It was well after five o’clock before Jamila and Jerry arrived at the BirthWell Centre, and it had started to rain.
After Jerry’s car had burned out, DC O’Brien had come to Daneville Road to pick them up and take them back to Peckham police station. They had both taken a shower and recovered from their escape by sitting in the staff room with mugs of hot tea and watching half an hour of afternoon television.
DCI Walters had suggested that if they weren’t up to it, they could postpone their interviews at the BirthWell Centre until the following day. Jamila had thanked him for his consideration but insisted that they talk to everybody who had seen Dr Macleod’s abduction as soon as possible. She knew from experience how witnesses could unconsciously censor and reinterpret their memory of a crime scene, especially if it had been gory and traumatic. She had known witnesses to swear that they had seen people who hadn’t even been there and invent car number plates that didn’t exist.
The sleeve of Jamila’s coat had been ripped open when Jerry had pulled her out of the shattered car window, and so she had borrowed a dark brown anorak from DC Pettigrew, which was two sizes too large for her.
‘I hate to say this, sarge,’ Jerry told her. ‘But that jacket makes you look like an orphan.’
Jamila had studied herself in the mirror. ‘My parents have both passed away, so I suppose, technically speaking, I am an orphan.’
Professor Karounis was on his way out to a bankers’ dinner, so he gave them the use of his office. One by one, they questioned everybody who had been in the operating theatre when Dr Macleod had been skinned by Susan Nicholls’s foetus and then dragged away. They weren’t able to talk to Susan Nicholls herself because she was still in intensive care, heavily sedated, and Nurse Yeom had called in sick.
Both Dr Bhaduri and Dr Symonds looked tired and distressed. Dr Bhaduri couldn’t stop coughing, although his cough was caused only by stress. Their accounts of the Caesarean section were almost identical, as well as their description of the way in which the foetus had clawed its way up Dr Macleod’s sleeve and ripped its way underneath his skin.
Nurse Harris told them how she had pinned Dr Macleod to the floor, while Janet Horrocks recalled her panic when she found that she couldn’t open any of the doors. Duncan explained his futile attempts to smash the doors apart with the fire extinguisher.
They all described the darkness and the moaning and then the singing sound, and how they had felt that some enormous invisible force had burst open the doors and dragged Dr Macleod out of the operating theatre.
It was only Kisi Adomako who said that she had actually heard distinct words being sung.
She was the last witness that Jerry and Jamila were questioning. She sat with her hands clasped together and her head bowed, and only occasionally looked up at them with her huge, soulful eyes.
‘You heard actual words?’ asked Jamila gently. ‘The others heard singing… but none of them said they heard words.’
‘The singing went up very high – so high you could hardly hear it. You know, like a dog whistle. But I felt that whoever was singing was very close to me. I’m sure I could feel their breath against my face.’
‘So what words did you hear?’
‘“Rise up, you shadows, and fly down, you crows.”’
‘That’s all?’ asked Jerry.
Kisi Adomako nodded. ‘But she sang it over and over, at least three times. Like this: “Rise up you shadows! And fly down, you crows!”’
‘You say “she”?’ asked Jamila.
‘I’m sure it was a woman. She was singing so high. And the way she was singing was not like she was pleading with the shadows and the crows to come and help her. It was like she was telling them to, or else there would be hell to pay. Men don’t sing like that.’
‘All right, Kisi. Thank you. I’m not exactly sure how, but that could be really helpful.’
Kisi said, ‘I can still hear her. I can still hear that singing, in my ears. I have never been so frightened in my life.’
When they had finished all of their interviews, Jerry and Jamila sat back and looked at each other. The rain pattered against the office window, and it sounded almost as if it had something important to tell them.
‘Do you really think she heard those words?’ asked Jerry.
‘Why would she make it up?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she simply misheard. You know what it’s like when you mishear a pop song. For years I thought “we built this city on rock’n’roll” was “we built this city on sausage rolls”.’
‘She heard some words though, and if she heard words, then we’re dealing with a person, and a female person – even if that person is some kind of supernatural force, or a spirit, or a ghost.’
‘What are the chances that it was the same spooky thing that took away those foetuses at St George’s and tore that poor girl’s arms off? That same thing we saw in the street with all those kids?’
‘Extremely high, I should think. And since we’ve finished here, we’d better get over to St George’s now.’
*
When they arrived at St George’s Hospital, forty minutes later, Dr Pocztomski took them immediately into the laboratory where he had been intending to examine the two distorted foetuses. Two forensic technicians were still there, in their crinkly Tyvek suits, taking samples from the pools and splatters of blood on the floor. They had propped the broken door up against the wall and were photographing it with ultraviolet light.
‘Give us a couple of minutes and we’ll be finished,’ one of them told Jamila, tugging down his face mask to reveal a neat little moustache, like Hercule Poirot. ‘I can tell you what’s really odd though, even before we’ve carried out any analysis back at Lambeth Road.’
‘Tell us something that isn’t odd,’ said Jerry.
‘No – you see the floor there, next to the sink? That’s where the victim had her arms ripped off. And you see all the footprints, in the blood? Every one of those footprints matches the shoes of one of the pathology team – the doctor here, and his assistant, and the two students who were here to watch. But that’s all. The perpetrator, him or herself – they didn’t leave a single footprint.’
Jamila pointed to the two portable incubators, with their plastic lids still open. ‘There’s no fingerprints or DNA on those?’
‘Yes, of course, and we’ll be matching them with all the hospital staff who might have handled them. But neither of them appear to have any trace of blood on them, which we would have expected if the perpetrator had opened them up after severing the victim’s arms.’
After they had looked around the laboratory, Dr Pocztomski led them upstairs to a small quiet waiting room, with an overstuffed sofa and two ill-matched armchairs. On the wall hung a faded reproduction of Ophelia floating in the stream, and on the coffee table lay dog-eared copies of Country Life and OK! magazines.
‘I am not superstitious,’ Dr Pocztomski told them. ‘My grandmother believed in ghosts and swore that she could have conversations with the dead, but I think she was simply senile. But let me tell you – what I saw in that laboratory today… I can only say that it must have been a ghost of some sort.’
‘Can you describe it?’ Jamila asked him.
‘I’ve already told the officers who first came here, after we had called the police. It was like smoke, black smoke. It appeared out of nowhere, nowhere at all, but it quickly took on a shape like a priest or a witch with a pointed hood. And it talked to us – well, shouted at us, rather, but it had no voice of its own. It used Mel’s voice – the unfortunate girl who lost her arms. It used her like a ventriloquist.’
Dr Pocztomski told them as much as he could remember of what the hooded figure had said. ‘God and their mothers turned their backs on them, and cast them out, but I never will! They are my nestlings now!’
Jerry said, ‘When the figure appeared, did you like smell anything?’
‘Yes, I did. It not only looked like smoke, but it smelled like smoke. Like a bonfire.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps a hint of something sour.’
Jamila and Jerry exchanged glances but said nothing, and didn’t ask Dr Pocztomski if the sourness reminded him of lemons.
‘Those two foetuses you were going to examine… do you have any idea what might have caused them to become so deformed?’
‘Many foetuses are malformed – more than you would think. If the malformation is extreme, the foetus more often than not is spontaneously expelled from the uterus. Otherwise, when the obstetricians see that it will be born with disabilities that would make its life intolerable, they will recommend termination.’
‘But these two foetuses… they were still living and breathing, weren’t they, in spite of being aborted?’
‘Yes. But of course they were taken away before I had the opportunity to examine them, so I have no idea how that could have been possible. Neither do I have any idea how they could have become so malformed in the first place. In the whole of my career I have never seen any foetuses that looked like them – and I have never encountered anything like that figure in a hood. How could it have torn off Mel’s arms like that? And it tore off the door, too, and flung it at me. How can something made of smoke have the strength to do that?’
‘Well – that is what we are doing our utmost to find out,’ said Jamila. ‘Meanwhile, doctor, I must ask that you do not speak to the media about this incident. That is partly because it could affect our investigation by letting the offender know how much progress we are making… or, to be honest, how little progress we are making. And also we do not wish to cause unnecessary public alarm, especially among expectant parents.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Pocztomski assured her. ‘I haven’t the slightest intention of telling anybody about this. They will think I am zwariowałem. In other words, that I have gone crazy.’
After they had left the pathology laboratory, they went along the corridor to the morgue. It was chilly and silent in there, and one of the fluorescent lights was flickering intermittently, like an irregular heartbeat.
A surprisingly cheerful morgue assistant with dreadlocks led them to the far end of the morgue and then rolled out the drawer on which Dr Macleod’s body was lying in a white PEVA body bag. He opened it up for them with a sticky, crackling sound, and they could see that he had been flayed right down to his raw red flesh.
‘Dr Kendrick is coming to examine him later,’ said the morgue assistant. ‘He still hasn’t completed his examination of all those forensic officers who were killed in that sewer, but he said that he wants to examine this one personally. Do you know Dr Kendrick? He specialises in cases where the victims have been dismembered or mutilated. You remember that case last year when that fellow in Croydon chopped up his wife and roasted one of her legs and ate it for his Christmas dinner? It was Dr Kendrick’s evidence that got him sent down.’
As they walked across to the hospital car park, Jerry said, ‘I think I feel sick.’
‘You and me both, Jerry,’ said Jamila.
They left St George’s and drove back to Peckham. For most of the way they were silent, but as they reached Peckham High Street, Jamila said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about? What you’re going to have for Christmas dinner?’
‘No, Jerry, I’m a Muslim. I’ve been thinking about what that midwife told us that she heard. “Rise up, you shadows, and fly down, you crows.” That sounds to me like the beginning of some sort of invocation.’
‘Sorry, don’t follow you,’ said Jerry. ‘What’s an “invocation”, exactly?’
‘It’s when you call on a spiritual force to help you in whatever you want to do. Like praying to God, or whatever gods you happen to believe in. Maybe it’s to cure your father of cancer, or to feed you, if you’re hungry, or to make you happy. Or like asking Satan or some demon to destroy your enemies, or to make you rich, or to bring you a hundred naked women for the night.’
‘I’ll go for that one,’ said Jerry. ‘You don’t happen to know it, do you?’
‘No… and I don’t know the one about the shadows and the crows either, but when we get back to the station, I’m going to google it, and see if it’s a known invocation. It might give us a clue, who knows?’