The Divinities

by Parker Bilal

  After that he found himself on a Hercules C130, swooping down at an unbelievably high angle into Baghdad. Then from there back to London. In less than twelve hours he found himself back in Freetown, standing in the rain, looking up at the gallery and the boarded-up door of the old flat. Burn marks stretched up the wall over the plywood sheets. Flecks of grey ash floated in the air like butterflies.

  There had been a mix-up in the booking at the crematorium in Lambeth. Another family was already waiting for them to be finished. They stood under umbrellas outside in the rain, holding their flowers, watching him as he left.

  As he was walking to the bus stop, beret in hand, a car slowed beside him. A Mazda, canary yellow with a sun roof. About as cheesy an excuse for a sports car as you could find. The man behind the wheel ticked all the boxes for a midlife crisis. Over the purple shirt hung a fistful of medallions and juju beads, cowries and shark’s teeth. Drake recognized his father despite this transformation and the years since he had last seen him.

  ‘You lost?’

  ‘Came to pay my respects, didn’t I?’

  ‘A little late, don’t you think?’

  Drake had started walking again. Now his father pulled the car over to the kerb and jumped out. He had put on weight, a hefty belly pushing out the waistband of his shiny trousers. He blocked Drake’s way.

  ‘Don’t be like that. Time like this, we should be together.’

  His accent was not what he remembered. A jumble of North Africa meets South London, with a dash of West Indian thrown in for good measure. This was the only consistent aspect of his father that would never change; the ability to shapeshift, to turn himself into something new. Right now he was dressed like a pimp from an old 1970s blaxploitation film. The blonde in the passenger seat added to the effect. All he needed was a wide-brimmed hat, which Drake wouldn’t have been surprised to find in the back seat.

  ‘Come on, let’s go get a drink. We should talk.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Drake.

  ‘Denny?’ the woman whined. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was wearing a dress that revealed more than it covered up. She tossed her hair and pouted before drawing on the fat joint she was holding.

  ‘She’s hungry,’ snickered his father. ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘Denny!’

  ‘It’s what I’m calling meself these days. A lot of bad feeling towards us.’ He sniffed. ‘So what’s all this I hear, you bein’ in the army?’

  ‘It’s a job. Regular hours, roof over your head, money in your pocket.’

  ‘Blood money,’ nodded his father. His skin was darker than Drake recalled.

  ‘I have to get going.’ Drake moved to get by. His father stepped off the kerb, went back round to get into the car.

  ‘Once you sell your soul to them there’s no going back.’

  A cloud of black exhaust coughed from the rear end as the car broke away with complete disregard for traffic. Horns sounded in its wake like a fanfare.

  It felt like a relief to be back in the shuddering draughty interior of a transport plane, hemmed in between loaded pallets. He’d requested an immediate return to duty and he was glad of that. It was a long, slow ride but he felt safe there, sleeping upright in his seat. The warm judder of the engines. Then the first gust of dusty air hit him in the face as he was coming down the ramp. A kind of homecoming.

  The halfway house in Earls Court was steadily crumbling into little pieces. A rundown row of grey terraced houses that shuddered beneath the steady flow of heavy-goods vehicles and coaches rumbling past. The front yard was cluttered with junk; rusty bicycles, overturned rubbish bins and the skeletal remains of what looked like an upright piano that had fallen from a great height. The debris trailed up the front steps to a door that was patched over with a sheet of plywood. It swung open beneath his touch. A dark hallway had been stripped down to bare floorboards and hanging tails of tattered wallpaper. The smell of rot mixed with fresh paint coming from somewhere. A sign on the wall said the house was untended during daytime hours but a monitor could be reached in case of an emergency. A telephone number had been scratched out and written over so many times you couldn’t make sense of it.

  Drake walked down the hallway, following the stench of piss. Maybe cats, maybe just people who hadn’t been housebroken. One step down from hospital. One step up from living on the streets.

  At the end of the corridor a large common room awaited him, with high bay windows facing onto a backyard full of more junk. A century ago this house might have been occupied by a well-to-do family. Now it teetered on the brink of the abyss. A counter fenced off an open kitchen to the right of the door. Everything was cluttered with pans, dirty dishes and scattered cereal packets. A thin man was sifting through the grey water in the sink as if panning for gold. He looked up and stood there, his jawbone twitching from side to side.

  ‘Waleed?’

  In his fifties, dishevelled, the man resembled a scarecrow. All he needed was straw in his knotted hair. There was paint on his fingers and on his clothes. He stared Drake in the eye as he used the spoon he had found to shovel cereal into his mouth, milk dribbling around the corners.

  ‘You a fucking copper?’

  Drake repeated his question.

  ‘What’s a fucking copper doin’ ’ere then?’

  Drake moved on into the big room. A young man was seated over by the bay window in an armchair scarred by cigarette burns. His face was puffy. Close up he had the look of a lost soul. Like a teenager who’d fallen asleep at the wheel and was trying to wake up four decades later. Rip van fucking Winkle.

  ‘Waleed? Are you Waleed Ahmad?’

  ‘Who are you?’ The figure in the chair looked up.

  ‘He’s a fucking copper is what he is,’ growled the man from the doorway behind him. Drake ignored him. When he moved closer, the young man reared back slightly. His eyes were at half-mast and what you could see of them was dulled by medication. Drake wondered if perhaps it might have been an idea to bring Crane with him. At least she had some experience of this sort of thing. Brilliant, Drake. Always coming up with bright ideas when it’s way too late.

  ‘I’m DS Drake.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ nodded the boy. He had a weird smile on his face, like he knew something nobody else knew.

  Drake moved slowly round to the window and leaned his weight against the frame.

  ‘How are you doing, Waleed?’

  ‘Don’t talk to him. He’s a copper. They lie!’

  ‘Hey, do us a favour, will you, go and find some kitten to torture,’ Drake called over. The man ducked out of sight into the kitchen.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ said Waleed. His voice was a twisted mumble.

  ‘I never said you did. I just came to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Questions? About what?’

  ‘About the fire. Remember the fire?’

  Waleed’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t start it.’

  ‘Nobody said you did.’ Drake held up his hands. ‘Did I say that?’

  Waleed stared at Drake for a moment and then, slowly, he shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘No, exactly.’ Drake nodded. ‘So, do you remember where you were when the fire started?’

  ‘I was here.’

  ‘I can vouch for that,’ said the scarecrow in the kitchen. ‘I can vouch for anything he says.’

  Drake ignored him. ‘Tell me about the masjid.’

  ‘What about it?’ Waleed frowned. He began picking at the arm of the chair.

  ‘You’re an only child, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The swollen face cracked in a wonky smile. ‘They took one look at me and decided never again.’

  ‘When you stayed there you would stay in the little room by the front door?’

  ‘It was easier. I didn’t want to live upstairs with them. They . . . worry about me.’

  Drake nodded. ‘You need some distance, that makes sense.’
<
br />   ‘Exactly.’ The dull cloud seemed to lift from Waleed’s eyes for a moment. ‘Distance.’

  ‘Tell me about Magnolia Quays, Waleed.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I heard you had a job there.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ He was growing agitated, writhing about in the chair as if trying to get out of it. ‘I mean, why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘They’re just questions.’

  ‘What does any of this have to do with the fire?’

  ‘Hey!’ The kitchen scarecrow was back, this time holding a big knife. Waleed squealed and jumped to his feet, hiding behind the chair.

  ‘Careful with that thing,’ said Drake.

  ‘You can’t come here, just come here asking questions.’ Water dripped from the steel blade.

  ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’

  ‘Sure, that would suit you, right? Fucking copper!’ He stepped forward. Waleed chose that moment to rush by and out of the room. Drake made to go after him but the scarecrow thrust the knife in his way. Drake sidestepped, blocked the man’s wrist and then twisted it into a lock. The fingers splayed open and the knife clattered to the floor.

  ‘You can’t do that! That’s assault!’

  ‘Not even close.’ Drake kept turning the man’s wrist until he was kneeling on the floor. Then he let go and went after Waleed.

  The front door stood open.

  CHAPTER 26

  When she stepped into the outer office Ray found Heather feeding the fish. She turned away from the tank, still sprinkling fish food on the surface of the water.

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Your nine o’clock. Richard Haynes?’

  ‘I don’t have a nine o’clock, Heather. I thought I made that clear. I don’t want any private patients while we’re on this case.’

  ‘Sorry, but I understood you had arranged it yourself.’ Heather stood clutching the pot of fish food. She lowered her voice. ‘He’s an old client of Doctor Rosen’s.’

  ‘Are you sure? I never arranged anything.’ Ray exhaled slowly. ‘You’re saying he’s in my office now?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I just assumed . . .’ Heather started to speak but Ray held up a hand.

  ‘It’s all right, but check with me first. No matter what the patient tells you.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Heather.’

  ‘Sorry!’

  Richard Haynes was seated on the sofa leafing through a book of landscape photographs by Ansel Adams that Ray kept on the coffee table for patients to distract themselves with. He jumped to his feet as she came in.

  ‘Mr Haynes, I’m sorry, there seems to have been some sort of misunderstanding.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I feel like it’s my fault.’ He was still holding the book for some reason. ‘My aunt, you see, Margot Haynes? She was a long-time patient of Doctor Rosen’s. He was practically family to her. I simply assumed . . .’

  Haynes resembled a would-be hipster on the verge of a breakdown. He was wearing a chequered shirt and tweed jacket. The glasses and scruffy hair gave him a rumpled look, as if he had just got out of bed.

  ‘I have a history, you know, of substance abuse. I’m a recovering addict.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Ray moved around behind her desk. There were two folders lying there, put there by Heather. The first was marked with the name Margot Haynes, written in Julius’s distinctive handwriting. The second one, thinner, bore the name Richard Haynes.

  ‘I brought over my file from my former therapist. I know it’s forward of me, but my aunt swore by Doctor Rosen, and I am rather desperate. When I heard he had passed away I just knew I had to try you.’

  Ray sat down and began to go through the file. It was an awkward situation, but there were two factors which obliged her to at least show some modicum of interest. The first was financial, and the second was the debt she felt to Julius and his legacy. This was personal. She couldn’t simply turn Haynes away.

  It took her five minutes to glean the basic information from the file: Richard Haynes was forty-two years old and working through the impact of his wife’s recent suicide. They had no children. He had been in counselling for three months and was also being treated for addiction to alcohol and cocaine.

  ‘I’m sorry if this seems rushed, but you have rather sprung this on me and I do have a lot of work and . . .’

  ‘I appreciate that. I wouldn’t be here, except for the fact that I had an anxiety attack,’ Haynes was quick to explain. He stared down at his hands. ‘I simply couldn’t deal with it. I was afraid, you understand, that I would go back to my old ways.’

  ‘Don’t you have a support group for that?’

  ‘I do, or rather I did.’ Haynes was silent again. ‘I have trust issues.’

  Crane studied him carefully. Automatically, Ray was doing what she always did, which was to listen. That was her job, listening. To the patient, to the crime scene, to the autopsy report. It was all there. All you had to do was pay attention. Patients often didn’t even know what it was they were trying to tell themselves. They couldn’t. They came in, sat down and started talking. They had something they wanted to get out. They just didn’t know how to start, or where, in their confused range of emotions, the important stuff had got lost in the mix. Her job was to guide them through. To unravel the tangle. To help each patient to find what it was, where their particular pain was located. She sometimes liked to think of herself as a kind of exorcist. A person who drove the bad spirits away. We all have our inner demons. They gather, build up, accumulate over time.

  Already she was beginning to sense that the problem with Richard Haynes was that he was not only intelligent, but also perceptive. You had to prove your sincerity. You couldn’t feign interest. His nerves were so wound up he would be able to tell immediately.

  ‘Look, since you’re here, we may as well do this, but I can’t promise that we can continue treatment.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said earnestly. ‘I can only apologize again.’

  Ray clicked on her recorder and took her place in the armchair opposite him.

  ‘Okay, why don’t you begin by just talking me through everything.’

  ‘Well, the fact is, I feel guilty. I know I shouldn’t. There’s no reason for me to feel that way. It wasn’t my fault that she died.’

  ‘Suicide is often harder to come to terms with than other forms of death.’

  ‘Other forms of death?’

  ‘When we lose someone in an accident, or to an illness, there is a kind of logic that applies. We can understand that this was out of our hands. There was nothing we could do.’ Ray spoke slowly, patiently, in an effort to convey the fact that she was trying to understand his pain. She was distracted partly by the fact that Haynes had a kind of halfway smile on his face as she spoke, which made her wonder. ‘Suicide leaves us with questions about whether we could have done more. To be more understanding, more supportive, more sensitive to the other person’s pain.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Haynes said after a long silence. ‘And this is hard for me to talk about, but I was often filled with feelings of loathing. In some ways I wanted her to die.’

  ‘You wanted her to die, rather than you wanted to end the marriage?’

  Haynes grinned. ‘I knew this was the right place to come. Already, I feel you are helping me to see my situation more clearly.’

  Ray leaned back in her chair. Once in a while, a patient would turn up trying to challenge her in some kind of intellectual way. They saw themselves as superior. Some couldn’t handle the idea of a woman knowing more about them than they did themselves. Listening to Haynes now, it almost sounded like listening to a scripted conversation. He seemed to have constructed his answers to elicit a particular response. The question was why.

  ‘So which is it?’ she said.

  Haynes crouched forwards, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘It wasn’t about our relati
onship. No, I think I just wanted her to die. More than that, I wanted her to suffer.’

  ‘That’s quite a statement. Are you sure that’s how you felt?’

  ‘You mean am I chanelling my grief into some form of self-harm as a kind of punishment?’

  ‘I mean, do you really think you would have been capable of hurting her, making her suffer?’

  ‘It’s strange, but I honestly think I was.’

  ‘Okay, can you tell me why?’

  ‘The thing is, I always felt we were not compatible. She lived such a superficial life, never questioning anything, never curious. You see?’

  ‘If that was the case, why stay together? Why not separate?’

  ‘That would have been impossible. She often said that if I left her she would kill herself.’

  ‘Does that go some way towards explaining your feelings of guilt?’

  ‘Oh, it’s much worse than that.’ The smile on Haynes’ face was rigid, almost like a grimace of pain. ‘You see, I suspect that I might have actually encouraged her.’

  ‘Suspect, or know?’

  ‘I’m not sure, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

  Ray set her notebook on the arm of the chair and locked her fingers together. ‘Mr Haynes, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps you might be better off with another analyst.’

  ‘Ah,’ Haynes snorted. ‘You don’t have time for me. My case is not interesting enough.’

  ‘It’s not that. I feel that your case deserves more than I can offer at this time.’ Crane got to her feet. ‘I can get my assistant to draw up a list of colleagues. All of whom come highly recommended.’ She held out her hand. ‘And of course, there will be no charge for this session.’

  Haynes remained seated. ‘You think I’m intimidated by you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It’s true that I find it distracting that you are so attractive. Can I say that?’

  ‘You can say it, but it only makes me more convinced that you would be better off with another analyst.’

  ‘Sure, I get it,’ Haynes nodded. ‘You’re uncomfortable with my case, with me.’