Beyond Reasonable Doubt

by Gary Bell

  Idiot.

  Instead, I found myself scrolling through my contact list, right down to the very last name, and typed a much shorter message.

  Borrow some cash off Percy for a morning train to Nottingham. I could use your help here. Rook. X.

  And then, with a second thought, I deleted the X.

  I had to preserve some professionalism, I told myself, before hitting send at almost five o’clock in the morning.

  13

  ‘It looks different to the photographs. It’s darker. Lonelier. Even sadder in real life.’

  Zara was right.

  I must’ve fallen straight back to sleep after sending the untimely text, so when I was eventually woken up later in the morning, roused by one of the hotel’s cleaners unceremoniously opening the door, I found a list of missed calls and texts asking where we were supposed to be meeting.

  Shit. I must’ve cringed all the way through brushing my teeth, before scrambling into yesterday’s creased shirt and trousers, and then rushing out to collect her from the station.

  It was long past noon by the time we’d found the right bend in the old railway, intermittently referencing our photographs of the crime scene as we traipsed north from the country park, my takeaway tea already lukewarm, miserable and pallid under the surface scum of long-life milk, the compost smell of the recycled paper cup. Disappointed, I forced the last of it down my neck, crunching through the slush of five sugars in the hope of clearing my headache, and then crushed the cup and stuffed it into my coat pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to toss it to the ground in that sorry place, despite the mass of faded, weather-bleached litter that had already blown in over the years, clinging to the tracks.

  Zara did nothing to alleviate my hangover.

  She’d turned up like a rocket, overly enthusiastic and eager to be out of the office, powering several paces ahead of me in her apposite Doc Martens.

  It was cold again, overcast. Leaves had begun to fall from the overhanging trees on either side, forming a brittle, tangled carpet of reds, mustards and yellows that had decomposed under the surface layer. The earth below was swampy, and it forced us to balance on the tracks, which had sunk slightly to form a long, twisted fossil of rust, like the spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.

  No human being belonged there. It was a dreadful place to die.

  Zara checked her own copies of the crime scene photos once more, holding them up to the environment and nodding. Then she pushed into the thick knots of foliage on each side and came back shaking her head.

  ‘More nothingness. Some woodland in the distance to the left, and you can almost see the brook up there to the north, but everything is overgrown and the fields are like bogs. What are we looking for, Mr Rook?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, squatting down on my haunches and taking off my hat, passing it between my hands. ‘Just trying to get my head around it all, I suppose.’

  From that height, I could smell the dust in the ballast, the blood-scent of the iron.

  Zara started moving nimbly up and down the tracks, much too lively for my whiskey eyes to follow. ‘I thought we might’ve seen some deer. That’d be nice.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Deer need iron in their diets. They gather at old tracks like these and lick the rails for the iron filings.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve never heard of a barrister coming out to the scene of a crime before.’

  ‘We call it a locus in quo visit. Sometimes it’s the only way to make sense of a situation. Did I mention that working with me would go beyond ordinary court hours?’

  ‘I’m not complaining, it’s cool. Feels like we’re detectives, you know? Sleuthing around like Sherlock and Watson. Mulder and Scully …’ A thought, and then: ‘Rook and the Rookie!’

  A smile tackled my headache like the ghost of a southbound train. ‘Hey, that’s actually pretty good!’

  She grinned back, proud of herself, showing all her neat little teeth in a row, and there was something bitter-sweet in it; not for the first time, I couldn’t help but see the reflection of The Girl killed less than a metre from where she was standing.

  If she’d been only half as pleasant as Zara, I thought, then what a terrible waste it had been.

  ‘All right then, Rookie,’ I said. ‘What are you thinking? First thoughts? It’s a long walk out here. You think she ran?’

  ‘Hmm …’ Zara paused, looking back and forth. ‘I don’t know … It rained heavily that night. You think she’d be able to run all that distance in a storm?’

  I closed my eyes, picturing the darkness, the desperation of the night.

  ‘She would if she was being chased. The dogs found broken fingernails at various points where she’d fallen along this track, right from the country park, which would suggest falling at some serious speed or force. We don’t know anything about what happened on that day. She could’ve been hiding out in Cotgrave. Maybe she ends up in the park by accident. Gets lost. I didn’t notice any lights there yesterday. It’d be pitch-dark when the storm comes, and there are miles of spiralling trails.’ I opened my eyes. ‘She could’ve gone in circles for a long time before she even got here.’

  Zara looked up through the space between the overhang. ‘Why doesn’t she use her phone?’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t have one,’ I reasoned. ‘Not by the time she gets here, anyway. She doesn’t have ID, nobody can find where she came from. I think it’d be fair to say that she probably doesn’t have one to begin with.’

  ‘OK …’ She hopped off the track, soles landing with a heavy crunch. ‘So, she’s lost in the park. All she has is that yellow jacket against the rain, and it’s coming down harder and harder by the minute. She stumbles across the tracks by chance, and follows it because, well, surely a railway has got to lead her to somewhere. But we’ve passed over two roads since the park, and come within metres of the cricket club, the RSPCA sanctuary and a holiday campsite! It was bank holiday weekend, so why wouldn’t she go there for help, or try one of the roads for a passer-by? Why stay on here?’

  ‘She might’ve been confused,’ I proposed. ‘She might not have been able to make them out through the storm. She might’ve been too afraid to try.’

  ‘Which begs the question of when does she come into contact with the killer? Is it a chance run-in with a random opportunist? Some psychopath lurking in the park? On the railway? Or does Barber follow her here?’

  ‘Could be anybody,’ I countered. ‘Murder between strangers is very rare. Inspector McCarthy mentioned migrants in the area. Working girls. If she’d been trafficked into the country, it could explain the absence of ID. It’d explain why there were no family members to claim her. Maybe she tries to get out of the city, but only gets as far as Cotgrave without any English, before the pimp trying to recruit her tracks her down.’

  ‘Pimp?’ Zara, I noticed, was frowning.

  ‘Trafficker,’ I revised. ‘He chases her through the park and up along here. It could take him hours, hunting her like that, until …’

  I looked back down the track; a solitary leaf drifted to the ground, bright as a yellow bird downed, another skeleton on the ballast.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Zara put her hands on her hips. ‘Traffickers? You think so?’

  ‘You ought to check the Home Office findings,’ I chided. ‘They’ve been found to be operating in every town and city across the UK.’

  ‘You ever worked with any?’

  As it turned out, I had.

  ‘A case in Wolverhampton a couple of years back. They were smuggling workers in from Pakistan for a thousand pounds a head, which the workers would have to repay once they got over here. They were paid a hundred pounds a week, and once they’d repaid the debt, they were free.’

  ‘Oh …’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘Well, it’s not great, but at least they let them go once they repaid the money, I guess.’

  ‘They did,’ I n
odded, ‘but that’s without the interest on the debt, which was ten per cent every week.’

  I could see her doing the maths. ‘But … that’s the entire hundred they earned! They’d never break the cycle.’

  ‘And isn’t that the point?’

  ‘What a bunch of bastards!’

  ‘Yes …’

  I decided not to tell her about how I managed to have them found not guilty.

  We went back to studying the photographs; hers on the iPad, mine on paper.

  ‘There’s something about the scene,’ she said. ‘It just doesn’t add up. Where’s all the blood, for a start? The signs of a struggle, not to mention the rest of the fingernails and teeth?’

  ‘Forensics say the evidence could have been contaminated or lost in the storm. They dug up the ground, searched the surrounding areas, but it had already turned into a swamp by the time the rain subsided, and besides, they had their man by then.’

  ‘A night of rain just washed away all traces of fingerprints and DNA?’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Surely a killing like this would take time. Effort. Organisation. It’d take skill and precision and planning.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said brightly. ‘We can use that to counter the pathologist’s analysis.’

  ‘That’s not exactly what I meant.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She looked over my shoulder, measuring the track with her eye. ‘What if she was killed somewhere else, and then her body was moved out here?’

  ‘It’s possible … They haven’t been able to say with any certainty whether she was killed elsewhere, led here, or followed and killed in situ.’ I shook my head, unconvinced. ‘But why leave the body out in the open, if you’ve already gone so far as to remove the evidence? Why all the way out here?’

  ‘Maybe it was a statement? Migrant girl, dumped on the last remaining site of the mine, only weeks after a newspaper article publishes plans to have it torn up and resurfaced?’

  ‘You’re seriously reaching. You’re bending the case to suit a narrative of your own fabrication. Where did you even get the connection between the colliery and a migrant girl? It’s nonsense.’

  She frowned then and turned away, muttering under her breath. ‘No more far-fetched than your pimp theory was …’

  I could tell from the abrupt shift in temperature that I’d embarrassed her with my argumentative tone, irritable, hung-over barrister that I was, so I gave her some more room to explore the idea, trying to pull it back to amicable.

  ‘Let’s say you’re right,’ I said softly, my own feeble version of an apology. ‘Who would do something like that? What type of killer would we be looking at?’

  She turned back, eyes bright again, lighting her face like a candle. ‘Somebody who was proud of what they’d done, maybe? Like … a serial killer?’

  I groaned, standing up straight. ‘It’s not a serial killer.’

  ‘I know that, but we could be looking at a similar mentality, couldn’t we?’

  ‘How’s that then?’

  ‘Well, for serial killers there’s no satisfaction in committing the perfect, evidence-free murder. Their actions can’t be empowering if nobody else ever finds out about what they’ve done, that’s why they look to repeat the buzz, and why most eventually boast and go on to confess, simply because they want to show people what they’ve done. It’s about superiority. For somebody who enjoys killing, I suppose it’d be like painting a masterpiece, only to burn it before anybody else ever gets to see it. The actual act of painting is only so much of a reward.’ She paused, nodding over her own train of thought, and then met my eye. ‘Criminological psychology.’

  At once as enthusiastic as a teenager, and yet as clever as any one twice her age.

  ‘Well …’ I said, trying to stay polite, ‘it’s an entertaining theory … Anything else stored away from your college days?’

  ‘Not really,’ she admitted, ‘just a lot of Emile Durkheim. You know him?’

  ‘“There can be no good without evil, no justice without crime”?’

  ‘That’s the one. Durkheim said that these acts were a necessary part of society; that people learn right from wrong by them, and a serious act of deviance forces people from all backgrounds to come together to react against it.’

  ‘Like a jury,’ I grumbled. ‘I don’t buy into all that criminology and behavioural science malarkey. They’ll never cure crime, so what’s the point? And if they ever did, then we’d be out of a job.’

  She shrugged it off. ‘Medicine hasn’t cured depression, but it doesn’t mean we should stop smiling.’

  It was a nice sentiment. The sort they could print on a coffee mug, I thought, but it reminded me of something Jenny would say; ever the left-leaning, picket-wielding, vocal enthusiast of the human rights movement, until it came to the amnesty of the vilest criminals in my diary, and all that liberalism up and vanished post-haste.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘what’s next on the agenda? This place is starting to freak me out.’

  ‘Lunch.’ My stomach, raw from the whiskey, rumbled in appreciation. ‘And, after that, I was thinking we could check in with the local mosques. She was Middle Eastern; it might be worth trying to find out if she’d attended any prayers before she died. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’

  ‘All right. But you know there are almost thirty mosques inside the city? Which one do we go to?’

  I sighed, turning back to face the long, winding way we’d come.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to start with the biggest.’

  14

  The imam of Nottingham’s Central Mosque and Islamic Centre was a short, stout man, with round cheeks and bright grey eyes. When he leaned forward to shake our hands I could smell the surface of his skin; nothing unpleasant, it certainly wasn’t unclean, but rather a very human scent, humble, and void of cologne or perfumed soaps.

  ‘Al-salāmu alaikum,’ he said, and I was both thankful and surprised when Zara responded.

  ‘Wa-alaikum al-salām.’ She looked down at his outstretched hand and shook her head apologetically. ‘I’m so sorry, but barristers don’t shake hands.’

  ‘That’s only with other barristers,’ I muttered, accepting his hand, and she blushed and did the same, apologising profusely.

  ‘I am Dr Musharaff Badour, imam of the masjid,’ he smiled. ‘How can I be of help today?’

  We were standing in our socks on the carpet of his modest little office, tucked away behind the great prayer hall, and, with so many more mosques to get through, we wasted little time pulling out copies of the stills from the CCTV footage of the victim.

  He leaned close to study the photographs, and answered almost immediately in a slow, raspy voice. ‘I’ve seen this girl before.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes, these exact pictures, I mean. The police issued us copies as part of their witness appeal earlier this year.’

  Crestfallen, I cursed myself for assuming it could’ve been so easy. ‘Did you show them to the members of your congregation?’

  He nodded, running fingers through the dense grey of his vast beard. ‘It was on the noticeboard for several weeks, but when it became apparent that she was unknown to our community, we were forced to file it with the others.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Zara interposed, ‘others?’

  The imam shuffled over to a dented filing cabinet in the corner of the office, opened the top drawer, rummaged through a thin folder from within, and handed me a selection of papers. The top sheet had the same image of our victim on it, underneath a Nottinghamshire Police hotline. I held them out at an angle for Zara to follow as I thumbed through at least a dozen more printouts, mostly home-made, featuring photographs of young women, the loose leaves now palimpsests of Arabic annotations.

  ‘We still hand them out from time to time, whenever we see new faces have been added,’ he muttered glumly.

  ‘But, some of these are dated eight years ago!’ Zara said. ‘They’re all missing?’

&nb
sp; ‘They were reported to the authorities at the time, but we never had much of a response.’

  She stopped me halfway through turning the pages, catching one of the sheets.

  ‘This girl!’ she said, straightening it out. ‘Parinda Malik. I think I recognise her …’

  I moved it to the top of the pile. ‘Really?’

  Parinda Malik had been twenty-three years old, according to the poster, when she stopped showing up to the mosque more than three years earlier. The only photograph was badly cropped and impossibly grainy; presumably, it had been taken of an entire congregation, with tiers of shoulders and robes surrounding her face, giving her all the standout qualities of a head-scarfed wallflower.

  ‘From around the city?’ I asked. ‘It’s kind of difficult to make her out, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not sure …’ Zara bobbed on the spot, eyes closed and straining, rummaging through the clutter of her memory. ‘I think the poster was up around my area a couple of years back, when I was home one weekend, maybe?’

  I took another long look at her blurry features, and then continued through the set, which turned out to be much more of the same. More faces. More dates. Few names.

  ‘With all due respect, Doctor,’ I said, when our victim came back around to the top, ‘the Islamic community seems to be pretty tight-knit around here, and yet some of these posters don’t even have names to their faces.’ I held one up, case in point. ‘I mean, this one is just a loose description of a teenager suspected to be lost? Doesn’t it seem unlikely that these women, the victim in our case especially, could simply appear and disappear without any interaction within the community? Where could she have come from? What was she doing here? Somebody has to know, don’t they?’

  He perched on the lip of his desk, adopting a pose reminiscent of Rupert, and I couldn’t help but notice something familiar in the crocheted skullcap pulled down like a wig, the gown flowing to his ankles like silk, and the tall bookshelves stuffed with daunting, weighty tomes. Our traditions weren’t so dissimilar.