Before he drove to Peckham the next morning, Jerry stopped off at Tooting police station. He had three minor investigations to catch up on, and he wanted to check the date of his next appearance at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court, to give evidence in a case of car theft.
As he walked into the entrance hall, PC Susan Lawrence called out, ‘Oh! DC Pardoe! DC Mallett’s looking for you!’
‘Okay, love. How was your ice-skating?’
‘Not much fun. Actually, it was a disaster. I slipped over about a hundred times and now I’m all over bruises.’
‘You should come out with me next time. At least you’ll get fed, and you won’t end up looking like you’re the victim of domestic violence.’
He went upstairs and found DC Mallett sitting at his desk, reading the Sun online and sipping a cup of Starbucks coffee.
‘How’s it going, ’Edge? The lovely PC Lawrence said you wanted to see me.’
‘Wotcher, Jerry. Yes. That Tweet you twatted about that old geezer you were looking for, the one you reckon set fire to your motor. Well, this woman’s been in touch, and she says she knows him.’
‘You’re having a giraffe, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ said DC Mallett, reaching across his desk and picking up a sheet of notepaper. ‘Her name’s Mary Stebbings, and she lives in St Norbert Road in Brockley. Here’s her phone number. She says the old geezer’s name was Malcolm Venables, and he used to live just across the road from her.’
‘What do you mean, his name “was” Malcolm Venables? Has he changed it or something?’
‘No, he’s dead. He died about a year ago.’
‘It can’t be him then, can it?’
‘That’s what I told her, but she said she was sure it was him. One hundred and ten per cent positive.’
Jerry stood holding the sheet of notepaper and biting his lip. This was ridiculous. It was obviously a case of mistaken identity. EvoFIT was the most successful method yet invented for identifying criminals, but even so, it led to the arrest of only six offenders out of ten. Malcolm Venables must be one of the four out of ten who had been mistaken for somebody else.
‘How’s it all going, this sewer business?’ asked DC Mallett. ‘I haven’t seen nothing about it in the news.’
‘That’s because it’s all embargoed. But I tell you, ’Edge, it’s a bleeding nightmare. Those deformed kids I was telling you about, we found nearly two dozen of them in an old cesspit over in Blackheath, and now they’re all at Evelina’s Children’s Hospital. You should see the state of them. No arms and no legs, some of them. One of them, he’s only got half a brain and the top of his bonce is flat as a pancake. I had to take a couple of Nytol last night, or I never could have got to sleep.’
‘So what are you going to do about this Mary Stebbings? Give her a bell?’
‘I don’t know. I’m on my way to Peckham later, so I could go via Brockley. I don’t want to dismiss this completely out of hand. Maybe this Malcolm Venables has a brother who looks just like him. Or a cousin.’
‘What about all them forensic officers what got killed?’
‘What’s left of them is still at St George’s, in the morgue. They were all chopped up into bits, but the pathologists haven’t finished working out which bits belonged to which other bits. And some of the bits are missing. Fingers, feet, even a couple of heads. There’s sewage workers still combing through the slush to see if they can find them.’
‘It’s mad, isn’t it? I’m glad you’re on it, and not me. I’m still chasing that Maxi drug gang over at Streatham, and that’s enough to drive you mental. We had another gang-related stabbing last night, and some young bloke got his ear chopped off with a machete.’
Jerry went across to his own desk, leafed through the messages that had been left for him and checked his PC for any reports. To his relief, there was nothing urgent. His insurance company had written to say that his car was a total write-off, but that was no surprise.
He drove to Brockley and found the small terraced house on St Norbert Road where Mary Stebbings lived. When he rang the doorbell, she answered at once, almost as if she had been expecting him. She was a small, sixtyish woman with her hair pinned up in a bun like a wire-wool pan scourer, and a droopy brown cardigan. Jerry reckoned he could have used the lenses in her glasses to start a campfire, if the sun had been out.
‘Mary Stebbings? Detective Constable Pardoe. Here’s my ID.’
‘Oh,’ she said, peering at his warrant card. ‘You’ve come about Malcolm.’
‘That’s right. You told my colleague that you saw his picture on Twitter.’
‘I did, yes. No doubt about it. Do you want to come on inside?’
She led him through to a small stuffy living room, clearly the ‘best’ room, with china dogs in the fireplace and lace antimacassars on the back of the armchairs. It smelled of lavender, and damp.
‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ she asked him.
‘No thanks, I’m fine. I’ve got a lot on today. You know what they say, no peace for the wicked.’
‘Malcolm wasn’t wicked. Malcolm was always very helpful. He used to put my bins out for me. Always smiling too.’
‘When did he die, Mary? You don’t mind if I call you Mary?’
‘November last year. November the nineteenth, because it was the day before my birthday. I saw him the day before, and he looked as fit as a fiddle. But he had one of those pulmonary embolisms. His daughter Penny said he went out like a light. One minute he was eating his cornflakes. The next he was dead as a doornail. Just shows you, doesn’t it? Relish every moment, because you never know when it’s going to be your turn next.’
‘Mary – it was me who posted that picture on Twitter. It’s an old man I’ve seen several times in the past few days, walking around the streets of Peckham and Tooting and Denmark Hill. This old man was very much alive, so I don’t think there’s much chance that it could have been your Malcolm.’
‘I’m sure it was Malcolm. I took a long hard look at it, and I’m sure.’
‘How’s your eyesight?’
‘Very good, as a matter of fact. I know I wear these glasses, but I had my eyes tested at Specsavers only last week, and they said my vision was clear as a bell.’
‘Malcolm doesn’t have a brother, does he? Or a cousin that you know of, who looks like him?’
Mary Stebbings shook her head. ‘He mentioned an older sister, but she died a long time ago. Cancer, I think he said. And his wife had passed away, too.’
‘In that case, the old man I saw must have been the spitting image of Malcolm, even if he wasn’t Malcolm.’
‘It said on the Twitter that he was wearing a brown tweed coat. Malcolm always wore a brown tweed coat. You never saw him in nothing else – not in the winter, anyway. He said it was his lucky coat because he was coming out of the Brockley Barge pub, and he stopped for a moment to button it up. They were building a whole lot of new flats right opposite, and when he crossed the road, a load of bricks dropped down and missed him by inches.’
‘He always wore a brown tweed coat?’
‘That’s right. His lucky coat. Another time when he was wearing it, he won £75 on a scratch card. They buried him in it.’
‘They buried him in it? Where?’
‘Deptford Park cemetery. I saw him in his coffin, wearing it. I went to the funeral myself.’
Jerry felt the same icy-cold dread that had made him shiver when he was down the sewer in Blackheath. Malcolm Venables was dead. He had been dead for months. There was no possibility that Jerry could have seen him in the reception area at the King’s College Hospital, or outside McDonald’s in Peckham, or standing by the Evelina Children’s Hospital, or on Tooting Bec Common. He was dead. Dead as a doughnut, as Jerry’s late father used to say.
‘Right, Mary. I won’t take up any more of your time.’
‘That’s all right. I haven’t got anything to do all day anyway, not since my Rodney got married and moved out. That’s why I spend so much time on the Twitter. It’s a blessing that Twitter, if you’re living on your own.’
*
Jerry knew he would have to go to Deptford Park cemetery, even if there was no earthly possibility that Malcolm Venables could have been the old man in the brown tweed coat who he and Jamila had seen.
The cemetery was in a fenced-off area on the east side of Deptford Park, surrounded by plane trees. Jerry parked in the street outside and pushed open the squeaking iron gate. A plaque by the entrance told him that it had originally been used for the burial of naval officers who had died at sea and who had no surviving relatives in England to give them a funeral. He was immediately taken by the cemetery’s quietness, despite the traffic in the streets all around the park and the aircraft flying low overhead. He was also struck by how neglected it was, its borders overgrown and cluttered with dead leaves and the trees around it in need of trimming.
He walked along the pathways between the graves. A light chilly wind was blowing, so that the leaves scurried around his ankles. Most of the gravestones were plain marble or granite and engraved with nothing more than the names of the men buried beneath them. A few of them were decorated with urns or railings, and four or five angels were standing with their wings folded and their heads bent in sorrow. Some of the gravestones had fallen over and some had grown such thick pelts of moss that it was impossible to read what was written on them.
Jerry found the grave of Malcolm Venables at the far end of the cemetery. It was one of a row of newer graves, although they were all overgrown with nettles. His headstone was light grey polished granite with the inscription Malcolm Arthur Venables, Died November 19 aged 81, Mal would always walk that extra mile, To help his friends and cheer them with a smile.
This Malcolm Venables certainly didn’t sound like the old man in the brown tweed coat that Jerry had encountered. That old man had smiled, yes, but his smile had been gloating rather than friendly, and if he had walked an extra mile it had been to find Jerry and Jamila, so that the hooded figure and her children could attack them.
What was noticeable though, was that the centre of Malcolm Venables’ grave was depressed to a depth of nearly a metre, unlike the other graves beside it. It looked to Jerry as if not enough soil had been shovelled into it when his coffin was buried, or else the ground beneath it had dramatically subsided after his interment and nobody had bothered to fill it in.
He was still standing in front of the grave when a short, middle-aged man in an olive waxed jacket appeared around the corner of the pathway and came strolling straight up to him as if he knew him. The man’s cheeks were reddened and rough, like somebody who spends a lot of his time outdoors, and he had a cast in one eye, so it was difficult to tell if he was looking directly at Jerry or over his left shoulder.
‘Paying your respects?’ he said.
‘I suppose you could call it that.’
‘Not an old friend then?’
‘No.’
The man stood with his hands behind his back, looking around. ‘I must admit that we don’t get an overwhelming number of people in here, paying their respects. Sometimes days will go by, and we don’t even get one.’
‘You work here then?’
‘As part of my supervisory duties, yes. Colin Burroughs, that’s me, if you ever need advice or assistance about parks or cemeteries. Outdoor Recreational Facilities Administrator, that’s my official title. What they used to call a park-keeper.’
‘It’s got a lot of atmosphere, hasn’t it, this cemetery? A hell of a lot of history too, judging by the gravestones. I didn’t even know it existed.’
‘Oh, it goes right back to the days of Nelson. Lately it’s all got rather run-down though, I’m sorry to say. Cuts in the council budget, that’s the problem. What limited funds the council have these days, they’d rather spend on those residents who are still above ground.’
Jerry nodded toward Malcolm Venables’ sunken grave. ‘What happened here then? Had a bit of an earthquake, did you?’
Colin Burroughs let out a sharp bark of laughter that sounded like Tuffnut. ‘No, no! That was your Thames Tideway, that was. They’ve been digging a new overflow tunnel, and it runs right underneath this cemetery. When it’s all done, it’s going to connect the Greenwich Pumping Station with the super sewer under the Thames. We’ve had two or three sinkholes appearing, and this is one of them. Once the tunnelling work’s all completed, we’ll be filling them all in, but it’s not worth doing it yet.’
He pointed over to the trees that overhung the north-west side of the cemetery. Jerry could see that there was a line of orange plastic barriers underneath them, and what looked like a warning sign, although from this distance he couldn’t read what it said.
‘This hole’s nothing though – not compared with the one we’ve got over there. Nearly ten metres deep, that one is. If any coffins had been buried there, they probably would have dropped down into the tunnel that they were digging. That would have given them a shock, wouldn’t it?’
‘But there weren’t any? Coffins, I mean?’
‘No. Nobody’s been buried there since the cemetery first opened, and I don’t think anybody ever will be. There’s a story about that end of the cemetery, that it’s cursed. They say that a witch’s ashes were sprinkled there, after she was burned at the stake.’
‘A witch? When?’
‘I don’t know. It would have been more than a hundred and fifty years ago because that’s as far as the records for this cemetery go back. And it’s only a story. But they’ve always called that the Witch’s Quarter-Acre, and they say that if you’re buried there your soul will never be able to escape from your coffin and go to Heaven.’
‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard that story before.’
‘Ha! No, I’m not surprised! We don’t exactly go spreading it around!’
Colin Burroughs took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Jerry. When Jerry shook his head, he shrugged and lit one, and stood puffing up smoke into the grey afternoon air. Jerry waited for him to tell him something more about the cemetery and its history, but he stayed silent and carried on smoking, one eye looking north and the other eye looking north-east. Perhaps he didn’t know any more than he had already told him.
‘Okay if I take some pictures?’ Jerry asked him.
‘Be my guest, squire. Be my guest.’
Jerry took out his phone and filmed a short video of Malcolm Venables’ headstone and the deep depression in his grave. Then he walked over and took more pictures of the sinkhole in the Witch’s Quarter-Acre. Down at the bottom of the sinkhole, he could see tussocks of grass and lumps of soil, so it didn’t appear as if it had collapsed completely into the drainage tunnel below it.
As he was walking back, Colin Burroughs beckoned him over.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, blowing smoke out through his nostrils. ‘I don’t believe that old story about the witch, not for a single moment. Just an old wives’ tale. But you won’t catch me coming into this cemetery at night. Nor during a thunderstorm neither.’
‘Oh, no?’ said Jerry, with a smile. ‘What are you afraid of?’
‘What are we all afraid of?’ said Colin Burroughs, tapping his forehead with his finger. ‘The spooky things that go on inside here. The human brain. More like a chamber of horrors if you ask me.’
*
Back at the station, Jamila listened in silence while Jerry told her about his visit to Mary Stebbings and to Deptford Park cemetery.
Then she sat back and said, ‘What do you think? It could be a coincidence that William Trench buried his witch-woman’s smoke near Deptford Park, and that there’s a story about a witch’s ashes being scattered there. And it could be another coincidence that this Malcolm Venables should be buried so close nearby.’
‘Two coincidences I could just about believe in,’ said Jerry. ‘But it’s the brown tweed coat that clinched it for me, because that makes it three.’
‘I can understand that, Jerry, but if Malcolm Venables is dead, how could it have been him?’
‘Sarge – how could a woman made of nothing but smoke almost knock me unconscious? How could children with no arms and no legs and no stomachs stay alive in a cesspit, even for five minutes? How could all those forensic officers get chopped into pieces and blown out into the street in a fountain of shit? I mean, Jesus – one old-age pensioner walking around Peckham when he’s been dead since last November, that’s practically normal by comparison.’
‘Well, yes, you’re right. But, I don’t know. The more we find out, the more bizarre this whole investigation seems to become. It’s like some horrible story about demons that my grandmother used to tell me.’
‘It wasn’t only the brown tweed coat. It was the sinkholes. William Trench wrote in his diary, didn’t he, that he and his mates buried the witch-woman’s coffin three times as deep as a normal grave, and piled a whole lot of concrete and stuff on top of it. They did that so it would be almost impossible to dig it up, but that means it would have been a whole lot closer to the tunnel that the Thames Tideway engineers were digging underneath. Supposing the roof of the tunnel collapsed, and the witch-woman’s coffin fell down into the tunnel?’
‘She would still have been locked inside it, with those seventy-two locks. How would she have got out?’
‘You remember what Alan Pattinson said? Nobody could turn those keys except for priests, or people whose hearts had stopped beating and then started up again. Or – the witch’s children, natural or adopted. If any of those kids had already been down in the sewers, they could have opened the locks around her coffin and got her out.’
‘You really think some of those children could have been living down in the sewers before she escaped from her coffin?’
‘I’m only guessing, sarge. But we’ve both seen what kind of power she has. Maybe she was able to keep them alive even when she was still locked up inside it. Who knows?’
Jamila stood up and went to the window. ‘We can’t allow this to continue. We have to do what William Trench did, and hunt her down and lock her away for good. Or better still, destroy her completely, so that she can never come back in any shape or form. But how do we find her, and more to the point, how do we destroy her? She is nothing but smoke.’
‘Didn’t you say that your granny used to know all about ghosts? What were they called?’
‘Churels. They can be made out of smoke too. But Churels are Pakistani spirits. And besides, my grandmother passed away a long time ago.’
‘There’s nobody in your family who might be able to do a spot of exorcism for us?’
‘Perhaps. But I couldn’t ask any of them to risk their lives, and I truly believe they would be risking their lives if they tried to catch her. Whatever she really is, and wherever she gets her strength from, this witch-woman is more malicious than any murderer I have ever had to go after.’
Jamila paused, and then she said, ‘As it is, Jerry, I believe that both you and I are in considerable danger. It seems as if she knows how to find us, wherever we are. We could so easily have been burned to death in your car, and she might try it again at any time. For all we know, she could burn us to death in this room, while we are talking. Or tonight, while we are sleeping in our beds.’
‘Oh, cheers. I’m having enough trouble getting to kip as it is. But if we’re going to catch her, and put her out of action, I reckon we need to do exactly what William Trench says he did, don’t you think? Number one, we need a dog, which won’t be any problem. We could always use Tuffnut, my ex-wife’s Staffie, if she’ll let us. Number two, we need a priest who can do exorcisms. I was reading about it the other day, and apparently, the Vatican still insists that every Catholic diocese has a priest trained in driving out devils.’
‘Even if we can find a priest, we will still have to convince him to help us.’
‘Come on, sarge. You can persuade anybody to do anything. You only had to flutter your eyelashes at DCI Walters and he approved all that overtime.’
‘Jerry,’ said Jamila.
‘All right, sorry. But I don’t think we’ll have too much of a problem getting hold of a priest. We won’t need the yew twigs and the whale oil, because the witch has been cremated already – apart from which, I don’t have a clue where we could find any whale oil. I’ve never seen any in Lidl. But, number three, we’ll need a coffin with seventy-two locks to shut her up in. With any luck, we’ll find that somewhere down in the Greenwich overflow tunnel.’
‘You really think so?’
‘We can but try. I’ll give that Gemma Bright a bell and see what she has to say about it. She’s the expert when it comes to finding things down drains.’
‘And what about this Malcolm Venables? This old man in his brown tweed coat?’
‘It could be that his coffin dropped down into the tunnel as well, and that’s why there’s such a bloody great dent in his grave. If it didn’t, we’ll have to get a court order to have his coffin dug up, if only to make sure that he’s still in it. And I know what you’re going to ask next – what if he isn’t still in it?’
‘Then, for the first time in my life, I shall have to seek an arrest warrant for a man who is dead.’