Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  ‘We need to talk to you about Emily Maxted,’ Carrigan said, studying Shorter, trying to gauge his reaction, but the man’s face was impassive and bland, impossible to read, his eyes fixed dreamily on the screen in front of him. Shorter’s hair had receded halfway up his skull. To compensate, he’d grown what was left into a shaggy blond afro and he now ran his hand across it as if to make sure it was still there. ‘Emily? God, I haven’t heard from her for ages. How is she?’

  ‘Emily was killed in a fire five days ago.’

  They both watched carefully as Shorter processed the information. His eyes flicked from Carrigan to Geneva and then his eyebrows shot up and he began to laugh, a series of semi-articulated hahas emerging from deep in his throat. ‘She put you up to this, didn’t she? I sincerely hope you’re not going to start stripping now.’

  Carrigan kept his mouth tight. ‘No, Mr Shorter, I am not going to strip, rest assured. But this isn’t a joke, Emily is dead, and we are investigating the circumstances surrounding her death.’

  Shorter had been rocking back on his chair and now he stopped, using his arms to anchor himself to the desk. ‘Emily? Dead?’ He looked down at the papers and print-outs and shook his head. ‘I knew it,’ he whispered. ‘I knew it would end like this.’

  Carrigan and Geneva exchanged looks. The more people they spoke to‚ the more it seemed that Emily had fulfilled the destiny everyone expected of her. It was only the location and circumstance that surprised them.

  Shorter was silent for a couple of minutes, facing away, and when he turned round they could tell he’d been crying.

  ‘How long were you and Emily together?’ Geneva asked, moving her chair just a little forward of Carrigan’s. They’d agreed in the car that she would lead and the way Shorter’s gaze tracked the line of her cleavage only confirmed that decision.

  Shorter quickly looked away and stared at the glass of Pimm’s in his hand as if surprised to find it there. ‘We were together about eleven years, give or take. We met at Leeds then moved down here.’ He downed the remains of his drink. ‘What . . . what happened to her?’

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ Geneva replied.

  Shorter glanced up, then back down at his hands. ‘Do I need a lawyer?’ he said.

  Carrigan and Geneva looked at each other, blood beating in their eyes. ‘Why would you think you need a lawyer?’ Geneva asked.

  Shorter shook his head, his hands fidgeting at his sides. ‘I don’t know if I should be talking to you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s entirely up to you, Mr Shorter, but if you decide to do that, we’ll have to arrest you on suspicion of the murder of Emily Maxted.’ Carrigan knew they had nowhere near enough evidence to do that but the look in Shorter’s face told him it wouldn’t get that far.

  ‘Murder?’ Shorter looked momentarily disoriented, as if waking to find himself in a strange bed. ‘Someone murdered Emily?’ His voice turned high and crackly. ‘That’s not why I didn’t want to talk to you. I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘You’re only interested in Emily’s murder?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because if I tell you about Emily and me, well, some of the things we did in those days weren’t legal – we thought we were doing the right thing at the time and that the laws were wrong – I don’t want any of this coming back at me . . .’

  ‘Mr Shorter, when was the last time you saw Emily?’

  Shorter seemed to sag, the question hitting him like a punch to the guts. ‘Nearly two years ago,’ he said in a flat, distant voice. ‘She decided we were over, packed up her stuff and left.’

  ‘And you haven’t heard from her since?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  Geneva thought about the timing of this. Nearly two years ago. ‘Did she leave out of the blue or were you going through a difficult time?’

  Shorter laughed unexpectedly, a small dry strangled choke of air. ‘Difficult? With Emily everything was difficult.’ He picked up an oversized paper-clip and started kneading it between his fingers. ‘She was different when we first met, of course . . . or maybe . . . I don’t know . . . maybe it was me who was different back then.’ He put down the unfolded paper-clip, pulled open a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray and a lighter. ‘You see, we didn’t meet like a normal couple does,’ Shorter explained, coughing on the smoke of the cigarette as he tried to light it. ‘We didn’t hook up at the uni bop or in smoky pubs or at lectures. When I first saw Emily she was wearing a black balaclava, a vinyl jumpsuit and she was covered in horse’s blood.’ Shorter let out a bitter little laugh. ‘I guess you could say it was love at first sight.’

  ‘Where was this?’ Geneva enquired, feeling the slightest twinge of . . . what? She couldn’t quite name it, some pale and minor envy at the lingering devotions in other people’s lives, perhaps.

  ‘We were on a hunt-sab mission. This was the late nineties, early 2000s. Students were marching against the poll tax, against fees, against foreign intervention. It was an exciting time. The world was changing and we believed we were the instruments of that change.’ Shorter took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘That day, when I got out of the van, I saw her. I actually stopped, stopped in my tracks, unprepared for such a vision. She was standing under a tree, pouring ball bearings from a cardboard box into small sandwich bags.’

  ‘Ball bearings?’ Geneva asked.

  ‘We’d leave them dotted around the route of the hunt and when the horses’ hooves made contact, the bags would burst, spilling their contents. Once the first horse goes down it’s like dominoes.’

  ‘I guess you weren’t too concerned about the horses’ rights, or did you see them as collaborators?’

  Shorter shot Geneva a sharp glance, not quite sure if she was asking him a question or making a statement. She noted a faint flaring in his eyes, a rush of blood to the cheeks, as if something had come to the surface and been instantly snuffed out.

  ‘I know . . . I know,’ he admitted. ‘It’s funny how easily you can convince yourself of the necessity of violence when you’re fighting to obliterate it.’ He shook his head. ‘We shared the same van on the way back. It had been a successful sab but a costly one. The riders had attacked us with whips and clubs. But that just made the atmosphere on the ride back even more electric.

  ‘The van was everything.’ Shorter’s eyes glowed with sparks of resurfaced memory, his whole body shuddering into animation as he continued, and Geneva could tell this was a part of himself and his past he romanticised and used as a bulwark against his fading present. ‘You have to understand that. When we were in the van the constant hum of the world disappeared. We no longer worried about the essay we were due to hand in, the girl who may or may not call back, the raging slammed-door argument with parents . . . none of that mattered. In the van there was just us and the task at hand. There was only now. The next hunt, the next bend of the road, the next police stop. Names were not important. History and background were not important.

  ‘We lived in the van that summer. We slept and talked and cooked and fucked and argued in the van. We knew every rivet and dent and bump and where to sleep without waking up bruised and cramped, and where to hide our stashes when we got pulled over. We criss-crossed the country that summer, up and down motorways and rural two-lanes. We went to marches and protests and sit-ins. Wildcat strikes in medieval stone villages and anti-war rallies in the heart of the capital. There was always somewhere to go to, new drugs to take, the clamour of massed voices, the tingled anticipation of trouble, the bloodrush of the cause. There were five of us in the van but really there was only Emily and me.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound to me like someone who would spend their time in a convent?’

  ‘A convent?’ Shorter’s eyes rattled in confusion. He picked up another paper-clip and was pulling it apart between his fingers. ‘I couldn’t think of a less likely place for Emily.’

  ‘How about nuns? Did Emily
ever mention being involved with nuns?’

  ‘Nuns?’ Shorter shook his head. He caught his thumb on the point of the paper-clip, winced as a bright red dot bloomed from his skin.

  ‘What else was Emily involved in?’

  ‘Whad’ya got?’ Shorter said in a weird accent.

  Carrigan looked up from his notes.

  ‘Like Brando in The Wild One,’ Shorter explained. ‘It’s how I always used to think of Emily back then. Didn’t matter what the cause was, she would throw herself headlong into it. It’s partly what made her so attractive, that unswerving dedication and wild-eyed zeal. She wasn’t like the rest of them, you have to understand that, for her it wasn’t a posture, a way to make her life seem more meaningful than it really was – she actually meant it, meant it too much, that was the problem. She became so consumed by the troubles of the rest of the world and so enmeshed in its grievances that she somehow lost her self, and it wasn’t long before I discovered another Emily residing just below the surface.’

  ‘Another Emily?’ Geneva said, seeing flashes of pain settle in Shorter’s eyes.

  ‘I began to see that there were two Emilys. There was the Emily I’d met – the midnight warrior dressed all in black, ready to go out any time of day or night and right injustice, who came back from meetings flushed and excited, who couldn’t get the words out fast enough, who sat on the couch and brilliantly analysed and dissected the problems of the world.

  ‘And then there was the other Emily. The days and weeks when things quietened, when even the most strident of activists had to go to the library, put their heads down and revise for finals. This was the Emily who stayed in bed all day with the curtains closed, who spent evenings telling me over and over how much she detested her parents, who locked herself in the bathroom for hours at a time, who looked in the mirror and saw only saggy skin, an ugly nose, bitten nails and fat legs. I took her to Florence, to Amsterdam and New York. I wanted her to see some of the other side of life, to let her hair down, but wherever we went she would just sit there and simmer, finding injustice in the smallest thing.’

  ‘But you still moved down to London together?’ Geneva asked.

  ‘I thought that once away from the buzz of student life she’d get better, realise the world was much bigger and more complex than she’d painted it. But London only made Emily worse. She no longer had the constant rush of meetings and seminars to go to. She was now in the real world and the real world came crashing up against her. She hardened in turn, became less communicative, except when railing against something or other she’d read on the Internet. Those were not good times. We argued all hours, furiously, with our words and with our hands, at the top of our voices. She’d call me a stooge, a collaborator, a capitalist pig. She spent entire evenings putting my family on trial. She would storm out, lose herself in the London night, be gone for days at a time and come back with a strange vacancy in her eyes and a small offering – a cake she knew I liked, or a paperback, or a bottle of wine – for the worry she’d caused me.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where she went?’

  Shorter poured himself a fresh drink. ‘No, but she found what she was looking for in London, meetings and action groups, angry young men and women whose lives had left them with nothing but hate.

  ‘We stopped sleeping together. We stopped talking to each other. We set up a couch in the living room and on the nights Emily did return, she would sleep there. She began hanging out in the squats of east London. These Dickensian hell-holes, no water, no electricity, rats, and food left rotting for days. These people wanted to save the world but they couldn’t even keep their own house in order. They pretended that cleanliness was a bourgeois concept, that washing and changing clothes were just another surrender to the system.’ Shorter lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘She began to get more secretive. She disappeared for days at a time, often coming back bruised and bloody, her eyes burning fiercely.’ Shorter paused, took a deep breath and his eyes drew hard and tight. ‘And then Nigel entered the picture.’

  ‘Nigel?’ Geneva looked up from her notes, catching the shift in Shorter’s tone.

  ‘He called himself Nigel the Nail – he used to say he didn’t want to be a thorn in the side of the government but a great big fucking nail. That tells you as much as you need to know about how Nigel saw himself. He was the self-appointed guru of the squat set, older by a generation, regaling them with stories of manning the barricades during the strikes of the Thatcher years, his time in prison, his days in Belfast and the West Bank.

  ‘Emily had been so uncommunicative for so long and suddenly she was talking all the time, about Nigel and how he did this and did that, and it was obvious she’d fallen in love with him.

  ‘A month or two after she met him, she told me it was over. Nigel came to help her pack her things, to make sure I didn’t cause a scene, she said – as if I even cared enough by that point. Nigel stood there sneering and making remarks about my furniture, my accent, the kind of coffee I had in the cupboard. Emily took her clothes and very little else. That was the last time I saw her.’

  Shorter sat back in his chair and stared vacantly at the wall, slumped and drained. ‘It’s easy to see now she was in a downward spiral. But at the time you always think this will pass, that things will get better. But they never do, and every day you become a little less blind, and it freezes your heart to look at the only person you’ve ever loved and see no future at all in their eyes.’

  There was nothing to say to this. They thanked him and left him there, his face white and his Christmas ruined.

  *

  As soon as Geneva was back in the car she immediately began typing into the onboard computer. Carrigan waited, the screen angled away from him so that he couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Instead he watched her face as it changed from worry and frown to a quick delicious smile.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nigel the Nail’s got some previous.’

  Carrigan nodded and started the car. ‘From what Shorter told us about him, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Geneva said, drawing it out. ‘Does it surprise you that four of those charges were for arson?’

  33

  Nigel Burton, AKA Nigel the Nail, had been remarkably easy to find. ‘Amazed you didn’t see him on telly last week,’ a gruff sergeant from the Public Order Unit had explained. ‘He’s marshalling one of those anti-Tesco protests. Loves the camera, our Nigel does, loves getting arrested too, good for his image and all that.’

  Carrigan let Geneva do the driving so he could study Nigel’s file on the way over. He didn’t even notice Geneva’s music or the spiralling south London snow, his eyes and thoughts completely ensnared by Nigel’s arrest sheet.

  He’d been in trouble since the age of fifteen. Burton, or Nigel the Nail, as he was now legally known after a deed poll change, had been arrested seventeen times. He’d spent a total of thirty-eight months in various low-level prisons and each time he was released he wasted no time before reoffending.

  Nigel’s first arrests were nothing unusual – possession of class B drugs, a minor infraction in a pub at closing time, the charges later dropped – but then he had got serious and most subsequent arrests were for public disorder issues, mainly stemming from his participation in violent protests and riots. However, what Carrigan was most interested in were the four counts of arson Nigel had been charged with. Two Starbucks, a suburban branch of NatWest and a synagogue. None of the charges had been proven; witnesses had backed out, evidence got misplaced, and Nigel always had a crew of cohorts on hand to provide him with a timely alibi. According to the sheet, Nigel was now living in a squat in Balham and leading the protest at the new Tesco Express.

  Carrigan looked down at the print-outs, confused, feeling a slight judder of disorientation. His mind reeled back through the last few days. They’d been digging deep into the convent’s secret history. They’d been followi
ng up the drugs in the neighbourhood angle. They’d been tracking the Peruvian connection. He didn’t know where or how Nigel fitted in, but his form for arson, and his relationship with the eleventh victim, changed everything.

  They turned into a narrow high street and Geneva pulled the car to a stop outside a row of cracked and leaning terraces. A huge hand-daubed banner was spread along the facade of three of the houses. Red paint read Tesco Brings Nazism to Your Street and Smash the Supermarkets. The lettering was crude and a misspelling had been painted over twice. Across the road, in the middle of a small parade of shops, was a Tesco Express, one window covered by a sheet of rough splintered plywood.

  ‘Democracy in action,’ Carrigan said as he pulled on his jacket and headed for the squat’s front door.

  Except there wasn’t a front door. The council had removed it and replaced it with large grey Sitex screens. The screens had been pulled open and now stood flapping in the wind. Carrigan heard the dull thump of electronic music echoing from inside and could see the shadowdance of people flickering across the windows.

  ‘Ready for this?’ he asked Geneva.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but that never stopped me doing anything before.’ She smiled and then her mouth curled up into a frown.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look way too much like a copper,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not?’

  She looked him up and down, ‘I know we’re not exactly undercover but it would help if we didn’t immediately look like the enemy.’ She made him take off his jacket and put it back in the car. His tie was similarly disposed of. ‘Lucky you got a beard,’ she said, shuffling closer to him. ‘But it’s too neat.’

  Before he could react she leaned forward and ran her fingers through his beard, fluffing and messing it.