Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘I’m not sure I can serve you any more alcohol,’ the girl said reasonably.

  ‘And where’s the fucking stripper? We always have strippers on Fridays.’

  Her smile was a lie by now. ‘We don’t have strippers here, sir. It’s a pub with a dining area, not a strip club.’

  ‘Every Friday.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Every fucking Friday. A sooty and a white bint they had last time. Fucking tasty. They even do girl on girl. What do you think of that, eh?’

  The waitress was steaming with rage now.

  ‘There used to be strippers in this pub,’ Dougie explained to Claire, ‘five years ago. When it was the Duke of York. Long time ago.’

  Roy took out his wallet. Notes spilled from it.

  ‘Another drink,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll speak to the manager,’ Claire said and moved away swiftly.

  ‘Take it, take it.’ Roy stood up quickly and grabbed her arm. He pushed the money into her fingers. ‘Take it. It’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’ She was steely yet also close to tears.

  ‘It’s my way of apologising, see. Take it.’

  The money dropped to the floor. The waitress walked off.

  All the customers on the adjoining tables were staring at Dougie and Roy now. ‘For fuck’s sake, man, sit down, you’re making a fool of yourself,’ Dougie hissed.

  Roy sat. ‘I used to be able to handle my drink,’ he said sadly. ‘They tell me you’re making a complaint against me, Dougie.’

  ‘Would I do a thing like that?’ Dougie said.

  ‘An allegation that me and my team have been guilty of acts of corruption. As well as being implicated in major crimes including burglary, assault, and, I can hardly credit this, murder. Is that true, Dougie?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Dougie lied. ‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Roy. You got nothing to worry about.’

  Roy shrugged. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  There was a brief silence between them.

  A few moments later, the manager came over. A big man, balding, biceps bulging out of his blue polo shirt, well able to handle himself.

  ‘Right, out,’ he said.

  Still seated, Dougie flashed his warrant card. ‘Apologies, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve been on a murder enquiry, working nights. We just got a result. Little girl was raped and killed but the good news is we got the bastard.’ Dougie flashed a killer smile to back up this outrageous lie. ‘Let us drink up, eh, and then I’ll get my colleague out of here.’

  Roy swivelled in his chair and stared at the landlord, as if amazed that someone of such muscular girth had just arrived on the scene. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘I said out,’ said the landlord, and laid a hand on Dougie’s shoulder.

  Dougie stood up. The hand was pushed away. Dougie was a full head taller than the landlord. He was still calm.

  ‘When I’ve finished my pint,’ Dougie said.

  The landlord poked him with a finger in the middle of Dougie’s chest. ‘You’ll go when I bloody say so. Out.’

  Dougie thought about it. He was very angry indeed. But he couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which beating a pub landlord to a pulp would help his career prospects.

  ‘Okay Roy, we’re off,’ said Dougie.

  ‘Like fuck we are.’ Roy stood up too. He was suddenly entirely sober. ‘I am Detective Superintendent Roy Hall, and this is my colleague Detective Inspector Douglas Randall and you, sir, are a cunt. What are you?’

  The landlord was an ex-boxer. His body language indicated he was about to take a swing at this drunken oaf.

  ‘Did you say Roy Hall?’ he said instead.

  Roy nodded.

  The landlord’s confidence ebbed. There was sweat on his brow now. His breath was coming in gasps.

  ‘Sure. Drinks are – no bill. You’re my guests.’

  Dougie looked at Roy. Roy sat down.

  The landlord walked away. Claire the waitress looked daggers at them both for an instant. Then she came to her senses, and lost herself in work.

  ‘Nice one,’ Dougie said, as he sat back down.

  ‘Withdraw the complaint,’ said Roy, ‘or I’ll put this tasty piece of snuff porn on the internet.’

  He handed Dougie his mobile phone. It was set to Video Gallery.

  Dougie picked up the phone and pressed Play. He watched a scene unfold on the tiny screen. Faint grunts were heard as a man was beaten brutally by boots and fists. Dougie absorbed the scene. One big man in a black leather jackets, Doc Martens, kicking the crap out of the victim. Face like a screaming goblin. A shorter man, burly, with a lead pipe, which he used methodically and brutally on the screaming victim’s legs. And a red-haired banshee. The sound was tinny but the effect was chilling. The banshee-woman was slamming the man’s head into the ground, again and again and again, as the lead pipe cracked his legs.

  Then the camera panned and six men and three women were revealed, gathered in a semicircle, like the crowd in an Roman amphitheatre, watching the violence impassively. The camera zoomed and picked out faces. Dougie knew them all. Then the camera returned to the beating. The victim was no longer making a noise. Blood spattered the red-haired woman’s face.

  ‘That’s you,’ Dougie said at length. ‘You’re not even wearing a mask, you daft cunt. That’s a prima facie and incontrovertible case for GBH charges that is. You keep this on your fucking phone?’

  ‘Not GBH. Murder. That was the pimp who died. Beaten to death, two broken legs and a cracked skull. It was when Mickey Dolan was head of Carter Street CID. That’s Mickey there see, the one who’s not me, the one with the lead piping. You remember the case? Henry Marcina, nasty little pimp with a taste for ten-year-olds?’

  ‘I remember the case.’

  ‘And do you recognise the bint? The red-haired girl with the brown suede jacket, who has been bouncing Henry’s head on to the ground like it was a baseketball?’

  ‘Yes I do. It’s Angela. My wife, Angela.’

  Roy smiled, shark-like.

  ‘One of the lads filmed it on a video camera. Then we transferred it later to some fucking file, whatever it’s called, then on to my phone. My insurance policy if you like. Every man on my squad can be ID’d from this film. The theory being, if I ever go down, they do too. Including DC Angela Fucking Ferris, as she was then. Who subsequently of course fell in love with some big lunk of a copper and became Angela Fucking Randall.’

  ‘Angela,’ Dougie pointed out, ‘is dead.’

  Roy grinned.

  ‘Yeah but her kids are alive. Her kids, your kids. What are they called?’

  It took Dougie a while to answer. ‘Daniel and Jessica.’

  ‘Nice names. Do you really want Daniel and, whatever her fucking name is, to know that their mum was a vicious fucking killer? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ Roy was virtually Tourette’s by now. ‘What would that do to them? Fuck them up, right? For life, right? Warp them? Make them into a fucking, laughing fucking, yeah, fucking what, yeah, eh?’

  ‘I’m calling your bluff,’ said Dougie.

  ‘Call it,’ said Roy.

  But Dougie couldn’t, and he didn’t.

  Till now.

  ‘You’ve got to let this go, Dougie,’ said Gina, in the airless mortuary room in the company of twelve cold corpses. ‘It’s too big. You know who Fillide is. Who her spell-binder is. You’re talking Roy Hall here. He’s untouchable. Just walk away. Let it lie. You’ve got no choice.’

  Dougie was still looking at the body of the black kid on the mortuary trolley.

  ‘One of my officers is in the frame for the murder of twelve youths including a fifteen year old boy and a seventeen year old girl,’ he said pleasantly. ‘And you expect me to let it go?’

  ‘Fillide is protected. She’s fireproof. She’s Roy’s bitch. Dougie, please.’

  ‘No one is above the law.’

  Gina snorted with rage.

  ‘Jesus!�
��

  ‘No one,’ he insisted, ‘is above –’

  ‘She belongs to Roy Fucking Hall!’

  ‘No one, as I have just explained, not even Roy Hall, not even the fucking Commissioner, is above the law,’ he told her sternly.

  Dougie, you’re a bloody hypocrite, he advised himself.

  Images of bloody horror flashed in front of his eyes. The red-haired banshee. The bloody corpse of Henry Marcina. Why did she do it? he kept asking himself. Why? Was she coerced? In fear of her life? Oh Angela! How could you have, how could you have, how could -

  Gina shook her head at Dougie, appalled.

  ‘You’re mad. Roy is a Mason. He’s a Detective Chief Superintendent. He’s in deep with the warlocks. They reckon most of the top brass in New Scotland Yard get their summer holidays courtesy of Roy’s slush fund. Roy Hall can walk on water, it’s official. You can’t go after him. You just can’t.’

  ‘Just,’ said Dougie, grimly, haunted by memories of the red-haired wailing murderess who had fathered his two kids, ‘fucking watch me.’

  Chapter 5

  The Thames Barrier at Silvertown was one of the official boundaries of post-Occlusion London. On the map it was designated as Spell’s Bound East.

  No hell creature, not even a free demon, could pass beyond it. Not by air or by water or by land; not unless their spell was revoked by a senior warlock.

  The spell-binding left a shimmer in the air above the gleaming steel barrages of the Barrier. Birds who flew through the schism would emerge at the other side startled and sparkling as if dipped in dew.

  Fillide and Tom arrived by police cruiser. Tom was enjoying the ride; it afforded him a fine opportunity to remind himself of London’s wonderful architecture.

  They’d travelled past the Greenwich Naval Hospital and glimpsed the stuccoed jewel of the Queen’s House, framed by the colonnades of Wren’s Royal Naval Hospital; skirted the the spaceship-shaped O2 complex; then continued steaming on past the new modern housing sprawls of 21st century Bankside.

  The boat skimmed rockily upon the fast-moving Thames waters. They were doing about forty knots. The boat’s captain was Inspector Rob Naylor of the Thames Water Police. He was a grizzled man with a salt and pepper beard. His skin was brown and weatherbeaten, his hands tough as leather; for thirty years, apart from a brief period as a probationer at Tottenham Court Road, the river had been his manor.

  Tom knew that Rob was the son of a Thames Waterman. His boat was state-of-the-art, with a turbo engine and electric harpoons to deal with water demons escaping from the St Paul’s Pool. Rob was a man of few words: most of them ‘no’. When Tom asked if he’d ever heard of Five Squad; and when Tom asked if the boat could go any faster; and when Tom asked if there was any chance they might not go quite so near the other boats, Rob had unleashed his all purpose reply: ‘No.’

  For most of the journey Rob had been smoking roll-up cigarettes, made of pure tobacco. He had the knack of rolling cigarettes with one hand while steering the boat with the other.

  This was a slow way to travel but Fillide had suggested it; she loved the river. And Tom loved nothing more than drinking in her pleasure.

  ‘Tell you what, why don’t we go to Rome?’ he said cheerfully as he stood by her side at the boat’s rail, looking out at the unfolding vista. Hoping she was being seduced by the water, and the breeze, and the warm sunshine, and him. ‘Maybe? One day?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me, you, Rome.’

  ‘Why?’

  She was, he realised, in one of her curt moods.

  ‘Um. It might be romantic?’

  She snorted. ‘I’ve been to Rome. I lived there. Remember?’

  Tom sighed inwardly; but he dug in.

  ‘Of course I remember. I just thought – it might be nostalgic. Bring back happier memories. Modern Rome. Red wine. Pasta. Rude policemen. You and me.’

  She was silent for a while.

  ‘Not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She scowled; he saw his error instantly.

  ‘If you were free from Roy, I meant,’ he said awkwardly. ‘And if you had, you know, a revocation spell, allowing you to travel abroad. And assuming we were free to – I’m sorry - I was just - daydreaming, I guess.’

  ‘Why? To humiliate me by reminding me of my plight?’

  Tom sighed. ‘I wanted to give you hope.’

  ‘Do not. It hurts too much.’

  ‘I’m sorry. If I could –’

  ‘Could what?’

  Tom was full of shame. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  They arrived at the barrage and berthed. The wind whipped the waters of the river.

  Tom looked at Fillide as she stared out at the vast silver flood barrage. He marvelled at her wild, unruly hair, her moist, beautiful face, her eyes that blazed with curiosity about every tiny detail of her world. He stifled an impulse to give her a bullet-point account of the depth of his love for her.

  She always sneered at him when he did that.

  ‘We’ll be a couple of hours,’ said Tom to Rob. ‘Why don’t you wait here?’

  Detective Inspector Naylor fixed Tom with the most forbidding version of his blank face: ‘No.’

  Tom sighed.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’ll come ashore, take some statements,’ said DI Naylor casually. ‘From the men who fished the suitcase up.’

  ‘You’re sure? We can do that.’

  ‘Nah. I’ll do it. Makes me feel like a real cop,’ Naylor said, ‘not just a ferryman.’

  Tom and Fillide clambered up on to the jetty. They were greeted by the DI from the Silvertown police, Tony White, whose CV Tom had read during the journey.

  Tom heightened his glamour slightly; his face almost shone now.

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

  White blinked. He was clearly aware that one of Tom’s eyes was pointing in a different direction to the other eye.

  ‘DI Tony White.’

  ‘Good to meet you.’

  ‘You should be warned, this is a bad one.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Tell me about it.’ He had, he felt, more of an air of authority these days. Few who met him realised he was only twenty years of age.

  ‘Two bodies in a suitcase,’ White said. ‘Mutilated, chopped up. The PNC flagged it up as of possible interest to your Gogarty case.’

  ‘There is no Gogarty case,’ said Fillide. ‘He’s long dead.’

  ‘Even so. Come look.’

  The Silvertown police had rigged up a temporary incident room in the museum room of the barrier, for viewing the corpses before they were conveyed to a mortuary. The bodies were still in the suitcase. It was a big case, more a trunk. The lid of the case was open, and they could see that the bodies had been hacked to pieces then squashed into position. There was partial decomposition of the corpses from river water but the skins were still intact. Tom kneeled down and studied the suitcase tableau intently. He took some photos with his e-berry.

  ‘The photographer has already been,’ White said.

  ‘I like having my own.’

  Tom prodded one of the bits of corpse with a finger. Cold, clammy. He dipped a speculum into the compressed mess of flesh and organ and extracted something.

  ‘What is it?’

  Fillide’s nose wrinkled; the smell was making her nauseous, even from the other side of the room.

  ‘Shit,’ said Tom.

  ‘Shit?’ That was White.

  ‘Human excrement.’ Tom prodded more.

  ‘Yeah, right. That’s one of the factors that was red-flagged,’ DI White explained. ‘Evisceration. Also, the limbs have been cleavered apart. The system gave us a close match with John Griggs, June 2020. You remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ said Fillide. ‘His body was found in a left luggage station. Somewhere in London.’

  ‘Marylebone,’ recalled Tom, though he’d never worked on the case. ‘The body was cut into joints, put into a sui
tcase with wheels, then checked in. The Left Luggage staff called the cops after a week. The maggots were crawling out. It went down as a Butcher case. The Butcher of Clerkenwell.’

  ‘Close match,’ White repeated.

  Fillide came closer and inspected the bodies. Tom noticed that she seemed wary of the two corpses, and didn’t make any attempt to touch them as she normally would. Nor, thankfully, did she try to lick the skin.

  ‘Who are they?’ Tom asked.

  As he spoke, squatting, his eyes still fixed on the suitcase tableau, Tom had to remind himself these intermingled body parts had once been two separate human beings. Now they were wedged together so tightly they almost formed a single multi-limbed person. More intimate in death than any two people could ever be in life.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said White. ‘The pathologist cut some clothing off. I took a whiff. Smelled to high heaven. Booze, body odour. Dossers I’d say.’

  ‘Elderly?’

  ‘Grey hairs, that’s true.’

  Tom stood, and started putting together hypotheses in his mind. ‘This is really sick. Fillide.’

  ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

  ‘I’m not –’ He bit his tongue.

  ‘We can’t help,’ Fillide told White. ‘This fits the Butcher of Clerkenwell MO, that’s true enough, but that case, you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘It’s cleared up,’ Tom clarified.

  ‘Even so,’ White persisted. ‘Close match.’

  ‘John Griggs was a Naberius murder. Naberius is dead.’ Fillide’s tone was insistent, as if she were talking to an idiot.

  ‘I know, and yet,’ said White. ‘It’s a close match.’

  Tom sighed. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘We all do it,’ White said smoothly. ‘Write off awkward cases. But what if Griggs had a different perp? What if it wasn’t your demon Naberius, it was some other guy? What if that some other guy is still around, chopping up people and putting them into suitcases?’

  He was beaming. The power of the PNC computer had transformed him into a detective genius.

  Fillide forced herself to move closer to the corpses. She sank to her knees and tilted her head as if cocking a gun. Then bobbed forward and sniffed the two dead bodies. Her face was just a few centimetres away from the decay. Her head snapped back; her features contorted, as if she’d swallowed poison.