‘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?’