The Lost Prophecies

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘Me?’ Shiva asked.

  ‘You.’ Williams smiled tightly.

  ‘It couldn’t work, sir. I could never pretend to be a religious fundamentalist.’

  ‘You won’t need to.’ Williams bent to a file on his desk. He passed a photograph to Shiva. It showed a woman in dark clothes, wearing surgical gloves, disconnecting wires in a junction box on a wall. She was in her early thirties. Her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail; her features, caught in an expression of fierce concentration, were the same light brown colour as Shiva’s.

  ‘She managed to disable the power system to that part of the museum. We also have a film of her working on the safe. She was there for three hours. We got the pictures because the museum surveillance system has a backup, a security camera with a battery that activates on movement. She missed the lens poking out of the wall. By then she’d already killed the security guard, a blow to the head from behind. The last photographs are of her taking the book from the safe and leaving.’

  Shiva looked at the woman’s face. The eyes were narrowed with concentration, the mouth tight. In repose the face was probably attractive.

  ‘The Americans tell us her name is Parvati Karam. Family were Indian shopkeepers in San Francisco before it was inundated. Moved up to British Columbia, grandfather did well as a wholesaler. Young Parvati is a mathematical wizard; spent ten years designing security systems for the Federal Reserve. In the meantime she got herself involved with the Shining Light Movement, and two years ago they invited her to emigrate to the Tasman Islands. Government in Dunedin were happy to take her on as a security systems adviser. And so the Shining Light Movement gained another expert.’

  ‘Do we have back-channels to the Tasman government?’ Shiva asked.

  ‘A few. We’re wary. Not all the Shining Light people declare who they are when they take civil service jobs. But the Tasman government doesn’t know what they’re up to, though they think something is going on.’

  ‘I should say, sir, I’ve never done any political work.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’d call this political. We don’t really know what it is. A murder, to start with.’

  ‘Where is Karam now?’

  ‘Back home, I’m afraid. The monthly flight to Dunedin took off the night after the book was stolen and she was on it. By the time our internet systems identified her, she was back in Dunedin.’

  ‘Has the Tasman government been contacted?’

  ‘Yes. But meanwhile Hardacre at internet decided to run an ancestor search on Karam, just to see what came up. And the system flagged up a connection to you.’

  ‘But I’ve never done any ancestor research,’ Shiva said.

  ‘We have.’ The old man smiled. ‘On your behalf. We realized years ago that if we could find an ancestral connection between one of our undercover people and someone we were interested in, it would be a way of getting into their confidence. It’s happened a few times, and now it’s happened with you. Your great-great-great-great-grandfather and Parvati Karam’s were brothers in the same Indian village. Both families emigrated in the 1940s, during the troubles when the British left. They were Hindus in the Muslim area. We want you to go out there, get to know her.’

  Shiva nodded. But he did not feel the frisson of excitement that a new case normally gave him.

  ‘We’ll fly you to Dunedin on the next monthly flight. A transworld flight – I envy you that. You’ll be a diplomat taking up a post at the EU embassy. Cultural attaché, tried and tested cover for spies. Contact her via her ancestor site e-mail, say you’ve been researching and found you were related, and ask to meet her.’ The clipped, peremptory tone was back.

  ‘When did she do her search?’

  ‘That’s interesting. Only a year ago, well after she joined the Shining Light. They discourage ancestor research. May indicate a vulnerability on her part.’

  Shiva looked down at the photograph. ‘She doesn’t look vulnerable.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve never gone undercover to trap a woman before.’

  ‘Will that be a problem?’

  ‘No. It’s just a question of . . . thinking around it.’

  ‘Do that.’ The commisioner nodded. ‘When Karam was in Birmingham she stayed at a guesthouse in the suburbs. Witton. See what you can find out from the landlady. She’s the only one we know who actually met her. I’ll give you her file, and over the next couple of weeks you’ll get some training about the Black Book and the Shining Light. I’ll see you again.’ He paused. ‘You were brought up a Hindu, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was brought up in the old traditions. But my parents weren’t really religious.’

  ‘You’ll have quite a bit to learn.’ He studied Shiva. ‘Yes, it’s hard to pretend serious faith. We think when you meet Karam you should be sceptical but not hostile.’

  ‘If she wants to meet me.’

  ‘It will be very helpful if you can make sure she does.’

  ‘And the Black Book? If I find it?’

  Commissioner Williams’s face darkened. ‘Destroy it.’

  Shiva had been given a guest apartment at the Commission. Tomorrow, books and papers would arrive, about Parvati Karam, the Black Book, the Shining Light Movement. His room was small, high up in the building. He had set the statue of Shiva on his dressing table. In the old days not many Indian boys had been called Shiva, but his parents had liked the statue. Shiva looked at his face in the dressing table mirror. It looked tired. It was a thin face, bony, clever – delicately pointed, Alice had once said. He looked at the statue. Sometimes he felt all the weight of India on him. Destroyed, massive inundations drowning half the Ganges valley in two years, while in the rest of the subcontinent the summer heat had risen to forty-five, forty-six degrees, more than humans could bear. There was no way out for the people; to the north lay only the bare Himalayas. What Indians were left now were scattered around the world, accepted or discriminated against in various degrees, depending on the country. Shiva thought of meeting this woman, another Indian. An enemy. He stared at the statue, trying to lose himself in its symmetry. The god’s face was enigmatic as he danced, protecting the world, his foot on a demon from the underworld.

  II

  A week later Shiva walked out to the inner-city suburb of Witton. He left early, dressed formally in a cotton suit and wing-collared shirt. Shopkeepers were opening their shutters, the arterial roads filling up with bicycles and horses and carts and the electric cars of the rich. With a quarter of a million souls, Birmingham, high above sea level, was one of the few populous cities left in the world. It had been chosen as the new European Union capital over Berlin, now a coastal city still threatened by the rising seas.

  For all that it had shrunk to a cluster of islands half its original size, Great Britain had fared better than most countries. It had an abundance of fertile land, only the Scottish and Welsh mountains requiring serious soil enhancement. No need in Britain for intrepid parties to brave burning deserts to raid the old cities’ landfill sites for organic refuse to make artificial soils. Britain’s island status, too, had protected it from the worst of the migrant wars.

  Shiva stopped at a roadside stall to buy a coconut from a vendor. The tanned young man expertly sliced off the top with his machete. Shiva drank the cool milk gratefully, for after an hour walking on the dusty road his throat was dry. He walked on to Witton, an area of old back-to-back terraces, with south-facing windows now converted to solar panels. There was a small lake in the centre to take the monsoon overflow of the river Lea. The water was low at this time of year and lines of chimneypots from submerged houses broke the surface. Children were swimming in the brown water, calling out to each other in Brummie accents.

  Around the lake new earthhouses had been built, and Shiva headed for one of the larger ones, two storeys high, the thick walls and the frames of the solar panels painted bright blue. A sign was nailed to the wall by the door. GUESTHOUSE. VACANCIES. He knocked on the door and a small terrier began a frantic barking.
A large, grey-haired lady opened the door. She wore a shapeless yellow dress, sweat-stained under the arms.

  ‘Good morning.’ The woman looked tense, worried. A Jack Russell ran up behind her, barking angrily. ‘Sit,’ the women snapped. The dog obeyed. Shiva stared at it; pets were an unusual luxury.

  ‘Mrs Ackerley?’ He gave her his most winning smile. ‘My name is Inspector Moorthy. Wonder if I could ask a few questions?’

  Her broad shoulders slumped. ‘Come in. Sam, away!’ The dog walked obediently off. ‘It’s about that woman, I suppose,’ Mrs Ackerley said heavily.

  ‘Afraid so. Expect you’re tired of being questioned about her.’

  ‘I had three officers on different days, asking me the same questions. They won’t tell me what she’s done.’

  ‘Last time, I promise.’ He smiled at her again.

  She sighed and led him into a lounge, where canvas chairs surrounded an old wooden coffee table. The shutters were open, large windows giving a good view of the lake. The computer was on, a documentary about Antarctica. Five-mile-wide rivers crashed through a landscape of stone worn as smooth as glass by vanished glaciers. Mrs Ackerley bent stiffly and turned down the sound. ‘You’d better sit down,’ she said.

  Shiva looked at the screen. ‘Look at those rivers.’

  ‘We’ll all be drowned yet.’

  ‘No, the ice sheet’s nearly gone. The sea can’t rise much further.’

  ‘So the politicians tell us,’ she replied darkly. She sighed again. ‘Please, ask me what you want. The guests are out at work. I don’t want them coming back to find the police here again.’

  ‘Thought they would be out at this time of day. That’s why I came now. It’s mostly businessmen and officials visiting the city that you take in, isn’t it? It’s a nice house, nice view.’

  She wasn’t mollified. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a police inspector?’ she asked.

  ‘Thirty-six. Older than I look. Now, I don’t want to trouble you by going over the whole ground again. I just wanted to ask what you thought of her. Miss Karam? As a guest. As a person. Your insight.’

  The old woman seemed a little mollified. ‘She appeared nice enough when she arrived. Very polite. But private. Didn’t mix with the other guests.’

  ‘Self-contained, then?’

  ‘Guests have a right to be private. Though I would have liked to talk to her,’ she added regretfully. ‘Coming from so far away. I wanted to ask what the Tasman Islands were like. What it was like to fly, looking down on all the old dead places. But I could tell it wouldn’t be welcome.’ She shrugged. On screen a man in a jersey stood on the bank of a great river, a tiny dot, chunks of ice the size of houses sweeping by.

  ‘I may be flying myself soon,’ Shiva said, to engage her. Mrs Ackerley’s eyes lit up with interest.

  ‘How exciting. Is it to do with this case?’

  ‘No. Something else. Tell me, what did she say she was doing over here?’

  ‘A conference on computerized power systems. To help conserve the electricity.’ Mrs Ackerley settled back into her chair, relaxing. ‘The only real conversation I had with her was a few days later. She’d been working in her room and came down to make a cup of tea. I asked about her family. She said they were in Canada; she hadn’t seen them for years. I told her my family had lived in Brum since the industrial times.’ Pride entered her voice.

  ‘Did she wear a cross?’ Shiva asked. Most of the Shining Light people did, chunky wooden ones painted silver.

  ‘No. I would have noticed. I wondered what religion she might be, as she was—’ Mrs Ackerley flushed ‘—of colour,’ she concluded, using the currently correct phrase.

  ‘You said earlier that she seemed quite nice when she arrived. Did something make you change your mind later?’

  ‘Yes. Sam. My little dog. I know people say pets eat scarce food, but it all comes off my rations.’

  ‘People can be too strict sometimes.’

  ‘He makes a lot of noise but it’s only to protect me. He doesn’t bite. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, only one of the other guests saw what happened and told the police when they interviewed him.’

  Shiva leaned forward. This hadn’t made it to the report. ‘What did happen?’

  ‘One evening I was in here and I heard a yelp from the kitchen. I went in and poor Sam was cowering against the wall, howling. I could see he’d been kicked. And that Parvati woman was standing against the opposite wall, glaring at him. I shouted at her that he’s only a helpless little dog. She was apologetic, said she’d been brought up in Canada and they have problems with wild dogs out there. One had bitten her once. But when I came in she’d looked angry, not frightened. I would have asked her to go but I need the money. One of the other guests heard us shouting and came down. Like I said, he told the police later.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s interesting.’

  ‘Is it?’ She fixed him with puzzled eyes. ‘If she’s done something bad enough to have the police coming here time and again, what does hurting a little dog matter?’

  ‘Everything matters,’ Shiva answered, retreating into his clipped official voice.

  When he left he needed to think, to order what Mrs Ackerley had told him. He walked across to the lake and sat on a bench under a eucalyptus tree, out of sight of the house. Nearby, a little boy and girl stood in the shallows fishing. They wore dirty kaftans and broad-brimmed straw hats, like Tom Sawyer. Mosquitoes darted around, and he hoped the children had put on their repellent. These lakes were malarial.

  Parvati Karam had been self-contained, Mrs Ackerley had said. That fitted with the information they had found on the databases. Her parents had been strongly atheist, like most people these days. Shiva’s own parents had kept up the old Hindu customs through respect for tradition rather than real belief. A loner at school, Parvati had shown great mathematical ability and had gone to university in Alberta at sixteen. The interesting thing, Shiva remembered, was that at university she had joined the dog-hunting clubs. It was not only people who had fled northwards from the deserts of the old United States but dogs too, millions of pets that had formed predatory packs, reverting to old instincts. They were getting larger, reverting to their wolf ancestry, and in the many isolated settlements they were a major problem. Hunting them was encouraged. The reports said that Parvati Karam had headed a student team, which won prizes for the number of dogs they killed. Had she gained a fear of them that had led her to kick Mrs Ackerley’s pet? Or was it hate?

  The dog hunting had stood out because otherwise Parvati’s life seemed so bland. She had worked on electronic security systems in Winnipeg after graduating. Three years ago she had been converted to the Shining Light Movement, and in 2133 she had taken up a new job in New Zealand. Within the Church she seemed to be just an ordinary member, going to church, joining the party, paying a tenth of her salary to the movement. No record of any official position in Church or party, no active involvement in the campaigns against sodomy or abortion or eating pork. Yet a few weeks ago she had come up quietly behind the watchman at the Birmingham museum and expertly felled him with a blow to the back of the neck that broke it. Shiva had seen the photographs, the look of surprise on the old man’s face. She would have learned techniques of stalking and killing in the dog hunts, he realized. He wondered if she had killed the man coldly, as though he too were a dog.

  Across the lake a group of men pushed a boat into the water, unfurling a white sail. They carried fishing rods. Ripples spread across the water, making tiny waves at Shiva’s feet.

  ‘Them blastid men’ll scare the fish,’ the little girl said to the boy. They were very alike; they must be brother and sister.

  ‘Na, they’ll drive ’em this way. ’Ere, I’ve got one!’ he shouted excitedly.

  A struggle began with a small carp that had taken the bait and was struggling fiercely out in the water. The little boy gripped the rod tightly while his sister waded into the warm shallows, grabbed the line and began ha
uling in the fish.

  Shiva envied their closeness. Like Parvati Karam, he was an only child. Large families had been officially discouraged since the Catastrophe, with so little good land to feed the survivors. He wondered: had her childhood been as lonely as his, had she too been driven to succeed by parents whose future she represented? Shiva had also been an outsider, a small thin dark child in the Surrey town on the edge of Thames Bay. But he had wanted more than anything to belong. He had found his way in by attaching himself to children who were natural leaders, popular and charismatic, for charisma begins early. But often those leaders of playground gangs were cruel, and Shiva had always recoiled from cruelty, perhaps because he feared them turning on him. When he was sixteen the group he hung on to attacked and robbed an old woman; the leader of the group, Starkey, had planned it carefully. Shiva watched them while they divided up the money, then went and reported the crime to the headmaster. Starkey, a promising pupil, was expelled. Shiva’s own part was kept secret; he was awarded detention with the lesser offenders to defray suspicion at his own request. His path had been decided then. Sometimes he wondered what had happened to Starkey. Perhaps he was in prison like Marwood.

  ‘Buy a fish, mister?’ A voice at his elbow startled Shiva. The two urchins stood beside him, the little girl holding up the carp, the sun reflected from its golden scales.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m staying somewhere where they give you food.’

  ‘Only one euro. Off the ration.’

  ‘No. Thanks anyway. I have to go.’

  He stood up and walked away. The sun was hot now, so he took his canvas hat from his pocket and put it on. Behind him the children argued about where to sell their fish.