Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  The monk didn’t reply. He stared out at the white wasteland behind them, then nodded imperceptibly and turned, leaving the gate open.

  They followed him into a large courtyard surrounded by huge stone walls. They had expected it to be empty and were surprised to see seven or eight priests working the frozen fields. They wore threadbare gowns and no gloves, sandals on their tiny gnarled feet, and they were wielding shovels and scythes, digging and furrowing the hard icy ground. None of the priests showed the slightest interest in them, their eyes fixed on their hands and the tools they held as they swung in some unspoken rhythm, their faces flushed and perspiring freely despite the cold.

  As they neared the main building, Carrigan could see more priests milling around the grounds, each one attended by an orderly. The priests ranged in age from very young to shrivelled figures lost in their wheelchairs but they all seemed to share a certain expression, a commonality of suffering, the puffiness around the cheeks, the sadness in their eyes, a dishevelment of body and soul.

  The monk led them through an airy and dark vestibule. The walls were bare stone and the cold and wet seeped through the cracks like smoke. They passed several monks kneeling in front of a large wooden crucifix, their heads almost touching the floor, and then went up a set of stairs that creaked and swayed under their feet and into another long corridor with doors evenly spaced along both sides, the smell harsh and sharp, industrial cleaning products and antiseptic mixing with the odour of confined men. The door to Father McCarthy’s room was locked from the outside and the monk reluctantly selected a key from the large silver ring hanging at his belt and turned the lock, the jambs creaking and shrieking like wild cats as they retracted.

  Father McCarthy was sitting on a hard-backed chair facing a white plastic table. He didn’t look up as Carrigan and Geneva entered and introduced themselves, his eyes focused on a large bowl resting between his enormous hands. The room was small and sparse. There was a narrow metal-framed bed up against one wall, a simple table with books lying stacked and splayed on it, a jug half filled with water and a large black crucifix, the wooden floor below it worn and sanded smooth by the constant rub of knees and shins.

  ‘You took your time,’ Father McCarthy said, taking a big mouthful of stew, his lips smacking against the spoon. He was eating some kind of broth, a thick blood-red gloop with dark kidneys and pellets of grey meat floating inside. His face was almost perfectly rectangular and it was huge, a concrete slab of a head framing deep-set eyes, his wrists almost the width of Carrigan’s hand. His beard was wild and unruly and totally white and, when he turned his head, Carrigan thought he could see the sheen of old scars on his puckered skin. McCarthy ignored his scrutiny and continued staring down into his soup.

  ‘You weren’t easy to find, Holden made sure of that.’ Carrigan paused and stared at the old priest. He was somehow everything the stories and rumours made him out to be. ‘Why did he put you in here?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ McCarthy replied. ‘The church wants to protect its image. When they heard about the fire, they knew you would find me and maybe the press would too, and that their precious little secret would end up as tabloid fodder. So, here I am. But it’s good you finally found your way to me. I knew you would. I need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I need to resume my work.’

  ‘And what work is that, Father?’

  McCarthy put down his spoon. ‘You know exactly what kind of work I’m referring to, detective, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  Carrigan suppressed something that was close to a smile. ‘We’re aware you knew Emily from Peru and we know what the nuns were up to.’ He took out Emily Maxted’s photo and handed it over to the priest. The paper disappeared in McCarthy’s hands as the scored and wrinkled flesh caressed the image. ‘Emily . . .’ The priest nodded softly and handed the photo back. ‘Emily was our saviour.’

  Geneva tapped her pen against her notebook. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  McCarthy went back to his stew, stirring the juice with his spoon. ‘When I first met Emily I knew immediately she was the one I’d been waiting for.’

  ‘Waiting for?’ Geneva asked, the pen sticky between her fingers.

  ‘They only come along once in a while. People like her. People with the true fire burning within them. The ones who’ll do anything for what they believe in.’

  ‘Including breaking the law?’

  Father McCarthy looked at Geneva and smiled. ‘There is only one law and that is God’s law. Tell me, what import do your jails and life sentences have against eternity?’

  ‘Is that what you were doing at the compound? Following God’s law?’

  ‘I was doing what I’ve always been doing. God’s work. The work the church has forgotten about in its haste to catch up to the twenty-first century. You’ve heard about the book Mother Angelica was working on the better part of her life? The moral calculus?’

  They both nodded.

  ‘The compound was an experiment in putting those theories into practice.’

  ‘I thought the book had been suppressed by the Vatican?’ Carrigan said.

  Father McCarthy nodded slowly and took another slurp of his soup. ‘That it was, but random chapters, lost pages, abstracts and glosses had crept out over the years. People in the church, priests and nuns on the ground, read these fragments avidly and collected them and passed them around.’

  ‘Why Peru?’ Geneva asked.

  ‘I’d been involved in Peru since the summer of ’73, and if anything, the situation’s worse now. Sure, the dictatorship is gone, the civil war engendered by the Shining Path is over, there is a president who was voted in – but nothing has changed. The mines are operating with impunity. The rivers polluted with cyanide. Entire species are dying off. Workers are being exploited. The mine company has even bought up all the local medical clinics so that reports of toxic poisonings and industrial accidents never see the light of day. And then, on the other side, you have the drug barons. Ex-Shining Path men now forcing villagers to grow coca. Burning their fields and taking their women. The church pretended it wasn’t happening. The world was more interested in other wars. Something had to be done.’

  Geneva leaned forward. ‘The sabotage and bombings? Is that what you mean by something had to be done?’

  ‘These things are sometimes necessary to stop a greater evil,’ McCarthy replied. ‘That’s what Mother Angelica’s book was about. That’s what the point of the compound was.’

  ‘Did you and Mother Angelica set it up together?’

  Father McCarthy shook his head. ‘I wrote to Mother Angelica a few years ago and told her how we’d organised the camp according to the principles outlined in her book. I thought she would be pleased but she was a long way away, both in time and space, from what was going on in Peru, and she’d lost her fire in the intervening years. She was content with helping the homeless, handing out leaflets and sheltering escaped prostitutes.

  ‘We were running out of money. We needed a steady and constant tithing if we were to fulfil our mission. I wrote to Mother Angelica again and begged her to come and see what we were doing but she refused.

  ‘Then I met Emily. She’d become very interested in the plight of the local people. She wanted to know what she could do to help. She reminded me of Mother Angelica the first time I saw her, forty years ago on that dusty dirt road leading up to Chiapeltec. The same spirit and fire, an equal ferocity. And I knew Mother Angelica would recognise it in her too.’

  ‘You sent Emily back to London to galvanise the nuns into action? To help fund your compound?’

  ‘They had lost their way. Someone needed to show them how to get back. Like I said, Emily was our saviour. She possessed the very thing the nuns had lost – the excitement of youth and the unwavering belief in one’s own power to change the world. The nuns had already fought their battles, in South America, in Africa, in all the world’s dusty forlorn places, and they had lost. Emily spoke to us of her time in the prot
est and anti-war movements, the screaming barricades and late-night beatings, and there was a sparkle in her eyes as she said it – oh yes, a touch of trouble and madness too, but beneath all that lay a pure white flame of indignation. All the nuns recognised it. Emily reminded them of who they’d been and what they’d lost.’ Something in the priest’s eyes mellowed when he said Emily’s name, intoning it as if it were a benediction.

  ‘It all sounds very high-minded but I don’t see how these ideas led to bombed-out buses, blown pipelines and dead executives?’ Carrigan said.

  ‘Every action the compound took was in strict accordance with Mother Angelica’s moral calculus. Every action was weighed and discussed and deemed necessary and proportional and more likely to do good than harm.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ Carrigan asked and it was hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  It seemed for a moment as if McCarthy wasn’t going to answer, his eyes locking onto Carrigan’s with such a piercing glare that it felt as if he were weighing his soul. ‘Where does anything go wrong, Inspector?’ The priest smiled. ‘You know as well as I do that there are no hidden meanings scribbled in the margins of ancient texts or obscured in the mathematical pattern of letters and spaces. There is no meaning in planetary motion or the disposition of tea leaves. Nor is there meaning in coincidence and similarity. There is nothing but actions and their consequences.

  ‘It didn’t take Emily long to do what she was sent to do. She convinced the nuns that sheltering escaped prostitutes wasn’t enough. That they should stop being so passive in the face of evil. She told them about the compound and the conditions she’d witnessed in Peru. A couple of the nuns came and visited. They saw what we were doing and they saw what the mine companies were doing. They embraced the cause whole-heartedly. They reported back to Mother Angelica and the money started flowing in.’

  ‘But Sister Rose McGregor never reported back.’ Geneva’s voice was clipped and low.

  Father McCarthy looked momentarily stricken and for the first time Carrigan could see how old he really was. ‘I blame myself for that,’ the priest said. ‘It was the last day of her trip and we were conducting masses for the local village. Sister Rose kept asking to see one of the mines we’d talked so much about and Father Ramirez offered to take her.’ Father McCarthy looked down at his shoes. ‘Two weeks later we found Father Ramirez’s head in the front yard of the local church. Sister Rose was never seen again.’

  ‘One of the nuns, Sister Glenda, kept coming back, though,’ Geneva said. ‘I also noticed that her visits often coincided with incidents occurring in the region.’

  Father McCarthy nodded. ‘As time went on, the nuns wanted to see if they were getting their money’s worth. If we were making a difference. Of course, we also showed them the free clinics we’d set up, the new schools and missions, defence lawyers we had on hand for the workers and the fund we kept for striking miners’ families. That was our job, to fight back on the side of the poor, by whatever means were judged necessary and proportional. As you can imagine, after Sister Rose’s disappearance, the nuns’ commitment to the cause increased greatly.’

  ‘So this was all about Mother Angelica taking liberation theology too literally?’

  McCarthy’s eyes creased. ‘It’s meant to be taken literally. That’s the point.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they try to escape the fire if their mission meant so much to them?’

  ‘Would it have done them any good?’ McCarthy said with a flat stony stare.

  ‘No,’ Carrigan conceded.

  ‘No. Exactly. And they knew that. They had nothing to fear from death, Inspector, on the contrary . . . they would have realised their situation and would have stayed sitting at the table and preparing for the life to come.’

  ‘Would they have had their rosary beads out?’

  ‘Yes, it’s quite possible they did.’

  ‘It sounds to me like they knew they’d done something wrong, gone too far, and were making amends.’

  ‘Ah, wouldn’t you like to believe that?’ McCarthy said. ‘It would make it so much easier, wouldn’t it? But you have to remember the compound was an experiment. An experiment in direct action, in accordance with the Bible and Jesus’ teachings. We weren’t revolutionaries or rebels, we were priests and nuns doing God’s work.’

  ‘And it got them killed.’

  McCarthy turned to face Carrigan. ‘I don’t know that it did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Father McCarthy smiled. ‘Well, you’ve asked me a lot of questions about Peru and the compound but you still haven’t asked me about the night she came back with blood on her clothes.’

  44

  ‘What do you mean she came back with blood on her clothes?’ Carrigan said. ‘Are you talking about Emily? Emily Maxted?’

  McCarthy nodded and pushed his bowl aside. He reached for a packet of Senior Service lying on the table next to him. He grimaced as he lit the cigarette, the scent instantly filling the room as he exhaled a spiralling twist of smoke from his nostrils.

  ‘I told you the nuns had been sheltering escaped women? They’d bring them in through the back garden and hide them in the priest-hole. Emily persuaded them to take it a step further – not to wait until the lucky ones managed to escape but to snatch them from the hands of their captors. It didn’t take much persuading. I suspect it had been Mother Angelica’s unspoken conviction all along. Emily watched the Albanians and got to know their routines. The women were only ever let out when they were being transferred to another brothel. Emily and her accomplice would wait outside, then grab the woman and be out of sight before they even knew what had happened.’

  ‘Accomplice?’ Carrigan said, reaching into his file and pulling out the mugshot photo of Nigel the Nail. He passed it to the priest, watching him nod, a slight curl of distaste appearing on his lips.

  ‘Not the kind of person you would want to have dinner with, but the right kind for the job.’ He handed back the photo, evidently not wanting to hold onto it any longer. ‘He’d been travelling with Emily in Peru. Back in London, Emily talked him into helping the nuns snatch women from the Albanians. He was enamoured with her, that was clear to see. This man was not interested in saving the women, he only craved confrontation and battle, but sometimes we use tools that do not fit our hands and yet who’s to say they’re not good tools?’ The priest dragged hard on his cigarette, a wisp of regret flickering in his eyes then just as quickly disappearing.

  ‘What about the blood? You said she came back with blood on her clothes.’

  McCarthy looked down at his hands and sighed. ‘Something went wrong the third time they tried it. When Emily came back she was screaming, all wild-eyed and hysterical. She was clutching a bag to her chest, blood all over her.

  ‘The nuns hid her in the priest-hole. They’d used it previously to shelter the escaped women and it was comfortable, if a little damp. For the first few days Emily refused to even come out – there was a new look in her eyes and it took me a while to realise that I’d never seen her scared before. She left a week later without saying a word to anyone. We saw her less and less after that. The nuns curtailed their snatch work for the time being, battened down and hoped it would go away. Then the visits began.’

  ‘The Albanians?’ Carrigan’s fingers were pressed tight against the stem of his pencil as he wrote down the information, all these missing blanks rushing in like mad whirling flakes of snow.

  ‘They’d somehow worked out who was behind it, I have no idea how. Two thugs came to the convent and asked to see Mother Angelica. They told her they only wanted Emily and the man who was with her that night. They didn’t know their names but they knew everything else. They came twice more, each visit with a new ultimatum to hand over the girl and Nigel. Mother Angelica held firm. They probably expected some spineless nun and had no idea of the torture and suffering she’d endured in South America.

  ‘But she wasn’t through with Emily. The next
time Emily turned up Mother Angelica took her off to the kitchen. I remember hearing them screaming and arguing and shouting over each other’s words. Mother Angelica told her it was over, that she was no longer welcome in the convent. That if Emily didn’t turn herself in to the police, the nuns would be forced to. Emily called her a coward, a fraud and a fake and then—’

  The door crashed open, spilling harsh white light into the room. Two huge orderlies entered, ignoring Carrigan and Geneva, and made their way directly to Father McCarthy, their strides long and brisk and full of purpose. Carrigan rose from his chair and saw Roger Holden standing in the doorway. The two orderlies flanked McCarthy and, at a nod from Holden, grabbed him by both arms and lifted him out of the chair.

  Carrigan took a step forward and one of the orderlies detached himself from the priest and moved towards him, arms tensed, an unspoken challenge in his eyes.

  ‘Put him down,’ Carrigan ordered, reaching for the baton on his belt. The orderly threw a short right and Carrigan ducked and spun and grabbed the swinging fist in his own, twisting the man’s arm behind his back in one quick move. The other orderly let go of Father McCarthy and was coming to his colleague’s aid, fists squared and ready.

  ‘Wait, Norman,’ Holden said. ‘We don’t need to do that – do we, Detective Inspector Carrigan?’

  Carrigan looked at the orderly, the ripple of muscles snaking down his arms, the funky smell of his fear-sweat. He saw Geneva up and ready, the can of pepper spray clutched in her small fist.

  ‘After all,’ Holden continued, ‘you’re trespassing. You used false pretences to gain entry. You took information from my office without permission. You’ve broken several laws, all of which I’m sure ACC Quinn will be very interested to hear about.’

  Carrigan took a step back, realising that Holden was right and even if he somehow managed to overpower the orderlies, he would never be able to get McCarthy out of the building.

  He let go of the man’s arm, catching his breath. The orderlies grabbed the priest and frogmarched him out of the room. McCarthy looked back at Carrigan once, then disappeared through the grey metal door.