by Stav Sherez
A group of concerned residents in a residential street off Pembridge Square decided they’d had enough of dealers doing business in their front gardens. They organised themselves and made a nuisance whenever anyone came down the road looking to make a buy. They found out the address of the local dealer and plastered posters outside his house and all across the street, naming and shaming him in photographs and deeds. They assiduously reported all offences and suspicions to the local station. A week later, the uniforms were called to the scene of two residents lying beaten, bloody and battered on the pavement. The assailants were nowhere to be seen and the victims had been too stunned and shocked and scared to say who did this to them.
Carrigan sat back and rolled his shoulders, waiting for the welcoming pop that would untangle his muscles. There was no mention of nuns in the report but the residents’ actions were very similar to the nuns’ initiatives in combating drug dealing in the neighbourhood. Carrigan looked up from the screen into the starless sky. Could it be that they’d got it all wrong? That Emily and the nuns’ tangled history had nothing to do with the fire? That it all came down to something as stupid and pointless as this?
He turned off the computer and stood by the window. He didn’t want to think about it but it was all he could think about. He knew sleep would not find him tonight and he didn’t bother looking for it. The snow was falling in thick spinning clusters, obscuring the motorway ramp and street outside. Somewhere above, he could see the faint blips of light marking another plane leaving the city and disappearing into the sky, a tiny metallic cylinder, crammed with people and hopes and histories, on the way to somewhere else.
23
The incident room was empty at this time of the morning and that was exactly the way she liked it. The antiseptic white spaces were silent but for the buzz and murmur of computers left on overnight, hard drives wheezing like exhausted workers at the end of a long and gruelling shift. Geneva could hear the splash and fizz of the Coke in her can, the steady pulse of the fluorescents above her, and popped two more pills, trying desperately to focus. She’d had way too much tequila last night and she’d woken, alone, at 4 a.m., with a blazing headache. She didn’t want to think about the flung words and accusations between her and Lee last night, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d told her after she’d mentioned the pathologist’s findings.
She fought back a wave of nausea, spread out her notes either side of the keyboard, checked her to-do list and sent out a request to Westminster and to Kensington and Chelsea for parking tickets registered to the fake SUV number plate. The chances were almost zero, the men in the SUV probably changing plates with great frequency, but nonetheless it annoyed her that no one else had bothered to check this. Once this was done she opened the box sitting at her feet. The diocese had sent further files on the convent yesterday and she went through these now, reading about their charity endeavours, anti-drug initiatives and numerous commendations. She flicked through the files until she saw a folder for travel requests. She took out the crumpled photocopies within and scanned them. For each trip out of the country, the nuns had to fill out a form requesting leave. One copy was sent to the diocese and another to the order for approval. There were nearly fifty such forms and Geneva went through them slowly, making notes of which countries the nuns had visited.
Twenty-three requests had been made for travel to the Vatican, twelve to the Holy Land and three to Ireland. The remaining eight requests were for travel to Peru.
Geneva pulled out the earliest request and scrutinised the handwriting. The form was a request from Sister Glenda Waldron for a six-day leave to go to Lima during the last week of November 2011. The reason for the trip was given as conference. There was an identical form for Sister Rose McGregor.
She remembered the name from the files at the diocese. Sister Rose had been the last nun to leave the convent, just over a year ago. The requisition forms had two signature boxes at the bottom, one for departure and one for arrival. Sister Glenda’s signature filled both boxes but Sister Rose had only signed the departure box. Geneva briefly wondered if Sister Rose had forgotten to fill in the form on her arrival, but the records were too well kept and organised for this to be likely.
She read through the other six travel requests. Each was signed, arrival and departure, by Sister Glenda. She went back to the main set of files but there was no record of Sister Rose anywhere.
Geneva pushed her chair back and rubbed her eyes. Two of the nuns had travelled to Peru in the last thirteen months, one of them on seven separate occasions. She felt a tingle in her stomach. She knew this changed everything. The Peruvian connection was no longer just ancient history. She jotted down the dates and made a note to call Holden, then, thinking back to last night, the look in Lee’s eyes, the way the words seemed so reluctant to leave his mouth, she entered tickling the bone into the search engine.
There were many references to comedians and funny bones but, hidden among the humour and jape, was an article about how drug cartels were getting more sophisticated and grimly medieval by the day. How the violence and torture had left the private sphere and was now occurring in the worldmesh of YouTube and Flickr. The article described this particular method of torture exactly as Lee had. The use of an ice-pick, the breaking of the skin, the point of the pick inserted through the tender flesh until it came up against the bone. She read reports from undercover DEA agents who’d undergone this ordeal. She thought about the nuns’ trips to Peru, her heart beating a little faster.
There was a sidebar detailing history and uses. Tickling the bone had been the favoured method of torture used by right-wing paramilitaries against leftist agitators, or folk singers, or writers, or people who’d been mistaken for someone else. This technique, the report stated, was primarily used in Central America, in El Salvador and Nicaragua, but it had also been adopted by Pinochet’s men in Chile and had spread to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.
She clicked on the word Peru, her breath held and body tensed, and read tales of military coups and counter-coups, repression and poverty, oil and torture and bicycle bombs in the marketplace. The phrase ‘liberation theology’ kept cropping up between the margins and across the texts. There was a whole section about armed insurgents in the Inca hills, a band of Maoist guerrillas called the Shining Path, led by an ex-professor of philosophy, cutting a swathe through the Andean heartlands, burning the bourgeois blight from the ground as if it were weeds and enmeshing the country in a twenty-year civil war. She sat back, the lights washing over her, as she thought about what she’d learned in the diocese archives and what she’d just read.
Seven of the nuns had been stationed in South America. Their stay had only overlapped for four months, during the autumn of 1973, in the San Gabriel province in the south-central section of the country. All seven of them had been relocated shortly afterwards.
Five of the nuns had identical torture scars. The pathologist had estimated the scars to be thirty or forty years old. Geneva looked at the flickering screen, willing to bet her salary, her iPod, whatever she owned, that the scars dated from the autumn of 1973. Something had happened in those cold mountains, up near the roof of the world, something which had followed the nuns all the way to London and the twenty-first century.
She felt a surge in her chest as she punched in the nuns’ names, dates of deployment and locations in varying sequences. She came up with nothing or with so many results it amounted to the same thing. She stopped, thought about it‚ and recalibrated her search parameters, this time substituting the word political for religious.
There were seventeen major political incidents in Peru during the timeframe she was looking at but only one in the remote San Gabriel region. She clicked on the link and was taken to a page devoted to analysing the dialectics of the September ’73 strike at the Chiapeltec mine. She cross-checked the dates, feeling more and more certain, and began reading.
The Chiapeltec gold mine had been worked continually since the days o
f the Incas. The Spanish had stumbled upon its natural bounty and duly co-opted it for the Crown, using native Indian slaves to harvest the shiny flecks of metal embedded in the rocks. The mine had been in operation since then, closing down only intermittently, changing hands and countries of ownership with striking regularity, bought and resold and bought again.
In 1973, the mine was in full production, the latest drilling and scouting technology applied to go even further down into the folds of compacted earth searching for the elusive dust. The death rate for miners was the highest in South America at the time, comparable to the mortality rate for slaves during the Spanish occupation. Geneva read dour reports of silicosis, cave-ins, noxious fumes, bar fights and strange cancers.
By the sizzling, scorched summer of 1973, things had come to a head. Twelve miners and two priests from the local village who’d tried to organise a strike disappeared. They were found three days later hanging upside down, naked and mutilated, in the village square.
Geneva glanced out the window, measuring the spindrift and gather of snow on the sill, trying to clear her head of the dread images the words had conjured. The phones kept ringing on the empty tables and she stared at them until the answering machines kicked in. Her private mobile hadn’t stopped buzzing and she checked the display but it wasn’t Lee and, despite herself, she felt a little sink of disappointment. Oliver had rung five times in the last hour and left three messages. She switched off the phone and continued reading.
The news of the murders had quickly spread from village to village, mine to mine, up mountains and down the long ancient river, and soon strangers started turning up at Chiapeltec, bearded burly men with serious brows wrinkled in righteousness and rage, priests and nuns and ordinary people. Journalists made the trek up to the high country with their cameras and microphones, their big-city certainties and beliefs safely in pocket. The village swelled and roared during the night with the megaphoned voices of political agitators, Marxists and Castroists, anarchists and liberation theologians, the crazed and God-touched. A committee was formed by a leading Peruvian bishop and a strike was called for the following day. There was a party atmosphere that night, a feeling of comradeship and unity, of purpose and prophecy, a swelling together of farmers and miners, intellectuals and holy men.
The first day of the strike went by peacefully, the workers lined up either side of the only paved road in the province, the atmosphere one of genial protest rather than anger or violence. Everyone went back to the village that night and celebrated their success with loud music and laughter so that no one heard the bomb go off.
There was a house at the far edge of the mine company’s property that the owners and management used for lunch and to conduct meetings. It was only in use during business hours. The bomb had been set to explode at midnight. It destroyed the building, leaving only grey ash and fingers of smoke curling up into the dark sky. It also destroyed the lives of twelve women and thirty-four children who’d been secretly relocated there in case their homes were targeted during the strike.
No one knew who’d set the bomb and squabbling and blame broke out among the strikers the next day, all of them knowing that the stakes had changed overnight. The bosses buried their wives and children that morning, and then they called in the army but the army was busy killing leftists in the dappled Inca hills. The government sent the next best thing. A battalion of death-squad veterans.
They came with blowtorches and machine guns, machetes and cattle prods, grudges and century-old hatreds boiling in their blood, but the villagers had their own weapons, clubs and pitchforks and hammers and anything they could find lying about in the sheds or stony fields. The battle raged across the day and deep into the night.
The army was sent in on the second day and two hundred strikers disappeared and were never seen again. The mine owners shipped in workers from the mountains, tough gnarled Indians who didn’t care about conditions and safety as long as they got paid. The murdered strikers’ families were booted out of their homes and the village that very night.
Geneva squinted as she finished the article and skimmed the footnotes, the long lists of the disappeared, the rumours of swirling moaning pits out in the hills, the flowcharts of red terrorists and religious institutions. The government blamed the insurgency on Marxist agitators, calling the bomb a terrorist outrage, the president appearing on national TV and saying that when the body had a sore, you had to cut it out quickly or it would spread to the rest of the body.
She sat back, queasy and shaken, the story reeling through her blood. She made notes and opened another can of Coke, then logged into the Press Association website with the password she’d got from Lee last night. She searched for images from the Chiapeltec massacre.
To her surprise, there were many, taken by brave and foolish photographers, and you could tell it hadn’t been an easy assignment, the shots often blurred and out of focus, a jostled sense of panic in each frame, a feeling that this was something photography couldn’t capture, that it was too quick and mercurial and real. There were photos of picket lines, army gunboots, vapour trails, grinning soldiers, and one of a woman holding her screaming baby as she lay sprawled and dead on the railroad track.
There were hundreds of these photos and Geneva scanned through them quickly, her hangover coming back hard and strong, the blood and screaming faces making her feel as if she could taste her own stomach, and then she stopped and zoomed and clicked on a thumbnail of a photo near the bottom of the page.
She tapped her foot as the full-size file slowly unscrolled on her screen.
The image was of a bristling picket line, all grimaces and clenched fists, maybe twenty or thirty people standing out in the bright dusty sun, arms raised heavenwards or holding handmade banners with skulls and demons crudely daubed upon them, and it wasn’t until Geneva zoomed in closer and studied the faces one by one that she recognised her.
She was much younger, of course, but there was no doubt it was the same woman.
Mother Angelica stood left of centre, wearing the full habit, wimple and cincture, and those tight round glasses that had led to her being nicknamed the Owl. Her mouth was twisted in a snarl of indignation and she had one arm raised, her fist pumping the empty sky.
Geneva looked at Mother Angelica for a long moment, then studied the faces of the people standing beside her, time and the piled emotions of the occasion making everything seem both dreamlike and utterly vivid at the same time. Behind the nuns was a group of priests. One of them was a full head taller than the others and in his fist he held a large wooden club studded with nails. Even across forty years, Geneva recognised the penetrating stare of Father Callum McCarthy.
24
Berwick Street in the snow. The fruit sellers crying out their bargains, the dazed Japanese tourists with record bags held protectively to their chests, the rainbow-haired girls from St Martin’s buying cloth for their end-of-year shows. A little further down, the porn parlours and DVD shops, lingerie emporiums and spangly nightclubs. Vegetables and lunch-hour sex side by side.
Carrigan trudged through the slush, past the doorways with their peeling paint and crude handwritten cards promising pleasure up two sets of stairs and the frazzle-eyed hipsters heading home. As a teenager he’d come here often to buy records, blithely unaware of this shadow world existing alongside. A sad reproduction of Amsterdam for people who’d never seen Amsterdam. The buildings faded and dilapidated, the girls crying out from blue velvet booths, their voices shrill and indifferent as if calling out items at a supermarket till.
After what he’d read last night, an idea had begun forming. He thought about the dealers in the alleyway behind the convent, the SUV visits, the men who’d attacked him in the ruins. He needed to know who was running drugs in his patch. Who the nuns might have upset and what kind of people they were dealing with. So, last night, he’d sent out a Met-wide request for information on drug activity in west London. A couple of hours later he’d received a call from DS
Byrd who worked for the Met’s Organised Crime Unit, suggesting they meet at the White Dove.
The pub could have been a museum piece, a smoked antique seeped in beer fumes and muzzy light, a last remaining bastion of the old Soho before the scenesters and media companies had taken over. You could still smell the smoke though it had been years since the last cigarette had been crushed out in the last ashtray. The windows were almost opaque and the world outside reduced to a blur of smudges and passing shadows, disappearing as quickly as dreams. Carrigan scanned the bar for Byrd but saw only old men hunched over pints of beer, their eyes already foggy and surrendered by lunchtime. You could read their life stories in the way they sat and stared at their drinks. It was the kind of place only the terminally lost frequented and the state of the decor and furnishings was testament to the fact that all anyone cared about was the level of liquid in their glass and the three feet of space which separated them from the rest of the world.
Carrigan finally spotted DS Byrd sitting at a corner table, a pint of murky ale and two clear shot glasses lined up in front of him. Byrd was in his late fifties but he was the youngest person here.
‘Thanks for meeting me.’
‘Was having my lunch anyway,’ Byrd shrugged by way of reply. His face was long and thin, riddled with folds, his hair a lanky black shawl draped across his eyes. His left leg was constantly in motion, pumping up and down against the floor, his eyes scanning the room.
‘You’re on the convent fire, right?’ Byrd reached for his pint and took a long deep swallow, then picked up one of the shot glasses and downed it in one.
