Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  When Dougie arrived he’d explained in detail the Love Chain Murders theory and she’d grasped it instantly. But even so, she’d refused to leave her home.

  ‘Problem?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘You’re saying that I’m now a target for the killer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great.’

  Dougie was taken aback at that.

  ‘Not great, you daft girl, we need to get you –’

  ‘No no no. I stay.’

  And Julia had smiled: cold and ruthless.

  ‘All you have to do,’ she explained, ‘is put an armed covert surveillance team in place. And I’ll go for long walks in a halter top. Flaunt my boobies. Post on Facebook ten times a day. Leave messages on Twitter. Forget to disconnect the My Position on my e-berry and leave it on factory default. Till the bastard seizes his chance and strikes, and then –’

  ‘You want to make yourself into bait?’ Dougie said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dougie shuddered; seeing the likely consequences like a waking dream.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why no?’

  ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘I’ll take the risk.’

  ‘Still too dangerous.’

  ‘It’ll be your job to keep me safe.’

  Dougie thought about it.

  ‘Too late,’ concluded Dougie. ‘We’ve got police cars on the street right now. Armed cops milling about. And he’ll know that. He’ll have electronic surveillance of some kind on this house. Trust me, it’s not hard to do. You can buy a mini-camera for less than a hundred quid and stick it on the lamppost outside someone’s drum. You can plant audio bugs on the windows; there’s a airgun that fires them. So he’ll know that we know. Which means, there’s no way he going to try to abduct you like he did the others. He’ll just take you out with a sniper shot from a distance. There are guns that can fire a guided bullet four or five miles and can be targeted on an individual’s mobile phone. There are bullets that can go through walls. If he wants to kill you, this bastard will kill you.’

  Julia scoffed.

  ‘You’re just trying to scare me. That’s not his MO. Sniper rifle is not –’

  ‘It is,’ said Dougie.

  She looked: give?

  ‘Those shootings in Oxford Street. The serial killer they called the Sniper.’

  She nodded, remembering it.

  ‘That was him. Same perp. Trust me, Julia. We have to keep you safe. Say goodbye to your friends, get in the car. And you’ll stay with us till we’ve got the bastard.’

  That was a week ago.

  A forensic team had subsequently searched Julia’s street and found six hidden micro-cameras and twelve audio bugs on the windows of the house. Gabriel and Harry were now staying with friends. The killer was still at large. And Dougie knew that he had fucked up. This was the best lead he’d had in four years and he’d fucked it up. Because Julia was right. She should have been used as bait. But Dougie hadn’t had the balls for it.

  And now Dougie was visiting Julia Penhall in East Dulwich almost every day, acting as his own Family Liaison Officer. Asking her occasional questions about her sister, just for form’s sake. Checking on the security, but not contributing anything useful or necessary. Mainly just, well, enjoying her company.

  ‘Easy, The Godfather,’ said Dougie, answering her ‘favourite film’ question. Remembering the first time he’d ever seen that film. The utter shock he’d felt when the gigantic Luca Brasi had had his hand pinned to the counter top with a knife, before being garrotted.

  ‘Two or One?’ Julia asked; to say Three would have been a friendship deal-breaker.

  ‘Both. Equally. You?’

  ‘Rififi.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  She gave a ‘shocked’ mime, in several defined stages. It was extravagant and utterly theatrical; talking to Julia was like playing charades with a commedia del arte troupe.

  ‘French film!’ she explained impatiently. ‘Made by an American director with a French-looking name, Jules Dassin. DA-sin not DaSAN. The generally held view is the book was crap and the film is pure genius, which it is. The lead actor was Jules Savarin, he’s a French actor with a wonderful gnarly face, and he played a French gangster with a wonderful gnarly face. It’s the grittiest of gritty noirs, but it’s also got a song and dance sequence, but mainly it’s got the definitive heist sequence, in a jeweller’s, they don’t speak a word for, oh, ages.’

  ‘Best dirty cop movie?’ asked Dougie, memorising all this data.

  ‘Prince Of The City.’

  ‘Nah, Serpico.’

  ‘Do you know any dirty cops?’ she asked. ‘I mean, in real life?’

  Dougie took a moment to make sure his poker face was on.

  ‘Nah. That only happens in the movies. In real life, all cops are incorruptible.’

  She looked at him. She realised he was kidding.

  She laughed.

  ‘Seriously?’

  And so he told her about Roy Hall. Not by name, just as ‘this cop I know.’

  He held nothing back. He talked about his time in Carter Street nick, serving under Roy Hall. He told her about Roy’s dirty deals. The money Roy took from armed robbers. Roy’s involvement in the drugs trade.

  And he told her too about Roy’s murder of a pimp, and the shocking cover up that had followed. And the acid attack that ‘this cop I know’ had – so Dougie firmly believed - engineered upon a female lawyer who was threatening to take him down. He spoke too of how Roy had corrupted a young female PC who went on to become his loyal DC at Carter Street. And how she’d been sucked into Roy’s empire of evil.

  Dougie told it all. It was madness, really, to reveal such dark secrets to a stranger who happened to be the relative of a murder victim. But once Dougie had started, he couldn’t stop.

  ‘And is he still alive? “This cop you know”?’ Julia was surprisingly calm about the revelations she’d heard. Somehow he knew that he could trust her never to betray the fact that he’d betrayed these confidences.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘And the other cop? The woman you talked about? The one Roy corrupted. You loved her, right?’

  ‘I never said so.’

  ‘Ha. I can read subtext. Do you still love her?’

  ‘She was my wife.’

  ‘Oh I see. “Was”. Not any more then? Divorced?’

  ‘She’s dead. She died. Brutal murder. Long story.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Julia was silent a while. ‘What was she like?’

  It was clear that Julia really wanted to know. Her energy, her generosity of spirit, filled and overspilled the room. Dougie found himself shaken by the depth of his fondness for her. And it dawned on him that she felt the connection too.

  He didn’t fancy her though. It wasn’t sexual desire that existed between them. Nor was it a father-daughter thing. It was - he couldn’t define it. It just was.

  ‘Red haired,’ said Dougie, explaining his wife Angela to his potential murder victim new best friend. ‘Gobby. Annoying as fuck half the time.’

  Julia laughed.

  The answer Dougie had wanted to give to Julia but hadn’t, was: ‘She was an awful lot like you.’

  Tom sipped his fourth Starapromen and he read the list again.

  Then he checked it against the Holmes VI on his e-berry, which had a list of all major incidents under active investigation by the specialist and murder squads of London. Five names stood out for him, but after ten minutes surfing the Met Net, he narrowed it down to one.

  Julia Penhall. Twin sister of Sarah Penhall. Supposed next victim of the Love Chain Murderer, perhaps the most baroque and terrifying serial killer of all time.

  Julia was now being held in a safe house, looked after by close protection officers, after clever profiling work by Five Squad suggested that she would be the next target o
f her sister’s murderer. But now, Tom deduced, the killer exactly knew where she was.

  He wondered what he should do with the information.

  His mood was bleak. For Tom had by this point realised that he’d been well and truly suckered. It was now blindingly obvious that someone must have been covertly filming him as he took the list from the shady looking guy in the old trainers who’d approached his table. That guy was almost certainly an old lag, with links to organised crime, and to Jagger himself. Dodgy as fuck in other words.

  Shortly after Tom took the envelope, the news came through on his e-berry that Jagger had escaped from custody, with the assistance of a crew of armed villains. At which moment it occurred to Tom that he had fallen deeply into the proverbial shit. For if it were alleged that Tom had been in some way complicit in the escape - and assuming there was film footage of the envelope handover - Tom would have no comeback. DCI Harry Matheson would have a stranglehold on him.

  Peckham cop receives brown envelope from associate of fugitive villain? In front of a disciplinary tribunal, that would kill Tom’s career stone dead. Pint of Starapromen = Elephant trap.

  Tom hadn’t realised Harry Matheson was quite so smart. Nor he, so dumb.

  Tom was also aware that if he acted on his newly acquired info - by tipping off Number Five Murder Squad that the Met’s security systems were compromised - he risked incurring the wrath of Harry and his similarly corrupt police associates. By telling the truth, he would put himself in jeopardy.

  But there was no way out of it. He had no choice but to do the right thing.

  With a heavy heart, Tom e-berried the number of the Whitechapel Major Incident Room, and made the call.

  Dougie had just pulled up outside his house when he heard a bleep and realised he had some messages on his e-berry.

  He put on the handbrake and checked his in tray. Two messages, both texts. He hardly ever got texts these days which is why he’d mentally tuned out the sound of the ringtone. Both texts were marked Urgent with many exclamation marks. Dougie checked the times of the texts and realised they had been stuck in cyber-space for half an hour or more.

  He read the first text, then swore. Then he read the second text; and he swore even more.

  The fact these were texts not emails meant they came from Taff Davies – who didn’t possess an e-berry, just an old fashioned mobile phone, and who always signed his texts despite being told not to do so. Taff also typed his messages in capital letters, for reasons that remained beyond anyone’s ken.

  The first text from Taff read: PECKHAM PC SAYS JULIA PENHALL’S SAFE HOUSE IS BLOWN. SENDING ARMED UNITS NOW. TAFF.

  The second text was also from Taff, and for once was unsigned. It said:

  TOO LATE.

  Chapter 14

  Fillide arrived at the crime scene just as the body was being taken away.

  She parked her Harley up on the kerb, took off her leather hair band, and shook her dark brown hair free. She never wore a helmet; what was the point? You only, in her opinion, died once. Then she stripped off her leather trousers and jacket and took a dress out of the pannier. A quick shake and it was ready to put on over her scarlet bra and matching red satin panties.

  A few pedestrians gawped at her as she was doing that. She gave them the finger; she could never get used to how prudish were the people of this century.

  The body of Julia Penhall had been found in an alley in Bermondsey, near Chambers Wharf. It was close to the river, in a part of London that still bore the dereliction of abandoned docks. Nearby there were rusty cargo boats berthed opposite the new developments of Wapping Old Stairs. You could hear the tide lap, if you listened hard.

  This particular run-through was easy to miss, and sheltered from view: a good hiding place. Julia had fled there to escape her abductor, but instead she’d bled to death.

  Fillide had read, on her e-berry screen, the data entries of the PC who’d first found the body. The PC had photographed the corpse’s features thoroughly, though the face was covered in blood and hard to ID.

  Then, once a thorough set of scene of crime photos were in the system for the detective team to reference, the astute PC had carefully washed the blood off the face with a wet-wipe before taking a second series of photos. That’s how the New Scotland Yard Central CAD Room had been able to flag this as their High Priority MisPer Julia Penhall, the suspected latest victim of the Love Chain Killer.

  Now the alley was cordoned off with police tape and CSIs in spacesuits were on their knees everywhere you looked, dusting debris and sampling every speck and mark and blood stain they could find.

  Fillide left her motorbike parked on the kerb and walked over to the crime scene, glancing around and upwards as she did so to observe the sightlines.

  Two converted warehouses had upper floor windows that overlooked the death scene, though only just. The alley was invisible from the river; it was a corridor cut in the middle of a pair of banana warehouses. The warehouses were empty now, with blackened bricks, and boarded-up windows, and winches on their upper storeys that were once used to lift cargoes of fruit up from the wharf.

  Gina spotted her and beckoned her over, impatiently. Fillide shrugged, and swaggered across. When she was close enough, she paused and hitched her palms on her hips and tilted her head to one side; then stared at Gina with contempt.

  This was Fillide’s standard gambit when talking to anyone, male or female, who was superior to her in social status. It was a habit she just could not kick.

  ‘House to house,’ Gina instructed. ‘George Row, Jacob Street, Wolsley Street.’ Gina wouldn’t meet her eyes; she hated Fillide’s direct stare trick.

  Fillide continued to stand louchely near to Gina, exuding sexuality and disdain. She despised Gina and the other female cops for the way they looked, and the way they dressed. They wore jeans and jackets just like the men, and they walked like men too. They didn’t even know to flirt. No bravo would ever want to swive such dreary bitches! They had, in Fillide’s opinion, no fuckin’ flamboyance.

  Fillide did, admittedly, sometimes wear a black leather jacket with matching black designer jeans - when performing assignments for Roy, for instance, and when on her motorbike. But that was only because it wasn’t possible to ride side-saddle with a billowing skirt on a Harley Davidson.

  But otherwise, whether she was in the office or on the street, she took care to always be exquisitely garbed, in clothes that were apt for a woman such as herself, renowned as she was for her beauty and her style.

  The dress she wore today, for instance, despite having being crushed in a pannier, was a real eye-catcher. It was a bold and flowing mélange of dark blue and light blue and orange and yellow, made of chiffon as thin as tracing paper that left her slender arms bare; with a skirt that swished like swordplay as she walked. The gown was slightly creased from its journey; but the colours were as rich as the stained glass rose in a cathedral window.

  She also wore silver rings on each of her fingers, from that New Age shop in Camden Market; and silver pendant earrings. And around her bronzed neck was a choker studded with shimmering diamonds set into dark blue velvet; fastened so tightly by her that if she had needed to breathe, she would not have been able to.

  ‘Why?’ Fillide said.

  ‘What?’ snapped Gina, not liking her tone.

  ‘Why waste my talents on the knocking of fuckin’ doors? Fuckin’ Plods can undertake that simple task,’ Fillide taunted. ‘I thought I would try yonder warehouses. Anyone on the upper storeys would have a fine view of the murder scene.’

  ‘We’ve already got two DCs covering that.’ Gina’s tone was steely. ‘Seamus and Taff.’

  ‘I should go also. Those lack-wits may have missed something of import, as they so often do.’

  Gina looked stormy.

  ‘The warehouses are empty,’ Fillide added. ‘Awaiting redevelopment. Whores might go there, to ply their trade. Squatters. It’s an area whose habitués are the very dregs of society,
in short; and hence, my kind of folk.’

  Gina sighed.

  ‘Then go.’

  Dougie Randall approached. He gave Fillide his usual scornful glare.

  ‘Gina,’ he said, positioning himself so he could not see Fillide, though she was right next to him.

  ‘Governor, I feel I may have a useful notion about this case,’ Fillide said.

  Dougie ignored her even more blatantly.

  ‘What is it?’ Gina asked Dougie.

  ‘The scars on the arm,’ Dougie told her. ‘They spell out a message. Come see.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Fillide, in a tone that stayed just the right side of mocking irony. ‘I said, I have a notion about this case that may assist your endeavours.’

  ‘Tell Taff,’ Dougie snapped. As always, he wouldn’t make eye contact with her; it really pissed her off.

  In truth, Ronnie Tindale was the only copper on the team who actually looked at Fillide when he was talking to her. She was a pariah in her own police squad. And in fairness, she knew why that was so. Yet it still stung.

  ‘Gina, come,’ Dougie snapped.

  Gina nodded. Then, also ignoring Fillide, Gina ducked under the crime scene tape and joined Dougie at the murder site.

  Fillide seethed with rage. One day, she vowed, she would kill these condescending knotty-pated fools! But for the moment, the spell-binding laid upon her would allow her to do no such thing. So she took out her slate – her e-berry as they called it – and re-read the case notes to date. As she did so, she mulled upon the various mysteries surrounding the death of Julia Penhall.

  For instance: Why had the victim run here, of all places? The trail of blood and glass indicated Julia had jumped out of the window of a warehouse in Bermondsey Wall, then had staggered randomly for a while. Then she’d walked down Marigold Street, leaving a thicker trail of blood, heading presumably towards the busy thoroughfare of Jamaica Road.