Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Read Free Page B

afford a bed and breakfast. I was soon back on my feet, raising the deposit to rent a house, which I shared with my new Spanish girlfriend.
Eventually, I got some money from the properties in Birkenhead and decided to get back into studying, but this time a subject that would be relevant to me: Business Studies. I applied to various
seats of learning, and in the end landed a place at the Polytechnic of North London in Holloway Road, a complete contrast with the tranquillity of Cambridge and my first introduction to the
metropolis. For the first couple of weeks I commuted from Cambridge: a ridiculously long journey. I would doze on the four-hour coach journey and wake as it came into London down Commercial Road,
through the heart of the East End. This was my first impression of the area, and I remember thinking it looked sad and rundown.
    I was soon living in London and having a great time, making good friends, girlfriends, finding the college work easy. I decided to go on to do a postgrad course in Management Studies at the
Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), funding myself with grants and casual work. I was, like all students, permanently broke and always with an eye out for a cheap
place to eat.
    That mission to eat cheap, often in the middle of the night after strumming guitars or arguing pretentious philosophy with my student friends, took me for the first time into theEast End. We patronized the famous twenty-four-hour Beigel Bake at the north end of Brick Lane, where we could have, in those days, a delicious, filling, cream cheese bagel for the
princely sum of 40p. And as we discovered this manna, at the same time I discovered the whole area, a place I knew nothing about but where, for some inexplicable reason, I felt at home. It was
rough back then – it still is, in parts. But I loved the buzz, the coolness of the place. It spoke to me in a way no other area has ever chimed with me before. There were hookers and their
pimps, knots of dodgy-looking men outside the pubs, and spicy, exotic smells drifting from the Asian restaurants and cafes. I was used to the rougher areas of Liverpool, but this was different in a
way it is hard for me to explain. I loved the place, still do, and if it was not for family reasons I’d live there today.
    I can remember one particular evening when I went with my best mates Andy and Paul to celebrate Andy’s birthday with a curry in Brick Lane, our idea of the best possible night out.
We’d had a tankful, we somehow got separated, and in my inebriated state I had no idea how to find my way back to Liverpool Street station. For some reason which now seems surreal, I found
myself talking to a Spanish prostitute in Spanish (thanks to my Spanish girlfriend I knew a smattering of words) and she took me back to the station, where I dodged the barrier and ended up back at
the flat where I was living. Her friendliness and willingness to help somehow typified the area for me.
    I knew nothing about Jack the Ripper at this stage. Yes, like everyone else in Britain I’d heard the name. But I had no idea that I was walking the streets where his crimes took place.
That would all come later. There was, though, a verystrange moment in 1991, nine years before I first heard the Ripper story. I was walking down Commercial Road and at the
junction with White Church Lane I had a very strong feeling that something had happened there. It was powerful enough to make me stop for a few seconds, and just absorb the feeling: I had no notion
what it meant until years later.
    My life was going well. While I was at college I met a lovely girl, Lyndsay, and we became engaged, and even got to the stage of sending out the wedding invitations, and paying for the dress.
But I realized that we had drifted apart, with her concentrating on her teaching career and me, after leaving college with my master’s degree, flat out pursuing a lucrative career with a
software company