Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  ‘What are we going to tell them? It wasn’t an honour killing, after all. They were trying to turn her into a magic carpet and something went wrong?’

  ‘Jerry—’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that it gets my goat sometimes, all this pussyfooting round the Muslim community.’

  ‘Jerry – we respect your religion. We ask only that you respect ours, in return.’

  ‘I don’t have a religion. I gave it up about the same time that I gave up smoking.’

  ‘We don’t smoke, either.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you? I thought you were still burning embassies. Sorry – sorry! Bad joke!’

  ‘It’s probably just as well for you that I don’t get it.’

  ‘Embassy cigarettes? Never heard of them? Never mind.’

  ‘I’ll see you at twelve.’

  7

  David unlocked the front door of the bungalow and stepped inside. The hallway smelled airless and damp. He was about to call out, as he always used to, ‘Hallo! It’s all right! It’s only me!’ but of course he didn’t need to – not now, nor ever again.

  All the same, under his breath, he whispered, ‘Hallo! It’s all right! It’s only me!’

  He went into the living-room. The curtains were half-drawn, so that it was gloomy in there. His mother’s knitting was still lying on the seat of her armchair, a half-finished sleeve in pond-green wool. She had promised him a new sweater for his birthday, as she always did every year, but this year, thank God, he wouldn’t have to pretend he liked it.

  This was the first time he had visited the bungalow since the funeral last week. He had been making excuses to himself why he couldn’t have come earlier, but the reality was that he had been dreading it. The smell of urine-soaked seat cushions. The chipped china ornaments and the murky reproduction landscape paintings. The kitchen with its blocked sink and its tannin-stained teacups and its dinner-plates that hadn’t been washed properly, so that they still carried a crust of month-old gravy round the rim.

  Worst of all were his memories of growing up here. David was an only child, and his father had died of a stroke when he was eight, so he had spent all his adolescent years here alone with his mother. Netty, her name was – a selfish, bitter, domineering woman who never had a good word for anybody.

  Strangely, she had been almost beautiful when she was young, in a sharp-jawed way, and she had kept her looks into her old age. But dementia had taken hold. Up until her late sixties she used to pin up her hair into an immaculate French pleat, but gradually she had allowed it to grow tangled and filthy. Her clothes became spattered with the food that she had dropped, and by the age of seventy-eight she was incontinent.

  A carer from social services had visited her every day, but she had spent only about twenty minutes tidying up and changing the bed and microwaving her lunch for her. It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t stayed longer. Netty had done nothing but insult her and complain that she was ugly and useless and a fat black cow.

  David had been appalled by her racism. When he was seventeen he had a black girlfriend, Millie, from Streatham, but he hadn’t dared to bring her home.

  He went through to his mother’s bedroom. In here, too, the curtains were half-drawn, so he pulled them open. The small garden outside was overgrown with weeds and heaped with sodden leaves. A concrete gnome was surrounded by dead bracken, so that only his faded blue hat was visible.

  David looked over at the bed with its thick brown- and mustard-coloured cover. The pillow was still indented from his mother’s head, and the sheets were still stained and wrinkled, untouched since her body had been lifted out of it. In the corner, her dressing-table was crowded with jars of foundation and crumpled tubes of anti-wrinkle cream. The mirror was so dusty that the bedroom appeared as if it were filled with fog.

  He had come to the bungalow with the intention of clearing up everything in it – emptying drawers and taking down curtains – so that it was ready to be put on the market. But now that he was actually standing here, all of that brisk efficiency had drained out of him. He felt as helpless as he had when he was a boy, overpowered by his mother’s relentless malevolence.

  Don’t you dare touch anything – this is my house, not yours!

  He went across to the fitted wardrobes and opened one of the sliding doors. All of his mother’s dresses and skirts were hanging in there, some of them filthy. Her lilac tweed suit he remembered from when he was a teenager, as well as the long green dress with the cowl-neck collar which she had always worn to what she considered were ‘special occasions’, like his school concerts and midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

  On the right-hand side, every shelf was untidily stuffed with her sweaters and cardigans, which she had once folded with almost obsessive neatness, and with her underwear, her withered roll-ons and her laddered tights. He was about to slide the wardrobe door shut when he noticed the black fisherman’s sweater which his mother had knitted for his father, for his birthday, the year before he had died.

  David had always thought it was the best sweater that she had ever made – mainly because his father had insisted on it being black, and not custard yellow or pond green or salmon pink like most of her knitwear. All the same, his father and mother had argued ferociously about something on his birthday – David couldn’t remember what it was – but after that argument his father had refused to wear the sweater.

  His mother had kept it, though, and on wintry days she had worn it herself, even though it was much too big for her.

  David tugged it out from under the other sweaters. It was untouched by clothes moths, and it was clean, so his mother probably hadn’t worn it for years. He had been thinking of buying himself two or three new sweaters for the winter, and if he kept this one, it would save him a bit of money. His solicitors’ partnership hadn’t been doing too well lately, and he was in arrears with his mortgage, although he hadn’t told his wife Evie that he was almost broke.

  His mother’s death had actually come as a relief, not just because he would no longer have to visit her two or three times a month and listen to her demented insults, but because she had left him nearly £17,000 in savings and shares and the bungalow would fetch at least £475,000, if not more. Her jewellery would be worth a couple of thousand, too.

  He took off his brown corduroy jacket and tugged the sweater over his head. It smelled faintly of the perfume his mother used to wear, but he found that nostalgic rather than off-putting. Perhaps she hadn’t been as hard on him as he remembered. She had been left to fend for herself with an eight-year-old boy to take care of, after all, and with only her child support to feed and clothe him.

  He looked at himself in the foggy dressing-table mirror. The sweater fitted him so well it could have been made for him. It was warm, and it relaxed him, so that he no longer felt so hostile towards his mother, and the bungalow seemed less depressing, and more homely.

  Now you understand what I went through, putting up with that ungrateful father of yours, and bringing you up, you obnoxious boy. I never even wanted you in the first place. You were an accident, and a tragic accident, as far as I was concerned.

  ‘I was an accident?’ said David, out loud. ‘You didn’t want me?’

  What am I doing, he thought, talking to myself? But perhaps he had been selfish, when he was a boy. Because the two of them had always argued so much, he had blamed his mother for his father’s death, without once thinking what pain and loneliness she must have suffered. No wonder her tongue had seemed so sharp at times.

  He shrugged on his jacket again, but he kept the black sweater underneath. He didn’t know why, but it gave him confidence, and certainty, and a feeling that he was in charge of his life again – and that was a feeling that he had been losing lately, with his partnership doing so badly. Nelson & White had lost several crucial actions in court, and because of that their reputation had suffered and business had dried up.

  He left his mother’s bedroom and went into the bedroom that had once been
his. His mother had been using it to store suitcases and deckchairs, as well as her ironing board and vacuum cleaner and cardboard boxes filled with all kinds of junk, from burned-out lightbulbs to ten-year-old women’s magazines. His single bed was still there, with its shiny blue quilt, and his poster of David Bowie was still stuck on the wall beside it, although the bottom half of it had been ripped off.

  This was where you hid yourself and never thought about how lonely I was. This is where you listened to your cacophonous music and masturbated every night. Oh, don’t think I didn’t know! I found all your Mayfair magazines! And you thought that I was being hard on you?

  David stood in the doorway with his mind in a turmoil. He felt as if he was seeing this room through his mother’s eyes now, and remembering what it was like when he came home from school and closed the door and stayed there all evening, only emerging to eat his supper in the kitchen and never say a word to her, except to grunt.

  You know what I should have done? I should have come into your room one night when you were sleeping, and suffocated you. Why didn’t I?

  David found that his eyes were filling with tears. He blinked, and they blurred his vision, so that all the junk in the bedroom seemed to dance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. I really didn’t know.’

  He was still standing there wiping his eyes when his iPhone warbled. He sniffed and took it out of his pocket. It was Evie calling him. There was a picture of her on his screen – dark-haired and petite and smiling, with red and yellow balloons in the background.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, “why”? I just want to know how it’s going, that’s all. Do you want me to come around and help you? I’ve finished all my shopping now.’

  ‘Why should I need any help?’

  ‘Well – there’s an awful lot of rubbish in that house to clear out, isn’t there?’

  ‘What do you mean, “rubbish”?’

  ‘All that old furniture, of course, and bedding, and curtains, and your mother’s clothes.’

  ‘They’re not rubbish! How dare you call them rubbish?’

  ‘David – what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter with me. Why?’

  ‘You don’t sound like yourself at all. And why are you being so aggressive?’

  ‘You’d be aggressive if you’d had to put up with all the bad feeling that I’ve had to put up with.’

  ‘Honestly, David, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Has it upset you, clearing out your mother’s stuff? I know she was a horrible old bag but you shouldn’t let her get to you. Not now – now that she’s dead. Why don’t you call it a day and come home? We can both of us go back there on Saturday and clear it out together. Or I’ll do it by myself, if it throws you off so much.’

  ‘Oh, you think I’d let you do that?’

  ‘David – please, come home. You’re sounding so weird.’

  David stood silent for a few moments.

  ‘David?’ said Evie, but then he ended the call without answering her.

  Yes, I’ll come and see you, Evie. And I’ll show you what I do to anybody who insults me. I’ve done it before and by God I’ll do it again.

  8

  When Jerry arrived at the Wazir house on Rectory Lane, he found three uniformed constables taking down the police line tapes and the last two members of the forensic team packing up their van ready to leave.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked the PCs.

  ‘Pretty much sorted,’ said one of them. ‘Not sure I need to go for a curry anytime soon, though. I feel like I’ve been breathing in balti for the past two days.’

  Mrs Wazir was sitting in the living-room with a short bald Pakistani man in a shiny black suit.

  ‘This is my husband’s brother Nadeem,’ said Mrs Wazir. ‘Samira’s uncle.’

  Nadeem put down his teacup and stood up, holding out a podgy hand with three gold rings on his fingers.

  ‘How is your investigation progressing?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, it’s early days yet,’ said Jerry. ‘I’ve just come around to see if I can tie up one or two loose ends.’

  ‘Samira and my family were very close,’ said Nadeem. ‘My brother has to be away on business in Pakistan sometimes for weeks at a time, so Samira often used to come round to spend the evening with us, and weekends too. I am mortified that she is gone. Truly mortified.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Late on Saturday afternoon. She had been working at the restaurant and she called in to give us some kebabs. She said she was tired so she didn’t stay long.’

  ‘How was she, apart from tired? Did she seem upset about anything?’

  ‘I have to say that she didn’t seem like her normal self. I don’t exactly know how to describe it, but she was very distant. It was like her mind was somewhere else. But maybe that was just because she had been working hard all day. That restaurant can get very busy at weekends.’

  ‘So... what were the loose ends that you wanted to tie up?’ asked Mrs Wazir. It was obvious that she was keen to get rid of him.

  ‘Had Samira complained to you at all about skin irritation?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘Did she tell you that she’d been feeling itchy at all, or sore?’

  Mrs Wazir shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. She had beautiful skin, like silk.’

  ‘OK. Another thing was – I saw a coat on top of the coat-stand when I came here yesterday. A short grey overcoat.’

  ‘Yes, that was Samira’s.’

  ‘She was wearing it the last time I saw her,’ put in Nadeem.

  ‘It was hanging on top of the coat-stand when I arrived here, but by the time I left after talking to you and your son, it had disappeared.’

  Mrs Wazir frowned. ‘What do you mean? It should still be there. Nobody would have taken it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs W, but it had gone, and it’s not there now.’

  Mrs Wazir stood up, gathering up the folds of her abundant black dress. She went out into the hallway and started to lift the coats off the coat-stand, hanging them one by one over the banisters. After a few moments she came back, frowning.

  ‘You are right. It isn’t there. I can’t think where it could be. I can’t imagine that anybody would have stolen it. It was only second-hand. She bought it from one of those charity shops.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure you didn’t remove it yourself, for any reason?’ Jerry asked her.

  ‘Why should I? And how could I? All the time that you were here yesterday, I was sitting in this room, with that policewoman, too. And so was Jamal.’

  ‘Do you know which charity shop she bought it from?’

  Mrs Wazir sat down again. ‘I don’t know the name of it, but Samira used to buy several things there, because she said it was always clean, and didn’t smell like some charity shops. And of course everything was very cheap. She bought gloves there, and scarves, and I think once she even bought some boots.’

  ‘Would you know where it is?’

  ‘Yes... on the Mitcham Road, in between Kentucky Fried Chicken and Sabina’s, where she used to buy her make-up. But I don’t see how this will help you to find out who killed her.’

  ‘It’s just routine procedure, Mrs W. We have to follow up every possibility, no matter how remote it might seem. Maybe her assailant saw her wearing that coat and mistook her for somebody else. It does happen.’

  Nadeem said, ‘Do you know when her remains will be released for her funeral? We like to bury our dead as soon as possible after death.’

  ‘I’ll talk to the pathologist and let you know. I believe he’s nearly completed his post-mortem so it’ll probably be Monday at the latest. Meanwhile – that’s about all for now. I may have to get back to you once we have some more information, but now I can leave you in peace.’

  ‘I will
never know peace again,’ said Mrs Wazir. ‘Every time I close my eyes I will see my beloved Samira with her face in ruins.’

  *

  It started to drizzle as Jerry drove down to the Mitcham Road, so that the pavements were wet and shiny. It was a long straight high street with shops and restaurants on either side, as well as the Tooting Granada cinema, a massive white art deco building which was now a bingo hall. In between KFC and Sabina’s cosmetics he found Little Helpers Charity Shop, and he parked on the red line outside. He could see a traffic warden eyeing him from a distance, but he couldn’t be bothered to walk up and tell him that he was a police detective on duty.

  In the front windows of Little Helpers stood three dummies dressed in coats and Puffa jackets, as well as an assortment of dolls and toys and second-hand books. Jerry walked in and realised at once why Samira had said that it didn’t smell like an ordinary charity shop. There were Yankee Candle reed diffusers on the shelves, and through the open back door he could see an elderly volunteer steam-cleaning a pair of corduroy trousers that were hanging up on a rail.

  A young woman was standing behind the counter, counting the money in the cash register. She had a short brunette bob and she was wearing a tight blue velvet jacket. She had plum-coloured circles under her eyes but Jerry couldn’t decide if she was tired, or if the circles were make-up.

  ‘I’m looking for the manager,’ he said. He glanced outside and saw that the traffic warden had already pounced on his car and was taking a photograph of it.

  ‘That’s me,’ the young woman replied, looking up at him quickly but then going back to counting her handful of £5 notes.

  Jerry took out his ID card and held it up in front of her. ‘Detective Pardoe, Tooting CID.’

  She looked up again, and it was plain that she was irritated because he had made her lose count. She didn’t say anything but started counting again from the beginning.

  ‘I’m wondering if you recall a Pakistani girl buying a short grey winter coat from you, not so long ago.’