The sky was beginning to turn a pale mauve colour when Jamila said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything else we can do here, Jerry. Let’s go home and get some rest. I’ll meet you at about two o’clock this afternoon.’
‘We’ve still got those two foetuses at St George’s to check up on, haven’t we? And I wonder if Dr Macleod managed to hoick that octopussy foetus out of that Nicholls girl.’
‘One thing at a time, Jerry, and the first thing I need is sleep.’
‘No, yes. You’re right, sarge. I’m cream-crackered myself.’
It had stopped raining soon after midnight, although the streets were still wet. All through the early hours, forensic technicians in white Tyvek suits had been silently criss-crossing the street like a tribe of lost snowmen. They had photographed and tagged all the body parts that had been blown out of the sewer, where they had fallen, and then collected them up in body bags. They would be taken to the morgue for identification and, as far as possible, for piecing back together.
After that, the pavements had been painstakingly searched by more than twenty officers on their hands and knees, working under portable LED lamps and headlights from the fire engines. It had taken about an hour for the sewage in the manhole to sink back down to its usual level, still gurgling and bubbling as it disappeared, but once it had dropped right down, the fire brigade had been able to hose down the street and then sluice buckets of disinfectant all the way across it. The early-morning air smelled strongly of diesel fumes and ammonia.
Behind the police barriers, Jerry could see the media gathered, with vans from the BBC and ITN and Sky News parked along the pavement. Helicopters from the TV stations had flown over several times too, and there was still one hovering over Camberwell Green, so that they had to shout to make themselves heard.
DCI Walters came up to them, along with DC Pettigrew. She had called him as soon as she and DC O’Brien had seen the way the bodies were cut up and realised that this could be a major crime scene, rather than some random industrial accident.
In his grey trilby hat and his droopy grey raincoat, DCI Walters looked as much like a bird of prey as ever. All the same, Jerry had noticed him talking intently and seriously to all of the forensic team involved in searching the street, and also to the paramedics who were carefully stowing the smaller body parts into polythene evidence bags. It was obvious that he was meticulous and thorough and that he wasn’t the kind of DCI who left all the minor details of any investigation to his underlings.
‘I was hoping I’d find you still here, DS Patel,’ he said, with that hint of a Scottish accent. ‘I’ve just been addressing myself to the media. I didn’t give them much, but then we don’t really know much, do we? You two are the supernatural experts. Any ideas?’
‘What did you actually say to them, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I said that we have no clear idea yet what caused the sewage to erupt like that. It could have been a spontaneous explosion of methane and hydrogen sulphide, combined possibly with another flammable gas. It could even have been an unexploded German bomb from the Second World War. After all, Thames Water have dug up at least seven of them since they started these new excavations for the Tideway tunnel – hardly a surprise when you consider how many tens of thousands of bombs the Luftwaffe dropped on this area of London during the war.
‘Of course, they asked me why I was here from the MIT. I told them I was checking to see if this could have been a terrorist attack – Real IRA or Al-Quaeda or Extinction Rebellion or some other bunch of loonies.’
Jerry said, ‘It wasn’t a gas explosion though, was it, sir, or a Second World War bomb?’
‘I know that and you know that. You only had to take one look at those poor buggers’ bodies to see that they hadn’t been blown apart. They were chopped up like joints of meat in a butcher’s shop, weren’t they, all six of them? Dissected. And that sewage spouting out like that… no bomb in the world could have caused that. So whatever you said about the supernatural, DS Patel – not believing in ghosts and whatnot – I can’t think of any explanation that isn’t supernatural. Can you? If you can, I’m dying to know what it is.’
Jamila looked at her watch. It was 6:07 a.m. ‘DC Pardoe and I are leaving now, sir. We’re too tired to think sensibly at the moment. We’ll see you back at the station early this afternoon. We need to analyse what actually happened here, and most of all, why it happened, and if it could have been in any way supernatural, although I’m always very reluctant to use that word, as you know.’
‘Suspend your disbelief for a moment and assume that it was supernatural. What kind of supernatural, would you guess? Some sort of poltergeist, perhaps, that can throw stuff around?’
‘Many different cultures have stories about vengeful spirits, sir, and some of those accounts are quite convincing. More than half of all Muslims believe in witchcraft and various evil jinns, including most of my own family. So from their point of view, this could have been caused by a vengeful spirit.’
DCI Walters took off his hat and frowned at it as if he hadn’t realised he was wearing it. He flicked drops of water off the crown and then carefully replaced it. ‘A vengeful spirit?’
‘Yes, sir. I mean – what do we have here? Six innocent people have been killed, and at first sight it looks as if they have been deliberately dismembered. If it was a supernatural event and not an accident, then there will have been a spiritual motive for it. If we can find out what that motive was, that will be our best chance of discovering what committed it.’
‘A vengeful spirit,’ DCI Walters repeated, still staring at her. Jerry couldn’t work out from his tone of voice if he was being sarcastic, or if he saw this as a possible first step in solving the most inexplicable mass murder with which he had ever been faced.
*
They were climbing back into their car when Gemma hurried up to them.
‘Sorry…’ she said. ‘Before you go, I just wanted to say that I might be able to give you some more help.’
‘Believe me, Gemma – any and all help gratefully received,’ said Jamila.
‘I’ve been thinking, that’s all. We’ve scanned all the known sewers for three hundred hectares around the Peckham Rye area with GPR, but so far we haven’t come across anything that could explain what’s been happening here.’
‘What exactly were you looking for?’
‘I don’t know. Anything. Fractured gas pipes, any unusual kind of toxic spillage. To begin with, I wondered if some factory was discharging some prohibited chemical down the sewer, and it got mixed up with other effluents so that it created some sort of hallucinogenic gas. I thought that may have been what made us see those spooky children and turned all the lights green.’
‘Well, yes, we thought of that too,’ said Jerry. ‘But there’s no gas that cuts people up into pieces or chucks keys at you or screams and howls or blows thousands of gallons of sewage out into the street like that.’
‘Of course not. The sewage… Jim Feather thought it might have been the tide backing up, but it couldn’t have been – not with that fatberg 90 per cent blocking it up between here and the Thames. It’s simply not possible.’
‘So do you have any explanation?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe there’s a whole lot of mad people living down there in the sewer who are chopping up anybody who comes near them. But after all that scanning, we haven’t found any trace of them.’
‘Which leads you to think – what?’
‘I’m not at all sure yet. I’m absolutely shattered, so I need to go home. But there was something we were told when I was training for this job, and I want to find my notes about it.’
‘Well, we’re packing it in for now too,’ said Jerry. ‘We’re having a meeting with the Major Investigation Team about two this afternoon, so why don’t you come and join us if you’ve got any new ideas? It’s at the old Peckham police station. You know where that is, don’t you? Right on the corner of Meeting House Lane.’
‘Okay. If I can dig that stuff out, I’ll bring it along. I’ll probably come along anyway, if that’s all right. You might think it sounds strange, but the sewers are like my whole world. What’s been happening, all this weird and horrible stuff, it’s like my world’s been invaded and taken over. I’m scared to death to go down there now.’
*
Once Gemma had walked off, Jerry said to Jamila, ‘Have you called yourself a taxi?’
‘Yes. He should be here in a minute.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Numb. How about you?’
Jerry looked at her, and it was one of those moments when he wished they weren’t serving police officers, so that he could give her a comforting hug.
‘I’m okay, sarge,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ll be interested to hear what that Gemma has in mind. Clever girl, that – like my Alice. Not that I want Alice to grow up to be a sewage engineer. She might expect me to visit her at work.’
He waited until Jamila’s minicab had arrived, and then he climbed into his own car and started the engine. He was about to pull away when his phone rang.
‘DC Pardoe? This is Inspector Bullock, Camberwell nick. I understand you’re currently investigating an incident at the Warren BirthWell Centre at Denmark Hill.’
‘That’s right. One of the doctors reported an intrusion into the operating theatre, right in the middle of surgery. DS Patel and me, we were supposed to go up there yesterday afternoon, but to coin a phrase, we got bogged down by this bloody sewage thing in Peckham High Street. I’m only just leaving there now.’
‘That doctor – that would be Dr Stuart Macleod?’
‘That’s right. He’s their top surgeon, so far as I know.’
‘Was, you mean. His body was found about an hour ago under the bushes in Max Roach Park.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No, straight up. Some bloke was taking his dog for an early-morning walk before he went to work, and the dog sniffed him out. I’m not sure of all the details, and at the moment the witness reports are all very confused. What seems to have happened is that there was a power cut in the operating theatre while Dr Macleod was carrying out a Caesarean section.’
‘When was that? Yesterday afternoon?’
‘That’s right, about 4:30, 4:40. But right in the middle of the blackout, Dr Macleod disappeared.’
‘I’m not sure I get what you mean. Walked out, or what?’
‘Two of the witnesses say he was dragged out by person or persons unknown. And of course, unidentified because all the lights were out.’
‘Dragged out?’
‘There was blood on the floor of the operating theatre, which we have yet to establish was his. He’d only just completed a Caesarean, after all. But here’s the really odd thing – the foetus that he’d removed from the patient had disappeared too. No sign of it. And there’s still no sign of it, even though Dr Macleod’s body has been found.’
‘Why didn’t anybody get in touch with myself or DS Patel as soon as this happened?’
‘Sorry, Pardoe, but nobody mentioned your involvement until this morning. In any case, if you’ve been tied up with that incident in Peckham High Street…’
‘Incident? It’s a major disaster. Five forensic officers dead, and one photographer.’
‘Yes. I’ve seen the reports coming in, and it’s the leading story on the news. Tragic. Just tragic.’
‘So, anyway, guv. Tell me about Dr Macleod.’
‘The power cut only lasted a few minutes apparently, and as soon as it was over, one of the other doctors made a 999 call. We had officers up at the BirthWell in less than fifteen minutes. But as I say – there was no sign of Dr Macleod when they got there, whether he left voluntarily or not.’
‘No CCTV footage?’
‘None. The CCTV cameras were blacked out for the same period of time. Total power outage.’
‘Where’s his body now? St Thomas’s?’
‘No, St George’s. He’ll have to be given a full post-mortem, so I doubt if that’ll be started until tomorrow now, or even the day after, and who knows how long it’s going to take.’
‘No obvious cause of death then?’
‘Well, this is the thing. He was naked, when he was found. In fact, he was a bit more than naked. He was skinned.’
‘Skinned?’
‘Every inch of him. From his face right down to the soles of his feet.’
‘What the hell can do something like that?’
‘I’ve been told that’s your speciality, Pardoe. You and DS Patel. Things that can do things like that.’
‘Oh, come on, guv. Just because we sorted out that madness in Tooting, that doesn’t mean we’re experts in every weird crime that comes up.’
‘Well, perhaps not. But nobody else has got a clue how he could have been kidnapped out of his own operating theatre and then skinned. We were hoping you could give us some input.’
‘Not right now. I’m on my way back to my gaff for a couple of hours of much needed kip. I’ll need to talk to DS Patel too. She’s got more of a handle on this kind of thing than I have. Not only that, it’s probably worth waiting until we get the results of the autopsy. Maybe we’ll have some idea then of how Dr Macleod was actually skinned. Bloody hell. Gives me the shudders just thinking about it.’
‘Fair enough. But put your mind to it, won’t you, and get back to me later today?’
‘Yes, guv. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have nightmares about it.’