by Anton Marks
That couldn’t have come from one man, surely.
Snatching his eyes away from the carnage, he looked back to the detective, in his pale blue disposable suit and hesitated. The sewer mist was clearing from a slight breeze that had developed and he could just see the high cheek bones, full lips and smooth white skin. John - or did they mean Joan? – Dawson brought the cigarette from his lips with far too much elegance for Shaft’s liking.
Shit!
In a dancehall, all shadows and sparse lighting, you could forget yourself with this brother if you were inclined towards skinny women, except she, was a he. Recovery from the shock was slow, and trying not to make his bemusement apparent, he headed in the detectives direction, his curiosity well and truly whetted.
The area smelled of urine, cars glistened under a layer of condensation enhanced from the street lamps above. Sound from the traffic behind him dramatically diminished some ways along. An ideal place for murder he thought.
He eased past two uniforms talking to what he imagined were witnesses and came closer to the Detective who was standing alone, sniffling. Feeling as if he shouldn’t penetrate his personal space for some inexplicable reason, Shaft stood there only to see him lift his head to look up at him and watched the tears welling up in his eyes and trickling down his cheeks.
Shaft swallowed.
Was this a wind up or what?
He had left one zone of weird shit behind him earlier and had just walked into another twilight zone. Uncertain of what his reaction should be, he decided to ignore the glistening tears and introduced himself with an outstretched hand.
“I’m Detective Sergeant McFarlane, Black Book.”
He turned slightly into the shadows his expression even more maudlin and decided his attention should remain where it was and gave him his hand. The detective snapped off his gloves and shook his hand. It was cold but a solid grip.
“Detective Dawson,” he said with an unusually cadence.“A waste of life.”
“Excuse me?” Shaft said.
“A waste of life,” Dawson repeated with more clarity.
“You know the victim?” Shaft asked.
“All life has significance, detective.”
Shaft’s speech was measured.
“Boss!” he started with care, “You may not realize this,” he lied. “But you have just taken me away from a beautiful woman and a confirmed invitation for coffee with the possibility of breakfast. It’s not for me to comment on your life philosophy, detective but just tell me why I’m here and if you get around to it, how you got my personal phone number?”
“Of course, of course,” he said calmly, “I sometimes forget not everyone is as focused on their work as I tend to be.”
Shaft’s nod of agreement seemed to lament the state of the Metropolitan Police Force personnel as Dawson did. He watched the detective’s red lips annunciate his words.
“Have you ever realised too late that you were not fulfilling your vast capabilities, detective?” Shaft breathed in to answer but Dawson was already away.
“That was the predicament I found myself in. My true calling would have been with the Flying Squad.”
Shaft just couldn’t see it.
“Nothing can rival the cut and thrust of tracking down the perpetrators using sheer cunning. Analyzing their motives, drives and snaring them because they are slaves to their impulses. Outwitted, outsmarted, outdone.”
“Right!” Shaft said thinking what next and trying to sound as focused and reasonable as possible. That didn’t work, especially when you were standing in close proximity to a colleague who had a definite sexual thing going on with this investigation.
He casually stepped out of arm’s reach. Dawson’s orgasmic zeal withered and he shook his head.
“Instead for my sins, this...”
He motioned disdainfully to the forensic tent, the investigating teams and the intense halogen lamps. Shaft in the meantime was still looking for some of the boys from Operation Trident to leap out and start rolling around with laughter.
He was disappointed.
Dawson grinned.
“You’ll need this.” The DCI motioned to the Noddy suit with plastic booties to slip over his shoes and a dust guard for his mouth.
“To answer your question I made my duty more bearable by analyzing cold cases from the Sweeney and a case of yours came up and held my interest.”
Even if Dawson saw Shaft’s impatience, he wasn’t in the least concerned. He had trapped a captive audience and he had no intention of letting go.
“This case in point had the Flying Squad in particular, and Scotland Yard in general, very worried, indeed.”
Shaft groaned, knowing he was about to be dumped on with facts and figures from a closed file he had more than enough knowledge about because he was the one who closed it.
“Eight jobs around the country, that we know of - four witnesses killed, netting them over five million pounds in antiquities and mystic curiosities, no leads and no arrests. Much later we realised it was all organized by the enigmatic figure of Enoch Lacombe, a Jamaican national, whose followers believed him to be a Voodoo priest of the highest order. A man we knew nothing about until someone in his own group set him up and only then by sheer accident you were able to corner him.”
Dawson slipped his gloves back on.
“Enoch’s right hand man – the one that turned on him – he acquired the team from the South London drug Don called Deacon. Two of that team, got twenty years a piece, Enoch himself the recipient of the sting received three concurrent life sentences and the other two who were instrumental in his capture turned Crown’s evidence and took on the witness protection scheme. Deacon himself escaped conviction completely.”
“And everybody lived happily ever after,” said Shaft, injecting some sarcasm.
“Come now,” Dawson snickered. “Endings like that would prove an anticlimax for historians. No, detective, your first witness protection candidate was found murdered a week ago in Poplar and what remains of this gentleman is, I believe, your fourth witness under our protection.”
Shaft’s expression of unconcern vanished, much to Dawson’s amusement. Head cocked to one side as if he was listening to the grating cogwheels of Shaft’s mental processes change gear, he nodded to himself, pleased.
The report that had materialized on Shaft’s desk last week didn’t exactly surprise him. Eric Magar Tin Bateson was found floating face down in a posh gym in Poplar, his lips torn or sliced off from his face. His first conclusion was men like him couldn’t stay out of trouble even after he was given the opportunity to start all over again with a new identity and a chance to right some of his wrongs.
And then again if you really got to know him as well as Shaft had over the period of the investigation, you could understand, even condone, his murder.
He was scum of the lowest order.
Like a dose of tapeworms that made you constantly scratch your ass to relieve the itch but nothing would until you shat the little parasite out was just an idea of how he felt while he was tracking the skinny bastard down. This untimely death was not peculiar unless you threw in the fact that Dawson’s body was possibly another witness from case file 547/ar.
Two dead witnesses from a case that had been closed three and a half years ago, dying violently in the space of a week and he was still fighting the impulse of excitement telling him he had very interesting developments on his hands.
He brushed non-existent lint from his suit and looked back up to Dawson suspiciously.
“What makes you so certain this is one of my witnesses?”
He patted his head with his gloved hands and stared.
“I take it you still have doubts about my investigative skills. Allow me to show you how I’ve come to my conclusions.”
Dawson paced away from him and then stopped suddenly, whipping out his handkerchief again.
Shaft tensed, expecting him to burst into spontaneous tears any minute but he spared him the embarrassm
ent and plopped the dust guard over his mouth
Shaft shrugged and followed Dawson as he flung open the tent flaps. Even with the mouth protection the smell of sulphur and burnt flesh dilated his nostrils with such force he stepped back.
“Christ!” He gasped. A veil of fetid rankness rose up like an intervening wall blocking his entrance and making his eyes water.
“Are you all right, Inspector?” Dawson’s muffled voice sounded concerned. A lumpy orange pool with still recognizable bits of king prawns, pork balls and ale spread across what was now the entrance. He didn’t see it until it was too late.
“Rass!”
Shaft looked down at his feet, thankful his plastic booties protected his Gucci shoes and slowly extracted his foot from the reservoir of vomit.
“The body was discovered by a gentleman wandering down here after a meal,” Dawson commented. “He decided to make his contribution to my crime scene.”
An involuntary shiver ran up Shaft’s spine.
“How goes it?” Dawson chirped.
The two examiners looked up from their grisly work like albino vultures feeding on carrion and shrugged.
At first glance, Shaft could not be certain what he was looking at, so contorted was the body. It took Dawson, who was moving bits of clothing away from recognizable parts of the corpse with his pencil, to give the dead body a sense of proportion. Crumpled beside the wrought iron fence and a car, the body had evidently not been moved from where it was dumped because of its odd position - legs broken and twisted and left propped on the metalwork of a Mercedes. It looked as if the victim had been planted head first into the ground with immense force. Closer inspection revealed a ragged pulp of flesh and bone where his head should have been.
No photo-fits possible here then Shaft thought breathing harshly through his mouth as he absorbed the horrific picture.
What the fuck could have done this?
“You recognize this don’t you, Inspector?” Dawson asked.
Shaft nodded.
Dawson’s roving pencil had lifted the man’s sleeves to reveal a distinctive pattern of scar tissue on his forearm.
Silently Shaft stood there, staring but not actually looking, his mind retracing the Enoch Lacombe case of four years ago. And experiencing the same feeling he had then, that more was to come.
It clung to him like the oppressive smell of decay, which would not go away no matter how you burned your clothes and washed your skin.
“Goddamit!” He muttered to himself.
This was not over and he knew it to his core.
4.
Saturday, July 6th
10.20am
Phase two was a meticulous and emotional business even if you were as hell bent as Y to make it a perfunctory exercise. Trying to destroy the evidence of a one year long relationship was not as straightforward as she thought. A better part of yesterday and this morning was dedicated to throwing away underwear, T-shirts and burning old correspondences between them. But how did you eradicate his smell, his memory? Y had been tempted to bin everything he had attachment to, in a whirlwind of anger anchoring this moment to make it symbolic.
Y had started this exercise totally distraught, the obvious memories not easy to just ignore but as she continued it became easier.
This was the final - and not just symbolic - exorcism of the demon that was Tyrone.
A profound thought tried to sabotage the therapeutic nature of what she was doing and pointed out the futility of it all.
It seemed to her that no matter who you were, a man or woman, of high moral standing or a cesspit dweller like Tyrone, you touched lives as you traversed the journey, always leaving a part of yourself with or without your consent.
Y fingered her way through the clothes racks in her wardrobe and pulled out a case in point.
The Voodoo dress - as Tyrone had named it - and one of her real favorites, deserved to go into the flame if she was following that line of thinking but she couldn’t. Cream colored, body hugging with sections of the midriff missing which revealed portions of her stomach. Short at the back and at the front much longer covering some of her left leg but revealing most of her right.
Homeboy’s eye candy as Patra would class it. Every time she wore it to an event they ended up not going out and making love instead.
The smile that formed on her lips was spontaneous and just as quickly she crushed it with a grimace.
The bonfire roared angrily making Y think maybe she was a bit too ambitious in its construction. Still it felt right. Arms folded, dressed in thick grey sweat bottoms worn low, showing the rim of her designer briefs and with a sweat top zipped up, a shocking red Tee just sneaking a peek over her zipper. She was intently watching the flames gather strength and start licking skywards like dragon tongues. She hunched her shoulders and flipped the hoodie over her short cropped hair although it was a sunny day, distributing her weight between both feet as she did - a habit she had when put in the spotlight or under stress.
Beside her alligator Puma’s, flecked with wood chip and humus, was a saw, a hammer, an axe and lighter fluid. This was her attempt at incinerating a part of her past but not so with her memory. That already was scorched with this episode, never to be removed.
The physical reminders were different.
Tyrone’s wardrobe of designer clothes formed the bed of the pyre; all his paper work, bills and magazines were at the top and for a long lasting burn were the hacked and shattered remnants of his favorite work chair and table.
The heat was getting uncomfortable and Y stepped back, only now wondering if it would affect her neighbours, hoping the blackened embers would not accidentally smear someone’s washing. Then again she didn’t care. She’d already been given a visit from the Housing Association bigwigs accusing her of running a business from her home – which she was, but denied with silky smooth reassurance that this was not the case.
Her caring neighbours expected high jinx from her anyway, so why disappoint. Y smiled, rocking on her feet as if the emotions and hurt were buffeting her body, her eyes stinging and her focus almost captivated by the dancing flames and their ferocity. Just for that moment she stopped dashing photographs into the eager conflagration and held onto the few left in her right hand.
She resisted.
Her thumb rubbed over the glossy surface of happier times - or was it false times and artificial happiness? It was as if all her insecurities had reared their collective heads, roaring her inadequacies to anyone who would listen. What did it take for someone to masquerade their affection for someone else for over a year? What kind of focus and hate did that take? Was anything in the past year real, anything at all?
Tyrone had appeared to be the kind of man she could spend her life with.
She was happy, he seemed happy.
Suzy had sensed something malevolent that Y had not. And it all became clearer as she thought about Tyrone’s reluctance to be anywhere near them because he had sensed his masquerade had been discovered. Y was supposed to be the strategist, her ability to see how things could go wrong and mitigating against it was a part of her gift but in this instance her own affections shielded her perceptions and that sunk her even deeper into depression.
Did it mean every relationship she entered into with her eyes closed because her usual astute senses were ineffective? Could Y trust her own judgment in situations of the heart? The wave of pessimism that was lapping at her feet seemed to subside suddenly as an image of Detective Shaft appeared laughing good naturedly at the state she was putting herself into.
For a moment she felt better.
A set of four-by-six photographs twirled from her hands embedding themselves in the heart of the heat and imploding immediately. Y looked down at the remaining photographs in her hand and for a moment she was transported.
Y is lying on her stomach naked, the cool white cotton sheets casually strapped over her backside almost reminiscent of her derrière being sculpted from Sicilian marble and the ar
tist capturing every crease and fold of the sheet around it. The ceiling fan above spins out a languid rhythm barely able to cool the room. Not that she cared as beads of sweat evaporated off her back in tantalizing waves of cool, whipped up by the fans. At that moment she was satisfied as she stretched and moaned. Satisfied because the man holding the camera made her dripping wet between her legs at a touch, made her orgasm with his words over the phone, the man who filled her up when he entered her like a hand in a perfectly formed glove. Satisfied he could spar with her and know she was his superior but was okay with that. Satisfied she could be herself in his company. So Y was acting up for the camera like a prima donna but still posing for that telling portrait. Her sense of completeness sparkled from the exposure and even when that memory sliced through the air, leaving Y’s outstretched fingers spinning into the bonfire, seized by the flames, blackening and curling as it melted into oblivion, the power of that memory remained. She hoped that sense of completeness would not be incinerated like the photographs, never to return.
That’s when her thoughts were drawn back to last night’s, toast and that light that bathed them with a feeling they would never be alone. There was literal magic around them when they were together that couldn’t be denied, something good and true. And that made Y feel there was some higher purpose to her life. She just couldn’t help thinking that broken relationships would be the price she would have to pay for being special.
She sincerely hoped not.
Suzy’s Apartment, West London
12.35
When tings nah run right Suzy’s first port of call was home. The comfort of being able to pick up the phone and call her family, especially her father, had been a life line when she was establishing herself here in the UK. The Wong family had a haberdashery store in Parade, downtown Kingston, Jamaica for over sixty years. Through political upheaval, violence and economic uncertainty, Mr. Wong would be there with Suzy’s mum and two brothers servicing one of the toughest areas of Jamaica’s capital. Mr. Wong was respected and respectful of his home and fiercely patriotic. He came to Kingston when he was three years old with Suzy’s grandparents from Montego Bay. Their parents had worked as indentured laborers in British Guiana, fighting against the odds to get to Jamaica for a better life. If anyone had helped to create the fortunes of downtown’s trading history he had. But she saw them beyond the titles of pioneers; most importantly they were her family that she loved dearly.