House of flies, p.19
House of Flies, page 19
Jerry zipped up his anorak. He was about to go out to Nine Elms to interview one of the survivors from the Palette Hotel, a young waitress who had been serving at the wedding breakfast. He had reached the door of his office when he heard a pattering against the window.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘Why is it that every time I decide to go out, it starts raining?’
‘Don’t talk to me about shit,’ Ruth Watkins retorted. ‘I’ve been talking about it ever since I got in this morning. Do you know many dog owners got fined last year for fouling the streets?’
‘I’d have to guess,’ said Jerry. ‘Thirty-three and a turd?’
‘Jerry, for God’s sake!’ Ruth turned back to her computer, but as she did so, three or four flies came circling around her and one of them started to crawl across her screen.
‘I can’t believe it!’ she said, flicking it away. ‘Where did these come from?’
But then the pattering on the window grew louder and more persistent, and flies started to struggle in through the gaps in the ventilator, hundreds of them, until the air in the office was filled with them, buzzing and tapping against the walls and the furniture. Some of them settled on the desks and the chairs, while others clung to the coats that were hanging up by the door. Still more of them crawled across the floor and in and out of the wastepaper baskets, as if they were searching for incriminating evidence.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ Ruth screamed, standing up and batting flies out of her hair and off the front of her sweater. They were even crawling up her shiny black tights, underneath her skirt.
‘Come on, Ruthie,’ said Jerry. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. We need to call those pest control geezers.’
They left their office and Jerry slammed the door behind them, so that only a few flies were able to follow them. As they hurried along the corridor to the lift, though, they could hear more doors slamming around the whole police station, and shouting on every floor.
Before they could reach the lift, DCs Okeke and Battersby came bursting out of their common room, with a cloud of black glittering flies buzzing noisily all around them. None of the officers said anything to each other, they simply ran towards the lift together, beating the flies away from their faces.
Jerry jabbed the down button and the four of them stood hopping and flapping their arms as they waited for the lift to arrive. When it pinged, though, and the door slid open, even more flies came pouring out, and they could see DS Morrison kneeling in the corner, her hands held on top of her head, and she was covered in a mass of flies.
Jerry and DC Okeke entered the lift, and each of them took hold of one of DS Morrison’s arms, so that they could help up on to her feet. Ruth stuck her foot into the lift door to prevent it from closing, and they dragged DS Morrison out of the lift and back along the corridor towards the stairs.
Flies were everywhere. Not only were they flying around the stairwell, they were covering the banister rails and the light fittings and crawling all over the framed pictures of decorated senior officers that hung on the walls.
Jerry and DC Okeke helped DS Morrison to climb down the stairs, with Ruth and DC Battersby following close behind them. They could hear panicky cries of distress rising from the floors below, and more doors slamming. When they reached the first floor, the fire alarm went off, jangling so loudly that they could barely hear themselves think.
As they passed the interview room, the door flew open and DCS Chance appeared, along with two newspaper reporters, and they too were surrounded by whirling clouds of flies.
‘Clear the building!’ screamed DCS Chance, over the deafening ringing of the fire alarm. ‘Everybody out! Everybody out!’
They clattered down to the reception area. The front door was wide open, and the officers and staff from the station were already gathering in the narrow street outside, still smacking at the flies that were clinging to their clothing.
DCS Chance came up to Jerry and his face was flushed. ‘This is insane! The whole damn station’s out of commission! You have to track down who’s behind this! And as soon as you possibly can! I mean, like yesterday!’
‘We’re trying, sir, believe me. I think we’ve made a little progress, but we still don’t know how it’s possible for anybody to conjure up so many flies, or what their motive could be. DI Patel and me, we were both thinking that they’re trying to stop us from finding out who they are, and – Jesus – this looks like we were right.’
DCS Chance stood looking back into the station. The reception area was now a glittering mass of flies, crawling all over the floor and the walls and the ceiling and the reception desk.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Keep at it. And if you need more professional help, don’t hesitate to let me know. But this whole fly thing is going to go public now, even if that Tristan Bagnold wanted us to put a lid on it. Those two reporters I was just talking to, they came from the Sun and the Telegraph, and I was halfway through telling them that it was only a few isolated incidents – even what happened at the Palette Hotel – when the whole damn interview room filled up with flies. I almost swallowed one, for God’s sake.’
DI Fairbrother came up to them. ‘I’ve called the pest control people, sir. They said they could be here in half an hour. Mind you, I think it might be worth calling more than one company, don’t you? This is not just an infestation, is it? It’s a bloody plague.’
22
During the night, three different pest control companies sealed off the police station and fumigated every floor with permethrin smoke bombs. They warned that it would take at least four hours before it was safe to return inside the building, and even then there would be heaps of dead flies to be shovelled up.
Most of the night duty staff were sent off to Wandsworth police station, which was only two miles away, while a mobile command centre with all the latest technology would be driven down from Hemel Hempstead and parked outside.
Jerry stayed in his car until it was nearly midnight, talking to Edge. He had called Jamila, and when he told her how the station had become suddenly filled up with millions of flies, she had wanted to come and see them for herself. He had said that there was no point. There was nothing that either of them could usefully do until the morning, when the insecticidal fog had finally cleared. She would be better off staying at her hotel and catching up on some sleep.
‘I will,’ she said, and Jerry could hear the relief in her voice. ‘To tell you the truth, I feel like death.’
*
Jerry returned to the station at eleven o’clock the next morning. He had seen reports on the ITV news about the whole building becoming inexplicably infested with flies. The Rt Hon. Tristan Bagnold had been interviewed, but all he had said was that health inspectors would be looking into the cause of the infestation and that it could have been the result of a cracked sewer pipe. Perhaps gristle and fat from the local meat market had built up in a sewer and that had attracted so many flies.
When Jerry arrived, the whole building was still cordoned off and the vans from the pest control companies were still parked next to the huge mobile command centre. He recognised Gary from GJ Pest Control, who was puffing away at a raspberry-flavoured vape and talking to his bookie on his phone.
‘So what’s the SP?’ Jerry asked him, when Gary had finished placing his bets. ‘Flies all dead yet?’
‘No, mate,’ said Gary. ‘You’re not going to believe this, but none of them. We’ve tried fogging them and spraying them and zapping them with electric fly killers on every floor. Nothing seems to affect them.’
He held up his thumb and his index finger and pressed them together. ‘I think the only way we’re going to kill them off is to pick them up one at a time and squash them.’
‘Are you serious? That would take you the rest of your life. What about today? Can I go back into my office? I need to pick up my laptop.’
‘Not for another two or three hours at least, mate, sorry. We’ve just let off a whole lot more smoke bombs. This time, we’re using permethrin with an increased amount of piperonyl butoxide. It’s not an insecticide in itself, your PBO, but it destroys the flies’ central nervous system, and that makes them less able to resist the permethrin.’
While Jerry was still talking to Gary, Jamila arrived in an Uber taxi. She was wearing a white polo-neck sweater and a long navy overcoat and she smelled of Qamar, and she looked far brighter than she had yesterday. Jerry told her that the flies had so far resisted all attempts to exterminate them, but that the three pest control experts were having another try to kill them off.
‘They’re using – what was it?’ he asked Gary.
‘Piperonyl butoxide. PBO.’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that,’ said Jamila. ‘It’s most effective for getting rid of pubic lice.’
Jerry looked at her and thought, that’s one of the things I really find attractive about her. She’s a woman of the world. But he resisted the temptation to wonder what she would do for company now that Ashish was dead and she was unattached. It was far too soon.
‘Can you bottle some samples of these flies for me?’ Jamila asked Gary. Then she turned to Jerry. ‘I’ve had a call from Professor Yearling and he wants to meet us at Falcon Road at two o’clock. If these flies can’t be killed by the usual insecticides, I think he needs to take a look at them for us.’
‘Did he tell you what he wanted to meet us for?’ asked Jerry.
‘Not in any detail. But he said he might have some information that could help us to find out where all these flies have been coming from.’
‘The Right Honourable Bagpuss seems to think they’re coming out of a broken sewer.’
‘I don’t think there’s any chance of that, Jerry. That would be random. The way these flies have been targeting people – me included – it has to be deliberate. And the way that Vincent Narrow keeps appearing. I’m quite sure that he doesn’t keep crawling out of some drain somewhere.’
They mounted the metal steps at the back of the mobile command centre. Inside, they found Edge and three female officers, surrounded by banks of CCTV screens. A large dish on the roof of the command centre could pick up signals from two different satellites, so that Edge and his team could connect to any video camera in the immediate vicinity, and beyond, as well as sending messages and receiving them from any other police station.
‘Morning, guv!’ said Edge. ‘We’ve been playing back all the CCTV footage from around here, trying to track where all these flies came from before they arrived here at the station.’
‘Any luck?’ asked Jamila.
‘Possibly. They covered up all the camera lenses in sequence like they did before, so we can’t see exactly where they originated. But the first camera they covered up was on the corner of Battersea Park Road and Atherton Street. So there’s a fair chance the swarm started roughly around there somewhere, or not too far away. Not all the streets around there are covered by CCTV, although quite a few of the houses have doorbell cameras.’
‘Atherton Street, that’s all residential,’ said Jerry. ‘Bloody great big Victorian mansions. Very nice place to live if you’ve got a million-and-a-half quid to buy yourself a gaff and another fifty grand to do it up.’
*
By the time Jamila and Jerry had arranged to meet Professor Yearling, the flies that were crawling over every inch of the police station had still not succumbed to the smoke that was supposed to paralyse their nervous systems and then kill them.
Gary opened up the station’s front door so that he could collect at least a dozen flies in a screw-top jar. When he did so, Jamila and Jerry could hear the frantic zizzing noise that still filled the whole building. It went on and on, like some terrible tinnitus.
‘Well, this hasn’t worked, has it?’ said Jamila, as Gary handed her the screw-top jar. ‘What are you going to try now?’
‘We’re giving the little buggers a bit longer, but if they don’t start dying off within the next couple of hours, we’ll have to think about spraying the whole place with paraquat. It’s so bloody poisonous it’s been banned in Britain since 2007, but we still have a few bottles left in store. If we have to use it, though, the whole place is going to need a really intensive clean afterwards. One sip of paraquat and you’re on your way to join your ancestors, I can promise you.’
Jamila and Jerry looked into the reception area before Gary closed the door, and they could see that the floor and the walls and even the windows were all thickly blanketed in glittering flies, while scores more flies were circling around in the air.
‘I reckon this is what hell looks like,’ said Gary. ‘Not flames, but flies.’
*
Professor Yearling appeared to be tired when they arrived at Falcon Road. The jacket of his three-piece suit was hanging over the back of his chair and his waistcoat was unbuttoned. On the desk in front of him was a sheet of paper with about fifty dead flies arranged in neat parallel lines, resembling a military parade in miniature.
‘I saw the news about the flies invading your police station,’ he told them. ‘There’s no question that we’re dealing with some highly unusual force here.’
‘“Unusual”?’ said Jamila. ‘That must be the understatement of the year.’
Professor Yearling shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s similar to the way that fish swim in shoals or hundreds of starlings fly together in a murmuration, although we still don’t know exactly how or why they manage to do that. We suspect it’s one way they protect themselves against predators. Safety in numbers, so to speak. But of course, these flies are the predators.’
‘These flies that are filling up our nick, it seems like they’re immortal,’ said Jerry. ‘We’ve had the pest control geezers in all morning, and they’ve tried every insecticide you can think of. So far, they haven’t managed to kill even one.’
‘Really? That convinces me even more that we have some form of remote control at work here. Don’t ask me what it is, but we can change the channels on our televisions without getting out of our armchairs, can’t we, and we can fly model aeroplanes by radio, so perhaps someone’s discovered how you can fly real flies in the same sort of way. But anyhow, let me show you why I asked if you could meet me here.’
He tapped at his computer keyboard and the image of a fly’s feet appeared on the screen, hugely magnified by an electron microscope.
‘You can see here the glue-like substance that flies produce so that they can stick on to ceilings. It’s surprising there has been so little research into it. Spiders produce an adhesive substance, too, so that they can run up walls, but it’s not the same stuff. The important thing about the glue that flies have on their feet is that we can analyse it chemically and tell where they’ve recently landed.
‘In the case of these flies – every one of these flies – the sugars and oils I found on their footpads contain traces of arsenic, as well as some blue and green pigment.’
Jamila stared at the screen and then shook her head. ‘Arsenic? Blue and green pigment? So what does that tell us?’
‘Arsenic used to be used in the manufacture of a dye called Scheele’s Green, which was a very popular colour in the nineteenth century for wallpaper, as well as fabrics and wax candles and children’s toys and even food colourants. The trouble with Scheele’s Green was that it contained copper arsenite, and it was highly toxic. People died from sleeping in bedrooms with green wallpaper, or wearing green dresses, and a whole party of children died from inhaling the candles at their Christmas party. In Scotland, people died from eating green blancmange.’
‘So what have you found out?’ asked Jerry. ‘These flies landed on something with this green colouring in it?’
‘Specifically, wallpaper,’ said Professor Yearling. ‘And not just any old wallpaper. The adhesive on the flies’ feet also contained a blue and green pigment produced only by a wallpaper manufacturer called Jeffrey and Company. What’s more, Jeffrey and Company prepared this pigment exclusively for William Morris, who as you very well know was probably the most popular wallpaper and fabric designer of all time.’
‘And that tells us what, exactly?’
‘It tells us that these flies came from a house that’s still decorated with original William Morris wallpaper, even after all these years. Many people kept it up because it’s so attractive, but it did tend to flake or go mouldy, and it went out of fashion in the fifties and sixties, so I doubt if there are very many houses remaining that still have the original paper.
‘I’ve checked all the patterns of William Morris wallpaper and this blue and green pigment was used only in a pattern called “Tulip and Bird”, so that narrows it down a bit. You can still buy wallpaper with this pattern today, but of course it doesn’t contain arsenic.’
Professor Yearling brought up the pattern on his computer screen. It was made up of rows of stylised green tulips with blue pigeons hiding behind them.
‘I’m in two minds,’ said Jamila. ‘We could show a picture of this on the television news tonight and ask if anyone recognises it. On the other hand, if we do that, it could well alert whoever might have been sending out all these flies, and they might leave their house or even tear down all their wallpaper. And of course we don’t even know if they actually live there. It could be the wallpaper from some victim’s house.’
Jerry said, ‘I think we should hold our horses, guv, at least until we have a bit more information. Don’t get me wrong, professor. This is valuable evidence. But it’s the kind of evidence that puts the icing on the cake, do you know what I mean? First of all, we have to find the cake.’
Professor Yearling stared at Jerry for a moment as if he were speaking in a foreign language. Then he said, ‘Yes. I think I follow you. You can’t ice a cake you haven’t got.’
*
Later that afternoon, when Jamila and Jerry were ready to call it a day, DCI Butcher rang Jamila and told her that they might have some important new evidence. Jamila put him on speakerphone so that Jerry could hear him too.
