On his way to Peckham police station, Jerry stopped off for a double quarter-pounder at the McDonald’s on Rye Lane. He hadn’t had the time to go shopping for over a week now, and all he had left in his fridge at home was a tub of out-of-date cheese coleslaw and a jar of pickled onions.
Some strategy meetings could go on for hours, and the last thing he wanted was his stomach gurgling because he was hungry.
He carried his burger to the corner by the window and asked two young women if they minded him sharing their table.
‘So long as you let us pinch some of your fries,’ said one of them.
‘You can try, love. I don’t fancy your chances.’
While he ate, he scrolled through his iPhone to see if there was any more news about the forensic officers who had been killed in the sewer, but there was none. He had managed to get in touch with Jamila while she was on her way home and tell her about Dr Macleod. However, he had received no more messages from Inspector Bullock about how Dr Macleod had been abducted from the Warren BirthWell Centre, and it was unlikely that the post mortem on his skinned body would be completed for at least another day or two. Until then, the police would give out no releases to the media.
Jerry had taken only two bites of his burger when he heard a tap on the glass. He looked up and saw the old white-haired man in the shabby brown tweed coat standing on the pavement outside, grinning at him with gappy teeth.
He slowly lowered his burger. The old man continued to grin at him, and nod, and give him the thumbs up, as if they were long-term friends who had happened to bump into each other purely by chance. The two young women looked at the old man and then at Jerry, and they obviously sensed that something strange was going on.
Jerry picked up his phone and took a quick burst of pictures of the old man. Then he said to the girls, ‘Keep an eye on my burger, could you, ladies? I need to have a chat with that old geezer outside.’
‘Not your dad, is he?’
‘I blinking well hope not. The last time I saw my dad he was getting buried in Blackshaw Road cemetery.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
Jerry pushed his way out of the restaurant’s front doors. Once he was outside though, the old man was nowhere to be seen. The only people on the pavement were a woman pushing a baby buggy and two schoolboys scuffling along and taking turns at punching each other on the arm.
He walked quickly to the corner of Elm Grove. The street was empty as far as he could see. He paused for a moment, in case the old man was crossing the road and was temporarily hidden behind a parked van, but he didn’t appear. Then he walked back to the other side of Mcdonald’s, to Holly Grove. A man in a hoodie was sitting on a camping stool, selling fake Louis Vuitton suitcases and Prada backpacks, but apart from a woman walking a standard poodle in the middle distance, Jerry could see nobody else.
He went back into the restaurant and sat down. One of the girls said sorry again, but he flapped his hand to show her that it didn’t matter. He had never got on well with his father anyway.
He checked the photographs on his phone. He had taken five pictures of the street outside, but the old man appeared in none of them.
He had been about to take another bite out of his burger, but he slowly put it back down on his plate. The old man had been standing right in front of him, he was sure of it. How was it possible that he wasn’t in any of the pictures?
He looked across at the girls and said, ‘You saw him, didn’t you?’
‘What? That old man?’
‘Yes. You didn’t see where he went, did you?’
Both girls shook their heads. ‘We wasn’t really looking.’
‘But you did see him?’
‘Yes. That’s why I thought he might be your dad.’
Jerry checked his phone again, but there was no question about it. There was the street, there was the woman pushing her baby buggy, although the two schoolboys hadn’t reached McDonald’s yet. But there was no old man.
Suddenly he didn’t have an appetite anymore. He stood up and lifted his jacket off the back of the chair.
‘Are you going?’ asked one of the girls. ‘Don’t you want your fries?’
‘No, love. Take the lot. I’ve decided to go on a diet.’
*
Jamila was waiting for him when he arrived at the station.
‘You haven’t heard any more from Camberwell?’ she asked him.
‘Unh-hunh. No. Not a sausage.’
‘I called Inspector Bullock myself after you’d told me about Dr Macleod. He sounds extremely confused about the way in which the doctor was abducted from the operating theatre. I think when we’ve finished here we should go to the BirthWell Centre and talk to any witnesses ourselves.’
‘I’m not surprised he’s confused. I mean, Jesus, this gets more and more insane by the minute. And listen – you won’t believe who I’ve just seen.’
He was about to tell Jamila about the old man in the brown tweed coat when the station’s front door opened and Gemma Bright came in wearing a businesslike grey suit and carrying a briefcase and a long cardboard tube under one arm.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late. Traffic.’
‘Not to worry,’ said Jamila. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs?’
They took the lift up to the first floor and crossed over to a high-ceilinged room that was bare except for a large desk and a random collection of office chairs. It was stuffy and it smelled of old wood panelling. Out of the cardboard tube Gemma drew several old maps and spread them out on the desk.
‘I wanted to show you this one first of all. This is a recent map, and it shows that the sewers haven’t changed all that much since Joseph Bazalgette first planned them back in 1865.’
‘I don’t think I need a map to tell me how old they are,’ said Jerry. ‘The smell sort of gives it away.’
Gemma gave him an unamused smile. ‘Here – this is the Battle Bridge sewer, which serves the Peckham area, and this is the Southwark and Bermondsey storm drain, which takes away excess water when the sewer’s overflow. They’ve survived so long because Bazalgette made them twice the size that was needed at the time, and he insisted on using Portland cement. It sets extremely hard and it’s waterproof.’
Jerry leaned over the map and examined it with a frown. Then he turned back to Gemma.
‘You said you had some ideas about what could have caused that bloody great fountain of sewage. Not to forget those poor buggers all getting chopped up like that. And then there’s all the other weird things we saw down in the sewer. All the lights turning green, and that howling noise. And those keys flying at us.’
‘Yes, I do have one or two ideas,’ said Gemma. ‘I’ve been thinking it over and over, and I don’t believe you can put any of them down to natural phenomena. I’m convinced that some person or persons must be doing this deliberately.’
‘But for what earthly reason?’ asked Jamila.
‘What unearthly reason, more like,’ Jerry put in.
‘I have no idea,’ said Gemma. ‘And I can’t even begin to imagine how they’re doing it. Our chief flusher suggested that all that sewage spouting out might have been caused by an abnormally high tide and the Thames Barrier being closed.’
‘But you don’t think so?’
‘No. That volume of sewage could never have got past that fatberg. It’s far too constricted. And how did all those forensic officers and my photographer get cut to pieces? Even a high-pressure hose couldn’t have done that. And what about those mutilated children, and those lights turning green, like you say, and those keys? What about poor Martin being blinded and having his legs amputated? It all seems like some terrible horror story, doesn’t it? But it’s real. You’ve witnessed it; I’ve witnessed it. It must be real. And since it’s real, somebody must be doing it.’
‘But you’ve searched all the sewers with your ground-penetrating radar, haven’t you? And you haven’t found anybody hiding in them.’
‘That’s how I came up with these ideas. And I definitely think they’re worth exploring.’
Jamila looked up at the clock. ‘It’s 2:30… time to meet up with DCI Walters and the rest of the MIT team. Listen, Gemma – why don’t you tell us your ideas once we’ve all gathered together? That will save you from having to explain them twice.’
Gemma rolled up her maps, and the three of them went upstairs to the large chilly office that DCI Walters had been allocated for this investigation. DCI Walters was already there, sitting at the head of a shiny walnut table with his hands steepled as if he were waiting impatiently for the answer to a prayer, and so were DCs O’Brien and Pettigrew. Another man sat on DCI Walters’ left-hand side. He looked professorial, this man, with unkempt white hair and half-glasses and a worn-out corduroy jacket in faded beige with leather patches on the elbows. His blue bow tie was tilted askew at a forty-five-degree angle.
‘Ah, Mulder and Scully,’ said DCI Walters.
‘Detective Sergeant Patel and Detective Constable Pardoe,’ Jamila corrected him coldly.
‘Just my little joke, DS Patel. Don’t take it to heart. In fact, you should take it as a compliment.’
‘Thank you, sir. But I think the compliments can wait until we can bring this investigation to a close. That’s if we can. In the meantime, this is Ms Gemma Bright, the engineer from Crane’s Drains who’s been in charge of the sewer where all of these tragic incidents have been taking place. She says she has some ideas that could possibly help us.’
Gemma said, ‘Yes. I believe that I might have.’
‘Excellent, good. We appreciate your input, Ms Bright,’ DCI Walters told her, without looking at her, although he sounded to Jerry as if he were thinking, What can a woman possibly know about sewers – especially a young attractive woman like this?
‘Please, take a seat,’ he told them. ‘This is Alan Pattinson, from Cullen’s, the antique lock and key specialists. Probably the most knowledgeable man in the country when it comes to antique locks and keys. He’s even written a book about them, haven’t you, Mr Pattinson?’
‘Two books, actually, detective chief inspector. One about antique locks and one about antique keys. But I don’t like to blow my own trumpet about it.’
They all sat down, and Jamila poured herself a glass of water from one of the plastic bottles in the middle of the table. Jerry was already beginning to regret leaving his cappuccino behind at McDonald’s.
‘Tell DS Patel and DC Pardoe what you’ve been telling us, Mr Pattinson,’ said DCI Walters. ‘I think you’ve shed some quite interesting light on this whole wretched business.’
On the table in front of Alan Pattinson lay a green canvas tool roll. He unfastened it and rolled it out. In each of the sixteen pockets that normally would have contained spanners or screwdrivers there was one of the keys that had been retrieved from the sewer.
‘This is the first time I’ve ever come across one of these keys in the flesh, so to speak, let alone so many of them, and of course, these are only a selection. I’ve seen pictures of them, in antique books, and they’re mentioned in several treatises on locksmithery. But the reason you come across them so rarely is because of what they were used for.’
‘Unlocking locks, I should imagine,’ said Jerry. ‘Why does that make them so rare?’
‘Aha!’ said Alan Pattinson, raising one finger. ‘They were used for locking locks, but not for unlocking them. Once they had locked a lock, they were left in situ. They were known as quarantine keys. The designs you can see on the bows all have an occult significance… each one of them different. Sigils, we call them.’
He took out a key and held it up. It had an X on its bow with a crescent moon on either side, and the letters M-U-R-M-U-R around the rim.
‘This sigil is for Murmur, who was one of the seventy-two demons listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon, which was a book about witchcraft. It was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century, but it was mostly based on material that was hundreds of years older. Murmur was a Great Duke and Earl of Hell, and he commanded thirty-nine legions of lesser demons.
‘If you were a sorcerer and you could conjure up Murmur, he would enable you to raise the dead and make them answer any question you might want to put to them. Supposing somebody had died without telling you where they’d hidden all their money… well, this was a way of bringing them back to life so they would have to tell you.’
He laid the key down and held up another. This key had a bullet-shaped design on its bow, with an inverted cross and two scissors shapes.
‘This sigil is for Malphas, who was a Great Prince of Hell and Satan’s second-in-command. He had fifty legions of demons under his command. If you summoned Malphas, he could give you the power to make all of your enemy’s buildings collapse and also to empty his brain of any thoughts he might have of attacking you… or indeed any thoughts at all. The only trouble with Malphas, though, was that he was never to be trusted, and he was liable to steal all the thoughts from your brain too.’
‘Do all these keys have the signs of demons on them?’ asked Jamila.
Alan Pattinson held up three more keys, one at a time. ‘Every one of them, and you sent me sixty-four altogether, so I can only presume there are some that you haven’t yet recovered. This one has Beleth’s sigil on it. This one is for Asmodeus. This one is for Marchosias. And so on.
‘As I say, they’re all demons listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon, but the list was originally compiled in 1577 by a Dutch doctor and occultist called Johann Weyer. He didn’t personally believe in witchcraft, and he called his list Pseudomonarchia Daemonum – which means The False Monarchy of Demons. But there were plenty of witches and conjurors and practitioners of black magic who believed that the demons on his list were real, and that with the right incantations they could call on these demons to work whatever mischief they had in mind.’
Jerry said, ‘You almost sound as if you believe that yourself, Alan, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
Alan Pattinson let out a laugh that sounded like a horse snickering. ‘Let’s put it this way, detective. In my business, you always have to keep an open mind. You’d be amazed at some of the uses that have been made of locks and keys over the centuries – some of them extremely risqué. I could regale you for hours about it.’
‘Well, yes, I’m sure you could. But let’s stick to these keys, shall we? Why were they called quarantine keys?’
‘They were called quarantine keys because they were specifically made for exorcists to keep the dead bodies of witches and sorcerers sealed in their coffins for the rest of eternity. The coffins would be fitted with seventy-two iron rings all around the lids and each ring would have a padlock. Each padlock would be locked with a key bearing the sigil of one of the seventy-two demons, and the keys would be left in the locks when the coffins were buried.
‘The exorcists believed that if the keys remained in the locks, nobody would be able to turn them or take them out. That’s because each key had been exorcised with a prayer that paralysed the power of the demon’s sigil. In other words, they jammed them, as effectively as if they’d filled them with superglue. Or spiritual superglue, anyway.’
‘But somebody took these keys out, didn’t they? They not only took them out, they bloody well slung them at us.’
‘Aha – but this is where it gets interesting. According to the Lesser Key of Solomon, a select few have the ability to turn the keys and open up the padlocks. Ordained priests can do it. So can people whose hearts have stopped beating but who have been brought back to life. And the children of the witch or sorcerer inside the coffin, natural or adopted – they can do it, too.’
‘So the coffins can be opened,’ said Jerry. ‘But then what?’
‘Whoever is lying in them can be revived. Or so the book says. And it doesn’t matter how long they’ve been dead.’
‘So what does this all mean?’ Jamila asked him. ‘Are you trying to tell us the fact that these keys were thrown at us down in the sewer – that’s an indication that some witch has been released from her coffin and resurrected?’
Alan Pattinson shrugged and looked almost coy. ‘That’s if you believe that kind of thing.’
‘Jesus came back from the dead, didn’t he?’ said Jerry. ‘A lot of people believe that. Why should a witch be any different? What do you think, guv?’
DCI Walters pulled a face to indicate that he had no firm opinion on the matter. ‘Something extremely strange is going on – we have to admit that. No matter how it’s been done, we now have five forensic officers and one employee of Crane’s Drains fatally injured, and of course we have another one of their employees blinded and mutilated. Everything that’s happened appears superficially to have a supernatural element – which is why I asked for you and DS Patel to be brought in. But as Mr Pattinson has pointed out, the chap who first made a list of all these demons didn’t believe in them himself, so there’s a good chance that these keys and everything else that’s been happening – the lighting effects, etcetera, etcetera – they’ve all been the work of somebody who’s using them to fool us into believing that something supernatural is going on, even though it’s all trickery. You know – like a stage magician saws a woman in half.’
‘Or in this case, saws the legs off one poor bloke and cuts up six other people into bite-sized pieces,’ said Jerry. He was making the point that DCI Walters’s analogy had been less than sensitive.
Gemma raised her hand to be heard. ‘I agree with DCI Walters. I was attacked by those strange-looking children myself, and they certainly didn’t feel like ghosts. They were real, even though they looked so deformed. They felt as if they had claws, and they tried to pull off my safety helmet, and no ghosts could do that, could they? I still think the whole thing could have been rigged, and that they might have been wearing costumes. I mean, how could any child survive with all its insides hanging out? Especially down in the sewers.’
‘I have to ask the same question again and again though,’ said Jamila. ‘And that question is – why would anybody go to such extreme lengths to do such bizarre things? What is their purpose? You talk about a stage magician, DCI Walters, and I would be willing to accept that the lighting and the costumes and the sound effects – yes, they could all have been artificially set up. They could have been a hoax. But how do you make a gale-force wind blow down a sewer? How do you throw dozens of keys through the air, like a blizzard? How do you dismember six people and have their bodies blasted out of a manhole in thousands of litres of raw sewage? And most of all, why?’
DCI Walters nodded. ‘All good questions, Detective Sergeant Patel. All very good questions indeed, questions that I’ve been asking myself too. But that’s why I’ve been farming out this investigation to the specialists like Mr Pattinson here, and like you and Detective Constable Pardoe. Because, quite frankly, I’m damned if I know the answer.’