The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  On a high stool at the Costa Coffee bar by the exit a young woman with blonde hair and more stylish sunglasses worn high on her forehead chatting girlishly on her iPhone watched him go. Only the most assiduous observer would have noticed the change in the tone of her conversation.

  10

  The traffic meant it took Marcus nearly forty-five minutes to get into central London from Heathrow, complicated by the fact that he was unfamiliar with driving in the metropolis and that he had no idea where they were headed.

  ‘Just drive,’ Nazreem had said, climbing into his battered baby-blue Peugeot 406 in the concrete maze of the Terminal 3 car park. She had insisted on throwing her rucksack onto the back seat on top of Marcus’s piles of papers, sandwich wrappers and empty Lucozade bottles.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London. Where else?’

  Almost anywhere else, Marcus had thought, dismayed by her brusque, almost unfriendly tone. He had imagined taking her back to Oxford, showing her round the ‘city of dreaming spires’, dinner at High Table in All Souls, the other dons taken aback by his beautiful exotic companion. But deep down he had known that was just wishful thinking. Nazreem was a woman with a purpose. He would just have to wait for her to share it with him. Or not.

  He was not sure if she had ever been to London before. Probably not, he surmised, although she seemed to be paying undue attention to the queues of cars exiting the car park and on the crowded M4 motorway, even for a first-time tourist. London’s traffic was bad but it was not unique.

  ‘We need to find rooms,’ she had said, beginning to lighten up as they came down off the Westway overpass into the busy Marylebone Road. Marcus noted the plural, but then he had not been making any assumptions. ‘Something cheap, where I can pay cash.’

  ‘There’s no need …’ Marcus began. If she was going to be a first-time tourist in London he could at least afford to put them up somewhere decent, not the Savoy or the Dorchester perhaps but not one of the flop houses around Paddington.

  ‘Somewhere close to the British Museum.’

  Marcus nodded. Maybe that was it: this was a business trip, she had a meeting set up and he was just a useful incidental. He didn’t know much about hotels in the area but was pretty sure there was a respectable establishment on Russell Square, a short walk from the museum.

  The traffic crawled along the Marylebone Road and through the Euston underpass. A taxi driver leaned out of the window of his black cab and swore vociferously at Marcus when he pulled abruptly across the road to be in the right-turn lane that led down towards the British Museum.

  He had come this way before and found it confusing: despite a mixture of names that suggested a series of broad open expanses – Upper Woburn Place, Tavistock Square, Woburn Place, Russell Square – and a volume of traffic that suggested a major thoroughfare, the reality was one continuous relatively narrow, clogged road, with the odd patch of green to the side, pedestrians darting continuously into the spaces between cars and double-decker buses relentlessly elbowing their way through.

  The difference was that since the last time Marcus had driven down here the route – the very place names – had acquired a fresh veneer of horror. He could not look at the red double-deckers without thinking of the horrific image of one very similar on this very road, its top ripped off, the buildings around smeared with blood. Thirteen people had died on one bus in the most publicly visible attack on the bloody Thursday in July 2005, when Al Qa’eda had struck at the heart of London. He wondered if Nazreem was even aware of it when she suddenly grabbed his arm, saying: ‘Stop here. This’ll do.’

  Marcus looked askance at her and then at the drab red-brick building she was pointing at. It was indeed a hotel, but one that looked as if it had seen better days, although possibly it never had. It was a six-storey, anonymous-looking pile except for a blue neon sign that said Country Hotel. He was about to protest, but Nazreem was already opening the door in the stationary traffic and hoisting her rucksack from the back seat.

  Marcus found it surprisingly easy to find a free parking space with a meter until he read its extortionate rates per minute and the reminder that he would also have to pay the £8 daily central London congestion charge. He hurried into the hotel lobby, a dingy place with a smoky, down-at-heel atmosphere peopled by men in tweed jackets or anoraks and women in sturdy shoes. The concierge shot a shifty glance at him as he came up behind Nazreem.

  ‘Two rooms was it then, miss? Adjoining okay? Shared facilities,’ with an insinuating smile. Marcus decided the hotel clientele was probably used on an equal basis by out-of-town farming folk and adulterous couples looking for a cheap venue for illicit trysts.

  ‘That’ll be £40 each for the night then. Cash upfront will do nicely. Oh, and sign the register, would you. As you like.’ It was obviously a pro forma rather than official request.

  Marcus managed to edge Nazreem aside and get his wallet out – he was determined to pay if nothing else – and was bemused to see Nazreem fill in the registration forms in the names Marie Mathieu and John West. He said nothing and grabbed her rucksack with one hand, only to put it down again suddenly, surprised by the weight.

  ‘I take back what I said about you travelling light. What’s in here anyway?’

  Nazreem spun round and shot him a dark look. ‘Leave it alone. It’s books. Important ones.’

  ‘You’ve brought them with you.’

  ‘Yes, for a friend. At the museum. I told you.’

  He was about to say she hadn’t but thought better of it. Nazreem hoisted the rucksack onto her back and gestured at him to follow her towards the lift.

  ‘Is there a reason why you gave them false names?’ he said as the lift groaned to a halt at the fourth floor. ‘Protecting our modesty?’

  Nazreem gave a long, weary sigh and turned to him with a ghost of a smile, the first he had seen on her face since that initial moment of meeting at the airport: ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a reaction to not having to produce identity documents every five minutes.

  ‘Look, Marcus, you’re right. There’s lots we need to talk about. But just right now, I need to freshen up. A good long soak in the bath to wash the desert sand away.’ She leaned forward and gave him the slightest of pecks on the cheek. ‘Just let me wind down a bit. I’ll knock on your door in …’ she looked at her watch. It was just gone five p.m. ‘… two hours’ time?’

  Marcus smiled back and shrugged: ‘Whatever you say. You’re the boss.’

  The room was even dingier than the lobby, with peeling wallpaper in one corner and a low, metal-framed cot with worn sheets. Marcus shook his head and wondered how he was going to pass the time. There was an ancient-looking fourteen-inch television but he couldn’t find the remote control. He heard the lock turn on the other side of the door to the bathroom which the two rooms shared, then the sound of water running. He turned the television on manually and pushed buttons to see what was on. There was no cable or satellite, just the five terrestrial channels, and reception on the fifth was fuzzy, but BBC2 was showing highlights from the British Lions’ rugby tour of South Africa. He sat back relatively contentedly to watch.

  The room was stifling however and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. There was no air conditioning and after a few minutes, he got up, crossed to the window, pulled the flimsy net curtains aside and opened it. The sound of the street rose to meet him, a dull cacophony of traffic noise. The air was not much cooler, but at least it was relatively fresh, if you discounted the exhaust fumes. He leaned out to push the window wide and immediately caught his breath. There on the pavement below him, unmistakable with her mane of thick dark hair now completely uncovered and the preposterous red and green rucksack on her back, was Nazreem climbing into the back of a black taxi.

  For a moment Marcus stared in sheer disbelief. He wanted to call down to her, not that he would have been heard, but he realised he had no idea what he would have said. He was literally speechless. The cab pulled out into the cr
awling traffic, moving at little more than walking pace at best. He could run down the stairs and be out in the street in less time than it would take the cab driver to reach the next corner, barely twenty yards away. But what would be the point? If she wanted to slip away without telling him, there was nothing he could do about it. And despite the rising lump in his throat, he didn’t believe that. If she had not wanted to see him again, there had been no need even to mention that she was coming to the country, let alone ask him to meet her at the airport. No, she would be back and she would explain. If she wanted to.

  It was then that he noticed the bearded man with dark glasses on the other side of the street folding up a copy of a newspaper and climbing into a black Mercedes with tinted windows. There was something that for a second seemed disconcertingly familiar. Not about the car; black Mercedes were common enough, particularly as chauffeured cars, the sort you routinely saw waiting to pick up guests at the airport or outside hotels. Not hotels like this, though.

  11

  Munich

  Lieutenant Karl Weinert of the Bavarian Kriminalpolizei paced up and down in the corridor outside the forensic laboratory of the Landeskriminalamt in Munich’s Maillinger Strasse. He had been there for twenty minutes already and he was not a man accustomed to being kept waiting, especially when he had been told the results were ready.

  It was not as if he was expecting much. The odds on getting any sort of identification were slim, but under the circumstances they had not much else to go on. In all his years in the force he had seen more than his share of gruesome sights: girls imported by people traffickers and kept as prostitutes in conditions that would have had animal rights campaigners up in arms, horrific facial scars and physical mutilations inflicted on victims in Turkish gang wars, and more recently the cynically brutal, almost wanton slayings that were the mark of encroachment by Russian Mafiosi. But he had never seen anything quite as grotesque as this.

  The bumpkin provincial officers in the little town of Altötting, used to little more than crowd control and the occasional outbreak of pickpocketing during pilgrimages to the local shrine, had been overwhelmed. The town police chief had breathed a visible sigh of relief at being able to hand over to the big boys from the state criminal police.

  Weinert and Richard Hulpe, his regular collaborator, however, had not been 100 per cent sure they weren’t the victims of some sort of practical joke, until they had got there and seen the evidence themselves. He was still straining even to imagine what sort of warped and seriously sick mentality could conceive of having such a vile parcel delivered – by an apparently anonymous courier service (they were working on that) – to a nun in the chapel of one of the holiest shrines in the country. Unsurprisingly, the good sister was still in a state of shock.

  They had found it difficult even to start an investigation on the spot; there seemed little point in conducting interviews at random amongst an extensive religious community or even the local lay people employed, but it would have to be done. Under the circumstances he found it more than incredible that the perpetrator could be local, but it was the first rule of police procedure that the murderer usually knew his (or her) victim.

  The trouble in this case was establishing the identity of the victim. There were no reports of any missing persons in the Altötting area, and certainly not among the tightly knit religious community. He had hoped to keep the more salacious details out of the public domain. When searching for a killer, particularly a sadist which this one undoubtedly was, it was always better to keep something back. He had said as much to Sister Galina, but the nun, who was still in the order infirmary, had made it abundantly clear – with no more than a hand gesture – that she had not the slightest intention of revealing any more than the absolute minimum. And under the circumstances, Weinert had had no problem believing her.

  But inevitably the word had got out. He did not know who had leaked it and there was next to no point in trying to find out. The tabloid press had a way of finding out the goriest details of murder cases, and in one like this there had never been any prospect of imposing a gagging order ‘for the sake of the investigation’. It had been for his own sake too, he admitted privately. As it had turned out, however, the circumstances – the religious setting and the sense of deliberate desecration – had kept the worst elements of the force’s inimitable black humour at bay. So far.

  He had no doubts that when the investigation ran into the sand, as he had a horrible feeling this one was going to, he would still end up being labelled ‘Inspector Dickhead’. At least they had kept the worst of it out of the press. Releasing the details about the heart was gruesome enough to feed the interest that might – just might – produce a lead; keeping back the more grotesque details about the genitalia would at least give a means to weed out any phoney confessions. God knows, releasing that sort of detail might have prompted a deluge of them. There had been that guy who volunteered to be eaten alive, penis first, by Germany’s home-grown cannibal, and had his wish come true.

  Weinert had little optimism about anything useful coming out of the forensics. Apart from Sister Galina, none of the other members of the religious community had touched the bag, unsurprisingly enough. The local police, who had been summoned immediately, had been so horrified at the thought of leaving evidence of murder within the confines of a sacred chapel – particularly evidence of this nature – that they had immediately removed it to the mortuary of the local hospital. Admittedly they had preferred to use tweezers to hold even the bag, but Weinert thought the chances of retrieving identifiable fingerprints slim. Identification of the victim was the first step and it did not look like being easy.

  The lab boys back in Munich had not held out much hope. The chances of the victim’s DNA being on a database were negligible. It was at times like these that policemen were tempted to wish that governments would introduce compulsory DNA registration for the entire population. In Wienert’s opinion this was going to be a case that stayed open for years, or rather opened and shut in everything but name. Because the sister had failed to get even the probably phoney details of the supposed courier company, there was no way of being sure the package had been sent from within Germany.

  Weinert was therefore irritated at having to wait outside the labs until some boffin in a white coat came out to tell him, as he was certain they would, that the case stopped here. It was at that moment that the lab door opened and Dr Heidi Wenger emerged and held out her hand with a grim but satisfied look on her face.

  ‘Nasty business. Very nasty.’

  Weinert nodded. He had no time for platitudes.

  ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. I don’t know whether or not you’ll thank me.’

  Weinert smiled tightly. He knew: he wouldn’t.

  ‘Right, well as you can imagine, the most immediate conclusion was that the deceased was an adult male.’

  Weiner grunted a suppressed laugh. That much had hardly taken a forensic scientist to deduce.

  ‘That, however, hardly narrows down the field. Then we took a DNA sample.’

  Yes, yes, that had been the whole point of the exercise.

  ‘But unfortunately it didn’t match anything on any of the Bavarian databases.’

  God, these people could draw out statements of the bloody obvious. Time to go back to his own office, fill in the paperwork, then do a few perfunctory interviews in Altötting before consigning the case to the ‘dormant’ files.

  ‘We drew a blank on the national database too.’ Yes, yes, surprise, surprise. ‘However,’ Wenger emphasised the word looking down her nose at him as if his scepticism was a bad attitude in a sulky schoolboy about to be given detention, ‘as we already had to get in touch with the boys from the federal Kripo up at Wiesbaden, we asked them to run it through their international records too.’

  Weinert frowned: he had never had direct dealings with Interpol himself, but he was well aware that international cooperation, even between the EU countries, was seldom as str
aightforward as might be hoped. There were always human rights hurdles to jump to get access to other forces’ national DNA records.

  ‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking,’ said Wenger. ‘That sort of thing can take days if not weeks. Not in this case, however.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me we’ve got an identity match? That we know who the victim is.’ Weinert had noticed a suppressed smirk of satisfaction on the forensic scientist’s lips. Now it broadened into almost a smile:

  ‘Oh yes. In fact we’ve been able to ascertain more than you might have expected. A lot more.’

  Weinert grunted. If he was about to be impressed by this long-winded self-important woman in a white coat, he was damned if he was going to let it show.

  ‘To be precise, in theory we know exactly where and when he died.’

  ‘You do?’ Weinert could scarcely restrain a look of extreme scepticism. Even presented with an intact corpse, pathologists in his experience were seldom eager to volunteer a time of death to within less than a period of several hours. Forensics could usually be relied on to give some clues as to where a murder had been committed if the body were not found in situ: there were things like fibre samples, pollen, stuff like that. But self-confidence on this scale was something new to him. There again, he wondered what that ‘in theory’ bit meant.

  ‘You look surprised,’ Heidi Wenger said. ‘You should be. Apparently he died at 00:18 hours yesterday.’

  Weinert physically felt his jaw drop. It was not the unusual – almost unheard of – precision of the timing that astonished him. It was the date. ‘But … but … the … the “thing” was delivered twenty-four hours earlier.’

  ‘Quite. Do you want to know where we believe he died?’

  Weinert nodded: talk about a question of the fucking obvious. But there was no stopping her relishing her moment of glory.

  ‘Would you believe a place called Erez?’

  Weinert shrugged. He could believe almost anything. ‘Never heard of it.’