Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘Let’s narrow it down first,’ said Dougie. ‘Killed. Kild. K, I, L, D. Is that it? Dumb and can’t spell for T O F E Y or actually rather brilliantly clever? Let’s surmise clever. So those letters don’t belong there. She’s not saying “killed” she’s saying “k,i,l,d”. Get it? A house, a street, beginning KILD. Or ILD. Or DILK. Or – what the fuck. Get on with it.’

  Catriona was already typing.

  ‘Hurry the fuck up!’ Dougie advised.

  ‘Easy,’ Catriona murmured. Then she read the screen. ‘There’s an Ildminster Square. East One. Four blocks from here.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘What else was on her body?’ said Dougie.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gina. ‘No other messages.’

  ‘Mutilations?’

  Catriona flashed up the path lab report as a holo. ‘Broken skull. Broken wrists. Two broken fingers.’

  ‘Why broken fingers?’

  ‘She fell from a fourth floor window.’

  ‘And landed on her hands.’ Dougie made a palms out gesture. ‘Breaking the wrists. And banged her head. Fracturing it. How could she break her fingers too?’

  ‘Which fingers?’ asked Gina.

  ‘Left hand, first and third fingers.’ Catriona said.

  ‘First is the little finger yes?’ asked Dougie.

  Taff finger-waggled.

  ‘But if you start at the thumb, it’s third and fifth fingers,’ he said, after giving it considerable thought.

  ‘Marks, abrasions?’

  ‘Just some puncture marks,’ Catriona said.

  ‘Where? How?’

  ‘On her thigh. Small. Pin pricks.’

  ‘Show,’ Dougie said.

  A photograph of Julia Penhall’s thigh flashed up on the Holo Wall: an eerie mid-air image. The skin looked unbroken.

  ‘Here it is magnified,’ said Catriona, and the image enlarged and they could see tiny puncture marks in the skin.

  ‘How many?’ Dougie asked.

  Andy counted fastest. ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Thirteen? Thirteen! Thirteen is: One, and Three.’ Dougie waggled the first and third fingers of his hand. ‘Fact: the first and third fingers of one hand were broken. Plus, thirteen puncture marks. Ildminster Square. Thirteen Ildminster Square.’

  Catriona hit Google Earth. As the images flickered, Dougie grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled on it.

  ‘Take that to the cell,’ he told Taff. ‘Show it to Gogarty.’

  Taff nodded. He walked out of the incident room.

  Dougie waited. He could see Thirteen Ildminster Square on Google Earth; it was a house just like any other house.

  ‘Cell camera,’ he said.

  Catriona turned on the CCTV link and projected it on to the Holo Wall. They saw Gogarty in his cell. Seated on the bunk, cross legged, still.

  They watched. Eventually the cell door opened and the uniformed gaoler walked in, followed by Taff. Taff said nothing but handed the piece of paper to Gogarty as if it were a parking ticket.

  Gogarty read the piece of paper silently. They all knew that the writing on the piece of paper read: 13 Ildminster Square, E1.

  Gogarty looked up at the cell camera. Without being asked to, Catriona magnified the image.

  Gogarty stared into the camera – knowing that Dougie would be looking at him – and there was hate in his eyes.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Dougie.

  Chapter 21

  Detective Constable Tom Derry parked up in Ildminster Square, a few houses down from the already infamous House of Horror.

  He marvelled at the media scrum on the pavement, just a few yards from him. He could see at least six news helicopters hovering above the square. His car monitor was rolling out a 24 hour TV news cycle most of which seemed to be about Gogarty and his murders.

  Tom waited for a while, holding the wheel of the stationery car, absorbing the spirit of the place. Something was perturbing him. A chill? No, a scent. A feeling. An ambience of evil. It made him shudder. And it reminded him – reminded him of –

  Skip back eleven years.

  Eight-year-old Tom Derry touched his grandmother’s face and he knew that she was dead. An eerie mood engulfed him; no not a mood, a scent. He could physically smell the wrongness of it.

  He’d always thought his gran would live for ever. And now she was dead. Her lips weren’t trembling the way they always did when she fell asleep during a film. Her limbs were stiff. Her skin was papery and had turned a funny green colour. Her heart had failed, so he’d been told, and he knew he would never be able to speak to her, or tease her, or laugh at her stupid jokes, ever again.

  Gran had been laid out on the sofa in the living room. It had taken Tom five minutes to clear off the clutter so the women of the family could lift her up. Tom had suggested they should phone for an ambulance but Mum pooh-poohed him and said it was too late for that. His gran had been found buried under leaves in a remote part of Little Millhole Wood, after a week’s absence. Tom’s Mum had tracked her down after several days of searching, and had loaded her into the back of Mrs Latimer’s van. Then Mum and Mrs Latimer had brought her home.

  It all seemed strange to Tom. In the normal world, Grans didn’t vanish for a week and die in the woods. And Mums didn’t put dead bodies into the back of vans and bring them back covered in mould. And rotting corpses didn’t lie on sofas, in front of the telly, while everyone was having their tea. That’s just not the way things worked, for most families.

  But Tom knew it wasn’t his place to query the way his mother liked to do things. So when the body was lugged in, he did as he was told. He diligently cleared all the rubbish off the sofa, including a packet of biscuits under the cushions that he’d been wondering about for months, and about fifteen quid in loose change. Then he watched as Mum and Mrs Latimer arranged Gran’s body on the sofa. And he carried on watching while they stripped and cleaned the corpse with meticulous care.

  And - after they’d all had their tea - he remained there looking at the body when Mum and her best friend Mrs Latimer went off to drown their sorrows in the pub. For an hour and a half he sat staring at the dead body of his gran. Tears spilled down his cheeks for a while, but eventually he’d had enough of that and he stopped weeping.

  He really had loved Gran. She was very formal and old fashioned and she could be sarcastic. But Gran could also be very funny, in her own droll way. They used to watch telly together and she didn’t mind that he had a penchant for Netflix and foreign films with subtitles. And she never made fun of him the way his mum and aunts always did; nor did she ever mock him for being a pathetic, spineless, un-Gifted male.

  Tom thought back on all the good times he’d had with his gran, and he knew that he would miss her terribly.

  Then Gran opened her eyes and smiled.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ she said.

  He was speechless.

  Gran laboured herself upright and got up on to her two skinny varicose-veined legs, and tottered over to him and kissed him on the cheek. Her hair was mostly grey but had been badly blue-rinsed. Her skin had the texture of sandpaper, and even though the mould had been cleaned off her face she was still greenish in hue. Her belly was swollen, as if she was pregnant; Tom guessed that was because of the bacteria brewing in her gut.

  She beamed at him with pale lips and eyes that weren’t in focus. And Tom stared back in horror.

  ‘Our little secret eh, Tom?’ she said. And Tom forced a smile.

  ‘Yes Gran,’ he said.

  Soon afterwards Mum and Mrs Latimer came home, smelling of booze, and quickly accepted that Gran had risen from the dead.

  Gran stayed in that state – Mum called it a ‘zombie re-incarnation’ – for another two years, enduring regular enemas and whole body scrubs. But then bodily decay finally cracked the old lady from tip to toe, and that was that.

  Skip forward again.

  Thursday the fourteenth of July, 2023.

  Tom got out of the car, brimming wit
h energy, shrugging off his brief flash of olfactory déjà vu.

  This was his first day as a fast-track CID officer.

  The promotion, as Tom had never ceased to remind his former colleague Brad, was his reward for the vital role he had played in cracking the Love Chain Murder case; when he had alerted Number Five Murder Squad to the hacking of the New Scotland Yard safe house files by Gogarty.

  That same day Jagger had escaped from the van taking him to the remand prison, due to a mixup with another prisoner who was due to be released. And he was now on the run, presumably in Ealing, but Tom had made no attempts to track him down. It was a fair price to pay, in Tom’s opinion.

  As for DI Harry Matheson – well, Tom would deal with that crooked scrote’s attempts at blackmail if and when he had to. But for the moment, he had other priorities.

  Tom walked along the pavement towards the press corps outside 13 Ildminster Square. He was wearing a leather jacket and Doc Martens, and he’d not shaved for a week to make himself, or so he hoped, more macho.

  The Gogarty house was a part of a small terrace, close to the Royal London Hospital. It was a quiet cul de sac with houses on only three sides – not really a square at all – facing a leafy communal garden. And it led off Sidney Square, which then led to Ashfield Yard. It was, Tom knew, just ten minutes walk from Leman Street Police Station. The houses in the terrace were small but elegant, built of grey London stone, and happily out of sight of the nearby Tower Hamlets high rises. The architecture was 1830s at a guess, Tom decided.

  However there were double glazed windows at Number 13. And pebbledash had been badly applied over old bricks at the front. It stuck out like a sore thumb - as incongruous as a council house in Belgravia.

  The forensics van was parked outside and CID and patrol cars were double parked along the road, wheels up on kerbs. A uniform cop stood at the front gate of Number 13 with a clip-board and a weary scowl, repelling all-comers with his stare.

  Tom approached the house. His way was blocked by the mob of journalists who were clustered on the wrong side of the METROPOLITAN POLICE – CRIME SCENE tape. Shouting at the gateway PC, gossiping among themselves, swaying this way and that like a shoal of prurient fish. Cameras flashed. Banter was hurled back and forth. Sticks of incense were sucked. Bored men and women fretted, waiting for the occurrence of something, anything at all, that they could falsely or exaggeratedly report. The uncovering of the secrets of the House of Horror was tomorrow’s big story; the press were relishing their field day.

  Tom took a deep breath, then pushed his way through the journalists, feeling like a celebrity as cameras flashed in his face and stupid questions were asked:

  ‘Is Gogarty the child of Satan?’

  ‘Is there any evidence of ritual abuse?’

  ‘How many thousands has this monster killed?’

  Tom slid his way through, murmuring, apologising, trying to convey through his body language that he was just a minor cog in the police machine, not at all worthy of their attention. Which indeed he was.

  He reached the clipboard copper guarding the crime scene. The cop was tall, blond, Kevlared up, and carried a handgun in a holster at his hip. ‘Bloody scrum, isn’t it?’ Tom said grinning.

  ‘Beat it, son.’

  Tom felt his confidence ebb, but he dug in.

  ‘Detective Constable Tom Derry. I start today,’ he said, showing his warrant card, and wishing his voice weren’t so high pitched.

  The Kevlared cop stared at him. Tom knew that expression only too well: disbelief and astonishment followed by resentment. No one loves a precocious over-achiever.

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  The blond copper seemed poised between saluting and giving Tom a clip on the ear. Tom cracked a boyish smile.

  ‘Coppers look younger all the time eh?’ he joshed, awkwardly.

  The blond cop scrutinised Tom’s out-thrust warrant card, saw it had a valid holo, and nodded. All was well.

  ‘DC Thomas Derry, assigned to Number Five Murder Squad,’ Tom said. The PC typed this all up on his keypad, then tilted his pad and took a photo of Tom for good measure.

  ‘Bring us out a cup of tea, eh?’

  ‘You got it,’ Tom said, in a tone he hoped was laddishly confident.

  Gogarty had lived in this house under the alias of Andrew Bishop for nearly seventeen years. Tom wondered how many hidden identities he’d had, other than the nine that Five Squad knew about.

  Tom pushed the front door, which was on the latch, and went inside. The wallpaper offended his eyes, but he recognised the style from his online briefing. It was a shocking shade of orange, the same colour as the hair of the killer clown in the movie It: embossed with swirling circles of many sizes intersecting to form double-bubbles. The effect was disorientating and vision-blurring, and aesthetically offensive at every level. All of which suggested to Tom that Gogarty was a man who didn’t notice his environment. He just bedded down where he could, and didn’t bother to change with the times.

  Tom recalled that Gogarty’s clothes, as listed on the Exhibits Register for his Clerkenwell address, tended to the nondescript. Black trousers, black T-shirts, some with logos, some not, black trainers with white laces. These were the fashion choices of a man who didn’t like to think too hard about what clothes to put on.

  Gogarty had no television in the Clerkenwell gaff where he’d been tugged; but he did have a plasma screen at this address, with no internet access but a DVD player with many discs. He seemed to own no books at either of his addresses. However he did have a Kindle filled with grisly true crime books but also with thousands of pre-1970s science fiction novels. A man who lived simply, and dreamed of murder and of other worlds.

  Tom stepped further into the hall. Two CSIs were on the stairs in white forensic suits, spraying the wall with a compound that would reveal blood stains. They looked like spacemen invading a suburban home. They thumbs-upped him, he did the same back. Then he took a suit off the peg and clad himself. He put on the shoe slip-ons, and the forensic gloves.

  Then he went into the kitchen which had been sprayed to reveal latent fingerprints, creating an eerie cobweb effect on every surface. There was a crime scene kettle on a temporary table, so he put water in it and set it to boil. Put a tea bag in a blue mug. While the kettle was boiling, he walked through the back door into the garden.

  The garden, he guessed, had once been beautiful: landscaped on several levels, with a fountain of water emerging from the mouth of a spitting marble nymph, clematis growing up an old and crumbling brick wall, and several rose trees jockeying for position with the mature shrubs. The balance of colours was exquisitely judged, and clearly a labour of love. Strange that Gogarty had taken such care with the garden, but not with the house?

  Tom filed that thought, though he had no idea what it implied.

  The middle part of Gogarty’s beloved garden was now a building site. Mountains of rubble and earth were piled up, and there was a giant yellow excavator parked on one side of a cavernous pit. And everywhere Tom looked there were Crime Scene Investigators in white forensic suits, peering at their ultrasound monitors, or drawing up soil samples in giant syringes, or dusting the earth off bones. And workmen too, orange-jacketed and muscular.

  One orange-jacket sat in the cab of the excavator, yanking the forward and reverse gears as the machine hopped around. Others workmen were operating the mechanical sieves. And too there were the coppers: uniform PCs in shirtsleeves and plain clothes CID in faded leather jackets. A scene of awe-inspiringly purposive chaos.

  Tom’s eyes scanned the tableau, as he tried to recognise as many of the crime scene team as he could. He had swotted up on the personnel files of all those assigned to attend this scene, not just the Murder Squad rosters. He counted twenty-nine bodies at the crime scene, and could put names to nineteen of them.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ a burly CID man asked, appearing in front of Tom like a rugby player intercepting a run for the try-line. He
wore a check jacket and a bright blue tie beneath his forensic suit. No warrant card was visible. Tom scanned the face: was this the legendary DC Daniel Davies, ex-rugby player and ex-boxer, and the most highly decorated officer of constable rank in the Met?

  No, Davies was older, late forties, even though the photo in his file was of Davies as a younger man. This guy was early thirties. Malone then. Must be. DC Seamus Malone. Also a rugby player. Formerly Drugs Squad and Regional Crime Squad. Donegal-born, though the accent was mostly South London, where he’d lived since he was four.

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Tom Derry, I start today,’ Tom said.

  Seamus Malone inspected him thoroughly.

  ‘DI’s back there,’ he said, nodding, to indicate the precise location of ‘back there’.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Gruff words, from a fat detective with burst veins in his nose and a bleary stare. He wore no forensic suit at all; his tie was blotched with food stains. This was DC Davies. Nickname ‘Taff’.

  ‘DC Tom Derry, I start today,’ said Tom.

  ‘You picked a hell of a day to start,’ said Taff.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Call me Taff.’

  ‘Yes, Taff.’

  ‘You’re the one who gave us the tip about the safe house. Am I right?’

  ‘That’s right, Taff.’

  ‘A few hours sooner, we might have saved Julia Penhall. And we wouldn’t have lost three good officers. So I hope you didn’t for any reason, like, procrastinate.’

  Tom realised he’d been rebuked. He resented that.

  Yet he could vividly remember sitting in the pub seething with hate for Jagger and DCI Matheson; putting off the moment when he called his info in. How much time had he wasted? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? By the time Armed Response turned up, the safe house was as bloody as an abattoir, the three close protection officers on duty were dead, killed with knives, and Julia had been abducted. But Tom quelled his spasm of guilt; no point, he told himself, crying over spilt milk.

  ‘I did my best, Taff.’

  ‘Sure you did, boy.’ Taff gestured with his thumb, to the far end of the garden where the DI was standing. ‘Go check in.’