Daniel Blake - Soul Murder

‘At home. I got back about five, and didn’t go out again till this morning.’

‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’

‘My mother. Of course.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No. Just her. I had nothing to do with Redwine’s death, so I didn’t take the precaution of getting five people to give me an alibi, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I didn’t ask whether you had anything to do with his death.’

‘Why else are you here?’

‘Listen, Mustafa, I’m sorry for your loss –’

‘That’s what people always say, when they don’t know what else to say.’

‘– but you being aggressive and giving me static isn’t going to help anyone here.’

‘Your father still alive, Detective?’

‘He is, as it happens.’

‘Then don’t tell me not to get aggressive. Not till it happens to you.’

Patrese reckoned Mustafa had a point. Best keep that thought to himself.

When it came to unsettling suspects, Patrese knew Beradino was a master. His trick – rather, one of his tricks – was to use their mood against them, as a martial arts practitioner will exploit his opponent’s weight and momentum to his own advantage.

If a suspect or a witness was calm, so too would Beradino be, looking to lull them into a sense of ever greater security until they, forgetting he was a cop rather than their best friend, let slip something they regretted.

If, on the other hand, they were upset, as Mustafa Bayoumi was increasingly becoming, Beradino would stoke the fires of their agitation as high as he could until they lost their sense of self-control – and again let slip something they regretted.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘You only help Muslims?’ His tone was suddenly snappy, all reasonableness and bonhomie gone as though in a puff of smoke.

‘We help our community.’

‘You proselytize?’

Patrese knew what Beradino was thinking. Places like Homewood – poor, deadbeat ’hoods where those who didn’t seek their oblivion via the liquor store or the crack house were open to almost anything which promised to improve their lot – were fertile grounds for Islamic recruiters.

And everyone knew what they were like, because everyone had seen footage of the Nation of Islam: Farrakhan and his bow-tie-wearing, bean-pie-selling disciples who hated whites, Jews, women and gays.

‘We welcome those who choose to come to us. Your religion does the same.’

‘Our religion was what America was founded on.’

‘And what an unqualified success Christianity’s been, hasn’t it?’

‘What does that mean?’ Beradino was no longer acting annoyed, Patrese knew; this was the real deal. The two of them had long ago agreed not to discuss religion, because it always ended in arguments; Beradino the devout, Patrese the unbeliever.

‘Jesus died for your sins, right?’

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘Then explain this to me. Either that was for everyone’s sins right up to the moment he died, in which case we’ve had two thousand years of some serious bad behavior left unchecked. Or he died for everyone’s sins then and for all time; in which case it hasn’t helped much, has it?’

Patrese almost laughed. It was a question he’d asked himself, and others, more than once, and no one – not teachers, not priests, probably not even the Pope himself – had been able to answer it properly.

‘Not to mention the impeccable behavior of priests up and down the country where young children are involved,’ Mustafa continued.

‘A few bad apples. Sinners, as we all are. Everyone in your culture’s perfect?’

‘I look around here, and I see people brought up to believe in the Christian faith. But I also know that, round here, all too often BC means before crack, and AD means after death. That’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough just to pray and hope everything will turn out all right. We have to go out and do the work.

‘And that work starts here. Islam prohibits drugs and alcohol. You stay off those, you can be a productive member of society. You turn to them, and you’re just waiting to die. And if the only way out of that is through Islam, then so be it. Because Islam places paramount importance on the education of our children. To be a teacher is a special calling. When I’ve finished my studies, I’m hoping to teach at the school we’re raising funds to build here; preschool to fifth grade.’

‘Somewhere to train the next generation of bombers?’

‘Not at all. A school where everybody has a strange name, so nobody feels alone. Muslim kids feel like outsiders in public schools. No matter how good those schools are, they can’t teach Islamic beliefs and morals. So we will. Kids hate being different; so we’ll make them not different. And you know why?’

‘I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.’

‘Because we have to do it ourselves now. Since 9/11, we haven’t been able to receive money from other Muslim countries, even from registered Islamic charities.’

‘That’s damn right. There’s a war on.’

Mustafa didn’t take the bait. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

‘We relied on that money a lot; perhaps too much. That was one of the reasons why, before 9/11, we – the immigrant Muslims – didn’t really have that much to do with the black Muslims.

‘Then suddenly we couldn’t move for surveillance, police raids, airport searches, special registration, and so on. All the time, we had to prove our loyalty to the flag. Still do, every day. I look black anyway, but African-American Muslims sympathize. They know what it’s like; not from being Muslim, but from being black.’

He looked at Beradino first, then Patrese; two white men who he felt would never understand, not fully.

‘We’re all niggers now, basically.’

You’ve seen homicide division rooms umpteen times on the silver screen, and it’s one of the few aspects of police work that TV gets right. There really are desks piled high with report forms and coffee cups, and the detectives sitting at those desks really do crick the phones into their necks while pecking two-fingered at their keyboards.

Amidst the barely controlled hubbub of a major homicide investigation, Patrese read the poster above Beradino’s head for the umpteenth time that day.

The Fifth Commandment, Book of Exodus, 20, of THE HOLY BIBLE.

Then: THE OATH OF PRACTICAL HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.

Beradino, who’d written the poster and had it typeset himself, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like.

Homicide investigation is a profound duty, and constitutes a heavy responsibility. Just as there is no crime worse than taking someone else’s life, so there is no task more important than bringing to justice the people who crossed that line. As such, let no person deter you from the truth and your own personal commitment to see that justice is done. Not only for the deceased, but for the surviving family as well.

And remember – ‘you’re working for God.’

No, Patrese thought angrily; he was working for the city of Pittsburgh. There were times when Beradino’s incessant God-squadding really got on his nerves, and this was one of them – not least because he was pissed anyway.

Every cop knows that the first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical. If they haven’t got a good lead in that time, the chances of solving the crime are halved as evidence disappears, suspects flee, and stories change.

More than forty-eight hours after Michael Redwine had been torched, Patrese and Beradino had nothing.

Sure, they had an autopsy report, but that just confirmed Beradino’s findings – that Redwine, alive when the fire started, had died from smoke inhalation.