Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Only the strong remained corporeal in such a place. But Magnus was strong; and he had endured.

  And this was his reward. He was now enjoying life as a member of Roy Hall’s élite squad of blaggers and contract murderers. And he loved it! He killed, he drank, he womanised, and he even got to drive high speed performance cars.

  There was a price to pay, of course. For Magnus was no longer a free man; he was a spell-bound slave. But it was a price Magnus paid gladly. And Lucretius too saw nothing amiss in serving as a vassal to such an indulgent master.

  Only Fillide rebelled against her lot. But, she realised with dismay, today had been a pleasure for her too. The bloodlust had come upon her and she had slain and butchered and now she was celebrating with crap alcohol.

  And it felt good.

  ‘Are we done?’

  ‘We’re done.’

  The three assassins left the flat and lingered on the walkway outside, like partygoers who can’t bear to admit that the drink has all been drunk and the party is over.

  ‘Till the next time,’ said Magnus.

  ‘Till –’ Then Lucretius stopped talking, and looked, and Fillide and Magnus followed his gaze.

  At the end of the concrete walkway they saw a witness. A black youth in a hoodie looking right at them. His face was shrouded by the hood; but in this moonlight he could see them all clearly. Clearly enough to ID them leaving the scene of the murder.

  Magnus drew his gun and shot the youth six times in the blink of an eye. The black boy was hurled backwards by the blast and tumbled down the stone steps.

  ‘Bastards!’

  They turned. A second youth, also black, also in a hoodie, had seen them kill his friend.

  Magnus sighed and raised his gun.

  The youth vanished. He’d jumped over the balcony and fallen – to his death?

  Fillide moved fast. She was at the balcony rail and peered down, and saw nothing. No dead body sprawled on the concrete courtyard forty foot below.

  Without uttering a word, the three of them leaped off the balcony and fell. An instant later, they swung their bodies in mid-air, and landed cat-like on the balcony on the level below. They each regained their balance and looked around. No trace of the youth. So they vaulted off the balcony and fell again.

  And kinked again, in mid-air, and landed lightly on the concrete floor of the lower level, Level Five. Again, no sign of the witness. But this time they heard the sound of footsteps down the stone steps at the end of their landing.

  Magnus gave chase down the stairs, moving fast for such a brawny man. And Lucretius and Fillide jumped off the balcony a third time.

  This time however Fillide misjudged and missed the lower balcony and fell all the way to the ground. She landed badly and her legs crashed against the ground hard, and she felt the bones splinter, and her neck broke agonisingly. She toppled over and rolled, feeling pain grip her. She braced herself with her arms but couldn’t stand up.

  The black youth ran past her, heading for the exit of this high rise complex. He was fast, a free jumper of extraordinary ability and courage. But she had her gun in her hand and she took aim at him, ready to fire. An instant later and he would be dead.

  But she didn’t fire.

  Good luck to him, she thought. The little fucker.

  Five minutes later Magnus and Lucretius joined her. They’d found no sign of their witness anywhere in the estate, but neither of them were concerned. Whatever happened, Roy would cover it up. After all, most of the station commanders in London East were on his payroll. The senior brass at New Scotland Yard were all Masons. And Roy himself was a Master Mason, and was well in with the Grand Master.

  Magnus picked Fillide up and shook her up and down to straighten her limbs. She stood on broken legs and winced with pain. Her forehead was bleeding and she mopped the blood off with a tissue. But within ten minutes her legs were healed, and the broken neck didn’t really bother her.

  ‘Till the next time,’ said Magnus, for the second time that night.

  They high-fived: a gesture Fillide had learned early on in her time in this world and taught to the others.

  ‘Glorious victory,’ murmured Lucretius.

  ‘Fuck the gods,’ said Magnus.

  ‘Vaffanculo,’ said Fillide grinning.

  Chapter 11

  Although the briefing was scheduled to start at 9am prompt, Fillide didn’t get to the Major Incident Room in Bethnal Green till 10.42. She had to go back to her room in the police section house first, and change into something more respectable: i.e. less riddled by bullets.

  After careful consideration, she picked out a ghost-grey Jean-Paul Gaultier billowing gown with night-black Gucci shoes and diagonal patterns of orange striding along her breasts. Her upper arms were bare but she wore long grey gloves, and there was no cleavage bared: it was too subtle a look for that.

  Fillide was feeling good. It had already been a long day, but she wasn’t remotely tired. But she did walk slightly stiffly, because of her broken back which was only 90% healed.

  As she entered the new Major Incident Room on the first floor of Bethnal Green station – formerly the recreation room, with a wall lined with pool cues and shelves of table tennis bats - Dougie threw her a vicious glare. She smiled sweetly back, and gave him a dry middle finger. A gesture intended to bear its modern meaning.

  He flinched. Fillide was pleased.

  Dougie was standing in the centre of the room. Strictly speaking it was too small to be an MIR, but after the destruction of Leman Street nick, they had been forced to improvise. The Murder Wall whiteboard was behind him, with the Holo Wall to his left. As always Dougie dominated his team with his height and his piercing glare and his brusque Sarf London tones, and because he was Dougie Randall.

  Gina stood beside him. The rest of the team – nineteen in all, not counting Fillide – sat at the briefing table or gathered around on folding metal chairs. There was also someone Fillide didn’t know: an elderly deep-wrinkled man with a goatee beard and glasses, wearing a brown jacket and a brown cloth tie.

  In addition, seated on a more comfortable leather chair with arms, nursing a tea mug that assuredly contained whisky or rum, was the Man himself. The Guvnor of Guvnors. Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Hall.

  Fillide ambled through the desks and picked up a folding chair and squeezed in next to Ian Gregory, the File Preparation Officer, who visibly stiffened at her nearness.

  ‘May we continue, RDC Melandroni?’ Dougie asked with heavy irony.

  ‘You may, good sir,’ she replied, and waved him to carry on: a gesture she’d learned from several Popes.

  She glanced at Roy, in his lordly chair beside the briefing table. He looked like a wicked schoolboy waiting to tease his teacher. He winked at her, clearly amused at her late entry.

  ‘The hunt for Gogarty and the demon which possessed him continues,’ said Dougie, ‘three weeks after the death of Julia Penhall and the escape of demon and Gogarty from Leman Street station. So far with sod all progress. No sightings, no CCTV matches, no informants. We are however actively compiling our Murder Books on Gogarty’s previous killings in Leeds and Bradford and Glasgow, including the mountaintop murder of his girlfriend Alexandria, surname unknown.’ Dougie grinned, mirthless. ‘Which is futile by the way since we don’t have the fucker in custody and we already have him in the frame for at least ten murders in London, but there you go. No stone unturned as it were. Meanwhile we still think that the demon which possessed Gogarty also possessed Jack the Ripper, and if someone had said that to me ten years ago, I would have had the bastard sectioned.’

  As he spoke, Dougie’s eyes were flicking across the room like a lizard’s tongue catching flies.

  Fillide remembered the first time she’d met Dougie Randall, five years ago. This was after Roy had decided she should have some kind of official role to supplement her clandestine criminal activities.

  Initially Fillide had welcomed the idea. She was tired of being n
othing but a killer and a thief and a whore. She wanted to do something good for a change. She wanted, she really did, to make a difference.

  So on her first day in Five Squad, where she had been assigned to replace the perilously sick DDC Baal, she’d walked up confidently to Dougie in his spartan office. She’d noticed that he had his Queen’s Police Medal in a box on one wall and a trophy sabre on the other. And she’d held out her hand in greeting to him, smiling with all the charm in her possession, which was considerable. Eager to make a good first impression in her new role.

  Dougie had ignored her handshake. And then he had stood up, stared at her calmly, spat in her face, took out his e-berry, and sent her an email about where to find the tissues.

  An email!

  She’d wanted to break his neck. But of course, she couldn’t, for such an act would have contravened her spell-binding. Which was why Dougie had done it, the spitting thing. To watch her writhe, yet be unable to defy or assault him.

  Since then, for five painful years, Fillide had taken endless crap from Dougie and from the rest of her human police colleagues. Belittled, insulted, sidelined, and at every opportunity treated with that special contempt which the alive feel towards the dead.

  ‘Cat,’ said Dougie.

  Catriona Okoro took over the briefing. ‘Everyone saw the demon escape from the station; yet no one really saw. But wherever he flew he must have landed somewhere. Air traffic control records have been accessed and are still being analysed. All rooftop CCTV footage has been scrutinised. We’ve interviewed six hundred witnesses, including anyone who has regular dealings with demons, including social workers, probation workers, foster parents of hell creatures, you name it, we’ve interviewed them.’

  DC Victoria Howe nodded, lethargically. She’d scheduled and organised the entire House to House and witness interview programme. In consequence, she hadn’t slept in weeks.

  Fillide paid little attention to the big black woman’s words. She wasn’t hugely interested in the Gogarty/demon case in truth. She didn’t understand who this Jack the Ripper was, or why people made such a fuss about him when he had committed – relatively speaking – so few murders. Fillide’s view on the case was simple. When the demon was found, by whatever unfathomable means, she would kill it.

  Her eyes drifted around the briefing room.

  Taff Davies was looking bleary, hung-over again no doubt. He was three times divorced, pals with all his exes, but what woman would want to live with a fat boozy bore like him?

  Fillide knew that Phil Matthews had been Taff’s regular drinking pal. So maybe that was the reason the fat detective was drinking even more than usual. She’d seen him in the canteen one morning unable to put sugar in his tea, because his hand shook so much. Betraying himself as a man only capable of functioning whilst drunk. Much like Roy really.

  Next to Taff was Ronnie Tindale, who had panda eyes: he wasn’t sleeping either. He was a workaholic and an obsessive, and a wretched bore. And what’s more, he seemed to understand all about computers, which Fillide found eerie. Fillide liked Ronnie more than the rest of her fellow officers. Even so, she liked him not at all.

  The women were the worst. Gina and Cat and Alliea and Victoria and the young Jewish one, Lisa; even Emily, the telephonist. They all despised Fillide not just because of her hell dimension provenance, but because of her beauty and sensual allure. They hated the way she flirted with men with such charm and ease. They hated her charisma, they hated the way she became the focus in every room she entered. They hated her scintillating wit - not that she often shared it with them. And they especially hated the fact she got preferential treatment because of her sexual relationship with Roy Hall.

  Fillide knew she could have won these women over by confiding in them. By telling them the truth about herself and her abusive relationship with Roy. Oh, if she’d only shared with them her tragic tale of despair, degradation and slavery! Then they would have felt sorry for her. Then, they would all have wanted to be her comforter, and her friend.

  But that wasn’t her way. For Fillide could never, ever, no matter what, lose face.

  ‘Three Squad have officers across the country searching for Gogarty at his previous residences and places of employment,’ Dougie said, as Cat sat back down, and mainly addressing his briefing to Roy Hall. ‘As far as cyberspace is concerned: the demon-that-was-formerly-Gogarty is not active on Facebook any more, nor on Twitter, and GCHQ have failed to find any clues despite monitoring all London phone traffic over the last two weeks.’ As he spoke Dougie nodded at the officers who had garnered these non-clues, giving lack of credit where it was due. ‘The demon must, we presume, have ready access to considerable amounts of cash because we’ve never found any bank details for Gogarty and yet he clearly enjoyed a good standard of living.’

  Though she ignored the words, Fillide enjoyed watching Dougie talk. He found it difficult to keep to his seat at briefings; he preferred to stand and loom over them. And though he could be still as a Buddha when others were talking, when he had the floor Dougie loved to move restlessly around. He would pace from side to side or sometimes walk around in big circles, and he would lunge, then wave his big fists in the air to illustrate important points. It was like watching a boxer replay his favourite fight.

  Gina was standing next to Dougie, a motionless shrub beside the gesticulating oak; carefully listening, occasionally prompting him.

  Fillide had known from her very first day on the Squad that Gina lusted after Dougie. It was obvious. And Fillide often wondered: was she actually fucking him? On balance, Fillide doubted it. There was a sad and defeated expression on Gina’s face sometimes, when she was looking at her guvnor. Fillide knew it well. It was the look of hopeless unrequited love.

  Fillide became aware that Tom, the geeky detective who’d fought so well at Ildminster Square, was looking at her. No, more than looking: staring at her. She wondered why. Was he leering at her voluptuous body? Well that was hardly a surprise, she thought, amused. She’d seen the way he looked at her that time in Ildminster Square, when -

  But no. No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t sex in his eyes, she realised. It was curiosity. He was looking at her neck with the forehead-wrinkling stare of a man who has scooped up and is inspecting a clue.

  It dawned on Fillide that around her throat she was wearing - carefully selected to tone with her billowing grey gown with orange stripes - a solid gold necklace of ancient Afghan origin. Stolen of course. Risky, but Roy loved her to play dangerously.

  Fillide recalled that the necklace had originally had been looted from a tomb in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then nicked by Lucretius from the Bayswater mansion of a dead drug dealer in 2019. So mayhap, she speculated, it was listed on the stolen property sheets that were distributed to detectives every week? Most people didn’t bother reading them but she had a feeling that Tom might.

  She flashed Tom a ‘fuck you’ look.

  ‘Prof,’ said Dougie.

  All eyes turned to Professor Harwich, the silver-haired man in the tatty jacket and tie. Fillide found him oddly attractive. She’d had lovers that age back in Rome; octogenarians with tired, wrinkled bodies and minds that still brimmed with energy and curiosity.

  ‘I would argue this demon is old. Very old, and hence very powerful,’ said the Professor.

  ‘On what basis?’

  ‘Because no demons I know of on Earth have such power,’ admitted Harwich.

  ‘Fair surmise,’ Dougie granted. ‘How old?’

  ‘Hard to say. There have been demons on Earth,’ said Harwich, ‘since Biblical times at least. We know that Solomon summoned demons to build his Temple. Jesus was tempted by Satan, the demon otherwise known as Lucifer. So let us suppose that one of Solomon’s demons stayed put. And has been on Earth ever since, possessing human evil beings and generally committing havoc. Imagine how much that would explain.’

  The squad nodded in agreement.

  ‘So how many other demons like this are there?
Running loose?’ said Roy. ‘And who else have they possessed?’

  ‘Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Elizabeth Bathory? Vlad Tepes? Genghis Khan? Take your pick,’ said the Professor.

  ‘That’s shit,’ interrupted Gina. ‘You can’t blame demons for all the – crap of the world.’

  Harwich shrugged, non-committal. ‘As to the identity of this particular demon,’ he said coolly, ‘I cannot say. As we have all remarked, it’s a blurry image. These creatures shapeshift, and they also create ocular unclarity.’

  ‘According to the PNC,’ said Andy Homerton, ‘Three hundred demons registered in the City of London can’t be accounted for.’

  There was a chill silence.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Roy. Though Fillide could tell he was hiding a smile. Quite a few of these rogue demons worked for him.

  ‘The official line is not to acknowledge it,’ said Andy. ‘In case it causes civil unrest.’

  ‘I see,’ said Roy, staying just the right side of hammy. ‘Well that’s an unsettling piece of news.’

  He winked at Fillide; almost imperceptibly.

  ‘So, Dougie, what are your next steps?’ said Roy.

  ‘We need more bodies for the search,’ said Dougie. ‘We need –’

  ‘We need to speak to Herneith,’ said Gina. Her voice was so loud and distinctive that the words rang like a gong.

  ‘No,’ said Dougie.

  Gina turned to Dougie, her expression fierce. ‘We need to do a deal with the bitch, it’s the only game in town.’

  ‘No!’ Dougie was insistent.

  Tom raised a hand.

  ‘Taff,’ said Dougie, ignoring Tom.

  ‘No, I think Gina has a point,’ Roy interrupted smoothly.

  Dougie looked resentful.

  ‘No stone unturned?’ suggested Roy.

  ‘There’s a price,’ said Dougie. ‘There’s always a price.’

  ‘Then let’s pay the price. I’ll authorise the funds, you set up the Herneith meeting a-sap,’ Roy said smoothly. ‘These things have to be done. Devil, long spoon, you know what I’m saying? But keep this on track, eh Dougie? Identify the demon, by whatever means possible. If we have to play dirty, we play dirty.’