Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  ‘Kirk,’ the investigator introduced himself, not specifying whether this was his first name or last. He was at least four inches taller than Carrigan and twice as wide, but he carried his size lightly, moving with a deft assurance as he offered Jack a cigarette.

  ‘Year and a half,’ Carrigan said, waving away the pack.

  ‘Me too,’ Kirk replied. He lit his cigarette and laughed, blowing smoke out into the night.

  The snow kept falling, thicker and thicker clumps, soundlessly lighting on their hair and clothes, blanketing the street around them.

  ‘You finished in there?’

  Kirk stubbed out his cigarette and nodded. ‘You want to grab a drink and I’ll talk you through it?’

  Carrigan smiled and pulled two paper espresso cups out of the take-out bag he was carrying. ‘I want you to show me.’

  Kirk looked Carrigan up and down as if he’d initially mistaken him for someone else.

  ‘It’s not really safe,’ he finally said.

  ‘Neither is smoking‚’ Carrigan replied with a smile, and led the way.

  Now that the fire was out, the real extent of the damage could be seen. The blackened shell of the building smouldered and sizzled darkly in the morning air, a hissing skull with empty windowframes and gaping doorways made all the more sinister by the normality of the houses on either side.

  Kirk handed Carrigan a fire jacket and hard hat as they crossed the front garden. Some of the trees had caught fire and stood blackened and skeletal, smoke rising from their stippled branches.

  The change in temperature hit Carrigan as soon as he stepped inside the house. The air was thicker, dusty and sour, and he began to sweat under the too-tight hat and clumpy jacket as he followed Kirk through the hallway and up the stairs. They walked across the landing, avoiding the places where the floor had collapsed to reveal black holes yawning like pulled teeth, and entered the dining room.

  The parquet flooring had turned black, blistering like sunburnt skin. The painted canvases had melted from their copper frames leaving new designs, tongues of smoke and flame, a narrative of blister and peel. Two wheelchairs sat in the corner of the room, arabesques of steam rising like probing fingers from their seats. Random mounds of ash and metal lay scattered across the floor. A large crucifix hung above the fireplace, the figure still smoking and blackened beyond recognition.

  Carrigan crossed over to the centre of the room and peered down at a set of dark smudges spotting the floor. ‘That what I think it is?’

  Kirk squatted on his haunches and nodded. He was biting the ends of his moustache between his teeth, his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. ‘The SOCOs took the bodies away this morning but yes, that’s what you’re looking at. Human tissue burns much more fiercely than wood. That’s where they died.’ Something cracked behind them and Kirk looked back uneasily. ‘We shouldn’t stay here long. The kitchen floor collapsed overnight and this one’s next.’

  Carrigan ignored him, bending down and examining the black patches. Each expertly traced the shape of the body that had left it, as if their very shadows had been trapped at the moment of death. He got up and began to count. He did this twice and each time he got ten. Ten black smears, ten bodies burnt down to ash and memory.

  ‘Doesn’t it seem strange to you that they’re so neatly positioned around the table?’ Carrigan took two steps back and inspected the mound of ashes which lay at the centre of the room. ‘That’s the dining table, right? And here,’ he pointed to one of the dark smudges, ‘and here and here and here. The nuns are sitting around the table when the smoke creeps through the door. Okay, that makes sense. But why are they all in the same position when they die?’ Carrigan shook his head and scanned the room. ‘You’d expect that as soon as they smelled the smoke they’d start to panic and try to find a way out. We should be seeing bodies scattered in a random pattern, or at least closer to exits and windows, but all we have here is ten dead nuns who seem to have quietly sat at the dinner table as the fire entered the room and who continued sitting at their places until the fire consumed them.’

  ‘Perhaps they couldn’t move because they were tied up,’ Kirk said quietly.

  Carrigan looked down at the zigzag canyon cracks in the floor. ‘Could you tell from the lock whether the door was fastened from the outside or inside?’

  Kirk shook his head. ‘No. Only that it was locked. But we didn’t find any key.’

  Carrigan thought about this as they stood among the ash and dust. ‘If the door was locked from the outside, we’d still be seeing a scatter pattern, right? People still panic even if they know there’s no way out. Which suggests that maybe the door was locked from the inside.’

  ‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’

  Carrigan shrugged. He thought back to what Geneva had said earlier. Maybe he needed to let her follow her instincts. She’d been right before, and it reminded him of being young and eager and new to murder work and how the years of practice and experience had dulled and withered his hunch-sense. He stared at the black smears and thought about the nuns’ last remaining moments. The agony and fear and panic as one by one they succumbed. What prayers, what regrets and childhood memories flashed before their eyes in those final fleeting seconds?

  He crossed over towards an alcove and checked the surrounding area but there was nothing of interest there. He looked up at the high inaccessible stained-glass window, the stately procession of pain and suffering enacted on the way to Golgotha, then turned his attention to the wall below, using the torch to run light up and down its coffered surface. The wall was empanelled with square insets made from a darker wood. The wood had blackened and blistered and peeled, the years of dust and varnish and smeary touch erased in flame. There was no way anyone could have gained purchase and climbed it to get to the window. Would the nuns have known that?

  A sudden thought flashed through his head and he crossed the room and squatted in front of the remains of the table. He could see the dulled edges of cutlery poking through the debris, teapots and trays, broken glass and cracked porcelain, a fork missing its tines and a swan-shaped salt shaker, its wings tarnished black. But he wasn’t interested in these. It was the small black objects peppering the ash that he now examined. Carrigan bent down and picked one of them up and rolled it between his fingers. It was still warm and when he tilted it towards the light he could see the pinprick tunnel threading through it. He put it back down and selected another but he already knew what he was looking at. When he was finished he got up, his knees cracking painfully, and pointed to the round black stones dotting the floor. ‘Their rosary beads were kept under their habits, on the waist. We shouldn’t be seeing them all over the place like this unless they had them out when the fire reached them.’ Carrigan looked down. ‘And that doesn’t make sense . . . why would they all have their rosary beads out when they were sitting down to dinner?’

  ‘Downstairs is where things start to get interesting,’ Kirk explained as they exited the dining room and made their way across the landing. Carrigan couldn’t help thinking there was something about the house, beyond the damage wrought by the blaze, which made it seem oppressive, as if gravity had more purchase here, a fleeting sense of agony and confinement which made him eager and impatient to get back out on the street.

  As they passed the door which led down to the basement, Carrigan stopped. He looked down at the blackened set of steps disappearing into darkness.

  ‘We can’t go down there until tomorrow at the earliest,’ Kirk said. ‘You wouldn’t last two minutes in there. If the stairs don’t get you, the fumes will.’

  Snow was falling in the chapel. The outer wall had collapsed and wind-blown flurries danced and scurried in front of them. Steam was still curling from the walls, white puffy coils which dissipated in the frigid air. Dotted around the room were niches and hidden cloisters, screened-off areas and the row of confession booths, making the room seem smaller than it actually was. At the far end, where the space opene
d up into a large hexagonal bay, stood the altar on a raised stone platform, a darkened crucifix smoking behind it. Carrigan stood silently taking in the scene, the language of niches and candle stands, the hewn syntax of rood screens and mystical vision and seared eyes.

  He walked over to the confession booths and searched the skeleton remains of the two on either side, then the one where the body was discovered. Most of the wood had burned leaving only the metal doors, the spiny supports and screens, yet, despite all this, they still looked eerie and magnificent. He stepped inside the booth, the smell heavy and rich in his nostrils, imagining the people who’d sat here and poured out the worst moments of their lives into the blank and faceless screen.

  Pulling his torch out, he aimed the beam at the back of the door and took an involuntary swallow of air as he saw the marks on it. He splashed the light left and right and saw that they were everywhere, up and down and across the surface of the door. He snapped on his gloves and used the back of his hand to wipe away the top layer of soot. The marks were more like scratches, you could see that now, small crescent-shaped grooves in the metal, overlapped, random and furious.

  ‘She was alive when the fire got to her. She was trying to get out,’ he said.

  Kirk craned his neck and saw the frenzied palimpsest of scratches that the eleventh victim had made. He took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. This close to the seat of fire the flames would have got to her before the smoke could knock her out. Those scratches may have been involuntary.’

  ‘Involuntary?’

  ‘As she burned, her muscles would have contracted and popped and she’d have flailed and lashed out. I’m afraid it would have been an extremely painful few minutes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Carrigan said, stepping out of the booth, trying to rein in the dread images conjured by the fire investigator. He scanned the room, the dark ceiling, the mottled floor. ‘Where did the fire start?’

  Kirk pointed to a large bayed niche at the opposite end of the room and they slowly crossed the nave, weaving through the scattered debris and mulch until Carrigan stopped and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ He could feel it in his nostrils, sour and caustic, an underlying stench behind the stink of the fire.

  ‘You noticed it too?’ Kirk came up beside him. ‘We’re not quite sure what it is.’ He pointed down at the floor, to an area that was darker than the rest. ‘From the amount of ash it looks like there was a large item of furniture here, maybe a chest of drawers or bureau. I took a sample and sent it off to the lab. We’ll know soon enough.’

  They crossed the room and the fire investigator gestured towards the wide semicircular niche in the west wall, a single blackened statue at its centre. ‘That’s your seat of fire.’

  Carrigan looked at the dark patchwork of marks behind the icon then craned his neck and saw the burnt ceiling beams and partially collapsed floor of the room above. Black arrows of smoke snaked up the walls in twisting spirals as if they too had tried to escape the flames.

  Kirk aimed his flashlight at a dense hatchwork of soot and grime to the left of the statue. ‘See how the damage is worse here than anywhere else?’

  Carrigan found it hard to tell one scorch mark from another, the seemingly random mosaic of burn shadows and ash smears vaguely sinister, a perpetual flicker at the periphery of his vision, but for Kirk the chaos of smudge and burn was like an open book, one whose language he could easily decipher.

  ‘What we have here is your classic V pattern, telling us this is where the initial temperature was the highest. That was a table,’ Kirk pointed to the two-inch deposit of ash spread evenly across the floor, grey and flecked with small shiny particles. Next to it stood a twisted frame of hissing metal. It was rectangular in design and composed of three horizontal sections with gothic tines of blackened metal rising from its cross-bars like accusatory fingers. ‘No idea what that is. Looks like one of those medieval torture devices,’ Kirk said quietly, and he was unprepared for Carrigan’s throaty laugh.

  ‘It’s a pricket stand,’ Carrigan said. ‘You find them in most Catholic churches. They’re usually dedicated to a saint, that’s what the statue is. People light a candle, put some money in the collection box and say a prayer.’

  ‘Didn’t help them much,’ Kirk replied. ‘All these bloody candles.’ He shook his head and pointed up to a set of metal rods fixed to the wall, small cylinders with empty brass rings hanging loosely from them. ‘Drapes or curtains,’ Kirk explained. ‘Textbook fire hazard. A candle must have fallen over and ignited them. The fire would have then spread up and across. Once it hit the drapes there’d be no stopping it.’

  Carrigan studied the niche then made a sketch in his notebook of the relative positions of pricket stand, table, drapes and saint. He took out his phone and snapped a few shots. ‘And you’re absolutely certain this is where the fire started?’

  Kirk smiled broadly. ‘It’s physics and geometry, not a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Any evidence of accelerants?’

  Kirk shook his head. ‘Not that I can see. No pool marks, no residual smell – the candles, the drapes, the painting – you wouldn’t need anything else,’ he said, biting the ends of his moustache again.

  Carrigan nodded and stared at the blackened statue. He didn’t recognise the saint. The figure was tall and thin and seemed unruffled by its present condition, an enigmatic smile planted on carved grey lips. He took a couple more photos of the statue’s face and turned around, studying the layout of the room, then took several steps back and looked again at the pricket stand, and from this vantage there was something different about it, a subtlety of shade and angle revealed by the slanted slabs of spilled light.

  The pricket stand had been positioned a couple of feet away from the back wall but it wasn’t quite flush. The left side of the stand was closer to the wall than the right by maybe two inches. Carrigan fished the torch out of his pocket again and splashed light onto the area. He got to his knees, the floor cold and hard, and scanned the space around the stand, using his sleeve to clear the ash. He licked the tip of his gloved finger and rubbed away the fine coating of soot until the surface of the floor was uncovered.

  He angled the torch in and hunched forward, running his fingers up and down the two faint scrape marks trailing from the pricket stand’s left leg. He got up slowly, thinking about this, and took a step back.

  ‘Somebody moved the pricket stand,’ he said, pointing to the floor. ‘Moved it so that the candles would be positioned directly beneath the drapes.’

  9

  ‘I’ve never talked to a police officer before.’

  ‘Well, there’s a first time for everything,’ Geneva replied, slightly surprised by the tone of her own voice. She’d been put through to John Staples, the editor of the Catholic Tribune, and had expected someone older, stuffy, severe and impatient, but the man on the other end of the line possessed a calm reassurance. She’d spent the last hour going through the files the diocese had sent over but could find nothing about a dispute. Yet Holden had denied it strenuously and this didn’t make sense. She looked at the pages and reports scattered across her desk and felt an unexpected wave of excitement. This was her favourite part, always. At this stage it was all paper and chaos – an avalanche of random and hidden data obscured in black type and binary code and she loved the challenge of it, the bloodrush when events and facts began to separate themselves from the main group and cohere into new and startling patterns.

  ‘I’m investigating the convent fire and I was wondering if you could help me with something.’ She told Staples who she was and explained what she’d found out about the convent’s dispute with the diocese. ‘But, to be honest, I don’t really understand much of it.’

  ‘No, that’s the point,’ Staples replied, his voice suddenly animated. ‘They couch everything in complex language so that the true meaning is hidden. There was talk of this a few months ago,’ he said, ‘but the rumours I heard were
that it had gone far beyond being just a dispute.’

  ‘Really?’ Geneva clutched the phone tightly to her ear, looked up and saw DC Jennings come in, scan the room and make his way towards her.

  ‘Yes, as I was saying, there were rumours that . . .’

  A shadow fell over her. She glanced up to see Jennings standing beside her, out of breath and gesturing impatiently. ‘Just a moment,’ she told Staples. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve got an address for the caretaker,’ Jennings said, trying to contain his excitement.

  She picked up the phone, ‘Mr Staples, I’m really sorry, but can I call you back? Something’s just come up.’

  *

  The Westbourne Park estate looked like yesterday’s vision of the future. A future that had never arrived. Long, dark and relentless, the windows like gouges in its black armature, it projected an overwhelming sense of enclosure and monochrome, a garrisoned claustrophobia Geneva felt deep in her bones. It could have been some turreted hell-prison from Mars, a place on the liminal edge of human existence, but it was right here, only a few minutes’ walk from the pet clothing boutiques and designer chocolate emporiums of Notting Hill.

  Inside, it was even worse. The estate was a labyrinth of shadowed corridors and locked doors, a suffocating human density stacked one on top of the other. Geneva and Jennings entered the courtyard, the sun immediately snuffed out behind the ridge of roofs from the surrounding flats. The snow covered the bare asphalt and the tops of the broken swings and abandoned roundabouts but it could do nothing to hide the sense of neglect and careless ruin.

  Graffiti had sprung up like some baleful flower, splashed and spangled across walls and doors and staircases, most of it impenetrable as Arabic or Burmese script and yet just as lovely. But Geneva had noticed a worrying new trend recently – angry political slogans replacing taggers’ names and lovelorn dedications; imprecations to kill the pigs, smash the system, arm the homeless.