‘Pick it up,’ he told the youth.
The youth meekly picked it up.
‘Now get out of my gym. And that garbage with you.’
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.
Not dragging but carrying.
The youth’s feet did not touch the ground.
‘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.
He clapped his hands.
‘Keep working!’
He sat down beside me as if nothing had happened.
‘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?’
‘Of course.’
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.’
‘Then I shall pray for him, too.’
We watched the children training.
‘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?’
‘Double up that jab, Lewis!’ Gane shouted.
‘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.’
‘Deuteronomy,’ Gane said. ‘Book 5, verse 21.’
‘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?’
‘Does he?’
Gane was not looking at me. But I knew he was listening.
‘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?’
‘None. Personal preference.’
‘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?’
I could smell his sweat now.
I had not noticed it before.
‘Do you think I am capable of killing a man?’ he said.
I didn’t think Father Marvin Gane was capable of taking a life.
I knew it.
‘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.
I could not do it.
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.
‘Where were you last night, Father Gane?’
For a moment I thought he was going to put his hands on me.
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 was home alone,’ he said.
‘So I shouldn’t look for you on the CCTV around Borodino Street?’
His mouth flinched.
‘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 mention his brother.
I waited for him to tell me that he had not placed a pillow over the face of Curtis Gane.
But he was standing up.
‘Are we done?’
I got up and held out my hand. ‘For now,’ I said.
He took my hand and he did not let it go and, with the slightest of motions, he pulled me towards him.
And once again I felt the power of this man.
‘Be careful out there,’ he told me.
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.