After he had dropped Jamila off at Peckham, Jerry drove down to Tooting police station. While the image was still fresh in his mind, he wanted to sit down in front of a computer screen with the EvoFIT operator and give her a description of the white-haired old man in the brown tweed coat.
He managed to eat two Jaffa cakes and drink a cup of tea while he picked out faces from a database. First it was pictures of men of different ethnicities – white, black, Asian or Hispanic. Then – when he had chosen the old man’s race – he selected his age group, and his hairstyle, and his demeanour, and gradually, he was able to evolve a picture that looked so much like the old man himself that it was eerie.
‘That’s him, you’ve nailed the bastard,’ he told the EvoFIT operator.
‘Oh. He looks nice. Just like my grandpa.’
‘Believe me, love, you wouldn’t want this old geezer for your grandpa. He’d probably cut your throat as soon as look at you.’
He left and drove back to Peckham. The sky was strangely dark, the greenish colour of corroded copper, as if a downpour was imminent. The EvoFIT operator would post the image of the old man on Twitter and Facebook and send it around to the local papers and all the other police stations in the south-west London area, those that were still open. As Jerry drove, he glanced at the print-out of the old man’s picture on the seat beside him. He couldn’t help wondering if the man really existed, or if he had imagined him. It was a mystery how he had vanished each time Jerry came looking for him. But Jamila had seen him too, so he must be real.
When he arrived back at Peckham, he found that Jamila was talking to Alan Pattinson, the lock and key expert. She had been trying to eat a spiced keema pasty, which was lying on its paper wrapper in front of her with a single bite taken out of it. Alan Pattinson, however, was droning on, and every time she raised the pasty to her mouth to take another bite, he would ask her a question, and she would have to put it down again.
‘So you’ve never heard of William Trench?’ he asked her.
‘No, I’m afraid not. The name means nothing.’
‘Well, not to worry. There’s plenty of British people who’ve never heard of him either.’
‘I am British, Mr Pattinson.’
‘Well, I mean people who were born and bred in Britain. They’ve never heard of Matthew Hopkins either. He was the Witchfinder General, born 1620, died 1647.’
‘I saw a film about him once, with old what’s-his-name in it,’ said Jerry. ‘Vincent Price.’
‘That’s right,’ said Alan Pattinson. ‘Matthew Hopkins always claimed that he was appointed Witchfinder General by Parliament, but he never actually was. He did it for the money that local towns gave him. It’s recorded that he caught twenty-three witches, four of whom died in prison and nineteen of whom were hanged, although he probably killed hundreds more.’
Jerry sat down next to Jamila. She offered him one of her keema pasties, but he shook his head. ‘Thanks, sarge, but I’ve already had a couple of biscuits, and I’m still feeling a bit dicky after, you know…’ He didn’t mention the children in front of Alan Pattinson.
‘So who was this William Trench?’ asked Jamila.
‘Ah, now he was a witchfinder too, in his way. He was originally appointed as the vicar of St George-in-the-East in Wapping, but when he took over the church, he discovered that almost the whole of that parish was dominated by a woman who purported to have supernatural powers. In fact, she was said to be the most powerful single witch in English history. People still went to church on a Sunday, but if they were seriously ill and were looking to be healed, or if they badly needed money, or if they wanted something nasty to happen to somebody they didn’t like – they’d always go to this woman.’
‘Pity she’s not still with us,’ said Jerry. ‘I could use a bit of dosh to buy myself a new car, and my neighbours downstairs are right getting on my nerves with their bloody music. Do you know how many times they’ve played “Shape of You” by old ginger-knob?’
Alan Pattinson gave Jerry the quick, impatient smile of a man who wasn’t used to being interrupted.
‘William Trench heard from one of his parishioners that this woman was holding ceremonies to summon Satan. He went to her house on Artichoke Hill and demanded that she stop calling on the Devil, especially in his parish. When she told him to rot in Hell, he went to his friend the magistrate and had her arrested on charges of fraud and extortion.’
‘How did he manage to do that?’ asked Jamila.
‘Well – she’d been making pin money as a faith healer and a fortune teller, but most of her profit came from being an abortionist. If a pregnant woman came to her seeking a termination, she would ask them for what seemed like a reasonable amount of money – five shillings, which is worth about thirty pounds today. But once she’d carried out the abortion, it was a different matter. She would threaten to inform the woman’s husband and parents and all of her friends about it – especially if the woman was pregnant because of what you might call a bit on the side.’
‘So she’d demand even more money to keep schtum?’ said Jerry.
‘Exactly. As much as twenty or thirty pounds in some cases. And any woman who didn’t pay up was threatened that her children would go down with the measles, or her pets would all die, or her husband’s business would go bankrupt. And it was widely believed that she would be able to do that.
‘There was one thing more said about her. Although she was an abortionist, she believed that all human life was sacrosanct. Even if a child was miscarried or aborted, she believed that it still had an inviolable right to life. Quite obviously it’s an apocryphal story, but it was said that she kept alive every one of the foetuses she aborted, no matter what was wrong with it. It was even said that sometimes she could be seen at night, walking through the streets of Wapping with the children running and limping behind her. Impossible, of course, but a good ghost story.’
Alan Pattinson held up a brown leather-bound book with a broken spine. ‘It’s all in here. The diaries of William Trench. I’ve borrowed this from Carmine’s, the locksmiths. They were taken over years ago by the Handykeys group, but they still have all their old records. Carmine’s were the company who made the seventy-two keys with sigils in them, and they made them to William Trench’s personal order.’
‘So it was this vicar, William Trench, who had them made? Does he say why?’
‘Oh, yes. It was quite a tragedy. The witch-woman was tried and found guilty of extortion and sent to Tothill Fields prison, but she was there no longer than a single night before she disappeared. Vanished, even though her cell was still locked. Either she picked the lock or bribed one of the warders, that’s my guess. But the following weekend, William Trench’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Miranda, was driving along Cannon Street when her carriage caught fire.’
‘It caught fire?’ asked Jerry. ‘How does a horse-drawn carriage catch fire?’
‘Nobody knows. It was right in the middle of the street, and even though it was open-sided, Miranda got herself tangled up in the reins somehow and couldn’t get out. The horse panicked and dragged the carriage along the street, and so nobody could stop it to put out the fire and pull Miranda out. William Trench heard all the shouting and screaming and came out of the church, just in time to see his wife being incinerated in front of his eyes.
‘Here,’ said Alan Pattinson. He opened the book, where he had inserted an orange train ticket as a bookmark, and slid it across the table.
Jamila read from it, out loud. ‘I knew instanter who was guilty of this hideous murder, for the flames which enveloped Miranda’s whisky were the most lurid emerald in colour, such as I had seen in the kitchen when I paid my visit to Artichoke Hill.’
Alan Pattinson said, ‘He was convinced that the witch-woman had escaped from Tothill and killed his wife in revenge for him having her put in prison. The day after he’d conducted his wife’s funeral, he gave up the vicarship of St George’s and went in search of the witch-woman, to get his revenge. He says he became the new Witchfinder General, except that he was in pursuit of only one witch.’
Jamila looked at Jerry, and he knew what she was thinking. We were nearly cremated by green flames ourselves. Maybe this hooded figure that we’re trying to nail down has the same kind of supernatural powers as the witch-woman that William Trench was after. Maybe she’s a descendant of that witch-woman. Surely she couldn’t be the same witch-woman – not after more than a hundred and sixty years.
‘If William Trench ordered those keys, I’m assuming he found her,’ said Jerry.
‘He did. He did find her, although it took him more than three years.’ Alan Pattinson took the book back and turned to another page that he had bookmarked. ‘Here, look – in January of 1859 he heard from the vicar of St Paul’s in Deptford, south of the river. Some woman was supposed to be getting up to all kinds of satanic shenanigans around the Royal Naval Dockyards. It’s all here, in his diary, how he took the ferry across the Thames almost every day to try to track her down.
‘In the end, he had the idea of persuading a young woman friend of his to pretend that she was pregnant. She went all around Deptford, asking barmaids and waitresses and nannies and serving girls if they knew of anyone who could help her to get rid of an unwanted baby. They directed her to a house on Tanner’s Hill, and that’s where he found her.’
‘And? What did he do once he’d found her?’
‘Here, read it. “I confronted her at her front door, but I was hurl’d back on to the road as if I had been kick’d by a horse. Two of my ribs were fractur’d and I lost a front tooth.”’
‘So – even if she didn’t have supernatural powers, she was incredibly strong?’
‘William Trench was convinced she had supernatural powers, and that she was invested with those powers by Satan himself. He says here that after she had hit him like that, he realised he couldn’t tackle her on his own. He didn’t know enough about demonology. He went to the Reverend Boniface at the nearest Catholic church, Our Lady of the Assumption, because the Reverend Boniface had qualified in Rome as an exorcist, a dismisser of demons.’
Jerry sat back. Then he turned to Jamila and said, ‘What do you call it when you don’t believe for a moment that something’s true, but you pretend to yourself that it is, like when you go to the pictures and watch a horror film, and you almost shit yourself?’
‘Suspension of disbelief,’ said Jamila.
‘William Trench certainly believed in her powers,’ said Alan Pattinson. ‘He convinced the Reverend Boniface, too. “On the night of September the eleventh, myself and the Reverend set out for Tanner’s Hill with Mr Dash and five men of the church whom the Reverend had sworn to silence. We had with us the casket with the seventy-two padlocks and keys which had been made for me at Carmine’s in St Martin’s Lane.
‘“When the witch-woman answered her door, Mr Dash held her at bay while the rest of us entered the house. The Reverend spoke the prayer of exorcism, which put her into a state of paralysis, whereupon we carried her out into the yard at the rear of the house. We laid her down and heaped her with lemons, since lemons are symbolic of purification. Then we covered her with yew-tree branches, dowsed her in several gallons of whale oil and set her alight, whereupon she burned with the fiercest green flames. She burned with such intense heat that we were obliged to stay well back.
‘“She neither screamed nor protested, but continued to curse us even as the fire consumed her. On the advice of the Reverend Boniface, we lifted her charred carcass into the casket as soon as life appeared to be extinct, and firmly sealed the lid. He had warned that the smoke from her cremation would still contain her spirit and that her spirit would never be extinct. I locked all of the seventy-two padlocks and left the quarantine keys in each of them, as instructed. The five men then carried the casket away to a site they had dug not far from Deptford Park, three times as deep as the deepest grave. They buried it there, and filled the grave with concrete and aggregate, so that there would never be a chance of it being accidentally exhumed, even in the far future.
‘“The gravediggers were paid a guinea each, and for his part, Mr Dash too was well rewarded.’”
‘Who’s this Mr Dash?’ asked Jamila. ‘Is he mentioned anywhere else in the diary?’
Alan Pattinson riffled through the book and shook his head. ‘Not that I can see. I can only presume that he was somebody who knew something about exorcism. Perhaps he was a friend of this Reverend Boniface. I’ve tried googling it, but all I’ve been able to find is Mrs Dash, which is a brand of American seasoning – you know, like chilli and garlic and onion salt.’
‘Whoever he was, he “held her at bay”, didn’t he?’ said Jerry. ‘Long enough for the priest to paralyse her anyway. It would be useful to know how he did that. Maybe he was just a big tough bloke like that PC Eddie Green.’
‘All the same, you’ve given us a tremendous amount of very helpful background, Mr Pattinson,’ said Jamila. ‘I’ll make sure that you get well rewarded – just like Mr Dash, whoever he was.’
‘Oh, please, call me Alan. It’s reward enough, DS Patel, knowing that I can do my bit to help solve a crime. I would have liked to have been a detective myself, don’t you know, but it’s my asthma, and my eyesight’s not particularly brilliant either.’
Once he had left, Jamila called PC Jane Dyer, one of the two officers she had left at the Evelina Children’s Hospital.
‘How is it going with the children? Everything still quiet?’
‘The nurses have cleaned them all up, and they’re trying to feed them now, but it isn’t easy. Some of them have throats so constricted that they can’t swallow. Others don’t even have stomachs. Some of them are asleep and can’t be woken up, and some of them are starting to get a bit bolshie. Two or three of the nurses have broken down in tears.’
‘Keep us up to date, please. We can come straight across there if you need us. We’re going to take a few hours’ break, but we’re always on call.’
Jerry looked at his watch. ‘All quiet on the western front? I think I’ve got enough time to visit my own witch, and take Alice out for a burger.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jamila, as they went down the stairs. ‘I am completely out of whale oil.’