Chapter 25

‘MOLLY ABBOTT,’ MANOLIS said.

Ahmed snapped his eyes open. ‘A tragedy. We all very sad. Mrs Abbott taught me, she taught us all. Our visa applications need good English. Mrs Abbott helped.’

‘So you were in her class?’

‘Yes. She care for us, for our English. And we knew people would come for us after she died.’

‘What people?’

An arm shot forward, pointing out the window. ‘Out there in the town. They blame us for what happened to Mrs Abbott. They say we done it.’

Manolis nodded knowingly. ‘And that’s all Mrs Abbott was to you, your teacher?’

Ahmed’s face went blank. ‘Yes,’ he said hesitantly. ‘What else?’

‘Not a lover, a girlfriend?’

Ahmed stiffened, a look of acute irritation crossing his face, his eyebrows turning in. ‘I am married,’ he said firmly, ‘I have wife.’

‘To some people, that means nothing,’ said Manolis. ‘I need to know if you were at all romantically involved with her.’

The detainee fixed the detective with a long, steady gaze. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘A hundred times no. I not romantic with her. I am married. I have wife. We have child.’

Deep inside his chest, Manolis felt a nasty beat to his heart. He sat forward and said, ‘Ahmed, now listen. I need to ask where you were last Friday night.’

The detainee’s face darkened. Manolis saw his dancing pupils, could see his brain working. Ahmed’s eyes narrowed, the muscles in his jaw twitching beneath his skin.

‘First you ask if I love her, now you think I kill her? Because I am Muslim and because we stone people?’ His voice had raised an octave.

‘Please, Ahmed. Yes, I’m here to help. But I can’t help you if you don’t help me. So please, just tell me where you were last Friday.’

Ahmed stood, his broad sandalled brown feet spaced to match his shoulders.

‘Who saying this?’ he demanded. ‘Are you asking others? Many Muslims are in facility. Why pick on me?’

Deacon stood, reached for his holster. Manolis gestured that he should sit down, that everything was under control. The detective held up his hands to Ahmed, his open palms requesting calm.

‘We’re not picking on you,’ he reassured him. ‘We are asking others.’

Ahmed took two steps towards the door, as if preparing to run. His face was blotchy, red and white at the same time.

‘If I kill someone, they send me home. If I kill, I die.’

His voice broke on the final words, and he appeared to visibly calm down. The guard sat.

Manolis thought a moment before he spoke again. He’d wanted to tell Ahmed that he was being questioned because he broke curfew. But instead, he approached from a different angle.

‘Maybe if you kill someone, you stay here. If you go home, you may not serve jail time. So you stay here and go to jail, swap a death sentence for a life sentence. Sounds smart to me. When you’re released, you go home. The war will probably be over.’

The detective’s logic settled in the room. The two men watched each other for some time, their breathing deep and steady. After a while, Ahmed smiled. It was a smile that cut his face into segments; Manolis quite liked it.

‘I never think like that. But jail is no change from here. This already jail. In fact, jail may be better. At least jail is jail. Here is nothing.’ His tone was resigned, his arms hanging by his sides like those of a puppet with cut strings.

Manolis lowered his gaze, his eyes settling on a spiny black insect inching its way across the floor; it did not look friendly. He scratched the back of his neck. He was struggling to find an angle. This suspect was like no other. If anything, murder made the most sense – it guaranteed him life in a law-abiding land.

‘Do you know about stonings?’

Ahmed’s query struck Manolis like a blow. It was wholly unexpected. He looked up to see a face that was calm but held intense sorrow.

‘I do,’ Ahmed added. ‘I see them, many times, in the hills near my village.’ The detainee sat back down and began. Stonings, he said, never took place in cities where victims were usually publicly hanged. They were more common in the countryside and mountains, away from prying eyes.

‘Revenge by blood, is what people say.’

Pits are dug using shovels and pickaxes. Ahmed made digging motions with his big brown hands. The condemned individual is lowered in, their arms tied with rope, their body wrapped in three pieces of white shroud in accordance with Muslim burial practices. The head is sometimes concealed. A mullah oversees the ritual. A crowd gathers, fists clenched, implements ready. Stones have to be the right size.

‘Too big and they kill too fast,’ Ahmed said. ‘But too small, like pebble, and they do nothing.’

Manolis pictured the desk down the hall, the murder weapon strewn across it. In terms of size, its many separate pieces sounded comparable, if not optimal.

‘They don’t have to be stones,’ Ahmed added. ‘People throw bricks, tiles, broken concrete. All things heavy, Allah does not care.’

Crowds whistle as items hit their mark. Shouts of joy ring out with every strike, every spray of blood. Dogs bark, hungry for flesh. A medical doctor periodically stops proceedings to check if the victim is dead. Most stonings take place at dawn.

‘How long do they last?’ Manolis’s voice was weak.

Ahmed shrugged. ‘Depends. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes two hours. And you can tell the people who are guilty.’

‘How?’

Ahmed said the innocent look straight ahead, lift their heads, hold them high. ‘Only the guilty look away.’

Manolis thought that sounded like a superstition and inwardly shook his head. But he then recalled the strange location of the wounds on the back of Molly’s head, and the surprising lack on her face. Kerr had explained them by saying she would’ve turned her own head in that situation. Did that make sense? Was Molly guilty of something? Guilty of what? Or simply terrified?

‘One time I see, the pit is too shallow. The woman has to wait for death listening to the sound of working shovels digging deeper pit.’

When the ritual is over, fists shoot into the air in triumph and celebration. Villagers boast of what they’ve done and receive blessings for their magnificent act.

‘People say they do their duty in the name of Allah,’ said Ahmed. ‘They are not the ones throwing the stones. Allah throws them. He guides their arms.’

Afterwards, the body is disinterred and taken away. The hole is filled in, the area flattened and raked clean to remove any trace of blood. Fresh soil is scattered.

Raked clean to remove any trace of blood…? Manolis wondered whether that might explain the noticeably small bloodstain at the scene.

Ahmed said that adulterers who confess are allowed to go free if they can escape the pit during their execution, and Manolis realised this was a quirk of the ritual that put women at a distinct disadvantage. Pits were dug deeper for women than men, up to their chest, not waist. The death game was loaded.

Manolis again considered the evidence. Molly was tied to a tree, not buried in a pit. She’d not been wrapped in cloth, and her head was left exposed. He imagined the horror of seeing stones approaching, even in darkened light. The uncertainty, their indistinct outlines probably making it worse. This could indeed explain the trauma to the back of her head if she’d been trying to dodge their trajectory. But there were similarities in ritual too. It had taken place in the countryside, and it could very well have been at dawn.

He recalled a unique feature about a stoning: that it was perhaps the only form of execution in which no single person delivered a fatal blow, but where a community became de facto executioner. Had he been wrong to suspect a single killer operating in isolation? Was Cobb itself the culprit?

‘You certainly know a lot about stonings,’ Manolis said.

Ahmed smiled gently, almost modestly. ‘Most of us from these countries do,’ he said. ‘Stonings, whippings, burnings, beheadings, all happen, all the time. We grow up with them all around us, even as children, it is part of everyday life. We fear them so we know right from wrong. But this is my yesterday. And today, I have nothing to hide.’

‘So,’ Manolis said, ‘then tell me – where were you last Friday night?’

There was a long pause before Ahmed replied. A deep sigh preceded his answer. ‘I was in jail, of course.’ He drank his words down thirstily, draining the mug in a single motion.

Manolis sipped at his own mug pensively, considering the young man’s emotionless face. His reply was equally protracted. ‘So you were there, in the detention centre?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘The same as any other night…’

It wasn’t sleeping. He explained that most detainees rested during the day because it was too dangerous to sleep at night.

Glancing over his shoulder, Ahmed checked whether Deacon was listening. He appeared to have fallen asleep behind his dark sunglasses, his breathing steady, slow. Ahmed turned back, watched the floor with intense concentration. Careful with his words, he began.

‘In the dead of night, blood pours from the bodies of young men, just as it had on the Friday she was killed.’

Arterial gushings – in their trembling brown hands were orange razors, disposable, single blade.

‘This is the men,’ Ahmed said. ‘For women, is even worse.’

He said the female detainees avoided the toilet block after dusk for fear of being raped. They would sooner wet their beds than go to the toilets, which were some distance from the accommodation dongas and didn’t have locks.

‘This is what goes on, what happens,’ he said.

Manolis cringed. He was beginning to form a picture.

‘I very happy my family not here,’ Ahmed went on. ‘I did not promise them this, to come be raped. You can stay in Iraq and do that.’

Manolis stroked his chin, heard a scratching sound. ‘How old is your daughter?’

‘Four when I leave, now ten.’

Manolis inspected Ahmed’s arms, tried to see if there were slash marks, but his sleeves were too long. Instead, the detective wrote in his notepad. He was deeply concerned about the reference to sexual assaults.

‘Did this happen on Friday?’ Manolis asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And you were there all night?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were asleep or awake?’

‘Both.’

Ahmed checked over his shoulder again; Deacon remained still. The detainee turned back and said the facility staff regularly cut off their electricity and water when detainees self-harmed, as punishment to others.

‘I sleep two hours, maybe three. The rest is nightmare.’

‘And when did you last see Mrs Abbott?’

Manolis expected Ahmed to say Thursday, which was Molly’s last scheduled English class. But he didn’t. Instead, he told the truth.

‘Friday afternoon. I go to her school, we talk about my visa.’

‘Your visa?’

‘Yes. She is helping.’

‘What happened?’

‘We talk, me and Mrs Abbott, and with another man. After we talk, I go home.’

‘And all you did was talk?’

‘Yes.’

‘What time was this?’

Ahmed scanned the cracked ceiling. ‘Three o’clock, maybe four.’

‘And you didn’t leave the detention centre again that night?’

‘No. I mean, yes, I not leave. I still not leave, only to come here today. No one leaves anymore. We too scared.’

Manolis consulted his notepad. ‘And this other man you were with, he is also at the centre?’

‘Yes. He is not like us. He is white.’

His mouth dry, Manolis took a slug of his drink. The water was tepid, tasted faintly of rust. He let the liquid coat his insides, burning like mild acid, and tried to swallow the tense lump crowding his throat. Dragging a forearm across his lips, he prepared his words deliberately and delivered them slowly.

‘Ahmed, please listen. The security records show that you did not return to the detention centre on Friday. That you left and broke curfew and were out all night.’

A weighty silence filled the room. Ahmed’s limbs perhaps felt heavy, as he did not move. He stared at the floor, processing the information with only pupils flitting. Manolis watched him, waiting.

After some time, Ahmed looked back to Manolis. ‘So, I am liar?’

Manolis paused. ‘This is the evidence I have before me. You need to prove to me otherwise. Show me proof that I am wrong.’

A quizzical look swept across Ahmed’s brown face. He opened his mouth and closed it again, and went back to staring. When he finally opened his mouth again, a solitary word fell out.

‘How?’

Manolis felt a profound sadness wash over him. The whole time he’d been speaking with Ahmed, he had pictured his own refugee grandfather and migrant father sitting beside him. They were judging his interrogation, grave looks of disappointment across their weathered faces. They too had once been strangers in a foreign land, and had likely been accused of something or other. Manolis felt enormous guilt and shame but remained professional. He shook off the vision and returned to task.

‘You need to show me something that says you were at the detention centre on Friday night. Something that shows you weren’t at the crime scene. Something that shows you were somewhere else. Only then can I consider ruling you out as a suspect.’

Ahmed continued staring, scanning. A soft frown appeared on his face. Finally, he blinked, and the light of an idea seemed to ignite behind his eyes. He leant in close to Manolis and spoke in a barely audible whisper.

‘It is guards. They must be. They have party Friday, everyone drinking, drunk. You see what they do in toilets.’

Manolis looked at him soberly and with clear eyes. ‘If that’s true, I need proof,’ he whispered back. ‘Words are not enough. I’ll do my best to find out more about the other things you said, but those are some very serious accusations.’

Ahmed stood, shunting his chair back across the floor. It startled Deacon and perhaps even woke him. He was abruptly by Ahmed’s side, restraining the detainee’s arm and preparing to march him out the door.

Ahmed eyed Manolis directly. ‘I bring proof,’ he said bluntly. ‘Praise to Allah, inshallah, and thank you to you.’

Manolis nodded his gratitude. The Iraqi was shoved forward, told to ‘move it’. After a few metres, he turned back, a half-turn, his eyes having changed again.

‘What about other man, the white man in truck with me?’

Manolis clicked his biro. ‘I’m about to speak with him.’

Ahmed smiled dark teeth, exposing jagged gums, and extended his free arm. Manolis stepped forward and shook his hand, matched his pressure. It was hefty and strong with a firm grip. The detective could not help but imagine how a rock might sit in that strong and hefty hand.