Fragments (17 page)

‘Not in that
sense, no, Detective Iqbal. As I’ve stated, I firmly believe that
attacks are aimed only at the Catholic Church. That the use of
Islamic elements is about causing trouble, not an actual part of
the crime.’

‘Then why are
you asking about this mosque?’

‘Because I
suspect that whoever killed that young man and wrote upon his body
knew a great deal, not only about Islam, but about Catholic
beliefs. They knew how to instruct a young man from the streets on
how to act in a Catholic Church. They could write Arabic with a
sure hand. The person is educated about faith and highly
knowledgeable.’

‘And...?’

‘When planning
permission for the conversion of the Church here was undertaken,
did you have any serious objections? And when I say serious, did
you have objections lodged by someone who argued time and again,
perhaps using lawyers or sending in many letters, or generally
using the legal argument as well as a religious one?’

‘We had several
objections, obviously.’

‘But did you
have anyone that seemed to be... out of place? Out of the normal,
expected response?’ It was Shahrukh who had picked up the thread
and pushed forward. ‘Did you have any vandalism during the
conversion? Anything unusual?’

Malik nodded.
‘Yes, we did. How did you know that?’

Maryam felt the
knot in her chest loosen. Shahrukh’s voice betrayed that the same
had happened with him. There was a chance that Wyn could be
saved.

Whilst Maryam
was searching through records of the Mosque with Imam Malik, a
young mother from the community by her side, Shahrukh had returned
to New Scotland Yard to examine the police records about the same
events. The usual stupid and everyday obscenities had occurred,
such as slices of bacon being nailed to the doors. However, there
had also been some more adept vandalism. A section from the bible
had been carved into a wood panel alongside quotes from the Qur’an,
on the inside of the former church. That had had to be removed and
stored safely. The files contained a photograph of the panel before
it was removed. Someone had spent a long time carving Deuteronomy
32.17 into the wood:

They
sacrificed to devils and not to God: to gods whom they knew not:
that were newly come up, whom their fathers worshipped not.

The Arabic was
much shorter but beautifully carved. Very sure and clear on the
swoops and curves. It was Sura 26.221 and translated as:

Shall I inform
you upon whom do the devils descend?

Maryam wrote
down both quotes, being careful to replicate them exactly.

‘Is the panel
still in good condition? Do you have it?’

‘I would have
to inquire. It may have been buried, I do not know.’

Maryam turned
to the file on the objections to the transfer. Among the usual
deluge of complaints about anything changing in any way in
someone’s beloved ‘community’, one complainant stood out. A man who
had been voracious in his protests; he’d even chained the front
gates, repeatedly. He’d tried to stop diggers and workmen going in
and had protested vigorously the removal of the windows. He’d
lodged dozens of complaints with the local council and the police.
He’d ended up being given an exclusion order under an anti-social
behaviour order, forbidding him from entering the street the
building was on. In the five years since the order there had never
been any more trouble from him. She noted everything down, thanked
the Imam and the woman who had chaperoned them, and left.

At the same
time, a tearful Keely Curtis was detailing all the areas in the
local Church that Jason Briggs had forced her to have sex with him.
She’d thought he loved her, she explained, and had bought her gold
earrings and a gold cross. Why would he buy her a cross if he
didn’t love her? During the break in choir rehearsals, Jason had
tried to find somewhere private for them to go and chat, but as the
only place they could meet was the Church during choir practice, it
was impossible. Her parents didn’t let her out of their sight apart
from when she was at the Church, and she was never out of sight of
the priest or a parish helper then. Jason finally persuaded her to
meet in the Sacristy during a Sunday service. She was attending
with her family and excused herself, saying she felt sick. She went
out the Church doors and went round to the Sacristy, where Jason
was waiting for her. He took her in and raped her with two of his
gang whilst the Mass was being said through the wall. Jason used
his mobile phone to film the other two having sex with her and
threatened to send it to the whole school, and her father, if she
said a word. Then they threw her back out into the graveyard. She’d
gone home, showered, thrown her clothes into the washing machine
and told her parents she was sick and stayed in bed for three days.
She was too scared to do anything else, and when Jason started
texting her to tell her to sneak out and meet up with the gang, she
did as she was told. When Jason was thrown out of the choir and the
new door and locks were put in the Church, Keely was ordered to
make copies of the keys. She worked in the shop every Saturday and
knew how to access the secure codes. She had been trained in making
keys: it was how she earned her pocket money.

Keely had
continued to be raped by Jason and some of his gang, in various
places in the Church. All the girls who’d been recruited from the
choir had been involved in sex in the Church, usually either the
confessional box or on the Altar. It was a ‘thing’ of Jason’s. He’d
told her he only did it there with ‘special’ girls. In fact, there
had been jealousy with some of the other gang girls, which Jason
had solved by smashing the face of one of the trouble makers. He’d
taken her into the Church with Keely and some of the other choir
recruits and smashed the girl’s face open on the Altar stone as
he’d raped her from behind. This had pleased Keely as the girl had
been having a go at her personally. None of the other regular girls
had complained about the ‘Church’ girls again. Keely had also been
given a lot of jewellery and a bunch of girls at school who were
bullying her had been ‘sorted’ by the gang. She had begun to like
running with them and had started to take part in the drinking. It
was only when she was caught paralytic in the streets when her
father had thought she was fast asleep in bed, that her family had
realised she was out of control and locked her down, literally. Dad
had changed all the door locks in the house and installed security
shutters on her bedroom window. She’d got out once from the
bathroom window, but her dad had caught her in the garden and had
knocked the living daylights out of her. She’d threatened to have
him arrested for assault and they’d kept her in her bedroom until
the bruises had healed a bit.

‘Can they do
that, Inspector? Can your Mum and Dad keep you locked up like that,
like an animal? I’ve told them how much I hate them, but they don’t
care! I hate this new school, and they won’t listen to me, and now
you know he hit me! They don’t care about me!’

All Inspector
Barham cared about, and was grateful for, was that she didn’t have
kids.

Maryam reached
Scotland Yard before Barham had finished interviewing Keely. Gatto
had been working with Iqbal on the records of the vandalism and
obscenity at the mosque conversion. They’d found the same details
about the legal order keeping the local man away from the mosque
and had been checking up on him. His name was Geoffrey Embleton, he
still lived in the area and he was in his late fifties. He hadn’t
been in trouble since the problems at the mosque conversion. They
were happy to let Maryam feedback to them her thoughts.

‘I’m pretty
sure he’s a Catholic, raised by a very old, or strict, family.’

‘How do you
know that?’

‘If he did this
carving here on the wood panel, it’s from a Catholic Bible, not an
Anglican one.’

Gatto was
impressed. ‘You can tell that just by looking?’

‘Yes.
Translations differ... is this computer on the internet?’

‘Yes, go
ahead.’

She opened up
several windows and put in different editions of the Bible in each
tab. Then she typed the same chapter and verse in each. Within a
minute they had four separate versions of the text.

‘It was an
Anglican Church, and at the time it would have been the New English
Bible that would have been in use. That talks about foreign demons
that are no gods, but you won’t get it on the internet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Still under
copyright.’

Both Iqbal and
Gatto laughed. Maryam, who hadn’t thought she’d been saying
anything funny, looked confused, but carried on.

‘You can see it
here in the King James, and here in the New Jerusalem Bible. The
New Jerusalem is the current Catholic one. But look here.’ She
pointed to the screen.

‘That’s the
exact same quote down to the colons.’ Gatto sounded even more
impressed.

‘Exactly. And
this, gentlemen, is from the Douay-Rheims Bible, which is the
official Catholic translation from the Latin Vulgate.’

They both just
stared at her.

‘It’s an old
text, superseded many years ago, too obscure to be used on the
walls of an Anglican church in 2004.’

‘There’s no
mistaking it. It’s a distinctive translation.’ Gatto was writing
details down on his notebook.

‘What does it
mean, the text, with the other one there, too?’ Iqbal asked.

‘I’m not sure.
The bible text is spoken by Moses to the Israelites in the desert,
after he’d returned with the Ten Commandments. The Israelites had
been making merry in his absence, getting drunk, worshipping false
gods. He returns from the mountains and blasts at them, warning
them to pay attention and do as the Lord has commanded or they are
in deep trouble.’

‘Fire and
brimstone trouble?’ Again, she was sure that Gatto had been raised
Catholic.

‘Yes, Faith of
Our Fathers trouble.’

‘Huh?’ It was
Iqbal’s turn to look confused.

‘Dungeon, Fire
and Sword,’ replied Gatto. ‘What about the other bit?’ He indicated
the Arabic script on the photo.

Shahrukh
answered that. ‘It’s the prophet speaking, replying to a question
about who are the people likely to be bothered by demons.’

‘And who’s that
then?’ Gatto asked him.

‘Sinners. Those
who lie and cheat. The point being that if you are pure of heart,
you won’t be bothered by them.’

‘So, let me get
this right. We have graffiti in a church about to become a mosque,
from five, six years ago, saying that the badly behaved will be
damned and that demons will come after sinners?’

‘A somewhat
crude summing up, but yes.’ Maryam was aware that one of her faults
was that she thought and spoke as an academic.

‘And now we
have a dead body in a church that has been defiled and is laying
out on a Muslim holy book, and a statement that a demon killed him
with the implication being that the said demon is a Catholic
priest?’

‘Well, yes, you
could look at it that way I suppose.’

‘Blimey. Well,
I think the priest is orf the ‘ook then, don’t you?’ That Gatto’s
childhood accent had slipped through as he spoke said much to both
Shahrukh and Maryam.

Barham had been
sceptical about the connections but let Gatto and Iqbal follow the
line of investigation: they had to find a connection between Briggs
and Embleton. Maryam, exhausted as she was, asked for a car to take
her to the Cathedral, where she informed Bishop Atkins of all
they’d uncovered and personally told Wyn Jones he was unlikely to
be charged. Jones had been stunned into pale silence. Fred had made
sure she’d eaten before sending her back to Peckham via Andy Scott.
They’d both tried to persuade her to stay at Westminster for the
night, but she wanted to wake up in a room she knew and compose her
thoughts for her report on her own.

The parish
house was still up and filled with people coming and going for the
prayer vigil in the Church, which was on its second night. Maryam
excused herself and went straight to bed, falling asleep within
moments.

Her dreams were
not happy. She woke after only three hours and drew upon her Tarot
cards. The reversed Chariot, card seven, was working alongside the
reversed Ace of Swords. The person involved was working against
authority, taking no heed of the situation or others’
understandings or feelings. The force working through that person
was out to destroy Divine authority. The Fool was once more the
card being worked against. Wyn Jones was the battleground. Why?

She spent an
hour writing her report for Rome and included Geoffrey Embleton’s
details: date of birth and last known address. At the police
station, she hadn’t asked permission to do so, she’d just not
spoken. They, in turn, had not forbidden her from discussing him
with others. The sins of omission: it oiled the wheels of justice
most days; when it wasn’t creating injustice.

She felt dirty
and sweaty. It was past dawn but only just. She prayed for an hour,
as she could pray when dirty with no problem. Then she ran a hot
bath, ignoring the banging in the pipes and soaked in it for half
an hour, before rising and then meditating for another hour.
Meditation needed clean. Her sense of balance restored, she
descended into the kitchen.

The women of
the parish had been busy; the kitchen gleamed. So had Father Jacob,
who handed her a plate of poached eggs on toast and a quite
acceptable cup of coffee. They talked about West Africa, his home
town, and how he was coping with the cold in Britain whilst she
relished the cleaner air. The stench of stale smoke was gone and
had been replaced by the lemon oil of detergents: it was much more
palatable. Everywhere, everything looked cleaner: the paint in the
hallway was three shades lighter.