House of flies, p.14
House of Flies, page 14
‘I wish,’ said Ronnie. ‘I’d dance on his fucking grave.’
‘So – did you get to see that Akbas last night?’ Frank asked him. Ronnie’s gang had been involved in increasingly violent skirmishes with a Turkish drug dealer. Earlier this year, Murad Akbas had set up a takeaway pizza business in Camberwell that was a front for selling heroin and cocaine. He had been so successful that he had started to encroach on Ronnie’s territory.
‘Yes, Murad and me had a bit of a chat,’ said Ronnie. ‘Quite friendly, as it happened. We met in the Ali Baba kebab shop. Nice tasty lamb kebabs they do in there. Murad said that it’s a free country, which means that he’s got the right to sell his shit anywhere he wants, so I said that yes, it’s a free country, which means that if I catch any of his pushers on my turf I’m not going to hesitate to cut their nuts off. He said in that case he’d better start using women, and we had a good old laugh about that.’
‘How did you leave it?’ asked Frank.
‘I drew a line down the Stockwell Road and Murad agreed that he’d stay on his side of it. No exceptions.’
Frank nodded. He hadn’t doubted for a moment that Ronnie would be able to warn Akbas off. Ronnie had a look about him – he was podgy, with wavy blond hair, a double chin and a nose like a piglet, a sort of cockney Donald Trump – but it was his colourless eyes that disturbed people the most, not only his enemies, but his gang members too. You never could tell if Ronnie was pleased with you or if he felt like slicing your ears off.
‘You think he’ll stick to it? Akbas?’ said Nick.
‘He’ll be a damn fool if he don’t. If we chop the goolies off of one of his pushers and the poor bloke has to go to the A & E, the hospital’s bound to notify the filth, aren’t they, and then the filth are going to find out that Akbas has been flogging a whole lot more than pepperoni pizzas and that’s his two-million-quid drug business straight down the Swanee.’
Jock swallowed almost half of his fresh pint of beer in three gulps. Then he slapped the table with both hands and said, in his strong Glasgow accent, ‘Right! I’m bustin’ for a widdle. Does anyone feel like a packet of crips while I’m up?’
‘You can get us some porky scratchings,’ said Nick.
Jock went off to the men’s toilet. It was cramped and dark in there, because the lightbulb had burned out and there was only a small grimy skylight, and it smelled of stale urine and cherry fragrance toilet blocks. The single stall had a notice on the door saying ‘out of order’ so Jock stood in front of the urinal and unbuttoned his jeans.
He was still halfway through urinating when he heard the door open.
‘Nearly finished, pal,’ he said. ‘I’ve three-and-a-half pints to empty out, God forgive me.’
The newcomer said nothing in reply, but Jock could hear a soft buzzing noise, as if the man were shaving himself with an electric razor.
‘Nearly finished,’ he said. ‘The wifey used to moan that I had a bladder the size of Loch Ness.’
He was shaking himself when he became aware that the buzzing was coming up closer behind him. Before he could tuck himself into his underpants and start to button up his jeans, he was suddenly gripped around the throat by two powerful hands. Two sharp thumbnails dug painfully into the back of his neck and eight fingers wrapped themselves in a double chokehold around his Adam’s apple. The hands felt as if they had a crunchy texture, and about six or seven dark specks flew into his eyes, catching themselves in his eyelashes and almost blinding him.
‘Gaah!’ was all Jock could manage to say. He flailed his arms, trying to hit the man behind him, but he couldn’t reach him. Then he tried to swing his left leg backwards, to kick the man in the crotch, but when he did that, the man slammed him forward so that his forehead cracked against the tiles on the wall. He felt warm blood streaming down his face and he dropped to his knees, stunned. The man carried on choking him, and now he knocked Jock’s face twice against the ceramic rim of the urinal, snapping the bridge of his nose.
Jock made one last desperate effort to twist himself around and break the man’s strangulating grip. All he could hear was this furious buzzing, and when he managed to turn his head halfway to the left, he saw that the man was covered from head to foot in flies. Even his face was crawling all over with flies, and Jock couldn’t even see any eyes.
Jock tried to turn his head further, but the man squeezed his neck so much tighter that he felt as if his lungs were going to explode. After a few agonising seconds, he blacked out. The man then smashed his head against the urinal again and again, until his skull cracked apart and lumps of his beige-coloured brains were splattered all over the cherry-pink toilet block.
He fell down on to his knees as if he were praying, with his head resting against the waste pipe. The man stood over him for a while, but then the buzzing grew louder, and the flies’ wings began to ripple and glitter. As if they had been summoned by some silent command, they all rose into the air.
*
Ronnie looked at his Rolex watch. ‘Jock’s taking his fucking time. Not constipated, is he?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Frank. ‘Him and me, we had a vindaloo at the Maharani last night. When I went this morning, it felt like half of Clapham was falling out me arse.’
‘How much has he drunk? I want him to pick up all that red diesel that Billy Albu’s got for us, and I don’t want him getting nicked for DUI.’
Frank stood up. ‘I’ll give him a shout. I could do with a wizz meself.’
He went across to the men’s toilet, blowing a kiss to Jim Fellowes’ wife, Margaret, who was drying glasses behind the bar. She jabbed her finger into her open mouth to show him that he made her feel sick.
As soon as he pushed open the toilet door, though, the smell that came billowing out made him feel as if he wanted to retch too. This was more than the reek of urine and faeces and toilet blocks. Frank knew what this was, because he had served in the army in Afghanistan. This was the smell of a rotting human body.
He stepped cautiously into the gloomy toilet, cupping his hand over his nose and his mouth. At first, he was unable to understand what he was looking at. But then he realised that Jock was crouching face down on the floor and that another man was lying face down on top of him. This other man, though, was wearing only a pair of padded white plastic pants, like a diaper, and apart from that he was naked. His ribcage had collapsed, so that he looked weirdly flat, and his skin had turned black and greasy, with bubbly yellow patches. He smelled suffocatingly sweet, with a strong hint of cheese.
A few flies were crawling over the man’s shoulders and back, and some were droning around in the air.
It was obvious that Jock was dead, too, with his skull split open and blobs of his brains lying in the urinal. Totally shocked, Frank took two stumbling steps backwards out of the toilet and slammed the door shut. Ronnie and the rest of the gang heard the door slam and looked across the pub at him.
‘What’s up, Frank?’ Ronnie called out. ‘Jock stunk the khazi out?’
Frank came back over. ‘He’s brown bread, Ronnie,’ he said, in a shaky whisper. ‘He’s lying on the floor with his bonce cracked open. And there’s another dead geezer in there with him, only this geezer smells like he’s been dead for nearly a month.’
Ronnie stared at him. ‘What do you mean, he’s brown bread? He only went for a slash. Are you joking, or what?’
‘Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me. We need to call the Old Bill, and right now.’
There was a long pause, and then Ronnie said, ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Jock hasn’t come out, has he? And I’ve only fucking wet meself.’
Ronnie took out his phone. ‘Look at the date. The twenty-third. They always say that twenty-three’s an unlucky number. I should of fucking stayed in bed.’
Nick leaned across the table. He also spoke quietly, so that Jim and Margaret Fellowes wouldn’t hear him. ‘Who’s this other geezer? This one that’s been dead for nearly a month?’
‘God knows, Nick. But he couldn’t have walked in there by himself, could he? Somebody must have carted him in there, but God knows why.’
‘Well, God may know, Frank, but He ain’t going to tell us, is He? That’s the trouble with God, if you ask me. Always keeps Himself to Himself. Miserable bastard.’
*
DI Simon Fairbrother came out of the toilet and peeled off his face mask.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine what the hell went on inside there.’
DS Morrison shook her head. ‘Someone bashed him to death against the urinal. I mean, he’s one of Ronnie Gibbs’s gang, so I can understand that the member of another gang could have had a score to settle with him. Maybe one of the Tooting Bec Terrors. But why leave him with a corpse on top of him? What’s that about?’
The Martian came out of the toilet, too, pulling back the rustling hood of his polypropylene hazmat suit so that his pointed ears sprang out.
‘So, what do you reckon, Derek?’ DI Fairbrother asked him.
‘Me? I’m only paid to collect and analyse the evidence,’ said the Martian. ‘Not to have inspired hunches like you lot.’
‘But supposing we did pay you to have inspired hunches?’
‘I’d still be stumped. The victim was strangled, we can see that from the contusions around his throat. He was strangled and then his head was struck against the wall and the toilet fittings with sufficient force to shatter his nasal septum and break apart the frontal plate of his skull. After that, for some reason, a dead male was laid on top of him. I’d estimate that this deceased gentleman probably passed away about twenty to twenty-five days ago, because he’s already started butyric fermentation. This gives the body a strong Stilton smell. Butyric acid helps our digestion, but it also makes our vomit smell the way it does.’
‘Oh, my Lord,’ said DS Morrison. ‘I wish I hadn’t had that cheese sandwich for lunch now.’
‘Sorry about that,’ the Martian told her. ‘But the mystery isn’t so much why the perp would have wanted to leave the deceased gentleman on top of the victim. It’s how the perp managed to do it.’
‘Not at all easy to carry a dead body into a pub at lunchtime, I would have thought,’ said DI Fairbrother. ‘Not without being noticed.’
‘The thing is – did anyone actually do that?’ asked the Martian.
‘I don’t understand you. How else did the body get into the toilet?’
‘Well, we lifted some footprints from the tiles and some of them are bare footprints that match the deceased gentleman’s feet, as if he had actually walked across the toilet floor unaided.’
‘You what?’
‘Yes, and we also lifted some fingerprints from the toilet door and the handle of the back door that leads out to the yard at the rear of the pub. And here’s what’s really stumping us. A preliminary test showed us that they appear to match the deceased gentleman’s fingerprints. Not only do they feature the same whorls and loops, but they also carry traces of butyric acid. And the fingerprints on the back door handle were the last fingerprints that anyone left there.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’ DI Fairbrother asked him. ‘That this dead man opened the back door and walked into the toilet by himself?’
The Martian pulled a face. ‘I’m only telling you what circumstantial evidence we’ve come across – so far, anyway. We’ll be testing it all more thoroughly in the lab, and we haven’t finished yet, so we’re bound to find more. But I’m afraid it’s up to you to work out what actually happened.’
‘Bloody hell, Derek! This is even weirder than that bloke who was supposed to have dug his way out of his grave in Wandsworth Cemetery!’
‘Well, I have to agree with you. But there’s one more thing I should tell you. The deceased gentleman had a number of flies caught in his eyelashes. They may mean nothing. I mean, dead bodies attract flies, don’t they? But we’ve bottled them up and we’ll hand them over to DI Patel and DS Pardoe, because they’ve been investigating all these incidents that involve flies. Maybe this is going to be a case for them, rather than you.’
DI Fairbrother turned to DS Morrison. ‘That would be a relief, I can tell you. I’ll give them a bell now. I’m beginning to feel like the zombie-hunter-in-chief.’
17
Professor Yearling came hurrying in through the doors of the coroner’s building as if he were late for an appointment. He crossed the reception area and shook Jamila and Jerry’s hands with both of his.
‘This is such a tragedy,’ he told them. ‘John Crowe was one in a million. He had only to take one sniff of a corpse and he could tell you to the day how long it had been dead.’
‘It was those flies again,’ said Jamila. ‘We really need to know more about them. You are becoming very important to our investigation, professor, believe me.’
They went upstairs in the lift together to a small laboratory two doors along the corridor from the pathology laboratory in which Dr Crowe had been working.
The flies that Dr Crowe had collected from every one of the victims had been transferred to this laboratory. Most of them were dead now, but Dr Crowe had kept some of them alive by feeding them with apple cider vinegar and sugar.
Dr Crowe’s Mercedes saloon had been taken to Lambeth Road on a car transporter with his body still inside it, covered in a blue sheet. Before he was taken away, though, one of the forensic technicians who had attended the scene had given Jamila and Jerry a test tube containing five of the flies that he had picked off Dr Crowe himself.
‘It’ll obviously take me some considerable time to test all these samples,’ said Professor Yearling, taking off his overcoat and hanging it up. ‘But I can tell you from just a first glance that they are all coffin flies, Conicera tibialis, although I can see some slight variations in their eyes and their wings. Normally, you would expect to find flies only on a dead body – blowflies, houseflies or flesh flies – sarcophagidae – but it seems that these flies swarmed all over their victims while they were still alive, or certainly before they had been dead long enough to start to decompose.’
‘Do you think that you’ll be able to give us at least some idea where they might have come from?’ asked Jamila.
‘If they fed on any distinctive foodstuff and if they clung to any distinctive type of surface, then it’s certainly possible. But I have to admit that I have never in the whole of my career as an entomologist come across a massive swarm of coffin flies like these. And what’s even more unusual about them is that they appear to have selected particular individuals to settle on.’
‘You’re right, they have,’ said Jerry. ‘And apart from that, they also seem to have this incredible strength. Like, how the hell could a bunch of flies have lifted the Bishop of Southwark fifty feet up into the air – even a couple of thousand of them?’
‘I’ve been looking into that since you first told me about it,’ said Professor Yearling. ‘I discovered that some experiments were carried out in the mid-1970s in Argentina – not with flies but with bees, because Argentina produces more honey than any other country in the world. They found that they could direct a swarm of bees to fly together in a particular direction by means of ultrasonic signals. Not only that, they could make them cluster together more tightly, which could conceivably have given them greater combined strength.’
‘Could flies be directed like that, do you think?’ asked Jamila.
‘It’s possible. There was another experiment in Croatia in 1989 with female horseflies. Horseflies normally feed on nectar, but in order to develop their fertilised eggs the females go searching for blood, both animal and human, and as you know they can give you a very nasty bite. Entomologists in Croatia found that specific sounds attracted female horseflies and other sounds repelled them. These sounds were too high-pitched to be audible to humans.
‘I’m not saying that this is what we’re dealing with in these investigations, but it shows that it’s possible for flies to be controlled in some way.’
‘Very well then, we’ll leave you to get on with your analysis,’ said Jamila. ‘You have our numbers for when you’re ready to contact us. But the sooner the better, if you can.’
Professor Yearling opened the green metal box of chemicals that he had brought with him.
‘I will, of course. I’m wondering, though. If these flies are being deliberately directed, do you have any idea at all what the motive could be?’
‘It could be religious,’ Jamila told him. ‘Apart from DS Pardoe’s friend Maureen Glover, all the victims so far have had some religious connection, although they didn’t all belong to the same faith. Maybe we’re looking for a homicidal atheist.’
*
Jamila and Jerry had only just sat back in their car when Jamila’s phone warbled.
‘Oh. Simon. What’s up?’
Jerry started the engine and began to drive back towards the station, but Jamila laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Hold on, Jerry. There might be another one. Do you know a pub called The Waker?’
‘Yes. It’s on Tipthorpe Road. Right dump. Warm beer and cold fish and chips.’
‘Simon Fairbrother says there’s been a murder. One of Ronnie Gibbs’s gang. But a decomposed body was found on top of him. And there were flies in his eyes.’
‘Ronnie Gibbs? That fat lump of leftover lard? Why would those flies go after one of his lot? He’s about as far from religious as Satan on his day off.’
‘Simon said it was only a few flies, but there’s some really unusual evidence that he can’t explain and he thinks you and me should at least take a look.’
‘Do you know something? If I was religious, and I wasn’t driving, I’d cross myself.’
The Waker was less than half a mile away from Lavender Hill police station. When Jamila and Jerry arrived there, they found that Tipthorpe Road was jammed with squad cars and forensic vans and two ambulances, and that the pavement on both sides of Lavender Hill had been cordoned off. When Jerry climbed out of his car, he recognised several TV and newspaper reporters on the other side of the street. They shouted questions at him and Jamila, which he couldn’t hear, so he simply waved to them.
