The sound stopped Dougie’s heart, just for a moment.
Naberius, all four wings fully extended, was a giant of a beast. He hovered, his body so deep a scarlet it was almost black, spiralling in front of the dawn-tinted white cumulus clouds. Dougie could see even at this distance the creature’s luminous eyes - accusatory ruby beacons. The creature’s body was a scaled carapace, like a dragon’s hide. His horns were like stone snakes growing from his head, frozen in mid-flail. His tail, a dagger blade that slashed the air in a series of sinuous stabs. And his roar was as loud as an earthquake that cracks the ground at your feet.
The hell beast Naberius swooped and flew downwards towards the cops in the line behind the garden, a hawk descending upon a flock of sparrows. He roared as he flew and Dougie felt his own courage melting. But Dougie stood his ground, and raised his pistol; and he and the army of assembled armed cops began to fire at will.
The hell beast veered away, knowing he could never break through the shimmer of the spell. A hail of bullets bounced off his hard hide; though some vanished into his flesh. The beating of his wings was like thunder clapping to a syncopated rhythm. Dougie was still aware of horns and tail and red carapace but as Naberius spun around in the air, Dougie now felt the beast more than he saw it.
The Harriers were in position by this point, hovering with motionless zeal.
They unleashed their fusillades of CRV-7 rockets and Maverick missiles with a whoosh of power, each missile laser-locked on to the demon’s body. Each containing armour-piercing shells packed with anointed explosives that were toxic with magic.
The missiles erupted upon the flying monster’s body, turning the air foggy with smoke and blinding the eye with flares of yellow and orange fire.
Dougie’s e-berry was still on; and on the screen, he saw the image of the Grey-Beard in his Observation Post, and observed the great warlock’s slight smile.
For ten solid minutes the hell beast was battered by missiles, dancing wildly around the sky in a futile attempt to escape. A baited bull goaded by aerial banderillas.
Then the Harriers flew upwards and were replaced by a row of wasp-like Apache attack helicopters, armed with Hellfire missiles. A fusillade of eight-kilogram augmented charge missiles were fired at Naberius. They flew through air and crashed upon their target and blew up upon his hide. The impacts tugged the creature first to one side, and then to the other, as if he were on an invisible string.
Naberius recovered and beat his four wings again, but more chaotically now, and he roared, but less loudly. More missiles crashed on him, this time from the Harriers shooting downwards upon their target. And more rifle shells from the police marksmen bounced off his hide like relentless tides upon a cliff face.
Suddenly one of Naberius’s wings fell from his body, and black blood gushed from the wound, and he roared again.
The beast flapped awkwardly above the house, heading towards the back garden. But bullets from fresh guns thumped against his body from that direction.
A Storm Shadow missile from an unseen launcher arrived upon the scene, weaving this way then that. Finally striking Naberius just behind his head and detonating, creating a expanding nova of dazzling light that slowly faded; to reveal the beast now only had two wings.
Naberius flew dementedly back over the shattered roof of the house, towards the front again. His darkly red body and billowing black blood were etched against the blue and crimson sky of unfolding dawn. His roar was an agonised mewl. More bullets began sinking into his weakened hide and exploding inside his body, spitting off shards of hide.
The tap-taps of gunfire from SCO19 officers behind testudos was incessant. Van loads of empty cartridge shells would be carried away from the scene when this was over. Naberius began to twitch wildly in mid-air, his spine arching round to achieve what in any other creature would have been breaking point. Blood continued to gush from his two wing stumps, scorching the grass and earth it landed upon. Then the flying beast spun around in a perfect circle, with desperate beauty, and another missile struck his abdomen and sank in and exploded.
Naberius tried to arc his body again and this time he failed. His two remaining wings were beating out of sync. Then the great beast came hurtling downwards like a shot bird and crashed to the ground.
There he lay, bloodied and whimpering, as armed coppers continued to rain silver bullets into his now permeable hide. The bullets sank through tough skin and bubbled the armour with interior explosions. Large gobbets of demon flesh began to spurt into the air.
There was no pause or let-up in the shooting. This was a massacre and it would end in the total annihilation of the beast. Naberius coughed and an ocean of bile flooded out of his mouth. He clambered to his feet then collapsed again. He howled, a sad and lonely howl.
‘Bind tighter,’ said the Grey-Beard on the e-berry screen, with a supreme confidence in his own power that awed Dougie. The shimmering in the air shrank and shrank, until the bleeding hell bastard’s body on the ground was the only place where the magic shimmered.
The binding grew tighter still and the demon howled with pain. Dougie realised the Grey-Beard was literally crushing the demon out of reality. There was a glimpse - like a barely seen lightning flash - of silver wraith. The demon’s soul.
Then that too vanished. And Naberius was gone.
In the silence that followed, Dougie could hear his own breathing: huff huff huff.
The front door opened and a man walked out, his hands on his head. A big bald man in a T shirt. He looked terrified. It was Gogarty.
A hundred carbines were trained on Gogarty’s body. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ he was whimpering. ‘Don’t hurt me.’
Gina nudged Dougie with her elbow.
Huff.
‘Watch out, he’s got a gun!’ Dougie screamed.
Only a single rifle crack was heard; though later it was ascertained that Gogarty was killed by no less than thirty-seven bullets.
Gogarty’s body exploded.
‘Let me through,’ shouted Dougie, running into the garden.
Six AFOs followed him at the double. But then Gina fell over, and one of them fell over her. And in the ensuing fuck up Dougie had time to reach the body and take the plant gun out of its plastic bag and drop it on the ground beside Gogarty’s corpse.
Gogarty’s prints were already on this gun, after Hyun-Shik Moon had found a way to put the killer’s fingerprints on to a pair of latex gloves, as a preliminary to transferring them on to the gun butt. Tony Williamson had then amended his Exhibits list from Ildminster Square to include a box of .45 ammo that was the perfect fit for the Grandpower .45 pistol that Dougie had just dumped. And Taff and Ronnie had clandestinely acquired a box of real ammo of this calibre, and had broken into the Bethnal Green Exhibits Office in the dead of night to plant it on one of the shelves.
Moreover the entire Five Squad Outside Enquiry team – Ronnie, Seamus, Fillide and Taff – all had ringside seats of the action and were willing to testify that they had seen Gogarty pull the gun out and brandish it just before he was shot.
This evidence would of course be contradicted by the film footage taken by the three impartial observers recording the action. However all their data was automatically uploaded into a Met Net cloud which had been corrupted by boffins in the New Scotland Yard geek squad. Thus, the two seconds prior to Gogarty’s shooting would now be fatally blurred on all three camera logs.
It was, Dougie felt, with a shamefaced sense of pride, one hell of a fit-up.
‘Okay, stand back, crime scene,’ said Gina authoritatively, muscling through. Grass stains on her knees and a conscience indelibly stained with guilt.
She used her e-berry to take photographs of Gogarty’s bloodily holed body, and of the terrifyingly large gun with Gogarty’s fingerprints on it that was lying a few inches from his lifeless hand.
Dougie took out his own pistol. ‘Search the house, look for accomplices!’ he shouted, to scatter the AFOs.
As a mob of
AFOs ran into the house, he strode closer to Gogarty’s body. The silver bullets that had exploded inside his body were seeping out as molten metal, and had coagulated on the torso, like a sheen of armour. The head had been penetrated by a bullet through one eye, creating a gory hollow. The back of Gogarty’s bald pate also had a perfectly formed bullet hole in it, an exit wound to match the entry wound in his throat. And the skull gaped open, revealing grey brain matter within.
Gina stood next to Dougie, inspecting the body.
‘He’s dead?’ said Gina quietly.
‘Not yet.’
Later, Dougie quietly explored the house in the wake of the CSIs and the finger-tip search teams.
In the main bedroom there was a crib for the talking baby. And in the room that must have been occupied by Veda, the Asian demon girl, there were assorted dolls and stuffed animals, and a Barbie house, and a motorboat for Ken. And a rocking horse. And a helium balloon with a picture of the Little Mermaid, partially deflated. And murals of aeroplanes dangling from the ceiling.
In the second spare bedroom – which Dougie guessed must have been the teenage golem’s room – there were books. More tree-books than Dougie had seen in a house for many years. Marx’s Das Kapital. The History of the Twentieth Century. The works of Barnaby Hopkinson. Books on the wars in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. Histories of ancient Rome. Two entire shelves of Greek mythology. Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All of Dostoevsky and Dickens. Hundreds of Penguin classics. All of Jane Austen. The collected works of Peter F. Hamilton. This demonic teenager was clearly a prodigious reader, Dougie decided, since all the spines were cracked.
‘A job well done,’ a man said to Dougie. He was wearing a tweed jacket, and he had a salt and pepper goatee beard, immaculately trimmed. He was short, much shorter than your typical SCO19 copper, even these days. And he wasn’t in uniform, and if he was a detective from one of the specialist squads, Dougie didn’t recognise him. Nor was he name-badged as CSI. He seemed strangely familiar.
‘Can I see some ID, sir?’
‘I don’t carry ID.’
‘Then –’
‘Most people recognise me,’ the little man said, smiling. ‘As I was saying, a job well done.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Dougie stiffly.
He had a bad feeling about this. He wondered if this little guy was with the Sewer Rats. But he had no warrant card peeping out of his front jacket pocket. Nor did he stand with the typically arrogant cynicism of the long time copper.
‘What you did was necessary,’ the little man said. ‘It’s a battle between good and evil, Dougie. People assume we’re bound to win, but that isn’t so. Every day is a battle. This – this was one of the worst. One of our own. How terrible is that? But really, did you expect anything else?’ The little man smiled. ‘We’re immortal, Dougie, not perfect.’
Now Dougie recognised him. This was the only warlock who didn’t have a long white beard. The only warlock who dared show his own face on national television. And yet he’d walked unchallenged into a crime scene without ID and without being recognised. For he had that rare and special gift of ignorability.
‘You’re Brannigan,’ said Dougie. ‘Chief Warlock James Brannigan.’
‘I know I am.’
And the little man was gone. He didn’t vanish he just – at some point – wandered off. And Dougie didn’t notice when.
‘Guv?’
Dougie shook his head. He was confident that what was currently in his mind was a memory of a real encounter and not a dream; but not as sure as he would have liked.
Dougie got an email from Gina. He headed up to the top of the house, where Fred Whittaker had knocked down the partition walls and the floor/ceiling between the fourth and fifth floors to create a huge studio space with a retractable roof.
‘We’ve found Alfred Whittaker, Sheila’s husband,’ said Gina, as she opened the door to the studio. ‘Positive ID, from the DNA swab.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Alive then?’ joshed Dougie.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Show me,’ he said sternly.
Dougie entered the studio.
He saw a giant Sheila Whittaker, naked and orgasmic, frozen in mid-coitus with an equally giant male. ‘Fred’s a sculptor, as I recall,’ he said drily.
‘Yes.’
‘These are all his?’
‘Most of them. Not this one.’
Dougie looked at the smallest statue in the studio. A marble figure of a chubby man with a pure white pony tail and an expression of pure rage.
‘It’s good,’ said Dougie.
‘It’s Fred. That’s what we DNA swabbed. That’s him.’
Dougie looked closer. The statue was undoubtedly made of stone. But when he touched it the skin was warm. And the eyes of the statue were staring at him, with blood-shoot whites. And the eyes were full of incredulity and rage.
‘Fred? Can you hear me, Fred? Are you in there?’
Fred stared back but he could not speak and he could not move and he could not even blink.
Dougie sighed. ‘Sorry, Fred.’
‘What can we do? Can this be reversed?’ Gina asked.
Dougie shook his head.
Fred continued to stare.
‘Fred, Sheila’s safe, so are your kids, and we killed the bastard who did this to you,’ Dougie told the statue.
Fred continued to stare. He did not blink. He did not move. And yet his eyes burned with wrath.
Chapter 20
Three days later.
Dougie took a deep breath. Exhaled.
Game on.
‘In your own time,’ said Deputy Commissioner Dogan Görcar.
The Turk’s name was pronounced, Dougie had learned early in his Met career, ger-CHAR, not ‘Gorkar’ as some of the top brass still had it
Görcar’s manner was notoriously beguiling. He was soft spoken and courteous. He had that knack of putting you at your ease, making you feel you were his special friend. He was good looking too, in a darkly Mediterranean way, with a flair for making women fall in love with him. But Dougie knew him to be one of the toughest interrogators in the Met.
‘The suspect was armed and dangerous, sir,’ Dougie said carefully and clearly. ‘I and several other officers saw that he was carrying a sidearm when he left the house. I called out a verbal warning. Several of the SCO19 marksmen then shot to kill, as per the SCO19 standard operating procedure for such scenarios.’
‘Thirty-seven of them shot him, simultaneously,’ said Roy Hall marvelling.
‘I believe so, sir.’
‘There are several witnesses who say Gogarty had his hands upon his head, said Görcar, as if inviting Dougie to agree that sunshine was generally hot.
‘I wouldn’t disagree with that, sir. Yes he had his hands upon his head, sir, to conceal the gun, behind his head. Like this, sir.’ Dougie demonstrated by putting both hands behind his head as if to conceal a firearm.
‘My department has asked to see the film footage of the shooting, can you explain why that hasn’t happened yet?’ said Detective Chief Inspector Roger Belair of Professional Standards. He was the chief of the notorious ‘sewer rats’ whose raison d’être was to police other police officers.
Dougie put on his mildly amazed expression.
‘The footage is available sir and I have viewed it. I’ll make sure a copy is in your DropBox file within the hour.’
‘I’ve viewed it too, in fact,’ said Roy. ‘Sorry about that Roger, minor oversight.’ And he shook his head sorrowfully.
None of this made Belair any happier.
‘Unfortunately however,’ Dougie told Belair, ‘none of the cameras worked properly that morning, sir. It was an effect of the massive spell-binding, we feel. Distortion of the, whatever.’
‘None of the cameras worked?’
‘They did work sir, but there is blurring during the moments immediately preceding t
he shooting. You should have the film on your system by now sir, as we were talking I sent an email to ensure it was uploaded.’ Dougie slipped his e-berry back in his jacket pocket. He sat, upright and alert, awaiting the next question.
‘Do you know how unlikely all that sounds, Detective Superintendent Randall? Cameras failing, film blurring.’
‘Yes sir, it has an unlikely tang, as truth so often does.’
‘This is not a court of law, Superintendent Görcar rebuked him. ‘Don’t play your clever games on us. We are your fellow officers, all we want is the truth.’
‘I’m telling you the truth, sir.’
Belair snorted. ‘It’s nonsense. What you say is nonsense. I have statements from seven senior officers at the scene, plus eleven officers at the OP points. None of them saw a gun.’
‘I was closer. I have very acute vision. And I’m sure there are plenty of other officers who also saw a weapon.’
‘Your officers. Backing up your story.’
‘Easy, now,’ said Roy Hall.
‘May I ask, do the witness statements from those highly decorated murder squad detectives on my team support my version of the affair, sir? Obviously I don’t know for sure myself, because there has been no collusion or even discussion between myself and my colleagues on this matter, none whatsoever. Sir.’
Belair looked as if he was attempting to expel a stone from his bowels.
‘They do,’ he conceded.
‘I’m sorry sir, I didn’t catch that. Are you saying, they do support my account?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is that a problem, sir?’
‘They all use,’ said Belair bitterly, ‘the same words. Almost word for word.’
Dougie smiled, in full lecturer mode. ‘That’s a common effect, sir, created by the phenomenon of “group think”. We police officers, we think alike, we speak alike.’
Belair looked away; washing his hands of it.
Roy Hall looked quietly satisfied. He inspected his manicured fingernails. Dougie hated being on the same side as him. But needs must.
Hell on Earth Page 55
