What Hides in the Cellar, page 5
‘Yes, but come on. You know how often witnesses think they’ve seen something completely different from what was actually there, or how often they make something up because they think that’s what we want to hear. A geezer with no head and a geezer with no feet and only half a geezer. Do me a favour.’
It was half past eleven, and DCI Chance had convened a meeting in his office between Simon Fairbrother and Audrey Morrison and Jerry and Edge, and only a few minutes after they had started, Jamila had arrived. She looked unusually flustered, and her collapsible umbrella had been blown inside out, so that it was hanging from her arm like a wet dead crow.
‘Honestly, the weather today! And those disgusting Tube trains! I’m going to drive next time, forget about the traffic! At least I won’t be sitting next to some filthy builder eating a McDonald’s!’
‘Good to see you, DS Patel,’ said Herbert Chance, standing up. ‘We’ve only just started. Do you want to take a seat next to DC Pardoe? Seeing that the point of this meeting is to bring you two together. The Ghost Busters, as I think they call you.’
‘I would prefer it if you didn’t,’ Jamila told him, as she shook out her raincoat and hung it up. ‘We have investigated some unusual cases, yes, but there is no such thing as ghosts.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Edge. ‘That skinny old bloke that cleans the toilets – Henry – he came out of a cubicle last night holding up his mop and he practically scared the number two out of me. If he’s not a ghost, he’s the nearest thing to it.’
Herbert Chance testily cleared his throat. ‘Let’s consider these investigations seriously, shall we? We have two homicides and one grievous assault that led to the victim losing his sight. In each case, a witness claimed that the suspect who may have been responsible for the offence was missing a part of their person. Simon, do you want to tell us what your witness saw?’
Simon Fairbrother reminded Jerry of his old geography teacher, who had always buried his chin in his neck and spoken in a low, relentless drone that you had to strain to hear. He turned over his notes and said, ‘The witness in this case was Mrs Gemma Treagus. She was upstairs when she heard her husband being shot in the hallway of their house in Bolingbroke Grove. She came downstairs to see her husband’s assailant pulling his body out through the front door. She was adamant that his assailant appeared to have no feet.’
‘Perhaps his trousers were too long and they were simply covering his shoes,’ Jamila suggested.
‘No. Not as far as she could tell. And his legs appeared disproportionately short for his body, with the distance from his hips to his knees being noticeably longer than the distance from his knees to the floor.’
‘I see,’ said Jamila, and jotted that down.
Jerry then recounted Shantelle’s evidence about the man who had been seen with Kathleen Hartley outside her parents’ house in Bennerley Road – the man with no head.
‘We did take her evidence with a pinch of salt, though, because she wasn’t entirely sober. In fact, she was pissed as a handcart. But she swore on her life that the bloke had no bonce.’
‘And Audrey? Tell DS Patel how your victim described the man who poked out his eyes.’
Audrey Morrison held up both hands. ‘Poor Yusuf. It’s really hard to say if what he saw was real. Perhaps it was some sort of optical illusion, or it could be that his recollection of the man who attacked him was somehow distorted, because he was blinded. I once had a rape victim who was convinced that the man who violated her had only one arm and only one leg, because he had pushed her so hard sideways up against a wardrobe. Of course she was in total shock.’
‘But this Yusuf?’ asked Jamila. ‘He saw only half a man?’
‘That’s right. Only his left half. Almost as if his right half was hidden behind a full-length mirror, or a wall.’
Herbert Chance said, ‘What is causing us such concern is that all three of these incidents occurred within twenty-four hours, and within less than half a mile of each other. I agree that all three assaults were totally different. A shooting, an extremely sadistic homicide, and a blinding. Yet they all have this one common denominator. For some unaccountable reason, part of each perpetrator’s body was invisible.’
Jamila said, ‘It may be worthwhile our talking again to the witnesses, just Jerry Pardoe and me. I have already told Jerry that in Pakistan we have stories about jinns – spirits who live in a world that is parallel to ours. Sometimes they can be seen. Sometimes they can’t be seen at all. On other occasions you might see only part of them – their face, or their arm, or their body from the waist up.’
‘But you don’t think that anything like that is happening here?’
‘They’re just legends, aren’t they?’ put in Edge. ‘You know, like fairy stories.’
‘I always keep an open mind,’ Jamila told him. ‘What is imaginary to one person can be real to another. Some people believe in God. Others dismiss Him as a fairy story.’
‘Well, then,’ said Herbert Chance. ‘If you think you might get more sense out of our three witnesses, by all means go ahead and arrange some more interviews. In the case of Mrs Treagus, you might have to contact her solicitor first.’
‘Very well. If you can give me their contact details.’
It was then that there was a quick, staccato knock at the door, and the duty sergeant opened it up before Herbert Chance could tell him to come in.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but we’ve had an emergency call from the principal at Brookwood School. Apparently, one of their teachers went missing but now they’ve found her body on the school playing fields. The principal told me that she’s been seriously injured and her body’s been burned.’
Herbert Chance stood up. ‘Right, then. We’ll get somebody out there right away. Simon, do you want to take this one over? You can take DS Lang and DC Williams with you. The magistrates postponed that arson hearing so I believe they’re both free at the moment. And we’ll need to alert forensics.’
‘She said something else, the principal,’ the duty sergeant told him. ‘But to be honest with you, it didn’t make a lot of sense.’
‘I’m not surprised. She was probably in a panic. What was it?’
‘She said that before she went missing, this teacher had been looking for legs on the ceiling.’
‘She was looking for what?’
‘I know. I asked her to repeat it, but she said the same thing again. The children in her class said they’d been frightened by legs on the ceiling and so she’d gone back to the classroom to find out what they meant. That was the last they saw of her before they found her body.’
Herbert Chance frowned, and then he turned to Jamila. ‘I could be barking up the wrong tree altogether, DS Patel, but this sounds as if it might possibly have some connection to what we’ve been discussing here this morning. Perhaps you and DC Pardoe can go along with Simon and interview the witnesses. I mean – missing feet and missing heads and half a body and now we’ve got legs on the ceiling?’
He shook his head and made a blurting sound with his lips. ‘Jesus.’
*
Jamila and Jerry stood well back by the goalposts as the five-strong forensic team waddled around Mary’s body in their noisy white Tyvek suits, like a solemn gathering of snowmen.
The investigators took hundreds of pictures, as well as samples from the grass all around her. Then they put up a blue vinyl tent – not only to shield her body from the rain, which was starting to fall more heavily again, but also to hide her from the long-distance lenses of the news photographers who were clustered behind the school gates.
Derek Grant lifted the flap of the tent and came over to where Jamila and Jerry were standing. Simon Fairbrother had gone back inside the school with DS Lang and DC Williams so that they could interview Sheila Daventry and other members of staff. Jamila and Jerry were also anxious to talk to the children of Year Two about the ‘legs’, but first they would need their parents’ permission. They would also have to wait for the arrival of a child psychologist from the Schools and Community Psychology Service.
‘Very, very nasty one, this,’ said the Martian, pulling down his face mask. ‘It looks as if she was run over by some kind of vehicle, although I’m not so sure it was a train. And then of course she was doused in some inflammable liquid and set alight.’
‘If it wasn’t a train, what was it?’ asked Jerry.
‘I can’t say yet. Not for certain. We’ll have to do some gauge comparisons and analyse the impressions that the wheels have made in her body, but I’d estimate that it weighed several tons, whatever it was.’
‘But it didn’t happen here, on this playing field,’ said Jamila. ‘There are no wheel marks anywhere. She must have been run over somewhere else and then brought here.’
‘That’s correct. But where she was taken and what exactly it was that ran her over, it’s too early to tell. There’s a railway line on the other side of Wandsworth Common, but I can’t believe that her assailant threw her in front of a train and then carried her body back here without somebody noticing. Not least the train driver.’
‘In any case, how would they have got access to the track?’ said Jerry. ‘And there’s the time frame too. The head teacher said that she was missing for not much more than half an hour.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t a vehicle at all,’ Jamila suggested. ‘Perhaps it was some kind of machinery. You know, like a printing press or a bottling machine. I remember my friend’s father was killed in a soft drink factory in Karachi. He was cleaning up broken glass underneath the production line when they started it up, not realising that he was down there.’
‘Well, we’ll find out,’ said the Martian. ‘We’ll also be able to analyse exactly what kind of inflammable liquid was used to set her alight. We’ve dug up some unburned samples that were soaked into the turf all around her. I have to say that it doesn’t smell like petrol.’
Jerry thought for a while. He couldn’t stop visualising Mary’s shattered and crushed and half-cremated body.
‘Hazard a guess,’ he said to the Martian. ‘How do you think this was done?’
The Martian shrugged. ‘I don’t have the first idea. I really don’t. Not unless she was picked up by a drone and carried away somewhere to be mangled, and then flown back here and dropped onto this playing field.’
‘And that’s about as likely as Millwall winning this year’s FA Cup,’ said Jerry.
‘Well, precisely. Even that Sherlock Holmes thing doesn’t work, not in this case. You know, “when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. Everything about this case is impossible. Everything. It couldn’t have happened. The only trouble is that it did.’
*
DS Lang came walking towards them, but stopped halfway across the playing field.
‘Jerry?’ he called out. ‘Two of the kids’ parents have turned up. And the shrink from the SCPS. And she’s quite a looker too.’
‘Thanks, Sarge!’ Jerry called back. ‘Maybe we can find out now what these mysterious legs were all about. Derek – we’ll look forward to hearing from you later.’
‘Oh – before you go,’ said the Martian. ‘I was right on the verge of emailing you when we got the shout to come out here. That cigarette butt you found at Bennerley Road, I gave it to Geoff Baxter as soon as we got back to the lab. He took one sniff and identified it snap! just like that.’
‘Well, I’ve never smelled anything like it. What was it?’
‘It was a vintage cigarette called Spanish Shawl. During the war, it was often the only cigarette you could get. It was made by J. W. Weiner Limited down in Portsmouth – Spanish Shawl Oriental Amber. I think they perfumed it to cover up how crap the tobacco was. Geoff said that some cinemas in wartime wouldn’t let you smoke them inside because they stunk so much.’
‘When you say “vintage cigarette”, can you still buy them today?’ asked Jamila.
‘Only if you’re a collector. They haven’t been produced since the end of the war.’
‘So what was somebody doing in the Hartley household in which nobody smoked, smoking a cigarette that was more than seventy-five years out of date? And why would anybody want to be smoking a cigarette that old, anyway?’
‘I’m afraid that’s up to you to find out,’ said the Martian. ‘But we’re still completing the DNA results, so we may be able to help you a little more later.’
Jamila turned to Jerry and said, ‘Come on, Jerry. Let’s go and talk to those children. Children always make good witnesses. They see things as they are, not as they believe they ought to be.’
7
Because of the discovery of Mary’s body, the whole of Brookwood School had been closed for the rest of the day, and parents were already beginning to arrive to collect their children.
The parents of five children from Year Two had agreed that they could talk to the police, and both parents and children were waiting in Sheila Daventry’s office. The children were sitting in a circle around a young woman with tangled blonde hair and the tightest navy-blue sweater that Jerry had ever seen. She stood up when Jamila and Jerry entered the office and held out her hand.
‘Karolina Mogielska,’ she introduced herself, with a slight Polish accent. ‘I am from the child psychology service.’
‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Jamila Patel and this is Detective Constable Jerry Pardoe,’ said Jamila, and then she turned to the children and smiled. ‘Thank you so much for staying behind to talk to us. We’ll try to make this as quick as we can. But it is very important that we find out what exactly happened today.’
Jerry dragged over two chairs so that he and Jamila could sit down facing the children. All of them looked pale and worried and one little girl was nervously chewing her lips.
‘Ms Daventry told us that you saw something strange,’ said Jamila. ‘It frightened you, whatever it was, and that was why you all left your classroom. Can you describe it for me?’
‘It was legs,’ said one little girl.
‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ Jamila asked her.
‘Naomi.’
‘And where were these legs, Naomi?’
‘They was up on the ceiling,’ a boy immediately put in. ‘The ceiling got all crackly and then the legs came down. They walked across the ceiling and then they went into the wall.’
‘And you are?’
‘Michael Solomon.’
‘Okay, Michael,’ said Jerry, leaning forward. ‘Can you tell us what these legs looked like? How far up did they go? Like, up to the knees, or further up than that?’
‘Up to the knees. And they had grey trousers on, and brown shoes. Brown shoes like my grandad’s. Not shiny but rough.’
‘That sounds like suede.’
The little girl who had been chewing her lips said, very emphatically, ‘They were lace-ups.’
‘Did they make any noise, these legs, when they walked across the ceiling?’
Naomi shook her head. ‘I didn’t hear them making any noise, but then some of my friends were screaming.’
‘And you say they disappeared into the wall? On which side of the classroom was that?’
‘Next to the door.’
A freckle-faced boy who had been silent so far put up his hand as if he were answering a question in class. ‘He dropped a fag.’
‘A fag? You mean a cigarette? Who did?’
‘The man the legs belonged to. It dropped down from the ceiling. It fell down next to my table.’
‘A cigarette? You’re sure about that?’
‘It still had smoke coming out of it.’
‘Did any of the rest of you see it?’
The other four children softly chorused, ‘No.’
‘Do you have any more questions?’ asked Karolina. ‘I think it would be better for the children if they could go home now.’
‘Only two more questions,’ said Jamila. ‘And I am asking this of all of you. What do you think those legs actually were? And whose legs do you think they might have been?’
‘A ghost,’ declared Naomi. ‘It must have been a ghost.’
All the other children nodded.
‘I think it was somebody who lived there before it was a school,’ said Michael.
From the back of her office, Sheila Daventry said, ‘It’s always been a school, Michael. It was built in 1951, on a bomb site. I don’t know what was here before.’
Jamila and Jerry stood up. ‘All right. Thank you all for your help.’
They left the office, but Karolina came out to join them in the corridor.
‘What do you think they saw?’ asked Jamila.
‘I am not sure,’ Karolina told them. ‘I have known children who have suffered from delusions before. Usually children who have been traumatised by violence at home, or who have witnessed a serious accident. Sometimes children can be deeply frightened by a film that they have seen or a story they have read, and they can imagine all sorts of monsters or weird things happening. Only last week I treated a seven-year-old girl who was convinced she could see a woman staring into her bedroom window at night, even though her bedroom was in a flat that was five floors up.’
‘But this wasn’t just one child,’ said Jamila. ‘This was fifteen children, and they all saw the same thing.’
‘I know. I have never come across anything like it before, not ever. It might have been mass hysteria, but how and why all fifteen of them should have seen legs walking across the ceiling – I can’t explain it. But I will look into it further, and try to find any similar case histories.’
‘Meanwhile, let’s go and see if that fag end was real, and if it’s still there,’ said Jerry.
They made their way along the corridor to the Year Two classroom. Just before they went in, Jamila’s colleagues at Ilford police station called her about a new incident of religious vandalism in Redbridge, so she waited by the door. Jerry circled around the classroom, ducking down to look under the tables.
Sure enough, next to a drawing book with a picture of an odd-looking horse in it, he found a half-smoked untipped cigarette end.
