The Broken Ones (31 page)

Oscar returned to the Industrial Relations floor. Neve had tidied most of the files away into an archive box. Only a handful of folders
remained on the desk. She was typing, and didn’t look up when he sat beside her.

“Finished?” he asked.

“Almost. Another hour.”

“How does it look?”

Neve stopped typing. She stared at the screen a long moment before turning to look at him. “Have you signed my transfer?”

Oscar opened his mouth, ready with another excuse, but he simply nodded and reached into his pocket. He pulled the form from the envelope, flattened it, and signed and dated the bottom corner.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, taking the form.

They sat in silence a while. On the far side of the room, the last of the public servants was collecting her lunchbox from a fridge. At the door, the woman caught Oscar’s eye and signaled whether she should turn off the lights. Oscar nodded, and two-thirds of the lights flicked off.

“You’ll miss your mate Foley,” he said. “Leaving will disrupt his plans to get you on a trans-Asia love holiday.”

Neve smiled, but it was a sad expression. She looked up at Oscar. “You look like a hatful of shit, boss. If you’re getting into fights, I wish you’d let me know. What have you done here?”

She gently took his fingers and turned the cut knuckle to the light. Her hands were warm.

“New interrogation technique,” he said. “I let people cut me and see what they have to say about it.”

She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “You should look after these.”

She fell silent, and let go of his fingers.

He thought about telling her about the idol he’d found in the ashes of the old brothel, and about the clawed creature in the garage. But she was leaving. The Barelies’ days were numbered. Neve had her transfer.

She’s safe now
.

Neve chewed the inside of her cheek, and they both fell silent again. Then she looked up.

“You see Moechtar?”

Oscar nodded. “Wants me to take the body back.”

“What if she goes missing again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think I’m going to get this solved before Friday.
And if that report”—he nodded at the document on her screen—“is as bad as your face says it is …”

His shoulders rose and fell again. He didn’t need to finish:
it will never get solved
.

Neve frowned. “Is there another way to identify her?”

Oscar rubbed his face. It hurt, so he stopped. “I checked Elverly’s records—she doesn’t seem to have had a dental visit for years. And her teeth look fine, so I think no joy there.”

“Cerebral palsy?” Neve murmured. Oscar nodded, and she asked, “Where did they diagnose that?”

Oscar blinked. Then he jumped forward. Neve jerked back, but he still managed to land a kiss on her cheek. “Brilliant.”

He picked up the phone and gestured for the White Pages. Neve handed him the book while he got an outside line. He dialed the hospital.

“Patient Records, police inquiry.”

A few minutes later, he had a promise from the records department that they would send through a summary sheet for Penelope Adeline Roth to the Barelies’ fax number.

He hung up the phone and grinned at Neve, but there were no words in his mouth.

“Fancy this,” she said eventually, and touched the transfer request with a tentative finger. “Just as you’re getting into fights and I’m coming up with decent ideas.”

He grinned.

Neve bit her lip and fiddled nervously with the mouse. A new expression slid across her face like a soft shadow. She spoke quietly: “Things have changed a lot. You know. In the last three years.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“With the church, I mean,” she continued. “The Catholic Church.” Her ears started to color. “You know?”

“Sure,” he said, a little confused.

“Divorce. In these new times. We’re not so bad.”

Oscar frowned, lost. “But you’re not married.”

Neve’s blush deepened. “I’m not talking about me.” She swiveled in her chair, back to the monitor. “I have to finish this.”

He stared, stock-still, unsure.

She nodded for him to leave. “Go on. I’ll call you if the fax comes.”

“Okay.”

He left, baffled.

Oscar drove home through traffic that was unsettlingly light. The western horizon had a fireside glow and, for the second night in a row, clear skies rode above him. Waiting at a working set of lights, he stopped and thumbed in the number of the hospital’s cardiology wing. The medical team had seen his father, but there was nothing on the chart about surgery time. The ward receptionist took his number and promised to call straight back. The light changed, and he accelerated.

Above the dead streetlights, the stars shone. Among the winking dots of ice white, a regular flash of red—a passenger jet. Its blink-blink-blink reminded Oscar of a task left unfinished, but he couldn’t think what. He watched the plane’s silent passage through the sky. For a moment, it seemed as if the world could return to normal. Could
be
normal.

Oscar’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number and assumed it was the hospital calling with the surgery details.

“Mariani,” he answered. “When will it be?”

A woman responded, “When will what be, Detective?”

It took him a moment to recognize the voice.

“Ms. Chaume,” he said. “I was expecting someone else.”

She was silent for such a long moment that he wondered if she was, too.

“We parted in quite a hurry the other day,” she said. “Odd circumstances.”

“The parting? Or the meeting?” he asked. He wondered why she was calling him. If she was after a favor, she’d soon discover—as Leslie Chalk had—how small his sphere of influence was.

“Both, perhaps,” Chaume said, and he could hear a smile in her voice. “What are you doing tonight?”

Oscar felt his jaw tighten. He wasn’t about to turn around and go back into the office to run some trivial errand for a rich girl who’d just met her first policeman. Still, there was a part of him that would do so eagerly. He remembered her slow, promising smile.

“I’m quite busy,” he said.

“Ah.” Again, he wondered if he’d lost her. Then she spoke and
again he heard that smile in her voice. “Well, if you become less busy I’m having a get-together at my house this evening. It is black tie, I’m afraid, and rather short notice. Still, if you find yourself at a loose end …”

It was Oscar’s turn to fall momentarily silent.

“Chislehurst is the property name,” Chaume continued. “On Connaught Road.”

“I know it.”

“From eight.”

Oscar found himself nodding. “Right.”

He was left holding a silent phone.

No. The world was not normal at all.

The front porch of his house was purple shadow, the sky above the house the color of cold, dark wine. He opened the door and called for Sisyphus. The cat didn’t appear. He went inside, took off his jacket and holster, lit the lantern and put water on the stove. He found himself wondering what sort of a state his suit was in.

Oscar opened the window and heard the sounds of digging in his backyard.

He loosened his pistol from his holster and slipped quietly out the front door and down the narrow side of the house through shadows pitch-black and cave-cold.

A figure was in his vegetable patch, driving a pitchfork into the soil with an expert gardener’s easy strokes: levering, loosening clumps of rogue grass, batting them against the metal tines to reclaim the soil, and tossing the weeds into a stack. Sisyphus sat watching the man curiously. Oscar approached silently and thumbed back the hammer of the semiauto with a distinctive click.

“Now that’s hardly necessary, Mariani,” Haig said, pushing the fork in again. “I’m freeing your okra beans, not stealing them.”

Oscar moved forward, his finger still on the trigger guard. Haig had created a prodigious pile of grass and weeds. His jacket hung on a spade driven into the ground three feet or so away.

“Besides,” Haig continued, “what are you going to do with an empty pistol? Beat me?” He stopped and straightened. Despite the work he’d
done, he looked hardly strained. “Me, I’d put my money on the man with the pitchfork. Or the man with the friend.”

Oscar looked around.

Under the shadow of the pawpaw tree near the back fence, Detective Kace leaned against the bricks of the old incinerator. All he could see of her face was the two bright glints of her eyes.

Oscar felt his heart hammer faster. He looked back to Haig. “What are you doing here?”

“Helping.” Haig grinned, and stepped easily out of the garden. He dusted his hands together and grabbed the pitchfork again. “Always helping.”

With no tie and rolled sleeves, Haig still seemed polished and impregnable. It wasn’t the uniform that made him this way; it was the man himself. Haig made the plain clothes look lean and efficient, as if they weren’t clothes at all but a pelt. He lowered himself easily to sit on the garden bed’s edge; when Sissy came up to him, he scratched behind the cat’s ragged ears. His other hand rested lightly on the haft of the fork. He looked up at the sky.

“ ‘I come into a region where is nothing that can give light.’ Do you know Dante?” he asked. “
Il Sommo Poeta
. Am I saying that right?”

Oscar noticed that Kace hadn’t moved. Business was yet to be done.

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not Italian.”

Haig rolled his eyes. “Oh, I know. You were adopted. I know you ran away from home at fifteen to try and find your real parents, then slunk home to Sandro and Vedetta, poor things. They did have a child, did you know? A boy. Only lived two days.”

Oscar was shaken. His mother had told him that she and Sandro had been unable to conceive. There was no grave for an infant. Yet into his mind sprang the recent memory of his father’s sleeping hands clutching an invisible infant. “You’re a wealth of information,” he said, fighting to keep his voice even.

Haig shrugged. “You know, you remind me of Dante, Mariani. He was a journeyman, like you. A soldier, a poet, a diplomat—”

“And an exile,” Oscar finished.

Haig gave a pleased nod. “Yes! Poor Dante. Never seemed to know which side to choose.”

Oscar’s heart cantered. This was the second mention today of sides, and for the second time he felt lost and stupid.

“What are you doing here?” Oscar repeated.

Haig leaned, picked a sprig of mint, rolled it between a tough thumb and fingers and sniffed them. “I know you don’t think much of me, Mariani.”

“Why do you care what I think?” Oscar asked.

Haig seemed to consider this. Overhead, a silent armada of black-winged flying foxes arced through the evening sky. “There are times I am doing something, and suddenly, of all the people I know or have known, who comes into my mind? Oscar Mariani!” Haig laughed. “And I wonder: what have I done to upset him? I mean, Mariani knows me so
well
. He and I are closer than most friends. He’s been inside my personnel folder, inside my house, even inside my telephone. Why doesn’t he like me?” Haig turned to the female detective. “You like me, don’t you, Kace?”

Kace was silent a moment, then replied, “You have your moments.”

“See?” Haig said. “And I treat her like shit. Much worse than I ever treated you.”

Oscar could see that despite Haig’s cheerful demeanor his stare was hard: it was focused on Oscar like a gem cutter’s, about to strike a blow that would save or destroy a rough diamond.

“You’re corrupt,” Oscar said. “You have people killed. And you don’t answer questions.”

Haig became silent and still. “You could only prove one of those,” he said quietly.

Oscar could see that the knuckles of Haig’s hand that gripped the pitchfork had become almost white. A man as strong as Haig could throw the tool like a javelin. There was no need for Kace.

“There’s a party tonight, Mariani. You’ve been invited.”

Oscar blinked.

“What’s it to you?”

“Don’t go.”

With that, Haig stood. In one easy move, he lifted the fork and threw it into the ground just a handspan from Oscar’s toes. He pulled on his jacket.

“Remember your Dante,” Haig said, walking up the side of the house and disappearing into shadow. “ ‘No one thinks of how much blood it costs.’ ”