Only five minutes after she had arrived at the station the next morning, Jamila was called by Dr Macleod’s secretary, Glynis.
‘The doctor asked me to tell you that he’s postponed a second attempt to operate on Susan Nicholls. She’s still suffering from hypertension after yesterday’s anaesthesia. If she’s well enough, he may try again later today.’
‘All right. But please let me know if he does. I would like to be there, or at least close at hand, if I can.’
Jamila sat down and prised the lid off her Starbucks cappuccino. She had slept for only two hours last night because she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the deformed children that she and Jerry had seen running around the corner on their way back from the BirthWell Centre, and about Dr Macleod’s description of the smoky hooded woman who had appeared in the operating theatre.
What unsettled her about the hooded woman was that it reminded her of a story that her grandmother in Peshawar used to tell her about witches called Churels. These were the spirits of women who had died during pregnancy or childbirth, who rose up from their graves to haunt those who had caused their death and the death of their baby.
They were shape-shifters, the Churels. Sometimes they appeared as animals or as pretty young girls in white dresses, but at other times they looked like hideous hags with their faces masked by coarse black hair. Sometimes too, they materialised as nothing more than spirals of black smoke.
All the same, she told herself, they were stories. She was open-minded about strange events that seemed to defy any rational explanation, but she was a highly trained police detective too, and first and foremost, she believed in evidence, no matter how irrational, or how strange.
Jerry came into the office, looking almost as tired as she felt, holding a half-eaten chicken-and-mushroom slice in one hand and a copy of the Express in the other. He hung up his raincoat behind the door, then he slumped down opposite her and said, ‘Bloody hell. Nightmares, or what? I dreamt I was in a fish and chip shop, and when I opened up my chips that foetus-thing was lying there looking up at me. It jumped out the wrapper and ran off across the floor.’
Jamila shook her head sympathetically. ‘Myself, I could hardly sleep at all.’
‘Hardly surprising. I mean, I can’t get my head round any of this. Like, what’s the motive? Even the weirdest offences have a motive. Look at that gay bloke who killed his husband because he kept putting the wooden spoons in the dishwasher.’
‘This is not necessarily about motive, Jerry, but it’s critical that we try to understand what is really going on here. It will not help us simply to dismiss all these events as “supernatural”. Not before we have exhausted every other possibility. The more I think about them, the more convinced I am that what we saw in the sewer and this foetus and those children we saw in the street, they’re all somehow connected, as we talked about yesterday. And it seems to me that the sewers are central to what is going on.’
‘So what’s your thinking?’
‘Of course we’ll have to wait for the forensic reports, but the explanation could be that there has been some unusual chemical spillage that has released a toxic gas – you know, like the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984. That was caused by pesticide leaking into the air, but perhaps this gas is like an airborne version of thalidomide, and it can cause severe malformation of unborn children. After Bhopal there were countless stillbirths and children with muscular and exoskeletal growth problems, as well as brain damage. But perhaps this gas can also cause mass hallucinations. Hence this hooded woman that Martin Elliot and Dr Macleod both believe that they saw.’
‘That’s possible, I suppose. But how can a hallucination drag you nearly a mile through a sewer and then saw your legs off and pull out your eyes?’
‘It can’t, of course. But it could have been a real person doing it, and Martin Elliot was hallucinating that it was some kind of spectre.’
‘Well, all right. Down the sewers is one thing. But how did this gas get into the operating theatre at the BirthWell, so that Dr Macleod hallucinated?’
‘I have no idea, Jerry. I am only theorising. But I was brought up on stories of demons and evil spirits, and I know that for the most part they are only an excuse for the cruelty and the negligence and the misdemeanours of men. It wasn’t ghosts who killed sixteen thousand innocent people at Bhopal, it was the careless release of a cloud of methyl isocyanate.’
‘But the keys? What about the keys?’
Jamila’s Skype rang, and she leaned across to her laptop to answer it. DC O’Brien appeared on her screen, sitting at his desk in his shirtsleeves. DCI Walters was standing in the background, talking on his phone and repeatedly waving a ball pen as if he were conducting a church choir.
‘DS Patel? Oh, good morning. DC Pardoe told me yesterday that things at the BirthWell didn’t quite go according to plan.’
‘No, you’re right. They didn’t. Did he tell you why?’
‘Not in any detail, no. Just that the surgeon might have to put the operation on hold.’
Jamila looked across at Jerry, who now had his mouth full. She was quietly relieved that he had refrained from telling DC O’Brien that Susan Nicholls’s abortion had been interrupted by the appearance of what had looked like a ghost. After Jamila and Jerry’s first case together, when they had confronted virus-infected clothing that had seemed to take on a life of its own, some officers in their Basic Command Unit still regarded the two of them as slightly cuckoo. That was why these investigations had been assigned to them, she was sure of it. Nobody else wanted to have it on their service record that they had spent weeks chasing foetuses with eight legs and hooded figures made of smoke.
‘So how can I help you?’ Jamila asked DC O’Brien.
‘You’re going to love this. We’ve just had reports of two more. One from Streatham nick and the other from Camberwell.’
‘Two more what?’
‘Two more of them foetuses. Not exactly the same as that one that they’re operating on at the BirthWell, but sort of similar.’
‘Are you serious? Where did they come from?’
‘One of the foetuses came from a young Pakistani woman. Apparently, she tried to give herself a C-section to get it out. She’s still alive but she’s in intensive care at King’s and her condition’s critical. The other foetus is hard to believe, to be honest with you. A young white woman claims that it killed her cat and then tried to crawl inside her. Lucky for her, her boyfriend came home and pulled it out of her.’
‘It killed her cat?’ said Jerry. ‘You’re having a giraffe, aren’t you?’
‘That’s what she said, apparently.’
‘How is she?’ asked Jamila.
‘Shocked, naturally, and she’s been given a check-up, but no serious injury.’
‘So where are they, these foetuses?’
DC O’Brien held up a photograph of the squirrel-like foetus that had been cut out of Joya and then a picture of the blue-eyed foetus that Michael had managed to extricate from Jenny.
‘Ya Khuadaya,’ Jamila breathed. ‘They are not still alive, are they? Where are they now?’
‘We had both of them sent over to the forensic lab at St George’s. And – yes – the last we heard they were still living and breathing. We’ve called in a forensic pathologist to take a look at them. Dr Pocztomski. He’s the leading pathologist in the south-east group, and he doesn’t only examine dead bodies but victims with serious injuries too. And foetuses. Unfortunately, he’s not available today, but he’ll be there tomorrow about one o’clock, and here’s his number if you want to make contact.’
When Jamila had switched off her Skype, Jerry said, ‘Gordon Bennett. Two more. It looks like you might be right, and this is some sort of toxic gas escape.’
‘If it is, we need to know as soon as possible what type of gas we are talking about. We might even have to call for people all around Peckham to be evacuated, especially expectant mothers. Let me get in touch with Lambeth and see what progress they’re making with the forensics.’
It took Jamila nearly ten minutes to find somebody at the forensics laboratory at Lambeth Road who could give her an update on the team who had been assigned to examine the sewer along Southampton Way. A lab assistant with a thick Welsh accent told her that there were eight of them, and they had just called in to say they would have completed their preliminary investigation in about an hour or so.
‘Right,’ said Jamila. ‘Let’s go and meet up with them. And then this afternoon we can go over to St George’s and see this Dr Posthumous, or whatever his name is, and see what he thinks about these foetuses.’
‘Oh well,’ said Jerry, finishing his chicken-and-mushroom slice and slapping his hands together. ‘I suppose it beats chasing after kids who keep shanking each other.’