‘Yes.’
‘You think you can overpower me. Break Sheila out of her coma state. Find a way to vanquish me.’
‘Yes.’
The creature that wore the body of Sheila smiled. It was the same smile that once had soothed Sheila’s fractious children when they were squabbling.
‘It can’t be done,’ Sheila said viciously.
‘We’ll see.’
Sheila laughed.
‘Defy me then. If you want to defy me. Go on, do it.
Sheila took out her athame from the scabbard that was pouched against her breasts. The blade glinted in the light. She licked the blade and blood dripped from her tongue on to the table. Then she handed the knife to Jacob.
‘It’s a magic blade. It can kill me.’
Jacob hefted the knife. He planned his next moves – how he’d slit her throat with a sideways swipe, then stab the blade into her heart with a fast thrust.
‘Go on then.’
Jacob hesitated.
‘It’s what Sheila would want you to do. She’d gladly give her life to see me dead. And this athame will kill my soul as well as her body. So what’s stopping you, you fucking nebbish?’
Jacob lunged at his mother’s throat with the sharp blade of the sacred knife.
Or at least he tried to; but he could not move.
‘Just kidding,’ she taunted. ‘Your people are famous for their sense of humour, am I right?’
Jacob wondered if the power of his will could break this spell.
He convinced himself that it could. He focused his gaze upon Sheila’s throat. He banished all other thoughts from his mind. He reminded himself that Sheila wanted this more than anything.
But still he could not move.
‘Vexing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Troy began to cry.
Sheila had already cast a spell to stop Troy talking, because he was so annoying. And now he was regressing fast, into real babyhood. But that meant he cried all the time. And that was even more annoying.
‘That wretched baby,’ grumbled Sheila.
Troy continued crying.
‘I’ll give him some milk,’ said Jacob.
‘Fuck’s sake! The damn thing’s a liability. Why are we dragging it around with us anyway? We have a great team here, you and me and Veda, but we don’t need that bloody baby.’
‘He’ll be fine. No trouble. Let me get up.’
The binding spell relaxed and Jacob stood up. He handed the knife to Sheila, hilt first.
But Sheila gave it back to him.
‘Good lad,’ she said.
‘Why are you giving me this?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Now, see to the baby, there’s a good boy. Stop it crying.’
‘I’ll give it milk,’ said Jacob desperately.
‘No that’s not what I mean. Stop it crying. Do you comprehend, you thick bastard? Stop it crying. Forever. Do you understand me, Jacob?’
‘No,’ said Jacob.
Sheila stared at him, ugly triumph in her eyes.
‘I can’t,’ said Jacob.
Sheila smiled. She knew he would yield.
‘I won’t,’ said Jacob.
Sheila waited. It wouldn’t be long now.
‘I defy you, monster!’ said Jacob.
‘Do as I bid you, child,’ said Sheila, calmly.
And so Jacob did as he was bade.
Chapter 4
‘It’s a cold case?’ said Gina.
‘Yes. Six months old. Unsolved. Just up our street,’ said Dougie.
‘Not really,’ Gina said, tersely. ‘Just a bunch of scrotey drug dealers. It’s not some drive-by affecting innocent members of the public. It’s not political, it’s not a top level gang hit. It’s just a bunch of scrotes killing other scrotes. There’s nothing here to make us cross turfs, guv. Leave it to Nine Squad.’
‘Take a look at the bodies.’
They were in the Battersea General Hospital mortuary, in the basement. Twelve bodies had been taken out of the deep freeze. Young men and women ripped to shreds by bullets. Their faces were waxy. The freezing process had rendered their skin eerily shiny. One of them, a young woman, had a bullet hole where her eye should have been. One body was still covered in a green plastic sheet; the rest were naked and straight out of the cold chamber.
‘This one looks familiar,’ said Gina.
A black male, early 20s, gutshot. Skinny. Dougie showed her an e-berry photo of the same lad before he died.
‘Lemarr McKenzie, half-brother of Conrad Caesar. He grassed his own brother up for a double shooting in a kebab house. He’s been missing ever since.’
Gina knew the Conrad Caesar case; it was one of theirs, an active One Squad file. ‘Okay, I’m backtracking here,’ said Gina. ‘I get it, this was a hit. Lemarr was the target, the rest were just collateral damage?’
‘That’s what I surmise.’
‘Not a robbery at all.’
‘Nope.’
‘Tallison and JuJu?’
‘That’s one theory.’
‘So where’s Grandage?’
‘Come again?’
‘DI Grandage is the investigating officer for the kebab house shooting. I should know, I’m deputy fucking SIO. Why haven’t we got Jim and his One Squad crew here? If we can pin this hit on Tallison -’
‘It’s not Tallison.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Softly softly.’
Dougie could be very annoying sometimes. And he knew it too, which made it even more annoying.
‘Okay, have it your way.’ Gina said.
She mulled a moment, then scrolled her e-berry for the case file. ‘Okay, I’m scrolling the forensic reports of the crack house shooting. No fingerprints at the scene, no DNA. Killers wore gloves and cleaned up, am I right?’
‘One or more of them had a shower at the scene.’
‘Yeah I see that,’ Gina said, reading.
‘However, local CID finally got a make on one of the killers leaving the scene. As of one week ago. Witness is a fourteen year old boy who decided to come forward. His best friend is this boy.’ Dougie waved a finger in the direction of one of the bodies. ‘It would have been his birthday one week ago.’
Gina followed his finger gesture. She walked over to the last of the metal autopsy tables. She pulled back the green plastic sheet to reveal a young IC3 male, no older than sixteen and probably younger, with three big bullet holes in his skinny black chest. And a look of surprise still on his face after all these months.
‘Nathan Fletcher,’ Dougie told her. ‘Fourteen years old. Him and his pal Shane Benson, they saw the killers leaving the scene, then were eyeballed and pursued. Our potential witness Shane got away, Christ only knows how, this one didn’t. Best pals. Mates since primary school. Hence, our witness Shane is very motivated. I’ve arranged for him to be put under protective surveillance.’
Gina nodded. ‘Sounds good. So, come on, who did the hit? Was it Tallison’s crew? The Chav Warriors? Or was it Juju’s mob?’
‘No. This was a different gang entirely.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m not sure if can tell you. It’s sensitive.’
‘Don’t screw with me, Dougie.’
‘This is off the record?’
‘Agreed.’
‘There’s a new player on the scene,’ Dougie said. ‘Or an old established player who’s grown bigger balls. Controlling the gangs. Dealing dark incense. Selling resurrected whores to men who like to beat up women. Taking a cut off the top from armed blaggings and finance fraud. Those Triad killings, the Bolger shooting. It all connects up. Tallison and Juju are no longer gang leaders, they’re employees. They report up to this guy. The capo di tutti capi I guess you’d call him.’
‘Who?’
‘I can’t tell you that. Not even off the record.’
‘Dougie!’
‘What I can tell you is that this job was farmed out to a team of contract kil
lers. I would bet that Tallison paid good money to make Lemarr McKenzie go away. Using killers provided by the aforesaid new player on the scene, who I shall not call Mr Big but you get the idea. He’s the Man. He deals, he steals, and if you want an enemy whacked, he can help you out no probs.’
‘We’re talking about Murder Inc here?’
‘This is the UK, Gina, we don’t have Murder Inc.’
‘Murder plc then.’
‘If you like.’
‘Lucifer wept.’
‘We have to tread carefully.’
‘The fix is in, I take it?’ There was no other reason for Dougie to be so very cagey.
‘When wasn’t it?’
‘So what next?’
‘The witness gave descriptions for two men and a woman. They fit the profile of known contract killers on our target nominal list. No names but I suspect all of them are damned. One has a big moustache, very retro. The other wears Army fatigues with a name badge saying “Luke”, which we assume to be a pseudonym. And the woman was described as “icy-eyed” and “unkillable”, medium height, dark brown hair, black leather jacket, a real “chiquita banana” in Shane’s quaint teenage slang, which I take to mean highly desirable totty. He said he couldn’t see her breath even though it was a cold night, that’s another reason for the lad to suppose she was one of the living dead.’
‘He got a pretty good look then.’
‘He was this close to her.’ Dougie gestured at the gap between him and Gina. ‘She was injured. She fell off a balcony. That’s how he got away.’
‘So, to repeat myself: why isn’t One Squad dealing? You can’t seriously tell me those guys are corrupt? ’
‘This is a delicate –’
‘Shut the fuck up, guv, with all due respect. This is not right. This is not right.’
Gina looked around with a madly shaking head and waving hands, as if she were a cartoon mouse looking for killer cats. This was her pisstake impersonation of what she considered to be Dougie’s absurdly paranoid state of mind.
‘Or here’s a thought,’ she said. ‘Why not hand-pick a whole new squad? Call it the A Team or the Kick Ass Squad or whatever you fucking like. Make it a covert operation answerable to you and you alone. That’s the way these things are done, guv. Not like this. We’ve got three entire murder squads at our disposal, and you’re acting like Sam Cocksucker Spade with me as your Nancy Fucking Drew?’
Dougie blinked.
‘Are you done?’
‘For now.’ Gina looked chagrined; she was known for her rants.
‘I wanted you to see these kids first. And feel it. See, that girl,’ he said, gesturing at one of the corpses. Gina looked. ‘The one with the broken neck. Jada Kemal. She was killed in the flat. Neck was broken. But she’s only seventeen years old. She didn’t have a gun in her hand. She’s a girlfriend of one of the dealers. Does that make her an evil bitch who deserves to die? I don’t think so. More like innocent victim who shagged the wrong boy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doesn’t that touch you?’
‘Huh?’
‘I want to know you care.’
‘Well I don’t care,’ Gina snapped. ‘I’m a copper, she’s a victim. This is how I pay my mortgage. When did you become a bleeding heart, Dougie?’
‘You’re a hard-hearted cow, Gina,’ said Dougie, finally grinning.
Gina looked relieved.
‘You bet. So. Recap,’ she said. ‘We’re on our own for the moment for reasons you won’t divulge. You’ve ID’d the two resurrected male assassins and I assume you’re trying to track them now. What about the woman? Do we have a name? Has the witness done an electronic photo-fit of her?’
‘Yes, and yes.’
She waited. He said nothing.
‘You’re killing me here. Who did he ID? Who’s our female killer?’
Dougie took out his e-berry and scrolled through his photographs, till he arrived at the computer generated Photofit of the female killer. It was remarkably accurate. He showed it to Gina.
She was shocked.
‘Now do you see why I brought you here?’ Dougie asked.
‘Yeah. Now I see. Even so –’
‘Even so what?’
‘This may be a crock of shit. The witness may be lying.’
‘He may be.’
‘But you don’t think so.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So you think she did it, you really think it’s her?’
‘I know it’s her.’
Gina looked again at the face of the killer on the e-berry. Female, dark brown hair that was almost black, brown staring eyes, robust nose, oval face. Undeniably beautiful. Unmistakably her.
Fillide Melandroni.
Skip back ten years.
To Friday the ninth of August, 2014.
It was eight weeks after the infamous Smallprint Massacre. Seven weeks after the Elephant and Castle Shopping centre was turned into a shrine for the Extirpated. Six weeks and one day after the Elephant and Castle Shrine was enclosed in a stockade, as the first step towards the creation of the Ghetto of the Damned.
Dougie was having lunch with his boss, the Royboy.
‘Best fish and chips,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent Roy the Boy Hall, ‘in all of bloody South London. And strippers too. Every Friday. That’s why I suggested lunch on a Friday, see? You and me. The old firm. What could be better eh!’
‘You’ve been drinking,’ Dougie said.
Roy giggled.
‘I’m pissed. As a fart. How are you bearing up?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Oh I doubt that. I really do. Losing your missus - that’s the kind of thing a man can never recover from, not truly. She was such a lovely woman, was your Angela. Lovely woman! I knew her well. We were friends as you know. I can only imagine how you must be -’
‘I’m over it.’ Dougie’s tone was curt.
It was eight weeks and six days since Angela had been murdered. He was by no means over it.
‘Hard to believe, my boy. The shit we went though that day. And the way it all turned out. Fucking – warlocks, eh! Would you Adam and Eve it, eh?’
The waitress arrived at their table with the orders, balancing two plates of fish and chips expertly on her arms, the cutlery gripped in her fingertips. She was blonde and chubby and busty and had a nice smile. Her hair was ponytailed and bounced on her shoulder as she walked; she must have been about nineteen.
Roy took time out from his maudlin sentimentalising to take a good look at her. Like a teenage boy ogling a picture postcard of a bird with big tits.
Dougie was mortified to be anywhere in the vicinity of this loathsome little shit.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Roy leered.
‘You’re welcome, Roy.’ She moved away from the table, warily, carefully keeping more than a slap on the arse’s distance away from the legendary Roy the Boy.
Roy peered down at his plate of cod and chips. The cod came in crisp golden batter and was the size of a small dog. The chips were underneath, hidden from view. It was a monster of a fish, and Dougie marvelled that it was still legal to serve it, with quotas and the like.
‘Looks good,’ volunteered Dougie. His own cod was equally vast. He sipped his lager, a draught San Miguel. He felt a shameful lust for the food he was about to eat. Grief or not, Dougie had never lost his appetite.
‘We’ve been friends a long time, you and me, Dougie,’ said Roy chummily.
Here it came: the hidden agenda.
Roy picked up the tomato sauce bottle, eying it warily as if trying to decide which way was up. Dougie took it off him and removed the cap. He handed it back. Roy shook it and tomato sauce splashed in puddles on the table, missing the plate by a good margin.
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t worry, Roy.’
‘Hate it when that –’
‘Just eat.’
‘Good idea,’ said Roy, let off the hook.
The hidden agenda was momenta
rily forgotten.
Dougie was awed that a senior police officer could be so utterly bladdered on a working day, when it wasn’t yet one o’clock. But he kept up the pretence that Roy deserved to be treated as worthy of respect.
Dougie ate. There wasn’t much conversation. After a while he glanced up and it dawned on him that Roy had fallen asleep. The knife and fork were still in his hand, but limply held, and Roy’s mouth was hanging open. His eyes were open but he was snorting occasionally. There was drool coming out of his mouth.
Dougie felt sick. He beckoned the waitress.
‘Are you okay, sir?’ She looked anxiously at Roy.
Dougie mimed ‘shush’. ‘He’s on medication. Another pint eh, love?’
The waitress smiled, in on the gag. ‘You got it,’ she mimed, and moved off, blonde ponytail lightly flailing her shoulder.
Dougie finished his meal and drank most of the second pint too. Then he waited for his boss to wake up. Roy wouldn’t forgive him if he just fucked off.
After twenty minutes of silent snoozing Roy jerked awake. He tried to cover his embarrassment by pretending not to be embarrassed. Instead, he glanced around as if he’d spotted someone. Then pantomimed an ‘aha’ expression towards his food, and noshed in vigorously. His meal was stone cold but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Aren’t you eating?’ said Roy eventually, looking at Dougie’s empty plate.
‘I’ve eaten, Roy. We ordered together. I finished my meal twenty minutes ago.’
‘Right. Course you did.’ Roy beamed.
‘How’s the fish?’
‘I’m a bit pissed to be honest,’ said Roy.
He pushed his plate away. He peered around till he saw the curvy blonde waitress and bellowed. ‘Oi!’
The waitress came back. Tense but still smiley.
‘I want to fucking order some proper food,’ Roy said. ‘Not this fucking muck. It’s cold and it’s, whatever. Off. What’s your name, love?’
‘Claire.’
‘My name is Roy.’
‘I know that, Roy.’
‘I’m a police officer.’
‘I know.’
‘Ignore him,’ Dougie said. ‘He’s been drinking.’
‘Another pint and some fucking food.’
Roy still had two full pints on his side of the table.
Hell on Earth Page 66
