Those Who Feel Nothing (4 page)

‘Watch your cheek, Constable.'

‘Sorry, ma'am. It's just that the Royal Pavilion itself is not a place you'd ever be likely to find me.'

‘You surprise me. He's also a regular broadcaster on current affairs shows on radio and television.'

‘That's not going to help me identify him either, ma'am.'

Heap interrupted again. ‘In addition, he's an expert on the churchyards of Sussex.'

‘I didn't think that included digging up the bodies,' Gilchrist said. She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. ‘Was this a recent burial, Constable?'

Stanford shook his head. ‘Definitely not – some one hundred and fifty years old.'

‘Do we know he was the one who actually opened the grave?' Gilchrist said. ‘Maybe the church was moving the body for some reason.'

‘So why was he there?' Heap said. ‘Was he cottaging?'

Stanford showed his teeth. ‘In Keymer at four in the morning, sir? Unlikely. Lovely people there but those that aren't already in the grave have one foot in it.'

‘I don't know if it's good or bad he wasn't cottaging,' Gilchrist said. ‘It wouldn't be much of a scandal in this city. I saw one chief executive chair a public meeting in spandex bicycle shorts through which his Prince Albert was more than evident. However, we could still do without one of our most prominent citizens getting that kind of media attention. The council's tourist department is already hard pushed to keep the Gomorrah-by-sea tag off the city.'

‘I think what he was doing is going to create enough of a scandal without his sexual practices coming into it,' Heap said. ‘If it was him.'

Gilchrist nodded. ‘That last remark noted. We mustn't jump to conclusions. As our new police commissioner pointed out, there's a big difference between being proactive and being predictive.'

Gilchrist looked back at Heap. ‘Perhaps we should have a discreet word with him,' she said, then looked at Stanford. ‘Right, Constable, you've done a good job. We'll take it from here.'

He stifled another yawn. Gilchrist got a waft of stale coffee breath.

‘Suits me, ma'am. My shift ended two hours ago.'

‘And you and your partner keep this to yourself. If it is him, I don't want it splashing all over the papers.'

Stanford's expression didn't change. ‘Absolutely, ma'am.'

Gilchrist and Heap watched him go.

‘You know, ma'am …'

‘That I might just have put an idea into his head? Absolutely.'

‘No, ma'am. That Gomorrah
was
by the sea.'

She sniffed. ‘I always thought Sodom-by-sea was a bit too near the truth but had more of a ring to it.'

‘Would that ring be a Prince Albert, ma'am?' Heap said.

Heap could keep a straight face like nobody else Gilchrist knew. She barked a laugh, embarrassed by how loud and abrupt it was.

‘You got a girlfriend, Bellamy?' she said after a moment.

He looked startled, his face flushing.

‘Scratch that question,' Gilchrist said, also flushing. ‘None of my bloody business.'

‘No, ma'am,' he said, giving the papers a little wave and heading back to his desk.

Gilchrist watched him go. He moved very gracefully for a short man. But he wasn't short-arsed or anything – he was actually perfectly proportioned. Just in miniature. However, she wasn't really thinking about that, she was thinking about his ‘No'. Did he mean that it wasn't any of her business, or did he mean he didn't have a girlfriend?

She'd been thinking lately that it was about time she got back on the dating scene. Well, not quite that. She'd never actually been on the dating scene. But she wondered about meeting someone. Not Bellamy, nice as he was. Then she laughed. Given her job, what were the chances?

You drop your duffel at your small hotel in Phnom Penh and head straight out to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It opened in 1980, kept exactly as it was found by the invading Vietnamese a year earlier. Even though its existence revealed the horrors Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge had inflicted upon his own people, the international community spent the next ten years denouncing Vietnam's invasion and insisting on recognising only the genocidal Khmer Rouge as Kampuchea's legal government.

Originally this place had been a well-appointed high school, with an airy set of buildings and ample open space around it. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge took it over and renamed it Security Prison-21. Guard towers were erected; the perimeter was swathed in barbed wire. Classrooms were turned into torture chambers, playgrounds into mass graves, a place of enlightenment into a place of darkness and horror.

Before you take the tour you read the plaque in the entrance hall. Some 20,000 prisoners were killed here during its time as a prison and interrogation centre. When there was no more space in the grounds to bury the bodies prisoners were transported to the Killing Fields.

You take your time walking round. There are four main buildings. Building A has mostly large individual cells where the bodies of the final victims were found. The cells contain only rusting bed frames. On the walls black-and-white photographs show the rooms as the Vietnamese found them. Each photograph shows the mutilated body of a prisoner chained to these same frames, finished off by the Khmer Rouge not long before the prison was captured.

Building B has terrible instruments of torture and leg irons on display. On the walls are paintings by a former inmate, Vann Nath, of torture being administered. Waterboarding, hog-tying and electrocutions are all represented in a naïve style in bright colours.

Building C is lined, floor to ceiling, with black-and-white photographs of some of the thousands of prisoners who passed through the system on their way to a mass grave. In one room you watch a bank of television monitors on which those who survived and those who tortured them recount their experiences. Torturer and victim are often from the same village and still live in close proximity.

On the top floor of Building D the rooms are crudely subdivided into small cells for prisoners and on the floors below large communal cells. This is the building you know best.

In the early days most of the victims had been from the regime the Khmer Rouge had overthrown: soldiers, government officials, academics, doctors, teachers, engineers plus students, factory workers and monks.

Then, as Pol Pot worried about a coup against him, he turned on his own party, accusing thousands of party activists and senior party officials and their families of espionage.

Most prisoners were held for two or three months. Some high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials were held longer. Everybody was tortured. No exceptions.

The torture methods were crude but horribly effective. Electric shocks, sometimes administered by lashing the victim with a live electric cable. Branding with hot metal. Hanging until almost choked to death then revived, again and again. Slashing with knives or machetes. Suffocating with plastic bags or by holding the victim's head under water. Waterboarding, decades before it became infamous. Fingernails pulled out with alcohol poured on the wounds to make the pain worse.

Surprisingly, rape, so often a weapon of war and subjugation, was against party policy. Rapists risked execution if they were found out. Skinning somebody alive was fine but you couldn't have forced sex with them.

Skinning alive was reserved for the most intractable prisoners. And around one hundred prisoners were bled to death in the medical unit. Every single drop of blood was drained from them in experiments to see how long a person could survive with different degrees of blood loss. Others had internal organs removed without anaesthetic.

The irony of this terrible experimentation was that there was hardly anybody capable of carrying it out professionally: the Khmer Rouge had killed most of the doctors in the country and closed all hospitals and medical centres.

You walk the perimeter. There is barbed wire all around the high walls and fences. A sign says it used to be electrified. As you walk you look up at the windows of the four buildings, still covered with iron bars and razor wire. All this to prevent one thousand five hundred prisoners getting out.

The Khmer Rouge was not expecting anyone to try to get in.

Gilchrist and Heap arrived in Kemp Town. Bernard Rafferty's tall, narrow Georgian house was mid-terrace.

A handsome young man answered the door in a sarong. He was bare-chested. He smiled but raised an eyebrow quizzically.

‘We're here to see Bernard Rafferty,' Gilchrist said.

‘I believe he's still in bed.'

Gilchrist looked at her watch ostentatiously. It was, after all, lunchtime.

‘Late night?' Heap said.

The young man took his time looking Heap up and down. ‘I wouldn't know. I was sleeping in the guest room.'

He continued to stand in the doorway, smiling at them, eyebrow still raised.

‘May we come in?' Gilchrist said.

He pursed his lips. ‘Well, I don't know. Shouldn't you have a warrant and all that kind of thing?'

‘We don't want to search the premises, sir,' Heap said. ‘Just ask Mr Rafferty a few questions. Perhaps you could tell him we're here.'

The young man turned back into the house as a tetchy voice called out.

‘What's all the bloody racket out there, Roger?'

‘It seems Mr Rafferty has woken,' Gilchrist said.

The young man called Roger nodded, a slight smirk on his face. ‘It seems he has.'

A familiar figure was coming out of the Bath Arms in the Lanes. It took a moment for Bob Watts to place him.

‘Winston Hart – how the hell are you?'

Hart, the former chair of the Southern Police committee, was looking dishevelled. Unshaven, red-eyed. His neat little moustache had grown into a straggly bramble over his mouth. He had been trying to get past Watts without acknowledging him.

‘As if you would care.'

‘I'm sorry the press did a number on you,' Watts said – and meant it. ‘How's your son?'

Hart's reaction was physical. He reeled back. ‘He's not my bloody son,' he said through gritted teeth. ‘He's the son of the anti-Christ.'

Watts was inclined to agree with him. Hart's son had killed his best friend and chopped off his head and pretty much dismembered him in a drugged and drunken stupor in a Hove flat some while ago. Hart had been obliged to resign during the press furore about his son's heinous crime, and now the PCC post that Watts occupied had replaced the committee altogether.

At the time of Hart's resignation Watts had been vengefully gleeful because Hart was one of a gang of people he blamed for wrecking his career over the disastrous Milldean Massacre. Hart had taken undue delight in lording over Watts at the meeting in which he was forced to resign.

However, that was long ago and now he genuinely did feel sorry for Hart.

‘Did your son get his deal?' Watts said.

‘I don't know. I don't have anything to do with him.' Hart put a sneer on his face. ‘You came up smelling of roses though, didn't you?'

‘I knew I could count on your vote,' Watts said evenly.

Hart spat at his feet and the sympathy Watts had for him dwindled.

‘Back on the fucking gravy train,' Hart said. ‘Lucky you.'

‘Luck had nothing to do with it,' Watts said, more calmly than he felt. ‘And the gravy long ago congealed.'

He watched Hart stumble down the alley then turned and went into the Bath Arms. It was one of the oldest pubs in Brighton. His father had frequented it during the thirties but it had been around, in some form or other, for a couple of hundred years before then. It was hosting a wine and seafood festival so he bought a large glass of muscadet and a pint of cockles, mussels and whelks.

He had the pub to himself except for an overweight man in his thirties nursing a pint at the far end of the bar. Watts recognized him as one of the men who worked on the security desk at the Brighton museum.

Watts sat on a stool at a high table by the open window. He got busy on the seafood with a toothpick whilst working on his tablet and glancing up occasionally to watch the world walk by outside.

He was thinking about his own children, Tom and Catherine. He couldn't understand how his estrangement from them could have become so complete. He'd encouraged them to become independent when they went off to university and they'd both made a good start by going about as far away as possible from Brighton.

Tom, the elder, was probably born independent. Now he was out on an archaeological dig somewhere dangerous in the Middle East. Watts had cautioned against; Tom had ignored him.

His daughter, Catherine, was freaking him out. She'd got religion. Big time. God squad: that's what they used to call it when he was at university. Bright-eyed girls and boys, all smiling a lot. A deadness behind the eyes, as with any person in a cult. He was used to the looks he'd seen on the faces of yoga obsessives in Brighton but true religious nuts took the blissful stare to scary lengths.

Her fundamentalist Christianity depressed him as he saw it as a consequence of his failure as a parent. What vast need had he and his wife, Molly, created that required filling with such madness?

As an eminently rational man, his daughter's Creationism depressed him even more. He kept up with what she was up to via her Facebook page. When he'd looked this morning her latest posting had been a photograph of a carving in Ta Prohm, a Cambodian temple. Creationists were claiming it was a carving of a stegosaur and that meant the spiky dinosaur had still been around millions of years after atheistic evolutionists claimed they had died out.

And that
meant the evolutionists were wrong about the age of the earth because they misrepresented the fossil record. And
that
meant the Creationist belief in the age of the Earth as given in the Bible was the true account. Men and dinosaurs had coexisted.