by Stav Sherez
‘But she didn’t tell you anything about the trouble she was in?’
Donna shook her head, ‘I should have known, damn it. I knew her better than anyone else and I thought she was just being melodramatic, I didn’t . . .’ She hung her head and stared at her shoes. Her body seemed to fold in on itself.
‘Can I have a copy of this photo?’ It was the most recent image he’d seen of Emily and would be much more useful to them than a four-year-old mugshot.
Donna nodded. ‘I’ll email a copy to your phone.’
‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that.’ Carrigan pulled out his mobile and showed it to her. It always managed to raise a smile and this time was no exception. She stared at the chunky black box, already an antique, and smiled.
‘What happened between your parents and Emily? Why haven’t they spoken for a couple of years?’
The question took Donna by surprise. She looked up at Carrigan and he could see the screaming arguments, slammed doors and sleepless nights burning through her memory. ‘The things she stood for . . . the things she said . . . you know how families are . . .’
Carrigan nodded but in truth he had no idea. His father had disappeared from his life when he was sixteen and his mother certainly wasn’t like any of his friends’ mums, not with her rosary beads and Reader’s Digests, her spotted half-blind Jack Russell and the permanent scowl etched on her face by her husband’s abandonment. ‘She must have been very angry and hurt by your father disinheriting her.’
Donna laughed a thin, harsh laugh. ‘The will? She didn’t care about that, money meant nothing to Emily.’
Carrigan nodded, thinking only someone who’d grown up with too much of it could ever think that. ‘What were the disagreements with your father about?’
‘What weren’t they about?’ Donna replied as they entered the second room and Carrigan was surprised to find the fast food images replaced by the illuminated face of Mohammed Atta in each light-box, his expression subtly altered between one and the next. ‘Everything she said or did our father saw as some kind of failure on his part. Remember, both our parents are child psychiatrists – when your kid grows up to be something other than you expected, it becomes a professional failure as well as a personal one.’ She raised her voice and changed pitch and stressed certain syllables to ironise what she was saying and distance herself from the memory of it, but Carrigan thought it only enmeshed her deeper in her own inescapable history and he felt bad because he’d imagined her life a gilded one, money and breeding and good luck. He should have known better, should have known that sorrow and pain lurked everywhere and came for everyone.
They left the gallery and crossed the winding strip of road that bisected the park, heading towards the small cafe overlooking the Serpentine pond. Carrigan bought them both coffees and, as he walked out onto the terrace, the trees silver and still, the lake almost frozen, he saw Donna sitting and facing the water, her hair windblown and aswirl, eyes lost in wistful haze.
‘Thank you,’ she said, raising the cup to her lips and blowing on it, white wispy vapours escaping into the chill air. A Labrador puppy came bounding up the path and stopped, tail wagging, by Donna’s feet. She ran her hands through its thick downy fur and stroked it and, for the first time, Carrigan saw her as she’d been before he’d come and broken the news and it pierced him deeply that she would only ever be this carefree and giddy in fleeting moments and that the memory of her dead sister would be like a lens through which she would forever view the world. He thought of his own dead, voices whispering to him in the crackle of night, the friends and lovers gone to earth and silence.
‘You said that Emily was always getting into trouble. When did this start?’
‘From very early on,’ Donna replied. ‘She was always in trouble at school, with her teachers, classmates, even her friends. It only got worse as she got older. She kept skipping classes, smoking and drinking during lunch breaks, seeing boys, getting caught – always getting caught as if that had been the intention all along. Everything that life threw at her just made her more furious and she would go off into these week-long depressions, sit in her room with the lights out, under the covers, moaning and crying. As she got older these periods got longer. Father and Mother tried everything, sent her to behavioural specialists, tried all sorts of pills – you can imagine what it did to them, having to send their own child to a specialist. It was the greatest sign of their failure as professionals and as parents.
‘She . . . she made several attempts at taking her own life. The usual teenager slashing her wrists, cries for help . . . but Father and Mother ignored her, believing that was the best way to deal with it. And then, one day, when she was sixteen, everything changed.
‘She’d gone to a summer camp the school had set up for kids who’d fallen behind. She’d been to these kind of places before and always ended up running away or assaulting a teacher, but this time something extraordinary happened. She stayed the whole length of the course and came back and it was like she was a new Emily.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She’d met a couple of older students at the camp and they’d introduced her to the world of politics. At first we were all so relieved she’d finally found something which motivated and interested her, but what we didn’t realise was that she’d only managed to find a new receptacle for her rage and fury at the world.
‘She began going to student meetings, small groups in dusty after-hours classrooms watching atrocity videos and international news reports, rolling thin cigarettes and drinking cider, discussing capitalism and exploitation. She would sit at the dinner table and rant non-stop about America and imperialism, spinning wild conspiracy theories, believing that everyone who didn’t agree with her was complicit.
‘You have to understand, Emily grew up in that house surrounded by all that money and in the streets she saw men sleeping in doorways and fishing their dinners from bins outside restaurants and it made her angry and ashamed and determined to do something about it. She was so passionate and brave and principled, I always envied her so much for that.’
‘And you?’ Carrigan enquired gently. ‘After all, you grew up in the same house.’
‘I was always a little less engaged with the world than Emily and I also learned early on that the world isn’t fair and nothing we can do will change that.’
She looked away, as if Carrigan had caught her in some shameful act. ‘We were still close though, she and I, and we went to university at Leeds together, but it was never the same. I chose to study English, she took courses in politics and history. She began going on marches and protests, getting into trouble with the police. She joined a radical animal rights group and went on hunt-sab missions. I rarely saw her any more on campus, and she barely ever came home.
‘Then things got worse. You never think they can but they always do.’ A slow baleful smile appeared on Donna’s face for a brief moment. ‘It was the Easter break of our final year. I’d prevailed on her to come home for the holidays. We were having lunch and a massive argument blazed between Father and Emily, over something stupid and meaningless, foreign policy, oil, something that had nothing to do with our lives. She called him a hypocrite. Father ordered her out of the house. In the middle of Easter lunch. She took her things, dropped out of uni and disappeared. It was the first of her many disappearances. We didn’t hear from her again for almost a year.’ Donna took a deep breath and brushed the tears from her eyes. She finished her coffee and wiped her top lip.
‘I’m sorry for bringing all this back.’ Carrigan reached his hand out, then, thinking better of it, pulled it back.
‘Don’t be,’ Donna replied. ‘They might be bad memories, but they’re still memories.’
He could see a deep sadness settle behind her eyes and he changed tack. ‘Did you know any of her friends? Boyfriends? Anyone she was especially close to?’
Donna shrugged as she watched a squirrel lean and quiver in the wind. ‘I tried to
avoid them when I could. They were not the kind of people I liked socialising with. Always so angry and bitter about the world and so full of unrealistic expectations and empty slogans. They just depressed me. Besides, people came and went all the time, found other things to get angry about. The only constant was Geoff.’
‘Geoff?’
‘Geoff Shorter. He was Emily’s first proper boyfriend. They met in her second year at Leeds and moved in together during her finals. They broke up last year. She told me he was acting all weird about it.’
Carrigan leaned forward, the chair legs scraping against the gravel. ‘Weird in what way?’
‘She didn’t say. But it doesn’t surprise me. When I first met Geoff I thought he would be good for her, drag her out of the swamp she’d sunk herself into, but if anything he only made her worse.’
‘How?’
Donna sighed and crossed her legs. ‘Geoff’s one of those identikit guilty rich white boys. His parents own some massive castle in Herefordshire, been in the family for centuries and all that, and he dabbles in all this activism and protest as a way to get back at his parents and his upbringing and to convince himself he isn’t exactly like them.’ She snuffled and finished the remains of her drink. ‘They never realise that for other people it’s a matter of life and death.’
‘I take it you’re not his biggest fan?’
‘He was a bad influence on Emily. He encouraged all her craziness and rage, I think it even turned him on. You should talk to him,’ Donna said, facing Carrigan. ‘He spent much more time with her in London than I did, he’d know who she hung out with, what she was up to . . .’ She looked down at the green water and hung her head. ‘Whatever trouble Emily got herself into, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Geoff was behind it.’
29
She’d always hated this pub, which, of course, was why he chose it.
He was late and that wasn’t anything new either. Geneva waited, a White Russian cooling her palms, the day’s notes and typed reports spread out in front of her. Before talking to Father Spaulding she was almost ready to be convinced that Carrigan was right, but the monk’s story had changed that.
All she knew for certain was that Holden had lied.
He’d told her the dispute between the convent and diocese was nothing important and yet Spaulding had said that the nuns were on the verge of being excommunicated. What could have led to such an extreme measure? She thought about the bank transfers, the trips to Lima, the missing nun, ignoring the swelling noise and merriment surrounding her. She reread interview transcripts as people laughed and kissed and bought each other drinks, their faces red and bright, clothes smeared wet and shiny with snow. She closed her notebook and pulled out her phone.
‘We know about Chiapeltec,’ she said, and heard Holden inhaling sharply on the other end of the line. ‘We know that the nuns weren’t travelling to Peru for conferences and we know about Sister Rose’s disappearance. We need to talk to Father McCarthy. He was a regular visitor and can tell us what the convent was up to. He was also the last person to be seen leaving the building.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ Holden replied.
‘There are other ways to find him,’ Geneva said. ‘Ways you may not like.’ There was a pause, a staticky silence which made her think he’d hung up. ‘Why do I get the impression you’re not dying to know who killed your nuns?’
‘Your impressions are of no concern to me,’ Holden replied. ‘And Father McCarthy is on retreat and therefore cannot be disturbed. This is something we take very seriously in the church.’
‘And we take the murder of eleven people very seriously, Mr Holden. Why has he suddenly decided to go on retreat? What kind of retreat are we talking about?’
There was a measured silence, thick with hum and crackle. ‘It’s a delicate matter,’ Holden finally said, and his voice now seemed to be coming from further away.
‘So is the case of a missing nun which the diocese refuses to acknowledge.’
‘Damn it,’ Holden snapped. ‘You won’t give up, will you?’ She could hear him sigh and tap something against his desk. ‘Father McCarthy has taken time off to face up to certain issues.’
She was about to answer, then stopped, realising what Holden was saying between the words. ‘Are you telling me he’s in rehab, not on retreat? That he just decided to check in the day after the fire?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Miss Miller, I’m just explaining the situation . . .’
‘Then why can’t we just speak to him?’
‘These facilities are private, and can only function if they remain so. Now, if you . . .’
Geneva was no longer listening. A date caught her eye in one of the files, a date she’d not paid attention to before. Something tripped, some switch in her brain, and she ended the call and pulled out the papers from her files until she found the one detailing the nuns’ recent trips to Peru. She checked the dates against the travel documents.
‘I’m glad to see you’re finally going through the papers.’
She snapped her head up and was startled to see Oliver peering down at her, a smile that was all teeth spread across his face. She quickly cleared the pages off the table, almost spilling her drink, Oliver catching it just in time, grinning, saying, ‘What would you do without me, Geneva?’
She was about to answer but there was no point. Everything she said Oliver would use as further ammunition against her. Three years of marriage had taught her that if nothing else. ‘It’s work,’ she snapped, not making eye contact, shuffling the papers back into her bag, wishing she was anywhere but here.
Oliver sat down and took a long sip of his bitter, the foam covering his top lip, his perfect fingernails tapping against the glass. Just looking at him made her feel queasy, the eroded years and restless nights coming back to her – the time they’d spent up north, her thinking this was the thing she’d been waiting for all these years, and then seeing him for what he really was and knowing she’d made the worst decision of her life. That long year of fretting and plotting and getting the nerve up. Telling him one night, her bags already packed, a friend outside waiting to collect her.
And, yes, that night – the screaming, fists and hurled accusations. Then came the threats and ravaged pleas, running out of the house and into her friend’s car, Oliver’s voice receding as they wound through the narrow streets of the spa town towards the train station where she hid in a photo booth, hoodie covering her face, until the train arrived, then the slow stifled journey south and the final humiliation, asking her mother if she could stay with her for a while.
‘You’re looking good,’ Oliver said, tearing her from the onrushing past. ‘Not easy for a woman to keep up with the years.’
Like all his compliments, even when they were still in love, this one came with hooks and barbs attached. ‘Can’t say the same for you,’ she replied, and though she’d said it to spite him, she realised that he really had aged, his good looks forming a hard shell over his bones, the youthful glimmer of danger in his eyes now sublimated to something feral and cunning, something you know to get away from as soon as you see it.
‘Always the charmer, Geneva. Good to see you haven’t changed.’ He had a packet of cheese and onion crisps ripped open in front of him. He stuffed a handful into his mouth and continued talking. ‘You remember the last time we met like this?’
Geneva nodded, hoping it would end this part of the conversation, but Oliver wasn’t prepared to let it go. ‘I think you said you loved me and we’d be together forever.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
Oliver crunched some more crisps and his voice turned hard and cold. ‘You left me, Geneva. Jesus. You left me. You don’t know how much that hurt.’
‘This is what you called me up for?’ She splashed the glass down, the liquid sloshing and spilling all over the table but she didn’t care. She was certain everyone in the room was looking at them, all these happy celebrating couples watchin
g her and Oliver bicker and blame across a pub table. ‘Look, Oliver, I’m busy. You called me up, said you wanted to sort this thing out, just you and me, no lawyers or any of that, and all you’re doing is fucking reminiscing.’
‘Being a cop hasn’t exactly made you into a nice person.’
‘Who the fuck wants a nice person, Oliver? I am what I always was. You call me up out of the blue last year, tell me you’re taking the house away from me, what the fuck do you expect?’
He took a folded sheet of paper from a leather briefcase by his feet. He carefully smoothed it out on the table. ‘I expect you to sign this, is what I expect. It’s the best deal you’re going to get.’
She took the paper from him, scanned it quickly and saw that nothing had changed, his lawyer suing for the proceeds of the house even though they’d bought it together. Oliver had paid the deposit and she’d paid the monthly repayments. The divorce had finally come through a couple of months ago, the house sold, but the money was still locked in litigation.
‘I need that money, Oliver,’ she said, immediately hating herself for having revealed so much to him.
‘I know you do,’ he smiled, flecks of crisps dancing across his teeth. ‘Sign now and you’ll get ten thousand pounds.’
‘You’re joking?’ She stared up at him and saw that he wasn’t. ‘The house sold for half a million.’
She glanced back down at the contract, reading through the dense technical language, feeling her face burning up with each word. She wanted to be through with this, to never see or hear from Oliver again, but her equity in the house was the only savings she had. Without it she’d never be able to buy another flat. She looked up at him and saw that he was enjoying this, a gleeful spark animating his face.
