Ghost Virus

‘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 set 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.