To the many high-rollers that stood next to him, they must have seemed like two pious, righteous and upright pillars who were simply mourning the loss of what was the antithesis to their ideal and illusion. Truth and purity that was the only thing at the heart of Adilaah’s being, and she became expendable in a bid to uphold their lie. Worst of all, Nick was now a part of that lie. He had sipped from the same poisonous cup and in that elixir was the corruption and conspiracy that he had willed for through his own blind ambition. And that made him feel sick with disgust, for he stood at a crossroads; maintain this treachery and allow an innocent man to be convicted as the true assailants go free. All the while becoming notorious for his self-serving rise to stardom, by being in league with the very people whom he swore to put away. Or he could act and inflict justice. A part of him told him to let sleeping dogs lie and reap his ill-gotten gains with apathetic glory. But another part told him that he could not allow any of this to persist. And that part had gone from a whisper, to the voice of an operatic tenor.
The Imam had concluded his prayer and family members began to offer their condolences to Mahmoud and Ashraf. The coffin began its shadowy descent into the red carpet covered ground. Nick felt his emotion churn from the centre of his chest and lodge itself in his throat like an iron weight, but he did his best to restrain it. Adilaah’s ghost still haunted his thoughts, so for him, her spirit lived while her body was laid to rest.
~
Nick took particular delight in watching her dress, despite knowing it was the end of another brief encounter and he would have to let her go again, back to her father and that world that he was an outsider to.
“You haven’t told him yet, have you?” Nick asked with particular emphasis.
“What do you expect me to tell him?” Adilaah replied defensively. “By the way Dad, you know that Driver who used to work for us, well I’m shagging his son…”
“He’d have something to worry about if it were actually shagging,” Nick said sarcastically as she finished clipping her bra and placing the straps over her shoulder. He had never seen her impatient or angry before, so this was one of those rare occasions where her tempered passion was brought to bear. She looked at him with daggers in her eyes as her shapely figure stood before him and he looked at her full bosom, flat stomach and smooth toned thighs, as she searched around for her blouse.
“You don’t get it do you? My father’s whole life is his faith and honour. And there’s no way that his daughter, his obedient, respectful and supposedly moral apple of his eye, is going to be seen to betray that,” Adilaah declared loudly, as she buttoned her blouse. “He would rather see me in a grave. And let me tell you, if he found out about this, that’s precisely where I would end up with no one to mourn me!”
Nick who had been reclining defiantly in bed, sat up with a purpose. “You forget one thing in all of this Adilaah, that you have a choice. You can choose how you want to live your life, choose your own fate. Even one with me!”
Adilaah scoffed at Nick’s reply and sulked while she draped the Hijab over her head.
“You don’t understand,” Adilaah spoke afflicted. “This is my only choice.” She finished adjusting her Hijab on her head and marched out the door, slamming it behind her.
~
Adilaah’s voice echoed over his thoughts, as Nick looked at the faces of Ashraf and Mahmoud with unbridled contempt. Then he shifted his gaze over to McNeil’s blank expression. Nick fought back his tears as he slowly pushed passed the hordes of mourners who had begun to leave. He stopped before the pit of the grave and gazed at the sight of Adilaah’s solitary white coffin. Inside lay all his regrets, hopes and, the emotion that he had not experienced with anyone else, love.
It made his heart swell and his eyes fill with tears. The emotion was too much, and a tear streamed down his cheek. He slowly placed his hand into his black overcoat and produced a partially opened ruby-red rose bud. Just like their love it had not full bloomed, and remained stunted and subdued, but for him it retained all of its inherent beauty and magnificence. Nick held it over the coffin and let go. The flower dropped and landed dead centre, almost as if it had seared itself to the coffin for the rest of her eternal journey, like an immovable relic. Nick took a deep breath as he lifted his heavy head. Mahmoud and Ashraf stared at his ritual and then at him. There was something unpredictable about the look in his eyes, almost as if it was something they had not expected. There was resolution in his eyes, forged in the foundry of dormant righteousness. He stared at them with petulant vengeance and they seemed to harbour an unusual feeling of fear. Nick smiled knowingly at them. They returned his gesture with scorn.
~
Nick felt no conviction in returning to the office and the reality that came with it. He was avoiding dealing with Nadir and the charges that McNeill would no doubt expect in order to neatly close the case. He needed some respite, and as he sat in the painted green hallway of the Nursing Home, he thought that he chose an odd place to find it.
The woe of the funeral still lay heavily upon him and he found it difficult to dispel the melancholy. He stared at the profusely mundane light of the fluorescent lights lining the hallway, and it seemed to catalyse his grief for Adilaah. In his head there was no strategy that would end well. In fact, he felt like he possessed the ignition and fuel that would tear down many lives, including his own. It was as if Adilaah came back into his life to set him on a radical course correction, a catharsis that, through her death, would purge through all of the discord with a fire of purity, pain and grief.
“Hello, are you Mr Shankar’s son?” the plump middle-aged Afro-Caribbean Nurse inquired.
“Yes. How is he?” Nick replied as he quickly sprung to his feet.
“He’s better today. His blood pressure was really high, but it’s stabilized. He’ll be pleased to see you.” The Nurse replied with a warm smile.
Rohit lay restfully in his sturdy metal framed bed, looking frail and diminutive, almost as if there wasn’t much of his body languishing under the covers. The room smelled stuffy and suffocating, shrouded in a sense of death much like the ceremony that Nick had just come from. He approached his sleeping father slowly, watching him breathing with great difficulty in a shallow heave. He studied his father’s form. Rohit had shrunk into half the man he was. He could always remember how his father towered over him with his strong build. His father had always told him stories of his life in the Indian army before he returned to civilian life, and Nick could tell his father deeply missed the discipline and order. Rohit had joined the army because his life was missing just that – order. He had come from a long line of ‘Walas’ – street traders who did everything from selling tea on the street to doing laundry just to get by. Rohit spent the best part of his life on the street, getting in all sorts of trouble until the time when he was fifteen or sixteen, he was implicated in the robbery of a wealthy English madam. But rather than sentence the boy to one of Delhi’s already overcrowded jails, a sympathetic magistrate ordered that the boy be conscripted into the British Indian Army as a stretcher boy and sent to North Africa to fight the Germans and Italians. Carrying so many wounded men to and from the medical camps, and dealing with the tragedy of war, made Rohit strong and powerful. But that was not the man who lay in the bed before Nick.
“Dad,” Nick said softly as he placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Who is it?” Rohit answered feebly.
“It’s Narendra,” Nick replied.
“You didn’t need to come all the way here just to see me,” Rohit implied.
“I wanted to,” Nick said as Rohit simmered into a quiet calmness.
“Is mum coming?” Rohit asked in a confused tone.
“No,” Nick answered becoming impatient at Rohit’s estranged mind.
“Oh,” Rohit answered disappointed. “I wish she would come.”
Nick looked at Rohit sadly as he watched his father drift off to sleep again, feeling like he had lost his father, an
d what remained was the remnants of the man that faded in and out of consciousness. The only living presence of the sum of his entire life was the barely alert shell that lay before him. He tried to afford more generosity, for the man had single-handedly raised him from an infant and given him everything that he could afford. He desperately wanted to resurrect the relationship that he once knew, the one that was just him and his father, when they were a unit trying to survive the hostile world that seemed to want to pull them apart. The sight of this solitary old man made Nick feel alone like he had never felt before. He needed his father – the man who seemed to have a fractured solution or piece of wisdom for him no matter what the dilemma, despite his resistance to it.
“I made Detective,” Nick announced at his dozing father. “I thought you might want to know.” Nick paused in silence. “Thought you might be proud of me,” he continued.
Nick took a deep cleansing breath and sat slowly on the bed, relieving his painful knee.
“Truth is, I’m in a real bind. I’ve done some things. I’ve lied. Covered up a murder. Now I’m about to convict an innocent man and let the perpetrators walk free,” Nick slowly spoke. “You shouldn’t be proud of me. I’m not proud of me,” Nick admitted.
Nick felt the delicate touch of Rohit’s hand on his arm.
“You know your Teachers used to call me to school and say, that boy is such a troubled boy. So shy and so quiet. He doesn’t play with the other children. And I used to say to them. Naren is a gentle boy, but when he is ready, he will be the man he wants to be,” Rohit muttered and then smiled at Nick, before falling off to sleep again.
His father’s words reassured him. He leant down and kissed his father on the forehead, something he had never done before. But he wanted the old man to know that he was grateful, not just for those words, but for everything he had done for him.
14
“Nadir is dead,” McNeill announced plainly without any attached remorse.
“What?” Nick exclaimed with shock cutting through his estranged voice. “How did this happen?”
“Used the strands from his prayer mat,” McNeill replied indignantly.
Nick’s heart sank as he stared out of McNeill’s large office window into the dark greyness that seemed to seize the daylight. He felt an overwhelming sense of despair eclipse him and while he thought this made things simpler for him, he couldn’t help but feel that this outcome wasn’t the right one. It was certainly convenient for him, as Nadir’s knowledge of Nick and Adilaah’s affair would go with him to the grave, but he couldn’t shake the sense of obligation that strangely seemed to persist in his agitated gut. He felt like expounding his emotion into a deliberate voice that would release his frustration, but instead he remained silent, and his very calm introspective seemed only to incense the Superintendent, making him un-characteristically unnerved and edgy.
“Left this,” McNeill rambled, sloppily tossing a transparent plastic jacket that contained Nadir’s note over to Nick.
“He had probable cause. He had motive and was photographed with the victim,” McNeill continued with a tone that seemed like that of a rambling salesman.
“Motive?” Nick enquired furtively, as McNeill ignored the detective’s abrupt interruption and continued.
“His DNA matches the scene. And of course, the 9-9-9 call,” McNeill declared as he noted Nick’s insubordinate manner and paced coolly from behind the refuge of his ominous desk to confront Nick.
“You did a good job,” McNeill remarked as his frosty outlook warmed.
Nick looked the Superintendent in the eye and said cynically. “Did I?”
“Yes. Not bad for your first week,” McNeill expressed. “I’m authorising a few days off. You deserve it.”
Nick felt the remark as somewhat condescending as he watched McNeill return to his desk, revelling in the triumph of his political weaving. He had got exactly what he wanted. An ally in Mahmoud Khan and a detective to do his bidding no matter what that entailed. The thought made Nick feel used and dirty, fouled with a stench that he could not remove. He could not even bring himself to wonder how it is that Nadir could go from the righteous stalwart to a remorseful weakling that could take his own life. He knew that McNeill was capable of treachery to further his own warped ambitions, but murderer? That was a step too far.
Nadir however, was the perfect choice for a suspect. Alone and indigent, a refugee with no fixed abode that the city streets would be happy to be rid of. He knew how McNeill would spin it too. Nadir’s threat of blackmail was not just putting Nick’s reputation on the line, it was putting the whole of Scotland Yard in jeopardy, including his own. And there was no way he was going to let someone of Nadir’s lowly stature smear him, let alone be responsible for another enquiry, which would certainly leave Nick on the wrong side of the firing line. He sensed that McNeill, in a strange twist of loyalty, had protected him, while protecting the whole police force. That day in the interrogation room, he had heard enough of Nadir’s words to put something into play, a strategy that involved the absolution of this. He knew if poked around and asked his gardening enthusiast Stanley, who had been in to see Nadir, that it would point straight to his partner Ron. He was the only one that McNeill had enough leverage on, that would make Ron take care of things rather ‘bluntly’ as he put it.
Nick looked closely at Nadir’s blood scrolled letter and read the words:
‘thou hast said that thou wilt torment me, but I shall fear not such a warning.
For where thou art, there can be no torment, and where thou art not, how can such a place exist?’
Nick turned around and opened the door, leaving McNeill without even being dismissed. The words resonated through his very soul. He had read them before.
~
Nick could not to even understand what prompted him to do it, but suddenly he found himself before Miles Monroe’s aluminium office door. He wrapped softly on the bleak frosted glass as he heard a muffled, “Come in,” from within.
Nick gripped the handle with purpose and placed his weight behind it as he pushed the unusually stiff door.
“You said your door is always open,” Nick remarked grimly as he approached Miles who was seated, crouching low in front of his desk, as though the workload was weighted squarely on his flaccid shoulders. Miles peered up at Nick, unsure of what to make of this visit.
“Sit,” Miles gestured with a mild manner.
“I’m fine,” Nick answered resiliently. “The Khan murder. The suspect hanged himself.”
“I know,” Miles replied coolly.
“I just think that…” Nick stammered. “I mean I…”
Nick took a deep breath as he summoned enough courage to complete a coherent sentence.
“It’s quite unnerving isn’t it? When you can’t tell your friends from your enemies,” Miles remarked as he reclined back into his chair, placing his hands behind his head as they touched the window ledge strewn with scruffy potted plants.
“There are always plenty of people who want to make allegiances with you on the way up,” Miles continued. “But not on the way down.”
Nick grimaced as he watched Miles smirk and open a desk drawer, before removing an article he had curled up in his pale fist. Miles looked at Nick sardonically, dangling the Gold Locket Chain that he had once placed around Adilaah’s neck. Nick looked at the chain with disbelief. Somehow the Prosecutor held it in his hands. The very thing that Nadir had threatened him with flayed about mockingly in front of him.
“Exquisite,” Miles exclaimed as he gazed at the jewel. “An antique no less. With a remarkable history. Belonged to the British Ambassador to India in fifty-eight. Reported stolen, only to end up around his daughter’s neck, whom as it turns out is your mother.”
Miles held up a plain brown dossier. Nick stared at it with trepidation. Then he gingerly took hold of it and opened the document, scanning the contents. He didn’t need to read the detail. His eyes simply went to the header. It read; Testimony
of Carley Anne Banks.
She had signed it. His heart sank.
“Hell, hath no fury as a woman scorned,” Miles lamented as Nick stood, mortified by the Prosecutor’s words. “She didn’t receive a Gold Locket necklace after all she’s fucking done for you! Her words, not mine.”
Miles looked at Nick somewhat sympathetically.
“She felt she needed to tell me everything,” Miles spoke blithely. “For your own good.”
Nick believed that when Carley left that morning, she would simply come back after a few days. She always did. But perhaps she sensed it, in the way he had described his determination to bring Adilaah’s murderer to justice. She was more than just a murder victim to him, and that it was personal. Despite her hard and sometimes brutal exterior, deep down she was remarkably perceptive, and all it took for her to turn on him was for Miles to show her what she was denied – a token of his love – the necklace. And Miles knew it was enough to undo Nick’s entire account of Tyson.
Nick stood horrified and lost for words, trying to conceal his disappointment at Carley’s betrayal.
Miles returned the gold necklace back to its resting place in the desk drawer.
“I couldn’t care less about your entanglements with the Khan girl. Her father might, but I have no cause to upset him, especially when things have been so amicably concluded,” Miles laboured. “But, what I do care about is what really happened that night with Tyson and Allen. And you have to decide what side you want to be on.”
A Time Honoured Killing Page 10