Dark Angels

by Grace Monroe

  Standing up to talk, it seemed to me that the symbol was still burning Kailash. Her voice was distant, unaffected by emotion.

  ‘The mark is caused by a third degree burn–hence very few people willingly brand themselves.’

  ‘When was yours done?’ I probed.

  ‘I was seven–and it didn’t heal well, that’s why the brand is raised on me.’

  ‘What does the symbol mean? I take it that’s important?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t work it out,’ Kailash replied.

  ‘The one I saw was not as…’ I fought for the correct word, ‘distinct as yours.’

  ‘Because it was a lot older,’ she answered, taking a deep breath like a swimmer going under water.

  I kept quiet, forcing her to continue speaking, but she didn’t–she got up and dropped her trousers again; too fascinated to be embarrassed I examined the keloid scar.

  ‘It’s a pentacle. A Masonic, and Templar mark. Sir Robert Moray–the first known Mason–used it when he signed the minutes of the Edinburgh lodge in 1641. He called it his Mason’s mark.’ If I was expecting her to be impressed by my knowledge, then I was sadly mistaken.

  Kailash shook her head.

  ‘Look again,’ she hissed. Turning round, she caught my eye. ‘You’re always jumping to conclusions–you’re too impatient, Brodie.’ I’d heard that criticism before, but I still couldn’t believe that patience is a virtue.

  Placing my thumb and forefinger on her warm soft skin, I stretched the scar, irrationally afraid that I was hurting her. Closer examination revealed the error of my previous discourse.

  ‘It’s reversed! The pentacle is upside down!’ I was excited by this discovery.

  ‘And…?’ Kailash moved her hands in circles in the air, signing for me to continue.

  ‘And a reversed pentacle is the sign of Baphomet–the goat-headed god.’

  ‘More,’ she said simply.

  ‘The Templars were accused by the Inquisition of worshipping Baphomet and…’ I pre-empted her next prompting, trying to buy some time; there was something else that was niggling me, and her too, I thought.

  ‘Baphomet is an old French word the origin of which simply means Mohammed.’

  ‘Interesting, Brodie, but not relevant–think of where you saw the sign last. And what manner of man it was on.’

  ‘Well, obviously it was Lord Arbuthnot–and he was a legal man.’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘No!!’ Kailash’s scream ripped through the air. It was as if a lightning bolt had struck my subconscious, jolting it into action.

  ‘Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley claimed it had an esoteric significance. If one point was upwards it represented good and if one point was downwards then it was evil.

  ‘Then if Alistair MacGregor chose that symbol–and opted to have it burned into his flesh at 1400 degrees–what type of man do you think he was?’ Kailash was frustrated with me, but I was reluctant to give her the answer she wanted.

  ‘For God’s sake, Brodie, look beyond the uniform the man wore. Think of what you have discovered about him since his death.’

  ‘His drug damaged heart; your accusations of him cottaging in the East End…’

  ‘You’re not asking the right questions, Brodie. Think, think. Just ask the questions that your intuition tells you to ask.’

  That was the heart of the problem for me, for any lawyer. You don’t go to university to learn the law; you go to have your mind trained. All my education had instilled in me never to ask questions that I did not know the answer to; such preparation disconnects your heart, that’s why lawyers have spawned a million jokes in every language. What’s the difference between a lawyer and a vampire? A vampire only sucks blood at night.

  Sitting there in that prison room, listening to Kailash’s erratic breathing, I knew my life was hanging in the balance. It seemed a ridiculous directive. What did I need to know to save myself, never mind Kailash?

  It was after all very simple.

  As soon as I opened my mind, it was staring me in the face–it had probably been there all along.

  ‘God, Kailash–I’ve been trying to find out what’s going on but you know all the answers. You always know them, always have known them but have held back.

  ‘Kailash–you’re the missing girl, aren’t you?’

  FORTY-THREE

  My words were, in truth, a statement of fact which I had finally recognised, but yet again Kailash evaded me.

  ‘Thank you for the compliment, Brodie–but surely I’m too old to be classified as a girl?’ With that, she smiled her set smile, her public smile, and continued to hide from me.

  ‘Look, you can play all the games you want to–maybe you get some weird kick out of all of this–but don’t take me down with you. Don’t do it, Kailash.’

  I got up to walk, to stride across that tiny room. I needed to pace. Kailash remained silent. I tried to wait her out; it was just too damned hard and she was too good at it.

  ‘You’re the key to all of this–Moses, the girls. How does the abandoned baby fit into it all?’

  Gripping the table, her knuckles went white. Was the show over, or had it just begun?

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Brodie McLennan. I’m not the key–that baby is.’

  ‘Please tell me. I’m getting lost in all this.’ I was ready to beg. Kailash’s eyes flicked over me. Sensing my distress, she laid a hand on my curls and smoothed them. Was it back to the professional Ms Coutts, always there to do whatever the punters needed? Was she working me now?

  ‘Brodie, Brodie, Brodie–do I need to spell it out to you? There were always girls–there were always pregnant girls. And when you get pregnant girls, you get babies. Not as often as you should–but sometimes, someone slips through the net.’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles, Kailash. Did you? Did you slip through the net?’

  ‘In a way, yes. There was a baby once, a baby who was mine,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Who was the father?’ I asked–but inside I already knew the answer.

  ‘You know who the father was. You know who the father was to all of those babies of all of those girls–me included.’

  She was going to make me say it, and then she was as good as saying she was guilty of murder. With me roped into withholding evidence and everything that went with it.

  ‘OK–it was Lord Arbuthnot.’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  My breathing stopped.

  I was completely lost.

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘It wasn’t “Lord Arbuthnot”–it was just plain old Alistair MacGregor.’

  ‘But you said he’d never been a client,’ I shouted at her. More lies, was that all she was capable of?

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I was thirteen when my baby was born–do you really think the devil pays for his privileges? I was Alistair MacGregor’s slave and I was marked by his brand. The brand you have just seen, the brand you have just touched.’

  So again I had asked the wrong question. I might have got to this point a lot quicker if I had asked if she had ever had sex with Alistair MacGregor. But then again, she would have denied that. The only thing she would admit to was that Alistair MacGregor had sex with her.

  ‘Why did you throw the baby into the sea?’ I asked, although I think I could understand why a thirteen-year-old who had been repeatedly raped and brutalised would throw away the spawn of such an encounter.

  ‘I did no such thing,’ she stated and the way she said it made a chill run down my spine. Both her hands were placed on the table, like a feral cat she was facing me down, furious that I could suggest she had taken such a step.

  ‘He did it, or his people did–they threw the baby into the water to get rid of the evidence.’

  ‘There must have been plenty of other evidence to convict him?’

  She grunted at me. ‘You’d think so–groups of children complaining over thirty years. No one listened–he wasn’t acting alone, you know. Th
ere was a ring of high-powered men with influence. High-powered people with influence.

  ‘I was left for dead after I had my baby. I was pumped full of heroin. It was their intention to dump me somewhere, probably in a bag like the other girls.’

  ‘Do you think they were pregnant too?’

  She nodded. ‘There is absolutely no doubt in my mind. I’ll bet amongst the body parts that were recovered–I bet they never found any wombs.’

  I would have to ask Patch; he had not been forthcoming with information, but I wasn’t going to be fobbed off now.

  ‘You can’t win against these people, Brodie. They’ve got the law on their side. But I will not plead–Alistair MacGregor is not being deified as a result of my actions.’

  ‘There is one way that we can verify what you’re saying, Kailash.’

  I reached over and pulled a strand of hair from her head.

  ‘DNA testing. If you were raped by him, if you did have a baby by him, and if that baby was thrown into the sea…these things can be proven. We’ll test the baby’s DNA and Alistair MacGregor’s–it will confirm that he is the father.’

  ‘You’ll do DNA testing on a baby that has been buried for years, Brodie. Dead and buried a long time.’

  ‘I know that and I know that this might be distressing for you–the baby will have to be exhumed for us to get a DNA sample.’

  Shrugging her shoulders she sighed: ‘Is that what you really think will solve all of this? You’re going to waste time getting an order to get an exhumation? You’d never get it anyway. What are you going to say? That you’ve got a hunch? That you’ve got a notion to dig up the bones of a long-dead child to satisfy your curiosity?’

  I had to think on my feet. ‘I know that, I know we’d never get it–that’s why we can’t go through official lines.’

  She caught my drift quicker than I would have liked.

  ‘You’d be robbing a grave, Brodie–if you were caught. You would be stealing a baby’s bones. Is that how far you’re willing to go to get to the bottom of this? That baby–the key to all of it: but at what cost?’

  Her voice trailed off.

  Thoughts of Burke and Hare came to me; they got away with it for some time before detection. But they did it under cover of darkness, we still had long light nights, and I would be visible if I attempted this.

  ‘If I was caught, I’d be arrested–my life as I know it would be over. But I’d still be alive.’

  There was nothing else for us to say to each other. We both knew the implications of what I was suggesting and we knew that I would carry the burden of it.

  I left Cornton Vale knowing that the night ahead would change my life–one way or the other.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I drove from Cornton Vale to Edinburgh, yawning all the way. I had become obsessed with sleep–I wanted the trial over for many reasons, the whole business over, but none so much as the fact that I just wanted to lie down and rest. Preferably somewhere without phones always ringing in the middle of the night.

  When I got back to the flat, it was clear that the usual suspects were still there. Fair enough for Fishy–he lived there after all–but did the others not have homes to go to? I swear when this thing is over, I thought to myself, I’ll move away and give none of those buggers my address. It was only after such a glib and normal thought had passed through my mind that I remembered exactly what I had planned for myself in the much nearer future. Christ, if I managed to successfully grave-rob, the whole shower could move into my room in celebration if they wanted to.

  As soon as I walked in, Fishy was on me.

  ‘I know where you were,’ he said accusingly.

  I stared at him–which part did he know? Joe’s big gob came to the rescue.

  ‘Aye–PC Fulton phoned. Was it really necessary to have Moses arrested?’ Joe pushed Fishy out of the way so that he could glare at me.

  ‘We’ve got too much to do to get caught up in personalities,’ I snapped back at him. I was stripping out of my bike jacket as I walked into the kitchen. Patch and Jack looked at me reproachfully.

  As I took my seat Jack handed me a cup of steaming espresso perfectly made with just a touch of golden froth on top. At least he hadn’t started on at me–yet.

  Patch had photographs from Lord Arbuthnot’s post-mortem on the table, the series of pictures that detailed his back and buttocks. I pointed to the inverted pentagram.

  ‘Can you just go over this again, please?’ I asked. I needed to collect my thoughts again and assimilate all I had learned since my visit to Kailash. The hour-long trip back from Stirling was a blur of sleepiness; I hadn’t done much thinking or analysing–or even plotting.

  ‘I’ve explained to the boys the significance of the mark, and we’ve been over it before,’ he said, putting another picture up on the makeshift board inside his briefcase.

  ‘But we need to consider it in conjunction with this. Laura Liddell–note the mark on her right buttock…and here,’ he placed another image up for us to look at.

  ‘A section of the second body found in 1985. The same mark visible.’

  ‘Now, note the marks on the deceased’s back.’

  He pointed to Lord Arbuthnot’s image.

  ‘These marks are old–they have been made by cigarette burns. Initially they concerned me because most likely they came from the deceased indulging in a sexual game known as smoking where he in effect becomes a human ashtray.’

  ‘And anyone who would allow himself to be used as an ashtray would not be dominant,’ I said, following Patch’s line of thought.

  ‘Precisely.’ Patch looked around the table.

  ‘What kind of nutcase does these things?’ Joe shivered involuntarily. ‘I can understand people giving–and getting–a good kicking; but this kind of pervy stuff? Christ, I’ve a lot to learn.’ I remembered the last time I had heard that phrase–when Kailash had spat it out at me in Cornton Vale.

  ‘More people do this than you would imagine,’ I said.

  ‘Well, the fact that anyone does it is more than I can fucking imagine,’ answered Joe.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Patch, ‘I’ve been researching this stuff and there are some people known as switches–they change from submissive to dominant depending on who they are with.’

  ‘Arbuthnot was a paedophile. So with helpless kids he was a dominant, sadistic torturer, but when it came to himself, he was the victim?’ I said.

  ‘No, that wasn’t what I meant,’ Patch said huffily. ‘Don’t twist my words, Brodie. Dependant on who his companions were–what they encouraged him to do–that would decide which role he took.’

  We were back to a killing team. One of the only explanations that had ever made sense for the attacks on me starting after Lord Arbuthnot’s death.

  As I looked round the bunch of misfits in my kitchen, I wondered how much more of this they could take–we were all in way too deep. Could I push them deeper still?

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘How the hell did I let you bully me into this?’ Joe gasped as he climbed the high wall surrounding Seafield Cemetery.

  ‘Christ, this must be twenty-five feet–and you don’t see many climbers that weigh as much as me.’ Sweat rolled down his face as he attempted to get a foothold on the wall. It was difficult, as it was intended as a deterrent to keep grave-robbers like us out.

  Jack Deans sat in his car listening to the police radio–our early warning system so that he could alert us if we were likely to be receiving police attention. The thud as Joe fell off the wall into the graveyard made me certain that someone would notice something soon to announce our presence.

  ‘I don’t want to do this, Brodie–it’s sick. Have you thought it through? If you need to do a DNA test on this poor bairn’s bones, what do you hope to find? That Kailash is the mother or isn’t she? That Arbuthnot is the father or isn’t? I don’t get what you want, Brodie. I just don’t get it.’

  Joe was expressing my own thoughts, but as I looked aroun
d the tombstones, I knew I didn’t want to join them. I’d take confusion and illegality over that option any day.

  ‘Piss off then, and I’ll do it myself,’ I said, secure in the knowledge that he would stick to me like glue.

  I ran in front, crouching down so low that my thighs screamed and my lungs were fit to burst. Naturally, I arrived at the grave first. The six-foot marble angel stared down at me from her plinth. As I moved her eyes followed. The ground was wet and clawing. I started to dig with my bare hands straight away, the black earth sticking to my fingers, creeping under my nails. It felt cold and damp beneath my touch, chilling my heart. I knew the words on the gravestone off by heart–the dark made no difference–they were burned into my vision:

  Remember man that thou art dust

  and into dust thou shalt return.

  The priest put ashes on my forehead and uttered those words on Ash Wednesdays.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be dust yet,’ I muttered at the angel.

  ‘Will you stop tickling that ground?’ Joe was beside me as I continued to try to get through the earth. ‘Move so that I can get on.’

  I had merely scratched the surface, but I didn’t see how Joe could do much more. He might have muscles, but he hadn’t brought any tools.

  ‘Christ, Joe,’ I whispered as loudly as I could. ‘Some help you are–where’s the shovel?’

  ‘Fuck!’ he said, a bit louder than I felt comfortable with. ‘I’ll have to go back and get it. That fucking wall’ll do me in one way or another. If I’m not back in…God. How long would it take for me to get arrested, do you think?’

  ‘Piss off, Joe–the sooner you get the shovel and the crowbar, the sooner we can get this over with.’

  As soon as I saw the back of him, any streak of bravado I had left me.

  It was dark, it was cold, and I was alone in a graveyard intending to dig up a baby’s corpse. Images poured into my head–what would it feel like to pull a tiny white coffin out of the ground, where it had lain for almost three decades? The wood would be rotten, the brass handles tarnished. Would I touch worms? Rats? Would I be sick?