One

The night is deliciously still. Peaceful. The rain stopped an hour ago and there's an orange glimmer in the sheen of water that remains on the street.

The shadows are long and dark, easily large enough to swallow a grown man into the night.

You're nearly there now. A bead of cool sweat trickles down your temple. You pat down the pockets of your overcoat to make sure you have everything you need and discover that your hands are shaking.

They ball into fists of their own volition.

The adrenaline is coursing through your veins.

Your feet carry you along, a route so familiar now that you could trace it with your eyes closed.

Months of planning. Of love and devotion to this project.

And finally, it's happening.

Tonight.

Tonight is the night.

You stop. Balanced on the edge of the pavement, rocking slightly on the balls of your feet.

You're there. You're actually there. The exact same spot.

Excitement threatens to overwhelm you.

You fill your lungs with air and take three steps backwards.

You disappear into the shadows.

And you wait.

You're not sure how much time passes.

But then you see her. Alone. Lost, wandering.

Number one.

Across the city, a long way from strangers in dark shadows, two telephones ring in two apartments roughly two minutes apart. Doctors Nikki Alexander and Harry Cunningham are not happy to be woken at such an unearthly hour on a Monday morning. When told that the other would also be attending, a bubbling sense of dread settles in their stomachs. For two pathologists to be called out, it's got to be a bad one.

The first thing that Harry does is text her, telling her that he'll pick her up in fifteen minutes. He figures that it's more environmentally friendly to car share.

The first thing that Nikki does is read this text and smile. Then she swings her legs out of bed and pads across to her en-suite bathroom, cursing the cold tiled floor.

Harry, meanwhile, does not find it so easy to leave the warmth of his duvet. He starts cursing the world.

Five minutes later and they're both dressed and both in their separate kitchens with their separate kettles brewing separate Thermos mugs of coffee. Strong coffee.

Despite registering that it's only just three am, Nikki pretends that it isn't and starts eating Special K straight out of the box, leaning back against her kitchen counter and fighting her eyes' determination to close again.

Considerably less calm, Harry searches desperately for his car keys. Which is ridiculous, because he was only in his car a few hours ago. One of these days he'll take Nikki's advice and dedicate a special place in his flat for them. Maybe.

"You said fifteen minutes," Nikki greets him as she collapses into the seat of his car outside her apartment block. "It's been twenty."

"Yes, well ... You're just lucky I'm here at all," is his surly retort. He doesn't do mornings very well.

"Lose your keys again?"

"No."

If there's one thing that Detective Inspector Neil Kitson of the Metropolitan Police hates, it's lukewarm coffee in polystyrene cups. There's nothing like a proper coffee, and the one he's just been handed is nothing like a proper coffee. He looks around for a bin, but of course there's never one around when you want one (and this godforsaken back street could really do with one), and so he hands it to an unsuspecting uniformed officer scurrying past without so much as a word.

Detective Inspector Neil Kitson of the Metropolitan Police doesn't have time to learn names and make conversation.

He's running a stressed hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, which could really do with a trim, when he feels the heavy raindrop fall against the back of his fingers.

"Bloody hell. Someone get a tent over her, quickly!" he barks at the surrounding SOCOs, who have only just arrived (it's all right, clearly they know he's got all day), gesturing at the dead body a few metres in front of him. "Hurry up! Before we lose what little evidence we have!"

He sighs exasperatedly when a young police constable trips and stumbles over a forensic kit. The whole lot of them are incompetent. Neil tips his head back and raises his eyes to the open heavens for a moment, inhaling deeply. Bloody forecast. 'The rain should hold off until lunchtime', they'd said.

His gaze travels the perimeter of the crime scene now, eyes narrowing against the increasingly persistent downpour. He looks up and down the long, narrow street, before making an impatient noise in the back of his throat. "Where the hell are the goddam pathologists?" he shouts, to anyone who will listen.

Professor Leo Dalton, meanwhile, sleeps soundly in his bed, and enjoys the perks of being the boss.

The reason the pathologists are late – as Nikki will point out to anyone in the vicinity – is because Harry got lost.

"I wasn't lost," he argues as they suit up at the boot of his car. "I knew exactly where we were. I just wasn't sure how to get from there to here. I'm sorry if I haven't learnt the A to Z of London's East End off by heart. Anyway, I don't remember you offering any directions."

"I did!"

"Oh yes, of course. Do forgive me," he says, overly dramatically. "Thank you so much for directing me the wrong way up a one way street. Reversing all the way back down wasn't embarrassing at all."

Two SOCOs nearby exchange glances and a smirk. This is not their first crime scene with Doctors Cunningham and Alexander.

Nikki merely giggles quietly, passing Harry his silver forensic case and picking up her own. His brows furrow as they walk towards the crime scene. "Have we been here before?"

She glances around as they duck under the police cordon tape. "I don't think so. Why?"

"Just ... looks familiar."

"About bloody time!" comes the gruff call of a broad-shouldered man in a rain-speckled but otherwise smart cashmere coat. It's difficult to tell in the darkness whether it's navy or black. Perhaps not the most important thing to focus on, Nikki realises, but she likes to judge character by the clothes on a person's body. Whatever colour the coat, clearly, this detective had not been prepared for rain.

She pushes her own damp hair out of her face as she and Harry reach him. "Doctor Nikki Alexander," she smiles, holding out a hand. "This is Doctor Harry Cunningham."

He brushes away her hand with a wave of his own. "Yeah, yeah, I'm DI Neil Kitson, whatever. Let's make this snappy, shall we, before we all end up looking like drowned rats?"

Nikki glances around at her surroundings as they walk, suspecting that there probably were actual drowned rats around here somewhere. A grotty street in the heart of Whitechapel, with small apartment buildings, construction yards and a large sports centre backing onto it, it wasn't exactly the ideal location to be at 4am on a Monday morning. There was a rumble as one of the first tubes of the day trundled through Whitechapel underground station below their feet.

She catches Harry's eye and he pulls a face. Clearly they'd been thinking along the same wavelength (it has been known to happen occasionally).

And then she sees the body.

Her initial thoughts had been right.

It was a bad one.

Harry has seen plenty of dead bodies over the years. Freak accidents, desperate suicides, vicious murders, old age, terrible illness; you name it, he's seen it. But this is ... something else.

He shares a look with Nikki, whose face has visibly paled, even under the harsh spotlights set up by forensics and the orange glare of the streetlamps overhead. Then he glances at Kitson, who is regarding the body with a slightly nauseous expression on his stern face.

She – for it's definitely a she – is slumped at the bottom of a wall on the pavement. She's only young; he would guess early-twenties at a push. She's wearing a shorter-than-short skirt and tank top, both of which are saturated with dark blood. Her head has fallen onto her chest and long, brown hair hangs in rain-and-blood-matted strands over her face.

Clearly visible on her neck and stomach are deep, gaping stab wounds. No, not stabs. More like ... slices. Leaving her body ... open. It's grotesque. Some killers show respect to their victims, adoration, even. But the guy who did this? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Harry can just about see inside her, can see a bloody mess of internal organs.

He takes another glance at their location. He's sure he's been here before. It's like ... déjà vu.

He bends down level with the victim, tilting her head back so that he can look at her properly. Bright green eyes stare back at him, dull and lifeless as they stare over his shoulder. He finds that he has to look away for a moment and take a breath.

Yes, as a highly skilled and experienced pathologist Harry Cunningham has seen a lot of bodies. But sometimes, nothing can prepare him for what he's going to see next.

It always rains when she gets called out to a crime scene, Nikki concludes as she snaps open her case and extracts a swab. Whenever she's on call, the heavens decide to open. It's like some higher power has it in for her; not only does she get woken at such unsociable hours and dragged halfway across London to some grotty crime scene, but she gets completely drenched while she's there. It always bloody happens.

With a sigh, she attempts to focus on what she's doing, lifting the victim's arm into the air. "Rigor hasn't set in yet, she's not been dead any longer than about two hours. Who found her?" she asks the detective standing opposite them, although she's not entirely sure whether he's going to bother answering her. He doesn't seem to like conversation.

He surprises her, however, with a softer tone than before. "Her boyfriend, Daniel Turner. Her name is Kelly Jessop, she's twenty-one. They were at a party nearby, had an argument and she stormed out. Half an hour later he went looking for her. And found her like this, poor bastard."

Beside her, Harry nods knowingly. "That's his vomit on the other side of the road, I take it?"

Kitson purses his lips for a moment, before saying through gritted teeth, "No, that was one of my completely inept officers."

Nikki, though, has stopped listening. "He found her thirty minutes later?"

"Thereabouts, yeah."

"Well, that didn't give the murderer very long at all, did it? Not to do this amount of damage..." she muses.

Harry grimaces. "You think he's done this before? Practiced?"

She shrugs and they fall silent. The rain patters on the canvas over their heads. Leaning closer, Nikki frowns as she notices something odd. "She's smudged her lipstick. Look, there's a streak of it from her bottom lip all the way down to her chin."

"She was at a party," Kitson reminds her. "I've seen what kids her age get up to these days. I'd be more surprised if her lipstick wasn't smudged."

Shaking her head, Nikki says, "She's not been kissing. Harry, give me your hand."

Looking puzzled, he holds out gloved fingers. Taking them in her own, she selects his thumb and hovers it over the lipstick smudge. It's nearly a perfect fit.

"So he put her hand over her mouth to stop her screaming, so what?" Kitson snaps impatiently.

"If he did that then it would be smudged all over her lips and chin, not just that one spot. I think he opened her mouth." She nods at Harry, who carefully prises the jaws open while she selects her tweezers from her case.

"What on earth for?" Kitson asks, bewildered.

But she's already found what for, and is extracting it gently. It's a small, folded piece of paper. She takes it in her fingers, as Harry and the detective peer closely over her shoulders. It unfurls to be about the size of a business card, with a swirling pattern and the words 'with sympathy' printed in one corner. The sort one might find in a bunch of flowers. But written on it in black permanent marker are three large letters.

JtR.

"'JtR'? What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Kitson barks, more curiously than angrily.

"Oh my god." Beside her, Harry has stumbled to his feet and taken two steps backwards, running a hand over his face. "Oh my god," he says again.

Straightening up herself, still holding the card, Nikki gazes at him questioningly. "What? Harry, what is it?"

"I thought this was familiar," he mutters. "We're in Whitechapel. How can you not see it?"

But she's nonplussed. Kitson, however, has nearly the exact same reaction that Harry did a minute previously. "You're bloody kidding me!" He and Harry share a look.

"What is it?" she asks again, more persistently, annoyed at being excluded from their epiphany.

"'JtR'!" Harry exclaims. "Jack the Ripper!"

Thought I would write a new multi-chapter, seeing as I haven't for so long. I realised as I was writing this just how much I missed it.

I'll try my best to update it as frequently as possible (I do actually have the next couple of chapters essentially finished) but you know what I'm like.

Let me know what you think?

Charlotte x