It had stopped raining by the time Jamila and Jerry turned into Southampton Way and parked behind the large white Crane’s Drains van. They unbuckled their seat belts, but before they climbed out of their car, Jamila turned to Jerry and said, ‘You know, Jerry, I have very grave doubts about this.’
‘Me too, sarge, to be honest. I mean, weird isn’t the word. But what’s bugging you about it?’
‘It was DCI Walters. He said he was sceptical, but it seemed to me that he was too quick to assume that Martin Elliot’s disappearance had something to do with the supernatural.’
‘I reckon he wanted to wash his hands of it, do you know what I mean? It’s all too screwy for the MIT, so he passed it across to us. Didn’t want to spoil his success record.’
‘You’re probably right. But I find these ghostly figures really hard to believe in, don’t you?’
‘Well, yeah. I suppose they could have been some kind of hallucination, couldn’t they? There’s methane down the sewers, isn’t there? And carbon monoxide, and if you breathe in too much of those you can start seeing things. And God knows what other solvents might have been dumped down the drains. But to be fair to Walters, how can three people all have the same identical hallucination?’
‘It’s very rare, but it has happened. In psychology they call it “folie à deux”, or a madness shared by two people. In this case it would be “folie à trois”. There’s even “folie à plusieurs”.’
‘Sorry, sarge. I’ve forgotten all my Frog.’
‘It means madness shared by many. My friend from the Crime Branch in Delhi told me about a case that he had to deal with in Burari, in the summer of 2018. Eleven members of the same family hanged themselves from the ceiling of their house, all together. Apparently they had talked a lot about śūnyata, but otherwise they were a normal family and they were not into the occult or anything like that. A psychiatrist decided they were suffering from shared psychosis, or what they sometimes call induced delusional disorder.’
‘What’s śūnyata when it’s at home?’
‘It means emptiness, or voidness. It’s a meditative state of empty awareness.’
‘Like when you look down into your glass and realise you’ve finished your beer?’
‘No, Jerry. It’s a belief that all things are empty of intrinsic existence.’
‘Sorry, sarge, you’ve lost me. But it doesn’t sound like something that’s worth hanging yourself for.’
‘I simply feel that the MIT should have brought in a forensic psychologist first, to interview the witnesses, before they called on you and me as ghostbusters.’
‘Why didn’t you say that to Walters?’
‘Because I didn’t want to question his judgement – not in front of his own detectives. And also because I think that you and I are quite capable of making an intelligent assessment of the witnesses’ credibility. If they do need to be seen by a forensic psychologist then I think we will know, once we have talked to them.’
‘I get the feeling you’re even more sceptical about this than Walters.’
‘Jerry – I was brought up among people who believe absolutely in the existence of ghosts and demons. My uncle used to sacrifice goats to ward off evil spirits, so I know what’s real and what isn’t. Those clothes that came to life – that wasn’t supernatural, that was an actual virus. I do accept that people see ghosts, but there is always an explanation. As you say, methane and carbon monoxide can give you hallucinations. How many times have you heard people with faulty boilers say that they have seen intruders in their house?’
‘Only once. But then the fellow who reported it was pissed as arseholes too.’
They climbed out of the car and walked along to the orange plastic barriers on the corner. Three engineers were standing around talking and smoking, and as they approached, Gemma was climbing up out of the manhole, and Jim was holding out his hand to help her. Newton came after her, lifting up his camera so that it wouldn’t knock against the manhole’s metal frame.
Jamila lifted her hand in greeting.
‘Ms Bright? Detective Sergeant Patel. And this is Detective Constable Pardoe.’
Gemma came over to the barrier and dragged it aside so that Jamila and Jerry could join her beside the open manhole.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Those other detectives told me you’d be coming to talk to us.’
‘Did they tell you why?’
Gemma took off her helmet and shook her hair. ‘Not really. Only that you were specialists.’
‘Did they tell you specialists in what?’
‘No. Not exactly. They just said that you’d dealt with this kind of thing before.’
‘You could say that, yes. But what you told those detectives… what all three of you told those detectives—’
‘About those things, you mean?’ said Gemma. ‘We can hardly believe it ourselves. Honestly, it was like being in a horror film, except that it was real. But those things did attack us, and I think they would have hurt us if we hadn’t managed to get away.’
‘Hurt us?’ put in Jim. ‘They would have bloody torn us to bits, if we’d let them, and had us for lunch. We would have been three shit sandwiches, and don’t think I’m joking.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gemma. ‘This is Jim Feather. He’s our senior flusher. And this is Newton Akamba. He’s our lighting and camera engineer.’
‘You’ve got yourselves a fatberg down there, as we understand it,’ said Jerry.
‘That’s right. The sewer’s almost totally blocked, all the way from here to Charles Coveney Road. That’s about an eighth of a mile. We went down there so that Martin could take a look at it and decide how we were going to clear it.’
‘You found a severed hand apparently.’
‘That’s right. A woman’s hand, stuck in the fat. It was just after we’d found it that all our lights went out and those things appeared.’
‘Luminescent, they were,’ said Jim, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Bit like a watch dial, you know what I mean? Glowing in the dark.’
‘And you all saw them?’
‘That’s right,’ said Gemma. ‘They weren’t hallucinations, because the methane and hydrogen sulphide levels were well within the safety limits, and there was no evidence of any unusual gases. Sometimes we can detect arsine from the semi-conductor industry, but that smells like garlic, or fishy, so you can always tell. Then there’s ethylene oxide, which they use in antifreeze and for sterilising food. That can give you headaches and hallucinations, but again, there was no trace of that.’
‘A crime scene team will be coming down later to examine the location where Martin Elliot was last seen,’ said Jamila. ‘Meanwhile, we’d like to take a look for ourselves, if you can show us.’
‘We’ve protective suits and boots and helmets in the van,’ Jim told her. He looked her up and down, and then he said, ‘Not sure we’ve got one small enough for you, love, but you don’t mind baggy, do you?’
‘This isn’t a fashion parade, Mr Feather. Any size will do.’
*
It was growing dark by the time Jerry and Jamila had struggled into their white protective suits and boots, buckled on their helmets and were ready to climb down into the sewer. Newton had set up a portable LED light tower on the corner so that the area around the manhole was lit up like a film set.
‘I feel like I’m on a mission to the Moon,’ said Jerry, tugging on his thick black nitrile gloves.
Gemma said, ‘We’ll be walking single file, and quite slowly, because we don’t want too much splashing. You’ll find it slippery underfoot in places, so watch your step. If the smell’s too much for you, or you start feeling faint, please shout out immediately. The sewage is knee-deep this time of day, especially with this blockage, and we don’t want you falling over and going under. If you do though, shut your eyes tight, keep your mouth closed, and hold your breath.’
‘In the Met, that’s what we call redundant information,’ said Jerry.
Gemma gave him a ghost of a smile. ‘Perhaps. But two of our flushers have drowned in the sewers in the past eighteen months, and if you did happen to go under, and we fished you out, we don’t really want to be giving you mouth-to-mouth.’
Jerry thought, I like this girl. She gives as good as she gets.
Newton climbed into the manhole first, so he could switch on the daisy chain of LED lights that he had strung along the walls of the tunnel. Jim went down after him, followed by Jerry, Gemma and Jamila.
Jerry carefully lowered his boots into the slowly moving tide of pale brown sewage. He sniffed, and then he said, ‘To be honest with you, it doesn’t smell as bad as I thought it would. It’s no worse than the bogs at the Tooting nick after Sergeant Khaled’s been in there, getting rid of last night’s vindaloo.’
‘Now you’re being racist,’ said Jamila.
‘You think so? You want to tell him that. I reckon he’s taking his revenge for the Raj.’
Jamila took several deep breaths. ‘I can smell something lemony.’
‘Yes, we could too,’ said Gemma. ‘We’re still not sure what it is. One guess is that it could be dipentene, which is a paint thinner and a by-product of waste tyres. But we haven’t had the time to carry out an analysis yet, as you can imagine.’
‘Maybe it’s lemons,’ Jerry suggested. ‘There’s plenty of pubs around here serving their drinks with ice and a slice.’
Gemma went first, with the rest of them wading slowly behind her. ‘We’ve searched the whole length of the fatberg with ground-penetrating radar,’ she said, over her shoulder. Her voice echoed from the curving brickwork so that it sounded as if there were two of her speaking in chorus. ‘We’ve also sent flushers all the way north along the sewer from Charles Coveney Road as far as the Thames outflow.’
‘But no sign of Martin Elliot?’ said Jamila.
‘No. Only the usual rag.’
‘What about that severed woman’s hand you saw? Did you find that?’
‘No. We couldn’t find that either.’
‘You’re sure it was a woman’s hand and not a glove, or something like that?’
‘It was a real hand all right,’ Jim put in. ‘It was going green, because it was rotting, and you could see a bit of the wrist bone sticking up.’
‘But the GPR didn’t pick it up?’
‘No, but then it does have its limitations, especially with high conductivity soil like clay. The hand could still be there, buried in the fat. If it is, we’ll find it soon enough, when we get the high-pressure hoses on it.’
They arrived at the glistening wall of fat and sewage clutter. Jerry said, ‘Jesus!’ and shook his head in disbelief. He had seen pictures of fatbergs on the TV news, but the reality of dripping solidified grease, stratified with layers of toilet paper and wet wipes, prickly with cotton buds, was more repulsive than he could have imagined. He glanced across at Gemma, who was frowning at her hand- held four-gas monitor, checking for methane and hydrogen sulphide, and wondered why on earth a pretty girl like her had chosen a career in drainage. Jamila caught him looking, and she gave a quick one-shouldered shrug, as if she’d read his mind. He had begun to suspect that Jamila was telepathic, or if not, the shrewdest woman he had ever met. He knew one thing for certain: she could always tell when somebody was lying to her. She said that she could see their eyes turn glossy black, like black olives.
Gemma said, ‘Right here – this is where Martin was standing the last time we saw him. Look – you can still see his fingermarks where he grabbed at the fat to try and keep his balance. I was standing here, next to him… Jim was here… and Newton was almost exactly where he’s standing now.’
‘So take us through it,’ said Jamila. ‘The light went out, and then what?’
Newton said, ‘I was carrying a Haloptic camera, which has a very powerful lamp attached, twenty times brighter than your standard lamp, and that suddenly switched itself off. I say “switched itself off” because the lamp and the camera were not damaged in any way and afterward they worked fine, no problem at all.’
‘Next second, all of our helmet lamps went out too,’ said Jim. ‘It was pitch-dark, and that’s when those ghosty things came at us.’
‘But you could see them, even though it was totally dark?’
‘That’s right. They sort of glowed. Almost like they was radioactive.’
‘And they attacked you?’
‘They were all over us,’ said Gemma. ‘One of them was snatching at my helmet as if it was trying to pull it off. I truly honestly felt that they were trying to kill us.’
As she said that, the LED lights that Newton had strung along the sewer wall started to flicker. They flickered rapidly at first, like strobe lights, so that when the five of them turned around to look at them their movements appeared to be jerky, like characters in a silent movie.
‘What’s happening, Newton?’ asked Gemma. ‘Don’t tell me there’s a loose connection.’
‘No, it can’t be. Maybe that bloody generator’s on the blink again.’
The lights stopped flickering, but then they went out completely, so that they were left with only their helmet lamps. After a few seconds though, the lights came on again, but now they began to shine much brighter than they had before, brighter and brighter – so bright that the interior of the sewer was almost completely bleached of colour.
‘Newton – what the hell?’ said Jim, holding up his arm to shield his eyes.
‘I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on!’ Newton protested. ‘These lights never did nothing like this before!’
Then, abruptly, the lights all turned green. Not just the LED lights along the wall, but their helmet lamps too.
Gemma checked her gas monitor again. ‘I don’t know what’s causing this. There’s no gas warning. But I think we need to get out of here, fast.’
They started to slosh their way back along the sewer. Gemma went first, with Jamila and Jerry close behind her, followed by Newton and Jim. The lights stayed green and almost unbearably bright, so that everything was green – the brick walls, the sewage, their faces, their hands, their white protective suits.
They were not even halfway back to the inspection chamber when they heard a low moaning sound. It was coming from behind them, and it grew louder and louder. At the same time, a foul draught started to blow along the sewer. It gained strength with every splashing step they took, until it was shrieking in discordant chorus with the moaning sound. The sewage lashed against the backs of their legs, and Jerry felt it spray against his neck and splatter against his helmet. It was like being caught in a storm, except that it was underground, and everything was blindingly green, and the rain was human waste.
Gemma shouted something, but the moaning and the shrieking were so loud now that Jerry couldn’t hear what she said. The moaning sounded like a woman in terrible agony, and the shrieking reminded him of a traffic accident he had once attended, when a school bus had caught fire and all the children had been trapped inside.
He wanted to walk faster and escape from this claustrophobic hellhole as soon as he possibly could, but the sewer was slippery underfoot, and he had nearly lost his footing twice already and had to reach out for the wall to stop himself from falling over.
They were less than fifty metres from the inspection chamber when he was struck on the right shoulder by some small hard object. Then he was hit again, on the back of his helmet, and this object clanked, as if it were metallic. Three or four more flew past him, and one of them hit Jamila. They dropped into the sewage before he could see what they were, but they had felt like nails.
Jamila, right in front of him, slipped and stumbled forward. She fell on to her hands and knees in the sewage, which was almost thigh-deep now and rippling in the draught like an incoming tide. She almost went under, but Jerry bent forward and put his arms around her waist and lifted her up. She was so light it was like picking up a small girl. She staggered and nearly slipped again, but then she regained her balance. She turned around and looked up at him and even in the bright green light he could see how relieved she was.
Gemma looked back to see what had happened, and Jerry raised his hand to reassure her that they were fine. Before Jamila continued to follow though, she held up an object in her glove so that Jerry could see it. It was a large old-fashioned key, with a bow shaped like a star, and he guessed that she had picked it up from the sewage when she fell.
‘Let’s get out of here first!’ he shouted at her, although the shrieking was so piercing now he doubted that she could hear him.
The children in the bus had shrieked like that, and he had never really got over it.
At last they waded into the inspection chamber below the open manhole. As soon as they did, the moaning and the shrieking died away. The draught subsided, although the sewage was still gurgling around their boots and slapping against the sides of the chamber. Jerry looked back along the sewer and saw that the green lights were gradually fading and changing back to white.
He looked at Jim, and he didn’t think he had ever seen a man with such a grim expression on his face.
‘What was that all about?’ Jerry asked him. ‘It’s all stopped now. That makes me think that somebody must have known we were in there, do you know what I mean? I reckon that was all for our benefit. Somebody wanted to scare us out of there.’
‘Well, they bloody well succeeded, didn’t they?’ said Jim.
‘I stink,’ said Jamila, holding up both arms and looking down at her sewage-streaked suit. ‘I have to get out of here and wash myself.’
Jerry said, ‘Technically though, what did we just witness down there? Do you have any idea what could have made an effing awful noise like that, and turned the lights green, and started that wind blowing?’
‘I cannot understand how the lights changed colour,’ put in Newton. ‘They are standard LED lights. They cannot turn green without a filter. It’s not possible.’
‘Well, you say it’s not possible, but it obviously is. And what about the noise? And the wind?’
‘I know what you’re asking me, detective,’ said Jim. ‘But the answer is no, I can’t explain how that was done. I can’t even understand how anybody apart from Crane’s Drains operatives knew that we were down there.’
‘Okay,’ said Jerry. ‘Maybe the forensic technicians can come up with some kind of answer, when they go down to take a look.’
‘Well, bloody good luck to them,’ Jim told him. ‘Right now, all I need is a stiff double Scotch.’
Gemma stood to one side so that Jamila could climb out of the inspection chamber first. Two of the sewage engineers helped her out of the manhole and Jerry heard one of them say, ‘Went for a swim, did you, love? You’d be better off down the leisure centre. Not quite so smelly.’
Jerry climbed up after her.
‘Didn’t you hear anything?’ he asked the engineers, stamping his foot to shake off a piece of toilet paper that was wrapped around the toe of his boot.
‘Hear anything? Like what?’
‘Like somebody howling. Aaaaaaahhh! And like the wind whistling. Phweeeeeee!’
The two engineers looked at each other in bewilderment. ‘No, mate. Didn’t hear nothing like that.’
‘Nothing at all? How about the lights? Didn’t you see the lights going green?’
‘What lights?’
‘The LED lights, the ones you’ve strung out along the sewer.’
They both shook their heads. ‘No. But then we wasn’t really looking, to tell you the truth. We was over there, having a quick snout.’
Gemma climbed out of the manhole and pulled off her gloves. ‘You can come back to our offices if you like, detectives. We have showers there that you can use.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jamila. ‘And when we’ve cleaned up, we need to talk about this. You’re the experts on sewers; you must be able to come up with some explanation. I’m going to tell the forensic team to delay their inspection until we have some understanding of what just happened down there. Maybe the fatberg is giving off some type of unusual gas that you don’t know about. I don’t want anybody else going missing, or worse.’
They walked over to the Crane’s Drains van and Jim slid open the side door for them. Jamila sat down, and Jerry bent over to pull off her boots for her.
‘Still convinced that it’s nothing supernatural?’ he asked her, keeping his voice down so that Gemma couldn’t hear him.
‘There’s something down there, Jerry, I’ll grant you.’
‘You don’t really think it’s some kind of gas?’
‘No, I don’t. There may be gases that can turn lights green, and there may be gases that can cause dramatic changes in air pressure, and that was why that wind started blowing. And that moaning sound, maybe that was gas blowing through holes in the fatberg – you know, like organ pipes.’
‘But you don’t believe that, sarge, do you? Not for a moment.’
‘No,’ said Jamila, and she held up the key that she had picked out of the sewage. ‘Whatever extraordinary properties gases may have, they can’t throw keys at people.’