Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘He lost his puppy fat,’ Cat said. ‘Worked out. Became a beautiful young man. But here he is at ten. And here’s Sarah.’

  An arrow against Sarah; her face was framed by a red halo for extra emphasis. Her image enlarged, as did Matthew’s; and the faces cloned and floated off the main photo, so that copies of their two faces in close up were now on either side of the school snap.

  ‘Follow the eyes,’ said Dougie.

  Matthew’s features were enlarged as Catriona zoomed in; it was now clear his eyes were turned to one side. Catriona daubed her screen with a finger, over the image of the main group photo; and a line was drawn on the holo of the photo, following Matthew’s sightline. It inched across the frame. Until the line touched Sarah.

  ‘He’s staring at her,’ said Gina.

  ‘He’s just looking away from the camera,’ suggested Taff.

  ‘No he’s –’

  ‘Yes he is. He’s staring,’ Dougie decided.

  ‘The little devil.’

  ‘He’s staring at Sarah. And who can blame the little nipper? She was a looker, even back then.’

  ‘He loves her,’ Dougie said. ‘Schoolboy crush.’

  ‘She is rather gorgeous,’ Gina conceded.

  ‘Never fades. The old schoolboy crush,’ Dougie said, betraying his own poignant experience. ‘He always loved her. More than his actual girlfriend, possibly. Sad, maybe. But – how could our killer, the sick bastard, know that?’

  ‘Matthew wrote a poem about her,’ said Andy Homerton, reading from his screen.

  ‘Another bloody poem!’ taunted Ronnie.

  ‘It was published, in an anthology. “My first love.” It was about Sarah. It named her, on line four. And he wrote a blog about it, years afterwards, last year in fact. A very funny piece,’ said Andy, who had read every single web entry Matthew had ever posted. ‘Mocking himself, talking about how much he still loved his childhood crush. It was heart-felt, self revealing. It made me weep to be honest. That’s how the killer knew.’

  There was a pause. Dougie walked closer to the holo of the school photo. Then closer still.

  The holo was being projected upon Dougie’s body, children’s faces flickering on his broad torso. And he reached out a hand to the 3D image of Sarah Penhall.

  For a moment - a brief moment of regret - Dougie patted her sweet girlish intangible head. And he stroked the illusion of her long brown hair; as it had been then, before she dyed it purple.

  He stepped back.

  In an instant, Dougie reassessed his whole approach. He abandoned four years worth of conjectures and theories.

  And he started a new line of enquiry.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go with it. Love Chain is the MO. Matthew loved Sarah. I get that. But who does or rather did she love most?’ Dougie asked. ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Plenty of ’em,’ said Catriona. ‘Let me…’ Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed as she speed-read the names on her screen.

  ‘Boyfriend, forget boyfriend. She wasn’t going steady, there were two guys but – nah. Who did Sarah really love most? BFF kind of love?’ Dougie thought hard and fast, and didn’t like it. ‘Surmise: Sister. Twin sister. Two peas in a pod sister. Everyone says they were inseparable. Where’s the bloody sister in this photo?’

  ‘At the back.’ An arrow targeted a child in the back row of the photograph. Serious, a bit dumpy.’ That’s Julia Penhall at ten. Twin of Sarah, identical, but she’d put on a lot of weight in Year Six. Hence, she’s the ugly duckling in this photo.’

  ‘The sister. Julia Penhall. The sister,’ said Dougie. ‘The sister.’ Each time he said it, it sounded worse.

  ‘The fucking sister!’ he roared.

  ‘Getting the address now,’ said Taff.

  ‘Call CAD, dispatch the Area Car and as many ARVs as you can muster, get your skates on,’ said Dougie. ‘The sister is the next target. Julia will be the next to die. Go, go, now!’

  Chapter 12

  ‘Remanded in custody, take the prisoner down,’ said the magistrate.

  The beak’s name was Will McIvor. He was a quietly spoken Scot with a good deal of experience as a stipendiary, and had a background as a litigator in civil cases. He was also a keen yachtsman, with a passion for early music, especially the Venetian lute music of Franciscus Bossinensis and Vincenzo Capirola.

  Tom knew all this because as his prep for the hearing he’d read the magistrate’s biog on his Linked In site, as well as googling him and reading his Facebook threads.

  Tom loved knowing about people; it was his job, but also his joy.

  Grim-faced, Jagger stepped away from the Bench, escorted by a court security guard in a sky-blue uniform. But before he reached the door he stopped, and turned, and looked over at Tom, and he stared.

  The stare slowly grew in intensity and became a message. It wasn’t a stare of intimidation or reproach: it was an offer stare. Tom read it instantly. This man was ready to deal.

  ‘Catch you later,’ Tom said to Brad as they left the court room.

  ‘We’re on duty, man.’

  ‘I’ve got to see a snout.’

  Brad rolled his eyes. ‘You’re a bloody uniform cop, you shouldn’t be doing CID work,’ he said wearily.

  ‘Good lad.’

  Tom patted Brad on the shoulder, and the big guy shrugged, mollified.

  Tom was pleased. Things were going well now between him and his partner. Brad had stopped treating Tom as his idiot younger brother. He no longer got annoyed at Tom’s geekishness and fustian turns of phrase. He wasn’t affronted by Tom’s gaucheness, or by his lack of interest in sport, telly, and girls with big tits. In short Brad had realised that, though he had initially appeared to be a useless twat, Tom was in fact a man who got results.

  Consequently Brad was well on the way to becoming Tom’s loyal henchman.

  It was a trick Tom had played before. He’d discovered early on in life that if you are someone who can make things happen, people will follow you blindly. Even if you are a scrawny pimpled git.

  Tom carried his helmet under his arm as he sauntered down the stone steps to the basement area of the court complex. He signed in and was allowed a ten-minute interview with Jagger. Tom knew he needed to act swiftly, before the lanky villain was shipped back to Wandsworth Prison where he was serving his remand.

  There were three cells beneath the court; the fourth room was set aside for lawyers to talk with clients. That’s where Tom was led. He sat alone at the table and waited five minutes until Jagger arrived, led by a different private security guard in the same wince-making sky-blue uniform.

  ‘Panic button there,’ said the guard, pointing.

  ‘I never panic,’ Tom said calmly. The guard gave him a patronising glance. Tom shrugged; you lose some.

  Tom looked down at the table until the guard had left and it was just him and Jagger. Then he looked up again.

  He said nothing: his practised trick of letting the silence do the work.

  ‘There was a fire,’ said Jagger abruptly, ‘or so I’m told, in the exhibits office of Peckham nick. Am I right, my pimply little fucking nemesis?’

  Tom paused a while. Then nodded.

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Nasty bit of luck that.’

  Tom smiled.

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Tom conceded.

  ‘My brief, he told me about all about it this morning.’ Jagger made an angry face; involuntarily nodding his head sharply once, twice, thrice, like a man biting down on a bullet while his leg is being amputated.

  ‘Did he now? You’d think he had better things to talk about than accidental fires on police premises.’

  ‘Well he did let slip to me, you see, that all the evidence relating to my case was being housed in the Peckham Exhibits Office, and hence was almost certainly destroyed by the fire. On that basis, he and I, being the astute men we undoubtedly are, we pretty much thought the case would be abandoned.’

  Jagger had his own rococo way wi
th words; Tom admired it. He chose to keep his own responses brief, buttoned down: ‘And yet that didn’t happen,’ he said.

  ‘No it did not.’ Jagger was clearly aggrieved.

  ‘That’s because,’ Tom said, smiling, ‘I made a decision to store the stolen incense in another nick. It was moved yesterday morning, before the fire. So there was no need for the prosecution to disclose to your lawyer that the evidence had been lost. Because, in fact, it hadn’t been. Lost, that is.’

  Jagger forced a smile.

  ‘Why the fuck would you do a thing like that?’ said Jagger, marvelling.

  ‘No idea.’ Tom smiled back. ‘Just playing a hunch.’

  ‘I’m going down, ain’t I?’ Jagger said.

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘Even though the fucking fix is fixed, tight as a virgin’s sphincter.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You knows that it is, my boy.’

  ‘I did have some inkling of that state of affairs,’ Tom conceded.

  ‘The idea being, I should walk away.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You have got some fucking nerve, boy.’

  ‘Piss.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Piss. I’m new and I’m marking out my territory with piss. Like dogs do. Piss. It’s all about status. A urinary declaration of power. You follow my metaphor?’

  ‘I do.’ Jagger was mellow now. He recognised a fellow scoundrel – or at least, he thought he did, for that was another of Tom’s favourite stratagems.

  Tom was aware he was playing a dangerous game here; but he was playing it well. He knew that Peckham nick, where he was currently based, was notoriously corrupt. His boss DCI Harry Matheson, former right hand man of the legendarily bent Roy ‘the Boy’ Hall, was the head of CID at Peckham, and he ran the area as his private fiefdom.

  So it was a reasonable surmise that Jagger was paying off Harry Matheson. And it therefore followed that Harry would have no intention of letting a scrawny little plod diminish his extensive Christmas present list. Tom was fully aware of all this before he had performed his act of noble cause corruption: the fitting up of Jagger. And so, mindful of these dark political undercurrents, Tom had persuaded DCI Bob Brown in Streatham to take on the Jagger case.

  It was instant brownie points for Brown and his CID team: a major arrest involving a man who had abused and corrupted innocent youths. Harry Matheson and his crooked CID team were thus totally outwitted. While the Streatham DCI got a pat on the back, and a boost to his clear up rates. With Tom remaining quietly in the wings; a puppet master who was too canny to be seen holding the strings.

  ‘I have people who look after me,’ Jagger said, almost plaintively.

  ‘Do you now?’

  ‘But they say, in this particular instance, they ain’t gonna help me.’

  ‘That’s because it’s gone too far.’

  The press coverage about Jagger had been relentless. He was not a paedophile, but you’d never know that from the stories being run about him. Only a fool would try to defend Jagger in a climate like that.

  ‘So I only got me the one card to play,’ said Jagger.

  ‘No way,’ said Tom; hiding his hopefulness.

  ‘You can make that evidence disappear.’

  ‘Can’t be done.’

  ‘Or you could maybe discover it was all planted. By some nasty evil woodentop. We can provide a scapegoat, easy, it doesn’t have to be you or nothing.’

  Jagger grinned at his own nefariousness. Tom mentally yielded him a point for his quick and logical thinking.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Tom said.

  ‘Then just turn a blind eye.’

  ‘Blind eye?’

  ‘Don’t try and find me.’

  ‘Find you?’

  Jagger shook his long donkey-like head in despair, marvelling at Tom’s idiocy.

  ‘When I escape,’ Jagger said calmly. ‘Cause in about forty minutes time, the prison van I’ll be travelling in is gonna crash, about half a mile from Wandsworth. And a bunch of blaggers with shooters and fucking will i. am from Black Eyed Peas masks on their fucking boat races will break open the cages in the van, in one of which I will be, are you following me?’ Tom nodded. ‘And that’ll be it, my boy, I’ll be up on me toes and away. I fancy I might move back to Ealing. I’ve got a house over there, see. No one’ll be any the effing wiser.’

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘Ah, so you know about the house in Ealing, do you?’

  ‘I do now.’

  Jagger grinned, sadly. ‘You’d have found out, sooner or later. Indefatigable, that’s what you are. That’s what Harry calls you.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Cunt too. Indefatigable cunt, that’s what he says.’

  Tom had an uncomfortable moment. Harry Matheson was a bad enemy to make this early on in his police career.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ Tom said, steely.

  ‘Nah. Bribing you,’ said Jagger, slyly.

  ‘I can’t be bribed.’

  ‘Yeah, you can. Every man has got his price.’ Jagger was grinning like a loon now, his head bobbing with excitement. ‘And I knows your price, I do, I really do, my pimply little boy. Shall I tell you what it is?’

  ‘I can’t be bought,’ Tom insisted.

  ‘Information. That’s your price. Your drug of choice. Am I right?’

  Tom thought about it.

  ‘Information about what?’

  Jagger crowed: fish landed.

  ‘It’s my stock in trade, see. I buy information. And I sell it. I’m a buyer and seller of knowledge. That’s why Harry Matheson has got himself a house in Saint Lucia, ’cause he always knows what shit is coming his way, ’cause of me. That’s why no one ever turns over none of my warehouses or nicks any of my kids, without me knowing about it first. I’m king of the datum in Bounded London. And that’s why no one could ever touch me. Till you came along. Cheeky boy, you are, ain’cha? I sure as fuck didn’t see you coming. So I asked Harry, what can I do to this little twat that’ll ensure I don’t get sent to jail? And he said, “Nothing, my son, knock it on the’ead. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime, you know how it goes eh?” So fair enough, I thought, and I changed me tack. And I said what can I tell this little fucker that’s gonna keep ’im quiet and out of me hair? And he laughed at that, he liked that idea, and then he told me what I should tell you. Exactly what. He defined the “what”, not to put too fine a point on it. And the “what” is a hook you’re gonna swallow and shit out your arse, zit-boy!’ Jagger hugged himself with delight; his skeleton-thin fingers clutching his puny shoulders as he rocked from side to side in his chair.

  Then Jagger waited. And Tom said nothing.

  That lasted a while.

  ‘And do you want me to tell you what that “what” actually is?’ Jagger persisted.

  ‘Yes. I do. What’s your price?’ Tom said.

  ‘What I said. Your blind eye, when I leg it.’

  Tom nodded, considering it.

  ‘And what’s the information that I’m expected to love so much? What is, indeed, this infamous “what”?’

  Jagger looked around, glanced up at the camera.

  ‘It’s off,’ said Tom. ‘I asked for it to be off.’

  ‘Jam it,’ said Jagger.

  Tom took out his jammer and pointed it at the camera. He pressed the Scramble button.

  Jagger waited.

  Finally he was satisfied.

  ‘Someone else has been buying information,’ he said quietly. ‘Not from me or my sources - this fella, he’s got his own ways in. But it leaves a trail, even in cyberspace. And that’s how I knows that ’e, whoever ’e is, has been finding out about police business. Confidential police business, if you catch me drift. In particular, ’e’s been downloading confidential police business that’s to do with the addresses of safe houses. Yeah, scout’s fucking honour! This little bastard has a list of police safe houses
! And I can get you that very same list, if you’d like me to. I can get you the names of every witness being protected in those very same safe houses by the Metropolitan Fucking Police this very week. Would you like to see that list, my indefatigable little C, U, N, T?’

  Tom thought about it. He knew he couldn’t say no.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘But let me just explain how it is,’ Tom said, in cold clipped tones. ‘From now on, Jagger, you’re on your own. If you can do a bunk and stay in hiding, good luck to you, but I won’t help you in any way. And you and I will never meet again. Wherever I am, don’t be there. If you see me in Oxford Street get a bus to Bluewater. If you see me in the pub, go to AA. If I move to Ealing, you and your boys and girls will have to move to Walthamstow. You got me?’

  ‘You ain’t gonna live long, you know that?’ Jagger sneered. ‘You ain’t gonna live long enough to start shaving, that’s what Harry says. No offence lad, I just figured you’d appreciate an honest prognosis.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances. Where’s the list?’

  ‘When you leave the court, go to the pub opposite,’ Jagger said, all business now. ‘The Duke of Clarence. Buy a point of Starapromen, make sure it’s got the name of the beer on the glass. Carry an Evening Standard. Open it at the Sports page. Sit on a table on your own. Someone will pass you the list. Okay?’

  Tom nodded. Deal.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Favourite gangster film?’ asked Julia.

  Dougie and Julia were in the kitchen of the police safe house, a detached property in Shawbury Road, East Dulwich. He’d brought some bottles of Belgian beer and now he was ‘debriefing’ her. Though in truth, there was nothing to be debriefed. Julia had already told him everything she could tell him. So really, he was just hanging out. The kids were with Bev. It wasn’t Wednesday, so it wasn’t Gina’s night to stay over. And Dougie was lonely. Hence, off he went to the police safe house to shoot the breeze with a potential murder victim.

  So much for a social life.

  Julia had been understandably shocked when, fifteen minutes after Dougie had stumbled on the Love Chain hypothesis, a convoy of armed response vehicles had pulled up outside her house and a man with a Heckler and Koch carbine had banged upon the door. But she’d been quick to grasp the danger she was in.