by Ellis, Tim
‘Okay. Round up your officers and bring them along to the railway arches on Brady Street. DC Rummage and I are already there. We’re going underground and we might need back-up.’
‘Will do, Sir.’
‘Oh, and ask Perkins for half-a-dozen high-powered torches and bring them with you.’
He ended the call.
***
Two men, who weren’t forensic officers and didn’t talk much, turned up in a red pick-up truck with the oxyacetylene equipment on the back and made short work of the wrought-iron gate.
Shortly afterwards, Sergeant Ada Sage arrived with her four officers and the high-powered torches.
‘Rather you than us,’ Crybaby Tucker said, as they entered the passageway.
Quigg led the way. As the only male, he was expected to go first. Not that he wanted to, but he had obligations to protect the weaker sex. Although, from his experience, he hadn’t noticed any obvious weaknesses in the female sex. He thought of Constable Gipson who could break him in half with her little fingers; of Ruth and Duffy giving birth to bowling balls – he couldn’t have done that in a month of Sundays; of Heather Walsh, who had died with grim determination under a pile of rubble; of the psychic Holly Hornsby, who had sacrificed herself for him in Highgate Cemetery . . .
After they’d been walking for about five-hundred yards Rummage said, ‘Have you seen these, Sir?’ She shone the light from her torch onto the wall of the brick tunnel.
He stopped to look at what Rummage was pointed at and added the light from his own torch. They were small leather bags hung by leather ties from rusty screws.
Rummage unhooked a bag and opened it. Inside were a collection of small bones.
‘At least they’re not human,’ Quigg decided.
Sergeant Sage came close, stuck her head between the two of them and said, ‘They look like chicken bones.’
Quigg’s forehead creased up. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’ Rummage asked.
‘Why are there chicken bones in leather bags hanging from rusty screws on the wall of the tunnel?’ He moved the light beam around the walls and counted ten bags in all. ‘What do they mean?’
Nobody said anything.
Rummage fingered the bones she’d removed from the bag. ‘I’m not sure they’re chicken bones, you know.’
‘They’ll be from some other small animal then,’ Quigg offered, like some kind of expert on small-boned animals. ‘Maybe a rat, a dog, or a cat.’
‘Or a child?’ Rummage suggested.
‘Don’t say that, Rummage. Let’s keep going.’
They seemed to be moving ever-so-slightly downwards, and the tunnel was by no means straight. He’d had in mind that it was an access tunnel for the Central Line between Bethnal Green and Liverpool Street, and although they could hear the trains in the distance, that distance seemed to be getting further and further away. And if they weren’t going to the train line, where the hell were they going?
‘Here,’ Rummage said again.
‘What have you found this time, Rummage?’
‘Skulls.’
He looked closer. There was a necklace of small skulls hanging from a leather thong. Quigg took out his pen and poked each skull in turn. ‘Chicken, rat, pigeon, duck, monkey . . .’
Sage interrupted him. ‘What’s that one, Sir?’
He peered closer at the skull she was pointing at. ‘It’ll be plastic.’
‘It looks like a real human skull to me,’ Rummage said. ‘And it appears to have been shrunken.’
‘Or it’s a child’s skull?’ Sage suggested.
‘Don’t you start, Sage. Let’s keep going.’
They carried on.
‘Something else here,’ Rummage said, after a short while.
‘I saw it this time, Rummage,’ Quigg said. ‘Don’t tread in the blood.’
The animal was probably a ferret, an otter, or a similar type of animal. Beyond the domesticated small animals, his knowledge became a bit sketchy moving towards the non-existent. The animal was hanging from a rusty screw by a leather thong tied around its back legs, its throat had been cut and there was a slither of blood down the wall leading to a dark red coagulated pool on the concrete floor.
Rummage knelt down, wriggled her hand into a plastic glove and stuck her finger in the blood. She sniffed it, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, and then said, ‘A week I’d say.’
Quigg half-laughed. ‘A week! Are you pretending to be a tracker in the Amazon jungle, Rummage?’
‘My father was a missionary in Africa, which is where I was born and brought up. I know about these things.’
‘Oh!’ he said, feeling stupid. He recalled what Aryana had written on the postcard: Listen to the missionary’s daughter and keep her safe. So, DC Jezebel Rummage was a missionary’s daughter who had spent her childhood in Africa. What else didn’t he know about her?
‘What’s that noise, Sir?’ Sage said.
They could still hear the trains in the distance, but now the faint strains of what sounded like hypnotic chanting echoed through the tunnel.
‘Chanting,’ Rummage said.
‘Let’s keep going,’ Quigg urged.
The further they went into the tunnel, the louder the chanting became.
‘Do you have any idea what’s going on, Rummage?’
‘I think I do, Sir.’
‘Would you like to share it with us?”
‘Not yet, Sir.’
He stopped. Took out his phone, but as he expected, there was no signal. ‘Sergeant?’
‘Yes, Sir?’
‘Send two of your officers back to the entrance. There’s no phone signal down here, and I have a bad feeling about what we’re walking into. Tell them to call Inspector Wright. We need more back-up.’
‘Okay, Sir.’
‘And a couple of armed officers wouldn’t go amiss either,’ he added to his shopping list.
She sent PC’s Constance Willard and Maria Collyer back up the tunnel to make the call. The other two officers – Kate Bentham and Selina Slayter – stayed with them.
They continued on.
The tunnel came to an abrupt end. They were on what appeared to be a walled ledge looking down on a high-ceilinged rocky cave. It reminded Quigg of a box seat at the theatre, especially as the show was already in full swing.
Although there was rubble everywhere, there was also indications that the cavern was an unfinished tube station. There was no train line leading in or out, but there were electric lights fixed to the walls, loose sections of railway track and sleepers scattered around. Quigg also spotted another pedestrian access tunnel to their left with steps leading upwards.
It appeared as though the main performance was from a man in a gaudy multi-coloured costume with feathers, beads, bones, a fur-lined robe and a feathered ruff. His face was painted white with red spots, dashes, and lipstick. In his hand was a pole with a bone-white skull perched on the top. He was leading his more than one-hundred-strong congregation by swaying and chanting hypnotically.
The worshippers mirrored his movements.
‘Look, Sir,’ Rummage whispered, pointing at seven naked pale-skinned children directly in front of the man. They were kneeling and swaying also.
‘We need to get down there and stop it, Rummage.’
‘There’s not enough of us, Sir,’ Sergeant Sage said.
Rummage nodded. ‘If we go down there, or try to stop it, they’ll kill us as well
‘As well?’ Quigg said. ‘As well as what?’
‘As well as who – not what. Those children are going to be sacrificed. Look . . .’ She pointed to a pile of rocks with one large slab of concrete lying horizontally on the top. It was hard to see, from where they were standing and the poor quality lighting, but there didn’t seem to be much doubt that the concrete slab and surrounding floor was covered in blood. ‘It’s a sacrificial altar. I should have realised sooner. The nightshade seeds are used by African witchdoctors to identif
y an unblemished child suitable for sacrifice. And so that the child doesn’t become frightened, the flower is crushed and the juice mixed with other ingredients to form the hallucinogen that is used during the ceremony. Dorcus Adero at the Ragged Children’s Home is the witchdoctor’s conduit to obtain unblemished children. She must hand out the seeds and indoctrinate them.’
‘Are you sure you haven’t taken some of that deadly nightshade hallucinogen yourself, Rummage?’ As he was speaking, he was also thinking of Aryana’s instructions: Listen to the missionary’s daughter and keep her safe.
‘I know it sounds far-fetched Sir, but wealthy followers of fundamentalist Christian sects believe that powerful spells require the sacrifice of unblemished children to expand their fortunes. And in the process, the witchdoctors themselves get rich – it’s big business. It used to be that African children were trafficked into the UK and sold for as little as ten pounds to these witchdoctors for sacrifice. However, following the discovery of the torso of a black African child in the Thames in 2001, Scotland Yard carried out an investigation and cracked down on West African children coming into the UK. The report came out in 2005. They also reported that of three-hundred black children going missing from London schools during a three-month period, they found only two.’
‘Two?’ Sage said.
Rummage nodded. ‘Coming from Africa myself, I was interested in what Scotland Yard discovered.’
‘And you’re suggesting that those three-hundred children were sacrificed here?’
‘Not necessarily here. There are many of these secret “churches” all over London. Experts believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of missing children because the police found a “wall of silence”.’
‘Jesus!’ Quigg said. ‘Well, we can at least save seven of them.’ He shouted down to the witchdoctor, ‘HEY!’
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Sir
The whole congregation and the witchdoctor stopped chanting and swaying.
The drugged children continued to sway and seemed to be oblivious about what was going on.
The witchdoctor pointed and shouted up at the intruders in a foreign language.
Quigg realised that he probably hadn’t thought through his plan clearly enough, because four heavily-muscled black men in loin cloths and paint markings burst onto the ledge through a passageway he hadn’t noticed before and grabbed the four of them.
They were force-marched down a set of winding steps into the open space of the underground cavern.
‘Who are you?’ the witchdoctor asked them.
Quigg took charge. He’d got them into this mess, now it was his responsibility to get them out of it. He recalled the Chief’s parting words: “Don’t get Rummage killed, or I’ll make sure you’re drummed out of the force in short order if it’s the last thing I do on this earth.”
‘Let us go,’ he said to the witchdoctor. ‘We’re police. I’m Detective Inspector Quigg . . .’
The costumed-man didn’t let him finish. ‘Police,’ he shouted to his congregation.
‘Police!’ they chanted and swayed. ‘English police!’
‘We know what to do with police, don’t we?’ he asked them.
‘We know!’ they chanted and swayed. ‘We know!’
‘The blood of police will make our spells stronger.’
‘Stronger,’ they chanted and swayed. ‘Much stronger with the blood of police!’
‘Strip them for the sacrifices.’
‘Strip them!’ the congregation chanted and swayed. ‘Strip them naked!’
One of the four black men tore off Quigg’s clothes. He tried to resist, but others held him tight. He saw the three women being stripped naked as well, and hoped that death was all the witchdoctor had in mind.
Where the hell was the back-up?
Then, to his shock and horror, he saw PC’s Willard and Slayter being stripped naked and forced to kneel at the end of the line. ‘Did you make the call?’ he shouted.
PC Willard shook her head. He recognised her now without her clothes on.
Just like the Ragged children, he knew then that they were lost. Nobody else knew they’d made their way down here. By the time anyone realised, it would be far too late. They’d be long dead. The witchdoctor and his congregation would be long gone. The Chief was right: Everything he touched turned to a bag of shit.
He was forced to drink something, which made his tongue and lips numb. Soon, he began to feel weird. Then his vision became blurred and he thought he saw Crybaby Tucker, Moped Enid, Jokestealer John and the other homeless people doing the hokey-cokey around the sacrificial altar. His daughter Phoebe called his name, but she was locked in a cage and he couldn’t get to her. His eighty-year-old mother was limbo dancing dressed in a bikini with a Peruvian night monkey suckling at her breast . . . Naked women paraded before him, beckoning him, wanting him . . .
***
‘Inspector!’
‘No more,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m worn out. Just let me sleep. I’ll give you more babies soon.’
He heard female laughter.
‘I certainly hope not.’ It was Rummage’s voice, but she sounded a million miles away.
He opened his eyes. ‘What’s going on, Rummage?’ His voice was slurred and didn’t sound like his voice.
‘You’re threatening to make me pregnant.’
‘I doubt that. I have more than enough babies. Why am I naked?’
‘Don’t you remember where you are?’
Nothing came to him. ‘Should I?’
‘We’re investigating the lost children from the Ragged Children’s Home in Bethnal Green.’
Gradually, slivers of memory came back to him. ‘The railway arches?’
‘That’s right.’
‘They were going to kill us?’
‘They were.’
‘And the children?’
‘Yes.’
‘So we’re dead?’
‘No, we’re not dead.’
‘How . . .?’
‘Crybaby Tucker and the other homeless people saved us.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
He pushed himself up. His head began swimming and he thought he might puke, but it passed momentarily. ‘Weren’t you naked as well, Rummage?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘That’s a pity. I didn’t really get a good look.’
‘If you had, I would have let them kill you.’
‘Where’s my clothes?’
‘Here.’
‘And what about . . .?’
‘Sergeant Sage has everything under control, Sir. The children are safe, the witchdoctor and a number of his followers are being restrained by the homeless people, back-up and Social Services are on their way . . . We cracked the case.’
‘Hardly, Rummage. I suppose I’d better get my clothes on before the cavalry arrive. Will you help me?’
‘I don’t think that would be appropriate.’
‘No, maybe not. Okay, what about one of the others?’
‘I’m sure Moped Enid would gladly help you.’
‘Maybe I’ll put my own clothes on.’
‘I think that would be the right thing to do.’
What about all the other children?’
‘What other children?’
‘The other one hundred and ninety-three lost children from the Home?’
‘They’re gone, Sir.’
‘Gone! Gone where?’
‘Dead. Sacrificed.’
‘What! All of them?’
‘I would imagine so. That’s why they were targeted in the first place. The witchdoctor would have dismembered the children and used parts from them in potions for spells to bring power, love, wealth and any number of other human desires for his wealthy clients. Or he might have provided the children’s body parts in containers to hide under their houses, carry around as good-luck charms and so on.’
‘That’s crazy, Rummage. Do people still believe in that qu
ackery?’
‘Even intelligent people who should know better.’
He dressed himself and pushed himself up on unsteady feet. ‘Is Perkins on his way as well, Rummage?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Good. And good work from you as well.’
‘Thanks, Sir.’
‘So, did being my new partner live up to your expectations?’
‘And more, Sir. Did I live up to your expectations?’
‘You’ll do, Rummage. Do you want to make it a permanent arrangement?’
‘If that’s all right with you?’
‘I’ll give it some thought.’
***
‘You came up smelling of roses again, Quigg.’
‘So it would seem, Chief.’ The effects of the deadly nightshade hallucinogenic that he’d been forced to drink had worn off, and he was now sitting in the Chief’s office. Officers from the Met’s Serious Crimes unit had descended on the railway arches and taken control of the situation. He’d been glad, because the case would surely take some unravelling.
‘I’ll be interested in reading your final report, Quigg. But I’m warning you now that you’ll be re-writing it in short order if there’s any mention of hallucinogenic seeds, two-hundred lost children, witchdoctors or human sacrifice under the streets of London. Keep it simple. Seven children went missing, you found them, arrested a paedophile ring, case closed.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘How did Rummage do?’
‘Good, Sir. I think she’ll be an asset to the team.’
‘Well, at least you didn’t kill her. She’s not pregnant, is she?’
‘If she is, it has nothing to do with me, Chief.’
‘Look after her, Quigg. If you lose Rummage, I can’t see you ever getting another partner this side of the apocalypse.’
‘Understood, Sir.’
‘You have my permission to take the rest of the day off, and I’ll expect your report some time tomorrow.’