Preacher Boy

by Gwyn GB

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, then turned to look at the house.

  She watched him, nothing like what she had expected with his credentials. He was handsome too. Strong. She might have only just met him, but she could see he didn’t give much away. He had eyes like traction beams, though. When he looked at her, she couldn’t look away. If she didn’t have Mr Chowdhury at home, she’d be sorely tempted to see what Dr Harrison Lane got up to out of work. She watched him put on a forensic suit and overshoes and log in with the crime-scene manager before standing in the doorway for a few moments and heading inside.

  The hallway was like that of any other wealthy house you might enter. Immaculate with a mahogany table and mirror. Harrison scanned the walls and floors, opening the drawers of the table, which were empty. The hallway led to a neat, understated dining room on the left, set up for formal dinner parties and clearly decked out to impress. To the right of the hall, a sitting room with leather sofas and plush carpets. To Harrison it smacked of show-house, neat, uncharacteristic decor. There were a couple of photographs of the family—two small children and the parents—but it was a sterile environment. Was this a family trying to distance itself from its Brazilian roots, or were they trying to cover something up? He saw no evidence of Catholic or Christian beliefs. No evidence of any religion.

  He progressed into the kitchen, careful to only step on the areas marked out by forensics. In here it was obvious where the children spent most of their time. A small square table was set up in one corner; it contained paintbrushes and paper, along with a stack of storybooks. Next to the table were a couple of boxes with colourful toys. There was also another table, which looked like where the family ate. Salt and pepper and chilli sauce sat in the middle. The kitchen was immaculate as well. Two empty dog beds were by the Aga, and all the surfaces were spotless and empty.

  Harrison scanned the entire room. Kids’ drawings were stuck neatly to the walls like an art gallery, and a couple of other creations, obviously from the children, were on the big American style fridge in the corner. Anyone coming into this house would think they were the perfect family. If the dog walker had to come into the house, that’s exactly what she would have thought—until she went upstairs.

  Harrison headed back to the hall. This was a three-storey town house, and the next level contained the master bedroom; two other bedrooms, which were clearly where the children slept; and a family bathroom. All rooms also had en suites with showers. Harrison looked around quickly. This floor was exactly the same as the ground floor. Show-home tidy. He didn’t waste much time. It was the upper floor, contained by a lockable door, where he knew he’d find the real answers.

  Smell was the first sense that alerted him. He smelled death, relatively fresh, not overbearing yet, but it was definitely in the air. But there was another odour. He had an idea what it was but needed more evidence. As he arrived on the top floor, the tone of the house changed completely. The walls in the upper corridor were covered in grotesque masks and imagery depicting spirits taking possession of the living, faces painted as skulls, and wooden effigies. Harrison noted the bulbs in the ceiling lamps had all been removed, which meant whoever came up here would have to pass these wall hangings in semi-darkness.

  The first room he came to was a small bathroom, certainly not like the luxury en suites he’d seen downstairs, but instead a cracked basin and ancient bath with no shower. Two thin towels hung from nails in the wall, and there were no mirrors.

  He went farther down the corridor and into a room that had a dormer for natural light—at least it should do if the large board covering placed across it was taken down. In the middle of the room, at the back, was a small wooden shrine. On the top were rows of candles bookended by two human skulls. Two black dolls sat on either side of the lower ledge on which a beheaded pigeon lay; plaster statues surrounded them. One of them Harrison recognised as the Orixa Omolu or Omulu, a long-haired god feared and revered in the African-Brazilian religions such as Macumba.

  Feathers lay scattered on the floor, evidence of previous sacrifices, and coloured candles skirted the edges of the room. Even more concerning, on the floor two flogging whips lay like snakes among the feathers, and on either side large metal rings were attached to the walls.

  Harrison took all this in. He also noticed the slight stain around the air grille at the top of the rear wall behind the shrine. When he looked behind him, towards the door, there was a round hole high up in the wall opposite.

  There was one more room to visit on this level. It too had a lock on the outside and was the source of the smells that had hit him the moment he’d arrived on the floor. The forensics team had pulled back from the room when they’d seen him come up, so it was empty—at least of the living.

  The first smell emanated from the dead girl lying on a bed against the far wall, and another smell came from the rotting goat’s head placed on a table underneath what would have been the window, had it not also been boarded up. The other bed was empty, but Harrison saw smears of blood on the pillowcase and some white, chalk-like marks on the blanket. There was a bucket in the far corner with a lid, which he assumed to be the toilet. Next to the goat’s head was a large empty jug, and Harrison located two empty glasses by the girls’ beds.

  He approached the dead girl. She could have only been around nineteen or twenty. She looked thin and undernourished, her skin the colour of fear. Her clothes were worn, and around her neck was a protective talisman. She was curled up, fetal-like, and the look on her face wasn’t one of peace. Harrison silently muttered an expletive at the people who had done this. Her neck showed signs of abrasion, as did her left ankle.

  He sighed, mindful that their priority had to be the young girl still alive, and crossed the room to sniff at the jug on the table. Straight away he detected what he’d been expecting: a musty fishy smell that hit him at the back of his throat.

  Harrison had two more things to check.

  In the hallway, he found the muddle of forensics officers waiting for him to finish. ‘Have you been into the loft area yet?’ he asked them.

  ‘Not yet. It’s not been highlighted as a site of interest. We were processing in there first,’ an older man replied.

  ‘Is it okay if I stick my head up there? I suspect there’s easy access.’

  The man shrugged. ‘That’s fine. You’re covered over. What are you expecting to find?’

  ‘Some magic tricks,’ Harrison replied.

  He pulled the rope for the loft hatch, and as he’d expected, a set of steps unfolded and a light automatically sprang on up above them. Harrison climbed up just far enough to peer into the attic and confirm his theory. The room was used for storage, so there were some boxes on one side, but at the far end, he saw a machine with what looked like a gas canister next to it. He retreated back down.

  ‘You’ll want to secure up there as well. It will be critical evidence.’

  He didn’t wait for the forensics team to question him further, but instead headed straight back downstairs again. DI Chowdhury stood in the hallway, and her face lit up as he came down. It turned into a look of perplexed inquisitiveness when he walked straight past her into the kitchen.

  She followed him and watched as he peered out of the kitchen window into the garden. Harrison crossed to the back door. It was locked.

  ‘Is there a key for this?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s in the top drawer, just to your right.’ DI Chowdhury pointed to a small drawer. Harrison opened it, grabbed the key, and unlocked the door.

  She watched from the doorway as he took off his overshoes then headed to the small greenhouse a few metres along on the right-hand side of the neat lawn area.

  Harrison peered inside. It was heated, as he’d suspected, and it didn’t take him long before he spotted it. A small treelike shrub with delicate fronded leaves.

  He spun round to face DI Chowdhury, who had come up behind him, making her jump. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You have two victims of modern slavery.
The family lives what appears to be a normal, respectable life downstairs, but they keep the two girls captive through fear. This kind of cult-like slavery has grown more prevalent in Brazil.’

  DI Chowdhury quickly pulled her notebook from her pocket and busily scribbled down what Harrison said.

  ‘It’s some kind of Macumba or Jurema cult variation. Centuries ago these religions were brought to Brazil from Africa with the slaves. In a nutshell, they involve invoking spirits and holding ceremonies where people make offerings and can be possessed by their saints. I suspect the young girl in the hospital had incisions on her head and white spots painted on her body?’

  ‘Yes,’ DI Chowdhury said in surprise.

  ‘She was drugged. There’s a small shrub in the greenhouse, the mimosa hostilis. Its root bark contains the hallucinogenic drug DMT. I think these girls were given the drink then chained or tied in the room with the shrine. In the attic is a smoke machine, and there’s a hole in the wall that can be accessed from the corridor. You’ll find some kind of projector somewhere. Or maybe it could even have been done with a mobile phone. They would have projected images onto the smoke and terrified the girls into believing spirits were possessing them. That way neither girl would dare to try to escape or give the game away, even though there were people, like the dog walker, visiting the house.’

  ‘My God, there’s a new one every day.’ DI Chowdhury shook her head sadly.

  ‘The deceased probably died of a heart attack. The family was obviously worried about leaving them alone all weekend, so they might have ramped up the scare tactics and gone a little too far.’

  ‘That all makes sense. I’ll pass on the information to the hospital. That poor girl is going to need psychiatric help as well as medical care. Thank you.’ She smiled up at Harrison.

  ‘No problem,’ he said and smiled back.

  For a few moments, DI Chowdhury forgot she needed to make some arrests.

  26

  When Harrison left the Dulwich house, he’d every intention of returning to the office, but he saw a road sign that said, Nunhead: two miles and found himself pointing his bike in that direction. This connection to the cemetery distracted him. He had so many questions, and it frustrated him that he seemed unable to find any answers.

  As he rode up Oakdale Road, he spotted The Nunhead Gardener Shop. Spontaneously, he pulled up and went inside. He knew what he needed. A decent pair of pruning secateurs. He fancied a spot of voluntary gardening.

  Within minutes he was back, striding through the cemetery towards the spot where he’d seen the graffiti. It crossed his mind that someone might be there cleaning the tombstones, thus scuppering his plan, but when he arrived, the place was deserted. The volunteers had made a start on the stones, with most of them cleaned up. Just a few areas remained where some black spray paint was still visible.

  Harrison felt as though he were about to commit vandalism, but he gave himself a mental talking-to and reasoned with himself. He would be doing them a favour, cutting down some of the brambles and other weeds that had encroached on the graves. He carefully stepped past the tombstones and pushed his way into the undergrowth as far as he could before he needed to start chopping.

  He peered through under the canopy of the big tree. It shouldn’t take too long to get in, he thought; he could push through part of the way with his bike leathers protecting his arms and legs. He started cutting, holding on to the brambles he’d cut with the blades to pull them out of his way and chopping back other bushes to clear a path through. As he cut, the smell of plant sap triggered a memory. Not a recent one. Not one from here. A memory from before his mother’s death. Those memories were so rare that he stopped for a moment and allowed his mind to savour it.

  He was with Joe, his stepfather, crouched low to the dusty desert ground in Arizona. Joe had begun to teach him signs, the things you look for when tracking. He’d broken some stems of plants and was getting Harrison to smell them, to recognise how you could tell someone had walked past because of the aroma of a crushed plant. The baking Arizona sun beat down on his head and neck. Joe was explaining that signs aren’t just visual like footprints, but also the scents that are carried on the wind or emanate from broken vegetation. This was before Harrison had ever tracked anything. When it had all seemed so bewildering, when the marks in the dust were just marks—not a secret code that showed what kind of animal or man had just walked past. Joe knew it was hard, and he’d been patient. Tracking wasn’t like learning his times tables. It’s a discipline, a state of mind. Joe was encouraging Harrison to trust the signs and the facts, not to guess at what he would expect to have happened. Our brains look for patterns from experience, it’s a necessary trait, helping us interpret our world and the huge number of stimulants and input that we encounter and have to process. A good tracker knows to follow the signs and piece them together based on what he is looking at, not what he expects to see.

  Harrison used to look forward to his lessons with Joe in the desert. Ironic that it had taken his mother’s death for those teachings to finally click into place and start being used.

  The memory was brief but pleasant. It brought a smile to Harrison’s lips, and he thought about how he’d not spoken to Joe in a few weeks. He’d have to call him soon. Theirs was the only relationship Harrison had from his childhood. The one man he’s always trusted with his life.

  For now, there were darker thoughts he needed to follow. His memory of Joe had been a sweetener, a little taste of joy and safety. As he cut through more brambles and got closer to the clearing, Harrison felt a growing dread.

  The dread had nothing to do with the tree, which cast its protective arms over the clearing. Something had happened here. Something bad, and he’d been there, witnessed it. Why couldn’t he remember it? Harrison peeled back the last of the brambles and stepped into the clearing. It was about ten feet in diameter and probably had been much bigger when he’d been a young child. Leaves covered the ground, fallen one year after another on top of each other. A thick mulch of life that had lived and been shed ever since that night.

  He stood for a few moments and tried to think back. Nothing came. Had he wasted his time? Come here on a wild goose chase, just like the Mannings had hoped he would? He listened to the birdsong around him. There’d been no birds back then. They’d arrived at dusk, which had turned into a black night. That much he remembered. The rest?

  Harrison walked around the clearing. He knew he was asking a lot of his memory. Not only had he been very young, but it also was a memory hidden behind the trauma of his mother’s death. At times it felt like he was standing trying to see over a mile-high wall. There was no way over, no way around, but he could just make out the tantalising sounds of what lay beyond.

  He was just about to give up, to struggle back through the gap he’d created, when his foot hit something solid.

  He hadn’t noticed it before because the carpet of leaves was so thick, and it lay hidden beneath them. The jolt as his foot hit the solid object jarred his body and sent a shockwave to his brain. It was like the long fuse on a bomb. He almost felt the flame travel up from his foot to his head and then bang. There it was.

  He knew what lay beneath those leaves. He didn’t even need to clear them away. It was a flat stone. He saw it, laid bare in the middle of the clearing and illuminated by candles. They were all standing around, his mother in long black robes he had tried hard to hide in. She held his hand so tightly that it hurt. He was scared. Scared by the chanting of the others around him and scared by the shaking of his mother’s hand. He knew she was petrified. Even her voice shivered with the fear in her heart.

  That flashback appeared in his mind’s eye for a split second. He couldn’t see faces or details. If he hadn’t been here, he might not have even realised where it was. But he knew it had been real. He knew he’d stood here with his mother, afraid of what was about to happen.

  Harrison tried to pull more from his mind, but the wall went up again.

>   He knelt and brushed the leaves away from the stone. It was flat grey granite. Was it a grave marker? Perhaps that could give him a clue.

  He scrabbled around on the clearing floor, tossing the leaves around him, searching for meaning in the bland grey stone. There was nothing. No inscription. No indication of why the stone was there.

  Raising himself from the ground, Harrison sighed. He’d confirmed it, but he hadn’t explained it. The Mannings had brought him here for a reason. They were definitely there that night. He couldn’t see their faces, but he knew. Why were they drawing him back now?

  He took one last look around and turned to leave. That’s when he saw her. It was almost like a ghost in the clearing, but it was in his mind. A split-second flash of film reel. A woman lying on the stone, blood pumping from her body and spilling over it. The memory kicked him in the stomach, almost made him bend double with its force. This flash of evil was hidden in his mind, but it had shown itself. His self-preservation mode had tried to forget it. To keep it locked away. Now it was out.

  Drained, Harrison left a few minutes later. That night was before they’d gone to live with the Tohono O’odham people and Joe in America. He’d always felt as though his mother was escaping something by leaving the UK. Had this been it? For him, though, the biggest question had always been why she went back. Why did she return them both to the centre of her darkness and danger and live with the Mannings? He knew there was only one way to find that out, and that was to track them down and make them tell him.

  27

  DCI Barker looked at the images on the small screen in front of her. It was of a block of twelve garages, or lock-ups, as they call them now. In her dad’s day, when he’d rented one like those, they’d been mostly full of people’s prized vehicles and occasionally the odd stash of stolen goods. Nowadays she failed to be surprised by what was found in them. Anything from a mini counterfeiting factory for fashion goods being sold on eBay to a home for migrants and asylum seekers. Like every square inch in London, these were prime real estate, and some had even been turned into illegal housing. Unsafe electrical extension cables ran down gardens to the backs of garages. Last year they’d gone to one that had a family of six living in it. No sanitary facilities, just a bucket. That wasn’t a life. Certainly not the life they’d hoped for when they’d escaped the bombing in Syria. Those days on the job made her sad. Others made her angry.