DCI Walters came in, looking more like a bird of prey than usual. He had cut himself shaving and had stuck a pink plaster to the side of his chin, but it had come loose and waggled when he spoke.
‘We’ve got ourselves a bit of a problem,’ he announced.
‘A bit of a problem?’ said Jerry. ‘That’s the understatement of the century.’
‘The problem I’m talking about, Pardoe, is that the media have got on to this. Somebody at St George’s Hospital has tipped them off that the forensic officers who were fatally injured in the sewer in Peckham didn’t die by accident. The pathologist has found that they weren’t dismembered by water pressure or any kind of gas explosion. They were deliberately cut apart by what must have been some kind of a saw.’
‘Even we haven’t been told that yet,’ said Jamila.
‘I’ve already been on to the pathologist about it. He apologised for the leak and said that he’ll be sending us his full report later this afternoon. He doesn’t know who leaked it, but he has a fair idea, and he’s going to look into it. He said that when he finds out who was responsible, heads are going to roll.’
‘That’s an appropriate way of putting it, under the circumstances,’ said Jerry.
‘That’s not all,’ said DCI Walters. ‘Somebody at Evelina’s Children’s Hospital has spilled the beans about the children you rescued. The media don’t have the full details, but they know that there’s a number of sick children being kept in isolation and that they’ve all been put into an induced coma. A reporter from the Daily Telegraph asked me why it was necessary to have armed officers preventing people from going up to the sixth floor and why a police dog was guarding the ward.’
‘What did you tell them?’ asked Jamila.
‘As far as the forensic officers were concerned, I said that we were still waiting for a full post-mortem report and until then I couldn’t comment. As far as the children were concerned, I said that they were suffering from a serious illness that medical experts had not yet been able to identify, but we were keeping them isolated to prevent the possibility of it spreading any further.’
‘And how did the press react to that?’
‘They were very persistent, I’ll give them that. They kept asking what kind of a serious illness, and where had it come from, was it like Ebola or something like that, but they got no more details out of me. The last thing we want is a public panic.’
‘We were coming up to see you anyway, sir,’ Jamila put in. ‘DC Pardoe has turned up some information that may help us to make some real progress with this investigation.’
‘I can’t guarantee it,’ said Jerry. ‘But, you know – you never know.’
He told DCI Walters about the cemetery and the Witch’s Quarter-Acre. DCI Walters sat and listened like a man who doesn’t want to believe anything that he is being told but knows he has no alternative, because nothing else that he has yet heard makes any sense.
‘We’re planning to go down into the tunnel and see if we can find that coffin,’ Jamila told him. ‘If we can do that, we might at least have some way of holding our offender, always supposing that we can catch her.’
DCI Walters looked at her for a long time before he answered. Offender, he repeated at last. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a puff of smoke called an offender. Every day that passes, the happier I am that you’re the front-line investigators in this case, and not me.’
*
Jamila called Gemma at Crane’s Drains. Gemma agreed to get in touch with the engineering contractors who were digging the overflow tunnel between Greenwich and Chambers Wharf.
‘I’m sure they’ll let us go down and take a look,’ Gemma told her. ‘It’s possible that the coffin could have dropped down into the excavation. They’re digging the tunnel with this massive boring machine called Annie that’s about as wide as two London buses. It creeps along about four metres an hour, and the engineers line the tunnel behind it with these precast concrete panels. Maybe the coffin fell through before they’d had the chance to do that. Something similar happened when they were digging the Channel Tunnel and water started to pour through the ceiling.’
‘Well, we have to check anyway,’ Jamila told her. ‘If you can get a team together sometime later today, that would be great.’
‘No problem. They’re working on that tunnel twenty-four hours a day, and I know the engineer in charge, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty in us getting access.’
Almost as soon as she had put down her phone, it warbled again. It was PC Dyer, calling from the children’s hospital.
‘PC Dyer. Is everything okay?’
‘You need to get here right away, sergeant. There’s something very weird happening.’
‘What do you mean by “very weird”? Are the children still in a coma?’
‘Yes. But it’s like we’re seeing things. I don’t like to say ghosts.’
‘When you say you’re seeing things, is that all of you, or just you?’
‘All of us. The doctors and the nurses too.’
‘Very well. We’ll be right with you.’
Jerry had been prodding at his phone and catching up with his WhatsApp messages. He looked up and said, ‘Don’t tell me. It’s something else bloody scary.’
‘PC Dyer says they’re seeing ghosts.’
Jerry dropped his head forward in resignation. ‘This is never going to end, is it? We’re going to be fighting this bleeding witch until we’re drawing our pensions.’
He shrugged on his raincoat and the two of them clattered downstairs to the car park. As he started the Datsun’s engine, Jerry said, ‘Just one thing, sarge. If you see that old fellow in the brown tweed coat… or even somebody who looks like him… shout out. I don’t fancy getting barbecued a second time.’
He drove at high speed to the children’s hospital, with the Datsun’s blue light flashing, and one or two quick bursts on the siren. When they arrived, they found that the two armed officers guarding the lifts were both looking confused and edgy.
‘Don’t exactly know what’s going on up there, sarge, but they’ve warned us to watch out for any intruders.’
‘Yes, you need to,’ said Jamila. ‘Keep your eyes open in particular for an old man in a brown coat. He looks quite harmless, but his appearance is deceptive. Quite apart from him though, do not let anybody up to any of the floors unless they are a member of staff and have ID. And I mean nobody. No visitors, not until we give you the all-clear.’
‘Okay, got you.’
Jerry and Jamila said nothing to each other as they went up in the lift. They didn’t even look at each other. On the sixth floor, as before, they found the paediatricians and the nurses and the police officers milling around in the corridor, all of them looking as rattled as the two armed officers down in reception. PC Maitland was still there, with Blizzard, and even Blizzard appeared to be nervous, clawing impatiently at the floor and repeatedly lifting up his hindquarters, even though he had been ordered to sit.
Jamila and Jerry went up to PC Dyer, who was standing by the doors of Peaceful Ward, peering in through the windows. She had that strained expression on her face that Jerry had seen before on young constables when they encountered a bizarre and frightening situation for which they hadn’t been prepared at Hendon training college.
‘There,’ she said. ‘If they’re not ghosts, what are they?’
Jamila and Jerry looked into the ward. The children were still lying on their beds, each of them deeply asleep and covered in a light blue hospital blanket. Yet sitting up on every bed, there was another figure, adult-sized, but physically afflicted in exactly the same way – a grown-up version of the comatose child lying beneath it. These figures were little more than watery outlines, and Jerry could see right through them, but they were distinct enough for him to be able to make out their faces and their various malformations.
Several of them were moving, turning their heads and lifting their arms as if they were swimming, and at least three of them were opening and closing their mouths, although Jerry couldn’t hear anything.
‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ said Jamila, her voice hushed with awe. ‘It’s the children, only grown up.’
Dr Latimer came up behind them. ‘As soon as they appeared, I told all the nursing staff to clear the ward. I have no idea if they’re dangerous or not. I’ve never seen anything like them. But after that last outburst of violence, I didn’t want to take any chances.’
Jamila bit her lip thoughtfully, and then she said, ‘Let’s go in. I’d like to see how they react to us, if at all. It could be that they’re nothing more than holograms. Maybe somebody has found a way of projecting images remotely. If so, it’s possible that we could trace where they’re being sent from.’
Dr Latimer looked dubious. ‘How would anybody else know what their deformities are? We’ve kept a total security blackout ever since the children were first brought here.’
‘Nothing in this investigation is logical, doctor,’ said Jamila. ‘We’ve stopped trying to discount any lines of inquiry simply because they don’t make sense.’
Jerry pushed open the doors and they stepped inside. The first thing he noticed was how chilly it was. It was like walking into the freezer at the back of the butcher’s shop where he had worked on Saturdays when he was at school. The windows were white with frost, although the sun was still shining through them, and their breath smoked.
Jamila and Jerry approached the first bed cautiously, with Dr Latimer close behind them. They could see the flattened head of the boy who was lying under the blanket, and the phantom figure that was sitting up on top of him had a flattened head too. Its eyes were opaque, and its mouth was dragged down at the sides, although it kept opening and closing its jaw as if it were chewing a lump of gristle.
Jerry went up close to the figure. It slowly turned its head and stared back at him, its jaw still opening and closing.
‘Who are you?’ Jerry asked it, although he knew that it was probably futile trying to talk to it if it was nothing but a hologram.
The figure kept on staring at him and chewing, and then suddenly, it flung up both of its arms and screamed at him – a scream that sounded like the blade of a knife being dragged along a railway line. Jerry stumbled back, but the figure kept on screaming, and then all of the other phantom figures in the ward began to scream too. The noise was so piercing that he couldn’t hear himself think.
Both Jamila and Dr Latimer had their hands pressed to their ears, and Jamila shouted, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here before we go deaf!’
The three of them pushed their way back out into the corridor. As the doors swung shut behind them, the screaming sank down to a quivering whistle and then died out altogether. PC Dyer and Andrew Tanner and the ward sister came hurrying up to them, and Andrew Tanner said, ‘My God, Ted! What are those things?’
‘I couldn’t even begin to tell you,’ said Dr Latimer. He was visibly shaken. ‘Maybe they’re some kind of optical illusion, but I can’t imagine what makes them scream like that.’
Jerry looked back through one of the windows. The phantom figures were still sitting on the beds, although now their heads were bowed as if they were meditating, or praying, or beginning to fall asleep.
‘What do you think, sarge?’
‘I think we should wait and see. Maybe they will fade away of their own accord. If they stay for much longer, I might call for the drone unit to see if they can jam the signal. That’s if they are being created by a signal.’
The ward sister said, ‘In the meantime, I think my nurses here can all take a break. They’ve had quite enough stress for one morning. We have to deal with some heart-rending cases here, believe me, but we’ve never had to cope with anything like this.’
They were still talking when Blizzard abruptly barked, and then growled, and then scrabbled his claws on the floor. His handler said, ‘Sit, Blizzard! I said, sit!’
Jerry turned around and couldn’t stop himself giving a shiver. Standing in the corridor less than ten metres away was the white-haired old man in the brown tweed coat. The old man lifted one hand and smiled, and then he called out, ‘There you are! I guessed you’d be in ’ere somewhere!’ His voice was oddly muffled, like somebody with a scarf wrapped over his mouth.
‘Right, you!’ Jerry snapped at him, and started to stride toward him. ‘You’re nicked, you are, sunshine!’
He had taken only three or four steps when – close behind the old man – a dark cloud of smoke began to fill the corridor. Blizzard barked even more hysterically and bounced up and down, and Jerry slowed down and then stopped.
The smoke rolled around and around and rapidly took on the shape of the hooded woman, her arms outstretched so wide that they reached both sides of the corridor. The peak of her hood almost touched the ceiling.
‘What in the effing eff is that?’ said PC Maitland. He was straining so hard to keep Blizzard in check that he was leaning backward and digging in his heels. ‘And where did that old bloke come from? We’re not supposed to be letting anybody up here, are we?’
Before Jerry or Jamila could answer, PC Dyer spoke in the harsh, unmistakeable tones of the witch-woman. Jerry looked around at her, and he could see how shocked she was that she was speaking at all, and even more by the words that were coming out of her mouth.
‘I have come to take my nestlings home.’
‘Not a chance,’ Jamila retorted, although Jerry could hear how stressed she was.
‘Do not try to defy me! I have shown you how they will grow and what they will become! Now you must leave them alone and let them lead their own sacred lives, not the lives that you think you can impose on them.’
Jamila stepped forward, her arms by her sides, both fists clenched. ‘You are not taking them. You have destroyed enough lives already. We are going to take care of them for as long as they live, which will not be long. But we are not going to let them go back to live in a sewer.’
‘The sewer is their home. It was the fat in the sewer that fed them before they set me free. You call that fat, waste. For my nestlings, it is nourishment. Now, stand aside and I will take them back where they belong.’
‘Oh, yes, and how do you propose to do that?’ Jerry challenged her. ‘There’s twenty-two of them in there.’
‘They are mine! They are my nestlings! Without me, they never could have lived any life at all!’
‘You should let ’er ’ave ’em!’ shouted the old man in the brown tweed coat, although he still sounded muffled. ‘They ain’t yours, them kids! You ain’t got no right!’
The hooded figure kept on rolling and swirling as if she were agitated, but she didn’t approach any closer. Jerry laid his hand on PC Maitland’s shoulder and said, ‘Go on. Give them a bit of Blizzard.’
PC Maitland bent down and unclipped Blizzard’s collar, and Blizzard shot off along the corridor like a bullet fired from a gun. He went for the old man in the brown tweed coat first, leaping on top of him and knocking him sideways onto the floor. The hooded figure did nothing to defend the old man, but shrank further back, her clouds of smoke becoming more and more turbulent. Jerry could see that he had been right, and that she was afraid of dogs, especially ferocious dogs like Tuffnut and Blizzard.
The old man flapped one arm, trying to beat Blizzard off him, but Blizzard growled and gripped his sleeve between his teeth, shaking his head violently from side to side. The tweed was so fragile that Blizzard ripped it into shreds, and when he tossed his head back, he wrenched the old man’s arm completely out of its socket.
This excited Blizzard so much that he went berserk. He snarled and tore at the old man’s throat, pulling out strings of dried flesh and tendons. But there was no blood. Jerry could see that the old man was desiccated, almost mummified. Blizzard bit with a crunch right through his spinal cord, and the old man’s head rolled off and tumbled across the floor, ending up with his face against a radiator.
Now Blizzard turned his attention to the hooded witch-woman, his tail erect and his hind legs trembling as if he were sexually aroused. The witch-woman was gradually retreating down the corridor, waving her smoky sleeves slowly from side to side as if that might keep Blizzard from coming any closer.
‘You will regret this,’ said PC Dyer, coming forward and standing so close to Jerry and Jamila that she was almost touching them. ‘You will be punished for it, I swear in the name of original sin. You think you can take my nestlings away from me? Nobody can take my nestlings away from me. If I cannot have them, nobody can have them. Nobody!’
Her sleeves waved more wildly, making a soft rumbling sound, as if they were being blown by a hurricane. Even Blizzard took two or three steps back. PC Dyer screamed out something that sounded like ‘Amulet!’ and then there was a devastating bang from Peaceful Ward, so loud that Jerry thought his eardrums had burst. The doors were ripped off their hinges and crashed into the paediatricians and nurses and police officers gathered outside, knocking several of them up against the opposite wall and some of them onto the floor.
Out of the ward roared a huge billow of green fire, searingly hot. The flames filled the corridor, scorching everybody in it and devouring all the oxygen like some ravenous dragon. Jerry grabbed Jamila’s arm and pulled her away, and between them, they stumbled toward the lifts. They were only halfway there, when the flames shrank back into the ward, although they were still burning fiercely inside.
Jerry looked further down the corridor. Blizzard had stopped chasing the witch-woman for a moment, distracted by the flames bursting out, but now he was after her again, furiously barking. The witch-woman was backing away, still waving her sleeves. She passed the lifts and retreated as far as the stairwell, and then she collapsed and folded up and dropped down onto the floor. Her smoke poured away between the banisters and vanished. Blizzard reached the top of the stairs and stood there baffled, his ears erect and his fur bristling, unable to understand how the witch-woman could have simply slid away out of his sight.
Jerry and Jamila turned back toward the ward. The paediatricians and the nurses and the police officers were climbing back onto their feet, their faces reddened and their hair singed and their clothes still smoking. Inside the ward, every one of the twenty-two beds was on fire, consumed by raging green flames that twisted and danced and leaped up almost as high as the ceiling. The witch-woman’s nestlings were being cremated alive.
The ward sister, her cap askew, had already called for the fire brigade. PC Maitland came hurrying toward them, lugging a fire extinguisher that he had found at the opposite end of the corridor. He pulled the pin and aimed it at the flames, but the heat was so intense that there was little he could do except spray dry powder into the middle of the open doorway.
Until the firefighters arrived, all they could do was stand and watch the beds blaze. There was no sign of the phantom figures, and they saw no movement from the children. There was no more screaming either. The only sounds were the crackling of fire and a strange mournful twanging as the fabric of each of the mattresses was burned away and their springs uncoiled.
Nobody spoke – not even to share their feeling that these children should never have survived anyway, and that it was a tragic blessing that their lives should have ended, although not like this.
Abruptly, and belatedly, the sprinklers in the ceiling started to rain down water all along the ward. They continued gushing until the green flames dipped and guttered and dwindled, and one after another, all the fires were put out. The twenty-two beds were left blackened and sodden and smoking, like two rows of funeral biers.
Five firefighters arrived with a noisy bustle of waterproof fire kit, although there was no more fire for them to extinguish. While they were making sure that there was no chance of any of the smouldering mattresses bursting into flame again, Jerry and Jamila walked slowly down the middle of the ward. There was little left on each of the beds except for springs and ashes and ribcages and other assorted bones. The smoke was as thick as a winter fog.
‘That witch-woman,’ said Jamila, shaking her head, ‘she is just like those terrorists who would rather kill their own children than let the infidels have them.’
They went back out into the corridor. Jerry nodded toward the body of the old man in the brown tweed coat, his head still lying next to the radiator.
‘I bet that was him, that Malcolm Venables. I mean, the way Blizzard could just pull him apart like that. I reckon that witch brought him back to life, like a zombie. I’ll have Lambeth test him for DNA, anyhow.’
Jamila wiped her eyes. ‘It is urgent that we find her now, before she can cause any more death and damage. Those poor children. They should never have been alive, but she was right in a way. Since they were alive, their lives were sacred.’
Jerry shrugged. ‘I think we’ve got her on the run though. All we’ve got to do now is find her – and, like you say, sarge, have some way of neutralising her once we have.’
‘“Neutralising”, that’s a very non-committal way of putting it.’
‘Well, yes. But you can’t arrest smoke, can you? You can’t put handcuffs on it, and you can’t Taser it, and you can’t shoot it.’
PC Maitland came up to them, his face smudged with soot. ‘Poor old Blizzard. He’s still sniffing around, wondering where that smoky woman went. But I thought you’d like to know that we can probably track her down, when you’re ready.’
He held up a white hospital hand towel with a black smear on it.
‘Her smoke left a residue on the walls. It has quite a strong smell to it too. If ever she turns up again, it won’t matter where, Blizzard and some of our other dogs will be able to track her down. I’ll tell you something about Blizzard. If somebody’s frying sausages five miles away, he can smell it, and it’s all I can do to stop him from tearing off trying to find them.’
He passed the hand towel to Jamila, and Jamila sniffed it. Then she gave it to Jerry.
‘Woodsmoke and lemons,’ he said. ‘That’s her all right. Now we need to find her coffin, and a priest, and we’ll have everything we need to get her banged up.’