Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘Film of the demon’s escape?’

  ‘Yeah, we have that. Someone filmed it on their e-berry. A passerby. Here it is.’

  Again, a vision appears hovering above the pub floor:

  Leman Street station from the outside. Flames billow out of windows. Shadows swirl in the flames.

  There’s a flash of light and the roof at the top of the five storey building erupts.

  A shape bursts through and an instant later is gone.

  ‘Slow it down.’

  The vision ran backwards, and started again, more slowly.

  The roof erupts. A shape bursts through. FREEZE FRAME.

  ‘Enhance it.’

  Cat typed and the image grew. The shape became a larger blurry shape. Horns were discernible. It now was evident that the creature had a hump.

  ‘Any chance of identifying this?’

  ‘Guv, it’s just a blur.’

  ‘But eye-witnesses ID this blur as a demon?’

  ‘That was their impression. Red. Horns. Scales. A tail. Demon.’

  ‘Surmise,’ said Dougie. ‘A Hell Breach was scheduled. The Gogarty-demon on Earth got a message from Hell so he knows about it. And –’

  Andy Homerton was shaking his head. ‘London is sealed,’ explained Andy, impatiently, ‘by warlock spells. They can’t be countermanded from the other dimension.’

  ‘So a Hell Breach –’

  ‘Is only possible if you have an inside man. Demon inside man, on Earth. You know what I’m saying?’

  Dougie nodded. ‘Okay. So instead let’s say: Gogarty-Demon who is already on Earth caused the Breach. Picked a place of evil, where the barriers are already weak. Then set the Breach on timer, by whatever means. Allowed himself to be arrested –’ Dougie was eating even more broken glass here but you’d never know it from his calm authoritative tone, ‘ – in order to get one over on the investigating officer, namely myself. Then when the Breach took place, he fucked off out of the cell. Which he knew he could do whenever he felt like.’

  ‘It was all a game,’ said Gina. ‘A taunt.’

  ‘Indeed. Think of what happened in Ildminster Square,’ said Dougie, ‘as the equivalent of a booby trap bomb left behind by an enemy army. Pick up a teddy bear by the roadside, and it blows off your hand. That kind of thing.’

  ‘You were the target?’ suggested Gina. ‘How does that play?’

  ‘No, no. That won’t fly. No one in the actual house died. Just the forensic officers in the garden. Besides, Gogarty-demon doesn’t want to kill me. He wants to taunt me. I’m his Schley, it’s all a game to him. The bastard.’

  The pub doors opened and two coppers walked in. Fillide, who was looking fresh as a daisy, and Tom Derry, who was dead on his feet.

  ‘Welcome, Tom,’ said Dougie. ‘And thank you for your efforts in fighting those evil bastards. Fillide, you rancid whore from Hell, take a seat, say fuck all, and you’ll be doing us all a favour.’

  She glared but said nothing. She found a seat as far away from the rest of the team as she could. As she strode past him Dougie spotted she had blood on her teeth, which she’d omitted to clean off.

  ‘Gina, summarise, said Dougie.

  Gina stood up, shook her shoulders.

  ‘Let’s recap, team, going way back when,’ Gina said. ‘ABC. Accept Nothing; Believe Nobody; Check Everything. Beware the dangers of concatenated decision-making. You know the drill.’

  ‘Go girl go,’ said Taff.

  ‘Our first line of investigation, LOI-1.’

  Catriona Powerpointed all this as Gina spoke, throwing up bullet points on their screens to support her words. ‘Melissa Anderson, Victim One, is killed and embalmed and we check out her family, her siblings, her parents as possible killers. We ruled that out in hours but there it is. LOI-One.

  ‘Line of Investigation Two: ex-boyfriend or stalker hypothesis. Ditto, ruled out. LOI-3, nutso Ed Gein type psychopath, implying this is the first of many such killings by a human serial killer. And so we thought, for most of the four years of this investigation. But now, paradigm shift, we’re on to LOI-Four. Namely the hypothesis that our murderer is a Serial Killing Demon From Hell. Possessing a human being who –’

  ‘Why possessing?’ asked Hyun-Shik.

  ‘Possessing Brian Gogarty. What do you mean, why possessing?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a shapeshifter. Not a demon in a human body, a demon assuming the form of a human body.’ Hyun-Shik shrugged. ‘Possible?’

  ‘Possible,’ conceded Dougie. ‘Run both hypotheses in tandem.’

  ‘Schley,’ said Taff, seemingly randomly.

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ said Dougie grudgingly.

  ‘Huh?’ said Alliea Cartwright.

  ‘I’m saying,’ said Taff, ‘the Ed Gein comparison is still strong. Hence Gogarty’s reference during his interview to Sheriff Schley, who you yourself Dougie referenced just a moment ago.’

  ‘Indeed I did,’ Dougie conceded.

  Sheriff Art Schley was the American law enforcement offer who had first arrested the serial killer Ed Gein. And who, during his search of Gein’s farm, found coats made out of human skin and other macabre mementoes. And who then - as most of Five Squad were aware - became so unhinged by rage that he had beaten Gein up in custody and subsequently lost his career.

  ‘For Schley read Randall,’ said Gina. ‘The aim of this killer is to taunt his nemesis. And possibly, even, to drive him insane, and force him off the case. No offence, guv.’

  ‘Grr,’ said Dougie, calmly.

  ‘Hence, the false confession,’ Gina continued. ‘Hence, the trail of clues to make us think he’d buried bodies in Ildminster Square when in fact, the only corpses were historical. All a joke. A great big joke.’

  ‘In short,’ said Dougie, ‘Gogarty won. He duped me, ran rings round me. He knew we’d find Ildminster Square. He knew that he could escape whenever he wanted to, so he didn’t care about being arrested. He just, in short, had some fun.

  ‘So that’s Round One to Gogarty. But now at least we know our enemy. He’s a monster from Hell, pretending to be a human serial killer. Potentially, this monster is hundreds of years old. Question: How did it get here?’

  ‘Black magic,’ suggested Alliea, ‘in medieval times. They all did it then.’

  ‘Possible. Exvoked by a magician who lost control of his creation,’ suggested Shai.

  ‘Wandering the Earth for centuries,’ suggested Seamus.

  ‘Unable to get back home.’

  ‘Living as a human.’

  ‘Or perhaps not,’ said Gina. ‘Remember, referencing Hyun-Shik’s idea, demons can shapeshift into almost any form. It might have spent a hundred years as a hawk, or a shark. We just don’t know.’

  ‘But at some point, if we follow the Shapeshifter LOI, it sticks to human form. This human form, the Gogarty body. And it kills. Why?’ Dougie said.

  ‘It’s evil?’ said Catriona.

  ‘Are demons evil? I thought they were misunderstood victims of human something of other,’ said Ronnie sarcastically.

  ‘They’re evil,’ avowed Dougie.

  ‘So let’s suppose it’s been a serial killer since the days of Queen Victoria. It murdered five people in the East End as Jack the Ripper. It was –’

  ‘How about Springheel Jack?’ suggested Tony. ‘Maybe Gogarty-Demon was Springheel Jack, as well as Jack the Ripper. We saw the way this bloody creature can leap.’

  ‘Possible,’ said Dougie.

  ‘Desperate,’ said Gina.

  ‘Hey, we’re out there,’ said Tony.

  ‘Rule nothing out,’ said Dougie.

  ‘It’s on the Grid,’ said Catriona. She typed. ‘Actioning you, Vincent, start reading up on Springheel Jack and other Victorian killers.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Vincent Hare said.

  ‘Ratcliffe Highway,’ said Tom. ‘Put that on the grid. The Ratcliffe Highway Murders.’ He grabbed someone’s pint and took a big sip. He looked as if he was ready to vomit.

 
‘What’s that?’ said Gina.

  ‘Famous East End murders. Everyone in the house killed, including the baby. Some say it’s linked to the Ripper case.’

  ‘Good thought, well done lad, is it true you fainted?’ said Dougie. Tom made a weary face. ‘Cat, Action Ratcliffe Highway.’

  ‘It’s done,’ Catriona said.

  ‘I’ve got it, I’m reading now,’ said Vincent Hare, not looking up from his e-berry screen.

  ‘I’m doubling you,’ said Alice, also lost in screen.

  ‘I’m learning about shapeshifters,’ said Hyun-Shik, reading frantically.

  ‘I’m reading Ed Gein, more on geomagic, demon fireballs, demon psychology,’ said Andy Homerton.

  ‘Continue,’ Dougie said to Gina. ‘Let’s have a narrative presentation of the case so far.’

  Gina shrugged her shoulders; went for it.

  ‘Okay. Here goes. Ancient serial killing demon, shapeshifting hypothesis: LOI-Four-Two, abductive inference 1,’ said Gina, who had been well schooled by Dougie in modern epistemological theories of detection. ‘It’s been on Earth for years. In London during the nineteenth century where it was a notorious murderer called Jack and possibly a woman molester with big bouncing strides. Then, either quiescent or doing who knows what mischief somewhere or other. It next appears as a parish priest in East London called Father Michael Connolly, who leads a blameless life and apparently dies at the age of fifty nine but has been identified by one witness as identical to Andrew Bishop aka Brian Gogarty. So we presume the shapeshifting demon likes this particular form. OR, reverting to LOI-5-1, Connolly is possessed by the demon and the Gogarty body is now approximately ninety years old, kept young by magic.’

  ‘I favour that hypothesis,’ said Tom. ‘On the basis that I’m one of the officers who interviewed Mrs Bradford, who knew the priest who become Gogarty and, well, I don’t like the shapeshifter thing.’

  ‘Thank you, Tom,’ said Dougie. ‘Noted.’

  Cat noted it.

  Gina continued: ‘Leaving that aside: ever since the Breaches and for at least ten years prior to that, the demon who we know as Gogarty has been an active serial killer. A one-creature walking crime wave. So two questions. Why? and Why Now?’

  ‘It’s dying?’ said Andy, looking up from his screen.

  ‘Demons can die?’

  He nodded. ‘Oh yes. They have a finite span when exvoked. But – no one knows how long. A hundred years. A thousand. No one is sure. But there are numerous recorded cases of demonic creatures on Earth dying of “old age”,’ explained Andy, with calm assurance. He was wearing a jumper now over his Hawaiian shirt; there were bloodstains on it from somewhere.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Dougie nodded. ‘Surmise,’ he said. ‘Gogarty-Demon likes to play games. He’s making crossword puzzles for us. Clues buried in the different types of murder, their modus operandi, even the locations. Clues for us to find. Taunting.’

  He nodded at Tom. ‘Just as you suggested. Gogarty is a serial taunter. And remember –’

  ‘Jack the Ripper taunted too,’ said Tom. ‘He wrote to the papers. He left that sign at Goulston Road. He wrote an article about himself, I mean Roslyn did –’

  ‘You have the talking stick, laddie, explain what the fuck you’re on about,’ said Dougie.

  Tom blinked.

  ‘Roslyn D’Onston,’ he said. ‘Was a journalist. A theosophist. He wrote to the papers claiming to know the identity of Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘ “In calmly reviewing the whole chain of facts connected with these bloodthirsty atrocities,” ’ Andy read aloud from his e-berry: ‘ “the first thing that strikes one is the fact that the murderer was kind enough to (so to speak) leave his card with the Mitre-square victim.” That’s a reference to the Juwes graffito. Roslyn D’Onston wrote this article for the Pall Mall Gazette and it was published in 1888.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tom, who knew the article by heart. ‘So if Roslyn was the Ripper, which we now think he was, what does that tell us?’

  There was a pause. Tom smiled faintly. His fluency was returning. He answered his own question: ‘It tells us that instead of hiding himself away as any sensible murderer would do, Roslyn put himself in the public eye. He made himself a suspect by guessing so adeptly about the Ripper’s psychology. But he also made deliberate mistakes: the graffito wasn’t found in Mitre Square as Roslyn claimed, it was found in Goulston Street.’

  ‘Okay, and we believe Roslyn was the Ripper,’ said Alliea, ‘because he once lived in number 13 Ildminster Square. The bodies in the garden were probably killed by him, in his twilight years.’

  Heads nodded; they were all up to date with the current paradigm.

  ‘Guv, Springheel Jack, I don’t think so,’ muttered Vincent. ‘Doesn’t match in any way.’

  ‘One less to worry about,’ muttered Alliea.

  ‘Okay scratch that one. Ratcliffe Highway?’

  ‘Not sure,’ said Alice.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Vincent.

  ‘Then continue reading. Gina, thank you for that account of where we’re at, Tom also, and thank you all,’ said Dougie formally. ‘Now, let me see the dead.’

  Catriona typed, and the obituaries appeared on their e-berry screens.

  Dougie looked through the images of all those slain in the Whitechapel Police Station by an Extra-Dimensional Entity of Unknown Name. He re-counted the dead to make sure he knew all their names. He recollected nights down the Old Red Lion with Phil Matthews. And their piss ups in the Charlie Chaplin in Elephant and Castle, in the days when it was a Country and Western pub. Phil had been a great storyteller. One of the lads. But now, Dougie reflected, he was just a footnote in someone else’s story.

  Tom raised his hand.

  ‘Just fucking speak,’ Dougie said.

  ‘Can I see the film of the escape again?’ Tom asked.

  Catriona typed. Once again they saw the image of the blurry demon flying out of the station.

  ‘It’s got a hunchback,’ said Tom, eventually.

  ‘They all have strange deformities,’ Andy informed him.

  ‘Not hunchbacks by and large. Not as – pronounced as that. Can we enhance the image?’

  ‘This is enhanced.’

  ‘Bigger then.’

  The image grew. The blurring grew worse.

  ‘What if that’s not a hunched back?’ said Tom.

  ‘How so?’ asked Dougie.

  ‘What if it’s Gogarty?’

  Catriona was typing away, fidgeting with the image.

  ‘Run a facial and body language recognition program,’ said Dougie. Catriona typed.

  The image became clearer as the computer tried to sort out the signal into something more meaningful.

  ‘It’s not part of the demon,’ insisted Tom. ‘It’s Gogarty. Gogarty riding on the creature’s back.’

  ‘That could make sense,’ said Andy.

  ‘Supporting evidence for LOI-Four-One,’ said Dougie, triumphantly, nodding at Tom to give him the credit. ‘The demon was possessing Gogarty. And now it’s resumed its demonic form and is taking him along for the ride, as its human slave, aka familiar.’

  Tom basked. But then he changed his mind.

  ‘Or alternatively –’ said Tom.

  ‘What?’ said Alliea.

  ‘What?’ said Dougie.

  ‘What?’ said Gina.

  ‘What?’ said Andy.

  ‘What?’ said Hyun-Shik.

  Tom shrank under the weight of stares.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Enough talk, let’s get to work,’ said Dougie crisply.

  The team began to stir, ready to action their Actions. Dougie drained his pint. Then he leaped off the bar, in a single impressively fluid move.

  ‘We’ll do the interviews now,’ Dougie told Gina.

  Chapter 6

  Dougie and Gina made their way up to the first
floor of the pub, where the B & B rooms were located. Both rooms were currently vacant so Alliea had done a deal to rent them by the week for the use of Five Squad, until they could sort out new premises.

  Gina set up the camera on a tripod and took her seat beside Dougie. One armchair and a kitchen chair faced a small sofa. Not ideal but it would do. An ashen-faced PC brought in the first witness. The only surviving prisoner, Jacko McGill. A career criminal, in for the armed robbery of a pub.

  Jacko had been drunk and smoked to the gills at the time of his offence and had forgotten to wear gloves or to spray his skin and hair to suppress DNA-shedding. So he’d been easily identified from fingerprints on a banknote he had dropped, and from the DNA in the sweat droplets he’d left behind on the counter.

  Jacko was sober now.

  ‘Interview with Jackson Armstrong McGill,’ said Dougie, ‘officers present are Detective Superintendent Douglas Randall, Detective Inspector Gina Henderson, Police Constable –’

  ‘Anne Harkaway,’ said the PC.

  ‘Tell us what you saw, Jacko,’ said Dougie.

  Jacko hesitated. It was against his nature to tell the truth. His eyes flickered. He took a sip of the coffee the PC had brought him. He nodded to acknowledge it was decent stuff.

  Jacko’s nose was a testament to his fanatically misspent life: broken six times when he was a street fighter, now zig-zagged with capillaries from his years as a drunk. He had trouble making eye contact. Dougie was patient.

  ‘Just tell us, Jacko. You’re not in trouble. The opposite. We need your help now. What did you see?’ Dougie said soothingly.

  ‘I saw your bird let the bastard out.’

  ‘Which bird?’

  ‘The gaoler. Ella. The one with the small tits.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Gina, amiably.

  ‘Ah, you can’t deny they’re –’

  ‘Stick to the point, Jacko.’

  ‘What I saw is, my cell door opened. I went out. There was Gogarty, I knew Gogarty of course, he’s in all the fucking papers. And he’s with Ella and she’s bleeding from the nose, he’s clumped her or something, but she’s still smiling at him like his dick’s split and she’s got two fannies. And then she opened up the other cells and there were four of us standing there, in the cell-block corridor, with this fuckin’ serial killer and this mad smiling bitch. And Gogarty asked us to follow him. And we all laughed and said sure. Then he raised his hand like this. And he snapped – he snapped –’