By 11:15 a team of seventeen uniformed officers had been assembled at Peckham police station, as well as six paramedics and five flushers from Crane’s Drains, who had brought with them all the helmets and breathing packs and LED lights they would need when they entered the Blackheath sewer.
They gathered together in the briefing room, and when they had finished coughing and scraping their chairs, DCI Walters stood up to give them a short introduction. He spoke in a dry monotone, as if he were addressing the shareholders’ meeting of a struggling restaurant chain.
‘You’re all familiar with the major incident here in Peckham two days ago when the main drain forcibly discharged a huge quantity of sewage. Tragically, as you well know, five of the Met’s forensic officers and an employee of the drain company were fatally injured.
‘What you won’t be aware of is that over the past few days we’ve had several other serious incidents in the same sewer and in other sewers in the Peckham area. Even though they’ve all involved assault and critical injury, and they all appear to be related, we’ve kept them strictly confidential. This is because of their highly unusual nature.
‘You’ve been gathered here this morning because we’ve located a considerable number of suspects involved in these incidents – approximately twenty in total – and we need you to go down into the sewers where they’re hiding and fetch them out, by force if necessary.
‘DS Patel here, along with DC Pardoe, has been running this investigation day-to-day, and I think she is the best person to explain what you can expect to encounter.’
Jamila stood up, and Jerry could tell from the expressions on some of the officers’ faces that they were thinking, Hallo, a woman, and a Pakistani woman at that, and rolling their eyes at each other.
Their expressions soon changed though, when she started to describe everything that had happened in the Southampton Way sewer, and how Martin Elliot had been dragged away and mutilated. She left nothing out – the appearance of the children, the green lights, the keys, the moaning, and the hooded figure formed out of smoke.
She also explained how the fatal explosion of sewage appeared to be connected with the incidents at St George’s laboratory and at the Warren BirthWell Centre, and the murder of Dr Macleod.
The officers sat in silence, and it was obvious that they were finding it hard to believe what Jamila was telling them.
‘I can fully appreciate that you are finding this all incredible,’ she said. ‘However, you will be going down into a sewer yourselves today, and it is possible that you will be coming face to face with some or all of these phenomena. So you need to be forewarned.
‘The children that you are tasked with bringing out of that cesspit are deformed beyond anything you have ever seen. Despite that, they have considerable strength, much stronger than ordinary children, so treat them with great caution and respect.
‘Above all, I have to advise you that if you see or smell woodsmoke, especially if that smoke has a distinctive tang of lemons to it, then you should immediately drop what you are doing and evacuate the sewer as fast as you can.’
After Jamila had finished and sat down, nobody spoke for at least a quarter of a minute. Then one officer raised his hand and said, ‘Come on, DS Patel – is this a wind-up? Is this some kind of psychological exercise to see how much bullshit we’ll sit here and swallow? It’s not April Fools’ Day, so I can’t think of any other explanation.’
There was nervous laughter all around the briefing room.
Jamila stood up again and said, ‘I was expecting that reaction, and I can’t say that I blame you. For that reason, I suggest you log in to this YouTube link. It shows excerpts from the videos that were taken down in the sewers at Southampton Way. It also shows you Martin Elliot, the manager of Crane’s Drains, in his hospital bed, Dr Macleod’s body in the morgue at St George’s Hospital, and the state of the laboratory at St George’s after the student pathologist had her arms torn off.’
There was a longer silence while everybody sat with their heads bowed, checking their phones. At last the officer looked up and said, ‘Blimey,’ and there was a rustle of shock from everyone else on the team.
DCI Walters said, ‘Once we’ve extricated the children, we’ll be taking them to Evelina Children’s Hospital, next to St Thomas’s. They’re setting aside an outpatients ward for us on the sixth floor, which they’ve recently converted from offices. They’ll have consultant paediatricians waiting for us, so that they can examine the children asap.’
‘The technicians here from Crane’s Drains will help you to put on your protective suits and helmets, and show you how to use the breathing apparatus,’ said Jamila. ‘And there’s one more thing. We’re calling this “Operation Suffer”. As in “suffer little children to come unto me”.’
‘Amen to that,’ said a woman paramedic at the back of the room.
They all stood up and noisily prepared themselves to leave for Blackheath. Jamila called Gemma to tell her that they were on their way.
‘The children are still asleep,’ Gemma told her. ‘They’re definitely not dead though. We’ve seen one or two of them stirring, as if they’re having a bad dream.’
‘Keep your eye on them,’ said Jamila. ‘We shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes at the outside.’
Jerry and Jamila went downstairs to the armoury. They would both be carrying Glock 26 subcompact pistols on Operation Suffer, although Jerry questioned if bullets would be any kind of deterrent to somebody who appeared to be made out of smoke – even if they were capable of hitting him so hard that they had almost knocked him unconscious.
As they waited to sign for their weapons and ammunition, Jamila’s phone rang. After she had answered it, she stood with her pen poised over the firearms docket, listening intently. She said, ‘Yes,’ and then, ‘Oh, no, that is so sad,’ and then, ‘Right, okay… was that all?’
‘What is it?’ Jerry asked her, as she tucked her phone back in her pocket.
‘That was Dr Gupta from King’s College Hospital. Martin Elliot died about an hour ago. Cardiac arrest.’
‘Oh, shit. Poor bloke. He wouldn’t have had much of a life though, would he? Blind, with no legs.’
‘Dr Gupta said he was calling because the duty nurse spoke to him last night. She told him that Martin Elliot was highly agitated, and she was worried about him. It seems he was convinced that he’d forgotten to tell us something important.’
‘Really? Did he tell the nurse what it was?’
‘Yes. Even though he was totally blind he’d managed to write it down on a piece of paper. The nurse promised him she would make sure that we received it. Dr Gupta’s kept it for us, but it was only two words. “Cave” and “friendship”.’
‘And Martin Elliot was stressed out because he’d forgotten to tell us that? “Cave” and “friendship”?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Maybe by “cave” he meant the cesspit where the children were hiding. I wouldn’t like to guess about “friendship”.’
‘Who knows? And of course he’s passed away now, so we can’t ask him.’
‘Didn’t that unpronounceable doctor at St George’s say that his grandmother could talk to the dead? Maybe we could ask her to ask him.’
‘Jerry – Dr Pocztomski also told us that his grandmother was senile. And anyway, we need to get our skates on. Whatever Martin Elliot meant, we have to go over to Blackheath now and bring out those children.’
*
By the time Jerry and Jamila and their seventeen-strong squad of officers arrived at Blackheath, they found that flushers from Crane’s Drains had already opened up the manhole on the corner of Duke Humphrey Road and surrounded it with blue canvas screens. A brisk breeze was blowing across the heath, which made the screens rumble like the sails of a yacht.
Every member of the squad was now kitted out in fluorescent-yellow PVC coveralls, as well as white helmets, gloves and boots, including Jerry and Jamila and the paramedics.
‘Gordon Bennett,’ said Jerry, as the officers gathered around them. ‘We look like the canaries’ annual reunion.’
Gemma and Jim Feather were standing by the manhole too, although they had left their ground radar team in the garden over the cesspit, to keep watch over the sleeping children and warn them if they showed any signs of movement.
‘We’ve surveyed the whole length of the sewer between here and the house with a Troglotech camera,’ said Gemma. ‘It’s three metres wide and it’s reasonably clean, and at the moment, the sewage flow is only about nine centimetres deep.’
‘What about the breach into the cesspit itself?’ asked Jamila. ‘How wide is that? None of our officers is exactly anorexic, and these suits are quite bulky. We don’t want to reach it and then find that we can’t get in.’
‘It’ll be a bit of a tight squeeze, I’ll admit that,’ said Jim Feather. ‘I reckon it was originally built as an outlet duct, so that the cesspit could empty straight into the sewer. That was probably done in the 1860s, before the householder could install one of them new-fangled flushing toilets, and the S-bend plumbing that went with it. But by the looks of it some of the brickwork on both sides has been knocked out to widen it, and quite recently too. I’d guess that whoever did that was trying to give the children easier access.’
Jamila turned to the officers standing around her. ‘Right, ladies and gentlemen. The plan is that we will enter the sewer in single file with an operative from Crane’s Drains in between every fifth one of us, carrying LED lamps, and that’s apart from the lamps on our helmets. Once we’ve reached the cesspit, we’ll enter it immediately and flood it with light. That will make it easier for us to see what we are doing, but more importantly it will dazzle the children and hopefully catch them off their guard.
‘Depending on how violently they struggle, the plan is to pass them back one by one along the line so that they can be lifted out of the manhole. If they are able to sit, they can then be fastened into their seats in the buses. If not, they can be strapped down to beds in the ambulances. Are there any questions?’
‘Yes,’ said one of the officers. ‘Am I dreaming this?’
‘If you’re able to smell shit in your dreams, then maybe you are,’ Jerry told her. ‘If not, then you’re awake, and this is real.’
He tightened the buckle on his helmet and added, ‘Okay, everybody? Here goes nothing.’
A burly officer from Gipsy Hill police station climbed down into the manhole first. His name was Eddie Green, and he had been a runner-up in last year’s Met Police Boxing Championships. Jerry and Jamila climbed down immediately after him. It was up to them to enter the cesspit before any of the other officers so that they could assess which children should be taken away first, and which children might be aggressive or even dangerous. Eddie Green would give them some protection if the children started to attack them. Apart from being a trained boxer, he was carrying a Taser attached to his belt, as well as a telescopic baton. Both Jerry and Jamila, of course, had their Glock 26s.
They sloshed their way along the brightly lit sewer, with Eddie Green in front, his head bowed so that he wouldn’t hit it on the curving brick roof. Jim Feather followed close behind, carrying an LED lamp and a video camera.
Jerry sniffed. He could smell sewage, but he couldn’t smell woodsmoke, or lemons. He couldn’t say anything to Jamila because they were keeping strict silence until they entered the cesspit, in case they woke and alerted the children. His heart was beating hard and his Perspex face mask was steaming up, and for the first time in a long time, he realised that he was genuinely frightened, to the point where he could almost have wet himself.
This was completely different to his first experience down in the sewers – even when the wind had howled and the lights had turned green and he and Jamila had been struck by that blizzard of keys. He had felt alarmed then, and disorientated, but he had also felt a self-surviving thrill of adrenaline. Today, he felt nothing but sheer shivering dread. He couldn’t stop thinking about the body parts that had come thumping down onto the pavement out of that cascade of sewage on Peckham High Street, and the way that hooded figure had attacked him.
He had the irrational sensation that the sewer was gradually closing in on him, becoming narrower and narrower, and that the air was becoming increasingly foetid and lacking in oxygen. He had to focus all of his mental strength not to turn around and blunder his way back to the manhole, and scramble out, and breathe in the fresh chilly breeze that was blowing across Blackheath.
It took them less than five minutes of wading through sewage to reach the ragged breach in the sewer wall. It was about half a metre wide and slightly less than one and a half metres high. The brick quoins on either side of it had been broken away, and some of them were still lying in lumps among the sewage.
Jim Feather was careful not to shine his LED lamp directly into the breach. He looked back to the line of police officers and flushers who were following behind him and gave them a thumbs-up signal to make sure that they were all ready. He was given a series of thumbs ups in return.
‘Okay, go,’ said Jamila softly, and patted PC Green on the shoulder. He ducked his helmeted head down and shouldered his way into the breach, his PVC coveralls rustling against the broken bricks.
Jamila turned to Jerry, and although she didn’t say anything, he could see that she was just as frightened as he was. They had both seen Dr Macleod lying scarlet and skinned in the morgue, and there was nothing to reassure them that they weren’t going to meet the same fate.
Jamila went into the breach first, with Jerry close behind her. Jim Feather followed, with the light from his LED lamp swivelling and dancing all around him.
They stepped into the cesspit and immediately filled it with light, so bright that it made them blink. Its ceiling and its walls were dry and fibrous with tree roots, and its floor had been spread with grubby brown blankets. The children were lying together in the far corner, most of them dressed in the white nightgowns that they had been wearing when Jerry and Jamila had seen them running away into Charles Coveney Road. Their arms and legs were all interlocked, as if they were clinging on to each other for security and warmth. As Eddie Green and Jamila and Jerry came in, three or four of them lifted their heads and looked up in surprise.
Three more officers and one of the flushers entered the cesspit behind them, and they all stood there confronting the children. For the first few moments, it was a silent stand-off, as the children stared at the police in bewilderment, and the police stared at the children in utter disbelief.
Every child was malformed in a different way. Some had enormous heads, with thinning hair on them, as if they were suffering from encephalitis. Others had tiny heads, with near-together eyes as dark as rabbits. More than one of them had several arms and legs, or conjoined bodies protruding from their chests, or no limbs at all. One of them was little more than a head, with two arms and a neck that inflated when it breathed.
‘Where’s old smoky?’ hissed Jerry, under his breath.
‘I have no idea,’ said Jamila. ‘But the longer she stays away, the better.’
With that, she approached the children and lifted both hands to show them that she meant them no harm.
‘Please – do not be scared of us,’ she said. ‘We have come to take you away to somewhere safe and comfortable. We are not going to hurt you.’
She reached down and took hold of the arm of the nearest child, a little girl with tousled blonde hair. The girl’s eyes were both milky white, and there was nothing but an empty cavity where her nose should have been. When Jamila tried to lift her up, she held on tightly to the boy lying next to her, whose body underneath his nightgown looked plump and childish, but who had thick hairy arms like a grown man.
‘Listen, I promise you, we’re going to look after you,’ Jamila told her. ‘Do you understand me? Do any of you understand me?’
The little girl held on to the plump boy even tighter and started to cry. Then more and more of the children started to sob. Some of their crying was high-pitched and squeaking, others made strange breathy sounds, because they had no larynxes or sinuses, and one small boy had no lower jaw, so that they could see his windpipe bulging out of his neck when he cried.
At least seven of the police officers were crowded into the cesspit now, and they looked at each other as if they were trying to persuade themselves that none of this was real, that it was impossible for these children to be alive, let alone crying.
Jamila tugged at the little girl’s arm again, and this time Eddie Green bent over and prised her hand free from the plump boy’s arm. The little girl let out a whistling sound, but instead of fighting, she reached out for Jamila and held on to her, and as Jamila lifted her up, she hugged her closely.
Next, a boy with a large head climbed to his feet, with tears running down his cheeks. He held out his arms, and Eddie Green picked him up and passed him over to one of the officers waiting by the breach in the cesspit wall. One after another, the children who could manage to stand up came limping and hobbling toward them, all of them with their arms raised, all of them wordlessly pleading to be taken away.
Those who had no arms or legs or who were so misshapen that they were unable to get up off the floor continued to sob, but they sounded less panicky now, because they could see that they were not going to be forgotten.
‘I’m not going to write about this in my memoirs,’ said Jerry, shaking his head. ‘People will say I’m taking the piss.’
All of the children were passed along the sewer by the line of officers and then lifted out of the manhole. They all smelled of stale urine and something pungent and herbal.
Jamila sniffed and said, ‘Mugwort. You can burn it as incense – it’s supposed to keep evil spirits away.’
‘Mugwort? I’ll have to get some of that for the ex-wife,’ said Jerry. His feeling of dread had completely faded now, and he was beginning to feel confident that they might be making some real progress with this investigation, for all of its insanity. If there was one thing he had learned, working with Jamila, it was that the supernatural was only terrifying if you didn’t understand it. Once you did, it was nothing more than deeply unsettling.
He was hugely relieved that the children hadn’t struggled or tried to attack them. He saw the girl who Gemma had sketched, with her intestines hanging below the hem of her nightgown, but she had her eyes half closed and a dreamy expression on her face, like the picture of Ophelia floating in the stream.
The remaining children were lifted up and handed along the sewer with exceptional care and tenderness, despite their deformities. There were twenty-two children altogether, and by the time they had removed the last of them from the cesspit, Jerry could see that the officers had begun to accept their extreme abnormality and treat them with the same consideration that they treated the victims of horrific accidents, like fires or car crashes.
‘That’s it then, sarge,’ said Jerry, once the last child had been carried away and the cesspit was empty. ‘The lights didn’t go green, and we didn’t get a howling gale, and old smoky didn’t put in an appearance.’
‘I still don’t think we’ve seen the last of her… or it, or whatever it is,’ said Jamila. ‘You remember what she said about touching her nestlings. “You’ll suffer like your friends have suffered.”’
‘Well, yes. And I still don’t believe that she’s only made out of smoke. She bloody hit me hard enough, and if it was her that killed Dr MacLeod and pulled that poor girl’s arms off…’
Jamila looked around the cesspit. ‘I’ll call Lambeth Road and ask them to send a forensics team to check this out… these blankets and everything. And there’s faeces in the far corner. They need to examine that to see what those children have been eating and where they might have got it from. That could help us to find “old smoky”, as you call her.’
They waded their way back along the sewer and climbed out on to the corner of Duke Humphreys Road, their boots dripping. All of the children who were able to sit up had now been lifted into the buses, and the remaining eight were being taken to the Evelina Children’s Hospital by ambulance.
Jim Feather came up to them and said, ‘Mission accomplished, folks. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a very stiff drink.’
‘Mission accomplished for you, perhaps,’ said Jamila. ‘For us, this is only the beginning.’
Behind her back, Jerry gave Jim Feather a hand-waggling gesture as if he were knocking back a glass of Scotch.