The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  ‘Sometimes. Maybe.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment, then took a forkful of chicken curry and washed it down with a swig of the wine, and said: ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘What? A painting of the Madonna? Why?’

  ‘One of the figures, one of the oldest ones, the very oldest. Why are they black, when the later pictures show her as white?’

  Marcus was taken aback. ‘I don’t know. I think the reason most people accept is that they have spent centuries wreathed in holy smoke.’

  Nazreem gave him a quizzical look as if to see if he was joking.

  ‘Candles. Incense and stuff. Spend a couple of centuries in an airless room with tallow burning all around you and you’d be pretty black too.’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’m not exactly white.’

  Marcus sighed. The face across the table from him was an almost perfect golden café crème, the sort of complexion people not born with it might spend fortunes trying to achieve. The sort of face people looked at. The way the group of men who had just come in through the door were looking at her now. Except not like that at all.

  And certainly not the way the waiter they were speaking to had begun to look at her as he made his way deliberately towards them, ignoring a diner at another table who tried to catch his attention. All of a sudden Marcus was aware that a second waiter had materialised just behind them and had put his hands on the back of Nazreem’s chair.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said, catching the sudden switch in his attention. Then she became aware of the man standing behind her. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Something was very wrong. The waiter was paying no attention to anyone but the men at the door, as if he was waiting for some sort of instruction. One of them, with a thin beard and dark sunglasses, was suddenly familiar. Marcus watched him put his hand inside his jacket; it didn’t look as if he was reaching for his wallet.

  He grabbed Nazreem by the elbow and pulled her to her feet, shouting ‘Run!’ as he pushed her past the waiter at his elbow towards the kitchen. The waiter thrust out an arm to stop her. Marcus pushed him hard on the shoulder sending him backward towards his colleague. The man behind him – and those behind him – lunged forward. Without thinking Marcus seized the cast-iron platter on the table, still hot but no longer sizzling, and hurled it with its cargo of steaming prawns in chilli and mustard into his face. The man howled and reeled backwards. Behind him there was pandemonium as his friends recoiled, tipping over tables, sending the other diners into screams of outrage that turned to terror at the sight of the gun in his hands.

  Marcus pushed Nazreem through the swing door into the kitchen, into a scene of steam, burning gas rings and clattering pans. One of the cooks rushed forward to block their way. Marcus elbowed him in the face and pushed Nazreem past. Ali, the proprietor, was standing by a large saucepan with a ladle at his lips: ‘Professor? Wot the …?’

  His words were broken off by the commotion building in the restaurant. ‘Trouble, mate. I’m sorry. Not our fault. The back door, where is it?’ Marcus thrust two twenty-pound notes into his hand. The chef clutching his nose stared at them a split second then at the man with the beard and gun forcing his way into the kitchen.

  In a second Ali had taken the money out of Marcus’s hand, pushed over two twenty-kilo sacks of Basmati rice into the gunman’s path and flung a ladle of sauce at him. Dragging Nazreem behind him, Marcus dashed for the open rear door, pulling pots and pans off the shelves to litter the floor behind him. As they gasped the damp night air they heard the voice of one of the waiters: ‘Boss, no, they must not get away. The imam commands!’

  Amid the bedlam Ali’s reply was wholly unmistakable: ‘Not in my fucking kitchen, he doesn’t.’

  15

  ‘I can tell you one thing,’ said Marcus as they ran down the alleyway behind the curry house, ‘whoever that lot were, it wasn’t Mossad, not unless they’ve started taking orders from a different set of clergy.’

  Nazreem said nothing. She was panting, out of breath and clearly in shock. The night was cold after the heat of the day and the thunderstorm that followed, and she was shivering. From behind them the noise of clanging kitchen implements and shouting voices grew louder. It would only be a matter of minutes at most before there were people on their tail.

  The curry house kitchen emptied into a warren of old artisan’s yards, one darkened shed proclaimed itself a computer graphics workshop, another, lit from within, had adverts for Bollywood movies on the windows, another was semi-derelict with rusted meat hooks hanging from collapsing rafters. Outsize commercial wheelie bins overflowed with pungent kitchen waste and debris from cardboard packaging, most of it reduced to mush by the recent rainstorm. Marcus trod in something squishy and organic and tried to ignore it.

  Angry shouts from the depths of the kitchen behind them were followed by an ear-splitting clatter and something that might or might not have been a gunshot. He grabbed Nazreem and pulled her after him, through the yard and out into the street, at right angles to Brick Lane, and then right again, away from the busy thoroughfare where more of the Beard’s best friends might be waiting in front of the restaurant.

  The streets were darker here, no garish shop fronts or pestering restaurant touts to get in the way. The little brick houses, most of them 300 or more years old, allowed brief glimpses through partly shuttered windows of Georgian interiors, some original and dilapidated, others expensively restored. There was a pub a few doors away but the doors were shut and there was little noise coming out. Then the bright lights of Brick Lane again, but if they were to get back to the car they would have to cross it.

  ‘Wait,’ he told Nazreem. ‘I’ll go first. The restaurant’s farther up and they’ll be looking for a couple. If nobody comes at me, wait until I’ve turned the corner and follow me.’ With more than a little apprehension he strode out into the busy street, and crossed it without incident. A single man was an unpromising target for the curry touts; besides, most people’s attention was diverted by the commotion. As he slipped around the corner into Fournier Street, he halted in horror. Almost immediately Nazreem was at his side.

  Marcus motioned her back against the wall and gestured with his head. She followed his gaze and saw the car, as mercilessly illuminated as an ageing model on a catwalk. Banks of floodlights had been turned on to light up the soaring tower of Christ Church picking out its glistening white stone like some giant ivory dagger against the night sky, but also making it totally impossible to get to the car without being noticed. Then his heart sank further when he realised it would do them little good even if they could. The Peugeot was listing unnaturally and thanks to the brilliant illumination he could clearly see the reason: both of the offside tyres had been slashed.

  He cursed himself for a fool. Obviously if they had traced them to Brick Lane, they must have somehow followed them in the car. And made certain they would not get away in it.

  In the distance a police siren sounded, coming closer. From around the corner in the bright lights of Brick Lane came screaming in Bengali, then the one word repeated in English: ‘Murder, Murder.’

  Marcus pulled Nazreem towards him, out of the spill of light, instinctively flattening them into the high arched doorway of the building they were standing against, as if in the hope that it might open and offer them sanctuary. But the door was firmly locked. He looked up and realised where they were: outside the mosque that had once been a synagogue and before it a church. From the wall above his head an ancient sundial protruded, above it a two-word Latin inscription: ‘Umbra sumus’. We are shadows.

  All of a sudden the spotlights were extinguished and the darkness swallowed them.

  16

  The difference between day and night is not what is used to be in the modern world. The sun’s rays never entered the fifth-storey office in the grey granite slab on Millbank where Sebastian Delahaye was whiling away what for those outside were the hours of darkness. There were no windows from which to
savour the view across the Thames to Lambeth Palace or along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. If there had been, Delahaye would not have noticed; he had his own windows on the world. Thousands of them open upon the streets of London alone.

  There were eyes everywhere and he could look through any of them. As a senior field coordinator of the intelligence service – and a man with a classical education – Sebastian Delahaye liked to joke privately he had more eyes than Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed watchman of the Greek god Zeus. Argus was the name he had given to the multilayered computer program that could gain immediate access to any of them.

  The powers it wielded had not come cheap. But the cost had been spread thinly. Surveillance cameras on motorway bridges had been paid for by the Highways Authority for the sake of safety, at ATMs by the banks to deter fraud, in shopping malls by the retailers to deter shoplifters and pickpockets, at pedestrian crossings and on street corners by local councils working with police to reduce accidents and street crime, in London by the socialist mayor keen to cut traffic levels with his congestion charge.

  Britain’s surveillance society had arguably grown from a single incident. In 1993 cameras at the Bootle Strand shopping centre outside Liverpool picked up crucial images of toddler Jamie Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who were to murder him. That was followed by the 1994 Home Office paper entitled ‘CCTV-Looking Out for You’ and a mushrooming of cameras in every town and city, on every ‘dangerous’ bend on a country road or pedestrian crossing in a rural village. Civil liberties groups estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom was in excess of six million, or one for every ten members of the population.

  In the days that followed the London bombings of 7 July 2005, surveillance cameras had identified the four British Muslims – three of them born and bred in Yorkshire – who had fallen under the spell of Al Qaeda – and murdered fifty-two of their fellow citizens. They also tracked down another gang of intended suicide bombers two weeks later, but when it came to action on the ground, the police instead misidentified and killed an innocent Brazilian plumber.

  The advocates of surveillance, who included Sebastian Delahaye, insisted that error was human but surveillance remained efficient. That efficiency was being put to the test right now. As first reports of a killing in London’s volatile Bangladeshi community had come in, Delahaye had begun doing what he did best: sifting and collating.

  For the better part of three months Delahaye’s department had been keeping loose but strict tabs on the movement of a man known as Sidi Al Barani, an Algerian granted political asylum from his country’s military regime after the rigged elections there in 2002, despite being known as a dedicated Islamic fundamentalist. Since his arrival in Britain Al Barani had taken pains to keep on the right side of the law, avoiding the outspoken Muslim clerics who attracted police and media attention with their virulent anti-Jewish sermons and praise for suicide bombers.

  But those who worried the security services more were the ones who kept a deliberately low profile while maintaining links to more sinister figures abroad, the ones who flew below the radar. It was they who prepared the ‘specials’, the sleepers who laid in wait. They were the ones to watch. Sidi Al Barani was one of them.

  Active monitoring of his movements had been stepped up after he was seen meeting with a young Iraqi, one of the rare few who came to Britain after the war that toppled Saddam but subsequently returned home. A young Iraqi reliably understood to be a courier for the shadowy figure who gloried in the cover name of Saladin, a man high on the West’s wanted list, believed to consider even Osama bin Laden a spent force.

  Signals had rippled up and down the intelligence community like an electric current when Al Barani had set off in his trademark black Mercedes and sunglasses for Heathrow only hours earlier. It was unlikely – given his status – that he was intending to leave the country, there being few others that would have welcomed him. The possibility, therefore, had to be that he was meeting someone else. And someone Al Barani wanted to meet was someone British intelligence wanted to get to know too.

  His appearance at Terminal 3 posing as a chauffeur waiting for a M. Joliet from Tangier had caused mild amusement, but also a thorough scrutiny of all known databases for anyone whose real or cover name was Joliet with a record of travel to Morocco. The discovery of a middle-aged Marseille businessman of that name with a business importing merguez sausages was received for a few minutes with some excitement but quickly dismissed, especially when the young female agent deployed on the spot reported that despite the placard, Al Barani had not met M. Joliet nor anyone else; he had not even waited for the arrival of the flight from Tangier.

  In fact, according to the MI5 agent who had been watching Al Barani at Heathrow, it appeared their target was engaged on a surveillance operation of his own. The object of his interest she reported was an arriving passenger, a pretty, dark-haired woman of Mediterranean appearance met by a Caucasian male in his mid-thirties. Neither had employed routine counter-surveillance techniques.

  On the recorded images from the airport cameras Delahaye could make out his own agent at the coffee shop in the background paying no obvious attention to anyone or anything except prattling aimlessly into her mobile. A few metres in front of her was the unmistakable figure of Al Barani holding his placard for the spurious M. Joliet. And in front of him stood a good-looking, tousle-haired man with a furrowed brow and an apprehensive expression staring directly at Sebastian Delahaye, or rather at the terminal’s arrivals board above which the camera was situated.

  So that was ‘Professor’ Marcus Frey. Delahaye let the name roll over his tongue as he often did when he first learned the identity of whichever of the grains of sand on the digital beach had been chosen by fate to come to his attention. The name had been provided by the head waiter in the Brick Lane curry house where the killing had taken place. He had been an ‘occasional regular’, someone the late owner – ‘Mister Ali’ they all called him – had made a fuss over. The waiter said he was a professor from Oxford University, an important man. No, he did not know what his connection was to the gunmen. But he thought for certain it had been ‘the professor’ they were after, and not Mister Ali.

  It had not taken Delahaye long to ascertain that the man was telling the truth. There was indeed a Marcus Frey who held a position at Oxford. He was not actually a full professor but a Fellow of All Souls, a South African who had written a controversial book about the Middle East, which might or might not have been relevant. Until now he had made no appearance on Delahaye’s radar at all, and yet here he was twice in one day, linked to a man about whom they thought they knew everything. For the man on the screen in front of him, standing in the arrivals hall at Heathrow, was unquestionably the same man as the South African-born historian in the passport photograph in a tabbed browser window on the screen to his left.

  The identity of the woman, however, was for the moment a mystery. She was wearing a headscarf, not wrapped tight in the traditional Muslim way but sufficiently to obscure her face from the cameras mounted above, save for one brief, tantalising moment when she stood on her toes and looked up at the professor to give him a remarkably chaste peck on the cheek. Indeed the whole meeting was indescribably gauche. Delahaye had suspected – as he usually did in male-female encounters – that the pair were lovers. Watching their greeting to each other he decided that was a mistake.

  He watched Al Barani’s head swivel as she came through the sliding door. The swivel any man’s head might make when a beautiful woman came into sight. But not quite. His interest was definitely more than sexual. Delahaye frowned.

  Delahaye turned back to the screen on his right, clicked the tab button on the corner of his customised Argus browser to call up another image from the queued files that had been hurriedly patched together. This from the camera installed just below the roof-line of the newly restored Hawksmoor church in the East End, close to the scene of the shooting. Inst
alled to deter graffiti artists from defacing the pristine white walls, it usefully also contained within its scan and pan field the main entrance of the one time church, now mosque, opposite.

  The image on Delahaye’s screen was timed at 21.58 the previous evening. It showed a remarkably clear view of the wall of the Hawksmoor church on one side and a row of terraced houses on the other ending in the staid bulk of the mosque. Pressed into its doorway, were two figures. Seconds later, in the zoomed, cropped and enhanced image, Delahaye could see the expressions on their faces: a panicky desperation on the clearly identifiable Frey and a pretty, dark-haired young woman with a look that was not so much of fear as of hard anger on her face. The headscarf was pushed back, her hair awry. Now that he could for the first time see her face clearly Delahaye felt there was something about her that was familiar, although for the life of him he could not say what or why.

  The counter at the bottom of the image clicked over to 22.00 and the bright image disappeared into darkness. Delahaye cursed. That was bloody environmentalists for you: saving the planet by turning off a few floodlights. The camera quickly began to readjust to the diminished lighting, then became a blur as its sensors reacted to the rotating flasher on a police car roof. The couple in the doorway were gone.

  He switched tabs again to the last image, which Argus’s facial recognition software gave an eighty-five per cent probability (it worked better with two faces together) as being the same couple, in the entrance hall of Liverpool Street Underground station, some forty-five minutes after the incident in the restaurant.

  He clicked back to the airport arrivals image from the morning and scrolled the camera timeline forward to the moment when Frey’s passenger emerged to greet him. Rear view. Difficult at first. He switched to the view from the camera opposite, mounted on the currency exchange booth, but the pan was wrong, the angle too oblique. Back again, a few seconds further down the timeline, the image was better, a profile shot. He nodded his head appreciatively. Definitely the same girl in all three captures. Good-looking. Probably early thirties. Dark, shoulder-length hair, with a headscarf worn more like a Western-style fashion accessory than a token of Islamic orthodoxy.