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he was drugged?’
    Barham nodded. ‘We believe so, what leads
you to ask that?’
    ‘He lay there and bled to death. There is no
significant arterial spray pattern evident in the surrounding area.
The wounds are shallow and the blood flowed out slowly and evenly,
from what I can tell. He would not have lain there and bled to
death, I imagine, unless he wasn’t able to rise. I can see no
evidence of restraints or serious injury that incapacitated
him.’
    Barham paid Maryam the best compliment; she
carried on talking about the details of the case without missing a
beat. ‘We don’t know what, the toxicology results aren’t back.
There was some spray on his chest; it could only be discerned by
using light filters. It suggests the first cut was on his throat
from someone standing behind him.’
    ‘So there wouldn’t be much spurt on the
murderer?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Curious.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘If the first cut was at the throat, it was
symbolic. It was a shallow slash, one presumes...’ She picked up
the autopsy photos and looked in more detail. ‘Yes, otherwise he’d
have bled out much more quickly.’
    ‘Agreed. All the cuts were shallow. He only
bled out as there were so many of them.’
    ‘Body couldn’t clot the blood fast enough.’
Maryam took a magnifier out of her shoulder bag and studied the
cuts.
    ‘Is there any suggestion the writing was
done by a different blade, from the slices that ensured the bleed
out occurred?’
    ‘None. However, as I said, the autopsy and
reports are not yet completed.’
    ‘And Father Jones remains relatively safe
until then?’
    Barham tensed. Maryam listened.
    ‘We have no reason to suspect it’s anything
but a deliberate ploy to make us look at Father Jones. We have... I
have... no expectation that he’ll be implicated.’
    Again, gentle words spoken with care. Maryam
had a sense of the huge wheels moving around them, grinding slow,
grinding small, as the competing politics of the various
authorities sought to ensure the dance did not end on their patch;
that the axe would not fall upon their head.
     
    ‘Have you informed the multi-faith agencies
working with the Met and used Bishop Atkins’ contacts in the
various London communities? You have informed the hierarchies, if
not the local mosques?’
    Barham shook her head.
    ‘I see. That’s what bought my ticket, was
it? Everyone agreed to keep all this quiet until after I arrived?
An outsider to help keep balance; to blame, if all else failed...’
Maryam hoped Barham would understand the trust she’d accorded her
by ending that last sentence out loud.
    Barham took it on the chin and kept going.
‘Yes, I suppose that would be one way of looking at it. Your
knowledge could have told us firmly this was not religious in
nature, just freakish, like the desecration in the graveyard.’
    Maryam nodded. ‘But what do you have hope of
here, in this case...? What outcome are you looking for from the
Congregation? Any religious analyst could have confirmed that
context. Why allow us in, in particular? The Congregation is
rather... unique in its brief.’
    Jenny Barham went quiet, taking a moment to
collect her thoughts. Maryam studied her. She was young to be an
operational Detective Inspector, barely in her mid-forties. She was
aging well in the job. She wore a wedding ring and her dress and
figure suggested there was another person somewhere, whom she
loved, who wore the match of it. Maryam doubted this woman believed
in any God, in any religion, and she was a little lost as to how to
respond.
    ‘We are hoping that we have something ...
concrete, to go on, before we approach the leaders in the various
Islamic communities in the area. That we could rule out certain
things before informing them of the... sacrilege.’
    ‘Rule out real occult influence? Present it
as vandalism or madness but all of human agency?’
    Barham laughed. ‘No! Not quite that. I mean,
not really.’
    ‘You don’t believe in the occult,