GHOST VIRUS
Graham Masterton
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
About Ghost Virus
Samira had been staring into her mirror all morning before she picked up the small bottle of sulphuric acid and poured it over her forehead. She was a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. What could have brought her to this?
DC Jerry Pardoe and DS Jamila Patel of Tooting Police suspect it’s suicide. But then a random outbreak of horrific crimes in London points to something more sinister. A deadly virus is spreading: something is infecting ordinary Londoners with an insatiable lust to murder. All of the killers were wearing second-hand clothes. Could these garments be possessed by some supernatural force?
The death count is multiplying rapidly. Now Jerry and Jamila must defeat the ghost virus, before they are all infected...
Contents
Welcome Page
About Ghost Virus
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
About Graham Masterton
About the Katie Maguire Series
About the Scarlet Widow Series
Also by Graham Masterton
From the Editor of this Book
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Tooting is a district of south-west London.
It has been settled since the 6th century.
Today its population includes
5 per cent Pakistani and 3 per cent Polish.
Its name is derived from the old verb ‘to tout’
which means to ‘watch out’ or ‘beware’
1
Samira had been staring into her dressing-table mirror all morning before she summoned up the courage to burn off her face.
You are not me, she whispered to herself. Whoever you are, you are not me.
She heard the clock in the living-room downstairs chime twelve, and that was when she stood up and walked over to the door. She turned the key and jiggled the handle to make sure that it was securely locked. Then she returned to her dressing-table and picked up the clear glass bottle of concentrated sulphuric acid that was standing next to her Rasasi Blue Lady perfume and Masarrat Misbah foundation and all her lipsticks and blushers and eye-liners.
Behind the cosmetics stood an oval framed photograph of Samira with her husband-to-be Faraz. They were standing outside the Mahabat Khan Mosque in Peshawar, in Pakistan, both smiling, Samira with her hand held up to shield her eyes from the sun. That photograph had been taken only three hours after she had first met Faraz, but she had been happy that they were going to be married. Although he had a large mole on his upper lip he was reasonably good-looking and soft-spoken and only four years older than she was.
When her father and mother had driven her to his family’s house in Hayalabad, she had thought for one terrible heart-sinking moment that she was going to be given to Wasim, his fat sweaty forty-four-year-old cousin. Wasim had been sitting in the corner smoking and cramming saffron burfi into his mouth in between puffs.
But however suitable Faraz was, there would be no wedding now. Her parents could keep their dowry. They would have only her brother Jamal to worry about, as if Jamal wasn’t enough trouble on his own.
She didn’t look at herself in the mirror again. Instead she took the bottle of sulphuric acid in her hand and went to the window to stare down at their back yard. It was only about four metres wide, with a narrow flower-bed and a concrete path which led up to her father’s toolshed. It was here, though, she had spent most of her childhood, ever since her family had arrived in England.
It was here that she had played with her dolls and dressed herself up in fancy costumes and pretended to serve tea in plastic teacups to her friends from Iqra Primary School.
She raised her eyes. It was a clear November day, with a washed-out blue sky and sunshine. An airliner sparked like a silver needle as it flew high across south London towards Heathrow Airport. Samira had wanted so much to go back to Peshawar and see more of the country where she was born. That would be impossible now. They wouldn’t know who she was.
She sat down on the maroon satin bedspread that covered her single bed. The grubby stuffed lamb that she had been sent from Pakistan on her fourth birthday was lying on the pillow, with its pink ribbon and its Ziqi label, so she had always thought that its name was Ziqi. She reached out to pick it up but then she changed her mind. Even Ziqi wouldn’t recognise her.
She lay back on the bed. In anticipation of her wedding next month she was wearing an orange shalwar kameez with an embroidered collar, with a long orange dupatta scarf hung over her shoulders. It was warm in her bedroom, almost stiflingly warm, but she was also wearing a thick grey peacoat, with wide triangular lapels.
It was already past time for the dhuhr, the midday prayer, but she knew that what she was about to do was in direct contravention of Allah’s will. Whoever she was, she knew that Allah would forgive her, but she simply didn’t have the courage or the strength to face herself any longer. All the same, she whispered ‘Subhana rabbiyal adheem’ three times as she lay there. Then, ‘Please Lord... please... don’t let me suffer too much and too long.’
She held up the bottle and unscrewed its yellow metal cap. She felt quite calm now, and her hand was steady. The acid had no smell, although she could remember being warned when she was at school not to sniff it, because its vapours could burn her nasal cavities.
She bunched up her dupatta and gripped it between her teeth, in case she screamed. Then, keeping her eyes wide open, she poured the acid slowly over her forehead. Instantly, she saw scarlet, and then jagged flashes of lightning, like demons dancing, and then total blackness. The burning sensation was so excruciating that she dropped the bottle and splashed even more acid down the side of her neck.
Her skin crackled and bubbled and melted, dripping down her cheekbones and onto her pillow. Although she was biting deep into her dupatta, she let out a hideous half-choked screech, arching her back and bouncing up and down on the bed in agony.
The pain grew even more intolerable, and she clawed at her face with both hands in a futile attempt to try to relieve it, but she succeeded only in pulling slithery lumps of flesh from her chin, and ripping off her lips like two fat glutinous slugs. She could feel her teeth being bared, and then the acid eating hungrily into her gums.
She shrieked, and dragged at her long black hair, wrenching it out in clumps.
/> All the same, her prayer was answered. The acid ate so rapidly through the nerve-endings under her skin that her face and her neck soon began to feel numb, and then her heart stopped. The half-empty acid bottle rolled off the edge of the bed onto the floor and Samira shuddered as if she were cold and then she lay still. Her flesh continued to crackle softly and dissolve, exposing her windpipe and her larynx, all the way down to the vertebrae in her neck, but Samira was in the hereafter, and felt nothing.
Nearly three hours went by. The pale daylight outside her bedroom window was beginning to fade before the front door downstairs was noisily opened, and her mother called out, ‘Samira! We’re home! Samira! Where are you, Samira?’
2
‘You know what you are?’ said Jerry. ‘You’re a pillock. That’s what you are.’
‘I was cold, that’s all,’ retorted the booming voice from inside the large green charity box. ‘What do you expect me to do? Sleep in a fucking doorway?’
‘Oh, shut it,’ Jerry retorted. ‘You was in there trying to nick stuff. You’re about the fifth twat who’s got himself stuck since they put it there.’
He gave the charity box a thump with his fist just to annoy the young man trapped inside and also to vent his own frustration about being called out on such a petty, pointless job. Ever since he had been sent down here to Tooting three months previously he had been handling nothing but anti-social behaviour and petty drug-dealing and racist stabbings by gangs of rival schoolboys.
Detective Superintendent Perry at New Scotland Yard had told him that he was being posted to the suburbs because he had a ‘keen sense of smell for the streets’. What Jerry had actually smelled were the bribes that his fellow detectives had been pocketing for quietly dropping prosecutions against the Harris crime family in Hoxton, and they hadn’t trusted him not to blow the whistle on them.
One of his fellow officers had pushed him up against the wall in the corridor and said, ‘You know what your trouble is, Jerry? You’re too fucking ethical. There’s only two places for ethics, chum – the pulpit and the cemetery. Not here. Not in the Yard.’
Jerry paced up and down Fishponds Road with the collar of his brown leather jacket turned up and his hands thrust deep into his pockets. Two uniformed constables were standing on the corner by the Selkirk pub, stamping their feet to keep warm, but he knew that it wasn’t worth him trying to go and have a matey chat with them. Like all the other officers at Tooting police station, they knew why he had been transferred here, and they wouldn’t speak to him – not socially, anyway.
They were all waiting for the area representative from the charity collectors to arrive and unlock the box. These days, the quality of the clothes and the shoes being dropped into charity boxes was so good that it was worthwhile for hard-up druggies to wriggle their way inside them to steal whatever they could. The only problem was that the boxes were now designed so that once they had wriggled their way inside it was impossible for them to wriggle their way back out again.
Jerry checked his watch and said, ‘Shit,’ under his breath. He would be going off duty in less than an hour, and he didn’t even know what he was doing here anyway. Detective Inspector French had told him to question the lad trapped in the box because stealing clothes from charity boxes was now developing into a major racket, and they needed to find out who was behind it.
In Jerry’s opinion, though, this lad had only been stealing clothes to feed his own habit, and he wouldn’t know a major racket from a minor ping-pong bat. Jerry reckoned the large-scale theft was being done by Lithuanians, and one Lithuanian in particular.
‘How much longer?’ the lad shouted out. ‘I’m bursting for a piss in here.’
‘Don’t have a clue, mate!’ Jerry shouted back. ‘You’ll just have to tie a knot in it!’
‘You gotta get me out of here, I’m telling you! I’m getting claustrophobia!’
‘That’s a clever word for a thick dick like you!’
It was gradually beginning to grow dark, and one by one the streetlights flickered on.
‘You gotta get me out! I’m going mental!’
‘You were mental to climb in there in the first place! Pillock!’
‘I’ll make a complaint about you! What’s your name?’
‘Detective Constable Jeremy Thomas Pardoe. Make sure you write that down. Oh, sorry – I forgot you haven’t got a pencil and paper and it’s pitch dark in there!’
‘I’ll have you!’
‘I should wait until I’ve got you out of there first, mate. You wouldn’t want me to change my mind, would you? Bloody hell – you could be in there for days before anybody finds you! Or weeks even!’
‘You bastard!’
Jerry walked away again and left the lad ranting. He had almost reached the Selkirk pub when a silver Volvo V40 came around the corner. It stopped next to the two uniformed officers and Jerry could see the driver leaning across to talk to them. They turned around and both of them pointed in his direction. The driver parked on the opposite side of the road and climbed out.
He had been expecting the usual bad-tempered prickly-headed bloke from the charity collectors, but this was a very petite young Asian woman in a dark grey trouser-suit and a black headscarf. She came across to him with a smile and said, ‘DC Pardoe?’
She made him feel very tall and scruffy. ‘That’s me. What can I do you for?’
‘They told me at the station at Mitcham Road that I would find you here.’
‘Oh, yeah? You’re not from the charity, are you?’
The lad inside the box banged loudly on the metal sides and shouted out, ‘Get me out of here! Get me out of here! For fuck’s sake get me out of here!’
The Asian woman glanced over at the charity box and said, ‘No need for us to lock him up, is there? He appears to have done that quite successfully for himself.’
Jerry decided he liked this woman. Not only was she exceptionally pretty, with dark brown eyes that were almost cartoonishly large and full bow-shaped lips, but it seemed as if she shared his sense of humour.
‘And you are...?’ he asked her.
‘Detective Sergeant Jamila Patel.’
‘From—?’
‘The Met, same as you. I’ve been working at the Yard for the past fourteen months.’
‘Really? Surprised I never clocked you.’
‘Is that meant to be a compliment?’
‘No – just surprised I never clocked you, that’s all.’
‘You wouldn’t have done. I was working with a specialist team on honour crimes.’
‘Oh, you mean like women being stoned for adultery?’
‘That’s right. And, yes, it happens even here in England, more often than you’d think. I had a woman in Edmonton last week who had a twenty-four-kilo concrete block dropped on her head because she’d had an affair with her English tutor.’
‘Bloody hell.’
DS Patel shrugged, as if she had to deal with cases as horrific as that every day of the week.
‘Then of course we’ve had any number of young women being strangled because they refused to marry the man their parents wanted them to – or because they’d run off with a boy from a lower caste and brought shame on the family. And most of the cases are so hard to solve. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything.’
‘OK...’ said Jerry, looking around. The lad inside the charity box had started kicking it now. ‘So what are you doing here in beautiful downtown Tooting?’
‘Well, first of all, DC Pardoe, I’ve come to collect you.’
‘I’m on a shout. I’m supposed to be questioning this pill— I’m supposed to be questioning this suspect as soon as we can get him out of there.’
‘You’re excused.’
‘What?’
‘DI French told me to tell you that you’re excused. He only sent you out here to give you something to do. But I want you because I’ve been sent down here to investigate what appears to be an honour killing, and before my team was se
t up, you successfully investigated three honour killings – two in Redbridge and one in Waltham Forest.’
‘Yes, I did. But if you’ve got a team, why do you need me?’
‘I did have a team,’ said DS Patel. ‘Unfortunately we were the victim of last month’s budget cuts. That was the official explanation anyway. The truth was that it wasn’t very popular with the Asian community leaders and they put pressure on the commissioner to disband it.’
‘So now it’s just you and me?’
‘Get me out of here! Get me out of here!’ screamed the lad in the charity box. ‘I can’t hold it any longer!’
‘Don’t worry about him,’ said DS Patel. ‘Those two uniforms will take him into the nick for questioning, once he’s out.’
Jerry went over and gave the charity box another thump with his fist.
‘Sorry about this, mate! I’m going to have to leave you! I’ll send somebody round in the morning to let you out!’
‘No! Noooo! You can’t do this! I’ll suffocate! I’ll die of cold! Please – I’m begging you!’
At that moment, a green Fiesta with only one headlight came up Fishponds Road. Jerry recognised it as the car belonging to the area representative of the charity collectors. It stopped right next to them, and the grumpy grey-haired driver climbed out. Underneath a beige windcheater he was wearing a brown Fair Isle sweater which he had put on backwards, so that the label was right under his unshaven chin.
‘Evening, Ron,’ said Jerry.
‘Huh,’ Ron retorted, dragging a huge bunch of keys from out of his windcheater pocket, and sniffing monotonously as he sorted through them.
The lad inside the charity box obviously hadn’t heard him arrive, or the jingling of his keys, because he was weeping now, like a young woman in distress.
3
Sophie had just turned off the lights at the back of the shop and switched on the alarm when there was a frantic knocking at the front door.
She could see a white-haired woman in a long tweed coat standing outside, with two large black bin bags. She went up to the door and said, ‘We’re closed! Sorry!’
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