Legacy Of The Ripper (The Study In Red Trilogy Book 2)

Book summary

In "Legacy of The Ripper," the discovery of a long-lost journal belonging to Jack Reid's uncle triggers a dramatic change in Jack's personality. He disappears, and a chilling series of murders reminiscent of the Whitechapel Murders unfolds in Brighton. Detective Inspector Mike Holland and Sergeant George Wright face a challenging investigation, grappling with the mysteries surrounding a peculiar house on Abbotsford Road and the enigmatic riddle left behind by The Ripper's legacy.

Excerpt from Legacy Of The Ripper

Does violent death have a name? Can evil truly be born into the world, evil so deep that it is bred into the genetic make-up of an individual? Until I came to this place and met the man who made me begin to suspect that such an evil could exist, I’d have been as dismissive as most of my profession at the prospect of such a possibility.

My name is Ruth Truman, and this, I suppose is my confession, my testament to the failure of all I’ve tried to do, of all I’ve stood for since the day I took the Hippocratic oath on becoming a physician, a healer, one who makes people better when they’re sick, who cures disease and puts a healthy smile back on the face of those who are beset by illness.

My career was always a fast track to the specialisation I’d chosen while at Medical School in London, and so, today, I’m a psychiatrist, and as such am charged with administering treatment to patients who suffer from some of the most dreadful and least understood diseases that afflict us as human beings, diseases of the mind. My career, until recently, has been one of unqualified success, as I rose through the ranks of my profession with almost indecent haste, becoming a senior consultant psychiatrist in one of our country’s largest teaching hospitals at the age of just forty one. My work with the most difficult of patients, and with those suffering from some of the lesser known but perhaps most interesting of psychiatric illnesses, in particular bipolar disease, more commonly known as manic depression and some of the more obscure dissociative disorders, led eventually to me being offered the post of Senior Consultant at one of the largest secure psychiatric hospital facilities in the United Kingdom. In this enlightened age of course, we now refer to such places as ‘Special Hospitals’ rather than the old institutional type of description which would once have been applied to such a facility.

No, in our politically correct, pre-packaged, health and safety orientated nation of today, the word ‘asylum’ no longer has a place, and perhaps rightly so. Those who are incarcerated, or should I say treated in the hospital are no longer referred to as ‘inmates’ but are now simply ‘patients’. These patients, of course, by nature of the acts they committed that led to their confinement at Ravenswood, are some of the most dangerous individuals our society can produce. As such they must be treated with the utmost respect in terms of ensuring the safety of those who have to work in close proximity to the assorted rapists, murderers, arsonists and serial criminals of every variety whom the courts have chosen to label as being of unsound mind. Quite often, those patients can, of course, be a danger not only to those who must care for them, but also to their fellow inmates, er, sorry, patients, and occasionally to themselves. The number of incidences of attempted self-harm in a hospital such as Ravenswood are far higher than might be supposed by those on the outside. With the greatest of care and supervision that we can provide, a determined individual will always find a way to inflict grievous harm upon themselves, occasionally with fatal consequences. Such events are, thankfully, a rarity, as most patients are found and treated before they can complete the act of suicide.

This then, is the powder keg environment into which are cast a selection of the most damaged members of our society, mentally speaking. As doctors and nurses, the staff must be constantly vigilant and on their guard when dealing with such individuals, and while some achieve their goal of an eventual release from their incarceration in the hospital, others, not so lucky, may find themselves living out the long years of their natural lives within the confines of Ravenswood and other facilities of its kind. We have a number of other staff, not medically qualified, but who in any other similar environment might just be referred to as guards. These men and women are members of the prison service and assigned to take care of the additional security necessary for the calm and efficient running of such a high-risk establishment. Without their presence, the ‘patients’ might just end up inflicting terrible harm on both staff and fellow inmates of the hospital, and pandemonium would reign.

The man whose tale I wish to relate, the man who has driven me to doubt the profession and the ethics that I have given my life to, shows no outward sign of being the proverbial monster, the thing of evil, the beast that I henceforth profess him to be. In truth, Jack Reid is one of the most handsome young men I have ever met. He has the good looks of youth, a cheerful and, at times, most charming disposition, and his fair hair and blue eyes, combined with his warm and gentle smile are such that the man is capable of ‘charming the birds from the trees’ to quote a much used colloquialism. At a little under six feet tall, he has the advantage of height over me, being a mere five feet two, but I have to admit that the towering young man has never used his size to try to intimidate me in any of our meetings. Jack Reid is politeness itself.

When I first arrived here, Jack had been a patient within these walls for just over a month. Not one of the three doctors who’d attempted to ‘connect’ with the sad and unhappy young man he was at that time had managed even a modicum of success. Jack Reid had been found guilty by reason of insanity of a series of three murders of innocent young women in and around the Brighton area. His barrister had successfully pleaded at the trial that, as Jack had no recollection of having committed the murders, which had been borne out by intensive pre-trial psychiatric examinations by a series of respected psychiatric consultants, then it would be impossible to convict him of ‘willful’ murder. It was put forward by the prosecution that Jack had committed the murders whilst in a form of ‘fugue state’, almost a trance, or while undergoing a personality change wrought by a deep psychotic disorder, a severe schizoid episode. Jack’s story, however, was very different and regarded as being so improbable that no-one, least of all the police and the prosecution, gave much credence to it at the time. That story, incredible though it may appear at times, forms the basis of much that I wish to record here.

A ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ plea was rejected by the judge, who directed the jury to disregard any such option when arriving at their verdict.

Jack Reid, although apparently having no knowledge of his actions at the time he’d committed the slayings, was sufficiently aware of his crimes that he did all he could to cover up the murders after committing each of the killings. He said, and the psychiatrists who examined him believed him sufficiently to accept this, that he’d woken as if from a dream at each of the death scenes, and, knowing that he must be the one responsible for the scenes of mayhem he encountered, and not wanting to be caught and punished he therefore did his best to evade the due process of law. At other times he contradicted this story, saying that he didn’t kill the girls, that someone else was responsible, which is where the most elaborate and unbelievable part of his story came in, and which we will focus on quite soon. This illogical and a times pitiful changing from one story to another probably helped the judge to decide there was enough evidence regarding the accused mental state that a conviction could be made on the grounds stated by the prosecution counsel, and the jury agreed.

How could a man commit such crimes and yet have no knowledge of them, while at the same time take all reasonable steps to avoid apprehension and prosecution? Something about the case of Jack Reid caused sufficient consternation for him to be committed to Ravenswood, the most secure and technologically modern hospital of its kind in the United Kingdom. It was hoped the medical staff here would be able to get to the bottom of this strange and chilling case, and that of course is where I entered the picture.

The Director of Medical Services at Ravenswood, Doctor Andrew Pike, solicited my services with a well-timed approach some weeks before my first meeting with Jack. I’d grown tired of my post at a leading London teaching hospital and was ready for a new challenge. When a friend of mine who’d been privy to one of my long and boring lectures over lunch on the need for a change of career direction met Pike at a psychiatric conference a few days after I’d shot my mouth off, and Pike had told him of the impending retirement of his senior consultant, Paul suggested that Pike speak to me about the vacancy. After a telephone call from the Director, and an interview that was little more than a social meeting between the two of us, Pike offered me the position and I, flattered by the confidence he apparently had in my abilities, graciously accepted my new role. I really felt that I could make a difference, and perhaps bring a new dimension to the treatment of what at one time would have been described as the ‘criminally insane’ although such phrases are frowned upon in these enlightened times.

It took me only a couple of weeks to make the necessary arrangements for my move to Ravenswood, and to find a beautiful country cottage to rent, a mere five miles from the facility. I left my flat in London in the hands of an agent to handle the task of renting it out for me, ensuring that the property would at least be occupied, and the sum of money I received each month would more than cover the rent on my picturesque cottage in the beautiful village of Langley Mead. My employers at the hospital were reluctant to accept my resignation, but there was nothing they could do to prevent me taking up my new post, and thus I found myself within the walls of Ravenswood far sooner than I I’d thought possible.

It was April, and the tulips and daffodils were in full bloom in the flower bed positioned just outside the large picture window of my office on the ground floor of Pavlov wing, named in honour of Ivan Pavlov, to whom we owe much by way of our knowledge of modern-day behavioural psychology. A veritable plethora of colours, vibrant reds and yellows, tinged with a few pastel shades of pink and off-white gave the little flower bed the appearance of being awash with far more blooms than were actually planted within it. The illusion created by nature wasn’t lost on my logical mind. If the very plants that spring from the earth can cause us to doubt the reality of a situation, then how much cleverer are those whose minds have developed the most warped and misleading codes of ethics, and who would do all in their power to mislead and misdirect those of us who seek to understand them? The irony of the situation was that, although the flowers were free to bend in the breeze and to soak up the life-giving rays of the sun that gave them sustenance, my new patients were, like me, locked securely within the structures that comprise the hospital, away from the sunlight, in safe and secure isolation. Even the window to my office was fitted with bars in the inside and alarmed to prevent unauthorised opening of the narrow ventilator slits at the top. Even on a hot and stifling day, the window itself didn’t open. Those of us incarcerated with our patients within those walls had to count on the air conditioning to maintain a comfortable environment. It is with those strictures in mind that it is, I suppose, possible to be envious of a tulip.

My new secretary, Tess Barnes entered my office, smiled a good morning greeting and placed a large pile of patient folders in my in-tray. She paused for a moment before leaving me and as I looked up, I could see he was eager to speak.

“Yes, Tess, what is it? If you have something to say please get used to the fact that I’m not an ogre of any sort of description. Feel free to talk to me any time you like.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor Truman,” she replied. “I wasn’t sure how busy you are. It’s just that Doctor Roper asked me to ensure that you looked at the file on the top of that pile. He thinks, with respect, that you might want to take personal charge of that particular patient.”

“Okay, Tess, that’s no problem. I’ll look at it straight away if he thinks it so important.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, and with that she turned on her heel and left my office, closing the door quietly behind her.

Alone once more, I reached out to the in-tray and picked up the file designated as potentially being of special interest to me by Doctor Roper, who I remembered meeting a couple of times in the previous two days. He seemed a pleasant and affable man and gave off an air of confidence and calm reassurance, the perfect demeanour for a psychiatrist. Wondering what he thought was so important about the file that he’d asked my secretary to specifically direct me to it, I placed the beige folder on my desk and looked at the name on the cover of the patient file before me. There, in a neat and ordered handwriting were written just three words.

The file was that of Jack Thomas Reid!