Girl on Fire

It was high summer now, the blazing days of August, and Stan and I were on Hampstead Heath, making our way up Parliament Hill, ascending the steep climb to one of the highest points in the city when all you can see ahead of you is hill and sky, and there’s a tingle in your blood because you know that the moment you reach the top all of London will suddenly be displayed below you.

I jogged back down the hill to the wood, calling his name, waving a pack of Nature’s Menu treats, and feeling a sense of rising panic. And then deep inside all the bright greens of summer, I saw a smudge of ruby-coloured dog concealed in the bushes and then those shining black eyes.

I got out some treats, still calling his name, but the most food-motivated dog in the world did not budge. He was not interested in food.

‘Anaphylactic shock,’ a passing dog walker said as his elderly Retriever gambolled on Parliament Hill. ‘Something stung her or bit her.’

Strangers always thought that Stan was female. There was something about the extravagant curls of his ears that made him look like a girl. I retrieved him from the bushes and held him to my chest. He was a dead weight in my arms. The dog walker looked at me impatiently.

‘But anaphylactic shock covers a lot of ground,’ he said as Stan closed his eyes and curled up on his examination table, wanting only to sleep, wanting only for the world to go away. ‘He’s certainly had some kind of extreme and rapid allergic reaction.’ Christian’s hands searched the red fur for clues. ‘I’m guessing it’s a sting from a bee or a wasp.’

‘Anaphylaxis is as serious in dogs as it is in humans,’ Christian said. ‘Leave him with us for forty-eight hours. We’ll give him epinephrine to get his heart rate up, antibiotics to prevent infection and some fluids to kick-start his blood pressure.’

Stan looked at us with mournful eyes. They were not completely black, I saw, but etched with a thin ring of deepest brown. And those eyes were round as marbles and as huge as the eyes of a hero in a Japanese comic. I felt my own eyes flood with tears and lightly touched his red fur.

‘He’s a fit young dog with a thin layer of fat,’ Christian said. Then he looked at me with a kind of clear-eyed compassion. ‘But as you know, they’re a delicate breed,’ he said.

I nodded. Stan was not moving. There was nothing more I could do. I left him with Christian. And this dog who hated to see anyone he cared for walk away did not even look up.

As I walked to the door of the examination room, he was as still as when I found him hiding in the bushes on that hill between the city and the sky, like a creature who had all at once had enough, like an animal who had crawled away to die.

She answered the phone herself. I was relieved that I did not have to talk to anyone else. And no doubt everyone else was happy that they didn’t have to talk to me.

‘Then I’ll begin. ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee. He was a pilot in the war.’

‘Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies of laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of – Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence …’

And nothing but silence on the other end of the line.

‘Are you all right, Scout?’

‘I’m listening very carefully.’

So I continued.

‘Hovering there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.’

‘Wow,’ said Scout.

‘Scout?’ shouted her mother from another room.

But I went on.

‘Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod,

The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand … and touched the face of God.’

Scout sighed. ‘That’s a good one,’ she said. ‘What happened to John the poet?’

I heard my ex-wife take the phone and felt her waiting until Scout had scampered up the stairs to brush her teeth. I could hear noises in the background. Family noises. Children getting ready for bed, music coming from somewhere. Some kind of late-night, chilled-out cocktail jazz that was not a perfect fit in a house full of young children.

These domestic noises fascinated me. I had never thought about my ex-wife’s home life. And now that Scout was living with her, I thought about it all the time.

Then Anne was on the line. ‘Do you have to read her a poem every night?’ she said.

‘Well, it’s our bedtime poem,’ I said, as if that explained everything. ‘Scout always has a poem before she sleeps.’ I thought about it, struggling to find a compromise. ‘I could buy Scout her own phone so that we don’t—’

But the total stranger at the other end of the line sighed with infinite weariness and slowly hung up.

I stared at the phone for a bit and then got down on the floor and did twenty-five quick press-ups. Then I did another twenty-five, thinking about my form, cranking them out more slowly. Out in the main room of our loft I could hear Mrs Murphy, totally lost without Scout and Stan to take care of. I flexed my right knee. It felt almost as good as the other knee. Fred’s intensive rehab had worked wonders on the injury from Lake Meadows and the gaps between the flare-ups of pain were getting longer. And then I did a third set of twenty-five press-ups, the lactic acid building up nicely in my arms and shoulders now, making them burn with an aching kind of pain. And then I caught my breath and slowly pumped out the final twenty-five, pushing myself to go on when I wanted to stop and rest.

I stood on the bed and pushed back a panel in the ceiling, the only place in the loft where Mrs Murphy never cleaned. I pulled down Jackson’s old kitbag and unzipped it, smelling the gun oil. I unwrapped the T-shirt inside and stared at the glint of the Glock 17 in the night-time. Then I wrapped it in the T-shirt, put it back in Jackson’s kitbag and stored it again in the ceiling.

‘But not Fred’s gym,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a different gym tonight.’

‘And how are they?’ she said. ‘How’s my Scout?’ she said. ‘And how’s my Stan?’

‘They lead such accelerated lives, don’t they? Their lives just rush past us.’

Teenage boys and girls were shadow-boxing, banging the bags and doing sit-ups, press-ups and planks. There was a small boxing ring with sagging ropes and Father Marvin Gane stood in the middle of it with a pair of battered Lonsdale pads on his hands. A line of children of assorted age and size queued up to throw three-punch combinations at the pads.

It was the first time I had seen him in the gym. Even in his clerical gear, he looked like a giant of a man. But in a sweat-stained T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, shouting instructions – ‘Double Jab! Right cross! Don’t let that right hand fade away! Get it back to your chin!’ – he looked like something else.

I found an empty bench and kept out of the way until he was ready for me. After the children in the ring had all thrown their combinations, he slipped between the ropes.

‘Shadow-box!’ he told them. ‘Three three-minute rounds! Ten burpies and ten press-ups between rounds! Keep it neat! Think about your form! Hard work and dedication! Defend yourself at all times!’

The children began bouncing about in the ring, their faces dead serious, dancing around their imaginary opponents.

Father Gane shook my hand and eased his large body on to the bench beside me, his handsome black face gleaming with sweat. Someone had once told him he looked a bit like Marvin Gaye on the cover of ‘What’s Going On?’ and he had grown a neat beard to encourage the comparison.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to your mother’s funeral,’ I said. ‘She was a lovely woman.’

He nodded briskly, a gesture that suggested we skip the small talk. ‘How can I help you, Detective?’

‘Sir Ludo Mount was hit by a truck in Borodino Street last night,’ I said. ‘He is going to live but he’s never going to walk again.’

‘I saw the news,’ Father Marvin said. ‘Very sad for his family. But I imagine he had many enemies.’

‘I was there when it happened. There was another message – a Biblical reference. This one was sprayed on the side of a cop car. Exodus chapter 20, verse 13: Thou shalt not kill. The Sixth Commandment.’

‘I know you had an interest in Borodino Street,’ I said. ‘Because I saw you down there a few times.’

He looked out at his gym. ‘I’m interested in anyone who has been separated from God,’ he said. ‘I prayed for the Khan family.’ He looked at me levelly. ‘Are you asking me for my theological opinion on the killer’s use of the Commandments?’

‘I’m trying to work out if it’s a false lead,’ I said. ‘If the use of the Ten Commandments is designed to send our investigation down a dead end.’

‘I see – you’re wondering if you should be looking for a religious maniac or if the use of the Commandments is just a con?’

‘The Ten Commandments are the basis of God’s law and establish timeless, universal and unequivocal standards of right and wrong,’ he said, watching the children as they stopped shadow-boxing and began their burpies. ‘But they’re not, as many believe, specific to Christianity. Ethical principles exist in every religion. You’ll find something like the Ten Commandments – we call them the Decalogue in the trade, from the Greek for “ten words” – in Islam and Judaism. As a Christian, I believe that what’s unique about the Ten Commandments is that only they were written with the finger of God.’

A tall, gangling youth had entered the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre with a small kitbag in his hand and a large spliff dangling from his mouth. He was pulling out a pair of worn red Cleto Reyes gloves when Father Gane turned him around and slapped him hard across the face.

The youth did not move and in a flash Gane had him by the scruff of his neck and he was carrying the boy to the exit door.

‘Come back when you’re sober,’ Father Gane said, and tossed him into the night as if he was a rag doll with the stuffing knocked out of it.

Gane came back to the bench, as every child in there watched him out of the corner of their eye.

‘But I thought you had arrested this – what do they call him? – Bad Moses?’ he said.

‘My boss thought so too,’ I said. ‘My SIO – you remember DCI Pat Whitestone?’

Whitestone and his brother Curtis had both been DIs when I started in Homicide at West End Central.

‘She liked this George Halfpenny for the murder of Ahmed Khan,’ I said. ‘Maybe you saw him on Borodino Street.’

‘I saw him talking but I wasn’t listening,’ he said. ‘Because I was praying. Our paths did not cross.’

‘But – between you and me – it was wishful thinking that Halfpenny was Bad Moses. He seriously injured a policeman when he was resisting arrest so there was a desire to see him go down. Many of my colleagues wanted George Halfpenny to be Bad Moses, including my boss. But Halfpenny was locked up in HMP Belmarsh when Ludo Mount got crippled. And I have spoken to George Halfpenny. The man’s an atheist.’

‘There was a famous murder case in the Seventies,’ I said. ‘The press called the killer Black Moses. A married white woman who had been playing around was strangled and they arrested her black husband. He was a lay preacher out of Trinidad and that fit very well because the killer wrote the chapter and verse number of the Commandment about not committing adultery on the bedroom wall. And he wrote it with her blood. Did you ever hear about that case, Father?’

‘The husband did ten years,’ I said. ‘But the murderer turned out to be the woman’s father, who was white and angry that his daughter had married a black man. Today we would call it an honour killing, even though there’s never any honour in them. The real killer, the woman’s father, let it slip to a workmate a decade later. They usually have to talk about it to someone in the end. It must drive you nuts, trying to keep that kind of secret. But the law missed the real killer at the time because he wrote the Commandment about not committing adultery on the wall.’

‘Although the way the killer wrote it was Exodus 20:14. He used Exodus rather than Deuteronomy. Like our guy now – like Bad Moses. He uses Exodus, doesn’t he?’

‘And I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would you use one set of Commandments and not the other? How would you choose between Deuteronomy and Exodus? What’s the difference?’

‘But when you talk about the Ten Commandments, you use Deuteronomy, don’t you, Father Gane? Bad Moses quotes Exodus. But you look me in the eye and you quote Deuteronomy.’

He turned to face me. ‘And do you think that might be a false lead, Detective? Me using Deuteronomy when the man you are seeking quotes Exodus?’

‘We never really talked about your brother,’ I said. ‘We never really talked about what happened to Curtis, did we?’

I had seen a lot of Father Gane in those last days of my colleague’s life. In truth, his brother Curtis and I had never been close friends. Curtis was too far ahead of me when I joined Homicide and Serious Crime Command for a real friendship to develop early on and when we grew closer, after he broke his back, the time was always running out.

But I had been there the night we busted a paedophile ring in an abandoned mansion on The Bishop’s Avenue, and I had watched DI Curtis Gane take one step back from a man holding a black carbon lock knife with a four-inch blade and I had seen him fall two storeys, breaking the vertebrae that connected his head to his spine.

I had been there when Curtis Gane’s life changed and I was there in those long hospital nights when he begged me to end his life.

But I had always known that Father Marvin Gane had it in him – the physical strength, the moral certainty – to hold a pillow over his brother’s head until the pain and suffering was over.

‘My brother was in unimaginable pain,’ he said. ‘In the end his death was a mercy. For him. And for my mother. God took him.’

‘I saw you – and your mother – the day we scattered Curtis’ ashes from the roof of West End Central. But I didn’t see you again after that. Not until Borodino Street. And I still don’t understand what you were doing there. I could understand why all those people came to pay their respects to Alice Stone and to leave their flowers. But some people couldn’t stay away from Borodino Street. Some people were drawn back to it again and again. And you were one of them, weren’t you?’

He watched the children springing around the ring, throwing punches at their invisible foes.

‘Your iniquities have separated you from your God, your sins have hidden His face from you, so that he will not hear,’ he said. ‘Isaiah chapter 59, verse 2. That’s why I went to Borodino Street, Detective, because it was a place without God. That seems totally absurd to you, I know. In a godless society, faith always seems insane. The idea of being separated from God seems raving mad to the man who does not believe in God. Of course it does. But you didn’t really come to talk to me about theology, did you? You came to see me because you mistakenly believe that I murdered my brother and you are wondering who else I might have killed.’

For a long moment there was only the sound of leather hitting leather, and gasps of effort, and the sound of breath running out.

I thought he was going to kick me out of the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre just as he had violently ejected the stoned young man. I did not doubt that he could do it. Of the two of us, he was by far the more powerful man. But he wrung his huge hands, as if in prayer or perhaps restraining himself.

‘I wasn’t anywhere near Borodino Street. And I didn’t run down that lawyer. And I didn’t kill the father of those two mass murderers.’

I waited for him to tell me that he had not placed a pillow over the face of Curtis Gane.

He took my hand and he did not let it go and, with the slightest of motions, he pulled me towards him.

When I got back to Smithfield, the meat market was in full swing, the club kids were coming out to play and my favourite Criminal Informant was waiting for me, watching the night go by and giving his pale frail body what it craved.

Nils was standing in the shadows, eating a sponge cake with his fingers, a streak of jam running down his leather trousers, relishing the sudden hit of sugar the way only the career heroin addict truly can.

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