Anita Sivakumaran was born in Madras and has lived in the UK since 2004. Her historical novel, The Queen, based on real events, has been made into a major television series. Black Rain is her second novel in the DI Patel detective series.

Also by Anita Sivakumaran

The Birth of Kali

The Queen

Sips that Make a Poison Woman

DETECTIVE PATEL SERIES

Cold Sun

Copyright

Published by Dialogue Books

ISBN: 978-0-3497-0157-8

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Anita Sivakumaran 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Dialogue Books

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

For Nila, my lovely daughter

The little girl played in the sandpit while she waited for Daddy. She dunked her plastic watering can into a bucket of water her mother had given her. ‘Be careful not to spill any,’ she told herself sternly. Her mother had warned her that she wouldn’t come every five minutes to fill it for her. She was very tired from working, and had gone to lie down for a tick.

The little girl didn’t mind being left alone. Daddy would never have left her even for a minute. But Mama worked long hours at night so she could be with her in the day. Except then she was too tired to play with her. Like now.

The little girl poured the water into the sandpit and made mud pies. One for her, one for Mama and one for Daddy. If Daddy was here, he’d be in the sandpit with her, playing. She was bored.

‘Hey, lil’ munchkin.’

She looked up at the sound of the man’s voice. Her face brightened. The nice man Daddy brought home the other day. The one who made Mama laugh. He’d even come to preschool yesterday with Daddy, made Mrs Bingham smile.

She waved from the sandpit. A queenly wave.

‘Come here, darling. Give me a high five.’

She went over to the fence, held her hand up. The man reached down from the top of the five-foot fence. Barely had their hands touched, when she scooted away laughing, the man’s hand grabbing thin air.

Her mother had told her not to talk to strangers, but the man wasn’t a stranger. Her mother had also told her: don’t go near the fence. Now the man said, ‘Come closer, doll. Give us a high ten.’

The little girl went closer, both hands raised up.

The man held out his hands, said, ‘Now you say high ten.’

The girl widened her stance, ready to scoot away like before and began saying, ‘High … ’

She didn’t finish. Simian arms swept down and scooped her up. She laughed at the sensation of being whooshed through the air, but the man didn’t put her down.

He carried her away from her garden, her mother, her house. As he buckled her into a car seat, she thought: Mama will be cross.

‘Hasina’ pulled her scarf tighter around her head so no wisp of hair escaped, then approached the desk. Silently she handed the passport over. The check-in assistant, whose name tag read ‘Clara’, pored over the pages, looking for the visa stamp.

‘First time?’ she asked Hasina, who nodded. ‘Business or pleasure?’

For a moment, Hasina was stumped. She didn’t know. Duty, she wanted to say, and settled for ‘Family’. It was the correct answer, in a way.

‘Tom’, the man assigned to watch Hasina, pressed a finger into his free ear to hear himself better. ‘Target heading to Security gates. Do I move now?’

A female voice crackled in his ear. ‘Sally on standby awaiting instructions.’

‘Sally’ had started off as a joke name. Aunt Sally, shepherder of girls. Then it stuck, became code for the female agent on tailing and interception duty. For some reason his code name was ‘Tom Thumb’. Either to do with his tomato complexion or short stature.

Ben from the surveillance van stifled a yawn. ‘Sorry, it’s been a day and a half. Wait and see if she makes contact with anyone. Usually they send an escort.’

Hasina approached Security, joined a winding queue. Before Tom could get close, a dense knot of men gathered behind her. Hasina disappeared into a branching queue. Tom was stuck behind a group of football fans with red Liverpool tops on. More and more of their mates kept joining the bunch in front of him, pushing him back. Hasina was nearly out of his sight. When he tried to push past the fans, one of them put a beefy hand on his chest, said, ‘Oi, mate, wait your turn.’

The agent didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Didn’t want to scare off Hasina’s contact. He spoke into his earpiece. ‘Sally, got eyes?’

‘Oh crap,’ said Sally. ‘She’s going through. I’m stuck behind a pushchair.’

Tom pushed past the football fans, who began yelling after him, but he couldn’t afford to let Hasina get away. He flashed his credentials at the security officers and made it to the Duty Free zone. No sign of Hasina.

Sally arrived, breathless, a minute later. They shook their heads at each other, then began a panicked search for the girl they’d been told strictly to never let out of their sight.

Hasina emerged from the restrooms beside Costa Coffee exactly as she’d been instructed. New clothes, new hair, new shoes. She’d left her small backpack – along with her passport and boarding card – inside a nappy bin, and now wheeled a sporty yellow case. As she walked past the two agents scratching around like gormless chickens, she flicked her hair over her shoulder. Then, arm in arm with the new brother who’d come to escort her, she started on the path to her new life.

The running man began wheezing but he couldn’t stop. You can do this, just get away. He reached the deserted stretch between two roads and turned back for a quick look, easing the heavy shoulder bag to the ground.

Through the darkness spot-lit by street lamps, the rain was a shimmering, dazzling curtain that hid his pursuers. Terraced houses loomed either side of the empty road, all curtained and gone to sleep. The people chasing him were still out there.

He started running again, his lungs close to exploding. Only last week his daughter had urged him to take up running. ‘Next week,’ he’d told her. ‘I’ll start getting fit next week.’ Now he may not have next week, or a next day. He’d focus on staying alive for the next hour.

Suddenly he caught sight of huge metal gates set back from the road, half-hidden by hedges. Pitch-black inside. He wouldn’t be able to see anything if he went in there. More importantly, they wouldn’t be able to see him.

He unslung the bag and threw it over the gates, then began climbing. He hadn’t been good at it, even as a child. He slipped, the metal slick with rainwater under his fingers. He cursed, looked at the hedges towering over the gates, wondered if they’d hold his weight.

He tried again, and his weight pulled the gates apart, the latch sliding open as he fell. Ignoring the jarring pain in his ankle, he limped inside. He peered into the dark, blinking the rain from his eyes, not trusting this eerie place. Was it a park or woods? Were there animals in there?

He closed the gates as softly as possible. His hand slipped. The huge gate swung too fast, the latch clanged against the metal, the sound piercing weather and air. He heard a man shout, not far away.

Where was the bag? He groped around frantically, came upon a hard leathery edge. He scooped up the bag and ran along the wire fence blindly, hoping to come to the path’s end and find some light, but only getting deeper into murk, the lights of any houses now too far away to discern.

Where was he? Some kind of woods? He’d never before in his life been surrounded by so much darkness. A primal fear awakened within him and his breath came even shorter than before.

The rain had thickened into black ropes. The bag’s strap cut into his shoulder. He crouched down by the wire fence. The pitch-black soup surrounded him like a python, crushing. Making a quick decision, he heaved the bag over the fence, and heard it land somewhere far enough away.

He heard a step behind him and launched himself sideways, stumbled against a bush and fell.

Even through the hammering of his heart, he heard the silky whisper, ‘Too bad, my friend. Things could’ve been different.’

He felt a sting on his arm.

As the darkness closed over him, the dying man spat out his last words, a final attempt at defiance. ‘You’ll never find it, you bastards.’

Chapter One

Barely had his lunch settled before Clive found himself trotting to the allotment. Sylvia made him. She didn’t harangue him with words as such, but her eyes followed him about the room as he rinsed and filled the kettle, fetched the milk, stirred the sugar, placed a cup beside her on the little table. A wealth of meaning in those eyes; asking, asking.

So, the toast barely finished, the tea too hot to drink and abandoned on the dresser, Clive pulled on his wellies and mac. He didn’t miss Sylvia’s sharp tongue, truth be told, but this silent pleading … Pleading from a proud woman, the dread of his saying no. All this spurred him outside in biblical weather conditions.

Flapping open the broken umbrella, its steel tip a blur of dried mud from when he leaned on it while peering at the tomatoes to check their ripeness, he called, ‘Back soon, me duck,’ before opening the front door to the grey blizzard.

Bastard slugs. This May Bank Holiday, like so many in recent years, proving to be a washout. Now, Monday afternoon, a veritable storm raged, perfect conditions for slugs to rise and devour cottage vegetable gardens. In all the years that Sylvia had her ol’ lottie, she’d kept on top of the slimy critters, her plot free of weeds, the soil pristine, nowhere for the grubbins to lurk. Now it wasn’t so easy. The allotment paths were wheelchair unfriendly, to say the least. Clive did his best, but with his hips, he couldn’t kneel or stay bent at the waist for more than a few minutes.

He felt a twinge in his right hip as he shuffled up to the gates. All Sunday he’d stayed in with Sylvia, resisting the temptation to turn the central heating on, nearly lighting some old newspaper and kindling that lurked in the hearth of the woodburner but denying himself that comfort. Instead, he’d busied himself googling solutions for the slug problem. This morning after breakfast he’d set to work on old Tupperware containers Sylvia had kept from when the children were little – she hated throwing anything away. He drilled holes into the lids and poured in the Foster’s Lager, which would both attract and drown the slugs.

Clive pulled open the metal gates to the allotment – someone had left them unlocked, again – and walked through the grassy accessway that ran between the allotment land and the back of a row of terraced houses.

He passed a back gate with its old ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign. Instinctively he looked down and watched himself step on a dog turd. Typical. Cursing, he wiped his boot on some grass, then spotting another pile, he gathered some leaves, scooped it up and slung it over the small gate. Gathering up his basket of slug traps he noticed a smear on his hand. Cursing louder, he went to the allotment tap, and then proceeded to lay down the traps in Sylvia’s greenhouse.

The dog’s owner curled his bottom lip as he watched Clive stomp away from his back gate. He stood just a foot away from his top-floor window. From there he had a view of the whole allotment. He could see the vandals as they came and went. He could see the so-called respectable old gentleman slinging poo into his tidy garden.

He waited, he had little else to do these days, passing the time by looking out the window, catching glimpses of Clive as he shuffled around in the greenhouse, then to’d and fro’d with the watering can in the rain.

He watched Clive finish and trudge back past his gate again. And, after he heard the metal gates being pulled shut, he went downstairs, coaxed a reluctant dog out into the rain. He opened the garden gate, placed his foot under the dog’s belly, half lifted it over the step, its short legs scrabbling in the air. Giving the animal a stern face, he shooed it onto the vegetable plots.

The dog, an unwell, uneven-tempered mongrel, whined for a while, then began sniffing about. It passed its own smells of shit and piss, some old, some recent, skirted the vegetables, cocked a hopeful ear for the frogs that lived near Sylvia’s greenhouse. It went to the corner of the common lot, which the people from the terraced houses used for dumping things they were supposed to take to the tip. It rootled among the rubbish, the broken bits of plastic bottles and lager cans, wooden chairs missing legs or backs, some metal plates, parts of a fridge, the drum from a tumble dryer, then came upon a brown leather valise.

The dog nosed open its flap, sniffed at the paper and plastic smells inside. It smelled faintly of old peanuts, but the dog found nothing actually edible. Cocking an ear for sounds, the dog licked the raindrops off its own nose, yawned. Then it shuffled into position, crooked its back and strained. It did its business in the mouth of the open valise. Then the dog trotted back to the gate and whined till it was let back in.

In the evening, as the watery sun disappeared for the night, a hedgehog uncurled from under the valise flap, and emerged to look for a quieter bolthole. It had found a nice burrow under a pile of dried brambles before all the disturbances began, before the flap appeared to roof its new home. Its movement pushed the flap up and over, closing the valise again.

Not long after, a teenage gang convened at their usual spot, by the allotment gates, which as usual were open. So they went in to smoke spliffs by the unofficial tip. In the failing light, one of them noticed the brown bag. He eagerly picked up the bag and opened it. ‘Eeow,’ he said, turning his face away in disgust.

‘Wassup, bruv?’ said his friend.

‘It stinks, man,’ said the spiky youth and flung the bag as far as he could. By the time his brain registered the valise’s heaviness, his arms were already sending it away into 2B’s flower bed.

By Tuesday evening, the rain had eased off and Clive returned to the allotment, keen to see if his traps had worked. Indeed, they had; the smell far from pleasant, but gosh it felt satisfying. Decades of growing vegetables and Sylvia had never discovered this trick. Who would have thought slugs were mad for beer? Perhaps they weren’t so different from humans, after all.

He gathered up all the containers into an old plastic tub and, hips aching, went over to the compost bins. Then he wondered about introducing a sudden glut of dead slugs steeped in stale beer into Sylvia’s compost. Wasn’t beer full of salt? No, he didn’t think she’d approve. He cast his eyes about, unwilling to dispose of the stinky things anywhere on Sylvia’s plot, briefly contemplated the dog gate, then settled on the common bit of land, used as a tip by the inhabitants of the terraced houses. He noticed new beer cans. He should write to the secretary about it. Take over the complaining from Sylvia.

He squinted in the failing light. Should have come a bit earlier. He put down the tray, and shook free a chair from the rubbish, startling a frog. No. Broken. He slung it back on the heap and emptied the slugs and beer. When he turned to go he spotted the shoe.

He bent, peered at it, picked it up, looked some more, trying to read without his glasses. ‘Oh my,’ he said out loud, when he made out the letters PRADA. His size too. The soles were a bit muddy but otherwise dry under the brambles.

He slipped off his welly, teetering a bit as he tried not to put his socked foot on the wet ground, slipped the shoe on. Perfect fit. He couldn’t believe someone from the terraces could own, much less throw out an expensive, branded shoe. If people threw away this kind of stuff, he wouldn’t complain about fly tipping. Wouldn’t it be dandy if he had the pair? He began looking about in the failing light, wishing he could see better. He imagined the look on Sylvia’s face when he walked into the house in his artfully scuffed Pradas.

Welly in one hand, slightly off balance, he poked around the rubbish. He had no luck, never had. His eyes roved over the rubbish as evening came on, and there, by the side of the broken wheelbarrow, in a tangle of brambles, was that it? Yes, the other shoe, sticking up out from the thorny sticks. He pulled the shoe from the brambles. Staggered back empty-handed. It wouldn’t come off.

This shoe still clung to its owner’s foot.