Sacrifice

by Jay Nadal

  Stephen the butler answered the door. Stephen acknowledged Scott again with a simple, small nod. He wore the same attire as last time, and still looked tired and weary. Scott analysed him with concern and wariness. “Is Mr Woodman in?”

  Stephen glanced in Scott’s direction before looking back down the empty corridor. He did this several times, which Scott found strange. His inability to maintain eye contact troubled Scott. He appeared nervous, agitated, and scared. He looked like a dog that had been repeatedly beaten by its owner and was now terrified of its own shadow. “He’s gone out, sir,” Stephen said in the softest of voices.

  Scott stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Do you have any idea what time he might be back? I’d like to ask him a few questions.”

  Stephen shook his head once. “He said he was going to London on urgent business.”

  Scott struggled to hear Stephen’s words. He appeared timid on the inside as much as he did on the outside. Despite the tranquil, quiet setting, Scott had to strain his ears to hear the man.

  “Parliamentary business?”

  “No, sir. He has a special bag that he takes to Parliament. That is still in his study. He took nothing with him today. He took a phone call just before he left. Said he needed to rush out immediately.”

  “And you don’t know who that call was from?”

  “No, sir.” Stephen glanced towards the floor.

  “Stephen, you seem a little worried. Is everything okay?”

  The question seemed to take Stephen by surprise as he held his breath and his shoulders stiffened. The man looked away before looking in Scott’s direction. He offered a simple nod.

  Just tracking Stephen’s eyes gave Scott the answer he needed. All was not well, because he had lied. Something in Stephen’s eyes reflected a pain; a silent call for help. Scott pulled out his card and handed it to Stephen. “If you ever want to talk…”

  Scott returned to his car, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, breaking the silence and serenity of the garden. As he started the car, he could see Stephen peering through the half-closed door.

  Sitting in his favourite armchair, Scott stared at the laptop screen. He had hoped to catch up on his Sky recordings. The list multiplied by the day. With little free time, he figured the list would grow even longer if he didn’t pick them off one by one. Instead, with the TV volume on low, it offered nothing more than an ambient hum as inquisitiveness spurred him on.

  He stared at Google Images of Alistair Woodman. The man had a solid political background. He had overturned a large Labour majority to win the seat of Brighton and Hove for the Conservatives. He had served politics all his life, starting as a young conservative. He didn’t shy away from a challenge and tackled local issues affecting his constituents. He attended debates both locally and in Parliament and considered voting for new laws a privilege.

  Reading through Woodman’s background, Scott found him to be a member of many committees from government policy and new laws, to wider topics such as trade and industry. The latter topic piqued Scott’s curiosity. Even though unethical, his understanding of regulations and authority, and how trade and industry tariffs worked, meant he was well versed in understanding how he could bend the rules.

  Digging a little deeper, Scott found articles and statements produced by Woodman. His positioning advocated the need for fewer rules and regulations, which currently inhibited businesses from developing cross-border relationships.

  Vociferous and unforgiving in his criticism of the trade and industry department, and in particular the minister in charge, he had lambasted them on many an occasion as the major hurdle to free trade. The Department for International Trade bore the brunt of his attacks. He called them antiquated, and a bunch of dinosaurs who sat around the table drinking tea, reading The Times newspaper, and sharing one brain cell amongst them.

  The man has balls.

  Scott stretched to relieve the tension in his shoulders. Cara had gone to bed early. When knee-deep in an investigation, Scott often struggled to switch off. The whirring mind, and that desire that every copper had of wanting a result, kept him up at night. He should have been upstairs curled up behind Cara’s warm naked body.

  He took another sip of Merlot, its warmth and richness soothing him. Despite trying to relax enough so he could go to bed, his mind kept falling back to the horrendous images of Michael and Nathi. How could they live in a part of the world that deemed their mutilation in such a positive way? He couldn’t begin to fathom why sacrificial killings were allowed, and according to Simon were on the rise again.

  He opened his inbox and scanned a few emails and articles from Simon. The content appeared to have an air of mysticism, pulling him in, absorbing his mind, and raising his curiosity in a fascinating way.

  No wonder the families and asylum seekers didn’t trust the police, since they were tarred with the same brush. He read an article from 1994. It referred to the case of a fourteen-year-old boy who’d been murdered in Botswana, and his body parts removed. The killing was widely believed to have been for muti, and the police even recovered some of the stolen organs as part of their investigation. However, before being tested to identify the organs as human, the evidence was accidentally destroyed leading to accusations of police complicity in the muti murder. The case was never solved. “Why am I not surprised?” he asked himself.

  Another case caught his attention. In 2008, a rash of muti murders occurred in the Butterworth area of South Africa. It was believed that a local witch doctor was responsible for a spate of murders in which body parts were harvested from the victims. The murders began with a nine-year-old boy, who was butchered in front of three friends by a man. Authorities later found his body with his organs sliced out. One suspect was arrested whilst in possession of a medical bag containing a woman’s placenta, the severed head of a cat, and chicken skin.

  Scott shook his head in disbelief. That email from Simon contained the subject line: “you will love this one!” Simon had the complete polar opposite view to him.

  The cases kept coming, one after another. Potential police corruption and falsified confessions marred many of the investigations. The fact that people who carried out witchcraft were seen as powerful people by the local community worried Scott. The risk of it coming to UK shores, concerned him further.

  34

  The tyres screeched across the tarmac. And then time froze. Scott floated above the scene, Western Road spread out below him. He looked down. The BMW had come to a stop. From his vantage point, Scott could see the world in minute detail.

  He could see strands of her mousey brown hair splayed out in the road, a dark red tinge spreading.

  The BMW smashed into Tina and Becky, catapulting Tina over the bonnet. She hit the windscreen and slid to one side, bouncing off and rolling on to the road. Becky was dragged beneath the front of the car, just her upper half visible.

  The car reversed and then drove around them before roaring away down the road. His family lay in a heap. Broken. Dying. “No!” Scott shouted, sitting up and groping around in the blackness. He flailed his arms in front of him, aware of somebody grasping his wrists and holding him. “Noooo!” he fought back.

  “Scott!” Cara, beside him in the bed, held on tighter. “It’s just a dream, babes, shush. Just a bad dream.”

  “Yes,” Scott mumbled through gasps of breath. Waking fully, he blew out a long breath, and then lay down. Cara wrapped her arms around him, and soon she was fast asleep again. Scott stared up at the darkened ceiling, unable to calm his pounding heart. A dream, was that all it was? Or were the images more akin to a flashback? He’d never seen it all that clearly before, his mind doing a sterling job blocking out the worst parts of the memory. He blinked and tried to recall exactly what he’d seen. A black BMW, with a man behind the wheel. Dark hair. White? He couldn’t be sure, the windows were tinted. Glasses…yes he wore glasses!

  It would soon approach four years. He turned to the bedside table and the little pict
ure frame on it, to see Becky’s cheeky smile.

  Ever since he’d lost them, Scott’s sleep had been plagued with bad dreams and sweaty nightmares. To begin with, he spent half the night tossing and turning, often waking in a sweat, with the pillows on the floor and a tangle of duvet wrapped around his legs.

  He still didn’t buy the official report, which had their deaths recorded as a road traffic collision, or RTC. But Scott had never seen what had happened as an accident. It was more than that to him. A drunk driver perhaps or someone under the influence of drugs might explain why they left the scene.

  The hit-and-run driver had been travelling way too fast for Western Road – but it was the “run” bit of “hit-and-run” which had fuelled Scott’s anger. The driver hadn’t hung around to see the consequences of their actions. Having never been caught in the following investigation, they’d escaped punishment.

  Whatever the reason, Scott had vowed to never let the case became a statistic. I’ll give it another look, he thought as his eyes succumbed to sleep once more.

  The air was thick with the scent of coffee as Scott came downstairs. Even though he wasn’t hungry, he caught a waft of toast that lingered in the air, which fired off a rumble in his stomach. Cara had woken before him and had prepared breakfast for both of them.

  He walked up behind her as she finished the eggs, and placed his arms around her waist. A thin T-shirt separated him from her naked body. “Morning, beautiful,” he said, planting a soft kiss on her neck. “This is a nice surprise. I could get used to this.”

  “Just doing my bit, Scottie. You must have had a late night last night. I don’t remember you coming to bed.”

  “Yes, sorry. I had some research to do, and before I knew it, it was gone one a.m.”

  “Did it help?”

  Scott let slip a laugh. “Yes, it was about a woman who wanted to become pregnant. She went to a sangoma which is what they call a witch doctor, who provided her with a magical belt to wear. Dangling from the belt were children’s fingers and penises. She was made to drink a concoction she believed contained human blood and fat, and she was given a piece of flesh which she believed to be a human organ, perhaps a heart. She sliced small pieces from the flesh each night and fried them on a stove.”

  Cara stopped cooking the eggs and turned to Scott. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I’ll show you the article.”

  Cara playfully punched him in the arm. “I meant seriously, do we have to talk about this before we’ve even had breakfast? Do you ever switch off?”

  Scott smiled and apologised, as he grabbed the orange juice from the fridge.

  Cara looked in Scott’s direction. “Are you okay?” she asked with a genuine look of concern.

  Scott knew she meant the dream last night. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and brushed off the incident. “I’m fine, babes. Thank you. I’ve not had many of those recently, so it spooked me.”

  Cara smiled sympathetically, and blew him a kiss before returning to finish the food.

  Scott wasn’t due in until mid-morning. Having breakfast with Cara had given him a different appetite as he admired her curves in the tight-fitting T-shirt. Her pert nipples poked through, and stirred his desire for her. Unable to resist any further, he took the opportunity to take Cara back to bed where they made love and then showered together.

  Scott’s mood improved as the morning continued. Mike had called to say that they’d had more feedback on Daniel Johnson. The camera that Mike positioned yesterday had been triggered late last night. Mike went there to retrieve the camera this morning, and found images that resembled Daniel Johnson going into the shed. Forensics had also flashed up that instruments discovered had Daniel’s DNA on them, along with another set of unknown prints.

  Both pieces of evidence were fantastic in Scott’s opinion. It placed Daniel Johnson in the shed having used instruments to mutilate animals. A further startling piece of evidence raised the stakes further. Human hair fibres were discovered on one wall within blood smears. Comparisons against DNA samples from Michael, Nathi, and the national database proved unsuccessful.

  Scott strode into the office with a strong bounce in his step, a healthy and relaxed glow on his face the only indication of the morning he’d had. In reality, he preferred to keep his private life just that, private. With the case turning a corner, and more importantly, his personal life becoming stronger, his headspace was clearer. Much of that was down to Cara. If he was truthful with himself, he couldn’t wait to see her again, he couldn’t do without her, and would spend every minute by her side if he had the choice.

  Abby grabbed Scott’s attention the moment he arrived. The excitement in her voice buoyed him. “Guv, good old Dolores Carter has come up trumps for us. She’s been working really hard on our behalf to prise out any information from the remaining asylum seekers. She’s got through and gained the confidence of one particular individual. They weren’t willing to come in with her, so we’ll just have to take her word for it at the moment until such time that we can persuade them to come in and make a statement.”

  Scott grabbed a seat. “Credible though?”

  “I think so. Anyway, Xabi had been arranging for asylum seekers to come into this country. He would smooth the way for them to enter the country. In return, he forced them to bring gold smuggled on their persons. They would either have to stick it up their rectum or vaginal cavity, and it would be retrieved once they got here.”

  “That would explain the cases at the hospital?”

  “Makes sense, Guv. I doubt they wanted to be searched. So they disappeared before being examined. And we know what happened to a few of them.”

  “And they have no idea where the pastor is?”

  “Not as far as we know, Guv. I agree with you. Xabi is being shielded by someone. Of course, this witness could be too frightened to tell. He’s putting his life on the line by revealing this information. He just kept going on about how they’re all promised a new life in the UK if they smuggled gold in.”

  “Scott,” Meadows’s booming voice thundered across the room as he pushed through the double doors to the office. Everyone turned to see him approach. His stern-looking face and furrowed brows suggested that it wasn’t a friendly visit. “Get yourself down to the Whitehawk. Two houses that held asylum seekers have just been firebombed. They’re still sifting through the debris for bodies. Let’s hope they find none.”

  The team sat in stunned silence, exchanging glances, and looks of confusion.

  “I could see this coming, Scott. You going in heavy-handed hasn’t helped. I warned you that racial tensions were high, and that we had to go in softly.”

  “No disrespect, Sir, but I hardly think we went in heavy-handed. I think we have been very considerate to the needs of the community. We’ve been dealing with a double murder, Sir. I can’t see how the firebomb attack is racist?”

  “Oh, it’s racist. There’s red swastikas daubed on the outside walls. There’s concern for the other asylum seekers. We got Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iranians, Pakistanis, the Nigerians, and the Iraqis. They’ll all be shitting themselves now. I’ve just been speaking to the Brighton and Hove refugee and migrant forum. They estimate that we have near between three hundred and four hundred asylum seekers in the Brighton and Hove area. We can’t protect them all, and we certainly don’t want more body bags.”

  “It’s the actions of the Home Office and Woodman, that are stirring up racial tensions…Sir.”

  Meadows glared at Scott. The tension between them prickled. “Keep the Home Office and Woodman out of the equation. I’ve already told you that the chief constable wants Woodman left alone. You bring the evidence that Woodman is anything other than clean, and I’ll back you to the hilt. Until then, sort out this mess on the Whitehawk.”

  With that, Meadows departed, leaving a whirlwind of bewilderment in his wake.

  “Someone left the gas cooker on,” Abby quipped as they stared at the burnt-out remains
of two terraced houses. The roofs had long since crumbled, and in their place stood thick beams of wood, blackened and charred from where the flames had licked at them. The ruins still leaked smoke, and she could see the faintest glow of embers as she watched the firefighters dowsing down the last pockets of heat. Black chocking dust hung in the air, and invaded her lungs as she stood on the pavement. Nothing had escaped the fire, merciless in its destruction. Glass littered the floor where the windows had broken, and lay blackened on the ground.

  “Not much left. The council will be pissed off,” Scott remarked as he looked up and down the street at the gathering crowds.

  Mike joined them having spoken to the officers first on the scene. “Firefighters reckon it was arson. There’s a smell of accelerant behind the doors. Chances are petrol was poured through the letter boxes and lit. There are rags on the floor just inside each doorway. The firefighters have done their search. There are no occupants.”

  At least Scott could be thankful for that. The fire had been no accident. The entire estate knew that, and so did Scott. The charred shells were so much more than a couple of burnt down houses. The invisible messages on the blackened walls were warnings.

  “The locals don’t seem too concerned,” Abby remarked as she glanced over towards a crowd being kept at a distance by PCSOs. Residents gathered in numbers, watching with morbid fascination. Some laughed, sharing a common joke, whilst others gossiped in hushed tones.

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Scott said, sighing. “Question is who did this? I can’t imagine getting any useful information from that lot. It could be kids, a disgruntled resident, or someone else.” The brittle atmosphere could snap at any moment. The electrically charged, negative tone ran through Scott’s mind as he looked at the tangled mess of what had once been homes for those seeking sanctuary. “The press are going to have a field day,” he mumbled as he turned to see his favourite reporter Tracey Collins from The Argus, pushing through the crowds.