They called it a night. Jamila caught an Uber back to Redbridge and Jerry drove back to his flat in Tooting.
As he entered the hallway, Rachel’s television was blaring so loudly that he gave her a knock. When she didn’t answer, he opened the door and went into her living room. She was sitting fast asleep in her armchair with her mouth wide open and Pimp My Ride at top volume.
Jerry switched off her television. The living room was warm enough at the moment, but all the same he took the purple crochet throw off the back of the sofa and draped it over her, in case she didn’t wake up until morning.
He looked around. He could vividly recall when the walls had been spattered with Nora’s blood. Now they had been redecorated with mustard-coloured wallpaper.
Upstairs in his flat, he took a can of Tennent’s out of the fridge, plonked himself down in front of his desk and switched on his PC. He was still feeling weird and disorientated after their excursion into Old Billingsgate, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the gruesome way in which Jasper Starke had eviscerated that young woman. He was sure she must have died very shortly afterwards, and he wondered if there would be any way of finding out who she was.
She deserved some small memorial, or at least a mention in the fish market’s history.
He checked his inbox. He had received at least a dozen emails, mostly with minor questions connected with his current cases, as well as a sarcastic message from his mother asking if he was still alive, and a reminder that his car insurance was due for renewal. But then he saw that he had been sent one by Edward Dance, the jeweller. Edward had managed to acquire a sketch pad while he was in hospital, so that he could pencil a very detailed portrait of the woman who had so mysteriously appeared in his shop, and he had attached it.
Her coat was definitely 1940s style, with high padded shoulders. But it was her hairstyle that caught Jerry’s attention the most – those two large rolls. He remembered how Adele had described the woman who had been Scratch’s housekeeper, Veronica – ‘she was tall, with funny rolled-up hair’.
He googled women’s vintage hairstyles, and almost immediately found a style that exactly matched Edward Dance’s drawing. It was a ‘victory roll’ and had been popular between 1940 and 1945 as a way of showing support for the men in uniform during the war.
He sat back. What if the woman who robbed Edward Dance had been Veronica? And what if the man who stabbed him – the Back Stabber – had been another member of Scratch’s gang of murderers?
He made a video call to Jamila. She was in her kitchen, waiting for her microwaved supper to ping. He showed her Edward Dance’s picture and reminded her about Adele’s description of Veronica.
‘Of course, it is too late to disturb young Adele now,’ said Jamila. ‘But we should go back to the Coopers first thing tomorrow and show her that picture. If she is the same woman, then perhaps we can arrange for Ghost to go to the jeweller’s shop and pick up her scent.’
‘But what if it is her, and Ghost tracks her down, and she’s in 1941? Do we go after her, like we did with Jasper Starke? That was the middle of the Blitz, 1941.’
‘Honestly, Jerry, I cannot say. In this investigation, it is useless to make predictions or assumptions. We can only take it one step at a time.’
‘Well, I suppose you’re right, Sarge. But I never thought the time would come when the very sound of the word “time” would give me the shivering willies.’
*
The next morning, at the Coopers’ house, Adele stared at Edward’s portrait for more than a quarter of a minute, biting her lower lip. Jamila couldn’t work out if she wasn’t sure that she recognised this woman, or if she did recognise her, and was too distressed by the sight of her to speak.
‘Well?’ she asked gently. ‘Is it anything like that Veronica woman who took you in?’
Adele looked back at her mother, who was standing close behind her, and then nodded. ‘It is her. That’s exactly what she looks like. Exactly.’
‘That is a great help to us, thank you,’ said Jamila.
‘Will it make it any easier for you to find Archie?’ asked her mother.
‘We sincerely hope so, Mrs Cooper. We are beginning to believe that many of these investigations are connected to each other. We are also beginning to believe that we know who might be behind all of them, and that this same individual is keeping Archie. He may be holding him as a hostage, but he may also be expecting him to carry on stealing for him. He is a kind of a Fagin.’
‘This Scratch person, do you mean? Adele told us all about him.’
‘Yes. That is the individual we are talking about. And this Veronica woman keeps house for him, as I expect Adele mentioned to you.’
‘There’s something I forgot to tell you about Veronica,’ said Adele. ‘I don’t know if it’s any use, but she told us that her second name was Crawford – Veronica Crawford.’
‘Really? That could be very useful indeed.’
‘But she also said that she got on people’s nerves, because she was always nagging them, and so everybody called her Veronica Vex.’
‘Veronica Vex? All right. We will look into that. Is there anything else you remember, which you may not have told us before?’
‘Only her scent. I don’t know what it was, but I’ll never forget what it smelled like. It was like too many roses, mixed with sick.’
*
Jamila and Jerry went to the canteen at Lavender Hill for tea and coffee and a late breakfast. Jamila had vegan puff pastry slices with maple syrup and tomato while Jerry opted for scrambled eggs on toast.
‘Scrambled?’ said Jerry, poking at them with his fork. ‘More like beaten into submission.’
‘We can start by trying to find any mention of this Veronica Crawford, or Veronica Vex. If she irritated so many people, perhaps someone has mentioned her somewhere.’
‘Well, we’ll know if we find her, if she smells like roses and sick. That probably means she’s been time-travelling too.’
‘What we did, Jerry, that was not really time-travelling. We were simply stepping into a parallel world that is always there. Ghost is aware of that, because he was raised by a medium, and that is all that mediums do. They do not summon dead people from heaven, or some kind of afterlife. They call them from the parallel world in which they are still living.’
‘You’re giving me the creeps, you are. What you’re saying is that my grandpa’s still alive, for instance? He was the grumpiest old bastard who ever contaminated a room with pipe smoke, I can tell you. You reckon he’s still there somewhere, puffing away and being racist?’
Jamila looked up from her eggs and Jerry saw a glint in her eyes that he had never seen before. ‘You like an occasional cigarette,’ she said. ‘But at least you do not call me a Paki.’
They finished their breakfast and went back up to their office. Edge was already there, waiting for them. He had some new information about the brutal murder of Mrs Lilian Ferris, Sabina’s mother.
‘That detached head that young Sabina was talking to, up in her attic – we went through the council records and we’re pretty sure we’ve sussed out who it was. When that was a block of flats, number 12 was occupied by a disabled war casualty, name of Terence Wakefield.’
‘He told her he’d been wounded at Dunkirk, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. The MoD helped us to locate Terence Wakefield’s military records and he was wounded at Dunkirk.’
Edge held up his phone and read from the information that had been sent from the Ministry of Defence.
‘He was in the Third Infantry Division, which was part of the British Expeditionary Force. He received severe injuries to his spine when the Germans were shelling the beach. After he’d been evacuated back to England, he was treated at Netley military hospital near Southampton, and he was there for several months. He never recovered the ability to walk and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.’
‘Yes. Sabina told us that, didn’t she?’
‘There’s more though. He might have been stuck in a wheelchair, but we’ve discovered that he was arrested in 1944 for attacking a woman by Clapham Common late one night and attempting to steal her handbag. According to the arrest details, she refused to give him her bag and he almost cut her hand off with a lino knife.’
‘So now we know who we’re looking for as a possible suspect,’ said Jerry. ‘Terence Wakefield, in a wheelchair. The trouble is, that block of flats was bombed during the war and doesn’t exist any more, so we won’t find him there. Not unless—’
Jamila flapped her hand. ‘No, Jerry – I do not believe that there is any future in recruiting Ghost to track him down. It would only end up something like that nightmare at Billingsgate.’
‘What did happen at Billingsgate?’ Edge asked her.
‘We have to brief DCI Chance first,’ said Jamila. ‘Let me just say that it was a very strange encounter, and so far as this investigation is concerned, it got us precisely nowhere.’
Edge looked across at Jerry as if he expected him to elaborate, but Jerry shook his head. He and Jamila needed to come to terms with what had taken place in the fish market before they could explain it with any authority to anyone else. In a small corner at the back of his mind, Jerry was still wondering if he and Jamila and Charlie had somehow been sharing the same hallucination, or dreaming the same extraordinary dream.
He remembered once when he was very drunk being utterly convinced that he had arrested a father who had set fire to his daughter for marrying the wrong man, only to wake up and find himself lying on his kitchen floor, fully dressed. In reality, the father had flown off to Bangladesh, never to be seen again.
His old chief inspector back at Tooting had warned him that there were times when his job would seem unreal. He had been right – and that was before Jerry had been teamed up with Jamila to investigate cases that seemed to have elements of the supernatural.
*
It was Jamila who found the key that would eventually unlock the secret of number 9 St Oswald’s Place.
She had been sitting in front of her computer for nearly two hours, tapping at the keyboard and frowning. She was wearing glasses, which Jerry had never seen her wearing before, and he thought they made her look unexpectedly vulnerable. She was usually so self-assured that he found that vulnerability even more attractive. He could imagine taking her to the opticians and waiting for her while she had an eye test, or helping her to look for her mislaid glasses.
While Jamila was searching for any mention of Veronica Crawford, or Veronica Vex, Jerry was scrolling through hundreds of mug shots in the Metropolitan Police archive. The faces of the two men who had confronted him in the corridor were still fresh in his mind, and since there was a chance that they might have been arrested at some time in the past, he was trying to see if he could identify them.
It was a depressing chore, enough to make anyone lose their faith in human nature. Almost all the offenders in the mug shots looked brutal, and ugly, and stupid, as if they had been hit on the head by half a brick.
He was still scrolling when Jamila took off her glasses and said, ‘I have found her! You are not going to believe this!’
‘You’re kidding me. Really?’
Jerry stood up and went over to Jamila’s desk. On her computer screen he saw a portrait of a pompous-looking man in a tailcoat and striped trousers, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. He wore rimless spectacles and his moustache was curled up at the ends, and he appeared to be well pleased with himself.
‘This is extraordinary,’ said Jamila. ‘It is unbelievable how some incidents in history are totally forgotten, like Charles Dickens going to meet Scratch. I suppose it is because they are hard to believe, and they do not fit in with the popular idea of what actually happened.’
‘So who’s this gent?’ Jerry asked her. ‘He looks as if he’s lost a quid and found a monkey, or else he’s just had a bit of hanky-panky with his kitchen maid.’
‘His name is Sir Frederick Treves. He was an eminent surgeon. He was famous for two things. He saved the life of King Edward VII two days before his coronation by draining his infected appendix. And he became close friends with Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. He studied the Elephant Man and wrote a book about him and when he died he dissected him and took samples of his skin and his flesh.’
‘I saw that film about the Elephant Man. Poor bloke. He was lumpy all over, wasn’t he? Personally, I think he looked less like an elephant and more like ten kilos of boiled cauliflower. But what’s this got to do with Veronica Vex?’
‘It says here that Sir Frederick Treves first saw the Elephant Man being exhibited in a shop in the East End of London in the year 1884. He visited him regularly and two years later he had him admitted to the London Hospital, to be taken care of there. And – look – here is an excerpt from Sir Frederick’s diaries. The Elephant Man’s name was Joseph but for some reason he always called him John.’
Jamila enlarged the text so that Jerry could read it more easily.
‘“When I arrived at the hospital last Wednesday morning, February 11th, I was approached by a woman who claimed to have information which I would find of considerable interest. She said that she was aware that John Merrick had now been admitted and that I was treating him. What was not generally known, she said, was that John Merrick was one of twins. After their mother had passed away when they were eleven years old, John was sent to live with his uncle Charles Merrick but his uncle refused to accept his twin brother, Matthew because, unlike John, who has the gentlest of dispositions, Matthew was uncontrollably aggressive and ill-behaved.”
‘The Elephant Man had a twin brother?’ said Jerry, shaking his head. ‘Who in the world knew that?’
‘Just read on,’ Jamila told him.
‘“This woman said that her name was Veronica Crawford, and that her parents Mr and Mrs Crawford had been friends of the Merricks and had agreed to care for Matthew. At first Matthew showed no sign of deformity apart from his feet, but by the age of thirteen his deformity had rapidly grown more extreme, and by his sixteenth birthday his appearance was as monstrous as his brother John, if not more so.
‘“She said further that at Christmas 1879, both her parents and her sister had perished in a fire in their house in Leicester. Consequently, she and Matthew had travelled down to London in order for the two of them to make a living by Matthew exhibiting himself, in the same way that John had done. He would call himself the Rhinoceros Man, in order to profit from his brother’s fame. They became acquainted with a fellow called Breeze who was both a showman and a magician, and Breeze had said that he could not only exhibit Matthew but teach him magic tricks.
‘“Unfortunately, Miss Crawford claimed, Matthew’s deformity had also made him increasingly sensitive to London’s smoke and fog, and to sunlight. He had eventually been forced to retreat into a darkened cellar, so she said, and so now he was unable to exhibit himself, and therefore earn sufficient money for himself and Miss Crawford to live on.
‘“If I were to give her five pounds, she said, she would take me to see him, and perhaps I could arrange for him to be installed at the London Hospital beside John. Of course I realised her request to be a deception and a fraud. John has never mentioned to me the existence of a twin brother, although he is aware that after his mother’s demise his father remarried and had two more children.
‘“I told Miss Crawford flatly that I did not believe her and that I was not prepared to listen to any more of her fraudulent concoctions. However, she reappeared at the hospital the following day, and the day after that, insisting that her story is true and repeating her appeal for money. She came again this morning and she has become so irritating that I have christened her Veronica Vex.”
‘So Sir Frederick didn’t believe her,’ said Jerry. ‘But we know she was telling the truth. Or mostly the truth, anyhow. So that’s who Scratch could be – Matthew Merrick. I wonder what would have happened if Sir Frederick had agreed to take him into the hospital, along with his brother?’
‘Who can say? But he cannot make money by showing himself off, like his brother used to, and that is almost certainly why he has formed a gang, and why he sends children out stealing.’
‘But what about this time-travelling thing, or this parallel world thing, whatever it is? How does he do that?’
‘That is what we will have to find out, Jerry. At least we know now who we are looking for, and that will help us to track him down, whatever world he is living in. It says here that Joseph Merrick’s skeleton is still preserved at St Bart’s medical school, although it is not on public display, and that his soft tissue was buried in the City of London Cemetery.
‘Matthew Merrick’s DNA will closely match that of his long-dead twin. What we need to do now is to arrange for Ghost to pick up his scent.’