As soon as Jerry returned to Peckham police station, he found Jamila to tell her what had happened.
‘If it hadn’t been for Tuffnut, I’m sure that smoky woman would have attacked us. From what she said, I think she was all ready to cut off Alice’s legs, the same as she did to Martin Elliot. It looked like she was holding something that could have been a saw, although I don’t know what happened to it, whether she dropped it or what.’
‘What about the old man?’
‘He buggered off too, as soon as I let Tuffnut off his lead. So I reckon there’s at least one thing they’re definitely scared of, and that’s dogs. That “Mr Dash” that William Trench mentioned in his diary – the one that kept the witch-woman at bay while the priest said a prayer to paralyse her. Perhaps he wasn’t a man after all. Perhaps he was a dog.’
Jamila swivelled around in her chair and started to prod at her laptop.
‘I’m googling for dogs called Mr Dash. You never know.’
‘I’ll bet you ten to one he was a dog. You should have seen how fast that witch-woman blew away out of there, as soon as Tuffnut went for her.’
After only a few seconds, Jamila said, ‘Here we are. It’s not Mr Dash but simply Dash. He was one of Queen Victoria’s favourite dogs when she was young. He was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and it says here that many people in Britain also named their dogs Dash in tribute to him.’
‘Right then. That’s something we’ve learned. When we go looking for this witch-woman we need to take a dog with us. Or maybe a couple of dogs. And we need to make sure that there’s a dog on guard outside the children’s ward, over at the hospital.’
‘I’ll contact the dog support unit. Unit Five at Nine Elms is probably the nearest, isn’t it? We’re going over to the hospital anyway, aren’t we? So I can arrange for a handler to meet us there.’
‘If this William Trench was able to catch her with a dog and lock her up, sarge, then there’s no reason why we can’t, even if she is nothing but smoke.’
‘The only problem is, Jerry, what do we do with her, even if we can catch her?’
‘Same as he did. Lock her up. And this time make sure that nobody lets her out.’
*
They had just climbed into their car when Jamila’s phone rang. It was PC Jane Dyer, from Peaceful Ward, and she sounded panicky.
‘Please get over here, DS Patel. The children are going wild. Listen… you can hear them screaming and crying and throwing things around, those that have got hands to throw things around with. We’ve had to evacuate the doctors and the nurses out of the ward and lock the doors.’
‘All right, constable. We were on our way over to check up on the children in any case. Jerry – PC Dyer says the children are going crazy. You need to put your foot down.’
They slewed out of the police station car park on skittering tyres. The Datsun was fitted with a siren and a blue flashing light behind the radiator grille, and they sped along Peckham Road and then Camberwell New Road at sixty miles an hour, weaving in and out between buses and taxis and delivery vans. It took them less than ten minutes to reach the Albert Embankment, and although they were stuck for nearly a minute behind a council dustcart, Jerry managed to steer up onto the pavement and then back onto the road, and within another three minutes, they were pulling up outside the Evelina Children’s Hospital.
They ran into the hospital, where the two armed officers were waiting for them, holding the lift doors open. They could hear the screaming as soon as they reached the sixth floor. The paediatricians and the nurses and the police constables were gathered in the corridor outside Peaceful Ward, looking stressed, while inside the children were howling and screeching and tossing chairs from one side of the room to the other.
Jamila and Jerry went up to the circular windows in the doors and looked inside. The children who had arms and legs were hobbling up and down, kicking the bedside cupboards and dragging the sheets and blankets off the beds. Those who were too malformed to climb off their beds were screaming as loud as they could and bouncing frenetically up and down.
Dr Latimer came up to them. His white lab coat was stained with parallel streaks of blood as if he had been clawed, and Jerry didn’t think he had ever seen a doctor look so grim.
‘They’re uncontrollable,’ he said. ‘And they’re insanely strong. Look at that poor nurse over there – they’ve scratched her cheek so badly she’ll be lucky not to have permanent scars.’
‘When did this start?’ asked Jamila.
‘About an hour ago. First of all they began to get restless and noisy and uncooperative. Then they started shouting and screaming and knocking over the glasses of water on their bedside tables. After that they gradually grew more and more aggressive.’
‘That’s so strange. When we first carried them out of the sewer, they seemed to be thankful. They weren’t aggressive at all.’
Even as Jamila spoke, three or four of the children were kicking at the doors. They kicked at them again and again until the veneer around the lock split apart.
‘Can’t you sedate them?’ asked Jerry. ‘Give them a dose of the old Rohypnol or something like that?’
‘I’ve already tried to tranquillise two of the most violent. I gave them four milligram doses of lorazepam, which usually works very quickly, but it had absolutely no effect at all. Some of them are so severely malformed that I wouldn’t know where to start injecting them, or if they had a stomach to digest a tablet if they allowed me to feed it to them.’
‘Do you have any idea why they’re behaving like this?’
Dr Latimer shook his head. ‘It’s like some form of mass hysteria. I’ve called Dr Feldman – he’s the head of our psychiatric team and he should be here at any moment. But I personally think it’s connected to their physical malformation. They’re feeling deeply frustrated because they’re so seriously disabled, and I’m sure some of them are suffering chronic pain too.’
He paused, and beckoned them over to the opposite side of the corridor, so that none of the nurses or police officers could hear what he had to say next.
‘I think they’re all fully aware too, how limited their lifespan is going to be. At least five of them wanted to know how long they can expect to live. “When am I going to die?” they asked me. They said that their mother would never tell them. By their “mother”, I presume they mean a woman who adopted them all.’
‘Yes – well, sort of,’ said Jamila.
‘They have every reason to be worried though,’ said Dr Latimer. ‘I doubt if even the least malformed of them will survive for more than a month, at the outside. The worst I expect to go within a week or so. No human beings can exist for long if they have no stomach or intestines or their heart is so misshapen it can barely manage to pump blood around their bodies. Some of them are suffering from mesocardia too.’
‘Sorry to be ignorant, but what’s that?’ asked Jerry.
‘For the first six weeks of their development, the internal organs of all embryos are symmetrical. After that, the heart makes its way to the left and the liver rotates into place on the right. It makes for a more efficient body if the organs are arranged as compactly as possible. But sometimes the heart remains in the centre of the body, and this is a serious condition that affects circulation. At least three of these children have this condition. They are like embryos that have grown in size but never developed in the way that they should.’
‘So what’s your verdict? I mean, medically speaking?’
‘To be absolutely frank with you, I believe the kindest option would be to euthanise them. I have suggested it in cases of VACTERL association that are far less debilitating than these. They have no meaningful future. They face nothing but pain and frustration and an early death. If an ultrasound scan had shown me children in this condition while they were still in utero, I would immediately have recommended that they be aborted.’
‘We believe they were,’ Jamila told him.
‘I’m sorry? They were aborted? Then how did they survive and grow to such a size? That’s impossible.’
‘We’re not entirely sure ourselves how they survived,’ said Jerry. ‘But we think that this “mother” you referred to has some way of keeping a foetus alive and kicking even if it’s been given the old heave-ho.’
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. I simply can’t understand how it could be done.’
‘It may be done by transplanting the aborted foetus into the womb of another woman,’ said Jamila. ‘We have come across several cases recently where this appears to have happened. Like hatching cuckoos in another bird’s nest.’
Dr Latimer shook his head again. ‘I keep up to date with every advancement in paediatrics, and I’ve seen no mention of any procedure like that. Not even with a healthy foetus, let alone a foetus so malformed that it can barely breathe or digest any nutrition. I mean – why would anyone do that?’
‘I don’t know what else to say to you at this stage, Dr Latimer. We are making some progress with this investigation, but only slowly, and there is a long way to go.’
They waited outside Peaceful Ward for another hour. Gradually the screaming and the kicking and the chair-throwing petered out, and eventually, when they looked in through the windows, they could see that all the children had fallen asleep. Some of them were lying on the floor. Others had dropped on top of heaps of blankets. The whole ward was wrecked, with broken glass and tipped-over bedside cupboards and ripped-open pillows strewn everywhere, but when they unlocked the doors and opened them, it was silent inside except for thin, constricted breathing.
Andrew Tanner came up and said, ‘What’s the next move then? They may be asleep now, but they’re not going to stay asleep for ever, are they?’
‘I’m going to try dosing them all with propofol,’ said Dr Latimer. ‘That’s what we usually use here to induce a coma. I still have several further tests I want to carry out, and it’ll be much easier to do that if they’re all unconscious. Then we can sit down and discuss what the way forward is going to be – both medically and legally and, I suppose, morally too.’
‘I’ve examined all of them now,’ said Andrew Tanner. ‘It’s extraordinary, because three or four of them have limbs that have been transplanted from other people – some of them quite unsuitable, such as adult arms on a young child’s torso. And what’s even more extraordinary is that they’ve taken, and grown. I can’t think how that’s been done, or how the limbs could possibly not have been rejected.’
‘What about the children as a whole though?’ asked Jamila. ‘Do you think it’s possible to save them?’
‘It depends what you mean by “saving” them. Myself, I think that it would be futile to attempt to give them arms and legs, even prosthetics. Almost all of them are beyond physical reconstruction. And that’s not even counting the ones who are missing parts of their brains. All we would be doing is putting them through extreme and unnecessary suffering. From my point of view, the answer is palliative care until they naturally pass away.’
They were still talking when a uniformed police constable came along the corridor with a beige-haired Belgian Malinois. He told the dog to sit and it obeyed instantly, its tongue hanging out.
Jamila said, ‘Thank you for coming so promptly. We have a very unusual situation here.’
‘Maitland’s the name,’ said the dog handler. He had dark circles around his eyes, like his dog. ‘There’s two armed PCs downstairs so I’m wondering what you need me and Blizzard for.’
‘Inside that ward we have a number of sick children – twenty-two in all. They are sleeping at the moment, although when they wake up they can be highly aggressive. But it’s not the children who are really the problem. Dr Latimer here is going to try and sedate them so that they stay reasonably calm. The problem is that they have what you might call a guardian… or a foster parent, for want of a better description.’
‘I take it this foster parent’s being a bit of a nuisance, then? Male or female?’
‘Female. But no ordinary woman, I warn you. She has the ability to get past security, although we are not certain how she does it. She is always dressed in a cloak and a hood, so that she looks like somebody wearing fancy dress for Hallowe’en. However, this is not fancy dress. She is extremely dangerous, and if she appears here, you need to treat her with the greatest caution.’
PC Maitland narrowed his eyes, and it was clear that he was having difficulty in believing any of this.
‘A woman in a cloak and a hood, and she can get past two armed PCs without them seeing her?’
‘We believe so, yes. But we also believe that there is one way of chasing her away. We’re not 100 per cent certain, but we think that she has a fear of dogs.’
‘She needs to be afraid of Blizzard here, I’ll tell you. He’s the most obedient dog I’ve ever had the pleasure to train, so long as you keep him active all day, and throw him his ball every five minutes. On the other hand, if you was a tea leaf making a run for it, and I told him to go for the k-i-l-l, you wouldn’t stand a chance in hell. He’s like Jaws with legs.’
Jerry lifted his hand to pat Blizzard on the head, but Blizzard looked up at him and snarled, in the same way that Tuffnut snarled at him.
‘No, best not,’ said PC Maitland. ‘Surprising how many people make that mistake, patting a dog on the head. If you do that, dogs always think that you’re going to hit them, or that you’re telling them off. Blizzard here, he’d bite your fingers off, right to the knuckles, and once he’d chewed them he wouldn’t spit them out either.’
‘Good boy, Blizzard,’ said Jerry, raising one hand in a high five. ‘Respect.’
Jamila and Jerry had a last few words with the paediatricians and the nurses and the police officers who would be staying on duty here at the hospital. Dr Latimer had already started to put each of the children into a medically induced coma, and he told them that so far the propofol seemed to be taking effect, and that none of the comatose children had stirred.
‘Bloody hell, I’m cream-crackered,’ said Jerry, as they went down in the lift.
Jamila was looking at herself in the mirror at the back of the lift. ‘I used to think that I would love to have children,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m not so sure.’
‘What, not even my kids?’ said Jerry, and immediately wished that he hadn’t.
Jamila didn’t answer that and walked out of the lift ahead of him. She didn’t speak again until they were back at Peckham police station.