image to the other and then back to Amber’s mutilated corpse, her mouth wide open and packed with dirty concrete, her eyes sunken black pits filled with soil, and then he suddenly jerked away from the table and jack–knifed as a thin stream of vomit splattered onto the floor between his boots. Wheeler coughed and began shaking as though he’d been plugged into the mains, his sobs filling the room.

  ‘That’s not me,’ he gasped, unable to look or even point at the images of Amber. ‘I don’t care what you say, that’s not me! I didn’t kill anybody!’

  Wheeler’s voice trailed off into miserable, choking sobs. Honor had heard of people who could vomit at will, and she’d sat across the table from some of the best liars ever to walk the streets of London, but the chances of both skills manifesting themselves in the same person were slim, to say the least. Wheeler was sheened with sweat, his belly shuddering as he blurted another line.

  ‘I want a solicitor! I want somebody here to help me! I’m not saying anything else.’ Honor glanced at her watch: eight thirty–two.

  ‘We’ll terminate the interview for a few minutes, Mr Wheeler. When we return, we’ll expect your full cooperation.’

  Danny stood and stalked out of the room. Honor walked out behind him and closed the door.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Danny uttered. For a moment, Honor thought that he believed Wheeler to be deceiving them again, but then he shook his head and ran a hand through his thick hair. ‘He’s not our guy.’

  ‘He’s an Oscar candidate if he is,’ she agreed. ‘We could have dozens of suspects now, and we don’t have names for any of them.’ She put a hand to her head and then kicked the wall, just for the hell of it. ‘Jesus Christ, we go from one unknown suspect to several dozen, we’re going fucking backwards!’

  Danny nodded but said nothing, staring at the floor, one hand resting on the pocket of his jacket where his cigarettes resided.

  ‘I don’t even know where to start. Visit Wheeler’s off–the–books sites?’

  ‘It’ll be a start,’ Honor agreed miserably as she considered how many alibis they were now going to have to confirm, and then only if they could track down every one of Wheeler’s hired–hands. ‘Many of them could be back in Poland, summer workers, travelling on EU open–borders, they could be anywhere. They’re all going home anyway aren’t they, fed up with the UK, Brexit, all that stuff?’

  Danny shrugged, staring into the middle of nowhere as though inspiration was going to just leap up and slap him around the chops. Shit. This was more than a setback.

  Wheeler’s case was for another department entirely, something they could off–load onto the fraud unit or hand over to the MET, but there was no way they could pick out everything pertinent to their own case in short–order, and hand it to DI Harper in time for it to be fed to the dogs come the press–conference.

  ‘We’ve got nothing,’ Danny said finally. ‘Just the guy in the CCTV, that’s all. Wheeler is a bust unless he can come up with all the contacts he ever made on his other sites.’

  In through the nose, out through the mouth. Honor closed her eyes for a moment and got a brief glimpse of a summer meadow, but it was overshadowed by dark clouds, rain falling like tears from a bruised sky. She snapped herself away from it, opened her eyes, reality for once better than the tainted solitude of her mind.

  ‘Okay, get onto Wheeler, every bloody name he can recall. We confiscate his mobile phone, computers, everything, and get somebody onto collating contact details for every person he’s spoken to in the last month. It’s all we can do, maybe we’ll get lucky.’

  Danny straightened up. ‘Will do. Er, could you send somebody down to clean up in there? I’ll move him to another room.’

  Honor nodded as she set off for her office, cursing Wheeler and his sodding hired hands. She stalked in and slammed the door shut behind her, walked to the window for no particular reason and stared through the glass at the busy streets bustling below. The roads were sheened with water that flowed along the gutters, turbulent clouds driving sheets of rain in swirling vortexes between the buildings. Cars were driving slowly with their headlights on, streetlights glowing in the gloom. It could have been mid–winter, not bloody September. So much water.

  Like a terrifying premonition, she thought about the water, about the weather, about how everything the murderer seemed to have done was timed along with the rhythms of the city itself. Water. Somehow, she knew already that it was too late, that somebody else was suffering somewhere and nobody knew about it yet, nobody but her and the deranged lunatic Ripper–wannabe stalking the drenched city streets. He wants the fame for himself, his own place in history. He wants noise, he wants attention, he wants people to know just how clever he has been. He’s the opposite of you, Honor, the darker path taken. He doesn’t want to hide away, he wants to be seen, to bask in the glory of his work and yet never be caught for it.

  The traffic rumbled past down below, and she heard the distant clatter of a drain cover as a stream of black cabs rattled over it. Hamlets Council had a lot to bloody answer for if they couldn’t even fix a sodding drain cover that was…

  Honor stared at the street below for a long moment, seeing nothing before her but the rain pouring down the window and images of Southwark Cathedral, the streets nearby, the apartment where Amber Carson had spent her last night before her death, and the manhole cover outside St Magnus church that tilted when she walked on it.

  Honor whirled and yanked open her office door as she hit the corridor at a run and sprinted down to the Incident Room. She plunged in and shouted at the first person she saw.

  ‘It’s the fucking sewers!’

  The DI, DCI Mitchell and the Borough Commander, Andy Leeson, all looked up from where they sat around a desk as though she were from another world. Several other detectives also stared at her in surprise. Honor reigned herself in and coughed.

  ‘I mean, sirs, I think I know how the killer can move through the city wit
hout being spotted: he’s using the sewers.’

  Katy Harper and the two men stared back at her for a moment longer.

  ‘I thought you were talking about the job,’ DCI Mitchell finally replied, his beard twitching with amusement.‘Perhaps you should share your idea with the team?’

  ‘Yes, boss, of course, I’ll do that right away.’

  Honor hurried to the board and wrote in big red letters the word SEWERS. The detectives in the room, one by one, finished their calls and turned to look at her.

  ‘Okay, the one place we never thought to look for this guy was down,’ she said. ‘Beneath the city. What do we know about the city’s sewers?’

  Danny Green shrugged. ‘Not much, beyond what I contribute to them every day.’ A few chuckles echoed around the room.

  ‘We need to look into them,’ Honor said.

  ‘How deeply do you want us to delve?’ Samir asked with a smirk.

  ‘You think we can flush him out, boss?’ Danny asked.

  ‘I’ll do the gags,’ Honor shot back. ‘Manhole covers are provided with rubber seals after major events in the city, visiting members of state and such like, so that we can tell whether they’ve been interfered with. We haven’t received any reports of broken seals, so the suspect must know about them and either repair or replace them when he moves through the sewers. Contact Tower Hamlets, find out what we can about how far somebody could move through the sewer system. It’s all really old, right, built by the Victorians?’

  ‘Most of it, yeah,’ Danny agreed. ‘They fix up some areas from time to time.’

  ‘Fine,’ Honor said. ‘We find out what we can, and then we get somebody to check it all out. It ties in with my suspicion that this guy is obsessed with the Ripper, he might want to spend a lot of his time in places that are old, from the same era. There aren’t that many of them left, so it shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Samir asked. ‘You think that this guy likes to spend his nights in the sewers?’

  ‘He might not like it,’ Honor conceded, ‘but it’s the perfect way to move undetected.’

  Danny Green reached for his phone.

  ‘You can call Hamlets,’ DCI Mitchell said to him, ‘but they’re not going to be able to help us much.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The weather,’ Mitchell replied with a sweeping gesture of his arm to the office windows, where rain was spilling in torrents down the glass. ‘The sewers will all be flooding and…’

  There was a prolonged silence as they all looked at each other. ‘Water,’ Honor said. ‘Hydrophobia.’

  Before any of them could say anything further, a constable dashed into the Incident Room and searched with a frantic gaze for Honor.

  ‘We’ve got another one!’ ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Another video has been sent to a family in St Luke’s, twenty minutes ago,’ the constable informed her. ‘Local station sent it direct to us, they already recognised what it was. Word’s spreading fast.’

  ‘Get it into the Incident Room, pronto!’ DCI Mitchell’s voice boomed. ‘We all need to see this.’

  ‘It’s already here!’ came a voice from a desk across the room.

  Honor saw at once the television screen in the IR fill with the image of a young woman. Honor’s heart felt as though it had stopped in her chest.

  ‘Water,’ she whispered to nobody in particular as detectives flooded into the room. The screen was filled with a woman’s face and upper torso, her features twisted with horror and illuminated by a pale, red light that occasionally flashed in her retina as she fought her bonds. She was shackled to an old brick wall, her mouth gagged, and water was spilling down onto her from above. The camera revealed little else, and there was no sound.

  ‘Who is she?’ Honor asked.

  ‘Jayden Nixx,’ came the reply. ‘Thirty–two, lives in Aldgate, single, that’s all we know right now. The family are on their way.’

  The borough commander glanced at Honor, his features a fusion of new respect and abstract disgust at what he was seeing on the screen.

  ‘I’d like you to speak to them, Honor.’

  Honor nodded, not even noticing the commander’s conciliatory tone or his use of her given name rather than “detective”. All she could see was Jayden Nixx thrashing against her bonds, and the ancient wall behind her.

  ‘She’s in the sewers,’ Honor said, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘That’s his next play, hydrophobia. He’s going to drown her.’

  Honor stared at the footage for a moment longer, then turned to DI Harper. ‘Wheeler isn’t our guy, we’re pretty sure of that. I need somebody to lean on him and dig out everything we can about who’s worked for him and when, any one of them could be our suspect.’

  ‘I’m pulling MIT 1 off the Finley case for you,’ DCI Mitchell replied, and rewarded her with a brief wink. ‘We’ll put them onto it.’

  Honor felt something warm spill through her belly and she smiled broadly in return, an action that sent bolts of pain through her cheeks. She averted her gaze rapidly as hot flushes tingled up and down her throat, stunned at her own reaction. Christ, she felt like she was about to piss herself with excitement. A quick glance again at Jayden Nixx’s ordeal killed off the primal joy in an instant, as did the voice of an IT technician working behind them.

  ‘Guys, we’ve got a real problem here.’ The detectives all turned to see the IT man look up. ‘This footage, it wasn’t sent to the family.’

  ‘What?’ DI Harper uttered. ‘It was the family that called it in, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but they weren’t receiving it exclusively,’ came the reply. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you: Honor was right, he’s escalating. This isn’t being sent just as an e– mail, it’s live footage. It’s all over the Internet, all over the bloody world.’

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  ‘It’s what?’

  DCI Mitchell’s voice boomed like an artillery cannon as he whirled to the IT man. ‘You Tube, viral sites, forums, it’s all over the place!’ the technician replied. ‘Look

  for yourself, this is going to be global within the hour.’

  Honor’s heart sank as she realised that their suspect was still one step ahead of them and showing no sign of letting up. As she had predicted, he had escalated his crimes, and now he was seeking the public recognition for whatever damned crusade his twisted mind believed that he was embarking upon.

  ‘Pull them down!’ DI Harper snapped. ‘Put Cyber Griffin onto this, get that stuff off the Internet.’

  The IT guy shook his head.

  ‘It’s too late for that now,’ he said. ‘Even if we pulled down every site showing this footage in the next sixty seconds, which is impossible by the way, it wouldn’t matter. People have seen it, they’ll be sharing it, streaming it across the globe. Try to cover it up, and everybody is gonna ask; what are you hiding from us?’

  Honor stepped forward as Harper fumed in silence.

  ‘Contact all digital vendors of on–line streaming and point out to them that this is effectively a snuff video, someone’s personal suffering being shared on the Internet without their permission and against their human rights. Have them pull as many live feeds as you can to at least damage the fallout.’

  The IT guy picked up a phone as Honor turned to one of the Cyber Griffin digital fraud detectives.

  ‘Get the BBC, Sky, everybody on the horn and tell them the same – we can’t share this information and we shouldn’t let this killer get his rocks off watching this girl die. We should also make every effort to trace the source IP address.’

  ‘Will do, ma’am.’

  Honor turned to Danny and Samir, not waiting for DI Harper or DCI Mitchell to give orders.

  ‘He’s escalating, just like we said he would, just like all serial killers do. This isn’t about his fetishes or his obsessions anymore, he’s jumped on the gravy train and he’s enjoying himself. This is where he’s most likely to start making mistakes, so we need to be r
eady to shut him down the moment something pops. Get onto the sewer angle and let’s see if something there might help us identify him. Do they have cameras in sewers, or covering the entrances? Are there other cameras near to the crime scenes or the victim’s homes that might have picked him up entering or exiting sewers? Find out what you can.’

  Danny and Samir whirled to their desks as Honor turned to DI Harper.

  ‘We need everything we can get onto this guy,’ she said, and glanced at Jayden Nixx’s desperate face. ‘How long has she got, do you think?’

  Harper shrugged.

  ‘Hard to say, depends on how deep she is in the system. Hours, at most, given the heavy weather that’s hitting the city and the entire South East. They’ve already raised the Thames barrier.’

  The borough commander gestured to the television.

  ‘She might not even be in the city,’ he said. ‘He could have taken her elsewhere to throw us off the case, ensure that she dies.’

  Honor thought about that for a moment, still transfixed by Jayden’s suffering. It was morbidly addictive viewing, and she understood now why he had created it, just as the Ripper’s savage and bloody mutilation of his victims both appalled and enthralled Victorian London in the late 1880s.

  ‘Shock and awe,’ Honor said out loud as she thought about the way in which modern day events sought to gain media coverage, using ever–escalating sensationalism to capture an audience. ‘He’s playing to a crowd, just like the Ripper. He knows they’ll be fascinated by it, knows that people won’t be able to stop talking about it. But he also wants to be in the same places, recapture the same fascination. This is all about the old city for him: ancient churches and cathedrals, old sewers and streets. Jayden’s somewhere in London, somewhere close by. He won’t have left the city.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Leeson asked. ‘There’s nothing in that footage to betray her location.’