Cell 34

5.16am on Saturday 28th July, 1929.

The Royal Nazarene Hospital, London

A heart lay in the middle of the office. Dawn cautiously peeked through thin purple curtains, casting a gentle light that revealed intricate geometric patterns etched into the skin. Around it was a seemingly chaotic arrangement of lines, runes, hieroglyphs, dots, and dashes, the chalk long since tattooed into the smoothed grain of boot-polished floorboards. Like many of the raids of late, the suspects had been tipped off and had fled in advance.

It was not until mid-morning, when the gloom could no longer conceal its secrets that the police constable on duty screamed down the corridor for the inspectors to come “most urgently.” The lines had begun swirling around his head like a colossal murmuration of starlings, pausing occasionally to depict unfamiliar stellar constellations of foreboding mythical beasts. Although the meaning of the symbols on the floor would be deciphered within six months, neither of the case’s inspectors, Andrew Blythe or Ruth Oakwood, would ever be told.

A cluster of stout barrels in the corner of the room caught Blythe’s attention. He pried the lid off one, only to jerk his head back in primal revulsion as an overpowering smell of rotting meat flooded his nostrils. A thin black slurry coated the inside, just about covering a carving that matched the pattern on the heart. Blythe failed to notice this as he was too busy fumbling in his breast pocket for a handkerchief and dashing to a nearby window to retch out of.

Oakwood slid on her gloves and glided to the mahogany desk, a grand piece with emerald green upholstery and beautifully carved legs. Her eyes darted around, zoning in on details and comparing them with the linked premises she had recently investigated. Glancing at Blythe’s pitiful form slumped over the windowsill, she mentally noted to once again request his secondment to end as soon as possible. Or, at least, for the superintendent to find her a different partner. She had no need for somebody as queasy as Blythe, especially as the most recent cases all suggested ritualistic sacrifice, hardly something for the faint-hearted or faint-stomached. Besides, she thought, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why they were always one step behind and had yet to catch anybody. She needed someone she could trust, not the chief inspector’s golfing partner. Unfortunately for Oakwood, although her sergeant confided in her that he also thought Blythe was “limp-spirited,” that the only cure for this was “character building,” and that she would have to “soldier on.” Oakwood would add these to her ever-lengthening list of meaningless clichés from meaningless people.

She noticed a pile of dumped envelopes cascading from the bureau to the floor. The scale of the crimes became evident as she flicked through bundle after bundle of letters, each addressed to different people. Most of the names were new, but she recognized a couple from recent missing person reports.

Oakwood sucked in her teeth to suppress some ‘colourful’ language as she felt something sharp cut through her glove and across the pad of her index finger. A scalpel had been left underneath the paper. It was gold-plated with a decorative handle. Macabre thoughts whispering from the crevices within her consciousness were quickly hushed when she found the name she was looking for on one of the stacks of letters. It was the name of the man they had rushed to find two hours ago: Mr Frank Green.