Back at Crane’s Drains’ red-brick building on Copeland Road, Jerry and Jamila were shown to the washrooms so that they could both take a long hot shower. Even after soaping himself twice though, Jerry was sure that he still smelled faintly of sewage.
Jim Feather was waiting for them when they came out, their hair still wet. Jerry sniffed his fingers to reassure himself that he didn’t really smell, and Jim said, ‘You’re all right, mate. That’s phantosmia. All of us flushers get it from time to time.’
‘Phan-toze-mia? What’s that then?’
‘It’s when you’re worried that you stink of something and your brain conjures up the smell that you’re worried about, even though it’s only imaginary. You’ll probably smell it again, on and off, maybe for three or four days. But you only smell of Lynx, believe me.’
‘Bloody hell. That’s bad enough.’
Jim led them to Martin Elliot’s office, whistling between his teeth as he walked. Gemma had already contacted John Crane, the company’s founder and owner, so that she could tell him about the lights turning green and the howling draught, and update him on their continuing search for Martin, whether he was alive or dead.
As Jerry and Jamila came in, she was still talking to him on Skype on the fifty-five-inch television in the corner of the office. He had a broad northern face, with deep lines in his cheeks and a deeply cleft chin. His hair was grey and combed straight back, like a 1950s’ cricketer, and he had a distinctive Yorkshire accent.
‘Whatever happens down drains, pet, there’s always a logical explanation,’ he was saying. ‘Sometimes you can see things that look like ghosts flitting around and hear shouting and singing. Once in Beckton the sewage itself caught fire, spontaneous combustion. I saw that for myself. But like I say, there’s always a logical explanation. That sewage catching fire, we tracked that down to a fly-by-night haulage firm in Barking. They’d poured thousands of litres of illegal red diesel down the sewers so they wouldn’t be caught with it. Somebody probably dropped a lighted fag end into the drain and blammy, up it all went.’
‘I understand what you’re saying, sir,’ said Newton. ‘But I can’t think of any logical way in which those LED lights could have turned green.’
‘Not now you can’t, lad,’ said John Crane. ‘But I can assure you that it didn’t happen by magic. Any more than that draught that blew you all out of there.’
Jamila sat down at the conference table next to Gemma and introduced herself. ‘I am Detective Sergeant Jamila Patel, Mr Crane. I am one of a team that is investigating Martin Elliot’s disappearance. This is my partner, Detective Constable Pardoe.’
‘How d’ye do, officer. If there’s owt I can do to help, you only have to ask.’
‘Mr Crane, we saw those green lights for ourselves, and we felt that draught, but there was one thing more. As we were retreating along the sewer, we were showered with keys.’
John Crane’s brow furrowed. ‘Keys? You mean like door keys?’
‘That’s right, sir, metal door keys. And they struck us with some considerable force, as if they were being thrown at us to hurt us, or at least to make sure that we left the sewer as quickly as possible.’
‘Well, keys, that’s right queer, I’ll admit. But there must have been some scientific reason for it. I don’t know… maybe there was a sudden upsurge of magnetic energy. It’s always full of surprises, that bobar, and none of them pleasant. You can never tell what’s going to come floating along in it next.’
Jim said, ‘I can put together a technical team first thing tomorrow morning, Mr Crane. I’ll call in Dale Roberts from safety and Lenny Machin from the lab, and maybe Ken Williams too. Ken really knows his onions when it comes to ventilation. We can carry out a thorough gas analysis and double-check the electrics, as well as take sewage samples all the way from the inspection chamber to the fatberg.’
‘That’s good,’ Jamila put in, ‘because as soon as you’ve done that, we can send in our own forensic experts. Provided, of course, you can assure us that it’s safe for us to do so.’
‘I’ll admit it’s a thousand-to-one phenomenon, what you experienced,’ John Crane told her. ‘But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about sewage over the years, it’s never predictable. You can never tell what some misguided barmpot is going to flush down his bog or how that’s going to react with what some other misguided barmpots might have flushed down their bogs – especially in confined spaces like sewers. But don’t you worry, detective, we’ll get this sorted in double-quick order. We’re Crane’s Drains… and when it comes to sewers, we’re the bee’s knees.’
*
Jamila and Jerry went back to the station to report to DCI Walters. They caught him just as he was leaving the station to go home, and even when they told him about the green light and the draught and the flying keys, he stood beside his desk with his coat on, jiggling his car keys, and they could tell that he wasn’t really listening to them.
‘What can I say?’ he told them, looking at his watch. ‘I think that more than justifies my calling you two in to investigate, considering your experience with strange stuff like that.’
Jamila said, ‘Mr Crane is quite convinced that there’s a logical explanation for what happened.’
‘It still sounds pretty weird to me. Somebody was throwing keys at you? And you couldn’t see who it was? I mean, you have to admit that’s weird, even if it isn’t supernatural.’
‘Crane’s technicians are going down there tomorrow morning, and if they give us the all-clear we’ll be able to send in our own forensic experts. Between them, I think they should be able to give us some answers.’
‘Right. Good. I look forward to hearing what they come up with. Meanwhile, I have to love you and leave you, I’m afraid. We’re having the wife’s mum and dad for dinner tonight.’
‘Everyone to his own taste,’ said Jerry. ‘I was thinking of going for a ruby myself.’
Once DCI Walters had hurried off, Jamila looked at Jerry and said, ‘He really doesn’t want to get involved in this, does he? I’m sure he thinks that Martin Elliot is never going to be found, and he doesn’t want the MIT to be blamed for it.’
‘Let’s just play it by ear, shall we? Meanwhile, I’m starving. I noticed this little curry house when I was on my way here. Do you want to join me, or have you had it up to here with Indian food?’
Jamila nodded. Jerry could tell that she was upset by DCI Walters’ indifference. Personally, he couldn’t give a monkey’s. He’d been sceptical of senior officers ever since he had worked at New Scotland Yard and found out how many of them were taking backhanders from fraudsters and drug dealers. They hadn’t sacked him, because that would have risked him whistle-blowing and creating a public fuss, but that was why they sent him out to the suburbs, where he could cause less trouble.
They drove down to Holly Grove, a narrow residential street with a yellow-fronted Indian restaurant on the corner, and parked right outside.
‘Ganapati,’ said Jamila, looking up at the name over the restaurant’s front door. ‘That is another name for Ganesh, the god with the elephant’s head.’
‘I used to know somebody in the Kremlin with an elephant’s head,’ said Jerry. ‘But his name was Gordon.’
Inside, the restaurant was plain, with bare wooden tables and utilitarian chairs, but it was warmly lit with lamps made from coloured glass jugs hanging from the ceiling, and there was a fragrant aroma of spices that made Jerry’s brain forget all about the smell of sewage. When he took off his jacket and sat down though, he could see himself in the mirror on the wall, and he thought that he was looking scruffy and washed-out.
He watched Jamila study the menu. ‘What do you think, sarge?’ he asked her. ‘Do you really believe we could have been given this job so we could be – you know – like scapegoats?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps. You told me, didn’t you, that Chief Inspector Kelley has been trying to pull the rug out from under you ever since you left the Yard. And I know for sure that I have made many enemies in the Pakistani community in Redbridge. All men, of course, who don’t like being criticised for the way they treat their women.’
She paused, playing with the turquoise ring on her left little finger. ‘After we wrapped up that case against Jokubas Liepa and his ghost virus, you and me, they could hardly dismiss us straight away, could they, after all the press coverage we were given?’
‘But?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m just suspicious of the way they brought us into this investigation so quickly, as if they had been waiting for some weird case to come up so that they could put us both on to it. If we can’t make any headway with it, they might well accuse us of incompetence. Either that, or they’ll say that we’ve been playing on our reputation as ghost hunters to get ourselves assigned to a job that’s going to win us even more personal publicity – even if they were the ones who assigned us to it.’
‘Well, you may be right. But supposing there is some kind of a spooky influence at work here? What happened to us down in that sewer – you have to admit that it was totally mad. Especially those keys flying around like a swarm of bloody locusts.’
Jamila unfastened her maroon leather purse and took out the large old-fashioned key that she had picked up in the sewer. She held it out to Jerry, but at first he hesitated to take it.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Before I took a shower, I washed it in very hot water. It’s clean.’
Jerry took it and peered at it closely. It was about fourteen centimetres long, with an elaborate bow, a long shank, and star-shaped key wards cut into the bit. It was iron and pitted with corrosion, so it was obviously old, but exactly how old he couldn’t guess.
‘We need to ask a locksmith to take a shufti at this,’ he said, passing it back to Jamila. ‘I know the manager at Kevin’s Keys, in the Broadway. If he can tell us what kind of a lock it was used for, maybe we’ll have a better idea of why it was being thrown at us.’
‘Yes, perhaps. And we’ll ask that Gemma Bright if her team can find us any more keys when they go down into the sewer tomorrow. But it’s an antique, isn’t it? So I think we’ll need more than your local key cutter. We’ll need somebody who’s an expert on historical locks and keys.’
A smiling waiter came over and asked them if they had decided what they wanted to eat. Jamila chose a vegetarian thali, and Jerry asked for the odyian lamb, with fenugreek, tomatoes and green chillies. He also ordered a pint of Fourpure pale ale, brewed in Bermondsey, while Jamila was content with tap water. He knew he shouldn’t drink on duty, but he persuaded himself that when they had left the Crane’s building they had technically knocked off for the day.
‘That Crane bloke, maybe he’s right, and there is a logical explanation,’ he said, snapping a poppadom in half and cramming it into his mouth. ‘I mean, he’s been in the sewage business for donkey’s, hasn’t he? And like he said, you never know what some plonker has decided to flush down the khazi.’
‘For now, I am keeping an open mind,’ said Jamila. ‘My teacher always said to me that some monkeys became men, while the monkeys who didn’t are still jumping around in the trees making faces at them.’
‘Really? My teacher told me to stop flicking ink pellets.’
They were still waiting for their main courses when Jamila’s phone rang.
‘DS Patel. Yes. Yes, I’m still here in Peckham. I’m having a quick supper before I go back to Redbridge.’
She listened, and as she listened, her eyes widened and she looked across the table at Jerry as if she were being told that there was a bomb in the restaurant and they had only minutes to get out.
Eventually she said ‘yes’, and ‘yes’ again, and took a ball pen out of her coat pocket. She scribbled something on one of the paper napkins, and then said, ‘Right away. Of course. We’ll see you there.’
‘What’s happened now?’ Jerry asked her. ‘Don’t tell me somebody else has disappeared down the drain.’
‘Martin Elliot has just been found. A gang of Tideway construction workers came across him lying in a sewer about half a mile north of Greenwich Pumping Station.’
‘Brown bread, I’m assuming?’
‘No. He’s still alive. But he’s seriously injured. He’s lost both of his legs and he’s been blinded. They’ve rushed him to King’s.’
‘He’s lost both of his legs and he’s been blinded and he’s down a sewer and he’s still alive? Bloody hell. My Uncle Harry fell over outside the pub and cracked his skull on the pavement and he was playing a harp in Heaven by the following morning.’
‘Come on,’ said Jamila, standing up and lifting her coat off the back of her chair. ‘We need to get to see him as soon as we can.’
Jerry stood up too, just as the waiter was bringing their curries on a tray.
‘Sorry, mate. We have to be going.’ He took three ten-pound notes out of his wallet and tucked them into the waiter’s shirt pocket. ‘Keep the change. Don’t spend it all on scratch cards.’
With that, he and Jamila hurried out of the restaurant and back to Jerry’s car. It was freezing cold outside now, and the windscreen was already beginning to ice up. Before they could drive off, they had to sit for three or four minutes with the engine running until it had gradually cleared.
‘Did you see that nosh there?’ said Jerry. ‘It looked incredible. And did you smell it? I mean, if nostrils could have orgasms! Why couldn’t they have found this Martin Elliot geezer half an hour later?’
‘It’s part of the job, Jerry, you know that. You wouldn’t like to be sitting in some council office from nine to five, would you?’
‘My brain wouldn’t, no, but my stomach wouldn’t mind, believe me.’
*
It took them only ten minutes to drive to King’s College Hospital on Denmark Hill. When they arrived, the receptionist showed them through to a chilly waiting room, where two young constables from Lewisham police station were sitting next to an aquarium full of listless goldfish, looking bored. One constable was short and thickset, while the other was tall and thin and mournful-looking. Jerry thought they looked like an unsuccessful comedy act.
Jamila introduced Jerry and herself, and then she asked the constables for an up-to-date briefing.
The short stocky constable spoke first. Every now and then he jerked his head sideways as if he were being annoyed by a fly. ‘We was notified by Thames Water shortly after 7:15 that the victim had been located in a new sewer pipe what they’ve been drilling as part of the Tideway construction.’
‘Did you go down into the sewer yourselves?’
‘We did, yes. It’s not yet operational, so we was able to follow the ambulance crew. The victim was lying on a shelf at the side of an inspection chamber. He was missing his legs, and it looked like his eyes had been put out too. To be honest with you, we couldn’t believe he was still alive and talking.’
‘When you say he was missing his legs, were they still there?’
‘No, they wasn’t, and that was the funny part about it,’ put in the tall, thin constable, in a sad tone. ‘Well, not funny, but you know what I mean. We walked all the way down the sewer until we reached the tunnel face but there was no sign of them.’
They were still talking to the constables when a doctor appeared. He was Bengali, not much taller than Jamila, with rimless spectacles and a hooked nose, like a parrot’s beak.
‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officers. I am Dr Sanjay Gupta, a consultant in emergency medicine. It has been touch-and-go with Mr Elliot. We have had to resuscitate him twice, although he now seems to be stable.’
‘Is he conscious?’ asked Jamila.
‘At this moment, no. He is under sedation because he was suffering very great pain. His injuries are extremely severe, and we have had to clean them and dress them, and he is now on intravenous antibiotics. However, he was conscious when he was admitted.’
Jerry said, ‘Really? Did he say anything?’
‘Nothing coherent. He was shouting very loud, like he was angry at somebody. He kept saying that it wasn’t his fault, whatever he meant by that. “It wasn’t my fault; it wasn’t me who got rid of them!” Very loud.’
‘But he didn’t say what it was that he didn’t get rid of? Or who?’
‘No, although he repeated that again and again. With those injuries, I doubt if he was talking sense. Or shouting sense, rather. But I will take you up to the intensive care unit, and you will be able to see his trauma for yourselves.’
He led them along to the lifts. As they were going up to the second floor, Jamila said, ‘What do you think his chances are?’
‘It’s very difficult at this moment to say. To be frank with you, I am staggered that he is still alive at all. But his injuries are most unusual, as you will see.’
Before he took them into the ward, a nurse came up and gave them light-green aprons to tie on, as well as surgical caps and masks.
‘I feel like a very hygienic bank robber,’ said Jerry, in a muffled voice.
Martin Elliot was lying on a tilted-up bed in a bay screened on either side by diamond-patterned curtains. He was linked up to an intravenous drip, and also to a blood bag. A nurse was standing beside his bed, watching his vital signs monitor and taking notes. In the next bay, a young woman was whimpering like a lost puppy and calling out, ‘Mama…! Mama…!’
‘Nurse, if you could…’ said Dr Gupta, indicating that she should fold down the sheet that was covering Martin up to his chest. Once she had done that, he beckoned Jamila and Jerry to come closer.
White crêpe bandages were wrapped around Martin’s torso and he was wearing an adult diaper. His legs had both been severed at the upper thigh, so all that remained were two short stumps, both of which had thick gauze pads stuck over them with surgical tape. Both of his eyes were covered with gauze pads too.
‘The only reason we have applied dressings is to prevent infection,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘When he was found, he was not bleeding, despite his rectus femoris and his femoral artery having been cut clean through. This was because somehow his stumps had already been cauterised, as if by a red-hot iron.’
He took a pair of surgical gloves from the dispenser beside the bed and snapped them on, wiggling his fingers as if he were preparing for a puppet show. Then he carefully peeled away the dressing from Martin’s right stump so that Jamila and Jerry could see how his thigh muscle had been seared. His flesh was blackened and crusted, like a steak that had been charred on a barbecue. His thigh bone had been cleanly sawn off and then scorched by the heat of the cauterisation to a light tan colour, with a scab of burned bone marrow in the centre of it.
Dr Gupta carefully replaced the dressing. ‘Both legs are the same. If you ask me what was used to amputate them, I would have to guess at a circular saw. When he was first admitted, I thought he might have fallen in front of a train, but as soon as I examined him, I changed my mind. A train or any other vehicle will cause severe crushing and will certainly not cut through muscle and bone as precisely as this. Now and then we have to deal with patients who have had limbs amputated by trains, and sometimes they have also suffered serious burns because they have touched the third electrified rail. But this cauterisation could not have been accidental. The heat has been applied too uniformly and too comprehensively and too deeply. Whoever did this did not want his victim to die.’
Jamila turned to Jerry. ‘They cut off his legs and blinded him, but they didn’t want him to die? So why did they do this to him? Was it out of revenge, do you think – some sort of ritual? Or perhaps could it have been some sort of reprisal? Under sharia law, in Pakistan, if you have blinded somebody a court can sentence you to be blinded, as a punishment.’
‘The trauma to his torso is quite puzzling too,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘I don’t want to remove his dressings to show you, but I have pictures here that will enable you to see quite clearly what has been done to him.’
He led them across to a shelf on the opposite side of the ward and opened up a laptop. He had taken twenty or thirty pictures of Martin’s chest and stomach, some of them highly magnified. Martin’s skin had been lacerated with deep V-shaped scratches, about thirty or forty of them in a herringbone pattern, all the way down from his neck to his pubic hair.
‘They’re in fives,’ said Jerry, leaning forward to peer at the screen more closely. ‘These were done either with a five-pronged fork, or somebody with very long fingernails.’
‘We took DNA samples from several of the scratches,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘We will be able to pass these over to your forensic technicians. I think your second suggestion is the most likely, that they were inflicted by somebody with long fingernails. You can see here and here that the spacing between the scratches is inconsistent, so that would rule out the possibility of a fork or some other instrument.’
He swiped across to pictures of Martin’s face, with both eye sockets ravaged. Both were cavernous and empty, and one of them still had a shred of optic nerve dangling out of it.
‘Jesus,’ said Jerry. ‘How do you think that was done?’
‘By hand, I’d say. Forcibly. And by a hand with long sharp fingernails, like the other wounds.’
‘I’ll contact forensics and get them over here to examine him as soon as possible,’ said Jamila. ‘Have you ever seen any injuries similar to these before?’
Dr Gupta shook his head. ‘This is unlike anything I have ever encountered, even when I was training at the Apollo Hospital in Kolkata. I treated men whose noses and ears had been cut off for failing to pay their debts, and women who had been beaten or branded or blinded for adultery, but nothing like this. Never. In my opinion, whoever did this was a maniac.’
Jerry and Jamila stayed for twenty minutes longer, but there was no significant variation in Martin’s vital signs and Dr Gupta said he was likely to remain unconscious for hours to come. Jamila asked him to contact her immediately if there was any dramatic change in his progress – either for better or for worse – and then she and Jerry left.
Outside, a freezing fog was enveloping the car park so that the street lights all around looked like dandelion clocks.
‘How are you getting back to Redbridge?’ Jerry asked Jamila.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll call for an Uber.’
‘I’ll catch you tomorrow then. What sort of time?’
‘Make it eight. The traffic’s always terrible at that time of day.’
Jerry saw that she was shivering. He could tell that she was not only cold but shocked, as he was. It didn’t matter how many mangled bodies he had come across in his career, the sight of serious injuries still chilled him and made him realise how vulnerable human beings are to being cut, or crushed, or burned, or disembowelled, or torn to pieces.
Instinctively, he wanted to put his arms around Jamila and hold her tight and reassure her that everything was going to be all right. Not only did he feel protective toward her, but he was beginning to admit to himself that he was very fond of her too, and that he could almost be in love with her. But of course, she was a DS and he was a DC, and they were working on a case together, and paragraph 2.3 of the Metropolitan Police Code of Ethics ruled that officers should ‘not engage in sexual conduct or other inappropriate behaviour when on duty’.
Besides that, he had no idea if she felt the same way about him.
‘Go and wait for your Uber inside, where it’s warm,’ he told her. Then, ‘See you tomorrow, all right?’ He was almost tempted to add ‘love’.