The Divinities

by Parker Bilal

  ‘Does he look Oriental to you?’

  ‘Oriental? Is that acceptable nowadays?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Kelly shook her head. ‘Japanese. I used to go out with one.’

  Drake looked over at her. ‘Real Japanese, or one parent or something?’

  ‘Real Japanese.’

  ‘Not adopted?’ Drake went back to studying the victims’ positions.

  ‘Not adopted. Kosher.’

  ‘Kosher Japanese, that’s a new one. How did that work out for you?’

  Kelly shrugged. ‘He had issues.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ Drake was only half listening, his mind filtering out what was relevant to the current situation. ‘Okay, let’s go with Japanese for the moment. So, I’m guessing not a labourer. Could he be working on the project as an engineer of some kind?’

  ‘How about prospective buyer?’ Kelly nodded. ‘Don’t look like they come cheap.’

  Drake followed her gaze. A billboard alongside the gate displayed a computer-simulated image of the finished product. Slick and clean. Happy couples pushing strollers. Men in suits. Young women on telephones. Everybody smiling. The tagline ran along the bottom: LUXURY APARTMENTS WITH A TIMELESS VIEW. It made it sound as if you were paying for a slice of eternity.

  The shoulders and torsos of the victims looked as though they had been stamped on by a herd of wild animals. Shards of bone protruded, trapped in dark patches of blood. The couple were lying almost on top of one another, wrapped in each other’s embrace. Out of fear, terror, love?

  Their upper bodies were twisted as if they had been trying to wrestle free from the weight of rubble. How long had they been aware of what was going to happen to them? They had been wrapped in canvas shrouds and bound with duct tape. The hand reaching upwards was evidence that the man had managed to tear one arm free. He was clearly scrabbling to get loose at the moment of death. The woman’s face was a picture of torment, her mouth open in a permanent scream.

  Had the killer been working alone? If so he would have had to walk back up the ramp to operate the truck.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find something to protect them from the elements.’ The rain risked dissolving everything into a grey, muddy mass. Kelly disappeared and came back with a tarpaulin.

  ‘You sure this is a good idea?’ She looked up at him as he began dragging it up over the bodies. ‘I mean, from a forensic standpoint?’

  ‘It’s either this or watching valuable evidence getting washed away. We can’t take that chance.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  There was something about these grey figures that jolted him, took him straight back to Iraq. The dusty brutality of it. Something ancient, medieval.

  In Iraq, people would often talk about home; what they missed. Something that had never bothered him. He’d joined up to get away from this place, this life, himself. If the circumstances had allowed it he might have stayed there. There was nothing to go back to. A missing father, a mother with a drink problem, and a country he wasn’t sure he belonged in. In Iraq, dusty, broken down and alien as it was, he had felt at ease, perhaps for the first time in his life.

  ‘What’s the name of that place in Italy,’ Kelly asked, breaking into his thoughts. ‘You know, where everyone was buried in ash from the nearby volcano?’

  ‘Pompeii.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  They walked back up the ramp to wait for the forensics team to arrive. DC Milo Kowalski had appeared. He was wearing a bright red anorak that was slick with rain, and he was smiling.

  ‘Looks like an excavation.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know, like a dig.’

  Kelly was scowling. ‘Do me a favour, Milo, don’t go getting religious on me.’

  ‘No, not religious. Palaeontology. It’s in the clay.’ Drake looked back down, wondering if he’d missed something. Milo continued. ‘London Clay. The city’s built on it. Everything. It was formed in the days when dinosaurs still walked the earth.’

  ‘You make this stuff up, right?’

  Kelly laughed. ‘You know he doesn’t.’ She was right, of course. This was Milo’s speciality, knowing things. His glasses were speckled with rain. He pushed them back up his nose.

  ‘The whole city is a massive burial ground. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No, Milo, we didn’t know.’ Kelly rolled her eyes.

  ‘We have forty-eight hours, Milo,’ said Drake. ‘So we need to move fast.’

  ‘Gotcha, chief.’

  Drake shivered. The wind off the river cut through his damp parka.

  ‘Let’s go over what we have so far. Who found them?’

  ‘Feller who opens the place up in the mornings.’ Kelly flipped through her notebook. ‘A Mr . . . Cataract.’ She muttered a curse at the rain-spattered page flapping in the wind. ‘Christ, I can’t even read my own handwriting.’

  Drake looked up at the concrete frame of the building that curved around them in an arch. He imagined this might be what it felt like to be in the middle of a stage.

  ‘It’s almost as if he wanted the world to see this, to see how they suffered.’

  ‘Come again?’ Kelly pushed wet hair out of her eyes.

  ‘I mean, why here?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Through the gap between the two sides of the building’s skeleton the river was visible. The rain was picking up, spitting thick lashes of it into the air, pitting the surface like a thousand invisible dancing demons.

  ‘Why this particular spot?’

  ‘Maybe he liked the view?’ shrugged Milo. ‘In medieval times they threw women into this river. For witchcraft, you know? Only the ones with magical powers floated.’

  ‘So the innocent drowned? Nice logic,’ Kelly muttered. ‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’

  The view. To define what had changed about London you could begin here. Luxury waterfront developments now cluttered the riverside, north, but mostly south. Everyone wanted a piece of the timeless river. The legend. The lore. Plain old romanticism. It wasn’t just the river, of course, that was an added benefit. It was all part and parcel of the mechanism that was summoning the super-rich to this city like vampires to a bloodfest. They didn’t so much live in the city as float high above it, dropping by on the circuit of their global empires. They were fast turning the city into a dead zone in which mere mortals had no place. And there was no sign of it letting up any time soon.

  ‘Let’s talk to the caretaker, the one who found them.’

  ‘Mr Cricket?’ Kelly stared off towards a stack of Portakabins by the perimeter fence. ‘Not much of a talker.’

  ‘How’s his English?’

  Kelly waggled a hand. ‘Touch and go.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘The uniforms say they can’t even tell what language he’s speaking.’

  ‘He’s not putting it on?’

  ‘No, he seems keen to cooperate. We just can’t understand fuck all of what he’s saying.’

  Kelly hailed from the west coast of Scotland somewhere. When she swore, which was fairly frequently, it sounded almost exotic to Drake, like you might feel hearing someone swear in Italian, or Greek.

  Overhead a jet airliner screeched down the flight path towards Heathrow. In the grand scheme of things two dead people on a construction site in South London didn’t amount to much. The world rolled on.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sunlight broke through the cloud cover, throwing a sudden flourish of colour over the scene. It put Drake in mind of a school visit to the National Portrait Gallery. How old was he then? Eleven, twelve? He’d been in care at the time. One of his mother’s bad moments. No space for him while she was battling her demons. His father was off too, on one of his regular jaunts. You never knew where he went, or when he would be back, if at all.

  The visit came as a distraction, but also as a revelation. He remembered the solid building. The sense of calm, of history being firmly
held in place by heavy stones. And he remembered the paintings of the old masters. He’d never seen anything like it, would never have dreamed of going in there on his own. He didn’t understand art then, couldn’t really claim to now. At one point the teacher said something that had stuck with him. She said, think of each painting as a window into the mind of someone who once walked the earth hundreds of years ago. That hit him. The idea of cutting across time, that this frame was a doorway that allowed him to look back, to see the world the way some painter who was now a pile of bones in the ground had seen things centuries ago. He was just this dumb kid. He knew he was looking at his own death; one day he too would be gone and there would be nothing, not even a scrap of canvas to remember him by.

  Over by the gates, the forensics team had arrived and was getting suited up. Between the blue jumpsuits Drake spotted Archie Narayan, everyone trying to give him a wide berth. Drake took one last look back at the crime scene. In a moment it would be sealed off and swamped by a layer of scientific professionals, protective tents, forensics officers, suited and booted. He wanted to remember it as it was, raw, the way the killer would have seen it as he walked away.

  Drake didn’t know much about the construction business, but someone had dreamed up a fancy name for this one. Magnolia Quays. A fantasy handle to fit the delirious price tag. Right now it was just a muddy hole in the ground, pitched up against the river, fenced off from the road by high siding decked with Klieg lights, warnings about guard dogs and security sweeps. As if that ever helped. Drake spotted a number of smaller logos on the advertising hoarding.

  ‘Do we have a note of those?’

  ‘Already done, chief.’ Kelly held up her iPhone to show him the picture she had taken. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas. Prices start at three million.’

  ‘All good things come to those who wait, isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person,’ she shrugged. ‘Uh oh.’

  Drake followed her eye. In his tweed jacket and wellington boots, the chief pathologist was striding towards them. A dinosaur wading towards its own extinction.

  ‘Let’s give the honourable doctor some space.’

  ‘Right you are, chief.’

  Every time she called him that, it reminded him that he had been demoted from Inspector back to Detective Sergeant. There was no reason for him to make that connection, he just did; the fact that his career, to all intents and purposes, had stalled.

  Drake nodded in the direction of the crowd that was gathering by the gate. Casual labourers turning up in the hope of work.

  ‘Let’s make sure we have a record of everyone who’s been in and out of this place in the last few months.’

  The construction business was like the collision of two alien worlds. On the one hand, there were the clients paying astronomical sums for their little slice of heaven. A chance to fence themselves off from the masses. Qataris, Kuwaitis, Russians, along with all manner of wealthy globetrotters. Money-laden moguls from around the world eager to plough their cash into London Clay, hoping to spin it into gold. On the flip side of that coin were the wary-looking workers who now stood in cheap, sodden jackets huddling from the rain just beyond the crime-scene tape. It put Drake in mind of a picture his mother used to have hanging on her wall. A black-and-white photo of Mohawks balancing along girders high above New York City. The Native Americans who built the first skyscrapers on land their ancestors had inhabited for generations. It wasn’t quite the same here. These people came from all over the shop, Eastern Europe, South Asia, Africa, the Far East, you name it. They toiled on muddy building sites, picking up irregular wages while constructing little palaces for the super-rich. They lived in crowded rooms, flats and terraced houses converted into flimsy barracks, dirty, overcrowded, submerged from contact with officialdom of any kind.

  ‘This is their Klondike,’ Cal said, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud.

  ‘Sorry, chief?’

  ‘We need to round them up before they vanish into the woodwork. Gently does it, Kelly. We don’t want to spook anyone. We just need to talk to them. And we need to speak to the site manager.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  As she walked off to speak to a couple of uniforms Drake turned his attention back to Archie Narayan who was fast approaching.

  ‘Surprised to see you here.’ Drops of rain pooled at the ends of his silvery hair like pearls. His eyebrows were bushy shoots of grey bobbing in the air like insect feelers.

  ‘It was called in as a couple of kids trespassing.’

  ‘And they handed it to you?’ The eyebrows lifted.

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ The coroner was gazing down at the bodies. ‘Looks like someone’s been scrambling all over there. Who put that tarp up?’

  ‘I was trying to protect the evidence.’

  ‘I might have guessed. Who uncovered them?’

  ‘Caretaker. Saw a hand and started digging.’

  ‘Christ!’ the coroner wailed. ‘It’s a free-for-all. Why didn’t he just call the police?’

  ‘He thought he could save someone. Also, and I’m going to stick my neck out here, I’d say that where he comes from, the police are not their friends.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’ Archie Narayan’s sharp eyes studied Drake. ‘How long is it since you handled a real murder investigation?’

  ‘It’s like riding a bike, doc.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘Until they take it away, I’m the one you’re working with, so, what can you tell me?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to let me at least take a closer look?’

  ‘First impressions. They were buried alive, right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, I forgot to bring my crystal ball.’ Archie sighed. ‘I’ll give you a simple answer. Wait for my report.’ In the old days the coroner had been a svelte figure, half-a-dozen sizes smaller. Now he was Falstaff.

  ‘Morning, sir.’ Predictably, Kelly’s cheerful greeting drew a scowl from the coroner.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘DC Marsh, sir.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ The scowl soured into an acid smile.

  ‘Any ideas why anyone would dump a ton of stone on a living person?’

  He gave her a withering look. ‘Perhaps the perpetrator doesn’t like getting his hands dirty.’

  ‘Is he always that cheerful?’ Kelly asked as they watched Narayan walk away.

  ‘Archie is an acquired taste.’

  ‘What was wrong with my question?’

  ‘It’s not personal. He treats everyone the same way.’

  ‘You’re saying I should take it because I’m a woman?’

  ‘Not exactly what I meant.’ Drake glanced at his watch. ‘Let’s focus on the location. Either our killer has some connection to this place, or he’s trying to send a message.’

  ‘Might be easier if he wrote us a bloody letter.’

  Trying to second-guess someone capable of killing in cold blood was a mug’s game. Kelly rubbed her chin with the tip of her biro before scribbling in her notebook.

  ‘What’s Klondike?’

  ‘Charlie Chaplin?’ He glanced sideways at her.

  The name meant something to her, but not enough.

  ‘A place in the Yukon, Canada,’ he went on. ‘Famous gold deposits. People rushed out there by the thousand. It was a stampede. The classic example of a town being swamped by desperate workers.’ Drake nodded at the crowd by the gates. ‘Klondike.’

  ‘You’re a regular walking Wiki-fiend. Worse than Milo.’

  ‘Do we have the site manager?’

  ‘On the way. He had to drop his kids off at school.’

  ‘At least someone’s got his priorities straight. We need a list of anyone that has been sacked recently, anyone with a grudge.’

  ‘You really think that’s what this is?’

  ‘More often than not, the best answer is the one staring you
in the face. Forty-eight hours, Kelly, then it’s out of our hands.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Find out who hasn’t shown up for work this morning.’

  Kelly pointed. ‘One thing, there’s a car parked out there.’

  Drake followed her finger towards a mauve Porsche Cayenne visible through the open gates. It was already ringed by crime-scene tape. They walked out to take a look. When they got there Drake was careful not to touch anything, peering instead through the windows and seeing nothing out of the ordinary. A pile of papers on the back seat. Magazines, brochures of some kind. A cable to charge a telephone was attached to the dashboard panel.

  ‘Did anyone run the plates?’ Drake asked over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s registered to one Marsha Thwaite.’

  ‘Thwaite? Where have I seen that name?’

  Kelly was jerking a thumb over her shoulder. Drake looked up. Running across the bottom of the billboard behind her was the name Thwaite Property Group.

  ‘Okay, well, that’s going to change things.’ Drake turned back to the car with renewed interest. It was parked under a street lamp. The kind of spot you might leave your car if you parked around here late at night. Perhaps there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. A glance up and down the deserted street told Drake that was unlikely.

  The car was unlocked. The keys were still in the ignition. Kelly pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went round to the other side. A handbag had been pushed under the passenger seat. Inside was a driving licence. She held it out for him to look at.

  ‘You think that could be her?’ she asked.

  ‘Could be.’ Drake tried to match the picture to the image in his mind of the female victim he had just seen. A grey, petrified version of this face.

  ‘Let’s assume that it is her, until we can prove otherwise. Get onto the development company. Speak to an assistant, someone who knows Mr and Mrs Thwaite.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘And get forensics to run a full check. Where’s Milo?’

  ‘He’s over by the site office.’ Kelly turned away to use her phone. As they walked back towards the entrance to the site she looked up. ‘Someone is going to call you. An assistant to the director, Mr Howard Thwaite.’