‘The kids took it all.’

  ‘Or you sold it,’ Henry said.

  ‘Think what you like.’

  ‘So why, if you were so nice to the kids, did they run off?’

  ‘If you find them, you can ask them.’

  Sandra said, ‘We found the video clip, Mr Baines. We know what your bosses did to Sahar Chauhan.’

  ‘Them up there aren’t my bosses.’

  ‘But they sent the clip to show you what happened to people who stepped out of line,’ Henry said. ‘Am I right? How did Sahar step out of line? Why was he killed?’

  ‘Maybe you should ask his bosses.’

  ‘Maybe I should tell the police about those two nuns,’ Henry said.

  Baines looked at his wife, who gave a fractional nod.

  ‘Sahar was a good cook,’ Baines said. ‘The best. But there was a problem up there. His boss was put away on some bullshit charge. And meanwhile, Sahar was involved with these other people, smuggling things out. The stuff he sent the kids was only half the story. I think he was trying to earn enough to buy a ticket home. I don’t know the details. But the guy that was sent up to sort things out found out about it. And yeah, I saw what happened to him, afterwards. I saw it and I deleted it.’

  ‘You put it in your browser’s recycling bin,’ Sandra said. ‘Not quite the same thing.’

  Chloe felt something cold grip her from head to foot. She said, ‘What did they do to him? To Sahar?’

  Sandra hesitated. Henry said, ‘They crucified him, basically. They nailed him to a wall and they shot him in the head. And they videoed it.’

  Chloe looked at Jack and Gert Baines. ‘When was Fahad’s father killed?’

  ‘About three months ago,’ Sandra said. ‘That’s the date of the video, although it could have been altered. We can check it out more thoroughly when we get back.’

  Chloe said, ‘Fahad saw it. He saw it, and he realised that he might be in danger too, and he took off with his sister.’

  Gert Baines said, ‘The computer we have here, it is a piece of shit. The boy knows something about these things, and my husband is cheap, won’t pay anyone to fix it. So he lets the boy. I told him, no. But he doesn’t listen. And now look what happens. They steal our money and run away, and bring all this trouble on our heads.’

  ‘I fucking deleted it,’ her husband said.

  Henry said, ‘Dragging it to the recycling bin doesn’t delete it. Even I know that. The kid found out about his father, didn’t he, and he ran away. Him and his little sister. Because they were scared they might be next.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have done anything,’ Jack Baines said.

  ‘Like you didn’t do anything to those two nuns,’ Henry said.

  ‘We didn’t tell anyone when they died, that’s all. And fuck you for thinking otherwise.’

  Baines’s anger seemed genuine.

  Henry said, ‘Are your bosses looking for Fahad and Rana?’

  ‘Why should they? Sahar’s dead, they don’t give a shit about two kids.’

  ‘And they don’t know about the Elder Culture stuff and Fahad’s pictures because you didn’t tell them. Because if you did, they’d know you’d been taking backhanders for delivering the mail.’

  ‘You try to be nice,’ Baines said. ‘And look what it gets you.’

  ‘Your idea of “nice” being to keep two kids prisoner,’ Henry said.

  ‘We fed and clothed them,’ Gert Baines said. ‘We made sure they went to school.’

  ‘I hope you find them,’ her husband said, with sudden force. ‘You fucking deserve to find them. And good luck when you do. Because you’re meddling in things you have no idea how bad they are.’

  Henry said, ‘Oh, we’ll find them. Count on it. And we’ll take better care of them than you and your charming wife.’

  Sandra said, ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr and Mrs Baines. Chloe, I said there was something you needed to see. Henry, why don’t you go with her while I wrap things up?’

  The young man, Leo, led Chloe and Henry Harris through a kitchen and storage space fitted into a shipping container, down a narrow corridor walled with unpainted plywood.

  ‘It would appear that each of the nuns had their own chapel,’ Leo said, opening one of the doors at the end. ‘They took Mass separately, never saw each other. Mad. There’s a light switch here. Wait…’

  A rack of fluorescent lights flickered on. The room was small, maybe three metres by two. There was a plain altar draped in white cloth with a crucified Christ hung over it and a kneeling stool in front. But that wasn’t what Chloe saw at first. The walls of the little room were lined with wood panelling, and every square centimetre had been painted over. A diorama of red rocks and red sand and a dark blue sky wrapped around the room. Cliffs, distant hills. The orange splash of a fat sun high in one corner of the ceiling. And along one wall were the spires, throwing short shadows across a stretch of ground where grey vegetation coiled around boulders and shelves of rock.

  Chloe stepped close to study the fretwork of the spires, their thorny projections. Something crouched at the very tip of one, a bag-like body and several ropy limbs knotted around a spar.

  She could see brush marks. She could see dribbles of paint. She could see paint spatters. A thickness or rim of pinkish paint outlined the rocky horizon. Rough stippling suggested shadows. But when she stepped back the imperfections and blemishes and exposed technique blended into a totality that plucked a wire inside her.

  Leo said, ‘Gert Baines said that Fahad painted it just before he ran away. He used ordinary emulsion paint. The cans and brushes are over there, in the corner. Did it in two days, according to her. Barely ate, barely slept. It was like he was possessed, she said.’

  ‘I need a record of this,’ Chloe said.

  ‘I’m already all over that,’ Leo said. ‘Used our drone to take a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree hi-def panorama.’

  His camo suit had taken on the red tones of the painted landscape; so had Chloe’s jacket. As if they were both blushing.

  Chloe thought of a severe old woman kneeling here, dressed in a habit and the kind of winged wimple that Belgian nuns wore in old films, surrounded by this wild alien beauty. An image with its own strangeness. Then she remembered that the two nuns were dead, buried somewhere out in the marshes.

  ‘We have to tell the police about the nuns,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you promised Jack Baines. He and his wife might have killed them. And their families should know what happened to them.’

  Henry and Leo exchanged glances. Henry said, ‘We’re operating in a semi-legal area right now. And Baines and his wife and their little down-home drug-growing thing are a side issue. The kid who did this,’ he said, gesturing at the diorama that surrounded them, ‘is in danger. He could end up like his father if we don’t find him first.’

  Leo said, ‘Sandra said that you should see everything? There’s stuff in the kids’ bedroom, too.’

  It was a small square room with a high window blinded by dried sea-salt. Bunk beds, a wardrobe with oak-finish veneer splitting from its MCF carcass, a musty odour of damp and mould. And plasterboard walls densely covered with black lines and loops from floor to ceiling. Even the door was covered. Chloe thought of the thorny scribbles in Fahad’s tumblr, wondered if he had tried to reproduce the interior of one of his spires. Tried to imagine sleeping here…

  There were drawings taped to the plasterboard walls. Sketches in red and black crayon of the spires and the desert landscape. A collage of images of cage fighters in outlandish sci-fi gear, pumped-up muscles glistening, faces contorted into snarls to show fangs or serrated shark teeth. Masks, body mods. And a poster, a fighter in silver shorts and a broad gold belt with a sunburst buckle that really worked its pulp sci-fi vibe, bare chest ridged with dermal armour, spikes jutting from elbows and wrists, standing with a bubble helmet tucked under one arm against a starry sky dominated by a ringed planet striped with Day-Glo orange and green. The fighter’s cheesy nom de combat, Max Predator, was scrawled in thick silver felt-tip across the lower left-hand corner.

  ‘Kid liked wrestling,’ Henry said, perhaps missing this major clue, or perhaps pretending not to see it.

  ‘We tossed the room,’ Leo said. ‘We didn’t find any artefacts—’

  ‘Because Jack Baines eBayed them,’ Henry said. ‘Or threw them out, when he found what happened to Sahar.’

  ‘—but we did find this.’

  Leo unfolded a square of paper. A childish scribble, wobbly crayoned lines in a rainbow of colours raying out from a central point.

  Chloe remembered Rana Chauhan, holding up a drawing for her to inspect. She thought of Gert Baines’s tapestry.

  Leo’s walkie-talkie crackled. Sandra Hamilton’s voice said, ‘We have visitors.’

  24. Ease Up

  Mangala | 27 July

  Sergeant Mikkel Madsen was waiting for Vic when he came into the squad room. ‘You have a bounce in your step, Investigator Gayle. Would I be correct in thinking that the trial went in our favour?’

  ‘Man’s been sent off to make fertiliser for the next fifteen years.’

  Vic had been in court for most of the day, giving evidence in the morning, staying on to hear the jury’s verdict. It had been a simple domestic murder. Two men had been cohabiting with a woman, all three of them shiners, and one of the men had decided to make the relationship more exclusive by strangling the other. He’d left the body wrapped in a length of carpet in the back garden of their house, and after a couple of weeks a neighbour had complained about an invasion of scrabs, little armoured scavengers as pestilent as rats. Vic had taken the call after a city health inspector had discovered the body; the prime suspect had confessed after a brief interrogation. An open-and-shut case that shouldn’t even have gone to trial, but the defence lawyer had argued that the doer’s confession was invalid because he had been undergoing cold turkey for his shine addiction, and the woman in the triangular relationship, initially a witness for the prosecution, had changed her testimony just before the initial hearing, had flat-out denied seeing anything, said that she had no idea how the dead man had managed to roll himself up in that carpet, but he was always doing weird shit like that. And because the scrabs had destroyed any forensic evidence there might have been, in the end it had come down to Vic’s word against hers.

  ‘For a change,’ he told Mikkel, ‘twelve upstanding citizens chose to believe the police.’

  ‘You do look persuasive in that suit,’ Mikkel said. He was a tall skinny man with pockmarked cheeks and a bushy moustache, fifteen years in the Norwegian police force and recently widowed when he’d won the lottery and come up. He took a noisy sip from his mug of coffee. ‘Remind me. How many cases do you have outstanding?’

  ‘Are you trying to take down my good feeling already? Have a heart.’

  ‘I don’t want you thinking that putting away the doer in a squalid little domestic is the highlight of your career. Especially as you have…How many open cases?’

  ‘You know how many there are, and you know I’m working them.’

  ‘Would I be wrong if I said sixteen?’

  ‘I have a warrant out on one. Issued it last week.’

  ‘But it stays open unless the doer turns up. Are you comfortable that the friends and relatives of sixteen victims are still waiting for justice?’

  ‘If I promise to feel bad, will you get off my case?’

  ‘I remember when the Jackaroo first announced their little gift,’ Mikkel said. ‘A lot of people said that it was a brand-new start. A chance to build fifteen different utopias on fifteen different worlds. A chance to redeem ourselves. But after all the fine talk about how we were going to do better, how we were going to realise the true potential of the human race, and so on, what did we get? It turns out that we brought every kind of human foolishness with us, and invented new ways to fuck up. Shine, meq, all the other new drugs. New ways of killing addicts slowly, while dealers and manufacturers kill each other quickly. Not to mention innocent bystanders.’

  ‘If this is about the anti-drugs initiative,’ Vic said, ‘the case I just put away definitely counts.’

  ‘We lead by example, Investigator Gayle. You look like a lawyer in that suit. Almost respectable. You up on the stand, me in the jury box? I’d believe everything you said. But like all of us you need to do better. Where is your apprentice, by the way? He hasn’t been in all day. He should have been in court with you, learning how to put a bad guy away. But clearly not.’

  Vic, who had no idea where Skip was or what he was up to, said, ‘I’m keeping him busy. Helping him learn new skills, giving him a thorough grounding in custom and practice.’

  ‘I hear,’ Mikkel said, ‘that he thinks he has a new lead in the Redway case.’

  ‘Yeah. A possible link with the people who smuggled themselves inside that shipping container. Drug enforcement checked the waste tank of its toilet, found what was left of a bunch of torn-up papers. They weren’t exactly in the best condition, as you can imagine, but the techs were able to piece together a few fragments. Turns out they were drawings of an Elder Culture site. According to the kid, these drawings resemble the layout of Site 326, one of the Elder Culture sites licensed to Cal McBride’s company, Sky Edge Holdings. His former company, because Danny Drury is in charge of it now.’

  Skip had called Vic that morning, talking a mile a minute. Vic had been forced to hang up on him because the trial had been about to start and he’d been in the middle of a conversation with the prosecution lawyer, but he believed that he’d caught the gist.

  ‘That’s what the kid told me,’ Mikkel said. ‘But I’m not hearing any actual evidence of any kind of link with the Redway thing.’

  ‘I admit it’s a stretch,’ Vic said. ‘But the drawing connects the people in the shipping container with that site, and Sky Edge Holdings. And Skip thinks Redway and his associate, David Parsons, were connected to the stowaways. That’s why, he thinks, Redway and Parsons were out by the shuttle terminal when they were jumped, and Redway was zapped in the head.’

  ‘But you don’t know who these stowaways are,’ Mikkel said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Or who killed Redway.’

  ‘We’re pretty sure it was either McBride or Drury. Both of them claim to have been elsewhere when Redway was killed. We checked their alibis, and both have holes, but yeah, so far we don’t have anything that puts either one at the scene. Which is why I told Skip to concentrate on finding the friend of the dead guy, David Parsons. He was there when his friend was killed, and maybe he can tell us something about these stowaways, too. There’s a watch notice out on him, and Skip has been checking out hotels and motels, flop houses and the like.’

  ‘That’s not all he has been checking,’ Mikkel said. ‘It seems that when he went over to the land-registry department to take a copy of that excavation licence, he found out that two other parties had also requested copies. A biologist who works for a company in France, and the British consulate. I see that this is news to you.’

  That must have been the part that Vic had hung up on. He said, starting to get a bad feeling, ‘I’ve been out of the loop, what with being in court most of the day.’

  ‘The kid went to look for this biologist,’ Mikkel said, ‘but her place is closed up. Her neighbours think she’s gone on one of her field trips. So then he went to the British consulate, wanting to know why they were interested in that licence, if they’d taken a copy on behalf of Redway and Parsons.’

  ‘Oh man.’

  ‘Exactly. The consul called City Hall, City Hall called the seventh floor, seventh floor called the captain, and she tore a strip off the kid.’

  ‘What can I say? He’s young and eager, this is his first case—’

  ‘You’re his partner. I don’t want to have to step between the two of you.’

  ‘I appreciate your tact, sergeant.’

  ‘But if you cannot control your apprentice’s wayward tendencies and teach him how we put down murders, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Tell me about the kid. Is he getting laid on a regular basis?’

  ‘I’ve seen his partner. And since the kid isn’t a damn fool, I’d say yes.’

  Vic had met her just once, soon after Skip had started work in violent crimes. She’d come in one evening to collect the boy detective for a concert they were going to. Classical music, out in the park. A knockout blonde with an athletic figure, unselfconscious in a clingy grey dress, telling Vic, after Skip had introduced them, to look after her man.

  ‘If that department is taken care of, show your apprentice how we relax around here. Take him somewhere convivial, engage in some male bonding over a drink or three, and explain to him that he should ease up on this whodunnit. It has been three days now, he has no hard proof that his two suspects had anything to do with it, and the only witness is missing. Probably buried by now somewhere in the back country. He should keep it active, follow up any new leads that present themselves, but meanwhile other cases are stacking up. Tell him all that,’ Mikkel said, ‘and then tattoo the chain of command on the insides of his fucking eyelids.’

  25. Max Predator

  Norfolk | 9 July

  Sandra said that two small boats were approaching from different directions, impossible to tell whether they were police or Jack Baines’s friends. Maybe both.

  ‘We’ll keep them distracted while you and the asset make your escape,’ she told Henry Harris.

  ‘The asset?’ Chloe said, as she followed Henry through the misty junkyard.

  ‘It’s like being a VIP.’

  ‘In your world, maybe.’

  ‘This is my world. Stay close, do what I tell you, and we’ll be fine.’

  They had almost reached the ladder to the landing stage when two men stepped out from behind a dinghy upturned on railway sleepers. One young and muscular, a baseball bat cocked on his shoulder; the other about Henry’s age, long grey hair tied back with a red bandana, raising a shotgun and saying, ‘Stay right where you fucking are.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39