The Fool introduces Maryam Michael who is one of my favourite characters ever. She fell into my mind fully formed and came with a long and interesting biography. Which will unfold slowly over the remaining stories of the Maryam Michael Mysteries, each named after a Major Arcana in the Tarot Deck. The stories will be sequential in terms of the titles, but the narratives in each will move around Maryam's life. She starts off here below in her sixties, but there is a lot of back story there, all the way back to her childhood.
I'll be removing all excerpts from the three stories in Fragments off the web for a few months after this week, so you've been warned, if you want more for free, read up on them this week!
I like to give my major characters some time to develop, so son't let the slow and steady start fool you: this is a gripping occult thriller. Enjoy.
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Barham
paid her the compliment of picking up a phone first; delivering orders that she
had the name of any Muslim officers on duty on her desk within the next five
minutes. She then dialled again and
demanded to know if they had any Muslim crime scene technicians on the books at all.
Given it was now late at night, Maryam had no idea whom she had called,
but the question didn’t appear to faze them.
Barham escorted Maryam to a nearby
posh office with an en suite to allow her to freshen up, aware she had come
straight from the train station. Maryam
took the opportunity to phone ahead to Peckham and inform Father Scott that she
would be unlikely to arrive at the priest house for several hours. She did not inform him this was because she’d
be next door in the Church itself.
Before Maryam left in the squad car,
an eager young detective was added to be her main liaison with the Met. DC Shahrukh Iqbal appeared to have been going
off duty when he was called in to be her escort; he very much looked like he’d
not long finished a hard shift. She
wondered if this would be his first murder case, his sudden appearance caused a
few raised eyebrows with the uniformed officers who were driving them. Maryam understood why Barham had been promoted
so young: she learned fast.
As they approached the Church of the
Mother of All Sorrows in the dark and the pouring rain, Maryam could see the police
tape around the main door and the police officer standing guard. Iqbal held the car door open for her as they
sprinted over the path, up the stairs and into the vestibule as fast as they
could. The uniformed officer on the steps
had opened the doors for them as they approached. The Church was probably over a hundred years
old and spoke of Pugin and classic Gothic Revival; vaulting stone arches and
stained glass windows. Highly ornate
carving and roof painting above the altar and a huge Christ crucified hung
central in domed space. The bright light
of the crime scene lanterns and the police tape over the entire sanctuary were
painful to experience, as was the smell.
Blood: dead dried blood. It
mingled with the scents of old wood, dust, and incense. Maryam hesitated looking down on the death at
the end of the aisle, imagining how it had looked with the corpse upon the
altar. A blasphemous mirror image of
what hovered above it. How it had smelled
when all that blood was fresh?
‘Have you been here before,
Detective Iqbal?’
‘Actually, I have.’
Maryam looked at him askance. ‘I thought...?’
‘That I’d just been assigned? I have.
I’ve not been here, at this murder scene, but I’ve been in this Church,
during orientation.’
‘Ah.
I see. You did a course on
multi-faith policing in Peckham?’
‘In the Metropolitan area, I visited
here then.’
‘So you know Father Jones?’
‘No.
I met with a Father Edwards and a Bishop Atkins.’
‘Did Inspector Barham know this?’
‘Not ‘till about an hour ago,
no. And please call me Shahrukh.’
‘As-Saamu alaykum, Shahrukh. I am Maryam.’ She did not offer to shake
hands.
‘Walaiakum salam, Maryam.’ Even in his English accent, one of privilege
and wealth, Shahrukh managed to pronounce her name with the correct
emphasis. She looked forward to him
speaking it aloud in front of Fred Atkins, especially if Fred continued to
refer to her as ‘Marie’ in front of him.
Maryam indicated that Shahrukh
should follow her as she walked down the long central aisle heading for the
sanctuary.
‘Then you’ll know of the import of
this. Have you been informed of all of
it?’
‘Nope. Inspector Barham just asked me to accompany
you and to assist you...’
‘And to not let me touch
anything...’
‘And to not let you touch
anything... then to escort you to the other house, then to go home. She said I’d get a full briefing when I came
in for duty in the morning.’
‘Wise, very wise. Although I dare say it will be boring for you
what I’m about to do.’
‘Why, what are you about to do?’
‘Nothing.’
And nothing was what she did,
although it was a very active nothing.
With Shahrukh by her side, she walked every inch of the church that was
not sealed off by tape. She went into
the empty confessional boxes on the gospel side of the church. She sat in each of them, on both sides of the
screen, and did nothing for five minutes.
She knelt on the penitent’s side and sat in the confessor’s. She avoided the confessional that was sealed
off by police tape. She walked out of
the nave back into the vestibule and took the stairs up to the choir area and
sat there. She asked the detective to
walk her out of the Church and into the Sacristy at the back via the outside
door, set to one side just for the priests to use. This ensured she didn’t walk through the
taped area of the altar. The outside door
was tucked to the side and had a large steel sheet over it. She spent ten minutes studying the interior
of the small room. When they returned to
the nave, she sat at the front pew and looked at the altar for about twenty
minutes.
She’d spent about two hours in the
Church before hunger and tiredness started to intrude. She asked Shahrukh to walk her through the
rain, and the graveyard, to the parish house.
He advised her to only leave the house with an umbrella in her hands in
the morning as there were a few stalwart local photographers snapping away from
the street during the day.
Another uniformed officer stood watch at the door there, who nodded to
her as she was allowed in by a very anxious Father Scott.
Inside the hallway, the smell of an
old parish house met them: dust, age, furniture polish, fried onions, and
cigarette smoke. The days of the smell
of cabbage were gone. Maryam doubted
that young Father Jones smoked, but the walls gave evidence that Father
Edwards, who had been in residence for decades, did so with gusto. Father Scott took Maryam’s coat and indicated
she should go through to the formal parlour.
‘I need to freshen up and change my
clothing, Father Scott; please show me to my room first. Could I ask you to make some tea and toast
please? I’m quite hungry.’
Father Scott nodded and they tip-toed
past the sleeping Bishop Atkins, pegged out in a chair by an old gas fire in
the parlour, and crept up the stairs. On
the landing, one room showed light under the door sill and Maryam thought that
would be Father Jones’s. All others were
dark. The floor boards creaked as they
walked to the end of the hallway and through the farthest door.
It was a visiting priest’s room, as
she had expected, clean and bare. It had
old linoleum and a faded rug, both from the 1950s, a dark wood bedside table of
indeterminate age and design. The lamp
and radio on the table were old, but the bed and bedding were modern and looked
new. There was a crucifix on the wall
above the bed and a couple of portraits of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin
Mother & Child on the walls. A desk
sat with a small television sitting on it, unplugged and forlorn. A jug of water and a single glass. A wardrobe and a chest of drawers finished
the room. Her cases had been laid carefully
to one side.
‘There is a guest bathroom next
door. It is not en suite, but no one
else will use it.’
Maryam nodded.
‘Would you like some soup?’
‘Oh yes, please, that would be
fine.’
‘There is real coffee.’
Her face lit up. ‘Oh, that would be wonderful, thank you.’
She longed to have a shower, but had
no idea how the plumbing in this old building would react, no need to wake
everyone with creaking and groaning. She
washed herself down quickly and dressed in pyjamas and a mandarin collared,
floor length house coat. It was only
partially a defence against Atkins: after what she’d seen she needed to feel
safe and comfortable.
Father Scott, who turned out to be
called Andrew but preferred Andy, had warmed through a tin of tomato soup and sliced
into a crusty loaf of bread. Tinned soup
in the UK was most acceptable and she ate it gratefully. The coffee was almost good and she enjoyed it
thoroughly. Andy was a most generous and
understanding companion who understood the value in silence. It was something she appreciated about
dealing with the clergy: the understanding that silence is often its own
defined space and not always an uncomfortable absence.
It was about three a.m. when Fred
blundered into the kitchen, having woken with a crick in his neck. One look at the tiredness in Maryam’s face and
he ushered both himself and Andy out the door, saying they would return in the
early afternoon. Her smile of thanks to
him was totally genuine, as he’d restored her memory that he was a kind and
caring man who just happened to be good at politics and enjoyed being a power
player. She felt chagrined for her less
than charitable thoughts of him and scolded herself for her own weakness.
Then she hauled herself into bed
with a grateful sigh. She’d been up for
almost twenty four hours and her head ached with the weight of the day’s
events. Sleep came swiftly.
The dawn filled the room with cold
light. The revving of motors and hooting
of horns crowded out the bird song. The
rain slashed the panes sideways. Maryam
slept.
When she rose five hours later, her
body was rested and her mind still held a little of the dreaming quality of the
spaces in-between. She sat at the desk
and shuffled her Tarot cards and placed them out on the desk. In her mind she was seeing the layout of the
chapel as she’d walked through it. She
placed the cards on the desk in roughly the same positions as the areas that
had interested her, finishing with the altar itself. Only once she completed the pattern she had
in her mind, did she look down at the lay.
The altar card sprung out at her:
The Fool. Card zero. The young man off on adventures, too keen and
new and full of the love of life to notice the danger he is in. The Sacristy had the most useful card to her,
a reversed King of Swords. It suggested
to her that someone was seeking to make most ill, under the guise of something
else. Her senses had resonated with
something in that room and the lay of the cards had reflected that. The
card at the confessional, the reversed Hierophant, rang out a clear warning to
her: misinformation, distortion, power achieved from withholding
information. Bad advice. Not a card you want to see in connection with
giving up on sin and the granting of forgiveness. With no repentance there can be no salvation.
There were a lot of positives in the
lay, including the World, card twenty-one.
A good ending. Or perhaps, with
the Fool there, central, a new beginning that would end well. Interestingly, the card by the vestibule,
where the police stood, was the Knight of Swords. Swords were so apt, given the circumstances,
and looking at the cards, she looked forward to both meeting Father Jones, and
working further with DC Shahrukh Iqbal.
She cleared the lay away and slipped
her cards into her shoulder bag. Then
she spent an hour in prayer and a further hour in meditation. Around her, people were moving about the
house with hushed tones and delicate treads, no doubt trying not to wake
her. The banging from the pipes as she
showered both confirmed her suspicions and served to alert them to her being
awake, so when she entered the kitchen, she was greeted by the smell of fresh
coffee, and frying bacon.
A startled Father Jones jumped up
from the kitchen table and smiled at her, offering her his hand, which she
accepted with a smile. She was
dumbstruck for a moment by his size and beauty: his photo had done him no
justice. He was easily six foot two,
perhaps six three. Both his hands
enveloped hers with a gentle but firm hold; long, strong fingers with calluses
that betrayed much reading, writing, and if she was not wrong, the playing of
the guitar. His eyes were hazel with
green flecks, a startling contrast with the dark caramel of his skin. His Welsh accent, cultured and enchanting in
one. His physique had the sharp and
supple tones of the professional athlete.
When he smiled you felt your heart lift.
It was no wonder the graffiti he’d been attacked with had concentrated
on his sexuality. Wyn Jones shone with
energy and humanity in a very warm and real body of flesh. The bruise on his cheek and the slight cut on
his lip only served to highlight his perfection. Poor man, how he must have had to fight to
make others believe his vocation was pure.
‘Please, Father Jones, be
seated.’
‘Please call me Wyn, sis...’ His
voice trailed off as he drew back in his mistake. It was one she was used to hearing from the
clergy and she smiled back at him.
‘Maryam is just fine, Wyn.’ She held
her hand outstretched in his grasp, for just a moment, to reassure him of the
honesty of her response. She then
approached Father Edwards, who was pouring her a mug of coffee. She extended
her hand.
‘Maryam Michael, Father, from the
Office of the Arcane. Sorry to meet you
in such dreadful circumstances.’
Father Edwards was over eighty years
old and his body was carrying the burden of the murder badly: he looked
defeated, wasted in the pain of it all. Maryam felt his age, his anxiety, his
desperate need for the nightmare to be over.
His face was grey and his middle and index fingers stained tobacco
yellow. Priests did not, in general,
allow this to happen as they dispensed the host from those fingers to the
mouths of the faithful. It spoke volumes
to her of what was going on inside. He
nodded and avoided her outstretched hand by giving her the cup of coffee. He turned and sat down at the table. A tobacco tin sat on it and he played with it. Maryam sat and Wyn jumped up again to make
her a sandwich of white sliced British bread and fried bacon. She thanked him, cut it in half and made
herself eat half of that. The discussion
slowly turned their attention from her, to the circumstances, and she was able
to dispense with the tiny bites she was taking and concentrate on coffee. Much more coffee!
By the time they had introduced
themselves to each other and swapped enough banal pleasantries to get them over
not talking about the murder, Inspector Barham had arrived with Shahrukh and a
crime scene team in tow. On their
arrival, Wyn went to his room and Father Edwards, who had not offered his
forename to anyone, although she knew it was Peter, retired to sit outside in a
somewhat dilapidated greenhouse, and smoke.
The rain pouring down on the panes obscured him from view. Before she and Barham discussed the case, Maryam
asked permission to have Father Edwards moved to a different address. Barham agreed and Maryam phoned Father Scott
on the mobile number he’d given her. He
was en route with Atkins. She requested
a respite place be found for Edwards in another parish house, perhaps even at
Westminster Cathedral. After all, they
had the apartment they had prepared for her?
Barham and she discussed the case,
with Maryam reporting she had no observations, but requesting that she be
allowed to direct the crime team in some additional tests. Barham was happy with this and they went over
to the Church. Maryam could see Wyn
Jones looking down on them from his bedroom window. She pushed her sympathy to the side and
concentrated on being calm and empty, open and flexible. In her heart she knew what Barham did, that
Wyn had no connection with this death at all.
Her head wasn’t so sure they were going to be able to prove that.
In the Church, Maryam asked if the
tabernacle interior had been fully checked, not only for fingerprints, but for
fluids. The crime officers stated it had
only been dusted for prints, which she had known, as she’d seen the dusting
powder all over the screen and door.
When tested, it proved positive for blood, a tiny amount on the base of
the interior. Barham asked what had led her to suspect this and they sat and
discussed it with Shahrukh and another detective named Gatto, as the lab
technicians catalogued.
‘It’s a sacred space. If the person who committed the murder was
also trying to reinforce the sacrilege within Catholic, or Christian, tradition
the way they had with Islamic, then it made sense to desecrate the area the
sacred host was kept in.’
‘Then why not make it obvious?’ Barham and Gatto were taking the lead, with
Iqbal listening hard. Maryam addressed
Barham who had asked the question.
‘I’m sure the secondary intent is to
cause problems between the communities.
Being seen to actively defile the tabernacle at the same time as
defiling the Qur’an would put both communities in the same position. The desecration of the Islamic element is being
made more visible than that of the Christian one.’
‘Why not desecrate a host?’ This was from Gatto, who shared the same
accent as Barham; both natives of this area of London.
‘These days there is no sacred host
kept in an empty, locked church. There are
usually only unblessed communion wafers.’
Gatto nodded. ‘Of course.’
Barham looked at him, and he continued. ‘The priest blesses the host at
each service, each mass. If there is any
left over, he swallows them himself so none of the sacred host is wasted.’
‘And the host is more sacred in a
Christian church, than say the pages of a bible would be?’
‘In a Catholic church, yes. The host is the physical body of Christ.’
Barham looked confused. It was Iqbal who spoke up, surprising
everyone.
‘In the Roman Catholic Church, the
bread and wine of the communion are changed by the prayers of the priest into
the actual body and blood of their saviour, our prophet, Jesus. In other Christian communities it represents
such, a symbol of it, not the actual thing.
Here, in this Church, it’s treated as if it is actually his body, his
blood.’
Barham looked to Maryam, who nodded.
‘Detective Iqbal has said it
succinctly. Ripping up a bible in a
Catholic Church would be annoying, but not outrageous or seen as a severe
attack. Polluting the tabernacle with
the blood of a murdered man is in line with the offence of ripping and
bloodying the Qur’an.’
‘So it confirms your thoughts that
this is a serious attack on both religions?’
‘On this Church, and its beliefs,
there has been a serious attack. I’m
still convinced the attacking of Islamic principle is about making more of the
offences to this one.’
‘The multi-faith leaders have been
informed this morning. Myself and DC
Iqbal have an appointment with the Imam of the local mosque this afternoon.’
‘I would be interested in attending
that, if you would allow it. But first I
must ask what you’ve done to find the weapon used in this murder.’
‘The weapon?’
‘Yes, the knife, although I suspect,
as does your surgeon, that from the writing and the cuts it is a scalpel. The report says nothing has been found.’
This time it was Sergeant Gatto who
took the lead, taking out a note pad, a very old fashioned and reassuring notepad,
and read from it.
‘Yesterday, the entire Church and
the graveyard were searched thoroughly, including with a metal detector. Detectors were quite useless in most of the Church,
given the nails in all the wood, but it was swept through. The drains were checked and the main sewer is
being examined today, on all the lead points.
The street outside, the bins and post boxes, have been checked and there
are ongoing searches in all the local gardens.
The bin collection was the day before the murder, so most of the bins
and skips out there are relatively empty, so that’s been quite easy. So far, we have nothing.’
‘Have you searched the parish
house?’
Barham took over again.
‘No, we haven’t. Father Jones was taken to the police station
and processed after he’d reported finding the body. He stayed with the body and phoned on his
mobile phone and the CCTV evidence confirms this. After processing, he was returned to the
parish house and asked to stay there. We
haven’t had the manpower to search the premises yet, as the rain has made
searching outside areas a priority. The
Bishop has given permission for such a search.’
‘The Sacristy was completely
searched?’
Gatto took that in his stride,
confirming Maryam’s suspicions that he’d seen the inside of a Catholic Church
quite a few times in his childhood; for all that he wasn’t practising now.
‘Yes, it was walked through and
nothing found, no evidence it had been broken into. It was locked until we had Father Edwards
fetch a key, as Father Jones was still down the station.’
‘What’s your point, Miss Michael?
What’s so special about this Sacristy room?’
Barham appeared to be intrigued rather than suspicious.
‘It’s just that if I were going to
desecrate a Church and I knew enough about the Church as this person appears to
do, I’d have spent a few moments in there.
Further, if I wanted to desecrate the host without being noticed, and hide
a scalpel where it was unlikely to be found immediately, it would be in the sink
in there down the plug hole.’
‘But we’ve explained that we checked
the drains.’
‘The sink in there isn’t connected
to the drains, Inspector. It’s a sacrarium. It’s completely separate from the normal
sewage system. It’s only used to wash
anything that a sacred, consecrated host could have come into contact
with. It washes straight down into
soil.’
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