John got up and went to the whiteboard carrying some printouts. ‘We’ve had a response to the e-fit from a Geovanni Manrique, an Ecuadorian national living in Ealing…’ He pinned up a photo of a young man, almost identical to the e-fit. In the photo he was grinning against a backdrop of a beach. ‘This is Sonny Sarmiento. Nineteen years old, an extreme sports fanatic from Ambato, a city in central Ecuador. Sonny was killed in a climbing accident two years ago. Geovanni is a friend of the family, and often goes back home. He recognised the e-fit.
‘We’ve also had word back from the Cyber Team. They’ve been through Lacey Greene’s laptop and her Facebook history.’ He pinned up a screenshot of the same photo taken from a Facebook profile: the name underneath it was ‘Nico Brownley’. ‘As you can see, our killer has been using Sonny Sarmiento’s profile picture. He also lifted off another sixteen photos, mainly of Sonny with friends on a trip to London. The Nico Brownley profile was created on the twenty-fourth of September last year. It looks like a lot of time was spent building up friends and a history to give the profile legitimacy.’
‘Can they access the Nico Brownley profile?’
‘No. It’s been deactivated. The IP address used was a VPN – a virtual private network – which makes it impossible to track where the profile was set up.’
The room was silent. A phone started to ring and Moss picked it up.
‘What about Lacey’s mobile phone records?’ asked Erika.
‘We should be getting those after lunch,’ said John.
‘Okay, this is a start. I want you to look through Lacey’s Facebook history and chat logs for anything that might lead us closer to whoever set up this fake profile of Nico Brownley. Find who else he had friended, get in contact with them.’
‘Boss,’ said Moss coming off the phone, ‘that was British Transport Police. They’ve found a coffee bike abandoned near London Bridge. Looks unusual, so they’re thinking it might be the one which belonged to Janelle.’
Chapter Thirty
An hour later, Erika and Moss arrived at London Bridge station. Alan Leonard, one of the project managers working on the redevelopment at London Bridge, met them on the paved concourse outside the station. He was a fresh-faced young man, rugged up for the cold with a hard hat hanging from his utility belt. It was now mid-morning and the concourse was fairly empty; only a few commuters were crossing in and out.
Erika introduced herself. ‘And what the does the redevelopment include?’
‘A new train station, development of the arches underneath, and of course, the Shard,’ said Alan.
They tipped their heads back. Above them towered the huge glass skyscraper, one of its giant wrought-iron legs sitting flat-footed on the edge of the concourse.
‘Ninety-five storeys,’ he shouted above a deep buzz of drilling which had started up. They couldn’t make out where it was coming from; it seemed to originate from both around and underneath them. ‘It’s 309.6 metres, 1,016 feet high,’ he finished.
‘And most of it’s still empty. And will remain so, bought up by foreign investors?’ shouted Moss.
‘Always nice to meet a socialist in the flesh,’ he said.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Kate Moss,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘And yes, my mother really called me that, and no I don’t ever get mistaken for her…’
He grinned. ‘Well, I’m still going to tell my mates I met Kate Moss… Would you ladies like to go up to the top?’
Erika felt he was about to give them a guided tour, so she steered the conversation back to why they were there.
‘Thank you, but we need to see this coffee cart.’
‘Let’s walk and talk,’ he said, leading them across the concourse and around the front of the station into Tooley Street. ‘Most of the businesses have vacated. The major structural work is now mostly being done underground… This is one of Europe’s biggest civil engineering projects.’
They passed under the low railway bridge next to Borough Market and then they had a clear view of Southwark Bridge, the traffic pouring across and around the lights. Southwark Cathedral towered up beside the bridge, seemingly squashed in as an afterthought.
‘We work under very strict conditions,’ he said. ‘When we demolish, clear or excavate, we have to catalogue everything we find, and dispose of it properly. Your coffee cart had been sitting there for the past few months…’
‘Where was it?’ asked Erika as they took a sloped diversion across where the road and pavement had been dug up, exposing a huge hole and an ancient network of rusting pipes.
‘The London Dungeon, the old site. It’s now moved to the South Bank,’ he said.
They continued along Tooley Street, weaving along ramps above the excavated pavement. The empty road was also closed off and filled with earth movers, electrical cables, and builders shouting above the noise. They passed one of the entrances to London Bridge station, and then reached a large boarded-up door, where above two stone columns could faintly still be read the words:
Enter at your peril.
‘This was the main entrance to the dungeon, but the only access is further down,’ shouted Alan.
They carried on walking, past a bar, and a bike shop, both abandoned and boarded up. They reached a junction road emerging from a tunnel, and the works finished. Alan opened the barrier for them, and they stepped onto the pavement.
‘It’s halfway down,’ he said.
They started down the tunnel, which was damp and bare, clad in stained concrete, with a line of swinging lights. Only one person passed them: a man togged in winter gear on a mountain bike.
Alan came to a stop by a rusty fire exit, and took a key from his utility belt. He opened it with a scrape and they went through into the dim gloom. Inside was a bizarre sight: a Victorian cobbled street ran the length of the space, about twelve metres in length, and there was a wrought-iron street lamp against a kerb. The lamp was on, and it cast a weak flickering light over the space. Next to the lamp was parked a coffee bike. A gleaming silver contraption with a wooden box mounted on the back. In front of it, in the centre of the cobbles, was a bundle of what looked like rubbish.
‘Hard hats, please,’ said Alan, handing them each one from a pile in the corner.
A large wooden door to the left was bolted shut. The temperature was freezing. He passed them each a torch too.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Moss as the light from her torch played over the pile of what they had thought was rubbish.
It was the body of a woman, bundled up in filthy clothes, and her face was still in anguish. Moss instinctively reached for her radio to call for backup, but Erika put a hand on her shoulder, training her own torch onto the woman.
‘Moss. It’s not real. Look. It’s a wax figure.’
They moved closer.
‘She’s so realistic,’ said Moss, peering down at the woman’s anguished face and noting the detail: the stained teeth protruding from her mouth; the hair poking out from under a greying bonnet.
‘This was the Jack the Ripper section of the London Dungeon tour,’ said Alan. ‘An actor dressed as a policeman would usher the tour group inside, tell them all about the Ripper’s first victim. That’s the body of Mary Nichols, found in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel.’
Erika shone her torch onto the wall and they saw a road sign painted in black. Despite knowing this was all an illusion, Erika felt her heart beginning to pound.