Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Yes, Dougie remembered him now; this was one of Sheila’s kids. Dougie had seen him that day, the day they killed Naberius, escaping from the house with his brothers and sisters. A big gangly teenager with wobbly features.

  Jacob’s fingerprints had been found on the handle of the door to the station, and on the walls and even on Ronnie’s body; a perfect thumbmark in blood was found on one of the haunches. However, there were no arches, loops or whorls, for golems have blank fingertips.

  Jacob Golem, Dougie learned, was the abandoned child of a legendary Jewish man-made monster from Eastern Europe. Dumped in the river at an early age by his father, as was the way with these demonic bastards. Retrieved, put into the care of the Demon City authorities, then fostered by Sheila Whittaker under Mammon’s cash-for-freaks scheme.

  Dougie was putting it together. Sheila Whittaker. The foster parent who had shielded the demon Naberius and the warlock Gogarty after the destruction of Whitechapel nick.

  What was going on here?

  Dougie left the team to their work, and double-stepped it back down the stairs to the scene of crime. He spent half an hour talking to detectives and uniform officers there, impressing them with his urgency and commitment. Essential stuff. Without inspiration and energy a murder enquiry will soon shrivel into nothingness.

  Then Dougie stood in the station reception area, which was blood spattered and covered in chalk marks to mark the spots where shreds of Ronnie’s organs had fallen from the killer’s mouth. The Crimestopper poster bore a splash of red, implying that the killer had steadied himself there with one hand, after Jenny had emptied the contents of her police issue handgun at him. But the silver bullets had bounced off and one of them had ricocheted and nearly hit Jenny herself. The bullet holes went up the wall all the way to the ceiling.

  Dougie continued his pacing of the ground. Retracing the killer’s steps, from the bench where Jacob had sat next to the old lady, Agnes Buckley, to the gaping hole in the brickwork where the security door between the station and the reception area had been smashed off its hinges during his escape.

  Dougie walked through the hole from reception into the corridor, which was taped off at either end.

  ‘Clear away, I want to look,’ he said, and the pathology and forensic team finally backed up.

  Two CSIs in their white forensic suits continued to measure blood spatter on the walls as Dougie squatted and looked more closely at Ronnie. The remains of the body were barely recognisable as human. The head had been ripped off the body, and had ended up nestling against the wall. The throat had clearly been chewed. Some of Ronnie’s clothes had been ripped off, and on his exposed skin of his torso a fingernail or claw had carved some marks.

  Dougie knelt closer, and looked at the message the killer had sent him. The fingernail marks formed a word, clumsily gouged but legible.

  The word was Dybbuk.

  Chapter 14

  Roy Hall had a spring in his step as he walked through the golden gates of the Buckingham Bordello, loins tingling, cock raw and small, and out into the grand sweep of the Mall.

  He’d spent the morning with three beautiful ladies of the night. Or more accurately, daytime. One of them was a courtesan who had many years ago pleasured the bravos of the Hell Fire Club. Roy loved those little historical linkages. It made him feel he was part of something greater than himself.

  He walked down the Mall towards the gilt backside of the angel above the Victoria Monument, flanked by black-painted bronze lions. He took a moment to admire the trees of St James’s Park on his right. To his left was the leafy expanse of Green Park. He walked past Queen Victoria and across the roundabout on to the Mall. The distant view of Admiralty Arch capped this long thoroughfare like a monumental football goal.

  He took quiet satisfaction in the many salutes he received from the mounted Horse Guards in bearskin hats and shoulder-strapped automatic rifles who lined this great boulevard. That was a nice touch, Roy felt. It added historical splendour for the benefit of the clients of London’s premier whorehouse.

  A horse carrying a bear-skinned warrior whinnied. Birds in the trees in the park were singing or cawing. Flocks of them blackened the blue sky.

  Roy walked briskly as was his way, and in a few minutes had reached the stuccoed Carlton House Terrace, the mansion that once had housed the experimental arts complex of the ICA. Its gleaming white pillars stood proudly, like soldiers on a parade ground. He marched up the steps that soared up the left side of Carlton House Terrace, leading to the statue of the Duke of York, staring disapprovingly out at Green Park and the Mall. The sadly neglected twin of Nelson on his column in nearby Trafalgar Square.

  Roy paused at the first level of steps, and looked back, to make sure his bodyguards were behind him.

  Ah, yes, there they were; almost sprinting up the stone steps to catch up with him. Four of them in all. Three burly crew-cut men in dark suits bulging with Kevlar beneath, and a slim blonde woman in a tight and revealing red dress. This was at Roy’s insistence, since he liked to see a woman’s figure au naturel i.e. without Kevlar, even if it did add to her risk level.

  Roy had a pool of twenty-four bodyguards in all; he called them his Entourage. Six of them were damned, and hence super-powered, including two of the members of today’s detail. There were eight on duty; these four and another four ahead of him on point.

  Roy took another moment to drink in the morning air and to savour the view. The park, the grand sweep of the Mall lined by the soldiers on their horses, Admiralty Arch, the roof of John Nash’s stucco Terrace. And the now-distant Bordello, cheekily illuminated with pink bulbs strewn across its façade and portico.

  It was a warm July day; the trees in the park formed a broad canopy circling the lake. Roy sniffed. He loved to stand here and smell the pollen billowing out from St James’s Park. As a young man he’d suffered badly from hay fever. But now, with his magically enhanced sense of smell, pollen was like cocaine to him. Above the trees of the park Roy could see the tips of the Gothic towers of Westminster Palace; the merest hint of the mock-medieval grandeur on the other side of Whitehall.

  With a sigh, Roy turned around and carried on up. He reached the top step in moments and was proud of the fact he wasn’t remotely out of breath. He strolled towards his car, parked as per usual on double yellows.

  Then a hand touched him. He turned. Blood spurted from his cheek. He’d been slashed. Across the face. The sfrigio.

  Roy took a step back, feeling the warm blood trickle down his cheek and neck. He could imagine how he looked; but he stayed calm.

  He saw his nemesis. Clad all in black; her black hair tightly bunned; her dark eyes blazing with rage. Sexy too, he had to concede, though she brandished a knife dripping with his blood.

  ‘Fillide, my dear,’ he said, one hand in his pocket, and pressed the panic button on his e-berry.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said and lunged at him with the knife again.

  He was fast; she was faster. She ripped him open from belly to throat but he got a punch in then fell and rolled and came up holding his gun.

  He fired at her but she wasn’t there. And suddenly he realised he couldn’t see. She’d ripped his eyes out.

  He heard shouting. Passersby, not his bodyguards; they would have used their codewords. Or fired their guns. He marvelled at Fillide’s skill. She’d clearly taken out all eight highly trained killers without a shot being fired. She really was the best. He wished he’d had Lucretius on bodyguard detail. Or Magnus maybe. They might have been more fucking use.

  He was blind now, but he still had his gun; and he was trying to locate Fillide by smell or sound or instinct. He thought he heard something and fired.

  Nothing.

  He fired again, wildly.

  He heard a cry; a man’s voice, not Fillide. Some random pedestrian had been shot. Well, tough shit.

  ‘Enjoy your time in Hell,’ a sultry voice whispered in his ear and he fired instantly. He blew off part of his own
ear. But he didn’t hear anything that would indicate he’d hit her. Though even if she had been shot, she would never cry out. She was too well trained for that.

  ‘Why are you doing this, my sweet?’ Roy asked, trying to draw her out.

  She laughed, mockingly. He fired at the sound of her laugh. But then he dropped the gun, his arm burning with pain. She’d slashed his wrist, deeply. She might even have hit an artery. He felt his strength start to ebb.

  He dug in deep, and reached for his other gun, his ankle gun. But she slashed his face again. Then his throat. Roy realised he was bleeding from a vein in his neck. No, not a vein, an artery. He’d lost all feeling in his arm too. The blood was pouring out of him now. He could feel himself fading.

  ‘They’ll bring me back,’ he tried to say. But he couldn’t utter the words.

  His last experience on Earth was hearing Fillide laughing; sounding happier than he’d ever known her be.

  Dougie was getting tired. He’d been back at work since 5am. He’d attended the interview of Jenny Sykes, but learned nothing new. He’d spent two hours with Harwich, the forensic demonologist, who gave him a potted history of the Jews and the blood libel, which seemed to be of limited relevance to his case. He’d driven to the mortuary and spoken to Thaddeus Sullivan, trying to get traction on Gina’s suggestion that the Gogarty they shot was some kind of mystic doppelgänger with identical DNA to the actual Gogarty. But Sullivan wasn’t buying that claptrap, and Dougie didn’t blame him.

  So that left dybbuks as his most likely scenario. It was now formally indexed as LOI-6-1 on the category board.

  Dougie strode into the MIR for the squad’s jackets-off brainstorming. All the team were there, apart from Fillide. Dougie wondered where she might be; but the thought didn’t detain him long.

  ‘Give me,’ said Dougie, ‘your ideas.’

  He looked around the incident room; eyes snaring them with questions they couldn’t answer.

  ‘We’re on dodgy ground here, guv,’ said Catriona, cautiously.

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Can I speak frankly?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m,’ said Catriona, ‘totally lost.’

  ‘It’s the fingerprint thing that spooks me,’ said Seamus. ‘No fingerprint on the fingerprint he left, I mean. Even bloody demons have prints, of some shape and form. All the damned do. So why not this guy?’

  ‘He’s made of clay,’ Alliea said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Seamus acknowledged.

  ‘We know the killer is the foster son of Sheila Whittaker. Find Sheila Whittaker,’ said Alice Tunstall shyly.

  ‘Yeah right,’ said Taff, who had pursued that approach all through the night, and now looked like death warmed up. ‘She vanished without trace after the Naberius slaying. She hasn’t been home in months. She hasn’t used her debit card, either at an ATM or contactless. She doesn’t log in to social media, she’s lost touch with all her friends and family. No trace of her on any of our London CCTV cameras. She’s living invisibly somehow and so are all her kids.’

  ‘Highly suspicious,’ said Dougie. ‘Deeply dodgy and alarming. Hence - why didn’t we know this sooner?’

  ‘She didn’t seem of any interest,’ admitted Taff. ‘She’s just a, well, mumsy middle aged lady. Very much the wouldn’t harm a fly type.’

  ‘Whose son is now a serial killer.’

  ‘Well there’s that.’

  ‘The message,’ Dougie said. ‘Focus on the message. Dybbuk. What’s a dybbuk? Give me a narrative exposition of dybbuk taxonomy and history, people.’

  ‘A dybbuk,’ summarised Andy, who had pulled his own all-nighter on this topic, ‘is a spirit. In other words a ghost. Best definition, it’s a human spirit so evil it’s not allowed into Hell.’

  ‘A human spirit so evil,’ Dougie recapitulated, ‘that it’s not allowed into Hell.’ He paused. ‘What does that tell us?’

  ‘Genghis Khan. Hitler,’ said Gina. ‘Pol Pot. That level of evil, I would surmise.’

  ‘Strictly speaking Sheol, not Hell,’ amended Seamus Malone, who’d once dated a Jewish girl.

  ‘Sheol is death, not afterlife,’ Lisa Aaronovich corrected him.

  ‘Let’s prioritise this line of investigation for the moment,’ said Dougie. ‘Surmise: Gogarty was not a warlock, as we previously supposed. Instead he was a human being possessed by a dybbuk aka evil bastard ghost, which is still alive and inhabiting another body. Let’s say, the golem is possessed by the same dybbuk who possessed Gogarty and also Roslyn D’Onston and potentially many others. Hence, the golem is just the vessel. A puppet, just like Brian Gogarty was before we filled him full of holes. The dybbuk is - we don’t know what it is. Let’s keep our scenarios open. What else?’

  ‘The dybbuk is sometimes called ru'aḥ tezazit, unclean spirit,’ said Catriona.

  ‘There’s also a gilgul,’ said Andy, ‘a transmigrated spirit. Or Ibbur, when a second spirit attaches to a soul.’

  ‘What do the warlocks say?’ said Dougie.

  ‘Nothing useful,’ said Lisa Aaronovich, warily. She’d made a series of frustrating phone calls to the Warlock Council Press Office and to Meera Shah, the Director of Information at New Scotland Yard.

  Dougie shook his head. He took a deep breath. ‘I have a new suggestion. A paradigm-expanding idea.’

  Gina shrugged. ‘Go for it,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. I shall.’ Dougie’s eyes roamed the room; making sure he had the absolute attention of every member of the room. Including Tom; though he was strangely abstracted today, Dougie noticed.

  ‘We have been told, have we not, that the dybbuk is the ultimate in evil.’

  Heads nodded.

  ‘We are aware, if I’m not mistaken, that our killer has warlock-like powers. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘Get to the fucking point, why don’t you?’ That was Gina.

  Dougie held the pause. Too long perhaps. Then he continued: ‘Adding those two ideas together: I would suggest the killer is,’ Dougie paused again, for the killer punch: ‘both of the above.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Ah,’ said Cat.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Gina.

  ‘In other words, our killer is the vengeful murderous spirit of a dead fucking warlock,’ Dougie concluded.

  A thoughtful silence followed.

  ‘That works for me,’ said Alliea.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good with it,’ said Gina.

  All heads nodded.

  ‘Bloody norah,’ said Tom; absorbing that one.

  ‘LOI-Six-One-One,’ said Cat.

  ‘Now it really is time to rock and, indeed, roll,’ said Dougie.

  The whiteboard started to fill up. The HOLMES computer was given key search words. The databases were trawled through. Dougie paced as the team threw out ideas. Catriona emailed actions. Gina formed a sub-team to brainstorm questions and facts, raw bits of data, fragments of thoughts. Tom formally re-briefed the team on the geomagic aspect of the case.

  ‘Warlock architecture,’ said Andy Homerton, awed.

  ‘Repeat your briefing on Rosyln D’Onston, Tom,’ said Dougie.

  Tom did, at some length.

  He talked about Rosyln’s motives, his opportunities. He discussed the fact that later in his life, Roslyn had an affair with a Theosophist who came to believe that her paramour was Jack the Ripper, and who told the police so, but was not believed.

  ‘Catriona, Action Theosophy,’ said Dougie; and Catriona started to type. The HOLMES screen began to fill with addresses of Theosophical Churches.

  ‘Remember, Roslyn was a black magician,’ added Tom. ‘He used body parts to make holy candles made out of human body fat; that’s the theory.’

  ‘We found a candle, in 13 Ildminster Square,’ remembered Dougie.

  ‘Forensic found human DNA in the tallow,’ said Tony Williamson.

  ‘Yes. I know, I know. We do still have that candle, d
on’t we?’ mused Dougie.

  ‘And there’s Mitre Square,’ Tom interrupted, brashly.

  ‘What about Mitre Square?’

  ‘Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper’s fourth victim, was found in Mitre Square,’ Tom explained. ‘The exact same location where Melissa Anderson, the first Embalmer victim, was found. It’s a cursed location in fact, because centuries earlier a Holy Trinity monk called Brother Martin stabbed to death a woman praying at the High Altar in 1530, before killing himself. Furthermore -’

  Dougie waved at Tom to pause there; and he did.

  At that moment, in unison, every single member of Five Squad remembered Ronnie’s final words, as captured by the CCTV cameras:

  ‘Martin? Who in buggery is this Martin? And why should I give a shit that he’s back?’

  ‘Coincidence?’ Dougie asked.

  ‘Or the first appearance of the dybbuk?’ said Andy.

  Everyone was staring at Tom; he rose to the challenge.

  ‘Maybe Martin was the original human being whose soul became the dybbuk. It was a bloody and a terrible murder, by all accounts. There’s a good chance there was a Satanic connection.’

  ‘Why did the monk kill himself?’

  ‘Lots of mass murderers do,’ Catriona pointed out.

  ‘But maybe there was a better reason. He was a warlock, and he killed himself, in a sacred place, to be reborn in another body?’ suggested Tom. ‘Brother Martin self-dybbuked?’

  Catriona typed that up.

  ‘I’ve left a message with Roy Hall. I’ve asked him if he’ll –’ said Dougie.

  There was an unexpected ripple of sound. An alarm clock, a rock riff, a Windows chime, a UFO noise, and more; as twenty-six mobile phones ring-toned simultaneously.

  ‘Spooky,’ said Catriona.

  Dougie checked his phone.

  ‘Email,’ he noted.

  ‘Email with attachment,’ said Catriona.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Don’t open it. There may be a -’

  Dougie opened the attachment. He watched a short video.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m opening the attachment now. Oh shit.’