The Uninvited (14 page)

The breeze wafts through the bars of the construction elevator. Its slow shaking progress down the side of the building soothes me. It is a limbo I could happily stay in.

‘If we didn’t see a child, then what did we see?’ I ask the foreman.

He looks at his shoes. They’re leather, and coated with a fine film of cement dust. ‘The men say it was an evil spirit. I don’t know.’

‘There’s no such thing as an evil spirit.’

‘I know, sir. But the men, they believe in them.’

‘You saw her too.’

‘I
thought
I did. But the light and the heat, they play tricks. Create false impressions. Very common here in Dubai. A lot of people imagine things that are not there.’ He shrugs. ‘Fifty degrees plus does that to you.’

‘But I never imagine things that aren’t there. Not even when I have a fever. What else did they think they saw?’

‘Some of them saw the child jump or fly.’

‘Jump or fly where? Over the edge?’ He is still looking at his dusty shoes. ‘Where? Where, where, where, answer me!’

He wipes sweat off his face. ‘Into him.’

Jonas Svensson said,
I must’ve swallowed one.

‘That’s not possible.’

‘I know. And it can’t have happened. I am just reporting what they said. But there is no evidence.’ He is speaking very fast. ‘I will be very honest with you now, sir. I don’t like to tell lies. As you say, it’s against my faith. And it’s not in my nature either. But I will not mention this little girl in my statement to police. The others will do the same. Nobody wants to be called crazy and lose his job. It looks bad for us to say we have seen something we cannot prove. Understand this, sir? That’s where we stand. You will have to do what you like and follow your own conscience.’

‘Did you see her or not?’

‘I saw her. But I am sorry, sir. If you tell the police this, I will deny it. Please. Understand me here. My men think this skyscraper is haunted. This is going to be a big problem for me.’

‘Did you see Mr de Vries lick his arm?’

He nods. He looks very distressed. ‘Yes I did, sir.’

‘Why do you think he did that?’

‘I cannot understand. He was behaving in a very strange way sir. I do not know why a man would lick his own arm. An urge must have come upon him.’

‘Just before he jumped he said,
You can’t come in
, and then he said some foreign words. They sounded Japanese. Did you hear that?’

‘No. I didn’t hear anything. I was far away.’

He said
toko
and he said
loshi
. I am sure of it. ‘And what about Ahmed Farooq. Did he behave oddly, last time you saw him?’

He looks at his feet again. ‘Yes. He did. Very oddly, sir.’

‘How?’

‘He asked one of the workers for some water. The man gave him his own bottle and he crumbled something into it. He had it in a plastic bag in his pocket. Then he drank it down. I asked him what it was, and he said medicine.’

‘Did it look like medicine?’

He makes a face. Disgust, distaste, something like that. ‘No. I recognised it. The desalination plants produce it like that. In blocks. It was salt.’

At the police headquarters I call Ashok but he is in a meeting, so I leave a message with Belinda Yates explaining what has happened. She expresses shock and sympathy.

‘My God, poor you, Hesketh! Look, shall I get one of our psych people to call you?’

‘No.’

‘Stephanie Mulligan! She’s specialised in workplace suicides.’

‘There’s nothing she can help me with,’ I say. ‘Do you have Svensson’s autopsy report yet?’

‘It’s just come in.’

‘Good. Send it. And I’ll need you to get hold of Jan de Vries’ too.’ And I hang up.

Salt is born of the purest parents
, wrote Pythagoras.
The sun and the sea.
It’s the only kind of rock we consume, the thing we cannot do without. Salt deprivation, as well as a salt excess, can cause medical conditions. ‘Sodic soil’ or ‘dry-land salinity’ is on the increase, due to salt in the water table being drawn to the surface by the sun’s heat. Shakespeare based King Lear on an Italian folk tale about a king with three daughters. One said she loved her father bright as sunshine, the second said she loved him wide as the sea, but when the third said she loved him as meat loves salt, he banished her. But she returned in disguise and gave the king a banquet in which the food contained not a single grain of salt. When he complained about the taste, she revealed herself. ‘Just as meat is tasteless without salt,’ she told him, ‘so is life without my father’s love.’ And they were tenderly reunited. Atmospheric change over the last fifty years has caused chemical imbalances in the world’s oceans, causing both increased acidity and ‘a large-scale, rapid rise in salinity, particularly in tropical regions’. Some marine species are reported to be adapting. Most are not. In India, a gift of salt brings good luck because it is solid when dry, but invisible when dissolved. Jesus called his disciples ‘the salt of the earth’.

The purest parents.

It has a melodious cadence to it.

I spend the afternoon with Detective Mazoor, who questions me gently, mercilessly, sympathetically, aggressively and in many other styles. Arab men are often very masculine-looking, with a great deal of hair on their wrists. I focus on his Rolex watch as he speaks, and observe the tiny second hand tick through the revolutions. His professional life must be lacking in excitement, because he wants me to confess to murder, which I presume would afford him kudos. If I had pushed de Vries then Mazoor could solve the case, and get the glory for it. And I would go to jail or even be executed. This would be a big ‘feather in his cap’.

One of the studies Professor Whybray generated – it linked into what he affectionately called ‘the Paranoia Index’ – mapped the stress levels of innocent detainees according to time held in custody and faith in the justice system. Predictably, there were impressive variations according to culture. Thanks to this study, and news reports I have read, I know enough about the Dubai justice system to have cause for alarm. Yet I do not feel nervous under Mazoor’s interrogation. The mesmeric second hand of his watch has a role to play here. So do the facts. I did not push de Vries, and if Mazoor has not already heard corroboration of this from the other witnesses, he soon will. Because of the detective’s intense focus on my hypothetical guilt, it is very easy for me to omit any mention of the ragged girl who signalled to de Vries and scared him into vaulting into the blue sky. When the foreman told me that he and the workmen would not mention her in their statements, I did not doubt him. Those men would have families back home. Losing their jobs would have catastrophic repercussions.

But I saw the child. She was probably no higher than my waist, and she was dressed in rags. The sight of her made the workmen agitated and she scared de Vries so badly that he killed himself. That’s how it seemed. And I heard her too. She generated a high, tuneless humming that grated on my ears.

Her presence didn’t frighten me.

But the impossibility of it did. I have no strategy to deal with something that so adamantly defies categorisation, quantification and logic; something that so stubbornly refuses to fit into any of the diagrams I’ve been constructing in my head.

As Mazoor interrogates me, I rock in my seat as gently as I can, so that he doesn’t notice. I keep calm and I do not get overloaded. There is a plastic water bottle in front of me. I reach for it and unscrew the top.

‘You have children,’ he says suddenly, changing tack. This throws me.

‘A stepson.’

‘Hmm. A violent little boy.’

‘What?’

‘Like you maybe.’

‘No. I’m not violent. Nor’s Freddy. Freddy’s a great kid.’

‘Oh, but I think he is violent.’

‘What do you mean?’ He reaches across and shoves my shirt sleeve a little higher to reveal the bruise on my arm. I regret not wearing long sleeves. ‘That wasn’t Freddy.’

‘How old is this Freddy?’

‘Seven.’

‘So who grabbed your arm?’

‘A man in Sweden. A mentally disturbed man.’

Mazoor puts his hands on the desk and observes them, then looks up at me.

‘You are lying, Mr Lock.’

‘I don’t lie.’

‘So how do you explain those bruises?’

‘I’m not violent. I never touched de Vries. If you’re implying we had a fight, then you’re wrong. Ask the others.’

He laughs. ‘I am a detective, Mr Lock. Not a fool. That bruise is at least two days old. So whoever made it does not concern me. Though as you guessed, your violent nature does. I will ask you again, why did you push de Vries off the edge?’

‘I didn’t push de Vries off the edge, or threaten him in any way. I was never alone with him. There were twenty-six workmen plus the foreman on the rooftop at the time. I am sure they can all corroborate my testimony. He vaulted. It was surprisingly elegant.’

‘Elegant?’

‘Yes.
Elegant
is the word I would like to use in my statement.’

‘Poetic,’ says Mazoor. ‘You are fond of your language.’

‘Yes, I am. My own, and others. Especially when coaxed into a rhythm.’

He smiles and leans back. He has a small gap between his front teeth. In African cultures such a gap is considered lucky and a sign of sexual potency. ‘So quote me some English poetry.’

I clear my throat.

‘“Who would have thought my shrivell’d heart

Could have recovered greennesse? It was gone

Quite underground, as flowers depart

To the mother-root, when they have blown;

Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.”

It’s from “The Flower” by George Herbert. I can also quote you some Shelley.’

‘Go on.’

‘“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”’

‘Well, Mr Lock. You certainly keep interesting things up your sleeve.’ He nods at my arm. He means the bruise. He has made a joke. I force a smile, but can’t manage a laugh. He shifts in his seat, sighs and shoves some paper at me. ‘OK, that’s enough entertainment. Draw me what happened.’

This I can also do. I show where I was standing in relation to de Vries. It’s clear he wants to hear the story yet again in order to spot an inconsistency. So for the fifth time, as I draw, I tell Mazoor about de Vries’ strange behaviour at the site: the screaming and the arm-licking and the fact that he had clearly been drinking alcohol.

‘In conclusion, in my opinion Jan de Vries was inebriated. He was also upset about Ahmed Farooq’s suicide, and having to break the news to his wife. I think he was having a mental collapse that nobody spotted or foresaw.’

He comments on the excellence of my sketches. He is right to. My 2-D representations are highly accurate. If we were in a different setting I might tell him about my admiration for da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, shared by my non-violent stepson Freddy. But we are in this setting, and his mission is to find a hole in my story. He is probably used to dealing with drugs cartels and alcohol smugglers and political assassinations, not stories of alcoholic Afrikaners who get ‘tipped over the edge’.

‘But there must have been a trigger,’ he keeps saying. ‘Something that happened.’

He is no fool.

I shrug. ‘The symptoms of mental imbalance are always unpredictable. Mr de Vries started behaving oddly. He worked himself into a crescendo. The elegant vault was part of that crescendo.’ I am thinking of
toko
and
loshi.

‘It is a strange situation, do you agree, Mr Lock?’ asks Detective Mazoor.

‘I agree that it’s strange. But as I said. Disturbed people behave in unorthodox ways. It’s well documented.’

Next he questions me about the nature of my consultative work for Phipps & Wexman and I explain a little about behavioural patterns in the workplace, and methods of targeting anomalies. I list some of the multi-national corporations I have dealt with over the years and he nods in recognition. ‘Specialised troubleshooting,’ I summarise. This being part of his job too, I detect the beginnings of an understanding. He leans forward attentively as I tell him about the direction my investigation has been taking, and the speculations it has led to.

‘I believe de Vries’ death fits into a pattern involving indigenous superstitions,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know if he believed in djinns, but the look on his face before he jumped over the edge was one of terror. Farooq certainly believed in them. And his wife apparently thinks he was possessed by one. It’s in her statement. Jonas Svensson talked about trolls. And Sunny Chen was afraid that the spirits of his ancestors were angry. All these men feared something which they were convinced was absolutely genuine. I suspect this is all part of a global outbreak of hysteria that goes well beyond the cases I’ve investigated.’