Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  It was basic forensics, something every detective, whether they liked it or not, quickly became familiar with, but Carrigan saw no gain in antagonising the new pathologist.

  ‘The bodies are in very bad condition. Burned for a long time. We couldn’t get any fingerprints off them and dental work for only a few.’

  ‘Do you have any previous experience with this kind of thing?’ Carrigan asked softly.

  Milan eyed him carefully, looking for the slight behind the words. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to know,’ he replied. ‘War has a way of making you into a very good pathologist.’

  ‘Which side?’

  ‘The side that wasn’t trying to kill me.’

  Carrigan shrugged, wishing he hadn’t brought the subject up.

  ‘What about DNA?’

  ‘I managed to scrape some samples but the tissue is very degraded – I don’t know if we’ll be able to get much from it.’

  Carrigan thought about this. ‘Prioritise corpse eleven, have her DNA checked before the others.’ He knew it was imperative that they get an ID on the eleventh victim as soon as possible. Without knowing who she was they were flailing around in the dark.

  Milan nodded and rubbed his small plump fingers across his shirt.

  ‘Did you notice anything different about her? The corpse from the confession booth?’

  Milan thought for a minute, checking something on his clipboard. ‘Yes, I thought you would ask that.’

  Carrigan waited for the pathologist to continue but he didn’t say anything else. ‘What was different about her?’

  He saw Milan smile, then quickly hide it, and he got the impression that he’d just passed some small but significant test. He watched as Milan went over to one of the gurneys and delicately turned the skull towards him.

  ‘Major blunt force trauma.’ Milan pointed to a shallow declivity at the front of the skull. ‘She was hit hard. Before the fire.’

  Carrigan thought of the body crumpled inside the confession booth, the fire investigator’s description of the woman’s final agonies. ‘Could she have fallen forward, hit her head against the booth door?’

  ‘Maybe, but probably not. She was hit with a lot of force. It would be very hard to do that to yourself. The blow would have rendered her unconscious.’

  Carrigan flashed back to the serrated scratch marks on the inside of the confession booth’s door. ‘She was awake when the fire reached her.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Milan replied. ‘It’s possible she came to, but after such a blow she would have been very confused and disoriented.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘I haven’t had much of a chance to examine them yet. I have ten more female bodies. They range in age from early twenties to late seventies. That’s more or less all I can tell you right now.’

  Carrigan nodded, knowing this had been a waste of time. He’d been too impatient and should have waited for the full report. He thought about the neat pattern of bodies, the way the nuns had stoically faced death at the dining-room table. ‘Anything to indicate that they were killed before the smoke got to them?’

  Milan shrugged. ‘Hard to say till I open them up. No external signs like on corpse eleven, but the fire didn’t leave us much to work with. Why, you think someone killed them then set the fire to cover it up? Amateur hour.’

  Carrigan was about to say that most criminals did not have a grounding in pathology and therefore made those kinds of mistakes regularly, but Milan had already turned his back to him and was washing his hands in the sink. He came back, pulling a green tubular packet from his top pocket. Carrigan watched queasily as Milan unsheathed the salami from its packaging and bit off a massive chunk.

  ‘Are there any indications they’d been tied up?’

  ‘I could find nothing that would suggest that.’ Milan spoke with his mouth full, making it even harder to understand what he was saying. ‘But the fire . . .’ he held up his hands, ‘who knows what it erased.’

  ‘So, apart from the body downstairs, nothing struck you as suspicious?’ Carrigan said irritably, thinking this was the least informative post-mortem chat he’d ever experienced.

  Milan shrugged. ‘Well . . . I don’t know . . . I mean, it has nothing to do with the case.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

  ‘Okay, but this is old, maybe thirty, forty years.’ Milan finished his salami, burped and snapped on his latex gloves. He walked Carrigan over to a group of gurneys crowded into the far corner. ‘The skin on corpse one’s legs has been totally burned off by the fire, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed it.’

  ‘Noticed what?’ Carrigan leaned closer but could see nothing unusual.

  ‘There are several unusual injuries on the shins of the corpse.’

  ‘What kind of injuries?’

  ‘Striations on the bone.’

  ‘Any chance these are related to their deaths?’

  Milan shook his head. ‘No, no, these are very old. You can tell from the way the cartilage has healed around it, good but not perfect. So, I think to myself, this is strange, but maybe she had some freak accident when she was young, these things happen all the time, okay? But still, I decide to check the others, just the shinbones, and yes, I’m thinking this is just some childhood accident but then I get to corpse four, corpse six, nine and ten, and I see similar marks.’

  ‘Can you show me?’

  Milan pointed with a penlight at the legs of the first corpse and Carrigan could see the black blistered surface, like something left in the oven for too long. The pathologist delicately pulled away a loose flap of skin to reveal the congealed mass of rendered tissue below.

  ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  Milan switched on an overhead spotlight and angled it in. The light was harsh and unremitting and Carrigan saw the obscene white glint of bone and he wanted to turn away but forced himself to look closer and then he saw what the pathologist had meant.

  There were several vertical lines running up and down the shinbone. They were rough and uneven, overlapping each other, and were about half a centimetre deep.

  The pathologist led Carrigan to the adjacent table, corpse four, and aimed the spotlight down into the mess of bone and burnt sinew. ‘See? Almost the same injuries. One, yes, could be an accident, something like that, but five? Five would be very big odds, the kind of odds you win lotteries off.’

  ‘And these are also old injuries?’ Carrigan stared at the small bones, marked and lined with ancient wounds, and felt a shiver run down the back of his neck.

  ‘Yes, very old. Exactly the same as on corpse one. Same thing on the others.’

  ‘Any idea what could have caused them?’

  Milan shrugged. ‘They’re not accidental, that’s obvious. Something very sharp and fine was used to make these. And it would have hurt a lot.’

  ‘Could it be self-inflicted?’ Carrigan asked. ‘Some kind of self-punishment?’

  Milan laughed. ‘Oh no, Mr Carrigan, I very much doubt it. These nuns were tortured, and by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.’

  11

  Geneva put Hubbard in interview room number two and tried to reach Carrigan and Karlson, but neither was answering his phone. She stood and stared at the water cooler as it dispensed two cups, weighing it up. You had to take confessions when they were offered – people quickly lost the desire to talk once they’d been sitting in a police station for a few hours. With the other two gone she was now the highest ranking officer in the team.

  ‘Would you like some water?’ She handed Hubbard one of the plastic cups and closed the door to the interview room behind her.

  Hubbard waved it away. ‘I don’t want a drink, I want to confess.’

  She sat down, called for Jennings and took out her notebook. She turned towards the far wall and started the digital recorder. Hubbard had waived his right to have a lawyer present but Geneva made sure she followed procedure – if Hubbard was about to confess,
she didn’t want some oversight on her part getting the confession thrown out of court. She stated the date and location, ‘DS Miller and DC Jennings present. The subject is named Alan Hubbard and has come in of his own volition.’ She heard a weird snuffling sound and looked up. Hubbard had slumped down onto the table, his head cradled in his folded arms.

  ‘I’m to blame,’ he said, his voice muffled and distant, more like an echo than an actual voice. His smell permeated the room, meaty and sour and close. It was obvious that he’d been drinking and that he’d been doing it for the last couple of days but under the bulb flicker and whirring tapes he seemed strangely sober and lucid. ‘I was supposed to do it last week. Fuck!’ He slammed one fist down onto his thigh. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  ‘What were you supposed to do?’ Geneva moved her chair closer, spreading her arms across the table and settling her head down to his level. There was a strategy and game-play to every interview and each one required a totally different approach. You had to anticipate, psychoanalyse, and go with the beat of the moment.

  Hubbard continued pounding his legs in staggered bursts. ‘I was lazy. Always lazy. Sister Jacky made it clear that I should do it before Christmas. I was going to do it, I swear, I just lost track of the days.’

  ‘What is it you didn’t do, Alan?’ Geneva said, starting to have a bad feeling about this.

  ‘They told me the boiler cover needed fixing. They didn’t say do it now but they never say do it now, that’s not how they are. The boiler blew because the cover hadn’t been fixed. The boiler blew and now they’re all dead.’ Hubbard started crying, small racked sobs emerging from the depths of his throat.

  Geneva looked at Jennings and saw her own thoughts and doubts mirrored in his eyes. She turned back to the table. ‘Mr Hubbard, we’ve had the report back from the fire investigator. You’ll be happy to know that the fire did not start anywhere near the boiler.’ It had been in the summary she’d read; one of the first things any investigator would look for. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘How can they know that?’ Hubbard said. ‘How can they know what happened when only God can know that?’

  ‘They’ve looked at the evidence left from the fire.’

  ‘But they weren’t there! How can they know when they weren’t there?’

  She was about to say something then stopped. There was nothing to say. Evidence and fact were nothing compared to this man’s guilt and need for recompense.

  She thought about what she’d seen in Hubbard’s flat, the gaunt grey pallor of his skin. ‘When did you contract HIV?’ Geneva asked quietly.

  Jennings’s head shot up from his notebook and he gave her a startled look.

  ‘How? . . .’ Hubbard used one of Geneva’s tissues to wipe his nose and beard. ‘How did you . . .’

  ‘I saw your pills, Mr Hubbard.’

  The man stared at the wall and sighed. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, his voice shifting down a pitch, ‘I was backpacking through Russia, got drunk one night and woke up in a prison cell. Two years later they let me out.’ He looked down at his crumpled shoes, the stitching unseamed and the leather curling up at the toes. ‘I didn’t know at the time, but they gave me this souvenir to take home with me.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Geneva said.

  Hubbard sniffed. ‘Most people thought I got what I deserved. Me? I knew I’d got what I deserved. The things I’d done . . . God, I wish I could forget my life.’ His head jerked up and his eyes met hers. ‘Do you ever feel like that?’

  Geneva was about to say no then stopped to think about it and nodded, sensing something small and important pass between the two of them. ‘Was that how you met the nuns? Through the outreach work they did?’

  ‘No,’ Hubbard replied. ‘I was looking for work. I just knocked on doors, that’s what I did. I knocked on their door, had no idea it was a convent, must have been the fortieth door I’d knocked on that day. When Sister Jacky opened it I didn’t know what to say, I must have stood there looking like an idiot. Finally, I snapped out of it and told her I’d fixed the front gate, the latch had been wonky, and that, if they needed, I could fix other things around the house and grounds.’ Hubbard stopped and looked at the blank surface of the table, his mouth pursed tight. ‘She was so kind, Sister Jacky. She took me to the kitchen, sat me down, gave me a cup of tea then made me lunch. Scrambled eggs, toast and bacon. She said yes, quite a few things around the place had fallen into disrepair, and that she would need to clear it with the mother superior but she was sure they could find work for me.

  ‘I came in twice a week after that. Sister Jacky or Mother Angelica would give me lunch, then a list of things that needed to be done. There wasn’t much. I think sometimes they even made things up or put things out of joint so that I’d have work to do. They gave me food to take home, they helped me find temporary accommodation and what did I do? I killed them. Like everything else I’ve ever done in my life, I fucked it up.’ He huddled into himself, his breath raspy and strained, his curled fists pressing down into his legs.

  ‘You mentioned two nuns, a Sister Jacky and Mother Angelica – were those the only two you met?’

  Hubbard shook his head. ‘Those are the ones I dealt with most of the time.’

  ‘Can you tell us a little about Mother Angelica?’ While Geneva had been disappointed that Hubbard did not seem to be the arsonist – her daydream of calling Carrigan and telling him she’d wrapped up the case, dashed – she now realised he could be a valuable source of information.

  Hubbard’s face darkened and a muscle on his left cheek started twitching. ‘I don’t think she ever liked me,’ he replied. ‘But she tried to hide it. She was different from Sister Jacky and the other nuns I met. As if she were floating an inch above the ground and everyone else a prisoner of gravity. She was an old woman and she’d been through a lot, you could tell by looking at her face, the way she conducted herself, how she never wasted a single word. She wore these tight round glasses that made her look like an owl.’ Hubbard smiled to himself and Geneva caught a brief glimpse of the man he’d been before life had hiccuped and sent him on a different track.

  ‘Me and Sister Jacky used to call her the Owl, it was our private joke. Sister Jacky told me that she’d written an important book many years ago, that they all looked up to her, and that I shouldn’t judge the Owl by appearances.’

  Geneva glanced up from her notes. ‘You must have got to know the convent’s routines pretty well. You didn’t by any chance notice anything unusual during the last month or so?’

  Hubbard’s eyes looked anywhere but in her direction. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions? Why don’t you just arrest me?’

  ‘We’ll get to that soon enough,’ Geneva said. ‘But I know you know more than you’ve told me. You think it’s your fault that the nuns died despite what the fire inspector found, okay, I understand that, but someone killed those nuns intentionally and I’m going to find out who it was. You can help me, Mr Hubbard, and you can help the nuns too by telling me what you know.’

  Hubbard took a deep breath and slowly unclenched his fisted hands, laying them flat across the top of his thighs. ‘My flowers,’ he replied. ‘Someone kept treading on my flowers.’

  ‘That’s not what we meant,’ Jennings said irritably. ‘This is a murder inquiry and we were looking for something a bit more . . .’

  ‘Where exactly were your flowers?’ Geneva interrupted, the edges of her fingers tingling.

  ‘In the garden, up against the back fence.’

  She considered this for a moment as she took a sip of water. ‘Did you notice if the damage was worse nearer the fence or further away from it?’

  Hubbard looked confused by this line of questioning and she could see him straining to remember. ‘Right next to the fence, about halfway across, that’s where they were trampled the most.’

  Geneva thought back to her quick perusal of the convent blueprints. There was a large garden at the back of the house. Sh
e tried to remember what was on the other side of it – more houses? another street? – but it was a blank. ‘Was that the only unusual thing you noticed recently?’

  Hubbard shook his head then looked down at the table.

  ‘It’s okay, Mr Hubbard, whatever you say won’t go further than this room. You want us to catch whoever did this, right?’ Her voice softened and slowed. ‘Everyone’s dead. You’re the only person who can tell us what went on in there, what could have led to this.’

  ‘It wasn’t the same,’ he whispered.

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘The mood in the convent,’ Hubbard said. ‘Everyone seemed in a bad temper all the time, even Sister Jacky who was never like that. They rushed down the corridors and didn’t see me. Doors that were always open now remained shut. Often the basement was locked and I couldn’t get to my tools. They began to talk in whispers, in corners and alcoves, their faces shaded and suspicious as if they didn’t trust each other any more.’

  Geneva was writing this down so fast the sides of her fingers were turning a bright red. ‘Do you have any idea what brought on these changes?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . but it started shortly after the new girl first appeared,’ Hubbard replied, something in his dead grey eyes flickering to life for a brief bright moment.

  ‘New girl?’ Geneva and Jennings said at the same time.

  ‘I first saw her about a year ago and then I kept seeing her more and more. She was often with the Owl, both of them talking, looking serious, their heads bent down over some book or other. She always smiled when she passed me in the corridor. She was very pretty.’

  Hubbard blushed and Geneva could tell he was a little in love with this girl, an anonymous yearning played out in snatched looks and chance encounters. ‘Do you know her name?’

  Hubbard shook his head.

  ‘Was it possible she was in training, a novice perhaps?’

  Hubbard seemed to find this mildly amusing, smiling out the corner of his mouth. ‘She definitely wasn’t a nun.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘The things she wore, ripped jeans, baggy T-shirts, big chunky black boots, but the funniest thing was her hair.’