The Divinities

by Parker Bilal

  ‘So far so normal. Who runs security on the site?’

  ‘A company called Kronnos.’ Milo had the details. ‘A guard passes by two or three times a night, depending on how busy they are. No fixed times. They try to avoid fixed patterns, but the guard logs in with their central office using an app and that time is recorded.’

  ‘And everything checks out?’

  Milo nodded. ‘Last guard went by at 1.47 a.m. Everything was in order and no sign of anything wrong.’

  ‘Did he notice Mrs Thwaite’s car parked there?’

  ‘No mention of it. He probably wouldn’t be looking at a parked car.’

  ‘Do yourself a favour. Don’t make assumptions. Check with him again.’

  ‘Okay, boss.’ Milo reached for the phone.

  Drake stepped back to survey the whole board.

  ‘So nobody sees anything until Kardax turns up?’

  Kelly checked her notes. ‘According to one of the Slovaks, who is not too happy about the situation, there are usually people hanging around outside the gates waiting for Cricket.’

  ‘In the hope he can find them some work.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And they all vanished when the shit hit the fan.’

  Kelly beamed. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself, sir.’

  ‘Okay, good work both of you. What do we have on Hideo’s background?’

  ‘He was a teacher at some kind of high school in France.’ Kelly frowned at the page she was reading slowly. ‘Ecole Superior des Sciences Lorraine.’

  ‘It’s a university.’ Milo cleared his throat. ‘École Supérior des Sciences.’

  ‘Oh, excusez-moi.’

  ‘Get in touch with them, Milo. Find out what they can tell us about Hideo. Anything at all, his background, his friends, etc.’

  ‘Right, boss,’ said Milo. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  ‘What is it, Milo?’

  ‘I promised to be somewhere . . .’

  Drake glanced at Kelly, who shrugged. ‘Prenatal classes. The boy wonder is going to become a father.’

  ‘Sure, go ahead. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’ Milo looked visibly relieved.

  ‘You too,’ Drake said to Kelly.

  ‘No prenatal classes for me, chief.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just go home and get some rest. We can start again early tomorrow.’

  When they had gone, Drake sat alone for a time in his chair, staring at the board. The map. The photographs from the crime scene. The victims. He needed a drink.

  The BMW was cold and unresponsive. He swung round, unable to bring himself to go home just yet. The traffic coming out of town was heavy at this time and he found himself turning, left, right, any direction just so long as he could keep moving. People moved through this city with the same fluidity as the rain that was hitting the glass in front of him. They came from all across the face of the earth. They changed their clothes, their hair, their names, their faces. They remade themselves. It was in the nature of the city. People could lay claim to it, but it belonged to no one.

  Drake had grown up all over South London. After the breakup, they had moved around constantly. For several years they had no fixed address. His mother in those days lived in fear that his father would find them. She jumped at shadows, peered around doors and through curtains before walking into the street. It was a form of paranoia that would later feed into her mental imbalance. Running became her default mode. Arriving breathlessly at yet another friend’s house, her child wrapped up in her arms. They slept on floors, on sofas, in people’s attics, in lock-ups, caravans and garden sheds. He was very small at the time, but it left him with the impression of the world as being in constant flux.

  Orange sodium lights flitted by overhead. A bus swerved in front of him on Falcon Road. He slowed, catching sight of two men coming out of a shuttered Halal chicken-and-chips joint. They high-fived and sauntered off, tucking earphones into place. He drove on, past a succession of pizzerias, estate agents, mobile repair shops, more property agents, Kebabistan, a pharmacy, more mobile repairs, more estate agents, betting shops, a Travelodge, a wholefood store. On and on it went, the names like a mantra running through his head.

  By fourteen, Drake had been in trouble with the law. Street life offered a welcome alternative to witnessing his mother in meltdown. Everything was always overshadowed by the looming threat of a return to the heaving wreck of it all; the inevitable bust up with friends and out again, wandering from place to place clutching their belongings, napping on the Tube, in hostels where they shared a room with the stench of other people’s misery. His mother’s instability hung over everything like a curse, even in the best of times.

  All Drake could remember of his father were fragments. A tall, dark-skinned man with long, elegant fingers holding a cigarette. His mother cursed him for ruining her life, but then, paradoxically, cried for him to come back to her. Right up to the end she carried a dog-eared picture of him in her purse. It was as if everything, the beatings, the other women, could all be forgiven and put aside. She never really accepted that he wasn’t stalking them, that he wasn’t coming back for her. Then it was as if all the drugs, the string of casual boyfriends, was a weird way of trying to get him back. That was his memory. A skewed snapshot of his own childhood seen through the lens of a woman who was defined by her unhappiness. He learned that life was a mess. No fucking happy endings, no forever afters, only here and now.

  CHAPTER 12

  The coroner’s office was housed in a large building off the Albert Embankment. It had a solid colonial weight to it. The interior had been refurbished, stripped right down to the brick and then modernized. A high doorway led past a deserted reception desk to a lobby with a metal staircase leading up to galleries that ran around the upper floors. On the first floor Archie Narayan’s office was in a corner, with a view through the window of the river and the MI5 offices on Millbank. The room was lit only by a desk lamp, which cast a warm glow on the bottle of single malt whisky standing alongside it. Archie peered over the rim of his glass as Drake came in.

  ‘Ah, our intrepid investigator,’ he said, reaching behind him for another glass. Drake waved aside the offer of a drink as he sank down onto the leather sofa that ran along one wall. ‘How are you coping?’

  Drake rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Wheeler’s given me two days to reel this one in. After that it’ll be taken off me.’

  ‘At least he’s giving you a shot.’

  ‘I can’t afford to fuck this one up, Archie.’

  The coroner nodded. ‘You’re trying to climb out from under a mountain.’

  ‘This is my last chance to put the Goran business behind me.’

  ‘So, you’ve come asking for favours.’ Archie raised his eyebrows as he rolled the whisky around his mouth.

  ‘I need all the help I can get.’

  ‘How are you getting on with the delectable Doctor Crane?’

  ‘Don’t say it like that, makes you sound like an old letch.’

  ‘Call me old-fashioned, but there was a time when it was considered acceptable to pay a woman a compliment about her looks. Now we’re all supposed to treat one another like automatons, humping one another without feelings or passions.’

  ‘Your old-fashioned romanticism is getting rusty.’

  ‘Call me what you like.’ Archie returned to his chair and raised his glass. ‘She looks like an Italian actress from the 1960s whose name escapes me. I used to have impure thoughts.’

  ‘I’m not sure I need to hear this.’

  ‘The one advantage of age is that you lose all inhibitions. You can say the most outlandish things without shame.’

  ‘The point being that you do actually know her?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Archie nodded. ‘Interesting. Highly intelligent, of course. Double first from Cambridge. She’s made a couple of smart moves, got herself in with the MoD. Mother Iranian dissident, father eccentric En
glish lord who denounced his heritage.’

  Drake lifted a hand to stop him. ‘Back up a moment. You seem to know a lot about her.’

  ‘Ah, well, she was taken on by an old friend of mine, Julius Rosen. He never had children so when he passed away, she inherited the practice.’

  ‘She’s doing consultancy work for the Met.’

  ‘A PR exercise.’ Archie waved his glass. ‘She got herself into hot water treating victims of police brutality. It got her onto the front pages of the tabloids for all the wrong reasons.’

  A faint bell rang in the back of Drake’s memory. He couldn’t remember the details, but it had something to do with a foiled terror plot.

  ‘Forensic psychology is a strange beast. Doctor Crane has made a name for herself, largely as a profiler.’ Archie reached for the bottle again to refill his glass. He gave Drake a nod. ‘Actually, you and she should have a lot in common.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Both outsiders, both struggling to convince the establishment that you are trustworthy.’

  ‘You should stick to the dead,’ Drake said. ‘Tell me you’ve got something for me?’

  ‘You’re asking for miracles.’ Archie gave a loud sigh. ‘I get that you’re worried. Come along, then.’ Picking up the bottle, Archie led the way out of the office, down the stairs and through a locked door into a dark corridor. The smell of chemicals hit Drake’s nostrils with a jolt. Familiar, like the sharp memory of something nasty he thought he’d forgotten. The autopsy room crackled with electric energy. Neon lights buzzed, refrigerators hummed, a gigantic extractor whirred overhead. In one corner a centrifuge spun in regular cycles, up to who knows what mischief. Two of the four examination tables in the centre of the room were occupied.

  ‘Our Stone Cold Lovers, as I like to think of them.’ Archie Narayan pulled away the sheet with a flourish.

  ‘Very droll.’

  The coroner seemed remarkably upbeat, considering. But then, for a man who spent most of his waking hours in the company of the dead, you might think that any contact with a living person would have been a plus. You’d have been wrong. Drake tried to recall how long he had known Narayan. Years, on and off. Didn’t seem to make a difference. Nobody ever seemed to get close to Archie. It was hard to imagine anyone more rigid and unforgiving.

  Now he pulled a rubberized black apron over his head. Cal swallowed hard and tried not to think of the greasy kebab he had wolfed down for lunch. Throwing up at this point would not help proceedings, nor improve his standing with the touchy medical examiner. Stretched out on the brushed steel tables, the bodies looked more out of place than when he had seen them early that morning. The coating of grey dust had been washed off and their injuries were more obvious. The heads crushed into pulpy masses, fingers and arms twisted into grotesque shapes.

  ‘Music, maestro, please.’

  Archie appeared to have acquired one of those sound systems that was activated by his voice. Handy, no doubt, when your hands were covered in all manner of organic material. The room was fitted with top of the range speakers. The string section of an orchestra began to slowly seep through, building gently. It felt as if they were standing right behind him.

  ‘Mozart’s “Requiem”,’ Archie murmured as he moved around the table.

  ‘Whatever floats your boat, doc.’ Drake didn’t care what it was. He found the music a distraction. Fancy strings and harmonies were unwelcome intrusions. What he needed to focus on, what he needed to feel, was the pain that Marsha Thwaite had experienced. The body splayed out on the table in front of him was a brutal sight, and he wanted to feel the anger in a pure and unadulterated form.

  She had been split up the middle from groin to thorax. Drake’s eye found the tag on her left foot. A cocktail of rotting bodily gases and chemicals made his stomach lurch. He held his breath and waited for it to pass.

  ‘They were buried alive, right?’

  Archie glanced up over the rim of his spectacles. ‘You could see that from their posture at the crime scene. They were struggling to get out.’ The coroner moved around the table. ‘On their knees. Immobilized. Hands tied behind their backs.’ He indicated the specimen tray on one side where the cut-off plastic ties lay. ‘They were hooded, bound and gagged. Then they were stoned to death. Literally.’

  ‘How did they manage that? I mean, how were they subdued?’

  ‘Ah, take a look here.’ Archie indicated a series of parallel marks on Marsha Thwaite’s neck. ‘Those are burn marks, slight, with local tissue damage.’

  ‘They were tasered?’

  ‘The size looks about right.’ Archie held a set of callipers against the burns.

  Somewhere in the corridor behind them a door slammed. Footsteps moved slowly away. The music was still twittering on in the background but now Drake found it easier to filter it out. They moved to the next table where Archie had not really begun his work. Tei Hideo was still in one piece. His body looked in good shape for his age. Slim build. Firm muscle definition. A man who worked out regularly. No steroids and weights, but plenty of fresh air, exercise and a good diet. Drake thought about the daughter and how she was going to miss him. He thought about his own father. All kids grow up learning that one day their parents would be gone.

  ‘We’re still trying to establish the reason they were killed together. Anything about this to indicate it could be some kind of, I don’t know, religious thing?’

  ‘Religious thing?’ Archie straightened up.

  ‘Just something Doctor Crane mentioned.’

  ‘You’re thinking of Saudi Arabia? Places where they bury people upright in the sand and pelt them with stones?’

  ‘Something like that. She was talking about Daesh, and Iran. People being hanged on cranes.’ Drake surveyed the autopsy table.

  ‘Stoning is for adulterers, isn’t it?’

  ‘There were no signs they were engaged in sexual activity at the time of death?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean they weren’t involved.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Archie rested his hands on the steel table. ‘I don’t really see it. Why here? I mean it hardly makes sense.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the point.’

  ‘Does anyone really believe that sharia law has a chance of being imposed in this country?’

  ‘People generally believe what they want to believe.’

  ‘Spoken like a wise man.’ Archie raised his glass in salute. ‘Sure you won’t join me?’

  ‘The spirit is willing but the stomach is weak.’

  The coroner heaved a long sigh. ‘Whatever they were up to, these people met a violent end for a reason.’

  ‘Someone wanted them to suffer.’ Drake was staring at one of the woman’s wrists. It had been sliced almost all the way through, bone and all. The hand was hanging from a sliver of skin. It took effort not to reach over and put it back in place. He tried to imagine what it would have been like for them. To have been dragged, stunned, unconscious or semi-conscious, from the car, across the broken ground, down into the pit. To find themselves tied and gagged, looking up at a dump truck rising above them and a ton of rocks coming tumbling down on top of them.

  During his time in the army, Drake had witnessed death. He’d grown used to the absurdity of it. People caught in mid-stride by a stray bullet. Laughing at a joke when an IED goes off and rips your body in two. He’d seen children die senselessly and over the course of two tours he had learned that in order to survive you had to grow a second skin, a layer of armour that could protect you from things that people should never have to experience.

  That was part of what made him angry. He knew what this was. Instinctively, whatever idea the killer had built up in their heads, he knew what they were trying to do; to bring that madness here, to spin it out right here at the heart of his world. The killer or killers wanted people to know that they were not immune from this violence. Not here. Not anywhere. That made it personal. It made it about everyt
hing he had fought for. Not queen and country, but common sense, decency. The order of things. He knew it was his job to stop them.

  He watched Archie pour himself another generous glass of malt whisky. He was about ready for a drink himself, but he needed this moment. This clarity. He needed to hold on to it, to understand why he was doing this, why he was going to catch whoever did this, no matter what.

  ‘In the old days this building was used by resurrection men.’ Archie smacked his lips and tilted his head back to gaze at the vaulted ceiling. Drake followed suit. ‘They used to steal corpses and sell them to medical colleges. Education was opening up and more and more people wanted to become doctors, but there was a shortage of bodies for dissection purposes. By law you were only allowed to use the bodies of men who had been condemned to death. So, people being people, a lucrative trade sprang up. They kept the bodies down here.’ Archie held his glass up to watch the light passing through the amber liquid. ‘People forget that we are only custodians of this world. Millions passed before us, and millions will come after us, if we don’t manage to destroy the planet beforehand.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Amen to all that.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Kostas and Eleni Markaris had been living in London for close on forty years, but to listen to them talk you might be forgiven for thinking they had arrived in the country a week ago. Kostas was a stooping, awkwardly shaped man with a head devoid of hair apart from his thick moustache and a thin band of grey wisps floating above his ears. He peered over the frames of his lopsided NHS spectacles as Drake came through the door, and gave a philosophical shrug.

  ‘Ah, the wanderer returns. Elenitsa, we have a victim!’ He winked as he leaned across the counter. ‘Today, she made a giovetsi better than any I have eaten, better even than my mother, God rest her soul.’ His eyes fluttered towards heaven.