by Stav Sherez
He stared at Emily’s face, those deep piercing eyes and slanted mouth, and then he noticed something in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo and his breath stopped.
He stared at it for a long moment, everything else forgotten.
A stray conversation echoed through his head. He strained to hear the words and understand their significance. Time seemed to contract and slow. Sentences ran jumbled through his brain, inflections and facts, things that didn’t mean much at the time now magnified to disproportionate size. His mouth felt dry, his hands slick and clammy. He knelt down and started taking the files back out of the box, throwing them onto the floor, going through the reports and statements until he found what he was looking for.
He pulled out the printed transcript of Geoff Shorter’s interview and started reading it again. Halfway through he came upon that suddenly remembered phrase and he stopped and his whole body shook as he realised what it meant.
For a moment, it seemed he couldn’t move, and then he put the report down and pulled out the photos of the burnt-out convent. He flicked through them until he got to the one he wanted. He stared at it and couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before.
But he had to be sure, absolutely sure.
He wrenched open his desk drawers, pulling them all the way out and upturning them onto the tabletop. He started going through months of accumulated junk – stray staples, Post-It notes, coffee loyalty cards, half-filled forms and bus tickets – flinging everything onto the floor, and he was getting more desperate and frenetic as he neared the bottom and then he saw it, lodged between the pages of a week-old newspaper.
He reached for it, but pulled his hand away just in time and snapped on a pair of gloves from the nearby dispenser, realising how his impatience had nearly ruined everything.
He picked it up, placed it carefully in an evidence bag, and called the lab.
49
He texted Geneva early on Christmas Day. He’d gone straight home from the station the previous night and hadn’t slept or eaten or done much of anything until the lab had called back. When the first faint light of Christmas morning lit up the motorway ramp outside his flat, he knew it couldn’t wait.
He called Karen and apologised for having to cancel Christmas dinner. There was a long silence and then she said she understood, and he knew she did.
He picked Geneva up from her mother’s house. She was dressed in clothes he’d never seen her in before, sedate and somehow formal, and it took him a moment to recognise her. An older woman was leaning out the front door, staring in his direction.
‘My mom wanted to come out and give you hell,’ Geneva said, but Carrigan could tell she was only half as pissed off as she was pretending to be.
The city was empty, the shops closed, the roads stripped of the constant honk and whine of traffic. As they headed north through the abandoned streets and holiday hush they could feel the muted sense of anticipation leaking from every Christmas tree-lit window, eager young faces pressed against the glass, watching the skies, their features distorted like stockinged bank robbers. It had been snowing for ten days but it hadn’t yet snowed today.
‘This is all very nice,’ Geneva said. ‘But where exactly are we going?’
‘It’s Christmas,’ Carrigan replied. ‘And I have one good deed left to do.’
She knew there would be no point pressing him further and so she sipped her coffee and stared out of the window, recognising streets and junctions they’d passed through less than a week ago, the large houses rising out of the mist like the prows of doomed ships, the high street gloomy and shuttered, the sprawling expanse of heath blanketing them on both sides.
‘I feel like such an idiot.’ Carrigan shook his head. ‘Two days ago I was telling them their daughter died trying to do something good.’
The maid opened the door and led them into the dining room. The scene looked as if nothing had changed from a few days ago, as if it were a painting slowly drying in its frame.
What was left of the Maxted family was gathered around the table, in the middle of Christmas lunch. Miles Maxted sat at one end, Lillian at the other. Donna, wearing a red dress, was stranded in the yawning gap between them.
The Maxteds hadn’t started on their main course, the food still steaming from the oven, the maid laying out the final pieces then silently taking her place in the corner of the room. Lillian was twirling a lock of hair in her fingers and didn’t even notice their arrival, but Donna looked up and her eyes grew wide and soft as she recognised Carrigan.
Geneva caught the look, the longing in it, and felt a hot rush of something she couldn’t quite name.
‘What do we owe this pleasure to?’ Miles Maxted’s voice was already thick with alcohol.
‘I’m sorry to intrude like this,’ Carrigan said quietly. ‘But something’s come up.’ Carrigan kept his face blank. The food smelled wonderful but it was obvious no one was eating, their plates full, contents untouched, the cutlery still perfectly arrayed on either side.
‘The investigation into the fire at the convent is about to be officially closed. There’s going to be a press conference tonight but I thought it best you hear it from me first.’
Miles Maxted looked up. ‘Just tell us what you have to tell us and leave us in peace.’
‘Remember how I said that Emily was working with the nuns and that she was killed by the Albanians because of this?’
‘You caught them?’ Donna asked breathlessly.
Carrigan shook his head. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘The Albanians were involved in all this but not in the way we thought. They didn’t set the fire.’
‘Then who did?’ Donna asked.
Carrigan took a deep breath. ‘I hate to be the one to say this, but we now believe Emily set the fire herself.’ He watched the reaction on Miles Maxted’s face, the sudden darkening in the man’s eyes, the twitch that made his lips snap against one another.
‘What on earth would she do that for?’
Carrigan had put the last details into place as he’d sat waiting for Geneva that morning. ‘We don’t know for sure. It could have been an accident. Emily was helping the nuns shelter escaped sex slaves, as I told Donna, but since then we’ve found out that Emily had taken it a step further.’ He ran through what Viktor had told him about that fateful night. ‘Emily killed one of the men in the ensuing struggle, stabbing him.’
‘Oh my God,’ Donna blurted, her face white as a candle. ‘No . . . no . . .’ she kept repeating to herself, ‘Emily would never . . .’
‘I’m afraid she did,’ Carrigan replied. ‘But, if it’s any consolation, the man she killed was probably trying to do the same to her.’ He watched Miles taking this in, eyes blinking rapidly. Carrigan could see that however much he didn’t want to believe it, his heart was pulling him in the opposite direction. Donna was quietly sobbing and she reached over and took her mother’s hand as Carrigan continued.
‘The Albanians didn’t take kindly to the murder of one of their own. They obviously didn’t go to the police either.’ Carrigan explained about the visits to the convent and demands to hand over Emily.
‘Oh God, poor Emily,’ Donna said, her arms dropping to her sides and hanging there uselessly like a rag doll’s.
Carrigan stared at her, the beauty he’d noticed the first day not diminished but somehow ennobled by her grief. ‘But, you see, I have this annoying thing where I can’t sleep very well when I’m on a case, and I kept thinking about this, thinking about Emily, what we knew about her, pacing my room, making myself coffee after coffee, but no matter how I looked at it, it just didn’t make sense.’
He turned to see Geneva’s eyes wide and alert, her gaze focused exclusively on him, a slight rebuke in the tilt of her head. ‘Emily was a survivor, everything we know about her tells us this. So, I had another coffee and looked out the window and knew that someone who’d defend herself so aggressively against one of Duka’s gangland thugs would never give in so easily. And i
t kept bugging me – why didn’t she run away? Why didn’t she simply disappear? From her years in the protest movement she would have known a lot of safe houses and hiding places, a lot of comrades who would ask no questions and gladly help her vanish.’ Carrigan stopped pacing the room and turned towards the table.
‘The next morning it was still there, in fact the nagging feeling had got stronger, but there was nothing I could do about it and so I started to clear the incident room, taking the photos off the wall, and as I peeled off Emily’s picture, the one that Donna took, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before and that’s when I knew.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Miles Maxted said.
‘When I looked closely at the photo I realised Emily couldn’t have been the eleventh victim.’
He paused, watching everyone’s expressions freeze and flicker, Geneva shooting him a dark stricken look that spoke of deep frustration and backhanded betrayal. ‘And then I remembered something. It was barely there but I could sense it, buried under layers of useless information. I pulled up the transcript of the interview we did with Emily’s boyfriend, Geoff Shorter, because I was sure he’d said something that we’d not taken in at the time. I scanned through the transcript and found it. But I had to be sure,’ Carrigan continued, ‘and I knew one way I could be certain. I was only worried I might have thrown it away but it was there in my desk, the small white card that Donna gave me last week. I had the lab look at it and they managed to get a usable print from it.’
‘But . . . but why on earth would you do that?’ Miles protested and, despite all the bluster and front, Carrigan could see he was upset.
‘We had Emily’s fingerprints on file from her arrest. We couldn’t compare them to those belonging to the body of the eleventh victim because the skin had been too badly burned, but I did a comparison between Emily’s arrest record and the print found on the piece of paper Donna gave me. They were the same.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Miles said.
‘No, neither did I,’ Carrigan replied. ‘So I got on the phone to someone at King’s College who’s an expert on these things and he told me something very interesting. Apparently, twins have identical DNA but not identical fingerprints. Your fingerprints are shaped by what you do, how you use your hands during the formative years of childhood. I guess you never knew that, did you . . . Emily?’
50
‘You need to get out of my house right now, Inspector.’ Miles Maxted shot up, his chair flying back, his face tight and flushed, eyelids fluttering like maddened butterflies. ‘I can see what you’re trying to do and I won’t allow it.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Please calm down, Mr Maxted, I haven’t finished yet.’
‘How dare you . . .’
‘Sit down, Mr Maxted, and I promise I’ll explain it to you or, perhaps,’ Carrigan looked across the table, ‘perhaps Emily can explain it better than I can.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.’
Her voice sent a shiver down his spine, coarse and rough, the way she used his name like an insult hurled in a fit of anger. It was a voice he hadn’t heard before. Emily’s voice. He forced himself to look at her but it was a totally different woman who was now looking back at him. ‘It won’t be hard to prove. We can take your fingerprints right now and settle this.’
She held his stare and said nothing.
‘What on earth happened to you?’ Carrigan said, and Geneva could hear the concern and mystification in his voice. ‘You seemed to have turned your life around, to have started doing something good.’
Emily looked at her parents but they refused to meet her stare. She turned towards Carrigan. ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.’
‘It never is,’ he replied, thinking of all the times he’d heard that line. ‘What was Donna doing in the convent the night of the fire?’
‘She followed me there. I told her to stay at home and wait for me but she didn’t.’ Emily shook her head and stared down at the table. ‘I was going to return the cocaine. I don’t even know why I took it that night, everything was so crazy. I knew it wouldn’t get the Albanians off my back but I thought it might be a useful bargaining tool. And I didn’t want the nuns to find it. Donna insisted she come with me. I tried arguing with her but it was no use.’ She kept scratching her forearm and taking shallow quick breaths, trying to catch her parents’ eyes.
‘Nigel was waiting for us at the convent. I’d talked to him the night before. Told him that, if we used the cocaine as a bargaining chip, the Albanians might let us go. He laughed and said I was nuts. He wanted us to sell the coke and use the money to get out of the country before the Albanians found us. I didn’t expect him to turn up at the convent. He was halfway out of his head, all amped up on speed and fear and adrenalin. He told me the nuns wouldn’t be disturbing us, he’d made sure of that by locking the door. He said the cocaine would help us start a new life. I knew any life I began with him would end up exactly the way this one had.
‘We argued and screamed at each other. I had the bag in my hand and I swung it at his head. The bag caught the candles and pricket stand as I threw it. Nigel staggered backwards. I started to run but he caught me and pinned me up against the wall and started to strangle me. I heard Donna scream as she jumped him. He turned and punched her in the face and she spun and fell forward and hit her head on the side of the pricket stand as she crashed to the floor. She didn’t make a sound. Nigel started coming for me again. And then he stopped. He was staring wide-eyed at the niche behind me. I turned and saw that the candles had ignited the drapes. Big shooting flames ran up the walls and were spreading across the ceiling. Nigel took one last look, laughed and ran out through the back window and into the garden.’
Emily shook, her entire body crumpling as she continued. ‘I went to where Donna was lying. There was blood circling her head. I couldn’t find her pulse. The flames were spreading across the room. I tried lifting her, tried slapping her face to wake her up but there was no reaction. I tried dragging her but the flames were all around us now. There was nothing I could do. If I hadn’t left that moment the fire would have got me too.’
‘And as you knelt there and saw Donna you realised how convenient this would be,’ Carrigan said, his voice calm and reassuring, belying the words coming from his mouth.
Emily shook her head. ‘It wasn’t like that. There was nothing I could do. Donna was dead.’
‘She was alive,’ Carrigan said. ‘She woke up.’
‘What?’ All the blood drained from Emily’s face.
‘She came to before the fire reached her. She crawled into the confession booth thinking she’d be safe there. She was burned alive inside, screaming and flailing and ripping her fingernails against the hissing metal,’ Carrigan explained. ‘It’s my fault. I should have seen it earlier. Her long nails scratched and tore at the interior of the booth as she was burning to death. But you, Emily, you bite your nails. They wouldn’t have made a mark. Geoff Shorter mentioned in his interview that it was a bad habit of yours. And it reminded me of something I heard a few days ago – how there are no hidden meanings, only actions and their consequences.’
Emily’s hands slid under the table but her face told Carrigan all he needed to know.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Lillian’s voice was cold and dismissive, the same tone Carrigan had heard her use with the maid.
A single tear ran down Emily’s cheek. ‘I was going to, I swear, but then you were so nice to me when you thought I was Donna and I didn’t want that to change. I’d never felt that from you or Dad. I knew that Donna’s death would break your hearts and, despite the way you’d always treated me, I couldn’t bear to do that to you. I knew you’d far prefer it if it was me who was dead.’
She looked at both parents but neither said a word nor denied her accusations. ‘I just wanted you to love me like you did her.’ Emily’s arms reached across the table into empty space. ‘I thoug
ht if I pretended to be her . . . If I said the things she said and did the things she did then maybe I would grow to be a bit more like her . . . I hoped . . .’ Emily stopped and looked up as Miles and Lillian Maxted rose from their seats. ‘Please? . . . Mum? . . . Dad?’
Lillian followed her husband out of the room. Emily watched them disappear down the dark hallway. She kept staring long after they’d gone, and continued to do so as Carrigan handcuffed her and led her outside to the waiting police car.
*
He walked through the snow and howling wind until his feet were numb and he kept walking, oblivious to direction or purpose, a solitary man trudging through the deserted city, and as he walked he turned his face away from the lighted windows, silhouetted Christmas trees and happy screams of children opening their presents. He pulled up his collar and buttoned his jacket as the wind came careening down the long empty street. The temperature had suddenly dropped and he could feel his wrist, broken five years ago in a bar fight, begin to throb and ache with the memory of that night. He wanted the wind to rip through his skull and blow everything away – all the years and nights and days, the dreams and disappointments, memories and missed chances – but most of all he wanted to forget this case and all its dark and twisted layers.
He walked as if the very act of walking could shake off the last two weeks as easily as it did the snow gathered in the folds of his raincoat. He walked in ever decreasing circles, traversing the shuttered shops and barren canals, the darkened office buildings and silent motorways, losing all track of time and space as the snow began to fall on Christmas Day, until he realised he was back at the station and that’s when he saw her.
