‘Jesus, you two,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Stop this right now. You’re serving police officers.’
Donaldson rubbed the red mark on his face left by Gilchrist’s slap. ‘Don’t think you’re in a position to talk, Sarah. And sometimes men need to settle their differences like men, even if one of them is a boy trying to be a man.’
‘That’s a bit wordy,’ Heap said. ‘Why don’t you just grunt?’
Gilchrist stepped between them. ‘We’ve got an investigation to get on with,’ she said, holding up a finger in warning.
Donaldson drew in his breath, almost popping his shirt buttons again. Gilchrist had an image of the Incredible Hulk. There was definitely something off about Don-Don’s wild eyes.
Heap squared off. Donaldson saw it and sniggered. Though he was only about six inches taller than Heap, Donaldson was about three times the bulk. He dwarfed him.
‘What – you’re going to hit me with some of that kung fu shit you do?’ Donaldson said. ‘You know the truth about the martial arts, Heap? The bigger your opponent, the bigger the beating he’s going to give you.’
Somebody had told Gilchrist once that if you’re small getting in fast is the only way to go. Heap was very fast. He stepped round her and moved in on Donaldson with a flurry of blows to head and neck and belly. He kicked at Donaldson’s shins and knees, twisting round him and getting his elbows into Donaldson’s kidneys.
Donaldson didn’t budge. He just stood there and absorbed it. But Heap was relentless. His barrage of blows continued. Then he kicked the bigger man’s legs away from under him.
Donaldson fell like a tree. Gilchrist was sure she felt the floor shake. Heap was shaking his left hand and grimacing. One of his blows had hit bone. Gilchrist smiled to herself. She’d always thought Donaldson a knucklehead.
Heap caught his breath. He glanced at Gilchrist. She stepped between him and Donaldson, lying on the floor.
‘OK. This is over now. What happens here stays here.’
She looked down at Donaldson.
‘OK?’
No response.
‘OK?’
Donaldson nodded slowly.
Gilchrist looked at Heap. ‘Tenacious little sod, aren’t you?’
He was still shaking his left hand. ‘Ma’am,’ he said.
Donaldson gathered himself together and got to his feet. Gilchrist saw the expression on his face. She was pretty sure he wasn’t going to let this go.
When you woke it was light. Westbrook was sitting propped up beside Michelle but he was watching you. You looked round for Rogers.
‘Doing a recce,’ Westbrook said. His voice was stronger now but he kept it low. ‘How did you know about Michelle, by the way?’
You didn’t respond. He gave a little smile and gestured round, wincing.
‘Pol Pot killed most of the museum workers and closed this down three years ago. Let the building go to shit. I would think three years of bat guano hasn’t helped the health of the collection. In fact it’s not too healthy for us.’
You said nothing.
‘How long are you planning to stay here?’ he said.
You shrugged.
‘I’m guessing you don’t have much food with you?’ Westbrook said.
‘You’re guessing right.’
‘It’s OK – I’m used to doing without.’ He gave you a long look. ‘You’ll never get out via the harbour.’
‘We got in,’ you said.
‘That astounds me. They are expecting a full-scale Vietnamese invasion any day now. The Mekong is an obvious way into Cambodia from Ho Chi Minh City.’
‘Saigon,’ you said, without really thinking.
Westbrook gave a faint smile. ‘The port is a high security area.’
‘Our intelligence is that what is left of the Khmer Rouge army is deployed all along the eastern border with Vietnam,’ you said. ‘That’s why there are so few patrols here in Phnom Penh. They don’t really expect a sea invasion and if they do it’s a big one coming in, not four people getting out.’
‘You would still be wiser to head northwest and cross the Thai border. Scarcely any security there.’
‘How do we get there?’
‘There’s a truck outside. Parked out of sight of the road.’
You looked at him. ‘How do you know that? And even if there is, it isn’t going to have any petrol in it.’
Westbrook shrugged. ‘Looks in pretty good nick to me. Worth checking out anyway.’
You were scratching yourself.
‘Lice,’ he said. ‘Sorry. We all had it. Have it. Better check Michelle for ringworm too.’
‘And you?’
Westbrook shook his head. ‘That’s one good thing about isolation – you don’t catch contagious things.’
‘Except lice. I’m guessing you didn’t bathe much.’
‘We got hosed down every few days and lived in our own filth in between,’ he said.
‘They fed you?’
‘Four spoons of rice at the start of the day and soup made from leaves later in the day.’
‘Water?’
‘Some,’ he said. ‘I saw a man beaten for drinking water without permission. Then he was forced to ingest a guard’s urine and faeces.’ He gave a wan smile. ‘I quickly learned obedience.’
You were impressed there was no self-pity in his voice.
‘There were rules we had to follow otherwise we were punished. We were warned not to cry out at all when getting lashes or being electrocuted. Any infraction of the rules, including that one, would get you ten lashes or five jolts of electricity.’
‘You were interrogated?’
‘Of course. There were three levels of interrogation. The first level was operated by the political unit. The unit wasn’t allowed to use torture to obtain confessions. But since nobody had anything to confess pretty much everybody was handed over to the cruel unit. The torture unit. If the torturers there didn’t get results you were handed over to the men graphically known as the chewing unit. They took torture to a higher level.’
‘You got all these?’
He nodded. ‘Michelle too,’ he said, and looked down at her. ‘You haven’t said how you knew about Michelle.’
You said nothing.
‘But I think I know.’
‘Do you now?’ you said cautiously.
He nodded. ‘You’re her soldier boy and she wrote to you before we left.’
You looked at him but said nothing.
He raised his battered and torn hands. ‘You’re going to have to set her shoulders, you know. I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘I can do that,’ you said.
‘I’m sure.’
You could see that both arms had popped out of their sockets. Michelle was so emaciated the end of the humerus bones bulged way out, stretching her skin so tightly it looked as if it was about to split.
You had dislocated your shoulder playing rugby a couple of times so you knew what agony she was in. The way to fix things was to manipulate the arms gently back into their sockets but that presupposed several things.
The first was the state of the humerus bones. You could check if they were broken but only an X-ray could tell you if either humerus was fractured.
The rotator cuff tendons were bands of tissue stretching over the tops of the shoulders. There was more tough tissue – the labrum – surrounding and supporting the shoulder joints. If any of this tissue was torn then she would need surgery to stitch the tendons back on the upper arm bone. After surgery, it would take three or four months for her to recover.
If nothing was torn or broken, she would be functioning again in a couple of weeks, fully recovered in six. You looked at her. Youth was on her side.
You gave her more morphine. She still winced as you gently touched the end of each bone. No apparent breaks.
You made a crude sling out of a shirt and bunched a blanket up beneath her left armpit to put her elbow at right angles. Then you gently manipulated the bone back in
to the shoulder joint. You heard a kind of wet click as it slotted back in. That probably meant the joint was still relatively healthy.
Even with the morphine you could see the pain flare in her eyes, which never left your face. You repeated the operation on her other arm. When you had finished she continued to stare at you until her eyelids fluttered and she slept.
You watched over her for ten minutes. As you did so you were aware that, leaning against the wall, Westbrook was still watching you.
You were wondering about Rogers – and that truck.
‘I’m going to find Rogers,’ you said.
You made your way through the rubble and rubbish, past colossal statues drenched in bat shit. Some of the objects were lying on their sides or were chipped and broken. There were a number of empty pedestals. You looked through the windows on three sides of the building. The streets were eerily empty. It was like some post-apocalyptic scene from a science fiction film. Or, worse still, a zombie film.
You could see the lorry parked down a narrow side road right next to the museum. It was one of those you had come in. Howe and Bartram were loading crates into the back.
‘Seemed a shame to miss the opportunity whilst we’re here,’ said a voice behind you. You recognized it as that of Rogers just before he smashed his weapon over your head.
SEVEN
‘Sarah, it’s Karen Hewitt.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘I’ve had an odd call from the Pavilion about some of the stuff you found there.’
‘The bones?’
‘The boxes.’
Gilchrist frowned. ‘There are more bones in them?’
‘No, thank God. There are ancient artefacts.’
‘Well? It’s a museum, isn’t it?’
Hewitt sighed. ‘Wrong period or something. Hang on.’
Gilchrist could hear a shuffling of papers. ‘I’m not really into history, ma’am.’
‘You think I am?’
‘I wouldn’t presume, ma’am.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Hewitt said drily.
‘Is it linked to our current investigation of Rafferty?’ Gilchrist said.
‘That’s for you to decide,’ Hewitt said.
Gilchrist stifled a yawn. She was tired today, for no good reason. ‘Who do I call?’
Gilchrist shouted across to Heap as she dialled the number Hewitt had given her: ‘Something else is happening at the Pavilion.’ She turned back to the telephone. ‘Hi there – is that Angelica Rutherford? This is DI Sarah Gilchrist. I understand there’s a problem with some things you found in Mr Rafferty’s storage boxes in the basement.’
‘Major problems,’ the woman on the other end of the line said. She had a kind of toned-down posh voice.
‘Because?’
‘We can’t find any provenance for the goods.’
‘Provenance?’
‘Who they were bought from,’ Rutherford said. ‘How much they cost. Where they came from. The export certificates from wherever that was. Import certificates. We have none of that paperwork.’
‘And that means?’
‘They might be stolen or have been illegally exported from their country of origin.’
‘Valuable stuff and you don’t know where it’s come from?’
‘High-end stuff and, actually, we do know where it came from. That’s the puzzling thing. I can’t imagine why we have them or how we procured them.’
‘What kind of stuff are we talking about?’
‘Hindu relics, possibly from the world’s biggest temple complex. Sandstone or brass heads and sculptures.’
‘What does Mr Rafferty say?’
‘Mr Rafferty isn’t available at the moment,’ Rutherford said. ‘I assume he’s keeping a low profile.’
‘I assume he is,’ Gilchrist said. ‘But I heard Rafferty isn’t very hands-on. Isn’t there a curator of this collection?’
‘As I said, we don’t have this kind of collection. The nearest thing to a curator for these objects went off months ago to find herself at a yoga retreat in Kerala.’
‘She’s still out there?’
‘Still looking, yes.’
Gilchrist laughed. She liked Angelica Rutherford. ‘Hindu stuff, you say? I thought the Royal Pavilion had strong connections with India?’
‘It did. In the Great War the Pavilion was used as a hospital for Indian Army soldiers wounded on the Western Front. But what’s your point?’
‘That it’s understandable there should be Hindu things in the Royal Pavilion. Could they have been gifts from the Indian people after the Great War? They donated that ceremonial gate just outside the Pavilion and the Chattri up on the Downs, didn’t they?’
‘You’re missing my point. The biggest Hindu temple in the world is not in India.’
Gilchrist thought for a moment. ‘Sri Lanka?’
‘No. Cambodia. Angkor Wat at Siem Reap in the north-east of the country. Huge palace and temple complex.’
‘I thought they were Buddhists in Cambodia?’ Gilchrist said. As if she knew anything about that kind of thing. And then remembered Heap being surprised there were some Buddhist relics in the boxes Donaldson had looked at cursorily.
‘They are, but Angkor Wat is Hindu. Back in the twelfth century there was a great Hindu empire stretching across that part of Asia.’
Gilchrist frowned. ‘And you’re sure that doesn’t fit the Pavilion?’
‘Certain,’ Rutherford said patiently. ‘This stuff is about eight hundred years older than the Pavilion. It doesn’t fit at all.’
Rutherford cleared her throat. ‘I believe a lot of artefacts were looted by the Pol Pot regime in the seventies.’
Gilchrist had only vaguely heard of Pol Pot but what she’d heard wasn’t good. ‘So the Royal Pavilion could have bought these things from Pol Pot?’ she asked, cautiously.
‘Certainly, Pol Pot sold everything. The Tamil Tigers did the same twenty years later in the part of Sri Lanka they controlled. Pol Pot had no respect for human life so he wouldn’t care a hoot about religious artefacts. He needed weapons and he needed bullets so I’m sure he looted his own country’s heritage. I know the National Museum lost most of its most valuable pieces.’
‘What is this stuff again?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Stone heads, wall art. Some brass.’
‘Portable?’
Rutherford laughed. ‘Everything is portable if you have the right equipment. These things are bulky but, yes, portable.’
‘And valuable?’
‘Not my field but I’d say yes. Not priceless but worth a bob or two. Cumulatively worth quite a lot.’
‘But these things have just been sitting there?’
‘They’ve never been displayed, if that’s what you mean. No reason why they should be by us. I can’t see where we would display these objects.’
‘And Bernard Rafferty acquired them?’
Rutherford was silent. ‘There is no one else who could have,’ she finally said, almost reluctantly. Didn’t want to land her boss in it, presumably.
Gilchrist thought some more. ‘Any chance this stuff could have been in the Pavilion for decades and just been forgotten about?’
‘That storeroom was empty when Mr Rafferty found the Brighton Trunk Murder files. We looked at the time in case there were any more files.’
Gilchrist frowned. ‘So they’ve only been there a couple of years?’
‘It would seem so.’
Gilchrist glanced across at Heap. ‘We’ll be right down.’
You vomited when you came round. You glanced at your watch. You’d only been out a few minutes. You made your way back to the office, slithering on bat shit more than once. You tried not to put your hands in it. Guano was full of nitrates, which, aside from being an essential component of fertiliser and gunpowder, burned like lime and could fuck up your lungs.
The office was empty. Westbrook and Michelle were nowhere to be seen. You hurried to the side of the building, where t
he lorry had been parked, slipping on guano as you went. The lorry was gone but you could hear its engine.
You went to the broken window you had entered through. The lorry was bumping away into the distance.
Rogers, Howe and Bartram had gone, taking Michelle and her father with them. And whatever they had stolen from the museum. You thought you knew why and where they were going. Unless they were making a big loop they were not heading for the harbour. They were heading north but not to the Thai border. They were going to Angkor Wat.
You found a bicycle in a storeroom at the back of the museum. It had a basket on the front. There was an overall and a lampshade hat hanging on a wall. You put them on. Not much of a disguise but it would have to do. You put your weaponry in the basket, tried to hide it with piles of paper. You set off after the lorry.
The streets were potholed and rubbish strewn but on you headed to the west and then north. You saw no patrols. You figured the lorry wouldn’t be going faster than fifteen to twenty miles an hour until it got free of the city and then, given the state of the roads, probably wouldn’t be able to go much faster. Maybe it would even be slower.
The bike had no gears and the tyres were almost flat but you calculated on the flat ground you could make eight miles an hour. For a while at least.
So every hour the lorry would gain between seven and twelve miles. By the end of the day it would be over a hundred miles ahead of you. It was a hopeless pursuit. You cycled on.
The lorry might run out of petrol. It stood out more than your bicycle so might be stopped – and more than once. You could keep going for as long as you had strength.
It was a hopeless pursuit. You cycled on.
On the edge of the city you found an abandoned petrol station. You poked around the back. In the far corner of a shed, under tarpaulin, you found another bicycle, this one with a crude motor on it. Within ten minutes you were chugging along the road, smoke trailing behind you. No faster but your leg muscles were getting a welcome break.
When you finally left Phnom Penh behind you entered a land of devastation and desolation. Unploughed fields. Fire-blackened crops and groves of trees. Entire villages burned down or simply abandoned. Dead bodies by the roadside, some hanging from trees. Carrion birds wheeling and shrieking.
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