Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘Why Louise?’

  ‘It was my grandmother’s name.’

  ‘Father’s mother or mother’s mother?’

  ‘My – our - father’s mother.’

  ‘Does your father have a middle name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Anthony.’

  ‘What’s Sarah’s favourite food?’

  Julia thought, for rather too long: distracted by the wrong sorts of memories.

  ‘Faster,’ prompted Dougie. ‘What’s her favourite food?’

  ‘Toast. White toast. Thick white toast, with too much butter.’

  ‘What’s her favourite colour?’

  ‘Black. Is black a colour? Black.’

  ‘What’s her favourite word?’

  ‘Me. Me me me!’ Julia was sounding hysterical.

  ‘Easy, now.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Dougie took a break, then resumed, in the same calm tone.

  ‘What colour top was she wearing when you went clubbing that night?’

  ‘Which night?’

  ‘The night before she disappeared. The night you went out on the piss. The sixteenth of April. A Sunday. The night they showed Comic Relief on the BBC. The Sunday papers had a story about a plane crash in Thailand, twelve Britons died.’

  ‘Ah yes of course.’

  ‘What colour top was she wearing?’

  ‘Sorry, can’t remember.’ She wrinkled her brow, fiercely. ‘Maybe –’

  ‘Let it go. Move on. Which club did you go to that night?’

  ‘Priapus.’

  Dougie knew of it; it was a satyr club. A place where sex shows and intoxicant incense were blind-eyed by the authorities.

  ‘Why would you go to such a place?’ Dougie asked, though he shouldn’t have, it wasn’t pertinent to the case.

  She shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s fun.’

  Behind his poker face, Dougie seethed. This stupid girl didn’t seem to understand how wrong it was to patronise evil places like that. In his candid opinion, all such clubs should be closed down. They were havens for hell bastards; they were, quite literally, dens of depravity. But for some reason the Vice Squad seemed to not give a damn about the satyr strip clubs and the brothels specialising in resurrected whores that had sprung up in the human zones of London. It was one of the many iniquities that made Dougie despair of the modern world.

  ‘We just saw the floor show, we didn’t, like, do the other stuff,’ Julia admitted.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ His tone was deadpan; that took some effort.

  Young people! They had, in Dougie’s opinion, no bloody idea. They’d grown into adulthood taking all this supernatural shit for granted. They didn’t appreciate that,

  up until ten years ago, satyrs were nothing but a legend. Demons were just a myth. Monsters from Hell were a staple of anime series and comic books, but they had no place in the real world.

  But then everything changed. Dimensional Breaches occurred all across the capital. Four ghastly ‘Irruptions’ spewed out armies of demonic and damned monsters from the parallel universe that even the most conservative of physicists referred to now as ‘Hell’.

  These days, the world was a very different place.

  For the war with the demons and the damned had given way to an unendurable peace. After days of savage fighting, the leaders of London had agreed a ceasefire; and had negotiated a terrible bargain with the invaders.

  Overnight London had acquired a vibrant, wildly diverse, immigrant community from Hell. The rest of the world had looked on in disbelief as the capital city of the United Kingdom was transformed into two interlocked nation states: Demon City, self-governed by the Hell creatures; and the warlock-controlled rest of the city, aka Human London.

  And ever since then, London’s hard borders with the rest of Britain had been rigorously policed by both human soldiers and winged monsters.

  This was the world in which Sarah and Julia Penhall had grown up. A world in which demons from Hell could buy houses, or work in shops and factories, or set up businesses, or play in football teams. A world in which grotesquely formed ‘bestial’ demons had their own regiment in the city’s army. A world in which satyrs with pricks the size of a burly man’s arm performed in strip clubs for the entertainment of thrill-seeking fools.

  Dougie felt old and bitter; he wished he’d been born into another age. He read Dickens a lot for just that reason.

  ‘Where exactly is that?’ he said calmly, of the satyr club; though he knew exactly where it was.

  ‘It’s next to The Venue in New Cross. It used to be a lap dancing club before it became - well.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to go there?’

  ‘Sarah’s. She’d read about it in London Online.’

  ‘What was on the cover of London Online that week?’

  She thought, and a smile flickered.

  ‘The Mayor. It was a photograph of the Mayor, the real one not the Demon one, in Nazi uniform. It was a joke, a Photoshop job. They got into trouble over it.’

  ‘Which Tube line did you take from your home to the club?’

  ‘We didn’t, we went by bus.’

  ‘What number bus?’

  ‘No idea, I just followed Sarah.’

  ‘You didn’t notice the number of the bus?’

  ‘I don’t notice things. I’m absent minded. Sarah is the one who notices things. She’s the clever twin. I’m just -’

  After the pause passed the five second mark, Dougie continued:

  ‘What colour was the bus?’

  ‘Red, obviously.’

  ‘Where did you sit? Upper or lower deck?’

  ‘Upper.’

  ‘At the front or at the back?’

  ‘Front. Front seat, so we could see the view.’

  ‘What was the view?’

  ‘I didn’t notice, I was daydreaming.’

  ‘What colour top was Sarah wearing?’

  ‘Blue. Sky blue. You could see her bra straps through the top. Sleeveless top. No jacket, even though it was cold. She had lovely arms. You could see the goosebumps. I had my big hoodie on. She teased me about it. She smelled of perfume, rose perfume. We were giggling, we’d never been to a satyr club before. We thought it would be a hoot.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me about the satyr.’

  ‘He’s tall. Eleven foot. His cock is – you know how this works?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s a nature demon. Permanently erect penis. It’s very funny. They’re harmless apparently. They get paid well. It’s not exactly exploitation.’

  ‘I’m cool with it, young people like to experiment.’

  ‘Some girls...well. I’m not one of those girls.’

  ‘Was Sarah?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me about the man,’ Dougie asked.

  She frowned.

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘You know. The one who was staring at Sarah at the satyr club.’

  ‘How did you know about the man?’ Sarah was visibly shaken.

  Dougie felt a surge of triumph. A lucky guess; he was famous for them.

  ‘Tell me about him. What did he look like?’

  ‘Young. Sticky up hair. Black hair. He had product or something in it. Big eyes. He was creepy. He asked her to dance and she said no. Then he fucked off. But later on, we saw him again, staring.’

  ‘When did you first see him?’

  ‘Soon after we arrived. Three drinks in. We were drinking cocktails. Gabriel had a bottle of vodka in his coat. Gabriel’s my friend from Uni.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s a hell creature.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But cute.’

  ‘Did she dance with anyone?’ Dougie said. ‘After she rebuffed the staring man?’

  ‘Oh yes, she loved to dance. She was, is, a fabulous dancer. She was – yeah, she danced. Mainly with the other boy
s from Uni. Amer, Bogdan, Elliot. Gabriel too, even though he can’t dance and kept bumping into people. Well it was just a laugh.’

  ‘What was the man wearing? The staring man?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘What cocktail did you drink?’

  ‘Mai-tai.’

  ‘What song were they playing when you drank your first cocktail?’

  ‘Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.’

  ‘What colour were the man’s eyes?’

  She almost paused and chose not to; and the memory came:

  ‘Grey. He came up close you see. He stared at Sarah, his face in her face, this close, too close. Then I patted his arm and he stared at me. Grey eyes, eczema on his face. Ugly. Skinny. Creepy.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘A top. A T-Shirt. A red T –shirt, with writing on it. Night’s Dawn, the band, Night’s Dawn, he must have seen them at a gig. He was twitchy, I think he was on something, drugs I mean. And he had a tattoo on his arm. A snake tattoo.’

  She paused, clearly shocked that all these memories had been there all along.

  ‘That’s all I remember.’

  ‘That’s all we need.’

  Gina was waiting for Dougie when the interview concluded. Lisa Aaronovich led Julia away, and Dougie conferred quietly with Gina.

  ‘Club CCTV?’ he asked.

  ‘We have a match. Young male, staring eyes, sticky-up black hair, red T-shirt. Liam Prior. He has previous. Aggravated assault. Burglary. He’s done time.’

  ‘Let’s pick him up.’

  It took them three hours to locate Liam Prior, via a satellite lock on his mobile phone. He’d bought the phone on the usual Pay as You Go basis beloved of scrotes everywhere. But he’d made the purchase with his own debit card, which was registered to his genuine home address. It was a cheap phone too, easily hackable and traceable by the Met’s computers.

  He was, in short, like so many of Dougie’s clientele, a fucking idiot.

  Seamus Malone took charge of the pre-arrest recce, and he sent e-berry photos of the scene to the Armed Response Unit from his street vantage point. Within the hour, Dougie was parked up in a van around the corner from the suspect’s drum, where he could follow proceedings on the van’s monitors. Armed officers had already arrived quietly in unmarked cars, and were masking up ready for the assault. Dawn was their preferred time of entry; but Dougie wanted this to happen now.

  When everyone was in position, Dougie said ‘Go, go, go,’ into his throat mike. Then he watched the assault via the helmet cameras of three of the AFOs and the stationery cameras positioned outside the house.

  First he saw four masked men use a metal Enforcer to smash down the front door. Then six gas-masked Men in Black carrying Heckler and Koch carbines abseiled down from helicopters; before blowing open the first floor windows with their flash-bangs. The front and back doors were smashed in, and he heard tear gas grenades explode. His eyes roamed from screen to screen; he watched in awe as the entire building was secured within nine minutes of his last ‘Go.’

  And he smiled. Gotcha, you bastard.

  Dougie got out of the van and walked two streets to dekko the scene for himself.

  As he had been briefed via his e-berry during his brief walk, Liam Prior aka ‘the staring man’ was in the bedroom, flat on his back on the bed, dead and cold. His face was a mask of terror, with no attempt to ‘set’ the features into a semblance of normality. The body had been stripped naked by the killer and resembled a waxwork dummy.

  Dougie inspected the corpse. He noted the absence of defence injuries. He saw, with the aid of a strong magnifying lens, the tell tale scars on the abdomen and chest and arms. The body had been eviscerated with a surgical trocar and pump, then embalmed. He also saw faint scars behind the ears, and guessed that the brains had been removed by that route.

  Manipulated, then discarded; that had been Liam’s destiny.

  Dougie paced around every room in the house, looking for clues about Prior’s psychology. It wasn’t hard to read: lonely saddo nonce perve. There were, in Dougie’s experience, a lot of them around.

  The house was owned by Liam‘s mother, but she was away on holiday. She’d have a shock when she returned.

  Prior’s room was like a bedsit, dark and squalid, with rotting kebabs and half-eaten packets of crisps in odd corners. Elsewhere, though, the house was the epitome of neat suburban much-dusted domesticity. Knick-knacks on shelves. Toby Jugs in a glass case. Antimacassars on the sofa in the living room. A television set hidden inside a wooden cabinet. It was like a time capsule.

  Dougie returned to Prior’s room. Prior had been lifted on to a stretcher, prior to being body-bagged. There was an indentation in the bed where he had been lying for, it was estimated, six days after being slain. The walls were covered with posters of heavy metal bands and the room stank of body odour and anti-perspirant that, Dougie guessed, Prior had liberally sprayed around to conceal his body odour. Built into one wall was a massive computer screen, fifty inches wide, 3D and 4G.

  Now that the body had been lifted away, Dougie could see that the sheets on the bed were stiff with old spunk.

  The profile was easy enough. Prior was socially dysfunctional, unemployed and unemployable, located on the tragic end of the autistic spectrum, and hence easily seducible by a serial killer who knew how to groom suckers via the internet.

  Dougie took one last look at Prior’s corpse. Eyes wide open. Staring. Even in his coffin, he would still be staring. Dougie hoped for that reason they would get the body cremated.

  Dougie walked out of the house and breathed fresh air. Gina joined him.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Dougie said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it then.’

  ‘Prior was just a pawn,’ said Gina. ‘His job was to lure Sarah out of the club. So the killer could do his stuff.’

  Dougie nodded.

  ‘At least we know for sure who’re we’re dealing with.’

  ‘Could be copycat. Everyone knows about the Embalmer killings.’

  Dougie shook his head; he didn’t favour that. ‘Get the City Police out here,’ said Dougie, though he hated those bastards. ‘I want anything they can give us. I want a forensic demonologist to scour the scene. If there’s any supernatural involvement, I want to know. If not, we’ll plough our own furrow. From this moment on, I want every available officer on this case. Whitechapel CID, uniform, pull some bodies off the Three Squad Butcher of Clerkenwell case and the One Squad gang killing. This is our absolute top priority. I want Sarah Penhall, alive.’

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘But that’s not going to happen, is it?’ said Dougie sadly.

  Gina was silent for a while.

  ‘The sister is an identical twin, isn’t she?’ she said.

  ‘The spitting image of Sarah, once you discount the hair. When I first saw her – well. It gave me a turn.’

  Gina hesitated, on the verge of saying something.

  ‘Get moving,’ said Dougie brusquely.

  Gina took out her e-berry; and began to type.

  Chapter 7

  Sarah had the run of the house. It was amazing how much freedom the bastard allowed her.

  For the first two days of her captivity she’d hardly seen him. He’d left her chained up in the garage, and he just turned up at night to make sure she was fed, and to empty the potty and provide fresh toilet paper. Then on that third day he had unchained her. And he had allowed her to walk to the toilet, unaccompanied.

  And she had found, to her immense horror, that she couldn’t leave. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make herself approach the front door, or the back door, or even the windows. That’s when she realised he had enchanted her.

  After that day he didn’t bother with the chains. She slept in his bedroom, in his big double bed, with awful psychedelic orange wallpaper on every wall. It was like living inside the dream sequence of a Hitchcock movie. She cooked in
his kitchen. She spent the days and evenings watching telly on his big flat screen TV. The box for it was still in the hall; she wondered if he’d bought it especially for her. There were no channels available on the TV itself, presumably to prevent her watching the news reports. But there was a Blu Ray player and boxes of Blu Rays, hundreds of them. And they were good films, all of them. Because he knew what all her favourite films were, of course: she’d posted her top 100 up on Facebook. And he’d also been good at guessing the films she hadn’t actually seen but would like. Such as A Taste of Honey. And Miracle in Milan. And Visconti’s The Leopard. He’d put a Post It on that one saying AMAZING. And it was.

  The house itself was awful. As well as the orange wallpaper in the hallway and main bedroom, there were bright scarlet walls in two of the other rooms, and a Bridget Riley pattern on the ceiling in the living room. The house was like a time capsule from the days when Dark Side of the Moon was considered a cool album, and when Jon Anderson sang profound gibberish for Yes. Sarah wondered if Gogarty had once been a hippy and a druggie. But seeing him now – this fat, sedate, slow-talking boring old codger - the thought seemed absurd.

  On the sixth day she heard a ring at the front door bell, and she ran with delight down the hallway and found herself able to open the door, and saw the postman in his red jacket and shorts standing there.

  ‘Recorded delivery,’ he said.

  And she wept tears of relief. And she tried, with every atom of her resolve, to beg this man to rescue her. She formed the words in her head: ‘Help.’ ‘I’ve been kidnapped.’ ‘Call the police!’

  But none of these words emerged from her lips. Instead she said, ‘How may I help you, kind sir?’

  And the postman gave her a funny look, because of her tears, and her strange use of language, which was of course the consequence of Gogarty’s binding spell.

  And he said, ‘You sign here, love.’

  So she signed on his e-berry. Her mind was in overdrive, and she tried to be clever and write PLEASE HELP ME I’VE BEEN KIDNAPPED instead of her signature. But that didn’t work; and she squiggled an unintelligible scrawl. Then the postman handed her the package.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘I bid thee farewell,’ she told him.

  The postie walked back down the drive, his body language tense.