The Divinities

by Parker Bilal

  ‘The invisibles.’

  ‘You see what I’m saying?’ The big man pulled the shirt away from where it was sticking to his chest. He kept the air conditioning to a minimum. It saved on overheads and besides, hot people get thirsty. He broke off to turn and raise his voice. ‘Hey, where did that fool get to now, eh? Aiiee, you can’t find good help any more. I’m serious. Come and work for me, you’ll earn good money.’

  ‘Let me think about it.’

  Papa Zemba sucked his teeth. ‘Why you want to work for them?’

  ‘It’s what I do,’ said Drake, swirling the ice around his glass.

  Papa Zemba nudged his glass against Drake’s. ‘At least here you’ll be among your own.’

  ‘Let me ask you about something else.’

  ‘Sure, what do you want to know?’

  ‘The fire over in Freetown.’

  ‘What’s to tell? Nobody cares about a masjid burning down. Now if it was a synagogue, you wait and see the trouble they would be raising.’

  ‘The imam has a son, Waleed. You know him?’

  ‘Ah! That boy is a headache.’ He rubbed his shiny dome of a head as if to stress the point. ‘I don’t know what his problem is. I tried to help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I gave him a job, here, behind the bar. He didn’t like that so I put him in the kitchen. His head is mixed up. I can’t tell you how much I lost in breakages. Hold on a minute.’ He held a finger up and turned away again. ‘Hey, find out where that dumb fuck lost himself.’ A second goon disappeared in search of the first. Papa snapped his fingers to wake the barman up.

  ‘You let a man die of thirst, eh? And get Zazie out here.’

  Zazie was one of Papa’s string of daughters. It was impossible to keep track of his offspring. Every now and then another would turn up. They popped out of the woodwork on a regular basis. Zazie was one of the established family. She was in her thirties and worked for him in a number of capacities. The fact that he had no sons, so far, Papa took as a sign from the Almighty. But in terms of business acumen, it was hard to see how any boy would outdo Zazie. She appeared through a doorway, dressed in a sharp suit.

  ‘Hey Cal,’ she smiled.

  ‘Zazie.’

  ‘He’s looking for that fool boy, the imam’s son.’

  Zazie’s face grew sombre. ‘Waleed. Why, what’s he done now?’

  ‘You know how it is. I’m looking into the fire.’

  ‘Right.’ Zazie looked as though she wasn’t quite sure she believed him.

  ‘I hear he was a lot of trouble.’

  She sucked her teeth, doing a passable imitation of her father. ‘He filled his head with all kinds of religious nonsense. You know, Salafist stuff about this country being at war with Islam. When it got to the point where he refused to shake hands with any women I told him to go and sort himself out before he could work here.’

  Papa Zemba chuckled. ‘You don wan to mess with my girl, eh?’

  ‘So you haven’t seen him since then? You know where I could find him?’

  Zazie leaned her elbows on the bar. ‘You think he had something to do with the fire?’

  ‘I just want to talk to him.’

  She weighed this up. She was smart. Her clothes, hair, the gold rings in her ears, they stood in stark contrast to her father’s loud shirts and neck chains. She seemed to make up her mind.

  ‘He had another stint in hospital. It wasn’t so bad this time. They moved him to a halfway house in Earls Court.’ She gave him the address without looking it up. ‘It’s a dump. He should have been with his family, but because of the fire that wasn’t an option.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been looking out for him.’

  ‘Somebody has to,’ Zazie shrugged.

  ‘Ah,’ the big man purred. ‘Here she is.’

  Drake looked up to see a caramel-coloured woman twirling herself round the dance pole. Vanessa. She had pneumatic, surgically enhanced breasts and wore a thong so minimal you could count the pimples where she’d shaved. Papa sucked in air like a man drowning. Zazie rolled her eyes and disappeared back through the door she’d come from.

  ‘She’s heavenly, don’t you think?’

  ‘She’s certainly something,’ consented Drake.

  ‘Don’t go getting any ideas. This one’s mine. Now get out of here, I’m working.’ Papa rolled ice around his mouth, his eyes fixed on Vanessa’s ass as she bent over to give him a better view. Drake left him to it.

  CHAPTER 24

  As Drake nudged his car up the kerb, close to the perimeter wall, it struck him that he wasn’t quite sober. The access road was quiet now. Taking a deep breath, he clambered up onto the boot of the car and from there to the roof, feeling the soft metal flexing beneath his weight. Leaning one boot against the lamp post, the same one that Marsha Thwaite had parked under, he leaned over and grabbed the top of the wooden boundary fence. It wasn’t graceful, but scrabbling about, slipping on the smooth surface, he managed to haul himself over. A splinter dug into his left hand and the pocket of his parka ripped on a nail. He landed heavily, cursing his own clumsiness. Pressing the sleeve of his coat over his bleeding hand, he limped off, past the Portakabins and out into the open area of the site.

  No alarms went off. No guard dogs rushed him. Drake felt the old reckless spirit of his youth surging back. He breathed in deeply, feeling a strange, mystical kinship with this place. The mud and rust reeked of history, good and evil. Once upon a time on these wharfs sugar had been unloaded from the plantations across the sea, bringing with it a legacy of slavery and wealth.

  As a teenager, he had spent time exploring its reaches. Different sections of the river corresponded to various periods of his life. A loner, always skiving off looking for something he could call his own. It was close to here that he smoked his first joint, drank whisky, had sex. His mother had been going through one of her good periods. She was off the booze and even holding down a job, at a florist’s of all places. The house was always full of cut flowers. There was a steady boyfriend, Baz, a lost soul who had been an unsuccessful burglar, but since his last stretch had been holding down a job as a plumber’s mate. For a time they ate well. Cal had new clothes that actually felt like his, rather than the usual ill-fitting cast-offs his mother nicked from Oxfam. She refused to pay for them on the grounds that somebody already paid for them once, so why should she pay a second time?

  Death was there too, tucked into the riverbank. A dead woman lying undisturbed on the low tide flats, her skin as grey as the mud she rested on. She looked like she had sprung from one of the books he used to read on the long afternoons in the local library where his mother often left him while she went to the pub, with strict orders to stay put until they closed. He would wait for her outside on the steps, and sometimes he wouldn’t.

  That woman came to occupy his thoughts, waking and sleeping. He saw her in his dreams, rising from the mud, covered in slime, worms coming out of her eyes and mouth. He half believed she wasn’t dead at all but had come up from below to take him down to the underworld. She wore the remains of a blue dress decorated with red roses. A pattern which, even now, never failed to make him shudder. Still, he remembered the details. The roots of her hair where the dye had grown out. The broken nails on her left hand. He was ten, too scared to tell anyone. Worried it was his fault, that he would be blamed. He felt a certain loyalty, a need to protect her, even though it was already too late for that. On the third afternoon he arrived to find the riverbank crawling with police. An old man in a tweed cap pointed and he took off running.

  The river was quiet now. Through the skeleton of the unfinished building he glimpsed light reflecting back from the black surface. The water had a silken quality to it that gave it a special glow, like a river of ancient legend. The air was so cold it felt as though it might snow.

  He passed the site office and walked out into the open space, passing the hole in the ground. It looked more like an open tomb in the moonlight. Crime-scene t
ape flapped agitatedly in the breeze around the spot where the bodies had been found. The completed part of Magnolia Quays was right up against the river. Future residents wanted nothing to obstruct their view. The site was narrow and the developers planned to use every available inch.

  If anyone had asked him what he was doing here, he wasn’t sure he could have explained. It was some kind of instinct that brought him back, the need to feel out the space, to inhabit the mind of the perpetrator, the person or persons who had carried out this crime. Through the shadows of the concrete frame he wandered, looking back at the burial site. Years from now people would live in these penthouses and duplexes, and they would in all likelihood be completely oblivious to the fact that two people had once been buried alive here. As he turned his head four shadows broke away from the pillars and began to run.

  ‘Hey! Stop! Police!’

  Drake took off after them. They were young, men he guessed, and they moved quickly. Lean black shadows cutting through the shadows of the concrete framework. He could hear their footsteps and their voices, calling to one another. Drake crashed into a light wooden trestle of some kind and tumbled to the ground. He swore as he picked himself up. The sound of their footsteps was already disappearing.

  A bright light snapped on, blinding him. He held up a hand to shield his eyes.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said a voice.

  ‘I’m police,’ said Drake, getting to his feet. ‘Point that thing somewhere else, will you?’

  The beam of light dipped, picking out a white spot on the ground. Drake fished his badge out of his pocket and held it up. The man holding the light stepped closer and studied it.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Drake?’

  ‘You’d better believe it.’ Cal dusted himself off. ‘Now tell me who you are.’

  ‘Kronnos Security. We’re patrolling the site.’

  In the glow around the beam, Drake could make out a tall, bearded man. He was wearing a uniform and a baseball cap with a logo on it.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, pointing to Drake’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s just a scratch. You’ve got people dossing on the site.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ The light did a circle of the surrounding shadows. ‘They get in from time to time. My feeling is the caretaker is in on it.’

  ‘How do they get in?’

  ‘Same way you did, I suppose.’ The beam came back to find Drake. ‘I wasn’t told you were on site.’

  ‘It’s not official. I was just taking a look around.’

  ‘Always better to let us know. We have dogs sometimes. You could have been hurt.’

  ‘Let’s not go making this into a drama.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Wait a second, you’re leading the murder investigation, right?’

  ‘That’s me. Are you out here every night?’

  ‘These last weeks I’ve had the honour of the graveyard shift.’

  ‘So, you would have seen the victim’s car parked out there three nights ago.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘You didn’t call it in.’

  There was a laugh. ‘Sounds like you’re interrogating me.’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘Well, it’s always a judgement call. Sometimes you see a car and it strikes you as off.’ He pointed the torch off towards the gate. ‘That your BMW out there?’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘I was just about to call it in.’

  ‘So, whether or not you report it depends on the make and model?’

  The other man chuckled. ‘Yeah, you could say that. It’s nothing personal.’

  It was hard to get a clear picture of him with the light from the fence behind him, and the flashlight he was holding. He was tall, and well built, that much Drake could see. He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Drake shook his head at the offer.

  ‘I’m still trying to quit.’

  ‘Good for you. I’d better be going,’ the man said, looking at his watch. They crossed the open ground towards the gates.

  ‘They keep you busy then?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  The guard nodded towards the crime-scene tape. ‘Nasty business.’

  ‘Yeah, it is.’ Drake would have put his age in the late thirties. Mountain-man beard. Close cropped hair. The name on the lapel of his uniform read M. Flinders. He unlocked the gates and locked them carefully behind them.

  ‘Let me ask. You come through here around the same time every night?’

  ‘We try to vary it, so as not to be too predictable. You’re thinking of Sunday? I can check.’ He reached into his pocket for his phone and flicked through with his finger. ‘01.47.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘Can’t do anything these days without it being logged. Big Brother and all that.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I gave a statement to one of your officers, young feller. Tall, glasses?’

  ‘That would be DC Kowalski.’

  ‘That’s the one.’ They were standing by the bright lights on the gate. On the back of the hand holding the cigarette Drake could make out a tattoo of a black panther head.

  ‘What’s that, the Light Brigade?’ Flinders’ eyes flickered down to his hand. He nodded. ‘So, where were you, Afghanistan, Iraq?’

  ‘Iraq. Two tours. How about yourself?’

  ‘Infantry and then the Special Investigation Branch.’

  ‘Military Police.’ Flinders smiled. ‘That explains why you joined the Met.’

  ‘In a way, yes. A bit like you, I suppose.’ Drake nodded at the car. A large Volkswagen van. It was painted dark blue. A jagged red cardiogram ran along the side with the words KRONNOS SECURITY SERVICES on it.

  ‘Plastic fantastic.’ Flinders flicked the shiny badge on his shoulder. ‘Toy soldiers in kiddie uniforms. It’s not the same thing.’

  ‘It’s a job, right?’

  ‘Sure. A lot of people came out worse.’

  ‘Is there anything you can remember about that night, anything at all that might be useful?’

  Flinders shook his head. ‘Whoever did this must have some balls on them.’

  The two of them turned to survey the site. It was quiet now, nothing moved.

  ‘To drive in like that would require keys. They didn’t break the lock.’

  ‘You see all sorts in this game. Always someone trying to make a little on the side.’ Flinders examined his cigarette. ‘When a firm is struggling, they tend to be less picky about who they hire.’

  ‘How long did you say you’ve been in this game?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Flinders said flatly. ‘But it’s coming on two years now.’

  ‘And before that, where were you?’

  ‘This is beginning to sound like an interview,’ Flinders grinned.

  ‘Sorry, comes with the territory.’

  ‘I hear you. The fact is it took me a while to settle down again. I tried all manner of things.’ Flinders shrugged. ‘You do what you have to do to make ends meet, right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Drake glanced off down the street. From where they were standing you could hardly see the main road. The killer would have been able to work unseen.

  ‘Did you get anything off the cameras?’ Flinders asked.

  ‘Well, that’s an interesting question. The cameras on the main road show the lorry arriving, but there’s no indication of how our man left. That’s one reason I came back.’

  Flinders nodded as if this made sense. ‘The fact is these cameras are not always as reliable as people think.’

  ‘True, but I still don’t see how he could disappear into thin air.’

  Flinders nodded over his shoulder. ‘There’s always the river.’

  ‘Possible, but with low tide it would have been difficult.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve considered all the possibilities.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Drake. ‘For all the good it’s done.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be funny or anything, but wha
t if he never left the site?’

  The idea had occurred to Drake. ‘It would take a lot of nerve.’

  ‘Sure, but might work. You know, staying on, and then mixing in with the workers when they arrived. That might explain how he got access.’

  ‘Well, we’re checking them all, so if that’s the case we’ll pick him up.’

  ‘Right.’ Flinders was nodding as he glanced at his watch. ‘Well, that’s me. I need to get on. Give me a shout if I can be of service.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Good luck with finding him. Nutter like that. The sooner you get him the sooner people can sleep easier in their beds.’

  Amen to that, thought Drake as he watched the security van pull away.

  CHAPTER 25

  Maybe it was the river that had brought memories, or maybe it was revisiting Freetown, but Drake slept badly. He found himself remembering when his mother had died. He had just arrived back in Iraq, on his second tour, after retraining and joining the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police. After the accident he was offered the chance of a transfer. At the time it had felt a little absurd, like someone’s crazy idea of a joke. Drake remembered half expecting someone to discover who he really was and throw him out. It never happened. Instead, Drake found life as an investigator was a little easier. Even the resentment that came with the job. Drake had been dealing with rejection of one sort or another all his life, so this was familiar territory. It was simply formalized into his uniform.

  He was stationed in Kirkuk when Captain Madoc called him into his office and told him the bad news about his mother. For a long moment the two men stood staring at one another. Drake realized that Madoc was expecting some kind of reaction from him, something that he didn’t feel. He came around the desk to rest a hand on Cal’s shoulder.

  ‘Sometimes these things can have a delayed impact.’

  Drake didn’t know how to explain that he simply didn’t feel anything, expect maybe relief. His mother had been trying to get out of this world for as long as he could remember. Now, finally, she had managed it.