Coldfall Wood Page 11

  “We can but hope,” Tenaka said, none too convinced. “In the meantime, we’ve had a report of a missing persons case that has me concerned.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  “The boy didn’t return from football training this evening.”

  “So, what, seven or eight hours?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Checked in with friends? Maybe they went to catch a late movie or something and he ended up crashing at a mate’s and forgot to let Mum and Dad know?”

  “His phone was active. We triangulated the signal and traced it to the park where he’d been playing football. Uniform found it under a bench.”

  “Kids lose phones all of the time.”

  “That they do. But there was blood at the scene, which SOCOs are checking. The lad goes to the same school as Underwood and Kahn. He’s in the year below and by all accounts is something of a rising star. Lots of articles about him being offered terms with several of the Premier League clubs in the area.”

  “Well known and popular, and I’m going to assume Muslim?”

  “Musa Dajani,” Tenaka said, as though a name by itself was enough to racially profile the kid.

  Julie followed his gaffer’s train of thought to the inevitable conclusion, “Which makes him a perfect target for retaliation against an honor killing.”

  “That it does. You know what it’s like out there, Gennaro. The anger and fear are festering. There’s a rotten core to it, Gennaro. Our patch is breaking apart. It only takes one idiot to think an eye for an eye is an answer to turn the Rothery into a battlefield, which cannot be allowed to happen. We’re going to increase our visibility over the next few days: more patrols, community outreach, get officers into the schools to talk to the kids.”

  “Better than kettling them,” Julie said, only half-joking. “I assume we’ve checked with the local hospitals?”

  “No admissions matching Dajani’s description,” Tenaka confirmed.

  “You want me to talk to the boy’s parents?”

  “They’re downstairs waiting for you.”

  “Okay, leave it with me.” His bed was a long way away. He checked his watch. Ten past five. Those poor people must be going out of their minds. The likelihood, if not the absolute reality, was if he wasn’t home now he wasn’t coming home. He couldn’t imagine what they were going through. Packing your kid’s lunch box in the morning, checking he’s got his kit for training before you ship him off out of the door, only for him never to come home again. Julie caught himself on the word never. He couldn’t go in there thinking like that; the boy’s parents would pick up on it. They were frightened; they weren’t idiots.

  “I knew I could count on you, Gennaro,” Tenaka turned around and walked back up the stairs, leaving Julie to do the same, in reverse.

  Instead of going straight into the interrogation room where the Dajanis were waiting, he stopped by the break room to grab a treacle black coffee. He was still wrestling with the paper filter when Sara Sykes, Melissa’s partner, came in. “Have you seen this?” She held up her mobile phone. He recognized the Twitter app running, but was too far away to read the newsfeed she was watching.

  “#ollieunderwood, #rotherystabbing, #justice4ollie, #aishainourhearts, #nohonour, and how about this for a nicely fucked up sentiment? #strikebackLondon.”

  He knew the basics about how hashtags worked, creating an index where all of the tweets under the same banner could be aggregated for easy reading by anyone with a computer or mobile phone. It changed the nature of communication. Information spread like wildfire. A single #strikebackLondon tweet could be seen by half a million teenagers in half an hour if the right person retweeted it; after that it would take on a life of its own. It would mutate, different exhortations would follow, everyone weighing in on what a bastard Jamshid Kirmani was, how Ollie was no angel, or how Aisha got what was coming to her, and every opinion in between. Opinions being like arseholes. Anyone looking up Ollie’s or Aisha’s names on the social network would find all of the tweets conveniently arranged to tell the story of the last nine hours.

  They had been lucky in that it was raining and London had to sleep. Those two factors had stopped things from exploding all over the internet last night.

  But that was yesterday. Today, as the saying went, was another day.

  The rain had eased off at dawn, now the sun was coming up and the streets were wet, but the morning was fresh and cool, the air filled with that heady rush that always accompanied the scouring clean of the streets. He’d sensed the tension on the High Street last night, and that was before they knew about Aisha’s death. Both sides were just waiting for the tipping point. And that tipping point was a kid who went to football practice and never came home. When that got out things were going to turn ugly, fast.

  “Do I want to know what they are saying?”

  “Fuck.”

  She pushed the phone toward his face. The latest tweet painted a target squarely on the back of Kirmani: Jamshid Kirmani murdered #ollieunderwood & #aishakahn. Find Kirmani. Time to #strikebackLondon. Demand #justice4ollie. #nohonour #riseup!

  “Fuck,” Julie agreed. It was the only fitting sentiment.

  Within the next minute or so Kirmani’s name was retweeted a dozen times. The thirteenth tweet linked to his Facebook profile and put his face out there for the world to see. It was the butterfly that flapped its wings in the social media forest and started the perfect storm.

  “This changes everything,” Julie said.

  “No kidding. We’ve got to find the kid before the mob do. And they’ve got a lot more eyes out there than we have,” which was no word of a lie. If it turned into a witch hunt, there was only ever going to be one outcome. The last thing any of them needed was to get the call that Jamshid Kirmani had been lynched from one of the lampposts in the Rothery, making a martyr of the little shit. “We’ll circulate his picture through the Boroughs, put everyone on alert. Hope we get a hit. Someone somewhere has to have seen him after he fled the boxing club. Techs are already going over footage from the surveillance cameras in the area. If there’s anything to be gleaned from them, they’ll find it.”

  “And in the meantime, we need to bring Kirmani’s parents in. Sweat them. He’s out there and we need to find him before anyone else does. If they know anything, we’ve got to get it out of them. It’s their kid, he’s up for murder; they aren’t going to want to turn on him, so don’t hold back.”

  “I’ll get Mel to bring them in. You’ve got to wonder what the hell is going on inside his head right now? How do you get to a place where killing the girl you love is ever an answer?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not one the with a degree in deviant psychology, that’s Ellie.”

  “I wonder if we can manipulate him into reaching out to the family to hurry it along, rather than just wait?”

  “Put Mum and Dad on TV saying ‘Just want him to come home,’ that kind of thing?”

  “Maybe not exactly those words, but yeah, appeal to the lost kid in him.”

  “That’s assuming he’ll see anything we do.”

  “I’ll run it by Tenaka. Can’t be any worse than doing nothing. Assuming the family will get on board.”

  “Check with them.”

  Julie nodded.

  He gave up his struggle with the coffee filter and headed off to find Musa Dajani’s parents in the interview room. They looked up at him so hopefully as he opened the door it broke his heart. He took the seat across from them, waving them to sit as they started to stand. He shook hands with both of them, introducing himself. “Mr. and Mrs. Dajani? I’m Julius Gennaro. I’m the officer looking into your son’s disappearance. Anything you can tell me—anything at all—that might help us find him, would be a tremendous help. Let’s start by talking about his routines. Have you noticed anything different about Musa over the last few days?”

  Both Mum and Dad couldn’t shake their heads quickly enough: eager to please, desperate to help, and t
errified that they had nothing of use to tell him.

  Julie nodded a couple of times, “Have you talked to his coach or friends from football?”

  “The last time anyone remembers seeing him was at nine o’clock, walking back through the park,” the boy’s father said.

  “Which is where they found his phone,” Mother Dajani added. She choked out a small sob with her next breath, then straightened her back and looked him in the eye. She had her hands clasped, ready to say a prayer. “It’s not good, is it?”

  Julie might not have been God, but at least he was listening. He thought about lying; it would have been easy to just say that kids lose their phones all the time and they shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but the seeds of false hope were worse than no hope at all. It wouldn’t be fair to them. “No,” Julie admitted. “It’s not good.” Kids were glued to their mobile phones. Their entire lives were on them. They didn’t willingly leave them behind. So no, it wasn’t good. He debated telling them about the blood, and almost didn’t, but he needed them to trust him so he had to give them a reason to and that meant being straight with them. “My main concern right now is that we found traces of blood at the scene.”

  “Oh, God,” Father Dajani said, his mind leaping to the worst-case scenario.

  Mum was a little slower to react. “You think it’s his, don’t you?”

  “I really don’t want to speculate.”

  “Which means you do.”

  “It’s a possibility we have to consider,” he said. “Because it changes how we go about things. Right now we’re checking hospital admissions for anyone matching your son’s description. We’ve got people combing through surveillance footage from cameras on the park gates to see if we can see when Musa left and if he left alone. Right now we are in a good place, as good as we can hope in situations like this, as strange as that may seem. The first forty-eight hours are vital in a missing persons case. We’ve got good procedures laid out to help us find your son, and a lot of experience to draw on, but I’m not sure we can treat this as a normal disappearance.”

  “Because of the stabbings last night?” Mother Dajani asked.

  He could hardly deny it, so he nodded.

  “You think the two things are related?”

  “I think there’s a strong possibility,” Julie admitted. “And to complicate matters someone has leaked the name of the killer, which is only going to muddy the waters. If we send uniforms out door to door to see if anyone saw anything, they’re going to make the same connection.”

  “People will take matters into their own hands,” Father Dajani said, something close to approval in his voice.

  “But not turning over every stone decreases the chance of Musa coming home,” Mum said, understanding the dilemma. “So you have to do it. You have to go out there and hammer on every door. You have to.”

  She was right; he knew she was right, even if it meant bringing hell to the Kirmanis’ front door.

  19

  The old man sat in the chair by the window. It wasn’t comfortable. Nothing about this place was comfortable. It reeked of sickness and death. The sun rose slowly above the rain-slick slates of the rooftops of the city. It was going to be a glorious day, he knew. The only pity was that he wouldn’t be around to enjoy it. He was dying. Again. Life came in cycles; that could not be denied. They’d woken him too early from his restorative sleep. The rot was still within him. There was nothing he could do except accept it.

  But that didn’t mean Viridius had to like it.

  He played with the bracelet the hospital staff had fastened to his wrist. His name was written on it in blue ink. All he had to do was rub his finger across the plastic for the ink to smudge. There was no permanence in anything. That was curiously appropriate. They’d asked him a thousand well-meaning questions, and he’d told them the truth in every answer, so of course they thought he was insane. That was the only logical conclusion for them to make, so he didn’t disabuse them of the notion but rather let them think whatever they wanted to think. The truth would be hard to deny soon enough.

  He held out his right hand, palm raised to the sun, and with the tip of the index finger on his left slowly traced a circle, round and around, like the kid’s game, and in his mind pictured a single seed and willed it to shoot. Round and around, until the white shoot pushed against his skin, forcing its way through. Round and around, as the seed flourished, drawing nourishment from his body and the sun at the same time.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He closed his fingers around the half-inch long shoot, hiding it from the light as the nurse stuck her head around the door.

  “Everything all right in here?”

  He nodded.

  “Anything I can get you?”

  He shook his head, but then changed his mind. “Yes, actually,” he said. “The officers who brought me in?” She nodded. “Is there any way you could reach out to them? I would like to thank them.”

  “Of course. I can pass your thanks along, that’s no problem.”

  “Actually, if it isn’t too much trouble I should like to thank them in person?”

  “Okay, well leave it with me and I’ll see what I can do. Can’t promise anything, but you never know.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “No juice or anything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, if you need anything, I’m just outside. They’ll be around with breakfast in an hour.”

  He nodded and she closed the door.

  Viridius opened his palm and held the seedling up to the light. In the few seconds that they’d been talking it had sprouted three small green leaves and grown another half-inch in the process. He smiled, gently running the tip of his finger in another circle and watching the seedling grow.

  Over the next hour he nourished the seed into bloom, putting all of himself into it, only for the seedling to wither and die in his hand. He brought forth more than a dozen leaves, making them flourish for a few seconds only to die one by one, browning and curling. They couldn’t hope to survive the rot inside him, and he lacked the strength to transform that sickness into another sapling within his craw. Without realizing what they were doing, the detectives had doomed this cycle of the Eternal’s life before it had even begun. He carried in him all the sickness of the season, desperate for the rebirth of summer and its vitality, but it wasn’t to be. Perhaps if he could convince them to return to his house and retrieve the branch so that he might consume it again, and in the process channel all of the rot consuming his vital organs into the stuff of the sapling, he would have a chance of making it to the other side of the equinox?

  He almost crushed the withering plant in his fist from sheer frustration, because he knew the truth of the matter was that nature was undeniable. It was the Oak King’s place to fall and the Holly King’s to rise. He must die another death so that his brother could wake. That was his nature as the Eternal. But his brother had been nowhere to be found for a century, and every death left this place unguarded for half of the year. And now, with their father returned, it needed them more than ever. The plant was one last desperate attempt to change things, but he couldn’t keep even that little of his magic alive in this damned place.

  It was all he could do to watch as the leaves fell away from the stem to rest on his upturned palm.

  He placed the leaves on the windowsill, in full view of the sun, and crossed the small room to the wardrobe where they’d hung his clothes. The old man took a tobacco tin from the inside pocket of his coat and from it, the papers he needed to roll a cigarette. Instead of using the tobacco in the tin, he stuffed the paper with the leaves from his palm, then licked the edges of the paper and rolled it into a straggling little runt of a cigarette. He put it in the tin, and had just put the tin back into his coat pocket as the door opened on a different face.

  It was the female officer who’d brought him in. She smiled at him, “Mind if I come in?”

  “You are very welcom
e,” he said, indicating the room’s only chair. “Please excuse my unsightly attire, I promise to do my best with regards to turning my back to you and exposing you to horrors that can never be unseen.”

  Ellie Taylor laughed at that. There was genuine warmth in the sound. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve been better,” he said truthfully. “I’m dying, after all.” She didn’t say anything to that. No I’m sorry or Don’t be silly. No How can you know? She just looked at the old man and waited for him to explain. “Rather than feel sorry for me, I wanted to thank you, and thought perhaps you might indulge me; help me get out of here, so I can die with the sun on my face? No one deserves to die in a place like this.”

  “I’m not sure,” Ellie said.

  “What can it hurt? We sneak up to the roof, maybe smoke a last cigarette, and watch the sun come up over London one last time for me at least. And if I don’t die, then you bring me back down here and we let the quacks shrink my head all day?”

  She smiled again. “Why do I get the feeling that I’m going to get into trouble for this?”

  “Because you’re a smart woman,” Viridius said, earning another chuckle.

  “Come on then, sunshine, get your glad rags on.”

  While he dressed, the police officer went out to the nurses’ station to check if it would be okay if she took him for a little walk. Then together they rode the elevator to the top floor. Across from them as they emerged, they saw a door marked Helipad beside a second bank of elevators. It wasn’t locked. They climbed a short flight of stairs, and walked out onto a concrete division—on one side there was a cultured rooftop garden, on the other a bright red helicopter waited idly.

  “Can’t have you trying to make a break for it,” Ellie said, steering him toward the garden pews on the other side of the divide. The potted plants were green, but there was barely a bud on them and no flowers. They sat. From their vantage point the most famous skyline in the world looked like a watercolor postcard with the red a little too rich over the water as it rippled toward morning. Even in the city, with so little of the natural world to see, the sounds of the dawn chorus were mesmerizing, with every starling, pigeon, sparrow, blackbird, and magpie lent their voices to the song. This was life and he would miss it so very, very much. He felt the tear break and roll slowly down the smooth plane of his cheek, and resisted the temptation to wipe it away.