‘Did he, then. What else did he tell you?’
‘Nothing much – I wasn’t there long.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be bad-tempered,’ he said, reverting to his usual, modest tone of voice. ‘I can hardly think straight. I keep remembering all the girls I sent down to Skopje – they were mostly girls. I’d wave at them as they drove off in our Mitsubishi camper van, and they’d wave back and grin with excitement. Oh, my dear God, how many did we send there. . . I can’t even count them in my head.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
‘And then after Syrna Street, what happened to them, do you know?’
I told him about the Vegas Lounge. I didn’t feel like sparing him the detail. There was something about his reaction to the discovery that the children in his care had been prostituted by a gang of traffickers in Skopje that was. . . I won’t say false, but constrained or repressed. It was as if his own self-pity left not much room for pitying anyone else.
‘God consigned them to my care,’ he said when I had finished. ‘And I did care for them. I did. To get some of them off to safety in Skopje. . . It seemed. . . The UNHCR. . . Dear Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me. I prayed for guidance before coming to Kosovo, you know. I beseeched Our Lord to tell me if it was right. I had no experience of looking after children. And my own childhood was. . . was. . .’
‘Troubled?’
‘Oh well, I’m not the first to suffer a little, and I won’t be the last. My mother was a good and lovely woman, that I am sure of.’
But she killed your father and left you with Wulfstan, I thought.
‘She came and found you when you opened the refuge?’
‘Yes – that was nearly three years ago. She’d settled in northern Albania. I was so happy to see her again. She couldn’t come to England because. . . Well, she couldn’t. And Wulfstan said that if I went to her, the police would follow and I would lead them to her door.’
This seemed improbable, but Father Daniel was not a worldly man.
‘Do you know where your mother is now?’
He did not reply for a moment; when he did, his voice was soft and bitter as ash: ‘She was the woman you found in the farmhouse.’
Priest, priest, she’d cried, pointing at her phone. Priest. . . Not calling for a priest, but for her son. And I’d sent him down there to find his own mother eviscerated in her chair.
‘I wish I’d known. I’m sorry.’
He didn’t answer, but lay down again and drew the bedclothes up to his chin. I was relieved that the conversation had ended, for now I felt guilty that I’d judged him so harshly. A little while later, I heard his breathing slow and he started to snore. I could hear Anna and Eleni whispering in the sitting room; but even when they fell silent half an hour later, I couldn’t sleep.
I was beginning to understand what had been going on in the background between MI6 and their political masters. The Vegas Lounge was a scandal-in-waiting – and bore uncomfortable similarities to the child-trafficking scandals that had disgraced the UN’s intervention in Bosnia a few years previously. Worse, the place was run by a brother of one of the Kosovar delegates at Rambouillet and a known associate of the KLA. If the scandal blew while the peace conference was in full swing, it would hand a massive PR victory to the Serbs and their Russian sponsors and upset the delicately balanced diplomatic rationale for military intervention in Kosovo. The threatened NATO bombing campaign was supposed to be a humanitarian intervention, which made it both legal and politically acceptable; but the ethical facade would look pretty threadbare if some of the people you were siding with ran an underage brothel in Skopje.
They’d decided to keep a lid on it. The relevant security agencies would have received a subtle diktat to the effect that now was not the time to move on Haclan Adjani. I’d found out what was going on and they’d locked me away in Norfolk without a second thought. But the UNHCR was also involved, because of Bryan Harley, and that was a thornier problem. They’d tried to prevent Colonel Adjani attending the peace conference, but evidently failed. A few days later, Clive Silk had met him at Rambouillet and, in effect, tried to help a child trafficker slip the net. If that got out, he’d be crucified.
Everything I’d seen since coming back to Skopje confirmed that Haclan had got the message and was shutting up shop. I went through what Anna had told me about Silk’s visit to Rambouillet and an idea came to me. I turned the idea over and over, examining it from every possible angle. It didn’t look that good from any of them, but it was the best I could come up with and we were running out of time.
36
I got up an hour later, dressed in the narrow hallway, then left the building. It was two-thirty a.m., the darkest time of night. I set off at a jog and in twenty minutes arrived at the far end of the street where my apartment was located.
Looming above me was a boarded-up theatre with an elaborate fire escape clinging to its back – the sections of rickety ironwork were a feature of the view from my bathroom window. The theatre was a haunt of homeless people – many times I’d observed them squeezing through a section of boarding. I found the place, prised open the gap, and entered a narrow strip of yard that was choked with rubbish lobbed in from the street. At the top of three wide steps were the main doors, their glass knocked out and replaced by oblongs of plywood, which had in turn been kicked in. The night was bitter and I guessed the people who took refuge here had retreated inside.
I made my way round the back and found the foot of the fire escape. It was a Manhattan-style affair, with cantilevered sections designed to be lowered from above, but someone had left a length of tatty cord attached to the bottom ladder. I pulled it down and the whole structure shuddered, then showered me with flakes of rust. This didn’t seem like such a good idea now, but I needed a gun and there were two in my apartment. I started up and made it to the first landing. I felt with my fingers for the bolts which fastened the platform to the wall and found that half of them had rusted away. Six more flights to the top. . . I don’t know what was worse about that ascent – the sonorous groans emitted by the fire escape as due notice of its imminent collapse, or the sound of unidentified lumps of decaying ironwork thudding onto the tarmac below. Eventually I made it to a small dome with a balustraded walkway, which gave me a good view of the street below.
They hadn’t made much effort to conceal themselves: a white Mercedes saloon was parked twenty yards down from Maria’s, its windows fugged up and a styrofoam takeaway box in the gutter below the passenger door. These were not professional intelligence operatives, not even freelance ones. There was an outside chance they were local police, but I guessed my former colleagues would find it hard to convince Skopje’s finest to devote their precious time to the capture of a junior British intelligence officer, whatever lies they told about me. No, they had to be Haclan Adjani’s crew. How had they found out I was back in Skopje?
Seeing them there outside Maria’s, brazenly watching my apartment, made me angry. I worked my way quickly round the parapet until I came to the side that bordered an alley separating the theatre from the block next door. A jump of no more than five feet, with an easy landing on a flat tarred roof a few feet lower down. In one movement I stepped up onto the balustrade and launched myself out over the black gulf between the two buildings.
It was further than I’d thought and my trailing leg caught the edge of the roof, but I toppled forward and rolled to safety. There were no more alleys to leap now, just various reassuringly solid walls and tiled roof-slopes. In less than a minute I was dropping down onto the back extension directly above my bathroom, which was out of sight of the watchers in the street. I clambered in through the metal window – which was too warped to be shut properly, but had the merit of being securely embedded in the wall.
The bathroom stank of old urine. The WC hadn’t been flushed last time I was here, with Katarina, because the cistern leaked and I’d tied the ballcock up with a rubber band. I took off the lid and saw it w
as stuffed with sheets of balled-up paper. I opened one out and straightaway recognised the tidily flamboyant handwriting: these were the missing pages from the back of Father Daniel’s Book of Prayer. Katarina must have got up in the night, torn them out and hidden them here.
I shut the door to stop any light filtering through to the front window, then flipped the switch and slowly extracted all the scrumpled paper from the cistern. Blood pounded in my throat as I smoothed the sheets out one by one on the bathroom floor. I put them all the same way up. I arranged them in three straight lines. I fussed over the creases. Why had Katarina hidden them here? Because she’d wanted me to find them? I looked for page numbers so I could put them in the right order. Anything to postpone the moment when I actually had to read them.
The first bore a poem, set out so it occupied the exact centre of the page. Most of the writing was in Albanian, but like the poem I had found in the front of the book when I’d been waiting in the BFPO to send it back to Northampton, this one was in English.
Say a little prayer
To cleanse your mouth of wickedness,
Say a little prayer
To save your lips from sin.
Say a little prayer
And give yourself to godliness,
Say a little prayer
And let your Master in.
I skipped uneasily over the next few pages, until I came to a passage of Albanian. I’d picked up enough of the language to be able to work my way through a newspaper article, with the help of the dictionary I’d bought at the airport on first arriving in Skopje. I fetched it from the sitting room, knelt on the lumpy grey lino of the bathroom floor and started to translate.
Heat belted off the radiator, cold blew in through the window, the cistern dripped. My mind carried unknown words from the pages of the book to the columns of the dictionary. Adult. . . Obedience. . . I hunted for meanings and dreaded what I would find at the place in the column where my finger came to rest. Punishment. . . It was a dark moment in my life. To be panicked by the knowledge that you belong to the same world and the same species as the author of some sheets of handwritten paper torn from a book – that is to be panicked by something you can never escape.
Bedtime Story, it was called.
Once upon a time there was a girl who felt sorry for herself. She was in the care of a kind man of God, she had a roof over her head and food to eat, and she was taught to read and write, but still she grumbled and complained. The kind man who looked after her asked her to help with some grown-up things he could not do by himself. He was lonely, you see, with only children for company; and because he was a man of God, who spent his whole life doing good things for others, he would never have a family of his own. So it was only fair that she should help him in these grown-up ways, to show she was grateful to him for looking after her so well and making sure she was warm and had food to eat. She knew she should have done these things gladly and with a willing heart, as God asked, but still she was stubborn and difficult. In the end, the good man asked God what to do. You must punish the girl, God told the good man, until she shows obedience. But I don’t want to punish her, said the good man. You must, God told him, for that is how I wish it to be. So he did punish her and she didn’t like that because it hurt. But she knew that it was right that if she refused to do what God and the good man wanted, she should be punished. And although the punishments made her cry, she understood that they were good for her and would make her better.
Now, go to sleep, children, and God bless you all, in the name of the Father etc. Think about what I have said to you, and in the morning you must try to do what God wants you to do without being difficult or complaining.
And then there was a page entitled Cleanliness.
Do you know what it says in the Bible? Cleanliness is next to godliness. Our outsides get dirty and we can clean them with water and soap, which God has given us for this purpose. But not many people know that we can clean our insides, too. We brush our teeth by reaching into our mouths, don’t we? And we clean our ears, and we even push our fingers up into our noses to find the dirt. So why should we also not reach into other parts of ourselves and clean them, too? You have been brought up in ignorance of these things, but I can help you make yourselves clean so that God will love and welcome you into his Church and not cast you out because of the dirty smells that come out of you and the dirty things you harbour inside yourselves which you are too lazy to clean. I will show you how to make yourselves clean enough so that God will love you, and there are two parts to it: first, there is the inspection, so that we can find the dirt; and then there is the cleaning itself, which can hurt quite a lot when you are not used to it. . .
I turned the page without reading any further, hoping to find that this was as bad as it got, that there were other items Katarina had torn out which would make the regime at the refuge seem less appalling. I checked my watch: it had taken me forty minutes to get this far. I worked feverishly through another page.
Do you know what gibber means?
No, Father.
Well, I want you to imagine the very worst pain you can, even worse than being whipped for a long, long time, or having your fingernails pulled out, or bits of skin cut off. I think you can believe that you would scream and scream and scream when you were having this pain. But if this pain goes on and on forever and never stops, well, you can’t scream at the top of your voice forever, can you?
No, Father.
No, after a while, maybe an hour or a day or even a few days, you get tired and you can’t scream any more. Now, the noise you make when the pain is still terrible but you are too tired to scream is called a gibber. And do you know where you hear this noise the whole time?
No, Father.
You hear it in hell! You hear it a long way from hell. As soon as you get close to hell, the gibbering fills your ears. When you come closer still, you see why they gibber in hell. You see the Devil’s bony black pigs, which are always hungry. You see their sharp teeth tearing the skin from people’s legs and gnawing at their bones. Would you like that to happen to you?
No, Father.
No. And the reason I am telling you about gibbering is because I don’t want you to go to hell. You know that when you are bad and don’t do what I tell you to do, God is watching. And if there’s one thing in the world our Dear Lord in Heaven loves more than anything else it is His Church, which is like His home on Earth, and the people like me who work in His Church are like His family, you see? So if you children are disobedient or disrespectful towards me, God hates that so much that anyone who does it, well, can you guess what He does?
No, Father.
He sends them to hell and the black pigs gnaw the skin from their legs and crack open their kneecaps with their big jaws. And then they gibber, oh, how those poor children gibber! So just remember that if you ever say anything or do anything to harm the Church or God’s family, which is people like me, well, God will find out and and He knows what to do.
Father Daniel’s Book of Prayer was a record not of his spiritual development, as it claimed on the front cover, but of his depravity. I should have been expecting this, for wasn’t it he who told me to take Katarina to the house on Syrna Street in the first place? But ever since I’d found him there, bleeding inside from the fists of Haclan’s men, I’d felt ashamed of my suspicions.
How gullible I was! He’d come to Skopje not to find Katarina, but to find the Book of Prayer. These pages, in which he had assiduously recorded his abuse of the children in his care, would incriminate him. Katarina understood that. Perhaps she had seen him poring over them, absorbed in lascivious contemplation of the procedures by which he gratified his desires. Katarina had seen how important the book was, and had had the courage to steal it.
But why had she torn out the pages that described the horror inflicted by Father Daniel? A primitive urge to dispel the evil they contained? Why not give the book to me? Because Father Daniel’s threats had worked their foul enc
hantment, I guessed. She hadn’t been long at the refuge, so might not yet have heard Father Daniel reading out the passage I had just translated. But some time during the night she’d spent in my apartment, she’d woken up, taken the Book of Prayer into the bathroom to read and found it for herself. Then she’d cast around in panic for some way to undo her defiance of the priest and his vengeful God. She hadn’t wanted me to find these pages – quite the reverse. She’d torn them out and hidden them, to save herself from the black pigs of hell.
This was all speculation, of course. But thinking of the terror she must have suffered that night, I felt engulfed by sadness and a renewed sense of guilt that I had done so little to help her.
I didn’t translate any more passages of text, but I spent another hour deciphering some of the pages of notes he kept for each of the children in his care: what made them frightened or sad, whether they were suspicious or trusting, straightforward or secretive, stoical or easily reduced to tears. By this means he was able to tailor the suffering he inflicted. He was a skilled, patient groomer, who presented his victims with a simple choice: be pious and obedient, or face eternal damnation. Piety and obedience were exacted by Father Daniel in numerous ways, all of them either physically or psychologically sadistic. The prospect of eternal damnation was conjured up at every opportunity, and especially last thing at night. The inspiration was biblical, but the delivery matter-of-fact and educational in tone. And by the way, Father Daniel added to the end of another of his ‘bedtime stories’, I’ve seen some of the Devil’s pigs in the woods, just a short way from here. Their lips are too skinny to cover their long teeth and the spit drips from their jaws because they are always hungry.
For the pious and obedient, there were little rewards – the right to sit in this or that chair, or go to bed late, or listen to music on the priest’s MP3 player. For the rest, there were punishments and the promise of hell. And presiding over this was God – Father Daniel’s God, whose Church was His home and whose priests were His family. God never forgave anyone who said anything bad about His Church or His priests – especially not children who knew better, as they did – but sent them gibbering to hell. Even if they did not know what they were saying was bad, He sent them to hell. For this reason, it was safer to say nothing at all.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 24