‘Body couldn’t clot the blood fast enough.’ Maryam took a magnifier out of her shoulder bag and studied the cuts.
‘Is there any suggestion the writing was done by a different blade, from the slices that ensured the bleed out occurred?’
‘None. However, as I said, the autopsy and reports are not yet completed.’
‘And Father Jones remains relatively safe until then?’
Barham tensed. Maryam listened.
‘We have no reason to suspect it’s anything but a deliberate ploy to make us look at Father Jones. We have... I have... no expectation that he’ll be implicated.’
Again, gentle words spoken with care. Maryam had a sense of the huge wheels moving around them, grinding slow, grinding small, as the competing politics of the various authorities sought to ensure the dance did not end on their patch; that the axe would not fall upon their head.
‘Have you informed the multi-faith agencies working with the Met and used Bishop Atkins’ contacts in the various London communities? You have informed the hierarchies, if not the local mosques?’
Barham shook her head.
‘I see. That’s what bought my ticket, was it? Everyone agreed to keep all this quiet until after I arrived? An outsider to help keep balance; to blame, if all else failed...’ Maryam hoped Barham would understand the trust she’d accorded her by ending that last sentence out loud.
Barham took it on the chin and kept going. ‘Yes, I suppose that would be one way of looking at it. Your knowledge could have told us firmly this was not religious in nature, just freakish, like the desecration in the graveyard.’
Maryam nodded. ‘But what do you have hope of here, in this case...? What outcome are you looking for from the Congregation? Any religious analyst could have confirmed that context. Why allow us in, in particular? The Congregation is rather... unique in its brief.’
Jenny Barham went quiet, taking a moment to collect her thoughts. Maryam studied her. She was young to be an operational Detective Inspector, barely in her mid-forties. She was aging well in the job. She wore a wedding ring and her dress and figure suggested there was another person somewhere, whom she loved, who wore the match of it. Maryam doubted this woman believed in any God, in any religion, and she was a little lost as to how to respond.
‘We are hoping that we have something ... concrete, to go on, before we approach the leaders in the various Islamic communities in the area. That we could rule out certain things before informing them of the... sacrilege.’
‘Rule out real occult influence? Present it as vandalism or madness but all of human agency?’
Barham laughed. ‘No! Not quite that. I mean, not really.’
‘You don’t believe in the occult, Inspector, in the supernatural?’
Barham looked confused by Maryam’s poise in asking the question.
‘Of course I don’t. I thought that was the point of your Congregation, to prove that such things do not exist and to explain occult events by revealing the human component?’
That she thought such revealed much to Maryam about how Atkins had presented their involvement. He did love to polish his words to reflect his own image.
‘We do investigate all reported occult activity that affects the Church, Inspector, to seek out the human agency in it. We do reveal the tricksters and the fakes, the psychotic and obsessed. That is true, but we do so in order to ascertain when actual occult activity has occurred, as opposed to human.’
‘You can’t tell me you believe in such things! Ghosts and ghoulies, demons and magic?’ Barham’s voice had risen several registers. Her tone had moved from surprise, almost to mockery.
‘What I believe is not of note, Inspector. The Church of Rome, whom I represent in this matter, does believe in spiritual forces beyond human knowledge or understanding.’
The warning was clear. Barham backed down. This was another example of how the world had changed and it was a good change. Government officials were no longer free to mock faith. Sometimes.
‘The issue, Inspector, is not what you or I believe or do not believe. The issue is the beliefs of those whom this case will affect. The issue is how communities will respond and how they may interact. The issue is how we mediate that response through our work.’
Barham blushed this time, but again took the blow on the chin.
‘Can you rule out that this crime has anything to do with the Islamic community?’
‘No. Not at this time. Neither can I confirm it has. Although it is likely the work of an individual, not any organised group. My advice would be that the Islamic authorities that work with the Metropolitan police are informed as a matter of urgency.’
Barham nodded. ‘Can you rule out... spiritual forces?’
Maryam smiled. ‘I appreciate your choice of words, and candour, Inspector. Spiritual forces move people to act in a way that cannot be defined. However, if you mean, can I rule out supernatural forces in this affair and assign it wholly to human action... I cannot do so until I have examined the Church and spoken to those concerned. But I can tell you it is extremely unlikely and highly improbable.’
‘Impossible?’
‘It’s impossible that this man was killed by anything other than a human being. The odds on it being only human agency involved on all levels are extremely high. The odds that supernatural forces are involved, miniscule. But I cannot rule such out until I have examined the Church and then spoken to all concerned.’
‘I appreciate you putting it like that. Yes, I have set up a car to take you over there, although I’ll presume you’ll want to examine the church in the morning, after you’ve had some sleep?’
‘Not at all, I want to look at it tonight, preferably in the middle of the night. It is the witching hour.’
Maryam smile was just enough of a tease for Inspector Barham to bark back a short laugh. The tension dissipated.
‘I’ll have a squad car take you down and send an officer with you. I doubt there is a crime lab person free just now, so for tonight you can only look, not touch.’ She stood up.
Maryam stayed seated and engaged the Inspector past her deliberate moves to signal the interview was over.
‘Before we go any further, tell me you have a Muslim police officer assigned to this case? One who can testify that no one official did anything offensive to his faith whilst interviewing and looking at the evidence?’
Barham stared at Maryam, then sat down again with a plonk. Her tiredness was starting to seep out of the edges, bringing with it her natural personality as opposed to her working identity. How many hours had she been on duty?
Barham took a deep breath. ‘No, I haven’t. Not yet.’
‘And you have used a Muslim crime scene investigator to handle the Holy Pages of the Qur’an? That you have those pages stored in a respectful and safe manner being guarded as a precious thing?’
‘Fuck.’
Barham paid her the compliment of picking up a phone first; delivering orders that she had the name of any Muslim officers on duty on her desk within the next five minutes. She then dialled again and demanded to know if they had any Muslim crime scene technicians on the books at all. Given it was now late at night, Maryam had no idea whom she had called, but the question didn’t appear to faze them.
Barham escorted Maryam to a nearby posh office with an en suite to allow her to freshen up, aware she had come straight from the train station. Maryam took the opportunity to phone ahead to Peckham and inform Father Scott that she would be unlikely to arrive at the priest house for several hours. She did not inform him this was because she’d be next door in the Church itself.
Before Maryam left in the squad car, an eager young detective was added to be her main liaison with the Met. DC Shahrukh Iqbal appeared to have been going off duty when he was called in to be her escort; he very much looked like he’d not long finished a hard shift. She wondered if this would be his first murder case, his sudden appearance caused a few raised eyebrows with the uniformed
officers who were driving them. Maryam understood why Barham had been promoted so young: she learned fast.
As they approached the Church of the Mother of All Sorrows in the dark and the pouring rain, Maryam could see the police tape around the main door and the police officer standing guard. Iqbal held the car door open for her as they sprinted over the path, up the stairs and into the vestibule as fast as they could. The uniformed officer on the steps had opened the doors for them as they approached. The Church was probably over a hundred years old and spoke of Pugin and classic Gothic Revival; vaulting stone arches and stained glass windows. Highly ornate carving and roof painting above the altar and a huge Christ crucified hung central in domed space. The bright light of the crime scene lanterns and the police tape over the entire sanctuary were painful to experience, as was the smell. Blood: dead dried blood. It mingled with the scents of old wood, dust, and incense. Maryam hesitated looking down on the death at the end of the aisle, imagining how it had looked with the corpse upon the altar. A blasphemous mirror image of what hovered above it. How it had smelled when all that blood was fresh?
‘Have you been here before, Detective Iqbal?’
‘Actually, I have.’
Maryam looked at him askance. ‘I thought...?’
‘That I’d just been assigned? I have. I’ve not been here, at this murder scene, but I’ve been in this Church, during orientation.’
‘Ah. I see. You did a course on multi-faith policing in Peckham?’
‘In the Metropolitan area, I visited here then.’
‘So you know Father Jones?’
‘No. I met with a Father Edwards and a Bishop Atkins.’
‘Did Inspector Barham know this?’
‘Not ‘till about an hour ago, no. And please call me Shahrukh.’
‘As-Saamu alaykum, Shahrukh. I am Maryam.’ She did not offer to shake hands.
‘Walaiakum salam, Maryam.’ Even in his English accent, one of privilege and wealth, Shahrukh managed to pronounce her name with the correct emphasis. She looked forward to him speaking it aloud in front of Fred Atkins, especially if Fred continued to refer to her as ‘Marie’ in front of him.
Maryam indicated that Shahrukh should follow her as she walked down the long central aisle heading for the sanctuary.
‘Then you’ll know of the import of this. Have you been informed of all of it?’
‘Nope. Inspector Barham just asked me to accompany you and to assist you...’
‘And to not let me touch anything...’
‘And to not let you touch anything... then to escort you to the other house, then to go home. She said I’d get a full briefing when I came in for duty in the morning.’
‘Wise, very wise. Although I dare say it will be boring for you what I’m about to do.’
‘Why, what are you about to do?’
‘Nothing.’
And nothing was what she did, although it was a very active nothing. With Shahrukh by her side, she walked every inch of the church that was not sealed off by tape. She went into the empty confessional boxes on the gospel side of the church. She sat in each of them, on both sides of the screen, and did nothing for five minutes. She knelt on the penitent’s side and sat in the confessor’s. She avoided the confessional that was sealed off by police tape. She walked out of the nave back into the vestibule and took the stairs up to the choir area and sat there. She asked the detective to walk her out of the Church and into the Sacristy at the back via the outside door, set to one side just for the priests to use. This ensured she didn’t walk through the taped area of the altar. The outside door was tucked to the side and had a large steel sheet over it. She spent ten minutes studying the interior of the small room. When they returned to the nave, she sat at the front pew and looked at the altar for about twenty minutes.
She’d spent about two hours in the Church before hunger and tiredness started to intrude. She asked Shahrukh to walk her through the rain, and the graveyard, to the parish house. He advised her to only leave the house with an umbrella in her hands in the morning as there were a few stalwart local photographers snapping away from the street during the day.
Another uniformed officer stood watch at the door there, who nodded to her as she was allowed in by a very anxious Father Scott.
Inside the hallway, the smell of an old parish house met them: dust, age, furniture polish, fried onions, and cigarette smoke. The days of the smell of cabbage were gone. Maryam doubted that young Father Jones smoked, but the walls gave evidence that Father Edwards, who had been in residence for decades, did so with gusto. Father Scott took Maryam’s coat and indicated she should go through to the formal parlour.
‘I need to freshen up and change my clothing, Father Scott; please show me to my room first. Could I ask you to make some tea and toast please? I’m quite hungry.’
Father Scott nodded and they tip-toed past the sleeping Bishop Atkins, pegged out in a chair by an old gas fire in the parlour, and crept up the stairs. On the landing, one room showed light under the door sill and Maryam thought that would be Father Jones’s. All others were dark. The floor boards creaked as they walked to the end of the hallway and through the farthest door.
It was a visiting priest’s room, as she had expected, clean and bare. It had old linoleum and a faded rug, both from the 1950s, a dark wood bedside table of indeterminate age and design. The lamp and radio on the table were old, but the bed and bedding were modern and looked new. There was a crucifix on the wall above the bed and a couple of portraits of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mother & Child on the walls. A desk sat with a small television sitting on it, unplugged and forlorn. A jug of water and a single glass. A wardrobe and a chest of drawers finished the room. Her cases had been laid carefully to one side.
‘There is a guest bathroom next door. It is not en suite, but no one else will use it.’
Maryam nodded.
‘Would you like some soup?’
‘Oh yes, please, that would be fine.’
‘There is real coffee.’
Her face lit up. ‘Oh, that would be wonderful, thank you.’
She longed to have a shower, but had no idea how the plumbing in this old building would react, no need to wake everyone with creaking and groaning. She washed herself down quickly and dressed in pyjamas and a mandarin collared, floor length house coat. It was only partially a defence against Atkins: after what she’d seen she needed to feel safe and comfortable.
Father Scott, who turned out to be called Andrew but preferred Andy, had warmed through a tin of tomato soup and sliced into a crusty loaf of bread. Tinned soup in the UK was most acceptable and she ate it gratefully. The coffee was almost good and she enjoyed it thoroughly. Andy was a most generous and understanding companion who understood the value in silence. It was something she appreciated about dealing with the clergy: the understanding that silence is often its own defined space and not always an uncomfortable absence.
It was about three a.m. when Fred blundered into the kitchen, having woken with a crick in his neck. One look at the tiredness in Maryam’s face and he ushered both himself and Andy out the door, saying they would return in the early afternoon. Her smile of thanks to him was totally genuine, as he’d restored her memory that he was a kind and caring man who just happened to be good at politics and enjoyed being a power player. She felt chagrined for her less than charitable thoughts of him and scolded herself for her own weakness.
Then she hauled herself into bed with a grateful sigh. She’d been up for almost twenty four hours and her head ached with the weight of the day’s events. Sleep came swiftly.
The dawn filled the room with cold light. The revving of motors and hooting of horns crowded out the bird song. The rain slashed the panes sideways. Maryam slept.
When she rose five hours later, her body was rested and her mind still held a little of the dreaming quality of the spaces in-between. She sat at the desk and shuffled her Tarot cards and placed them out on the desk. In her mind she wa
s seeing the layout of the chapel as she’d walked through it. She placed the cards on the desk in roughly the same positions as the areas that had interested her, finishing with the altar itself. Only once she completed the pattern she had in her mind, did she look down at the lay.
The altar card sprung out at her: The Fool. Card zero. The young man off on adventures, too keen and new and full of the love of life to notice the danger he is in. The Sacristy had the most useful card to her, a reversed King of Swords. It suggested to her that someone was seeking to make most ill, under the guise of something else. Her senses had resonated with something in that room and the lay of the cards had reflected that. The card at the confessional, the reversed Hierophant, rang out a clear warning to her: misinformation, distortion, power achieved from withholding information. Bad advice. Not a card you want to see in connection with giving up on sin and the granting of forgiveness. With no repentance there can be no salvation.
There were a lot of positives in the lay, including the World, card twenty-one. A good ending. Or perhaps, with the Fool there, central, a new beginning that would end well. Interestingly, the card by the vestibule, where the police stood, was the Knight of Swords. Swords were so apt, given the circumstances, and looking at the cards, she looked forward to both meeting Father Jones, and working further with DC Shahrukh Iqbal.
She cleared the lay away and slipped her cards into her shoulder bag. Then she spent an hour in prayer and a further hour in meditation. Around her, people were moving about the house with hushed tones and delicate treads, no doubt trying not to wake her. The banging from the pipes as she showered both confirmed her suspicions and served to alert them to her being awake, so when she entered the kitchen, she was greeted by the smell of fresh coffee, and frying bacon.
A startled Father Jones jumped up from the kitchen table and smiled at her, offering her his hand, which she accepted with a smile. She was dumbstruck for a moment by his size and beauty: his photo had done him no justice. He was easily six foot two, perhaps six three. Both his hands enveloped hers with a gentle but firm hold; long, strong fingers with calluses that betrayed much reading, writing, and if she was not wrong, the playing of the guitar. His eyes were hazel with green flecks, a startling contrast with the dark caramel of his skin. His Welsh accent, cultured and enchanting in one. His physique had the sharp and supple tones of the professional athlete. When he smiled you felt your heart lift. It was no wonder the graffiti he’d been attacked with had concentrated on his sexuality. Wyn Jones shone with energy and humanity in a very warm and real body of flesh. The bruise on his cheek and the slight cut on his lip only served to highlight his perfection. Poor man, how he must have had to fight to make others believe his vocation was pure.
Fragments Page 8
