Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Marilyn had fled, which was some consolation. However Agatha regretted giving the younger woman the Glock; she could have done with that.

  She waited. The creature waited too, peeking out into the corridor, glowering at her with bright red eyes.

  Occasionally it inched forward. And each time it did so Agatha hefted her gun up and projected an air of calm and deadly resolve. Then the creature would back up again, eyes locked on her with rage. In theory, a salt gun could kill a hell beast like this, when fired at close enough range, and into the mouth. Agatha realised the monster was afraid of her.

  She continued to wait. Her hands were starting to tremble. At one point she fancied she heard a man’s voice laughing, but she wasn’t sure if that was just a hallucination.

  And still the creature held back. It glowered with scarlet eyes, and snarled, and dribbled venom from its jaws on to the beige carpet of the corridor; and waited for her to yield.

  She did not yield.

  Ten minutes four seconds later a voice said, ‘We’ll take this, love.’

  The creature ducked back into the custody suite in a trice. The corridor ahead of her was empty now. She was safe.

  Agatha dropped the gun with relief and leaned against the wall. A black-clad police officer in body armour and a visor was standing by her, reassuringly terrifying. More officers were appearing down the scorched corridor: dozens of them, no, scores. Carrying carbines and automatic machine guns and shoulder-launched missile tubes and mortars. An entire army.

  Agatha remembered what she needed to remember. She gripped the senior SCO19 officer by the arm.

  ‘It’s a Black Alert,’ she told him. ‘Phil Matthews, he’s a good lad, he’s been here for years, he wouldn’t have pressed that button if –’

  ‘Let’s get you out of here, love,’ said the officer, who was easily six and a half feet tall, in his most reassuring tones.

  ‘Listen to me, for pity’s sake!’ she snapped. ‘There’s Yellow, Amber, Red and Black, and you’re supposed to go through them in turn. Unless you absolutely cannot do so. Phil was not a man given to panic. So if he went straight to Black, that’s because he was about to die. Do you get my drift?’

  The Man in Black was looking at her blankly. ‘No.’

  ‘Everyone in the custody area is almost certainly dead,’ Agatha explained patiently. ‘So, at the risk of seeming callous, you should do what you have to do, as brutally as you are able. Do I make myself clear?’

  There was a pause.

  The Man in Black nodded.

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  Chapter 1

  ‘Dead three months,’ said Taff, ‘and see the state of him.’ He grinned, mirthless. ‘I should look so good.’

  Dougie viewed the naked corpse of Matthew Baker. It was Sunday the sixteenth of April, 2023.

  The body was lithe and strongly muscled. The skin was tanned unevenly: the arms, face and calves were brown as mahogany, but the torso, groin and upper legs were iPod-white. Clear signifiers of an active outdoor life. The limbs were still supple. There was no lividity, no rigor mortis, no liquefaction of the eyeballs, no blistering, no loosening of the finger and toe nails, no distension of the abdomen or scrotum. In short, none of the usual signs of putrefaction and decay. Matthew had been found wearing a watch with a missing battery, which had stopped at 16.00 on 19th January 2023. As a working hypothesis, Dougie was taking that as the time of death.

  ‘Has he been identified by next of kin?’ Dougie asked Taff.

  ‘No need, guv. He’s on the DNA database. This is our boy,’ Taff said.

  Manju was folding up the green plastic mortuary sheet. Just a few moments before she had whipped the covering off the bare corpse like a magician’s assistant, to shockingly reveal Dougie’s failure to save this beautiful young man’s life.

  ‘Touch the skin if you like,’ she said.

  Dougie touched the corpse’s leg with a fingertip. The flesh was soft but cold; the chill caress confirmed Dougie’s belief that life had fled this body a long time ago. He grimaced. Manju grinned at his squeamishness.

  Manju was pretty, petite, unaffectedly adorable. Her slender brown arms were strong from lifting dead bodies in and out of the freezer. Dougie had seen her many times with a rotary saw opening up a corpse from chin to groin whilst humming a pop song.

  ‘Whoever did this, did a bloody good job,’ she said. ‘In a year’s time, this body will still be fresh enough to –’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  She grinned. ‘Fresh enough to fuck!’ she said, daring disapproval; and getting it.

  Dougie sighed.

  ‘That’s not funny,’ Taff told her censoriously.

  Manju was unabashed. She was, Dougie knew from their many vigorous debates on the topic, convinced that her generation had invented gallows humour.

  ‘Go fetch the old bugger,’ Dougie told her sternly.

  ‘Tell you what, I’ll go fetch the old bugger,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  Manju threw the folded sheet on to a work surface, and headed to the office. She wasn’t wearing scrubs, just a white coat over her street clothes. Her hair was carefully bunned tight to her head. She walked briskly, like a bird considering whether to fly.

  Dougie sniffed, savouring the aroma of the hundreds of Tibetan sandalwood Buddhas that sat brooding on the medicine shelves, almost but not quite masking the ingrained smell of death in this mortuary dissecting room. The Buddhas wouldn’t be much help once the post mortem began, however. Dougie knew that Matthew’s arteries and veins had been bled out then refilled with a rich cocktail of embalming fluids. Once the chest cavity was opened up, the stench of formaldehyde would erupt outwards and swamp the Buddhas’ soft forest fragrance, turning scented air into noxious fug.

  Knowing this, Dougie seized his moment. He began to breathe deeply: in through the nose to a count of five; holding for two, three, four, five, seconds; then slowly exhaling in bursts. Then again, and again; till his head was dizzy with the intoxicatory and pungent tang of ancient woods. Finally he counted silently to ten, to clear his mind of extraneous thoughts.

  And he walked slowly around the corpse, circling the stainless steel table once, twice, three times. Looking for defence injuries or attack wounds or any trace or absence that might inspire one of his legendary hunches, and finding nothing.

  Taff waited patiently, giving the guvnor time to do his stuff.

  Dougie paused a moment, in his circumnavigations of the metal table. He leaned his big frame over the body, and peered closer at Matthew’s skin, trying to spot the incision marks over the major blood vessels that he knew had to be there. But he couldn’t see them. He stepped back and made a frame with his fingers. He studied Matthew’s face, frozen in its last expression. He tried to imagine what the poor bastard’s dying thoughts had been.

  Matthew’s eyes were closed, so Dougie said ‘Eyes,’ and Taff stepped behind the head, and nursed the eyelids open with his fingers and thumbs. Now the brown eyes of Matthew Baker stared unseeingly at Dougie. But that didn’t help either.

  Matthew Michael Baker: 1998-2023.

  For the last three months Dougie had been immersed in every biographical fact relating to Matthew Michael Baker. He’d read interviews with Matthew’s friends and family and colleagues and casual acquaintances. He’d read his work appraisals and the personal statements he’d written for all his job applications. He’d read his emails and the replies to his emails. He’d scanned his favourite websites. And he knew him, as well as you can know any human being whom you have never met.

  Matthew had been a sporty guy with a BA in Geography from Northampton Uni, who had worked in an insurance office in Holborn. He was competent at his job, and popular with his workmates because he never skived or stole credit for work he hadn’t done. He was, however, undervalued by his bosses because he was considered to be too much of a ‘pretty boy’. And for the same reason he was covertly and deeply desire
d by the three women in his office, all of them married, two with kids.

  He was, everyone agreed, not much of a socialiser. Although in small groups he could be animated and very droll. Nor was he in the least bit vain, despite his exceptional good looks. He had been proud of the fact he had a good head for numbers, and could add up a row of figures without resorting to a calculator. He lived quietly, swam or ran twice a day, worked out in the gym once a week, and saved most of his earnings. His dream had been to retire young and become a scuba diving instructor somewhere in the Med or the Caribbean.

  That, of course, would never happen.

  Matthew had been found dead on a Circle Line train. For nearly five hours he had travelled in huge loops around London through dark tunnels on a journey that for him had already ended. Remarkably, for all those five hours, none of his fellow passengers had realised he was dead; or if they did realise, they kept that information to themselves.

  Eventually a middle aged woman from Hounslow had jostled him with her leg whilst getting up, and Matthew had toppled out of his seat and sprawled out on the floor. It was, even from the CCTV footage, obvious he was dead or unconscious rather than drunk or asleep. The woman from Hounslow, however, left the train without saying anything. And the corpse remained in situ, to the mute embarrassment of all aboard, until a black teenage boy Instagrammed the police on his smartphone.

  ‘We’ll have him this time,’ Dougie told Taff, projecting a confidence he didn’t feel.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Someone must have seen the killer bringing the body on to the train. He can’t be that fucking invisible.’

  Taff shrugged. ‘He, or she,’ he said mildly. They didn’t even know that much.

  Thaddeus Sullivan, entered. Green-gowned, bare-armed, sucking on his eternal ball of nicotine gum. Dougie had known Thaddeus Sullivan for nearly twenty years. The pathologist was a ageless veteran, well over sixty now but with hair still naturally black, and only the faintest of wrinkles on his brow and around his eyes.

  ‘Can I start now?’ he grumbled.

  ‘Not yet. I’m appraising the scene.’

  ‘Lucifer wept!’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Dougie, ‘blaspheme.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Thaddeus retorted wickedly.

  ‘Knickers, twist, don’t,’ Dougie advised him.

  ‘Miss Lahane, haven’t you prepped the body yet?’

  ‘Fuck off, granddad.’

  ‘Harrumph.’ Thaddeus glowered at his rebellious assistant, who added insult to insult by showing him her middle finger. Dougie continued to circle the corpse as Thaddeus stood impatiently, like a child who is forced to wait until everyone else has taken a seat at the table, before gobbling his meal.

  Thaddeus was well used to Dougie’s ritual, but it still annoyed him immensely. The CSI photographer had already taken numerous pictures of the corpse, allowing the geeks in Five Squad to create a computer 3D image of every part and pore of the body. And Thaddeus himself would narrate a running commentary during the post mortem as the official record of the case; this would include the detailed measurement and cataloguing of all marks and blemishes and surface injuries on the body. So Dougie’s preliminary scrutiny of the cadaver was unnecessary and self-indulgent. Yet it was sacrosanct.

  ‘I do have a bloody home to go to, you know,’ Thaddeus eventually sniped.

  This was Sullivan’s four hundred and third PM performed in the presence of Detective Superintendent Douglas Randall; in the view of both men, that particular gag never wore thin.

  ‘Hush, man. Where are the embalmer’s puncture marks? There aren’t any.’

  ‘There are, you’re just too blind to see.’

  Manju reappeared with the rotary saw. She turned it on, to test it. The humming noise cut the air. Dougie glared at her and she switched it off. She waited too.

  Dougie slipped on his latex gloves and picked up each of the corpse’s hands in turn, and carefully checked the fingers. No staining, nails well clipped, palms extremely calloused; Matthew had been a keen canoeist, which would account for that. No broken fingernails, nor any traces of blood or skin under the nails. The wrists had not been bound; or at least, not recently, for there were no abrasions visible.

  Next Dougie looked at the toes and feet, which were also unmarked. The legs were muscular. He used a gloved finger to check the underneath of the penis for bite marks. Nothing. He used one hand to hold the jaws open so he could inspect the teeth. Nothing amiss there either, and nothing concealed in the mouth cavity.

  Dougie recalled that Matthew had had a girlfriend, and that he’d bought her a wedding ring off Amazon the day before his disappearance, three months before he eventually turned up dead on the Circle Line. The girlfriend was called Aisheshek. Like Matthew, she was a scuba diving fanatic. When she’d first learned of Matthew’s abduction, Aisheshek had taken it badly. Knowing, as they had all known after those first Facebook messages were posted by the killer, that Matthew’s death and subsequent embalming were inevitable.

  Dougie doubted she’d ever feel safe again.

  ‘Guv?’ Taff prodded.

  ‘Yes yes.’ Dougie was restless. As per the other seven cases, he couldn’t visually ascertain a cause of death. No knife wounds in the flesh, no bullet entry or exit wounds, no lacerations around the neck or traces of manual strangulation. He decided to give up. ‘Let me see the sewing,’ said Dougie.

  Thaddeus, bearing a sullen ‘I told you so’ expression, rummaged on a shelf, and handed him a magnifying scope.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dougie.

  ‘It’ll all be in my report,’ Thaddeus pointed out.

  ‘I like to see for myself,’ Dougie snapped.

  Thaddeus sighed, despairing.

  Dougie fastened the scope to his eye, and fiddled with the magnification. Thaddeus pointed with a fingertip at the spot where Dougie should look. Dougie leaned over and peered.

  Through the lens of the scope, he could see the stitching on the body’s pale flesh. There were a series of micro-stitches that had resealed a puncture caused, it was reasonable to assume, by a surgical trocar. With the aid of this embalmer’s tool the killer would - as he had done in the previous seven cases - have dug holes into various parts of the torso, then used a pump to suck out the lungs, kidney, liver, and heart.

  The brain, Dougie surmised, would have been removed, ancient Egyptian style, through the nose. The body cavities would have been filled with organic foam, treated to prevent the proliferation of bacterial decay. And incisions would have been made on all the major arteries and the blood drained out and replaced with embalming fluid.

  Then the wounds on the skin would have been stitched up with the aid of a surgical robot-suturer, and the flesh neurochemically treated, and rouged to give the skin a healthy glow. Leaving the body ageless and perfect in every respect. Except, dead.

  Eight murders in, and Dougie still found it shocking. He’d seen every kind of murder in the course of his long career – brutal, frenzied, deranged, cold-blooded, sick as fuck, you name it. And he was familiar with just about every way in which a corpse could be mutilated or affronted. But what this bastard did to his victims was perverse, even by Dougie’s standards.

  After five minutes of careful examination of the corpse through the magnifying lens, Dougie sighed.

  He gave Matthew Michael Baker one last look.

  ‘Proceed,’ he told Thaddeus.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How’re the girls?’

  ‘Like leeches. No wonder I’m so poor.’

  ‘I heard Lucy’s getting married.’

  ‘She’s threatening it. I’ll have to pay, no doubt.’

  ‘Who’s the lucky man?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Her intended, I mean. Her beloved.’

  ‘Some fucking doctor. Feckless philandering workaholic, no doubt. You know what those buggers are like.’

  ‘I have some notion.’

  ‘Harrumph.’ />
  ‘Are we ready, Thad?’ asked Manju.

  ‘Yes yes yes, don’t rush me, girl.’

  Manju rolled her eyes.

  Taff stifled a smile. He searched around with his eyes and found a chair and sat on it. He folded his arms, and let his attention slip. Dougie knew from past experience that the fat cop had no intention whatsoever of watching what was to follow.

  Thaddeus put on his latex gloves. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can do your bloody job properly?’ Thaddeus said to Dougie, nodding at the corpse. Bringing the conversation back on track. ‘By which I mean, stop this bastard before he does the next one?’

  ‘I’ll do my best, old man.’

  The two men shared a look.

  ‘We’re recording,’ said Manju.

  ‘This is the post mortem summary -’ Thaddeus said in dry, carefully enunciated tones into his throat mike.

  As Thaddeus commenced his narration Dougie was staring at Matthew’s powerful beautiful naked corpse: a body that was once fit and strong and full of life and, damn it all, love. Now just a shell of flesh:

  ‘- of my examination of V43721A, formally identified to me as Matthew Michael Baker of 73 Ladbroke Grove, London.’

  Chapter 2

  Julia had a terrible hangover.

  It was, she firmly believed, the worst hangover she’d ever had. So stomach-churningly terrible that she thought she was going to die.

  Time to get up.

  She showered and forced some toast down, butterless because she forgot to butter it, and sipped hot tea which didn’t taste like tea because she could still taste the lime from last night’s tequila shots; but at least it was hot. She staggered out of the house to the bus stop, attacked from above and all around by sunshine.

  By the time the bus arrived in New Cross, Julia was feeling better. Or at least, less like death warmed up. But she was sleepy. Very sleepy indeed. So sleepy she had to be nudged awake by her pal Sonibel, or she’d have missed her stop.