The Broken Ones (9 page)

Neve indicated a side street.

“Here. This one.”

Oscar turned the wheel.

Lucas Purden lay on a mattress in a squat house, desperately waving pot smoke that didn’t exist out of the air. He had clearly forgotten what drug he’d taken but knew he’d taken
something
, and—seeing badges—had enough capacity to know he’d better hide the fact. Purden was twenty or twenty-one. His eyes were a dull brown, and the earrings in both lobes were a dull and dirty silver. His skin was greasy. His blond hair, stained jeans, and green collared work shirt all bore an oily grime that said they hadn’t been washed in weeks. And, Oscar noticed, he smelled. But then so did the whole squat. Luke was the only person in
it; the other residents had cleared out the moment a police car—even a weary, unmarked sedan like Oscar’s—turned into their street. They hadn’t bothered to alert Luke.

Despite his theatrical flapping, Luke had forgotten that his fly was unzipped; Oscar and Neve had interrupted what was clearly enjoyable leisure time. Neve looked away from the metronome waving of his erection and knelt beside him, just out of arm’s reach. She sent an unhappy glance at Oscar. He ignored it and nodded—go ahead. She sighed and turned to the grubby boy.

“Lucas Purden?” she asked.

“Guh,” Purden replied. Oscar could see the boy’s eyes were glazed, his pupils almost as large as small coins.

“We’re here to ask you about the girl. You found a girl last night, Lucas, in the number-one auger pipe at your work.”

“No.” Purden nodded. “Yeah?” He shook his head. “Guh.”

Neve looked at Oscar. He made a circular gesture with his finger—keep going—and began to look around. Aside from the mattress, there was a line of old school lockers against one wall, and a stereo chained to a sink pipe.

“How did you find her?” Neve asked.

Purden licked his lips and tried to look composed.

“Light. Light the pipe.
Not
light the pipe.” He began to giggle and tried hard to stop it. “Light
on
the pipe. Red warning light. On the pipe. Flipped.”

“What flipped?”

“We flipped!” Purden giggled more, nodding. “Flipped a coin. To go out. Me and Mister Bruce.”

“Your supervisor?”

While Neve quizzed the young man about whether he saw anyone on his trip to or from the jammed auger, Oscar inspected the locker’s door. On it was written, “Lukes. Dont touch. Privat!” The style was childish, and the letters’ component lines and curves were shaky. Oscar looked at the boy—his hands vibrated in a slight but uncontrollable palsy. Purden hadn’t made the fine scalpel cuts they’d seen on the dead girl’s abdomen. Interestingly, though, there was a circular bandage stuck on the boy’s neck.

“Luke, give me your locker key,” Oscar said.

“Locker?”

Oscar tapped the locker, and Purden’s eyebrows rose in surprise, as if he’d never noticed the six-foot metal cabinet next to his mattress.

“Five seconds, Lucas. Then you’re under arrest. Four.”

It took three of those four seconds for the message to sink into Purden’s brain, then he fumbled quickly in his pockets. His penis flailed as he hunted for his keys. Neve picked a spot on the far wall to stare at while the ruddy member waved like a drowning man’s arm.

“Here, here.”

The boy passed the keys to Neve, who took them in a delicate pinch and passed them to Oscar. The locker door groaned. Inside was a damp pile of pornographic magazines with heavily worn corners, three empty bottles of roll-on deodorant, a small Vegemite jar containing only a dusting of cannabis, a glass pipe with a blackened bowl giving off the sweet chemical snap of Delete. Oscar pushed them aside and looked inside a shoebox. It held mostly junk retrieved from the bottom of the plant’s filter box: a cheap silver earring, a broken watch, a foreign coin, a medal from a school’s running race … but one thing caught his eye. A packet of Fentanyl patches. Fentanyl was a powerful painkiller—it was used in lollipops issued to combat soldiers. Quality analgesics like Fentanyl were as rare as truffles and almost as expensive, far beyond the economic reach of a slow-witted boy who worked in a sewage plant. Oscar opened the packet. Inside were a dozen sealed medicated patches just like the one on Purden’s neck. A small fortune’s worth.

He showed the pack to Lucas. “Where from?”

Purden’s euphoria had dulled, and his eyes slid like marbles in oil. “Mine.” His voice was groggy.

“How did you afford them?”

Purden licked his dry lips and smiled.

Oscar knelt beside Neve and loosened Purden’s collar. Another two patches were stuck on the skin of his upper chest.

“Mine,” Purden repeated, on the edge of sleep. “Come on.”

Purden’s half-open eyes glazed, and a snore rattled through his nostrils. His penis held bravely high.

“We’ve lost him,” Neve said, and stood. “Maybe he found some jewelry that was actually worth something and went to town on it.”

“Maybe.”

“Take him in to the watch?” Neve asked.

Oscar shook his head. “He’ll be raped.” It was the simple truth. The watchhouse was understaffed and overcrowded. Oscar pulled out his business card and dropped it on the snoring boy’s chest.

His car started on the third try.

“I can fill in the report,” he said.

“Thank you.” Her tone was curt.

“Home?”

“Church.”

“Really? You don’t want a shower first?”

She looked at him.

“You smell a bit,” he explained. “We both do.”

“It’s Saturday.” Her words were edged with ice chips. “It’s a working bee.”

He shrugged. “I’ll need directions.”

Hunched pedestrians scuttled like beetles over the wet roads, heads down. Oscar felt a little embarrassed that he’d been working with Neve for more than a year and he had no idea where she worshipped. But then he had no idea where anyone worshipped anymore; the faithful had become a rare and reclusive species. In the weeks and months immediately after Gray Wednesday, houses of worship enjoyed an enormous influx of congregants petitioning their brand of God to remove the blight of the ghosts. But when they discovered that prayer did nothing to shift their personal dead—who were, it seemed, immutable evidence of a joyless afterlife—congregations plummeted. Churches, temples, and mosques steadily emptied. It wasn’t the same everywhere: in North America, Canada’s Mennonites swelled in number and bulged down into the United States, rubbing heatedly against Mormonism, which had shifted and adapted and spread up to Pennsylvania and down to Tijuana; in Africa, a resurgence of animism stretched from Senegal to Mozambique; Norway had all but closed its borders, and whispers
from Sweden reported mass sacrifices to Odin. But most of Europe had turned its back on gods old and new, and languished in economic depression.

Neve directed him over the river into a section of town that had gone through a strange circle of life. Before the Second World War, this area had suffered a reputation for ruffianism and black marketeering; then it became a rich larder of multiculturalism with the influx of postwar migrants; then a third shift to gentrified exclusivity; finally, after Gray Wednesday, it underwent a swift devolution to its original state. A hundred times in the past year Oscar had tried to persuade Neve to move to a safer suburb; a hundred times she had refused. He understood now that she refused to abandon it. She held hope that, one day, her suburb could be resurrected.

He slowed at the huge white Catholic church on the hill. Its grounds were a battlefield of broken bottles and garbage; its stained-glass windows were long gone, replaced with scorched and bullet-pocked boards and tin. “Not this one,” she said. “We’ve lost this one.”

She directed him through narrower streets to stop outside a tall brick fence. The brickwork was recent, and on its top course upturned broken bottles were set in mortar to deter fence-climbers. A stout, plain gate sat in a neat architrave.

Neve didn’t get out. She remained silent and still for such a long moment that Oscar wondered if she was waiting for him to say something.

“Look,” he began, “let’s just get the autopsy—”

“You can come in,” she said primly. She looked up at him. A frown rode her forehead, and her mouth was a pink knot. “If you want.”

He stared at her. “In?”

Pink flushes appeared on her cheeks. “It’s just a working bee. No prayer. You don’t have to pray or anything.”

He tried to think what this all meant. “Um …”

Neve looked away, embarrassed, and fumbled for the door latch. “Never mind.”

He watched her go to the gate and knock, not a typical rap-rap-rap but a coded staccato tapping. A moment later, the heavy gate swung open, revealing men and women in jeans and work shirts in front of a tiny, old wooden church with scaffolding around its small spire. A young man broke into a smile when he saw Neve and kissed her chastely
on the cheek. Oscar felt jealous little wings flap inside him. Stupid. Of course she’d have men interested in her. But what arrested Oscar was Neve’s expression. She was smiling. He wondered if he’d ever seen her do that; it was as surprising as stumbling across a previously undiscovered portal that opened to a new and fascinating world. But then Neve seemed to remember something. She turned to glance back at Oscar, and her smile fell away to a more thoughtful, troubled look. The gate swung shut, severing the stare and returning Oscar to the filthy gloom of the street.

He put the car in gear and drove off.

Chapter
4

H
e’s not home.”

The woman was speaking even as she inched the front door open.

“He’s here.” Oscar stepped onto the tiled porch. “His motorbike is up the side.”

“He’s sick,” the woman continued. “Migraine, terrible. Not to be disturbed.”

Oscar gently took Denna Lovering’s shoulders, kissed both her cheeks, then entered the house. She sighed and followed. “You’re thin.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll get you some soup. You know where he is.”

Denna pottered off through a pair of saloon doors, tut-tutting to the empty kitchen. “She has no pride in herself, she’s moved in with the man, a married woman.…”

The Loverings’ house was immaculately neat, but nothing postdated the mid-eighties. On one wallpapered wall was a framed photograph of a younger Denna Lovering, her husband, Paz, and their two black-haired boys; around it were a dozen sepia photographs of unsmiling progenitors. In the wood-paneled dining room Oscar passed an orange velour settee, a white-painted fireplace, a china cabinet full of Lladro figurines, and a menorah on the topmost glass shelf.

Oscar took the internal stairs down to the basement door. He didn’t knock.

The air in the basement was cold. The room had low ceilings and deep shadows. Old furniture was neatly stacked against walls and covered with sheets that had become gray and dusty with age. A kitchen hutch remained uncovered, and on its shelves were curios from two
dozen countries: carved bowls and feathered blowpipes, bronze deities and wooden masks, painted plates and snow globes. Homemade sausages hung from ropes strung under the stairs, and their meaty smell competed with the brimstone tang of soldering flux that wafted from a workbench. Working under two angled spotlights was a late-middle-aged man, concentrating intently as he dipped the mercury silver tip of an iron into a small tin; a puff of yellow flux smoke rose, turning him into a medieval alchemist laboring over bubbling tinctures.