And then without warning, the other boy stepped up to Coughlan and punched him hard in the face.
Coughlan felt a great bolt of pain shake his spine and nail him to the chair. Tears sprang across his face and diluted the blood that bubbled from his nose. His head spun for a second, and then he fell unconscious face-first across the bag of drugs.
“You’ve killed him,” squealed Pete. “You’ve killed him.”
“He’s not dead,” said the other kid, poking Coughlan hard in the shoulder so that his head lolled back and forth. “Look, he’s still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed like that.”
“But he might be dead soon,” said Pete, his face turning white and his tongue sticking in his throat.
“Don’t be fuckin’ stupid,” said the other kid, stepping forward and giving Coughlan a hard shove. The old man slid off the table and dragged the bag of drugs onto the floor with him, spilling its contents across the battered linoleum.
Pete just stared at the old man, the spread of drugs.
“Well go on then, pick ’em up,” said the other kid.
Pete hesitated for a second, his limbs telling him to run, but then did as he was told. He gathered the drugs together and tried to see if Coughlan was breathing all right.
“Come on, come on,” snapped the other kid, tapping Pete in the side with the toe of his trainer.
Pete hurried to scrape up the remainder of the packets and stuff them back into the bin liner. He gathered the neck of the bag together and then tried to hand it to the other kid. But the other kid just told him to put it back in the cupboard.
“But what about Mr. Coughlan?”
“He’s not goin’ to be telling no one,” came the response.
Coughlan came round moments later, more shocked than hurt. Drifting back into the here and now, he remained on the kitchen floor for a short time, listening for signs of other people in the flat. It all appeared to be quiet, and he was sure that it had been the slamming of the door that had stirred him. He ran a hand across his upper lip, wiping at the blood there. It had started to harden and it felt like his nose had stopped bleeding. He climbed to his feet and shuffled across to the sink. He turned on the tap and let it run until it got as cold as it was going to get. Cupping his hands together, he filled them with water, and then held his nose in the water until it had all leaked through his hardened fingers. He repeated the action. As the center of his face started to numb, the numbness spreading out from his nose, he felt his strength returning and his mind clearing. He knew that he should go to the police, but he also knew that would be a mistake. He had seen what had happened to people who stood up for themselves, and he did not want to go through that himself. Rather than bringing an end to their torment, it had more often than not meant an escalation.
He shuffled through into his bedroom and changed into a fresh shirt, throwing the bloodstained one into the waste bin behind the door. There were a few splashes of blood on his trousers, but as he had just bought them a few weeks earlier, he was reluctant to throw them out too, and decided to keep them on. Once he had finished dressing, he walked into the bathroom to inspect his injuries in the mirror. He used a flannel to wipe the dried blood from his skin and then leaned in to the mirror to get a closer look. There was a small scratch on the side of his nose, and the beginnings of a bruise, but apart from that the damage appeared to be minimal, at least on the outside.
He went back into the bedroom and put on a thick sweater. Despite the warmth of the evening, the assault had left him feeling cold and he had goosebumps on his arms. Then he went back into the kitchen and looked at the blood on the floor, the bloodied handprints from the floor to the sink like the footprints of some great lost beast. The sight of it made him feel a little sick, and he told himself he would clean it up later. He turned and left the flat, closing the door behind him.
He walked through Camden Town, through the streets he had walked since childhood, feeling that he no longer knew them. His mind was all over the place, dislocated and lost within the familiar maps of his life. Earlier he had been quite prepared to confront Pete about letting his friends use the flat, but now he felt like he just wanted to forget that he had ever met the boy.
He tried to eat an omelette at a café on Chalk Farm Road, pushing it around his plate until it got lodged in the cooling grease, and then walked up to Parliament Hill fields. There, he sat on a bench overlooking the athletics track, watching a group of girls messing about in the long jump pit. At one point, one of the girls ran across to the steeplechase water jump. There was no water in it, but she still jumped in and pretended to be drowning, waving her arms around and screaming. Her friends just ignored her and at last she returned to the sand pit.
The girls left when it started to get dark, but Coughlan felt too tired to walk home just then and stretched out on the bench to rest for a few minutes before setting off. The brittle summer stars spreading across the darkening ceiling of the world reminded him of a time during the war when he had dragged his mattress onto the roof of the outhouse to listen to the bombs dropping on the East End. Despite the noise and the threat of the bombs getting closer, he remembered it as being a time of calm for him, a time before he had met his wife, a time before the neighbor’s house had been crushed. He let his lids fall, so tired and with a persistent headache, and when at last he opened them again it had started to get light. Surprised, he rubbed hard at his face to wake himself up and then climbed to his feet. His back ached but the pain eased up as he started walking toward the gate. When he checked the clock outside the jeweler’s store on Kentish Town Road he was surprised to see that it was 5 o’clock in the morning.
He let himself into the flat and stood for a few moments in the hall, just holding his breath and listening. Minutes passed but all he could hear was the regular sounds of the flat creaking. He appeared to be alone, but to make sure he went round each of the rooms, checking in cupboards and behind doors, before going back to the front door and locking it. Then he went back into his bedroom and climbed into bed, still in his clothes.
When he woke again it was after 4 in the afternoon, a dull rectangle of orange light spread across the bed beside him. For a moment he did not know where he was, and then he remembered falling asleep on the bench and it all came back to him. But in that fleeting moment of not knowing, he had felt at peace with the world. And now the knot was back in his stomach. He looked at his watch again to check the time. Pete or some of his friends would be around soon and he did not want to be here for that. He went into the bathroom to check on the wound, and then back into the bedroom to dress in a set of thicker and more comfortable clothes. In the kitchen he took his pension book from the drawer, slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers, and headed back outside. He took a quick glance at the drug dealers sitting near the phone booths, then turned and headed back up toward Parliament Hill fields, calling in at a corner shop to purchase a couple of small pies and a carton of milk.
There were a few pensioners out on the bowling green, and a middle-aged couple were struggling to hit the ball over the net on one of the tennis courts. Coughlan stopped for a moment to watch them, aching inside at their casual grasp of the ordinariness of their lives, and then continued on to the bench where he had slept the night before. As he turned from the fence bordering the court, he started to panic at the thought that someone else might be sitting there. But when he reached the top of the rise and saw that there was no one else there, the feeling of relief that flooded his senses was just as great as if he had returned to his flat and found that Pete and his friends had decided to leave. He stepped up his pace until he reached the bench, took his seat, and then looked around, blinking in the high afternoon sun. There was no one on the athletics track, no one messing around in the long jump pit, nothing for him to watch and help pass the time. But on the main path there was a woman out walking her dog, and when Coughlan offered her a cheerful hello he was rewarded with a brief smile. It was the greatest reaction he’d had had in a long time, the greatest acceptance.
Through the birch trees on the far side of the track and the cranes that seemed to be forever stalking the streets of London, Coughlan watched the sun go down until he became shrouded in darkness. The shroud felt a little colder than it had the night before, so he pulled his coat tight around his chest. A slight wind had also started to blow across the hill, and he thought that perhaps he might be too cold on the bench. He tried to think of somewhere else he might be able to sleep. There was a small café near the tennis courts, and he thought that perhaps he might be warm snuggled up there at the back of the kitchen. But then he remembered the bandstand further back. Not the usual kind of bandstand with a wrought-iron railing circling the stage, but one with a solid wall facing the path. Whenever the bandstand was in use, the audience would sit on the hill to watch. If he crept in there he would be sheltered from both the wind and people passing on the path. Taking one last look across the track toward the failing light, Coughlan bundled himself up inside his coat and headed for the bandstand.
Within an hour he was asleep. He dreamed of black-and-white creatures diving from a concrete island and swimming free, at ease with both themselves and their surroundings. From the opposite bank he stood and watched them for a long time before summoning up the courage to dive in and join them. His arms and legs felt awkward at first, stiff and making little progress, but soon he too was swimming free. At first the other creatures kept their distance, but after a few minutes he was accepted into their fold, and when the swim was over the creatures let him climb out onto their concrete island. When he looked back at the place from where he had dived into the water, it had disappeared.
The following morning he awoke feeling like he had just had the best night’s sleep of his life, and he set off back to the flat with something approaching a spring in his step.
Walking across the estate, he saw that the door to his flat was wide open. Fearing that he had been burgled, he picked up his pace and hurried up the stairs. But as he approached the door, the fear was replaced with something else: huge relief that at long last he had no responsibilities and could do just as he pleased. On reaching the door, he stopped and listened for a moment, and then pulled it closed and carried on walking.
A
hundred wary eyes watched his approach through the yellow-stained sodium twilight. The cats were all around him, frozen as if ready to pounce, though whether toward him or away from him, he couldn’t tell. Heldon considered himself a cat lover, but their stares forced a shiver of unease.
The pinpoints of light punctured the night—under trolleys and cars, on corrugated roofs, though most of them, attached to near-identical scrawny brown bodies, surrounded an overturned plastic barrel that had spilled a neat chevron of part-frozen meat and bone onto a torn newspaper headline:
Iran: Allied Generals Are Ready.
By day, Ridley Road Market is the heart of Dalston. A heaving babel of traders and shoppers—East End English, West African, Indian, Russian, Turkish—squeeze past each other in a permanent bottleneck. The stalls—Snow White Children’s Clothes, Chicken Shop, Alpha & Omega Variety Store—offer exotically colored fabrics and cheap electrical goods alongside barrels of unidentifiable animal parts, unfamiliar vegetables, and unlocked mobile phones.
But at night the market belongs to the cats. They are everywhere. They don’t need to fight, there’s always plenty of food to go round; they just wait their turns in the shadows.
At least they keep the rats away
, thought Heldon, in a transparent attempt to console himself. A foot-long rodent scuttled behind a wheelie bin. The cats’ eyes remained fixed on the larger intruder. “Don’t mind me,” he said out loud, “just keep eating your dinner.”
“Ignore the cats, they’re just keeping an eye out for troublemakers.”
The deep, careful African voice came from a closed stall within a concrete shell on the other side of the road; a tired-looking sign above a closed wooden door read,
Bouna Fabrics
Afr
, before trailing off into decay.
The cats returned to their business. Heldon crossed the road and opened the door.
“Hello, Ani. You’ve got yourself a few more cats since I was last here.”
“Yes, my friend. At least they keep the rats away, eh?”
Aniweta smiled and the men shook hands. A Nigerian barrel of a man with a gold-ringed grasp to match, his strong dark hand engulfed Heldon’s puffy pink-white flesh. He claimed to be in his forties. But his watery eyes and leather-tan skin made Heldon think he was older than that.
“It’s good of you to see me,” said Heldon.
“Well, it’s not as if I have a choice, eh? Come, let’s go out back, this place gives me a headache.” Aniweta turned, pushed his way through the lurid yellow and green fabrics hanging from the ceiling, and disappeared.
A thick black curtain veiled a door leading into a small, dimly lit room. Lined shelves held rows of unlabeled glass jars containing dried plants, powders, and things too deformed to be identified as animal, mineral, or vegetable. A heavy wooden desk, its surface covered with what could just as easily be scientific or magical debris—scales, tongs, a pestle and mortar, stains, scorch marks, and candle wax—stood near the wall facing the entrance.
Aniweta sat down on a sturdy wooden chair and looked expectantly at Heldon.
The sickly aroma of faded incense, over-ripe vegetables, and old meat reminded Heldon of the first time he’d been down here. That was almost five years ago. Then he had been a little afraid, though he would never have admitted it at the time. Now he was just angry.
“There’s been another one, Ani. But I suppose you know that already.”
“Yes, I know. A girl this time. No doubt you will call her Eve.”
Heldon knew the market well. You had to, working in this neighborhood. Mostly it looked after itself, a closed system, and it was best not to get involved. The force had their own people in there, and the market presumably had its own people in the force. Recycled mobiles and other stolen goods were one thing. They could be dealt with quietly. But there were other things that could not be ignored. As the trade in guns and drugs got a little too casual, like it did every year, a few stalls were inevitably raided, as was the old pub on the corner of St. Mark’s Rise, which was now less popular, though more peaceful, as a beautician’s.
But all this was regular police work, and so no longer Heldon’s business.
At first, bush meat was his business. Chimps mostly, but also the odd gorilla, brought in from the Congo and Gabon. An Italian punk girl had almost fainted on seeing a huge, dark, five-fingered hand fall out of brown paper wrapping as it was passed to a customer at the Sunny Day Meats stall.
The raids found no whole animals, only parts—heads, feet, genitals, hands—most too precious for food and sold only for
muti
or
juju.
Medicine. Magic. They turned up something else too. The squad at first thought the bag contained parts of a baby chimp: fingers stripped of skin, a dark and shriveled penis and scrotum, teeth. But forensics found otherwise. They were human.
The stallholder was arrested.
Heldon’s team had kept the details from the press, but Aniweta had known. As a
sangoma,
a witch, he knew many things. Heldon knew very little about him, however, except that he had emigrated to London from Nigeria in the 1970s, had a UK passport, and no criminal record. He had always proved a reliable source of local and traditional knowledge, and his calm manner, coupled with a dark sense of humor, had commanded Heldon’s respect and, on occasion, fear.
At first Heldon had assumed the parts were imported. That was until September 21, 2001, the autumn equinox, when a boy was fished from the Thames outside the Globe Theatre. The five-year-old’s body was naked, apart from a pair of orange shorts, put on him, it turned out, after he had been bled to death. Then his head and limbs had been severed by someone who knew precisely what they were doing.
They named him Adam. It was sickening to keep referring to him as “the corpse” or “the torso.” They initially thought he was South African, but an autopsy revealed otherwise—inside the boy’s stomach was a stew of clay, bone, gold, and the remains of a single kidney-shaped calabar bean. The calabar bean was like a neon sign to the investigation. The plant grows in West Africa, where it’s known as the “doomsday plant” because of the number of accidental deaths it causes. It’s also used to draw out witches and negate their power—once a bean is eaten, only the innocent survive. The shorts were another clue. Bought in a German Woolworth’s, they were coral orange for the
orisha
spirit Ochun, the river queen of the Yoruba religion: the great diviner who knows the future and the mysteries of women.
The calabar would have caused his blood pressure to rise painfully, followed by convulsions and conscious paralysis; his screams imbuing the magic with a rare and terrible strength. Then his throat was slit and his torment ended by a final blow to the back of the head. Once dead, the butchery began. The blood was drained from his body and preserved; his head and limbs removed, along with what is known in
muti
as the atlas bone: the vertebra connecting his neck to his spine, where the nerves and blood vessels meet.
The boy’s genitals, still intact, suggested that it wasn’t his body parts the killer was after. It was his blood, drained slowly and carefully from his hanging corpse. Adam died to bring somebody money, power, or luck. Perhaps the slave traffickers who brought him to London. His journey probably began when he was snatched or sold in Benin, and continued through Germany before reaching these shores, his final destination.
Somebody had cared for Adam before he died—there were traces of cough medicine in his system. Who knows whether he was brought here with sacrifice in mind, but had he not been marked for death, he might have ended up working as a slave, or as a prostitute. At least then he’d have had a chance.
Despite arrests in London, Glasgow, and Dublin, and prosecutions for human trafficking, nobody was convicted of the boy’s murder. Heldon had burned with frustration for months, but he had managed to keep it together, unlike others in the team. The three-year investigation had taken its toll on O’Brien, the detective in charge. He’d quit the force a nervous wreck at what should have been the peak of his career. Heldon had been his deputy on the Adam case; he’d seen the strain, the shards of paranoia puncture O’Brien’s hardman armor.
And now there was another corpse.
Aniweta was right. They had called her Eve.
The girl had been mutilated like Adam, her torso wrapped in a child’s cotton dress; white with red edging. Dustmen had tipped her out of a wheelie bin on December 5, four days ago, outside a dry cleaners on White Horse Street, near St. James’s. She was probably six years old.
“What can you tell me, Ani?” Heldon asked the
san-goma.
“I can tell you that this one is different.”
“So far, forensics suggest that she was killed the same way as Adam.”
“Yes, but she is different. Powerful.” Ani nodded his head, impressed. “The red and the white on the dress are for Ayaguna. He is a young
orisha,
a fighter. You know him as St. James, and when he comes, he rides a white horse. Now she rides with him. He likes the girls, you see, he likes them young like this. Their blood is clean. This is strong
juju.
You’ll find things inside her: clay, gunpowder, silver, maybe copper.”
“Anything else?”
Ani, who had been staring at the stains on his tabletop, turned to look directly at Heldon.
“Yes, my friend, I can tell that you’re not sleeping well.”
Heldon was caught off guard. “Well, you might say I’m taking my work home with me.”
“Like O’Brien?”
“No. And I don’t intend to end up like him. But yes, this has shaken me up. I didn’t expect another one so soon. And then I suppose there’s the war.”
“There is always war, that is Ayaguna’s business. But there will be no war where this girl came from. She is one of their own. A peace offering.”
“I was talking about Iran, but yes, we think the girl was another Nigerian.”
“No, she is not one of ours. She is from the Congo,” replied Ani, with a certainty that Heldon could not question. “That’s where the trouble is. But for now there will be no war. She died to end the fighting. She will keep Ayaguna happy for a while. How long depends how well the
sangomas
know him. If they know him well, she will have died with six fingers and six toes. Her skin cut six times with a blade and burned six times with a flame.”
“If she died to prevent a war, why was she killed here and not in her home country?”
“The
sangomas
don’t like war. It upsets the balance. So much death creates problems for everybody. Now the smart ones are over here.”
“Makes sense. I don’t like war either. Okay, thanks, Ani. We’ll be in touch.”
Heldon returned to the night. The cats were gone.
Forensics showed that Ani was right. Mineral analysis of her bones revealed that she was indeed Congolese. The girl had swallowed, or been forced to swallow, a mix of gunpowder, silver, copper, and clay. She had been bound and stabbed several times, then scorched with a burning twig from the iroko tree. They had not found her limbs, so they couldn’t count her fingers and toes; but Heldon suspected that if they ever found them, there would be six of each.
African newspapers revealed that the Congo had been on the brink of another bout of bloodshed, but in the past few days an agreement was reached between the warring factions. With over three million already dead, you would think they were tired of killing.
The story hardly made the UK nationals; the situation in Iran was worsening, despite the fact that things in Iraq had hardly improved since the Allied pullout eighteen months earlier. And now they were regrouping, preparing to flex their muscle against a defiantly hostile Iranian leadership. The mid-term government disingenuously declaring that the opportunity for peace lay in the hands of the Iranians, not the combined forces amassing at the nation’s borders.
More dead children.
Rather than desensitizing him to death, Heldon’s work had revealed to him its full horror. He knew what a bullet meant: the torn, seared flesh; the shattered bone; the screaming; the smell of blood. He had no children of his own, but he knew that the statistics of war weren’t just numbers. They were a thousand Adams, a thousand Eves. Blasted, mutilated, lying in rivers, in puddles, in the arms of their parents; caught in the camera’s lens, denied over breakfast, ignored on the train.
As an inevitable war loomed once again, the antiwar protests had grown incandescent, seething with fury and frustration. Heldon took part as often as he could. He didn’t tell his colleagues, just as he didn’t tell them everything that Ani had told him. It was easier that way.
He didn’t tell them about his other research either. There was no need. And he hadn’t told Ani. Again, why bother? He probably already knew all about the killings anyway. They had occurred throughout Europe and Africa over the years. Many, like Adam, were for power. Terrible as they were, they no longer interested Heldon. He was only interested in the others; the others like Eve. They were different. And they had worked. The evidence was there on the record—brief respites in long histories of warfare. Powerful
juju.
She is one of their own … different … powerful.
Ani’s words drove Heldon onward as he strode through the car park behind Kingsland Shopping Centre. Smooth, smothered by concrete, a no-man’s-land between road and rail. Few people entered the mall through this back way. Once past the main entrance to Sainsbury’s, the shops tail off into a mirror of what’s available outside on Kingsland High Street.
A gray mid-morning on a school day. Any kids around now are avoiding something.
Now she rides with him.
He found her under the outdoor metal stairwell. Hood up. Not doing anything.
She was one of our own.
He had thought about this moment over and over again. Can a death ever be justified? Is one unpromising life worth ten thousand others? If it works, then yes, it is. Suddenly, Heldon knew exactly what he was doing.