Killing the Shadows

PROLOGUE

The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.

By the time it reaches the narrow split-level streets and twisting venn els of the Old Town, the haar has lost its deadening solidity. It has metamorphosed into wraiths of pale fog that turn tourist traps into sinister looming presences. Peeling posters advertising recent Festival Fringe events flit in and out of visibility like garish ghosts. On a night like this it’s easy to see what inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to create The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He may have set the book in London, but it’s unmistakably Edinburgh that comes eerily off the page.

Behind the soot-black facades of the Royal Mile lie the old tenements surrounding their barren courts. Back in the eighteenth century, these were the equivalent of today’s council-housing schemes overcrowded with the dispossessed of the city, home to drunks and laudanum addicts, haunts of the lowest whores and street urchins. Tonight, like a tormented replay of the worst historical nightmare, a woman’s body lies close to the head of a stone staircase that provides a steep short cut from High Street down the slope of The Mound. Her short dress has been pulled up, the cheap seams splitting under the strain.

If she had screamed when she was attacked, it would have been smothered by the blanket of foggy air. One thing is certain. She will never scream again. Her throat is a gaping scarlet grin. To add insult to injury, the gleaming coils of her intestines have been draped over her left shoulder.

The printer who stumbled over the body on his way home from a late shift cowers in a crouch at the mouth of the close leading to the court. He is close enough to the pool of his own vomit to gag on the rancid stench held hovering by the oppression of the haar. He has used his mobile phone to call the police, but the few minutes it is taking them to arrive feel like an eternity, his recent vision of hell stamped ineradicably on his mind’s eye.

Flashing blue lights loom suddenly before him as two police cars swoop to a halt at the kerb. Running footsteps, then he has company. Two uniformed officers gently help him to his feet. They lead him towards their squad car where they hand him into the rear seat. Two others have disappeared down the close, the woolly sound of their footsteps swallowed almost immediately by the clinging mist. Now the only sounds are the crackling of the police radio and the chattering of the printer’s teeth.

Dr. Harry Gemmell hunkers by the body, his gloved fingers probing things that Detective Inspector Campbell Grant doesn’t want to think about. Rather than study what the police surgeon is doing, Grant looks instead at the scene-of-crime officers in their white overalls. They are taking advantage of the portable lights to search the area round the body. The haar is eating into Grant’s very bones, making him feel like an old man.

Eventually, Gemmell grunts and pushes himself to his feet, stripping the blood-streaked latex from his hands. He studies his chunky sports watch and gives a satisfied nod. “Aye,” he says. “September the eighth, right enough.”

“Meaning what, Harry?” Grant asks wearily. He is already irritated by the prospect of enduring Gemmell’s habit of forcing detectives to drag information out of him piecemeal.

“Your man here, he likes to play follow-my-leader. See if you can figure it out for yourself, Cam. There are marks on her neck that indicate manual strangulation, though I reckon she died from having her throat cut. But it’s the mutilations that tell the story.”

“Is all this supposed to mean something to me, Harry? Apart from a good reason to lose my last meal?” Grant demands.

“Eighteen eighty-eight in Whitechapel, nineteen ninety-nine in Edinburgh.” Gemmell raises an eyebrow. “Time to call in the profilers, Cam.”

“What the fuck are you on about, Harry?” Grant asks. He wonders if Gemmell’s been drinking.

“I think you’ve got a copycat killer, Cam. I think you’re looking for Jock the Ripper.”