Fragments (11 page)

‘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 was 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.