Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Tom walked further into the crime scene. Tarpaulin fences had been created to block the neighbours’ view of the unfolding horror. A cherry tree scattered blossoms in the wind, showers of pink that swirled around the host of white-gowned CSIs who were digging up the bushes.

  Tom walked around the pit at the centre of the garden, and peered inside it. It was startlingly deep, and made him dizzy. In addition to the mottes of earth banked up near the garden fences, he knew that half a ton of soil had been carried out through the back gate in wheelbarrows before his arrival.

  He took a moment to study the long row of wooden trestles on which rested trays of carefully labelled bones. Three white-coated CSIs supervised by a tall grey haired man were assembling the found fragments into possible bodies. One CSI was male, balding, focused. The second was female, dark haired, clearly very nervy. The third, another man, was foreign – Italian maybe? – and highly attractive. Tom rummaged his memory banks and recollected their names: Don Griffiths, Emilia Hardy, Marco Salvatore. The grey-haired man with spectacles was their boss, Home Office Pathologist Professor Jeremy Denton.

  ‘You’re standing too close to the samples,’ Professor Denton warned him irritably.

  Tom backed away.

  Denton withered him with a stare: meaning, now fuck off.

  But Tom lingered. He looked again at the bones arranged on the trestles, all labelled and cleaned. He mentally counted the pieces and made an assessment of size. He studied the position of the bones and he recollected the photos he had studied earlier, of the bones as they had appeared in situ.

  ‘Have you age-tested the calcium in the bones?’ he asked.

  Denton looked amazed he was still there. ‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ he said, dismissively.

  ‘I’m Tom Derry. DC Tom Derry. I’m with, ah, Number Five Murder Squad. The bones look brittle.’ Tom stepped forward and touched a phalange on the wooden trestle with a finger tip.

  ‘Then don’t touch them.’ Denton spat out each syllable like gristle.

  ‘No bleaching. What are your estimates for height?’

  Denton stiffened.

  Taff Davies approached, and started watching this encounter, with visible delight.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Denton.

  ‘I need to know your estimates about the height and probable age of the skeletons,’ Tom explained, as if to an idiot.

  Professor Denton smiled; Tom recognised that as a warning sign.

  ‘Just to be clear, I report to the SIO and no one else. I have a job to do, and you appear to be a stupid teenager who has just wandered in off the street. Now go forth, as it says in the Bible, and multiply,’ said Professor Denton, in tones of nicely judged contempt.

  Tom was yearning for a chance to measure the long limbs on the osteograph board, and check them against the height tables in his e-berry. But that was clearly not going to be feasible.

  Tom’s gut feeling though was that these bones were small, by contemporary standards. He turned his back on Denton abruptly, strode over to the pit, and peered down once again. Then he started to climb down the ladder.

  ‘Lad,’ said Taff Davies, who was watching him as a sheepdog might survey a lamb in heavy traffic, ‘descend no further.’

  ‘I want to see for myself,’ Tom protested.

  ‘You need a degree to go down that great big hole in the ground. It’s one of the laws of the crime scene.’

  ‘I have a degree.’

  ‘Get out, you daft bugger!’

  ‘It’s deep,’ said Tom.

  Taff sighed.

  ‘Too deep,’ Tom added.

  ‘Define too deep, lad.’ Taff took out an incense stick and sucked on it; Tom noticed the faint tremor of his hand. Incense was a well known and effective hair of the dog. And Taff’s eyes were bloodshot. Tom had already observed that his breath smelled of applemint. The deduction was trivial for someone of Tom’s intellect. This fat Welsh copper was a major boozer.

  ‘If you were burying a body in the garden,’ said Tom, clarifyingly, from a position half in and half out of the pit, ‘with a shovel, at night – you’d never go this deep. It’s ten foot at least.’

  ‘Maybe he used a machine.’

  Tom was sceptical, but decided to reserve judgement till he saw the calcium dating results.

  ‘Out,’ added Taff.

  Tom clambered back up the ladder, and out of the pit.

  Above them could be heard the thudda thudda thudda of Indigo One, one of the Met’s patrol helicopters, taking aerial shots of the scene. Tom looked upwards; a cameraman on a harness in the helicopter was peering down, capturing the wideshot with his long lens. Then a harried-looking woman with sandy-coloured hair that looked as it was rarely brushed and a face like the Artful Dodger approached him.

  ‘Please, someone rescue me,’ said Taff, grinning broadly at the female cop. ‘This little bastard’s too fucking keen.’

  Taff did a hanging himself mime. The woman tried and failed to hide a smile.

  Tom nodded at her. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, formally.

  She smiled, apparently pleased at his good manners.

  This was the DI. Detective Inspector Gina Henderson. Tom had met her at interview.

  ‘You’re the new boy,’ Gina said accusingly, though still smiling.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. We met at interview, ma’am. Pleased to see you again. Ma’am.’ He winced; too much!

  ‘Call me Boss. I hate being ma’am-ed,’ she said drily.

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  ‘Have you done a murder before?’

  ‘No, Boss.’

  ‘Jesu, blessed Mary and Joseph. Coppers getting fuckin’ younger,’ said a darkly accented voice behind him.

  Tom turned and saw a beautiful young woman of Mediterranean aspect. Her colours assailed his eyes: she wore a tailored lilac jacket with a warrant card peeking out of the breast pocket, stitched with yellow patterns, and a long skirt of flowing burgundy. She also wore a necklace of bright red rubies at her throat that looked like drops of blood upon ivory. . She also wore a pair of white forensic overshoes and a latex glove on one hand, but otherwise, like Taff, made no real concession to the forensic integrity of the crime scene.

  ‘Hi,’ said Tom. ‘I’m Tom.’

  She smiled but shook her head: indicating that she didn’t give a fuck that he was Tom.

  The Italian Beauty moved towards the trestles, rudely shoving aside the nervy English girl, who glared but did not resist; then she picked up an arm bone in her latex-gloved hand and sniffed it. And licked it, her long tongue leaving a wet trail from elbow bone to wrist bone. She put the arm down, and made a note in her e-berry with her ungloved hand.

  No one commented; Tom was shocked.

  ‘That’s Fillide, she’s an RDC on our team. We’re equal opportunities here,’ Gina briefed him, quietly.

  ‘I know who she is, and what she is, and I’m cool with it,’ said Tom though in truth, he wasn’t.

  ‘She’s dangerous,’ Gina added, still quietly. ‘Remember that okay? Don’t socialise with her, don’t trust her, and whatever you do, don’t fuck her. That’s an order.’

  Tom blinked at the DI’s candour. But he knew it was good advice. It was well established that Resurrected Detective Constables could have a toxic effect on staff morale if allowed to indulge in their characteristic sins.

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  Tom looked again at the Italian Beauty: Fillide Melandroni. He would have known her instantly of course, even if he hadn’t researched the team. She’d lost a little weight, Tom realised, since joining the modern age. A slave to contemporary fashion? Or maybe the dead just didn’t pile on the pounds, no matter how much they ate?

  ‘She’ll show you the ropes,’ added Gina. ‘You can do house to house together. Uniform have covered the ground, just see how much they fucked it up.’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  ‘Go on then,’ Gina said. She moved away. As instructed, Tom walked over to Fillide.

&nb
sp; ‘How many bodies have they found?’ he asked her.

  She stared at him again. ‘Can’t you count?’ she snapped.

  Tom surveyed the trestles. The bodies were still in the process of being sorted anatomically and only one of them formed a recognisable skeleton. But the individual bones had been catalogued by body as IS1, IS2, and IS3.

  ‘I count four.’

  ‘Three. Just three.’

  ‘That pelvis,’ Tom said calmly, ‘belongs to a different body.’

  Fillide blinked. She walked over to the far end of the trestle, pushing Denton to one side abruptly. She inspected the bones. She picked up a human pelvis, red with London clay, and, once again, licked the bone as if it were another and more appealing part of the human anatomy.

  ‘I haven’t examined that yet!’ snapped Professor Denton. ‘For pity’s sake, do I really have to endure all this hocus bloody pocus!’

  ‘Old bones,’ said Fillide. ‘Ten years older than the other one.’ She nodded at Tom. ‘Different body. Very good.’

  Denton stared at her. He looked at the pelvis.

  He moved it to an empty section of trestle. ‘Mark it up, IS4,’ he told Emilia – the nervy English girl.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Emilia asked.

  ‘She’s sure, that’s good enough for me,’ he conceded.

  ‘But is it true, Professor?’ Tom asked, savouring his vindication. ‘That the bones are old?’

  ‘We think so, yes,’ he admitted, reluctantly. ‘The preliminary dating tests do in fact confirm – yes, they’re old.’

  ‘How old?’ Tom said.

  ‘A hundred, hundred and fifty years, maybe, hard to be precise with such old smells,’ said Fillide.

  ‘That tallies with our estimates,’ Denton said.

  Tom nodded: this all confirmed his own initial guess. ‘Buried too deep,’ said Tom. ‘Gogarty could never have could dug a hole that size without an industrial excavator. Those bodies were buried four or five gardens ago. Someone paved the garden over; someone else turfed over the paving. Someone dumped builder’s rubble on the lawn; someone else paved over that. The garden grew higher. The bones sank deeper.’

  ‘That’s what we think. Late nineteenth century,’ Denton said.

  ‘Not Gogarty then,’ said Tom.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Tom felt flat. He’d thought this would be his big moment, a chance to investigate scores of murders committed by Brian Gogarty, who was shaping up to be the most prolific serial killer of the twenty-first century. But these dead bodies weren’t his. Whose then? And why -

  A thought occurred to Tom. Or rather, an intuition.

  He walked closer to one of the skeletons, IS2, and inspected the skull and attached vertebrae. He picked up a magnifying lens and studied the neck bone thoroughly. He looked at the positioning of the body: lying on its back, one hand resting inside its stomach.

  He was aware he was being stared at, but blanked everything out apart from his investigation. Typing swiftly with one hand on his e-berry, he cross-referenced the real skeleton with his crime scene pictures of the skeleton as it was found. Then he flipped to Google Earth and used his self-coded app to measure the distance of this crime scene from eight locations:

  The old Whitechapel Hospital

  Mitre Square

  Bucks Row

  Goulston Street

  Miller’s Row

  Berner Street

  Hanbury Street.

  All of the readings were in metres, but Tom converted to yards in his head.

  And once he’d juggled the numbers a while in the part of his brain that did instant mental arithmetic, it became evident that a pattern had emerged. A distance pattern. He now knew that 13 Ildminster Square was exactly 950 yards from the old Whitechapel Hospital.

  950! A mystic number, according to the key Kabbalist traditions.

  He looked up, to be greeted with multiple disbelieving stares. He realised he looked like a teenager texting in the middle of a dinner party.

  ‘If you’ve quite finished,’ said Gina drily.

  ‘I have it. I know what’s happening here,’ Tom said excitedly.

  DC Seamus Malone had joined the sceptical throng, and was staring at Tom with pitying contempt. ‘Do we really have to put up with this eejit?’ he observed.

  ‘Hush, be kind,’ said Taff, pityingly.

  ‘Constable, shift your arse,’ said Gina, to Tom.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear my deduction?’ Tom said plaintively.

  A chorus of ‘no’ expressions assailed him.

  ‘This woman was murdered,’ Tom insisted.

  ‘We’ve already ascertained that,’ Denton said, with theatrical weariness. ‘Someone cut her throat so deep he nicked the neck vertebra.’

  ‘And then he disembowelled her and put the hand in the stomach. See?’ Tom pointed.

  Denton blinked, perturbed at this new notion.

  ‘Nonsense. The hand was here,’ Denton patted his own tummy, ‘and fell through when the flesh rotted.’

  Taff began tennis-match-watching: half a smile on his lips.

  Tom snorted. ‘No, you’re the one talking nonsense!’ he said in his angriest tones.

  Denton stiffened. Gina marvelled. Malone shook his head. Taff kept the half-smile going. Tom observed all their reactions in an instant with his peripheral vision, a knack of his.

  ‘Honestly!’ Tom continued, more vehemently than he’d intended. ‘Can’t you see it? Can’t you see how the dates connect up? The area? The location? Honestly! Yes, I’d say this is definitely the same MO.’ Tom was already bitterly regretting his strident tone, but he was in too deep now to back out. ‘I know who the murderer is. Well actually, I don’t, not for sure, but there is circumstantial, well, it certainly confirms one school of, in fact this may be the greatest breakthrough since, well it’s certainly all very odd,’ he said, dribbling off.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Denton said.

  ‘He just opens his mouth and total fucking shit comes out,’ marvelled Gina.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom. ‘Let me organise my thoughts.’ He took a deep breath; tried to dial it down.

  ‘Skeleton is a female,’ he said more calmly, ‘five foot three, according to my off-the-cuff extrapolations from the long bones, right handed, on the basis of the bevelling of the shoulder that I can see for myself, and I further observe that the crime scene is a numerologically significant distance away from the old Whitechapel Hospital and the MO is similar, perhaps similar, okay I’m reaching here, with a tiny but finite percentage degree of possible similarity, to a murder committed at Miller’s Court. A murder which took at approximately the right period for this skeleton, i.e. late nineteenth century.’

  Professor Denton’s lined and wrinkled face acquired a new line: he smiled.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Denton, much as the Magi must have reacted to the emerging infant. ‘I see what you’re driving at!’

  He cast his admiring gaze far and wide. For by now a entire mob of hardened cops had gathered to watch Tom flounder.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Taff.

  ‘He’s talking about Mary Jane Kelly.’ Denton grinned. ‘It’s so obvious, why didn’t I see it myself. This man’s a genius, he’s cracked the case!’

  ‘Tell me more, Professor!’ said Taff, excitedly.

  Gina was smiling too by now, with dawning delight; though Tom guessed she was using facial irony. DC Malone, who loomed next to Taff, wore a similar expression of eager anticipation. Which, Tom realised, with a sinking heart, was equally bogus.

  ‘Mary Jane Kelly,’ said Professor Denton, ‘was the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper.’

  A pause ensued.

  Gina clicked her fingers. ‘Of course!’

  ‘Mary Kelly’s throat was cut right across by a knife,’ said Tom, undeterrable, ‘nearly severing the neck. Which is exactly what happened to this victim. Also, Mary’s abdomen was ripped open and the bre
asts were cut off, though obviously there are no organic remains with this particular skeleton so we can find no parallels there. But, we do know that after cutting her open the killer carefully inserted one of Mary’s hands in her stomach. That of course I take from the account in the Illustrated Police News. And you can see from the position in which this particular skeleton was found, that –’

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  Tom was aware he was leaking credibility and hence status; it was not a good start. And, even more worryingly, second thoughts were pressing themselves upon him thick and fast.

  ‘Obviously though,’ continued Tom, with growing dread, ‘the distance from Whitechapel Hospital is pretty irrelevant really. And this could be just a post-mortem artefact. Her hand was resting here,’ he touched his own tummy, ‘and so maybe it fell through when the flesh rotted away, as indeed you, Professor, proposed. And the date range is, I suppose, now I come to think of it, pretty broad. And we don’t even know if this was a prostitute. So as a working hypothesis I suppose it is,’ Tom wanted the ground to swallow him up, but the ground failed to oblige: ‘a fairly desperate hypothesis. It just struck me you see. The similarity. I do read a lot, you know.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Denton, his fun over, his smile a distant memory, ‘I have some work to do.’

  ‘Listen, Detective Constable Arsefluff,’ said Gina, nicknaming him indelibly: ‘go and do some house to house. And in future,’ - she did a mime of zipping her mouth shut – ‘wait till your balls drop before you talk to grown ups, you get me?’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  Gina shook her head, deploring him. Tom’s face felt like wax.

  Gina’s mobile rang, and she took the call. She listened intently.

  ‘Say again, guv?’ she said.

  She listened. Then laughed.

  ‘How did you know we were -’

  She listened.

  ‘What’s that, guv?’

  She listened.

  ‘Look, guv, if this is a fucking windup -’

  Tom turned and began to walk away. Then he heard a cry from behind him. It was Gina, shrieking like a banshee, beckoning him with one hand:

  ‘Arsefluff! Come fucking here! Fucking now!’

  Tom turned and walked back. Gina’s face was bright red.