Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  34

  On their way back to the station, Jamila received a text from Dr Fuller telling her that he had successfully removed Mindy’s jacket with far less skin abrasion than he had feared. She would be spending the night in intensive care at St George’s and sent over to Springfield in the morning for psychological assessment and further recovery.

  ‘It’s my day off tomorrow,’ said Jerry. ‘If you want me to, though, I’ll come over to Springfield when you go to see her. I don’t have to pick Alice up until six.’

  ‘Let’s see if she’s fit to be questioned,’ said Jamila. ‘Is your Alice staying overnight?’

  ‘Yes, she usually does. We won’t be doing anything very exciting – just go to Nando’s for a bean burger and then come back to my place and watch Frozen for the eleven-thousandth time.’

  ‘How old is she? It must be very hard for you, only seeing her now and again.’

  ‘She was seven in June. And you’re right, yes, I’ve missed out on a lot. She seems to have grown taller every time I see her. But there was no way that her mum and me could have stayed together. Too much alike, that was our trouble. You know what they say about magnets.’

  They turned into the police station car park. They didn’t get out immediately, but sat together in the car for a while, as if they needed some quiet time to think – not only about their investigation, but about themselves.

  ‘I’d better go and write this up,’ said Jamila, at last. ‘I don’t know how Saunders is going to react, but he needs to know what a confused state our suspects are in. There won’t be any future in taking any of them to court, not the way they are now. We’ll have to apply to have them sectioned.’

  ‘That’s if they live long enough.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re really going to die, do you? I’m sure that must be a delusion.’

  ‘I don’t honestly know any more. The way this case is going, I’m beginning to think that I need to be sectioned myself.’

  ‘I’m going to do some Googling,’ said Jamila. ‘There could have been similar outbreaks in the past, maybe in other countries.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible, but you’d think we would have heard about them, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps they were so unbelievable that nobody ever took them seriously.’

  ‘So what are you going to Google? “Coats that make you think you’re somebody else”? “Jackets that make you want to eat people”? How about “Sweaters that crawl around the house and make a grab for your ankle”?’

  ‘Jerry, we’re not going to solve this by making fun of it.’

  ‘Do I look as if I’m laughing? I’ve never had a case that’s given me the willies so much as this one. And the worst part about it is, there’s so much evidence, and all our suspects have freely confessed to what they’ve done, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever.’

  Jamila laid her hand on top of his. ‘Don’t allow yourself to get frustrated. Everything in the world makes sense. It’s just that sometimes we can’t understand why.’

  Jerry looked at her. There was something in her eyes that made him feel both reassured but lonely, as if she had acknowledged that they could never have anything more than a professional relationship. It wasn’t only their different ethnicity and their different religions. She would always be DS Patel and he would always be DC Pardoe.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Let’s go and make Smiley as baffled as we are.’

  35

  Philip had to run across the terminal concourse to catch the last train from Victoria to Streatham Common, and he was still trying to get his breath back by the time the train stopped at Clapham Junction.

  Apart from a girl with dreadlocks right behind him who wouldn’t stop talking on her mobile phone, he was the only passenger in his carriage. He could see his face reflected in the blackness of the window and he thought that he looked at least forty years old, even though he was only twenty-eight. His hair had been thinning lately, but he put that down to stress.

  Streatham Common station was deserted when he arrived, and so he didn’t have to show his ticket. It was nine minutes past midnight, and a fine rain was falling, so that the streetlights all shone like dandelion clocks.

  He turned up the collar of his jacket and started to walk down Greyhound Lane. It would take him only five minutes to get back to his flat, but he was so tired that he felt like lying down in the nearest front garden and falling asleep, regardless of the rain. It had been a little over five months now since he had started his first major role as reward manager for Ensurex International, but during that time they had taken over two other insurance companies, which had meant that he was responsible for sorting out hundreds of conflicting demands for bonuses and pensions and other benefits.

  He loved figures. He could have happily crunched numbers all day. But it was dealing with foul-tempered managers and whining, discontented staff that he found so exhausting. Ensurex International paid well, but he was beginning to wonder if it was worth all the pressure.

  He crossed over to the row of houses which faced the south side of the common. The common itself was dark and empty, with only a sparse line of plane trees separating it from the road. His flat was in a converted Edwardian house on the corner of Braxted Road, with a paved-over garden and a gaggle of green dustbins outside. The couple who lived directly underneath him smoked and argued and played rap music all night and he had wanted to move for months, but he never seemed to have the time or the energy to look for anywhere new.

  He was only thirty metres away from his front driveway when he noticed six or seven dark figures standing on the common, roughly in a circle. He stopped and stared at them, shading his eyes from the streetlight with his hand. They were too far away for him to be able to see them clearly, but they all appeared to be hooded, and they were swaying slightly, as if they were performing a ritual dance.

  He knew that he should probably mind his own business, but there had been reports in the Streatham Guardian recently about a local society of Druids who had been trying to trace the ley lines that ran across this part of South London. Ley lines were supposed to connect one site of supernatural significance to another – such as a Neolithic hill fort at Crystal Palace to a sacred well in Waddon. They interested Philip because he had worked out a way of mapping them mathematically with shape analysis, which archaeologists often used to locate buried ruins.

  He admitted to himself that it was nerdish, but he had always loved solving problems with numbers, ever since he was a schoolboy.

  The dark hooded figures certainly looked like Druids, and perhaps they had found a ley line crossing the common. After all, Streatham had been named ‘street-ham’ after the Roman road that had been built through it, and it was conceivable that the Romans had followed the mystical track used by the ancient Britons.

  Philip crossed over the road and walked over the wet grass towards the figures. They continued to sway, but they were silent, neither talking nor singing, and under their hoods their faces were in total darkness, so it was impossible to make out what they looked like.

  As he came nearer, the three nearest figures turned their heads towards him, but he still couldn’t see their faces. It was almost as if their hoods were empty.

  ‘I – ah – I hope I’m not interrupting anything!’ Philip called out. ‘I saw you all there and I couldn’t help wondering if you were Druids. You know – looking for ley lines. I’m very interested in that myself. Ley lines.’

  Now the rest of the figures turned towards him. He stopped where he was, concerned that he might have interrupted a family occasion that was deeply personal, like the commemoration of a dead child, or perhaps some kind of fringe religious ceremony. Still, the figures remained silent, although they continued to sway in a way that was beginning to make Philip feel inexplicably uneasy.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s just that I was reading about Druids and ley li
nes in the local rag. Sorry. Sorry. I’ll leave you to it.’

  He started to walk back towards the road. He had only gone a few metres, though, before he heard a very soft rumbling sound behind him, like somebody shaking out a floormat. He started to turn around to see what it was when one of the figures leapt up onto his shoulders and knocked him face-down onto the grass.

  For a few seconds he was too winded to say anything. He started to lift up his head but the figure swung its arm around and hit his left ear so hard that his eardrum burst. He tried to roll over and push the figure off him, but two more dark figures dropped down beside him, one on each side, and somehow they wrapped their sleeves around his arms, binding him so tightly that he was unable to move, while another two bound his legs.

  He felt as if he were laced up in a straitjacket. The more violently he struggled, the tighter his bonds became, so tight that they were cutting off his circulation. He was desperate to shout for help, but the figure who had first knocked him down was pressing down on his back and he was unable to draw enough breath into his lungs. The figure was so heavy that he thought his spine was going to crack, and all he could manage was a repetitive ‘Ah! – ah! – ah!’

  While the figure on his back kept him pinned to the ground, the figure who was holding his right arm started to twist it around in its socket. The pain was so excruciating that it brought tears to Philip’s eyes, and with his good right ear he could hear the tendons and muscles crackling apart.

  ‘Stop-stop-stop-stop-God-that-hurts-stop!’ he begged, but the figure kept on twisting harder and harder until Philip felt his upper arm-bone wrenched right out of its socket. The figure then screwed his whole arm through three hundred and sixty degrees, so that the sleeves of his raincoat and his jacket and his shirt were all ripped off together. It took one final twist to tear his skin apart, too, and with every heartbeat dark red blood was squirted out onto the grass.

  The pain was so overwhelming that it went beyond Philip’s capacity to feel it. He saw nothing but bright scarlet and then he saw black and then he passed out.

  The figure tugged three times at his arm to pull it away from his shoulder, then slung it off into the rain and the darkness.

  It was now that the rest of the dismemberment began. Philip’s left arm was rotated twice by the figure that had been gripping it, and then once more, until it was suddenly torn free. At the same time the two figures holding his legs bent them sideways at right angles, again and again. It took over twenty minutes of twisting and pulling, with all seven figures clustered over Philip’s mutilated body like a clamour of rooks, except that this clamour was deathly silent. Apart from the constant swishing of late-night traffic along Streatham High Road, the only sounds were the tearing of Philip’s trousers, the cracking of his thigh muscles as they were stretched to the limit and beyond, and a soft sucking noise from each of his hips as the joints were dislocated.

  While they were wrenching off his legs, Philip suffered a massive cardiac arrest. His chest jolted, but if the figures realised that he had died, it didn’t deter them from rolling his bloodied torso over onto his back. Huddled over him, they punctured his stomach with scores of pinholes, perforating it so much that they could rip the skin and muscle apart as if they were tearing open a padded envelope. Once they had opened him up, they scooped out his bowels in armfuls.

  The figures weren’t repelled by the stench, or the blood, or the faeces. They embraced his intestines like long-lost children, passing them around in slippery loops, one to the other, and wrapping their arms around them. After that, they dragged out his stomach and his liver and his lungs, and held them up to their hoods as if they were kissing them.

  For nearly an hour they sat in the drizzle with Philip’s remains strewn around them, their heads bowed like pilgrims who have at last found the spiritual peace for which they have been searching all their lives. Then, one by one, they rose and silently made their way to the north side of the common, where the trees grew more densely, and disappeared into the darkness.

  36

  Jamila was walking along the corridor towards the CID room with a cup of latte in one hand and her wet raincoat over her arm when DI Saunders called out to her from his open door.

  ‘Didn’t you get my text?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m sorry, no. I forgot to charge up my phone last night.’

  ‘I tried to call your landline too, but your friend told me you’d already left.’

  ‘Yes. I needed to do some shopping before I came into work. Otherwise I never seem to get the time.’

  ‘You’ve heard this morning’s news, though?’ asked DI Saunders.

  ‘What? No. What’s happened?’

  ‘A young man was found on Streatham Common early this morning. What was left of him, anyhow. He was literally torn to pieces. Both of his arms and both of his legs were ripped off – and I mean ripped off, not cut off. God alone knows how that was done. Not only that, he was gutted, with his internal organs all over the place. Liver, lungs, heart. A dog-walker reported it. He said it was all he could do to stop his boxer snaffling bits of the victim for breakfast.’

  ‘That’s awful. Do we know who he is, this young man?’

  DI Saunders went back to his desk and picked up his notebook. ‘Philip Wakefield, aged twenty-eight. Single, not involved in any current relationship. He was a rewards and compensation manager at Ensurex International. That’s a big insurance company based in the Walkie Talkie building. City of London police have arranged to meet his managers this morning to find out if he had any problems at work. Any business enemies, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Who’s handling it from here?’

  ‘DI French is taking overall control, with DS Willoughby and DC Bright. But it’s possible that you and DC Pardoe might have to be involved, too.’

  ‘Quite honestly, sir, I think we’ve got enough on our plates. Have you read my report from Springfield yet?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Well – skimmed through it, to be fair. I’ll be going over it more thoroughly this morning. But there’s a reason why you and Pardoe need to take a look at this case, although I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s just a freaky coincidence. DI French informed me that when we undertook our preliminary search of the common and the surrounding area, they found a coat.’

  DI Saunders hesitated, almost as if he was reluctant to tell her any more. Jamila could tell by his expression that this investigation was vexing him much more than he was prepared to admit.

  ‘A coat?’ she coaxed him.

  ‘A black duffle coat. Apparently it was snagged in the thorn bushes on the north side of the common, among the trees. The cuffs and sleeves are soaked in what is almost certainly blood, which was still damp when the coat was discovered. The lining also has bloodstains, as well as faecal matter and shreds of what appear to be human skin and strings of connective tissue. There’s bloody tissue and blood clots inside the back of the hood, too.’

  ‘So the coat probably came into close contact with the victim’s remains after he was killed?’ said Jamila. ‘It could have been a futile attempt to cover him up.’

  ‘Maybe. Let’s hope so. I think you know what I’m thinking, Jamila, and I think you’re thinking the same as me. The ground was saturated because of the rain, and although it’s mostly grass it’s muddy in places. By rights there should have been dozens of recent footprints around the victim’s remains. You can’t tear a man to pieces without leaving some trace that you were there. So far, though, the CSEs have found only his footprints – the victim’s – and the dog-walker’s.’

  Jamila said nothing, but her mind was spinning over like a kaleidoscope. It almost sounded as if Philip Wakefield had been attacked by a giant eagle, or a dragon – some creature that had soared down from the clouds and torn him apart without landing on the grass. What else would have been strong enough to pull off his arms and legs? What else could have done it without leaving any tell-tale impressions on the ground?

  Of cou
rse this was real life, and not Game of Thrones, and giant eagles and dragons didn’t exist. But who could the coat have belonged to, and why had they left it behind when it was caught in the bushes, when they must have known that it was soiled with incriminating evidence?

  Unless, of course, there wasn’t a perpetrator – not a human perpetrator, anyway. In her mind’s eye she kept seeing flashes of the black raincoat that had run away down the road from Mindy’s house. A coat, running, with nobody in it. Or maybe there had been somebody in it – somebody invisible, or a ghost, or a spirit – but somebody who left no footprints.

  DI Saunders was right. Jamila was thinking what he was thinking. There was no question that Philip Wakefield’s killing had been far more gruesome than the murders committed by Sophie Marshall and David Nelson and Laura Miller and Mindy. But so far the only circumstantial evidence in every case was the same. An item of clothing – in this case another coat.

  ‘I assume there were no eye-witnesses,’ she said.

  ‘Not to the actual killing, no,’ DI Saunders told her. ‘It must have taken place sometime shortly after midnight because Philip Wakefield had just come off the last train from London Victoria. It was pitch black and it was raining. Of course DI French has got his team knocking on every door along both sides of the common, and he’ll be putting out the usual appeal on social media. Meanwhile the victim’s remains have gone to the mortuary and the coat was bagged up and sent off to Lambeth Road.’

  ‘I’ll call DC Pardoe and get him up to speed,’ said Jamila. ‘After that – well, I’ll just wait for DI French to call us, if he needs us. I was hoping to question that Mindy girl this afternoon. With any luck she might be able to throw some more light on how these clothes make people so psychotic.’

  DI Saunders said, ‘I don’t have to remind you not to mention this coat to a soul, DS Patel. And by that I mean nobody, apart from Pardoe.’