They had intended to walk along Peckham High Street to Southampton Way, because it would have taken them less than ten minutes, but the skies had turned as black as charcoal and lightning was dancing over the rooftops. As they stepped out onto the front porch of the police station, they were deafened by a bellow of thunder directly overhead, and rain started to hammer down so hard that the gutters in the street were immediately flooded and water started to spout from the police station roof.
‘The gods are angry about something or other,’ said Jerry, as they went out of the back door to the car park and climbed into his Mondeo. ‘Chelsea thrashed the Gunners 4–1 last night, that’s probably it.’
He turned into Peckham High Street, but almost immediately, he had to slow down behind a bus. Standing at the bus stop, he could have sworn, he saw the same shabby old man in the brown tweed coat who he had seen in the vestibule of King’s College Hospital when they had visited Martin Elliot. The man was staring at him, and just before Jerry was able to move off, he gave him the same gap-toothed grin as well as a sly wink, as if he knew him.
‘I think I’m losing it, sarge.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I just saw the same old geezer I saw at King’s yesterday, standing by that bus stop.’
‘Coincidence, Jerry. Or else he’s a lookalike. You have to admit that one old man can easily be mistaken for another. All the elders in my village look like clones.’
‘No, this was him all right.’
‘Jerry, there is no law against him visiting the hospital one day and catching a bus in the high street the next.’
‘I know. But right at the moment when I happen to be passing? World of weird.’
The rain continued to drum down so hard that Jerry had to keep the windscreen wipers whacking away at top speed all the way to Peckham Road. When they arrived, they saw that the forensic team had erected a large blue vinyl tent over the manhole, and that three of them were standing around outside it in their white Tyvek suits. Four white Forensic Services vans were parked on the pavement in a line, and he parked in front of them.
They hurried back to the tent, and one of the team lifted the flap for them so that they could go inside. The noise of the rain clattering on the vinyl was so loud they had to raise their voices. Jerry already knew two of the crime scene investigators, Phil Mullins and Margaret Broadbent, and so he introduced Jamila. Gemma Bright was there too, along with Jim Feather. Gemma looked pale and cold and washed out, and when Jerry asked her, ‘All right?’ she gave him nothing more than a half-hearted shrug.
‘No word of a lie, this is the strangest bloody crime scene I’ve ever had to examine, like – ever,’ said Margaret Broadbent. She came from Durham originally, so she spoke in a broad northern accent. ‘I’ve been down collapsed mines before but never down a blocked-up sewer. I’m going to take a week-long bath in Chanel No.5 after this, and I’ll still be worried what I smell like.’
‘So how is your examination progressing?’ asked Jamila. ‘We were told that you were almost finished.’
‘We’ve dug up a whole mess of stuff we need to take back to the lab so that we can scrutinise it in more detail. There’s the keys, of course. We’ve found well over sixty of them under the surface of the sewage, scattered over a distance of about seventy-five metres. Sixty, can you believe it? They’re all pretty similar to that one key you fetched out yourself, although every one of them is slightly different. Some of them have stars on and some have crescent moons and others have faces. Yes, I said “faces”, although they had plenty of that on them too.
‘The keys we’ll be sending off to Cullen’s – they’re an antique lock and key specialist in Kensington. With any luck, they should be able to tell us where the keys came from and how old they are and what they were supposed to open.’
‘Have you found a woman’s amputated hand? It had orange nail varnish and what looked like a gold wedding ring.’
Margaret Broadbent shook her head. ‘We’ve dug up several items of jewellery, as well as kids’ toys and sex aids and the remains of more bloody pets than you could shake a stick at. Why people don’t take their unwanted kittens to a shelter instead of flushing them down t’toilet, I’ll never work out.’
‘There seem to be passages or tunnels running through the fatberg. Do you know how these were dug out? Or were they caused by the natural flow of sewage?’
‘Some are obviously natural, because the sewage usually finds a way to keep flowing, but some of them look as if they may have been clawed out by hand. In places, you can see that the saponified fat appears to have deep fingermarks in it, and even some broken fingernails. But I wouldn’t like to say for sure until we’ve studied all the photographs we’ve taken. Some of the surfaces that we’ve examined we’re also going to print out in 3D.’
Gemma said, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to start clearing out the fatberg with high-pressure hoses, weather permitting, but two or three of the forensic team are going to be staying with us in case anything else turns up. You know, apart from keys, and kittens.’
Phil Mullins checked his watch. ‘We’ve got five of our team still down there, giving the sewer a last going-over. They should be out in a couple of minutes.’
‘Newton’s down there too – our lighting and camera man,’ said Gemma.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jerry. ‘After all the fun and games we had down there the last time? I’ve got to admire his nerve.’
Phil Mullins bent over the open manhole and shouted out, ‘Terry? How’s it going?’
He waited, with his head cocked to one side, listening, but there was no reply – only the trickling sound of sewage.
‘I thought he was almost back,’ he said, and unhooked his radio. ‘Terry? Where are you now, mate? I thought you said you were just about finished.’
The only answer was a loud crackling noise, and he held up his handset so that everybody else in the tent could hear it, even over the rain.
‘Some kind of interference,’ said Jim Feather. ‘We get that sometimes, in a thunderstorm.’
‘Yes, but he should be almost back by now. The last we heard he was pretty much winding up.’
He slapped his radio hard into the palm of his hand then tried calling the forensic team again. ‘Terry? Janice? Hallo? Can you hear me?’
The loud crackling continued, but then they heard another sound, and this was coming from the manhole. It started as a thin, edgy whistling, like the wind on a stormy night, although it rapidly descended in pitch to a low, ghostly moan – the same moan they had heard the last time they had ventured into the sewer. The flickering white LED lights that had been reflected from the sewage directly below the open manhole began to shine an acidic green.
‘Oh my God, it’s happening again!’ said Gemma. ‘You need to get your team out of there right now! I mean it!’
Phil Mullins knelt down over the manhole and shouted out, ‘Terry! Can you hear me? Get the hell out of there pronto! Terry!’
There was still no answer. The moaning was growing louder, and the green lights were flickering even brighter so that the whole of the inside of the tent was lit up in epileptic green, which made them all look as if they were jiggling and jumping. Phil Mullins turned to Margaret Broadbent and said, ‘I’m going down there. Maybe the methane level’s spiked, and they’ve all been knocked unconscious.’
Jim Feather said, ‘Here – I’ll fetch you a breathing pack. And I’ll come down with you.’
‘I’ll get help from the fire station,’ said Gemma. ‘If they’re unconscious, all six of them, you won’t be able to carry them all out on your own.’
The Peckham fire station was no further than the opposite side of the road, and she lifted the tent flap to go over and alert them. As she stepped outside though, they heard a rushing noise and chilly foetid air started to blow into the tent, as if an underground train were hurtling toward them along the sewer. A huge fountain of sewage exploded out of the manhole, knocking both Gemma and Phil Mullins off their feet and sending Jamila and Jerry and Margaret Broadbent staggering backward. It blasted the tent over sideways with a clatter of aluminium poles, and it spouted across the street, thousands of gallons of stinking brown water. It was more than water though. Out of the fountain, lumps of faeces spattered onto the ground all around them, and then larger lumps, which rolled across the pavement and into the gutters.
‘What’s happening?’ Gemma screamed at Jim Feather.
Jim Feather had one hand lifted to shield himself from the random lumps that kept dropping out of the sewage. All he could do was shake his head.
‘The tide!’ he shouted back. ‘It could be the tide! Maybe it’s a freak tide, and they’ve closed the Thames Barrier, and it’s all backing up!’
‘How can we stop it?’
‘We can’t! Not if it’s the tide!’
Another lump dropped with a splash at Jim Feather’s feet, and when he looked down at it, he saw that it was a torso. It was headless, although it still had a pipe-like neck, and its lungs and its chocolate-coloured liver were still hanging out of it.
Jerry was standing next to him and he saw it too, and when he looked all around him, he realised that all the larger lumps that were falling out of the fountain were pieces of human bodies. Heads, hands, arms, legs and feet. Half a ribcage. A woman’s pelvis, wound around with shreds of torn white Tyvek. They were so slathered in shiny dark-brown sewage that it had taken him a few moments to understand what they were.
‘Oh my God oh my God oh my God!’ screamed Gemma. Newton’s video camera came tumbling onto the ground right beside her, with its light still lit, followed almost immediately by Newton’s left arm, ripped off at the shoulder, but with his bloody grey T-shirt still wound tightly around it.
Traffic along the Peckham Road had come to a standstill, and on the far side of the road, a small crowd of onlookers had already gathered, staring at the fountain without comprehending at first what it was. It was only when sewage started to flood the opposite gutter that they smelled it and began to run away – a few of them at first, and then more and more, shouting in horror.
Jamila and Jerry backed over to the other side of Southampton Way, both of them calling on their phones for reinforcements. The folding doors of the fire station opposite were rolled back, and a fire engine began to nose its way out with its blue lights flashing. It reached the kerb, but the road in front of it was blocked by a stationary skip lorry and, as far as Jerry could see, traffic had already backed up as far westward as Camberwell Green so the skip lorry couldn’t move either.
Another torso came spinning out of the fountain and bounced across the road. As it rolled toward them, Jerry could see that its flesh looked as if it had been sliced rather than ripped apart, and its spinal column was cleanly cut through.
‘Jesus Christ! They’ve all been chopped into pieces,’ said Jerry, as he lowered his phone.
‘All of them, yes, by the look of it,’ said Jamila, and her voice was strained with shock. ‘I count… two, three, four… pieces from maybe five bodies anyway.’
‘But what the hell can do that, sarge? Don’t tell me one spooky woman with a saw could have done that, not on her own.’
Gradually, the sewage began to subside. It sank lower and lower until it was only just brimming above the level of the manhole. It gurgled occasionally, as pockets of gas burst out, and Jerry could see that there were still some lumps floating in it. Six firefighters went hurrying across the road on foot, but there was little that they could do except stand next to Gemma and Jim Feather beside the manhole and watch the sewage bubble. There would have been no point in trying to pump it out, because it would have had nowhere to drain away.
Jerry could hear sirens coming from the direction of Lewisham and Walworth, the nearest police stations that were still open. Jamila had called the MIT team back at the Peckham station. DCI Walters had left for a meeting at New Scotland Yard, but DCs O’Brien and Pettigrew were still on duty, and they were already on their way. The most urgent need was to clear the blocked-up traffic and cordon off the area all around.
A police squad car came driving along the pavement toward them, its siren whooping and its lights flashing. Jerry and Jamila stepped back out of its way, but as Jamila turned around she caught sight of a small group of figures about two hundred metres up the street, close to the corner with Charles Coveney Road. She frowned at them, and then covered her eyes with her hand to mask the glare from the street lights, because for some reason she couldn’t get them into focus.
‘Jerry,’ she said, tugging at his sleeve.
Jerry turned around too. There were seven or eight figures, all of them blurry, and all of them appeared to be wearing white – long shirts or nightgowns. It was still raining hard, and it was difficult to tell exactly how far away they were, and because of that it was equally difficult to tell how tall they were – whether they were children or adults. They were all clustered together, and they were swaying as if they were trying to keep their footing in a blustery wind.
‘Oh, shit. It’s more of them,’ said Jerry. ‘It’s more of them spooky kids.’
He hesitated at first, but then he started to walk toward them, quickening his pace as he went. Jamila said, ‘Jerry!’ and she hesitated, but then she followed after him. ‘Jerry, be careful!’
As they approached the figures, they could see that Jerry was right and they were children. Some of them were taller, as if they were about eight or nine years old, but the rest couldn’t have been more than three or four. Their faces were as white as clowns, with smudges of black for eyes, and they all appeared to be distorted in some way. One child at the back had an elongated head and a jaw that sagged down, so that his tongue hung out between his jumbled teeth. Another had only a gaping triangular hole where her nose should have been. One of the smaller children at the front had a face like a Christ-child from a medieval painting, but underneath its soaking white nightgown, its hips were disproportionately wide, and its ankles and feet were the size of an adult’s.
On the opposite side of the road, a young couple with a baby buggy were standing under their umbrellas, transfixed. Their wet black Labrador was cowering down behind them, clearly terrified.
Jerry had no idea what he was going to do when he reached the children. His hair was plastered flat on top of his head and rain was running down inside his collar, and he was so pumped up with adrenaline that he could hardly believe any of this was real. But he was still a hundred metres away from them when they clustered closer together and started to shrink away.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stay right where you are! Stop! We need to talk to you! Stop!’
At that moment, as if it were pouring out of the cracks between the paving stones, a dark twirl of smoke rose up into the rain. It grew thicker and thicker, and started to circle around the children, as if it were protecting them.
Jerry ran the last few metres then stopped dead. The smoke had taken on the shape of a hooded figure, taller than him, and its arms were spread wide as if it were warning him not to come any closer.
Jamila caught up with Jerry, and she stopped too.
‘It’s just as that doctor described it,’ she said.
‘This is no hallucination, sarge. This is no toxic gas.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it is. In Bhopal, the cloud affected people’s perception for miles and miles all around.’
Seconds passed. None of them moved, and none of them spoke. The hooded figure stood in front of the children, its arms still spread, with the sparkling rain seeming to fall right through it. The children huddled behind it, still swaying, clutching each other tightly. The late afternoon echoed from all directions with the sound of police and ambulance sirens.
‘I’m asking you to stop right where you are,’ Jerry called out, lifting up both hands to show that he meant the children no harm. ‘We’re police officers, and we need to know who you are and what you’re doing here.’
‘It’s raining, and you have no raincoats,’ said Jamila. ‘And look at you – you all have bare feet. We can’t allow you to wander the streets like this.’
The hooded figure pointed at Jamila and Jerry, and they heard a woman’s voice. But the voice wasn’t coming from the figure itself – it was coming from the young woman with the baby buggy on the opposite pavement. It didn’t sound like a young woman’s voice though. It sounded old and ravaged, with a high screech to it.
‘Turn away! Do you hear me? Turn away and leave us be! These are my nestlings and nobody may touch them!’
Jamila turned to the young woman in astonishment, but the young woman herself was looking shocked, pressing her hand to her chest as if she couldn’t believe that she had just spoken. Her partner was staring at her too.
‘Debbie?’ he said, shaking her shoulder. ‘Debbie, what the fuck?’
‘Turn away!’ the young woman repeated, and this time she screamed it, hurling her umbrella into the road. ‘Turn away and leave us be! Touch my nestlings and you will suffer as your friends have suffered!’
‘Debbie!’ yelled the young woman’s partner. ‘For fuck’s sake, Debbie!’ Their baby woke up and started to cry, and their Labrador let out a howl and then started to whine and whimper, creeping low down onto the pavement.
Jerry said, ‘Right! That’s enough of this crap!’
He strode toward the hooded figure, almost sure that he could walk right through it, in the same way that the rain was falling through it. But before he could reach it, it let out an ear-piercing whistle. It whirled around like a dust devil, its sleeves sweeping left and then right, and it struck him criss-cross blows on the chest that sent him stumbling backward, with all the breath knocked out of him. Its arms may have looked as if they were nothing but smoke, but he felt he had been dealt two vicious lashes by a braided leather whip. He lost his balance and sat down heavily on the kerb, clutching his breastbone and bending forward in agony.
‘Jerry?’ Jamila turned toward the High Street to see if there were any uniformed officers in sight who she could call for back-up, but it was a chaos of blue flashing lights and firefighters and paramedics and body parts strewn across the pavement. It looked like some medieval vision of Hell.
She turned back to face the hooded figure. She wasn’t armed today, not even with a Taser, and she wasn’t even sure that a bullet could have brought it down. The children in white were already starting to run away, some of them hobbling, some of them half loping and half leaping, their hips twisting unevenly. The hooded figure paused for a moment and then followed them, opening out its cloak wider and wider like a pair of huge dark wings.
Jamila started to run after them, but they were rushing away so hurriedly through the rain that she didn’t know if she could catch up with them, and even if she did, she didn’t know how she could possibly detain them. They reached the corner of Charles Coveney Road, where the hooded figure looked back to see if Jamila was still chasing them. Jamila was sure she could see white eyes glittering like diamonds deep within the shadow of its hood. She stopped and stayed where she was, while the children ran around the corner and disappeared out of her sight. Once they had gone, the hooded figure shuddered and then blew away, as if it were smoke blown from a chimney in a breeze.
Jamila walked back to Jerry, who was still sitting on the kerb, coughing and trying to get his breath back.
‘Are you okay, Jerry? No bones broken?’
Jerry shook his head, still gasping for breath. ‘Winded, that’s all. But bloody hell. I thought that thing was nothing but smoke.’
Jamila patted his shoulder and then crossed over to the young couple with the pushchair. The young woman was crouching down, trying to soothe their sobbing baby. The young man was stroking the dog.
‘What the fuck was that all about?’ the young man asked her. ‘Those kids – I mean, mate! They looked like fucking ghosts, man. And how did Debbie shout like that?’
‘I am not at all sure,’ Jamila told him. ‘But those children you saw, they may not have been what they appeared to be. And what caused your young lady here to shout out like that, I am afraid I have no idea at all. But I would be grateful if you could give me a contact number in case I need you both as witnesses to what happened here. I would also suggest that you go to A & E at St Thomas’s or visit your GP as soon as you can, for a check-up. It is possible that what we saw and heard here was caused by the effect of a toxic gas.’
‘What, like noz, you mean?’ He meant nitrous oxide, or laughing gas.
‘Possibly. It is far too early to say.’
The young man told Jamila his phone number, then he nodded toward the high street. ‘What’s going on down there then? Somebody got themselves cheffed up or something?’
‘I can’t tell you at the moment, but if you were thinking of going in that direction you will have to find another way home.’
The young man turned to his partner, who had lifted their baby out of his pushchair and was cuddling him to calm him down.
‘This is a fucking nightmare, this is.’
‘Yes,’ said Jamila. ‘I think that is exactly what you could call it.’