What Hides in the Cellar, page 7
‘Killed, son. Didn’t stand a chance. The only thing that got out alive from that house was their cat.’
Adele started to cry. She pressed her hand over her mouth and stood in the rain with her shoulders shaking in bewilderment and grief.
The man said, ‘I’m really sorry, darling, but I don’t know what I can do to help you. Maybe you should call the coppers and ask them what’s going on.’
Archie tugged at Adele’s sleeve. ‘Let’s go back to that old woman’s house. That’s where it all started to go peculiar. Perhaps if we go in again and then out again, it’ll all be like it was before.’
Adele nodded and wiped her eyes with her fingers. The man called out, ‘Sorry, darling,’ yet again as the two of them ran back up to Salcott Road.
Once they reached the old woman’s front door, they pressed the bell. They couldn’t hear it ringing inside the house and she didn’t come to answer it. They pressed it again and again, but she still didn’t answer, and so they knocked. After a long wait, the door opened and there she was, with a half-eaten currant bun in her hand.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone back home.’
‘We did, but everything’s gone strange and our house has been bombed. We don’t know what’s happened to our mum and dad.’
‘What do you mean, “everything’s gone strange”? Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Adele. ‘There isn’t a war on. At least, there wasn’t. And there aren’t any trams, but now there are. We don’t know what’s happened to us.’
The woman looked at Adele and Archie thoughtfully, still chewing. Then she said, ‘I think you’d better come in. What you need is a word with Old Scratch.’
‘Who?’
‘Old Scratch. If anybody has any idea what to do, he will. I’ll give him a ring and ask him if he can see you.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Come along inside. He’s the one who can make every dream you never had come true.’
*
Adele and Archie followed the woman into her kitchen, and the woman poured Adele a glass of water. Then she went into her living room and they could hear the distinctive sound of a dial telephone.
‘Hallo?’ she said, but then she closed the living-room door so that they couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. After two or three minutes, though, she came back into the kitchen and said, ‘It’s all right. He can see you. But he said that he couldn’t make any promises.’
‘Promises about what?’ asked Adele. ‘What did he mean?’
‘You’ll see when you talk to him. Here – I’ll write down his address for you. It’s not all that far on the tram. Nine, St Oswald’s Place, in Kennington. It’s at the back of the church, but it’s not part of it.’
‘But we’ve never been on a tram,’ Archie protested. ‘And we haven’t got any money for the fare.’
‘I gave you a shilling each, that’ll be more than enough. It’s twopence to Kennington from here but it’ll only be a penny each for you two, children’s fare. And you can borrow my umbrella so you don’t get soaked and catch your death.’
‘What’s he like, this Old Scratch?’ Adele asked her. ‘I mean, is that his real name? What are we supposed to call him?’
‘Oh, he has more names than you can shake a stick at. But Scratch will do.’
‘I’m frightened,’ said Adele.
‘Well, we all are, darling, just at the moment. But you know what the song says. “Just forget your troubles… tomorrow is a lovely day.”’
9
When Jamila and Jerry arrived at the Metropolitan Police forensic laboratory in Lambeth Road, they found the Martian waiting for them upstairs in Block B. Molly Something was there too, peering at a sample of something through a microscope, but she didn’t look up when they came in.
Fancy her getting married to a bloke called Hugo, thought Jerry. And I’ll bet they have two kids called Christopher and Fiona.
‘We’ve come up with a fair few answers,’ said the Martian, pulling two stools across so that Jamila and Jerry could sit down next to his bench. Jerry thought that without his bulky Tyvek suit, he looked less like a Martian and more like a local dentist. ‘The trouble is, the answers seem to have raised even more questions than they’ve answered.’
‘Well, there’s a surprise,’ said Jerry.
Jamila said, ‘What DC Pardoe and I are mainly interested in finding out is whether these three crimes genuinely share anything in common. If they do not, then there really is no reason for us to continue working on them together. They brought me down from Redbridge only because the witness statements all bore some unusual similarities.’
‘I understand that,’ the Martian nodded. ‘I’ve heard of your reputation for investigating offbeat crimes together. And there’s no question that these three cases are well outside the usual parameters of routine investigation. Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were “supernatural”, but in my book “inexplicable” would go a long way to describing them.’
He reached across the bench and picked up the evidence bag containing the grey woollen scarf that had been found in Kathleen Hartley’s front garden.
‘Take this scarf. As you know, its label comes from a department store that ceased trading after it was bombed during the war, but the odd thing is that it appears to be practically new. The forensic examination of clothing wear-and-tear is still a very niche business at the moment, but we were able to determine by the condition of the fabric that it is probably less than six months old.
‘Although it’s comparatively new, its owner is a heavy smoker. And both the DNA and the tobacco tar that we extracted from it are an exact match for that Spanish Shawl cigarette that you found in the same room as Kathleen Hartley’s body.’
‘And what about the cigarette end that I found in the classroom at Brookwood School? You thought that was a Spanish Shawl too?’
‘I was right. It was. But the DNA we took from the saliva that was left on it was no match to the first cigarette. We’re talking about two different smokers here.’
‘One with no head and one who was nothing but legs. Great. That rules out posting any ID sketches on Twitter, doesn’t it? “Have you seen these men?”’
‘What about the shopkeeper – the one who was blinded?’ asked Jamila.
‘We found fingerprints on each side of the plastic screen that the perpetrator pulled away from the counter. Although the shopkeeper said he saw only half a man, we were able to lift both right and left fingerprints. And, as you know, fingerprints are a reliable source of DNA.
‘On top of that, we were also able to lift a partial fingerprint from the shell casing that we found on the floor of the house in Bolingbroke Grove where Kenneth Treagus was shot. That too gave us a sample of DNA and from its Y chromosome – guess what?’
‘I have no idea. Tell me.’
The Martian looked almost triumphant, like a magician who has pulled two cats out of a hat. ‘We were able to establish that the DNA almost certainly belongs to a brother of the perpetrator who blinded the shopkeeper.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jerry. ‘So the man with no feet is a brother of the man who is only half a man? Does this get any more complicated?’
‘Well, I’m afraid it does. Shell casings aren’t numbered. Several governments have carried out research into the possibility of doing it, but it would prove far too expensive and time-consuming. But in this case the shell casing was very distinctive because it was part of a consignment of .45 ACP ammunition that was stolen from London docks on 17 August 1942, in the middle of the war. It had been sent from the United States on lend-lease and every bullet was stamped F A 42 – F A showing that it had been manufactured by Frankford Arsenal.
‘According to the records, almost all that box of ammunition was recovered by the police two days later because some informant with a grudge tipped them off about it. But there’s no question that the round that killed Kenneth Treagus definitely came out of that stolen batch.’
Jerry said, ‘This is mental. Who carries a gun around with eighty-year-old bullets in it?’
‘Believe me, it gets even more baffling. We haven’t yet completed our autopsy of Mary Jonas, not by a long way, but there are two things we do know already. The first is that she was burned not with petrol but with aviation fuel.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s possible to distinguish between them because aviation fuel has different hydrocarbons and special additives to stop it from freezing at high altitudes and suchlike.
‘The second thing is that she was run over by a wheeled vehicle that must have weighed as much as fifty tons. That wheeled vehicle ran on tracks with a gauge of exactly four feet seven-and-three-quarter inches. That’s just over one metre and forty-one centimetres.’
‘So what kind of vehicle was it?’ asked Jamila. ‘Can you tell?’
‘There was only one type of vehicle it could have been, DS Patel. A tram. And not a modern tram either, because the standard track they run on today is an inch or two-and-a-half centimetres wider.’
Jamila blinked at him, utterly perplexed. ‘But there are no tramlines anywhere in the vicinity of that school, old or modern. And there was no way that a fifty-ton tram ran across that playing field. There are trams running through the centre of Croydon, aren’t there? But Croydon must be more than half an hour away, and Mary Jonas wasn’t missing for long enough for her to be taken there. And even if she was, how could she have been run over and then her body brought back to the school?’
‘That’s what I mean by inexplicable,’ said the Martian.
*
After they had returned to Lavender Hill, Jamila and Jerry went into the canteen for a cup of coffee and a long think about what Derek Grant had told them.
‘This is really doing my head in,’ said Jerry. ‘They’re all linked together, those three incidents, but the way they’re linked together makes no sense at all. I mean, what were the motives? Okay – the perp who poked out that poor bloody shopkeeper’s eyes, he was on the rob, and his brother might have been burgling the Treagus house when he was disturbed, and that’s why he shot Kenneth Treagus.
‘But why was Kathleen Hartley sliced up like that? And why was Mary Jonas squashed by a tram and set on fire? The perps who did them in were both smoking the same brand of out-of-date fags, but did they actually know each other, and where did they get those fags from anyway?’
Jamila had been prodding at her phone. ‘All I can find for Spanish Shawl cigarettes is empty packets for sale to collectors on eBay starting at £29 each. Or there’s one box that used to contain twenty-four cigarettes but has only thirteen left – and they come with a caution that they are definitely not for smoking.’
Jerry tore open three packets of sugar and stirred them into his coffee. ‘Jesus. As if the forensics weren’t bonkers enough, there’s all these witness statements about people with missing bits. Do you think they’re connected, or is it just coincidence? Or maybe all the witnesses had been sniffing the same brand of glue? It’s not as if the same bit was missing in each case, is it? Heads, bodies and legs. Jesus.’
‘I still can’t help thinking about the jinns,’ said Jamila. ‘These cases have so much similarity to the stories that are told in Pakistan. And did you see that report that was on the news this weekend? It said that some scientists in Antarctica have discovered particles rising from the ice that prove there is a parallel universe next to ours.’
Jerry puffed out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know. As if this bloody universe wasn’t bad enough.’
He drained his cup of coffee and was thinking about a second cup when Simon Fairbrother came into the canteen, looking right and left to see where they were.
‘Ah, Jerry – DS Patel – thought I might find you in here!’
He came and sat down beside them. ‘I’m not at all sure if this is one for you, but I thought there’s an outside chance that it might be. Four hours ago we had a misper report, two kids missing by Wandsworth Common.’
‘Oh, yes? And what exactly are we supposed to do about it? Can’t you get the dogs out?’
‘Well, we will, of course. But I’ve just heard the first witness statements. I could be way off the mark, I admit – but it sounds to me as if there’s an outside chance that their disappearance might have some connection with all these weird cases that you’ve been assigned to look into.’
‘Don’t tell me. Somebody saw them being abducted by a man with no arms on a horse with no legs.’
Simon Fairbrother ignored that remark. ‘They’re a sister and a brother, ages eleven and nine. Adele and Archie Cooper. They were walking up Northcote Road when they were met by two of the sister’s school friends. The friends asked them where they were going and they insisted that they were carrying shopping bags for an elderly female.’
‘And?’
‘And the thing about it is, that they weren’t. There were no shopping bags and there was no elderly female. But that was the last that anybody saw of them. They were supposed to come in for their lunch, but when their mother went to call them, they were gone.’
‘They didn’t have a phone between them?’
‘No. The girl has a phone but she’d left it indoors. The last their mother had seen of them, they were kicking a football around in their front garden.’
‘Maybe they were just joking about an elderly woman. You know what kids are like. They have invisible friends, don’t they, some of them? A pal of mine at school had an invisible dog called Boot.’
‘I would have agreed with you, Jerry, if these kids hadn’t gone missing, and if we hadn’t had these three cases where the suspects could only be partially seen.’
‘All right,’ said Jamila. ‘For the sake of being thorough, we will talk to the sister’s friends. Are they here at the station?’
‘No, they’ve gone back home, but I can give you their phone numbers and their addresses.’
‘Oh well,’ said Jerry. ‘Just as well I haven’t got time for a second cup of coffee. It only would have given me the shakes.’
*
They drove down to Honeywell Road, where Rosie lived. Ola was there too, and they were sitting in the living room playing Unravel Two on Rosie’s Xbox.
While Rosie’s mother hovered protectively in the living-room doorway, the two girls could only repeat what they had told the officers who had interviewed them earlier. Adele had insisted that she and Archie were carrying some old woman’s shopping for her.
‘Do you think she was pranking you?’ asked Jamila.
‘She must’ve been! Because there was nobody there and she wasn’t carrying anything. It kind of looked as if she was carrying something, didn’t it, Ola? She had one hand right down by her side, and when she lifted it up to show me this pretend shopping bag that wasn’t there, she lifted it up like this – like she was actually holding up something really heavy.’
‘But then she and Archie just walked off?’
‘Yes. We went to call on Adele later to see if she could come round here to mine, but her mum said she hadn’t come back, and that’s when we called the police.’
‘I think – I think they might have gone up Salcott Road,’ said Ola.
‘Salcott Road?’ Jerry asked her. ‘That’s only about two streets further up from where you met them, isn’t it? Did you actually see them go up there?’
‘No. But I looked back just the once and they were gone, so they might have done.’
‘Did you tell the officers this, the ones who came to talk to you?’
‘No. This is the first time I’ve thought about it. They definitely got as far as Salcott Road but I didn’t see them after that.’
Jamila looked from one girl to the other. Both looked completely serious.
‘You’re absolutely one hundred per cent sure that there was nobody with them, either an old lady or anybody else?’
Both girls furiously shook their heads.
‘Come on, then, Jerry,’ said Jamila. ‘Let us take a look along Salcott Road.’
*
‘To be honest with you, I don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for here,’ said Jerry.
‘Well, neither do I, Jerry, but I had a strange feeling that we might find something, that’s all.’
‘All right. I’m willing to go along with that. I freely admit that ninety per cent of your strange feelings have turned out to be incredibly accurate.’
They were standing on the corner of Salcott Road. The only people in sight in this long street of terraced and semi-detached Victorian houses were two workmen shovelling broken bricks into a skip and a man walking towards them with a bedraggled white Sealyham terrier on a lead.
‘Maybe we should try knocking on some doors,’ Jerry suggested. ‘Somebody might have seen those two kids. And – look – those first two houses both have doorbell videos. There’s a chance that they might have picked them up.’
The man who was walking the Sealyham was approaching them now. He was wearing a trilby hat and a tightly belted trench coat, so that he reminded Jerry of a private eye out of an old Robert Mitchum film.
‘Sir!’ said Jamila, holding up her ID wallet.
The man came nearer and peered at her ID short-sightedly. ‘Oh! You’re police! I’m not speeding, am I?’
‘I just want to ask you if you happen to have seen two children walking up this road at any time this morning? A girl of eleven and a boy of nine?’
The man stopped and tugged at his Sealyham’s lead. For some reason, Jerry found it difficult to focus on his face. It seemed to be blurry, as if he were looking at them through a misted-up window.
‘I did see two children like that, yes, as a matter of fact,’ the man told them. ‘Round about when was it – elevenish? That was when I was taking Gracie for her morning constitutional.’
‘You did see them? Where? Were they alone, or did they have somebody with them?’
‘They had Mrs Chibnall with them. They were carrying her shopping, by the look of it.’
‘You saw them carrying a woman’s shopping bags? Is Mrs Chibnall an elderly lady?’
Adele started to cry. She pressed her hand over her mouth and stood in the rain with her shoulders shaking in bewilderment and grief.
The man said, ‘I’m really sorry, darling, but I don’t know what I can do to help you. Maybe you should call the coppers and ask them what’s going on.’
Archie tugged at Adele’s sleeve. ‘Let’s go back to that old woman’s house. That’s where it all started to go peculiar. Perhaps if we go in again and then out again, it’ll all be like it was before.’
Adele nodded and wiped her eyes with her fingers. The man called out, ‘Sorry, darling,’ yet again as the two of them ran back up to Salcott Road.
Once they reached the old woman’s front door, they pressed the bell. They couldn’t hear it ringing inside the house and she didn’t come to answer it. They pressed it again and again, but she still didn’t answer, and so they knocked. After a long wait, the door opened and there she was, with a half-eaten currant bun in her hand.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone back home.’
‘We did, but everything’s gone strange and our house has been bombed. We don’t know what’s happened to our mum and dad.’
‘What do you mean, “everything’s gone strange”? Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Adele. ‘There isn’t a war on. At least, there wasn’t. And there aren’t any trams, but now there are. We don’t know what’s happened to us.’
The woman looked at Adele and Archie thoughtfully, still chewing. Then she said, ‘I think you’d better come in. What you need is a word with Old Scratch.’
‘Who?’
‘Old Scratch. If anybody has any idea what to do, he will. I’ll give him a ring and ask him if he can see you.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Come along inside. He’s the one who can make every dream you never had come true.’
*
Adele and Archie followed the woman into her kitchen, and the woman poured Adele a glass of water. Then she went into her living room and they could hear the distinctive sound of a dial telephone.
‘Hallo?’ she said, but then she closed the living-room door so that they couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. After two or three minutes, though, she came back into the kitchen and said, ‘It’s all right. He can see you. But he said that he couldn’t make any promises.’
‘Promises about what?’ asked Adele. ‘What did he mean?’
‘You’ll see when you talk to him. Here – I’ll write down his address for you. It’s not all that far on the tram. Nine, St Oswald’s Place, in Kennington. It’s at the back of the church, but it’s not part of it.’
‘But we’ve never been on a tram,’ Archie protested. ‘And we haven’t got any money for the fare.’
‘I gave you a shilling each, that’ll be more than enough. It’s twopence to Kennington from here but it’ll only be a penny each for you two, children’s fare. And you can borrow my umbrella so you don’t get soaked and catch your death.’
‘What’s he like, this Old Scratch?’ Adele asked her. ‘I mean, is that his real name? What are we supposed to call him?’
‘Oh, he has more names than you can shake a stick at. But Scratch will do.’
‘I’m frightened,’ said Adele.
‘Well, we all are, darling, just at the moment. But you know what the song says. “Just forget your troubles… tomorrow is a lovely day.”’
9
When Jamila and Jerry arrived at the Metropolitan Police forensic laboratory in Lambeth Road, they found the Martian waiting for them upstairs in Block B. Molly Something was there too, peering at a sample of something through a microscope, but she didn’t look up when they came in.
Fancy her getting married to a bloke called Hugo, thought Jerry. And I’ll bet they have two kids called Christopher and Fiona.
‘We’ve come up with a fair few answers,’ said the Martian, pulling two stools across so that Jamila and Jerry could sit down next to his bench. Jerry thought that without his bulky Tyvek suit, he looked less like a Martian and more like a local dentist. ‘The trouble is, the answers seem to have raised even more questions than they’ve answered.’
‘Well, there’s a surprise,’ said Jerry.
Jamila said, ‘What DC Pardoe and I are mainly interested in finding out is whether these three crimes genuinely share anything in common. If they do not, then there really is no reason for us to continue working on them together. They brought me down from Redbridge only because the witness statements all bore some unusual similarities.’
‘I understand that,’ the Martian nodded. ‘I’ve heard of your reputation for investigating offbeat crimes together. And there’s no question that these three cases are well outside the usual parameters of routine investigation. Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were “supernatural”, but in my book “inexplicable” would go a long way to describing them.’
He reached across the bench and picked up the evidence bag containing the grey woollen scarf that had been found in Kathleen Hartley’s front garden.
‘Take this scarf. As you know, its label comes from a department store that ceased trading after it was bombed during the war, but the odd thing is that it appears to be practically new. The forensic examination of clothing wear-and-tear is still a very niche business at the moment, but we were able to determine by the condition of the fabric that it is probably less than six months old.
‘Although it’s comparatively new, its owner is a heavy smoker. And both the DNA and the tobacco tar that we extracted from it are an exact match for that Spanish Shawl cigarette that you found in the same room as Kathleen Hartley’s body.’
‘And what about the cigarette end that I found in the classroom at Brookwood School? You thought that was a Spanish Shawl too?’
‘I was right. It was. But the DNA we took from the saliva that was left on it was no match to the first cigarette. We’re talking about two different smokers here.’
‘One with no head and one who was nothing but legs. Great. That rules out posting any ID sketches on Twitter, doesn’t it? “Have you seen these men?”’
‘What about the shopkeeper – the one who was blinded?’ asked Jamila.
‘We found fingerprints on each side of the plastic screen that the perpetrator pulled away from the counter. Although the shopkeeper said he saw only half a man, we were able to lift both right and left fingerprints. And, as you know, fingerprints are a reliable source of DNA.
‘On top of that, we were also able to lift a partial fingerprint from the shell casing that we found on the floor of the house in Bolingbroke Grove where Kenneth Treagus was shot. That too gave us a sample of DNA and from its Y chromosome – guess what?’
‘I have no idea. Tell me.’
The Martian looked almost triumphant, like a magician who has pulled two cats out of a hat. ‘We were able to establish that the DNA almost certainly belongs to a brother of the perpetrator who blinded the shopkeeper.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jerry. ‘So the man with no feet is a brother of the man who is only half a man? Does this get any more complicated?’
‘Well, I’m afraid it does. Shell casings aren’t numbered. Several governments have carried out research into the possibility of doing it, but it would prove far too expensive and time-consuming. But in this case the shell casing was very distinctive because it was part of a consignment of .45 ACP ammunition that was stolen from London docks on 17 August 1942, in the middle of the war. It had been sent from the United States on lend-lease and every bullet was stamped F A 42 – F A showing that it had been manufactured by Frankford Arsenal.
‘According to the records, almost all that box of ammunition was recovered by the police two days later because some informant with a grudge tipped them off about it. But there’s no question that the round that killed Kenneth Treagus definitely came out of that stolen batch.’
Jerry said, ‘This is mental. Who carries a gun around with eighty-year-old bullets in it?’
‘Believe me, it gets even more baffling. We haven’t yet completed our autopsy of Mary Jonas, not by a long way, but there are two things we do know already. The first is that she was burned not with petrol but with aviation fuel.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s possible to distinguish between them because aviation fuel has different hydrocarbons and special additives to stop it from freezing at high altitudes and suchlike.
‘The second thing is that she was run over by a wheeled vehicle that must have weighed as much as fifty tons. That wheeled vehicle ran on tracks with a gauge of exactly four feet seven-and-three-quarter inches. That’s just over one metre and forty-one centimetres.’
‘So what kind of vehicle was it?’ asked Jamila. ‘Can you tell?’
‘There was only one type of vehicle it could have been, DS Patel. A tram. And not a modern tram either, because the standard track they run on today is an inch or two-and-a-half centimetres wider.’
Jamila blinked at him, utterly perplexed. ‘But there are no tramlines anywhere in the vicinity of that school, old or modern. And there was no way that a fifty-ton tram ran across that playing field. There are trams running through the centre of Croydon, aren’t there? But Croydon must be more than half an hour away, and Mary Jonas wasn’t missing for long enough for her to be taken there. And even if she was, how could she have been run over and then her body brought back to the school?’
‘That’s what I mean by inexplicable,’ said the Martian.
*
After they had returned to Lavender Hill, Jamila and Jerry went into the canteen for a cup of coffee and a long think about what Derek Grant had told them.
‘This is really doing my head in,’ said Jerry. ‘They’re all linked together, those three incidents, but the way they’re linked together makes no sense at all. I mean, what were the motives? Okay – the perp who poked out that poor bloody shopkeeper’s eyes, he was on the rob, and his brother might have been burgling the Treagus house when he was disturbed, and that’s why he shot Kenneth Treagus.
‘But why was Kathleen Hartley sliced up like that? And why was Mary Jonas squashed by a tram and set on fire? The perps who did them in were both smoking the same brand of out-of-date fags, but did they actually know each other, and where did they get those fags from anyway?’
Jamila had been prodding at her phone. ‘All I can find for Spanish Shawl cigarettes is empty packets for sale to collectors on eBay starting at £29 each. Or there’s one box that used to contain twenty-four cigarettes but has only thirteen left – and they come with a caution that they are definitely not for smoking.’
Jerry tore open three packets of sugar and stirred them into his coffee. ‘Jesus. As if the forensics weren’t bonkers enough, there’s all these witness statements about people with missing bits. Do you think they’re connected, or is it just coincidence? Or maybe all the witnesses had been sniffing the same brand of glue? It’s not as if the same bit was missing in each case, is it? Heads, bodies and legs. Jesus.’
‘I still can’t help thinking about the jinns,’ said Jamila. ‘These cases have so much similarity to the stories that are told in Pakistan. And did you see that report that was on the news this weekend? It said that some scientists in Antarctica have discovered particles rising from the ice that prove there is a parallel universe next to ours.’
Jerry puffed out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know. As if this bloody universe wasn’t bad enough.’
He drained his cup of coffee and was thinking about a second cup when Simon Fairbrother came into the canteen, looking right and left to see where they were.
‘Ah, Jerry – DS Patel – thought I might find you in here!’
He came and sat down beside them. ‘I’m not at all sure if this is one for you, but I thought there’s an outside chance that it might be. Four hours ago we had a misper report, two kids missing by Wandsworth Common.’
‘Oh, yes? And what exactly are we supposed to do about it? Can’t you get the dogs out?’
‘Well, we will, of course. But I’ve just heard the first witness statements. I could be way off the mark, I admit – but it sounds to me as if there’s an outside chance that their disappearance might have some connection with all these weird cases that you’ve been assigned to look into.’
‘Don’t tell me. Somebody saw them being abducted by a man with no arms on a horse with no legs.’
Simon Fairbrother ignored that remark. ‘They’re a sister and a brother, ages eleven and nine. Adele and Archie Cooper. They were walking up Northcote Road when they were met by two of the sister’s school friends. The friends asked them where they were going and they insisted that they were carrying shopping bags for an elderly female.’
‘And?’
‘And the thing about it is, that they weren’t. There were no shopping bags and there was no elderly female. But that was the last that anybody saw of them. They were supposed to come in for their lunch, but when their mother went to call them, they were gone.’
‘They didn’t have a phone between them?’
‘No. The girl has a phone but she’d left it indoors. The last their mother had seen of them, they were kicking a football around in their front garden.’
‘Maybe they were just joking about an elderly woman. You know what kids are like. They have invisible friends, don’t they, some of them? A pal of mine at school had an invisible dog called Boot.’
‘I would have agreed with you, Jerry, if these kids hadn’t gone missing, and if we hadn’t had these three cases where the suspects could only be partially seen.’
‘All right,’ said Jamila. ‘For the sake of being thorough, we will talk to the sister’s friends. Are they here at the station?’
‘No, they’ve gone back home, but I can give you their phone numbers and their addresses.’
‘Oh well,’ said Jerry. ‘Just as well I haven’t got time for a second cup of coffee. It only would have given me the shakes.’
*
They drove down to Honeywell Road, where Rosie lived. Ola was there too, and they were sitting in the living room playing Unravel Two on Rosie’s Xbox.
While Rosie’s mother hovered protectively in the living-room doorway, the two girls could only repeat what they had told the officers who had interviewed them earlier. Adele had insisted that she and Archie were carrying some old woman’s shopping for her.
‘Do you think she was pranking you?’ asked Jamila.
‘She must’ve been! Because there was nobody there and she wasn’t carrying anything. It kind of looked as if she was carrying something, didn’t it, Ola? She had one hand right down by her side, and when she lifted it up to show me this pretend shopping bag that wasn’t there, she lifted it up like this – like she was actually holding up something really heavy.’
‘But then she and Archie just walked off?’
‘Yes. We went to call on Adele later to see if she could come round here to mine, but her mum said she hadn’t come back, and that’s when we called the police.’
‘I think – I think they might have gone up Salcott Road,’ said Ola.
‘Salcott Road?’ Jerry asked her. ‘That’s only about two streets further up from where you met them, isn’t it? Did you actually see them go up there?’
‘No. But I looked back just the once and they were gone, so they might have done.’
‘Did you tell the officers this, the ones who came to talk to you?’
‘No. This is the first time I’ve thought about it. They definitely got as far as Salcott Road but I didn’t see them after that.’
Jamila looked from one girl to the other. Both looked completely serious.
‘You’re absolutely one hundred per cent sure that there was nobody with them, either an old lady or anybody else?’
Both girls furiously shook their heads.
‘Come on, then, Jerry,’ said Jamila. ‘Let us take a look along Salcott Road.’
*
‘To be honest with you, I don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for here,’ said Jerry.
‘Well, neither do I, Jerry, but I had a strange feeling that we might find something, that’s all.’
‘All right. I’m willing to go along with that. I freely admit that ninety per cent of your strange feelings have turned out to be incredibly accurate.’
They were standing on the corner of Salcott Road. The only people in sight in this long street of terraced and semi-detached Victorian houses were two workmen shovelling broken bricks into a skip and a man walking towards them with a bedraggled white Sealyham terrier on a lead.
‘Maybe we should try knocking on some doors,’ Jerry suggested. ‘Somebody might have seen those two kids. And – look – those first two houses both have doorbell videos. There’s a chance that they might have picked them up.’
The man who was walking the Sealyham was approaching them now. He was wearing a trilby hat and a tightly belted trench coat, so that he reminded Jerry of a private eye out of an old Robert Mitchum film.
‘Sir!’ said Jamila, holding up her ID wallet.
The man came nearer and peered at her ID short-sightedly. ‘Oh! You’re police! I’m not speeding, am I?’
‘I just want to ask you if you happen to have seen two children walking up this road at any time this morning? A girl of eleven and a boy of nine?’
The man stopped and tugged at his Sealyham’s lead. For some reason, Jerry found it difficult to focus on his face. It seemed to be blurry, as if he were looking at them through a misted-up window.
‘I did see two children like that, yes, as a matter of fact,’ the man told them. ‘Round about when was it – elevenish? That was when I was taking Gracie for her morning constitutional.’
‘You did see them? Where? Were they alone, or did they have somebody with them?’
‘They had Mrs Chibnall with them. They were carrying her shopping, by the look of it.’
‘You saw them carrying a woman’s shopping bags? Is Mrs Chibnall an elderly lady?’
