Ghost Virus

There was a moment of utter silence and darkness before the emergency generator kicked in and all the lights flickered back on.

‘This is getting more than serious,’ said Inspector Callow. ‘Have you had an update from the SAS yet?’

‘About thirty-five minutes, they told me,’ said the radio operator. ‘The traffic’s a nightmare.’

There was nothing more they could do but watch as the clothes that were clustered around the police station continued to pound at the door-panels. Jerry said nothing, but he had seen how the duffle coats had torn off the door of his car, and he wasn’t at all sure that the police station doors would be strong enough to keep them out for very much longer.

‘Anti-terrorist unit’s come back,’ said the radio operator. ‘Garratt Lane’s blocked solid and they’re trying to find an alternative route. ETA maybe twenty.’

Sergeant Bristow came into the control room. He went straight over to DI Saunders and said, ‘Liepa says he needs to talk to us, urgent-like.’

‘Liepa? What the bloody hell does he want? Doesn’t he realise we’ve got a crisis on our hands?’

‘Well, that’s it, sir, he does. We’ve had to tell him what’s going on in case we have to evacuate the cells. He says that he can help.’

‘Help? How?’

‘He didn’t go into any detail, sir, but he said that he knows how these clothes have come to life.’

‘He’s blagging it,’ said DI Saunders. ‘Go back and tell him we’re not interested.’

‘Hold up a minute, guv,’ said Jerry. ‘Liepa deals with second-hand clothes all the time. That’s his racket. Maybe he does know something. It might be worth hearing what he’s got to say.’

‘He’s responsible for killing one of our officers,’ DI Saunders retorted. ‘Why should he care what happens to the rest of us?’

‘He probably doesn’t care two hoots,’ said Jamila. ‘But maybe he cares about his own survival. If the clothes manage to break in, he’s going to be in just as much danger as we are.’

‘He’s locked in a cell.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to save him, guv,’ said Jerry. ‘I reckon that some of those coats could tear a cell door off, no trouble.’

‘I would like to hear what he has to say,’ said Jamila, firmly.

Sergeant Bristow looked at DI Saunders, and DI Saunders thought for a moment and then shrugged. ‘OK. Bring him up to interview room two. But as soon as we’ve heard him out, I want him banged up again straight away.’

When Sergeant Bristow had left the control room, Jerry said, ‘You’re right, guv. Liepa’s probably going to come out with a load of old moody, but like I say, he’s been handling second-hand clothes for years, and maybe he can give us a hint.’

‘I’ll believe it when I hear it,’ said DI Saunders.

*

Jokubas Liepa was already sitting at the table in interview room two when DI Saunders came in with Jerry and Jamila. Two PCs were sitting at the back of the room with their arms folded. On normal days, they would have been looking bored, but with the persistent sound of thumping echoing through the station, they both appeared edgy, and one of them kept letting out nervous little coughs and licking his lips.

Liepa was unshaven but still resembled a movie villain, with his long black hair curling back over his shirt collar. When DI Saunders and Jerry and Jamila pulled out their chairs and sat down opposite him, he gave them a humourless smile, as if he regarded them with nothing but contempt.

‘We understand you have something to say to us regarding the present situation,’ said DI Saunders.

‘“The present situation”?’ echoed Liepa. ‘I think that is what you might call an understatement. Your police station is surrounded by clothing which has life of its own, and which is determined to kill all of you. I think that is more than just a situation.’

‘So what do you know about this, Mr Liepa?’ asked Jamila.

‘I know everything about this. I know why and how this clothing has come to life, and I also know why it is hammering at your doors.’

‘All right, then,’ said Jerry. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’

‘You can never have something for nothing, you should know that,’ said Liepa.

‘So if you deign to enlighten us, what do you want in return?’ asked DI Saunders.

‘What do you think? I want a guarantee here and now that you will release me without charge for manslaughter. Cast-iron guarantee.’

‘Forget it,’ said DI Saunders. ‘You were party to killing one of our officers while involved in organised robbery. I can’t let you get away with that.’

‘Do I have to remind you that it wasn’t me who was driving?’ said Liepa. ‘And now you have a choice. Either you decide to drop the charges against me for killing one policeman, or else all the officers in this station could die.’

‘You’re just as much at risk as the rest of us,’ said DI Saunders.

‘No, that’s where you’re wrong. And that’s what I can tell you, if you give me that guarantee. Otherwise – well, I have to leave you to your fate, which will not be pleasant, I can assure you. Have you ever wondered what it feels like, to have yourself torn to pieces, limb from limb? To have your guts dragged out of your stomach?’

Jamila looked at DI Saunders and gave him an almost imperceptible nod. From downstairs, there came a loud splintering noise, and the sound of officers shouting.

DI Saunders thought for a few moments and then he said, ‘Very well. It doesn’t seem like I have much of an alternative, does it?’

‘These detectives are my witnesses to your promise,’ said Liepa. He turned around in his chair and added, ‘These two constables, too.’

‘Go on, then,’ DI Saunders told him. ‘What do you have to tell us?’

‘As you know, I collect second-hand clothing and send it to Lithuania to be processed,’ said Liepa.

‘You steal second-hand clothing and send it to Lithuania,’ DI Saunders put in.

‘That is a matter of opinion. Once somebody has decided that they no longer want an item of clothing, who does it belong to? Nobody. If they throw it in the dustbin or leave it out for charity, what’s the difference? Stealing means taking something from somebody who still wants it.’

‘Don’t let’s argue about that,’ said Jamila. ‘Tell us more about this second-hand clothing that you send to Lithuania.’

‘All of it goes to our textile mill in Šiauliai, that is run by my uncle Dovydas. If the clothes are nearly new and in good shape, our girls will repair them and alter them so that they look more modern, and then we resell them. If they are not so good, the fabric is sorted and recycled and carded into new yarn, which will be used to make new clothes.’

‘I think we already knew that,’ said DI Saunders, impatiently. ‘What does that have to do with these clothes that are trying to break our doors down?’

‘What you don’t know is that many of the clothes we recycle are infected, because the people who used to wear them were sick. They may carry some fungus or some disease like ringworm or bronchitis or HIV. But sometimes they’re infected with what we call vaiduoklis virusas. I suppose in English you would call that “ghost virus”.’

‘And what exactly is a “ghost virus” when it’s at home?’ asked DI Saunders.

‘When a person wears a coat, say, sometimes they leave not only their sweat and their perfume and their tiny flakes of skin in it, too small to see. If they are highly stressed, or unhappy with their life, or frightened to die, they infect it with themselves. How would you describe that?’

‘You mean their personality,’ said Jamila.

‘That’s right,’ said Liepa. ‘Their body is buried, or cremated, but in their clothes they have left behind their personality. You must know this for yourselves. How many times have you tried on a coat that belongs to somebody else and felt like them?’

‘So this “ghost virus” can infect people who wear a dead person’s clothes?’ asked Jerry.

‘Exactly – if the dead person was angry enough at dying. At least that’s what my uncle and I believe. People who die happy, I don’t think they infect their clothes in so much the same way. Maybe they make the people who wear their clothes happy, too, but I have never come across that. Only anger at being dead. Only desperate to come alive again.’

‘Once a dead person has infected a living person, what then?’ Jerry asked him, being careful not to mention the word ‘cannibalism’.

But Liepa didn’t hesitate. ‘They want a new body of their own. They need a new body of their own, otherwise they cannot survive for very long. That’s our experience. And to get that body, they need to kill other people and eat them. As far as we know, that is the only way they can come fully back to life. Otherwise, if they can’t have human flesh to eat, they starve, and they die a second time.’

Jerry and Jamila looked at each other. Liepa had to be telling the truth. This was exactly what Sophie Marshall and Laura Miller and Jamie Mullins had told them – or, rather, what they had been told by the personalities who were hiding, cuckoo-like, inside them.

Liepa said, ‘This vaiduoklis virusas – this ghost virus – it’s very catching. What do you call it? Contagious. Sometimes at our factory we have stored clothes together and later we have found out that all of them have been infected by the same dead personality. A strong and revengeful personality can go through somebody’s wardrobe like the wildfire, until every item of clothing that you own is infected. Not only a wardrobe, but a shop, especially a shop that sells second-hand clothes. Those charity shops – they are like crowds of dead people, hanging there, waiting to come back to life.’

‘What about new clothes?’ asked Jerry. ‘Like, clothes that have never been worn by anybody, or hung up anywhere near second-hand clothes? Those clothes outside, there’s nobody in them. They’re empty. And I’ve seen some coats for myself that were absolutely brand-new, as far as I could find out.’

‘It is the same with new clothes but different.’

‘Different how?’

‘Almost all of the new clothes that you can buy have fibres in them that are recycled from old clothes – even from the best shops. If the fibres are infected with the vaiduoklis virusas then the new clothes will be just as desperate to come back to life as clothes that have only been restyled.’

‘But they don’t need anybody to be wearing them, do they, before they come to life? And when they do, they don’t eat people, they rip them to pieces.’

Liepa nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, they don’t eat people. They would, if anybody was to buy them and put them on. But until that happens they can’t eat people because they don’t have mouths to eat with or hands to cook. So, yes, they tear them apart, so that they can take out of them the most important thing that they lost when they died.’

‘You’re talking about their soul,’ said Jamila. ‘That’s what they’re after when they rip people to pieces, isn’t it? They still have their personality. They still have their anger. But when they died they lost the one thing that makes us human.’

‘You are a very clever lady,’ said Liepa. ‘Yes, these new clothes are searching for souls, or whatever you want to call the human essence. For the second-hand clothes, it’s easier, because they can feed from the souls of whoever puts them on. But the new clothes have to go hunting for them, and as far as they are concerned, nobody else’s life is as important as their own.’

DI Saunders was clearly growing impatient. ‘This is all very well, all this mumbo-jumbo about souls, but I thought you said that you could help us. That was the deal, wasn’t it? If you can’t help us, there’s no way that I can consider dropping the charges against you.’

Liepa closed his eyes, and for a moment Jerry could have believed that he had fallen asleep. What he was doing, though, was showing DI Saunders that he needed to be patient, and that all would be explained in due course.

When he opened his eyes again, he said, ‘In our factory, in Šiauliai, we began to see signs of the ghost virus only late last year. Maybe just one article of clothing that came in for recycling was infected with it, but before we knew it the whole factory was infected. Some of our seamstresses were trying on clothes while they were restyling them, and they couldn’t get them off. Dresses, skirts and suits. And then one of our girls went home and murdered her husband and her baby daughter, and we found out later that she had cut them up and cooked them in a čenakai, which is a stew.

‘After that, some coats began to move around the factory by themselves – only at night, at first. But one morning my uncle came to the factory and found our night-watchman had been torn wide open. His feet were fifty metres away from his head and his žarnos were hanging from the ceiling. His intestines.’

‘I presume you called the police,’ said DI Saunders. ‘What did they say?’

‘Policija? No – why would I do that? It would only get us into trouble, and what could they do against a virus? Also, I knew already what the vaiduoklis virusas was. There was an outbreak in another textile mill in Kaunas about six or seven years ago, and my friend who ran the mill told me all about it. Not only that, there are many stories about it in Lithuania. The virus was supposed to have come from Russia. It was one of the ways in which they tried to take over our country.’

The thumping downstairs was growing increasingly frantic, like very fast drumming. The shouting was becoming more panicky, too.

DI Saunders said, ‘Come on, Liepa, get to the point. We haven’t got all bloody night.’

‘All right, all right, I will tell you how I can help,’ said Liepa. ‘The way my uncle and I learned how to control the clothes was to shut down the factory, switch off all the carding machinery, all the lights, everything. At first we did it because we didn’t know what else to do, even though every day it was costing us so much money. But when we went back after three days to see what would happen if we started up again, we had no more trouble. The new clothes stayed where we had hung them up, ready for packing. My uncle took a risk and tried on a second-hand jacket. It made him feel strange, he said, like there was somebody whispering to him, in his ear, but he was able to take it off again easy, and it did him no harm.

‘That was when we understood that the ghosts in those clothes thought of my uncle and me like gods. They depended on us to come back from the dead. If we didn’t restyle the second-hand clothes, they would never go back on the market to be sold and find new owners. If we didn’t card all of that fabric, the fibres from recycled clothes would never be woven into yarns and become new clothes.

‘For all of those clothes, new and second-hand, we are the difference between death and life after death. We are their only hope of resurrection.’

‘But at what price?’ said DI Saunders. ‘Your clothes have killed hundreds of living people – people who never had the chance to live their lives to the full, like they have! Do you know what you’re talking about here? Mass murder. Deliberate, pre-meditated mass murder, and you’re responsible for it. And you seriously expect me to drop all the charges against you?’

Liepa pointed a finger at him. ‘Do you know why those clothes are trying to get in here? Do you know what they want? Why have they come to this police station rather than anywhere else? Like I told you, I am one of their gods. I gave them life. They have come here to rescue me. Think about it. If Jesus had been born again, and unjustly held prisoner, don’t you think that crowds of Christians would come flocking to set him free?’

‘All right,’ said Jerry. ‘How did they know you were here? They haven’t got eyes so they couldn’t have seen it on telly, and they haven’t got ears so they couldn’t have heard it on LBC.’

Liepa pressed the fingertips of both hands to his temples. ‘I called them, detective. Don’t forget that they are ghosts – whatever it means to be a ghost. They can pick up a thought from thin air as easily as we can receive a text, especially when somebody is concentrating on sending them a message.’

‘So what are you trying to tell us?’ said DI Saunders. ‘If we let you out of here, they’ll all go away?’

‘Of course. They have no interest in harming any of you. They only want to see me released, so that I can carry on bringing more and more of them back to life.’

‘And what will they do, after we’ve let you out? That’s always assuming that we do let you out?’

‘They’ll go back to wherever they came from… back to their shops. They’ll lie down again, like the clothes that they are, and it will be hard for you to believe that they ever came to life. They won’t attack anybody else, once they know that you’ve let me out.’

DI Saunders stared at him, and it was obvious that he was wracked with indecision. Liepa was calmly admitting that by continuing to sell clothes infected with the ghost virus, he was making a profit out of mass murder and cannibalism, and that if he were released he would continue to do so. It was plain that he had no qualms about making that admission, because it would be impossible to prove in court. Even with all the forensic evidence that Dr Fuller and the laboratory technicians at Lambeth Road had amassed, there was no way in which Liepa could be indisputably connected with any of the killings that had taken place over the past few days.

Jerry doubted that they would even be able to trace Liepa’s company back from the second-hand clothes that had been sold in Tooting’s charity shops, or the yarns that had been used to make all the duffle coats and other clothes. And if he were questioned by the prosecution about the ghost virus, he could always say that he had made it all up, as a joke. How could anybody scientifically prove the existence of vaiduoklis virusas?

DI Saunders was faced with the starkest of choices. Should he let Liepa go, or should he risk the lives of all the officers and staff who were trapped inside the station, including his own?

His mind was made up by a thunderous crash from downstairs, and an officer shouting, ‘They’re in! They’re in! They’ve broken the fucking door down!’

DI Saunders stood up, and so did Jerry and Jamila and the two PCs. Jamila looked at Jerry as if she wanted to tell him something important, but DI Saunders said to Liepa, ‘Come on, then. Let’s go. Now you can show us just what a god you are.’

Liepa stood up, and gave another one of his humourless smiles. ‘In another life, you know, detective inspector, you and I could have been very good friends.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ said DI Saunders. ‘If there is another life, I’ll come back and haunt you.’