by Stav Sherez
Underneath was a stack of identical flyers for something called the African Action Committee. She remembered Cummings mentioning that Grace had joined an African society in her first year. Geneva looked down at the flyers, basic Photoshopped headlines and a crossed-through silhouette of a black man carrying a machine gun. She scanned the tiny print, saw that the flyer was for a weekly Thursday night meeting in Hackney and remembered Cummings saying that Grace had stopped going after her first year. Geneva took the flyer and put it to one side. She looked away from the table and out through the green mesh. London was darkening outside her window, she could hear buses and cars shuffling through the streets, the faint hum of a radio playing chart hits. She went back to her task, flicking through internet articles, pages from Wikipedia, the BBC News website, other news feeds, and then she realised.
She looked up from the pages and stared at the objects on her desk, confused.
She picked up the inventory and scanned it again, just in case she’d missed it the first time round. She got on her knees and went through the boxes, unpacking the books and papers, making sure she hadn’t overlooked it. She glanced back at the table.
Grace was a student. Grace had printed all these pages out. So why hadn’t they found a computer anywhere in Grace’s flat?
10
The incident room, 6.30 p.m. Carrigan sat at his desk finishing off a packet of crisps. He rubbed his fingers on his cords and watched as Berman sat hunched over his computer screen, three other screens shielding him from the rest of the office, naked motherboards and strange boxes with wires surrounding his desk. Jennings was wolfing down a Big Mac, the smell instantly making Carrigan feel hungry again. Karlson was on the phone, his face shielded, his voice low, sweet talking some new conquest, no doubt.
Carrigan got up, saw that Geneva was late and Singh was missing, but started anyway. ‘How are we doing with forensics?’
Jennings wiped his mouth, and quickly scanned through some notes. ‘Still waiting for the DNA and other samples but they managed to get a fingerprint off the glass of milk left in the kitchen. Same fingerprint they found on the plastic ties that were used on Grace.’
Jennings smiled like an eager schoolboy trying to please his favourite teacher. Carrigan could tell he was giving him the good news first. ‘But . . . ?’
Jennings hunched his shoulders, his eyes straying from Carrigan’s. ‘No hit on the PNC. Far as we can tell, the killer doesn’t seem to have ever been arrested.’
‘I was hoping we’d get something,’ Carrigan said. ‘Someone like this, it’s hard to believe he’s kept his nose clean.’
‘Maybe he’s just better than we are,’ Karlson suggested. ‘The fact he’s not on the database might only mean he’s been too clever so far.’
Carrigan looked up from his notes. ‘Then why, all of a sudden, does he get so sloppy as to leave not one but two sets of fingerprints behind?’
Karlson’s silence didn’t make Carrigan feel any better. ‘Jennings, fax the prints over to immigration, see if he’s on any of their databases.’ He thought of the man he’d seen outside King’s Court not once, but twice now. ‘Karlson, anything at SOAS?’
DS Karlson stopped jotting in his notepad, looked up. ‘Not much of interest. I spoke to some of her classmates, got pretty much the same story from all of them.’
‘Which was?’ Carrigan hated the way Karlson always teased everything out, the secret pleasure he got from it as if it were the only thing that brightened his day.
‘Everyone I spoke to agreed that Grace was a model student but none of them really seemed to know her. Studious, polite, but cold was the consensus. I asked about drugs and everyone seemed very surprised we would ask that concerning Grace. I didn’t get the sense that anyone was covering up for her.’
‘Good,’ Carrigan replied. ‘DS Miller should be here soon. She interviewed Grace’s professor so let’s see what she has to say.’ He stared down at his notes, then back up at the room. He told them about questioning the tenants on Grace’s floor, Golshan Najafi’s description of the row Grace had had with her boyfriend on the night of the murder.
He heard low whistles and feet shuffling as the team assimilated this information. ‘Did anyone mention anything about Grace having a boyfriend?’
Karlson shook his head. ‘I did ask but no one seemed to know her outside of class.’
‘Then we need to go back and reinterview them. The boyfriend is our main priority now.’
‘Wouldn’t you have been better used here than going round doing door-to-doors? It’s a job for the uniforms.’ There was a faint smile creeping across Karlson’s face.
Carrigan snapped his head round. The suit the sergeant was wearing was shiny and looked to have been shrink-fitted to his physique. ‘Are you telling me how to run this investigation?’
Karlson smiled thinly. ‘No, just wondering if it was the best allocation of resources.’
Carrigan felt his lips tight against his gums, he forced a smile. ‘You wondering about how I’m running this case is a waste of resources.’
The door crashed open and Geneva came in balancing a stack of papers and books in her hands. The tension in the room dissipated as everyone looked at her. ‘Sorry, I’m late,’ she said, dropping the bundle onto her desk, straightening her blouse and taking a seat.
‘How did it go with the professor?’
She summed up what Cummings had said, more or less duplicating what Karlson found out from Grace’s fellow students. ‘Good work,’ Carrigan replied, remembering the old newspaper reporter’s maxim that every piece of information needed at least two corroborative sources. ‘And how did Cummings strike you?’
Geneva checked her notes. ‘I think he likes playing the role of the cool hippy professor on campus a bit too much but he was genuinely shocked when I told him she’d been killed. I didn’t get any sense that he was hiding anything and his alibi checked out.’ She took a deep breath, not sure how to go about this, terrified, here in this new team where everyone was looking at her, everyone immediately judging her, but she’d learned that keeping your mouth shut never endeared you to anyone and besides, there were more important things than her career at stake. ‘He talked about her dissertation a bit and I had a look through some of her books and notes.’ She paused, taking in the mood around her.
‘And?’ Carrigan said impatiently.
Well, here goes, she thought, back to being a constable again. ‘The SOCOs didn’t find a computer at Grace’s flat but all her notes, everything, was printed out.’
No one said anything – Karlson was giving her a strange look but DC Berman’s head had finally risen from his various screens. ‘I think this is something we need to look at,’ Geneva continued. ‘She was dealing with some pretty serious political stuff in her dissertation. I’d like to follow up on that.’
Carrigan looked at her, still trying to understand what her role was, why Branch had seconded her. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he finally replied. ‘Why take her computer yet leave all her notes and books behind if it was about her work? They would have taken everything. Besides, the MO’s too personal. We wouldn’t be seeing such overkill if this was about her work. She probably just left it in her locker at SOAS. We need to concentrate our resources on finding the boyfriend. It’s our only viable lead at this point,’ he continued. ‘He was seen arguing with Grace a few hours before her death; it’s much more likely that this is something that got out of hand then some conspiracy against her.’
Geneva stared down at her notes, surprised by Carrigan’s rebuke. This was the first time she’d seen him like this and she wondered if it was because of the case or something else – had he worked out why Branch had put her on his team? ‘We should at least check whether she had an internet connection. It won’t take that much time.’
‘Sure.’ He shrugged his shoulders as a peace offering but could see she wasn’t accepting it, her lips pressing against one another like two thin pieces of wire. ‘Jennings, I
want you to keep hassling forensics, see if they can get that DNA sample analysed soon. Karlson, go back to the university, talk to her friends again, someone must have seen her with a boyfriend or heard her mention one, you know how students talk.’ Karlson frowned and was about to say something but then changed his mind.
‘Professor Cummings also mentioned a close friend,’ Geneva interrupted. ‘Cecilia Odamo, another Ugandan. He said she hadn’t showed up to an important meeting she had scheduled with him on Monday morning and no one’s seen her at SOAS since.’
‘Shit,’ Carrigan said, wondering if his words from yesterday were coming back to haunt him, if this really was the start of a series and not a one-off.
Carrigan went back to his desk, the sound of the other detectives on headsets, tapping away at keyboards, scratching down notes, surrounding him. He picked up the phone and got the number for the Ugandan embassy.
He got through on the first ring, a man with a rough-and-tumble accent answering breathlessly. Carrigan explained who he was and gave the man Grace’s full name and passport number. ‘Anything you can find about her parents, next of kin, would help us tremendously,’ he added.
He could hear the young bureaucrat on the other end humming to himself and the distant hammering of fingers on a keyboard. ‘Yes,’ the man returned to the line. ‘We have here . . . uh . . . Okay . . . please wait a minute.’
Carrigan was put on hold. He cradled the receiver to his ear, watched Geneva throwing a pile of notes and papers onto the floor, then sat up when the voice came back on the other end of the line.
Except this time it was a different voice, the man altogether older and with a much better command of English. ‘DI Carrigan?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid we have nothing in our system concerning Ms Okello.’ The man’s tone was smooth and urbane.
‘But the person who answered the phone said he’d found . . .’
‘Thank you for your enquiry, Mr Carrigan, but I’m afraid we can’t help you.’
The man hung up the phone before Carrigan could ask him any more questions. He stared at the lifeless receiver in his hand, the buzz of work around him. A strange feeling crept up his spine but he told himself it was nothing, just hearing that accent again, that was all.
He slurped the remainder of his drink, his stomach reeling, feet jittering, the memories swirling and sluicing through his brain like wild things unloosed. The thought of going back home filled him with dread, he didn’t want to stare at the walls waiting for the day’s adrenaline to wear off like some unexpected drug and so instead he called Ben.
They’d gone to university together, gone to Africa together, and now they met once a fortnight, discussed each other’s lives and watched old TV shows. They weren’t scheduled to meet for another couple of weeks, the yearly trudge down to the Dorset village where David was buried, but Carrigan didn’t want to go home tonight, his head still ringing with the day, images of Grace flickering behind his eyes, the phone call to the Ugandan embassy fresh in his mind.
He got off the train at Turnham Green, walked past the fields where the blood-soaked Civil War battle had been fought, past the church where Van Gogh had preached his mad fiery sermons, and crossed the Great West Road. He turned into the narrow cobbled lane and walked through Chiswick Pier. It had been redeveloped during the last decade, erasing the park where he’d kissed his first girlfriend, the pub where he’d puked all over the landlord on his eighteenth birthday, the particular bend of the river he liked to sit by. They’d replaced them with faux-Georgian condos and security gates. Each development had a quaint name, as if it were some isolated Cornish village. Stoney Reach. Potter’s Quay. Each condo had gates within gates, numbered fingerpads, scrolling cameras, signs that warned ‘PRIVATE: KEEP OUT’. A sense of an encased, preserved Britain – but one which was entirely fake.
Ben’s house was the first past the development, the old river residences butting up against the new. Jack unlatched the gate, knowing this was the kind of life he could have had if he’d made the right choices, if things had turned out differently.
He stared down at his shoes, noticing how the leather had torn and wilted from the tips, and pressed the buzzer. He brushed some crumbs from his jacket and beard. Dvořák rang out, faint and sickly sweet. Jack hoped it would be Ben who answered the door but instead it was Ursula.
Jack held his breath and met her eyes; something flickered then died like a match left too long in the wind. History flashed between them in that split-second, twenty-three years reeling down the decades to when he first laid eyes on her in his lecture class, her long black hair cascading down her shoulders, the way she entered a room, the sound of her voice.
They’d quickly become friends, discussing music theory, sharing cold drinks and warm chips. He’d been breathless the first time they spoke. All that term he’d been waiting for the right moment, knowing it was the hardest thing to negotiate from being friends to something more and how easy it was to end up losing both. She came from country-house dinner parties and foggy Sunday-morning hunts, beagles yapping at her ankles, a shotgun nestled in the crook of her arm. He came from Shepherd’s Bush. He’d wanted her to meet his friends, not just another poor London Irish kid with dubious cohorts. It was obvious the first moment they locked eyes, her and Ben, and there was nothing Jack could do about it but step back and force his desire down to where it could be kept locked and bolted. And it had worked for a long time. It was only recently that he’d started thinking about Ursula in that way again. He knew it was more to do with nostalgia than lust. For all the span of his marriage to Louise and those dark years after her death he saw Ursula only as Ben’s wife. But now something had changed, an imperceptible shift, the revoked past snapping at his heels every time he pressed the buzzer.
‘Good to see you, Jack,’ she smiled, holding the door open for him, her teeth white and perfect in that soft mysterious mouth of hers. He nodded, saw her eyes drift down to his midriff, the overhanging belly and crumpled clothes, thought he detected a note of pity in her expression and shuffled past her, through the elegant hallway bedecked with hunting scenes and into the river room.
Every time it got him. Every time he was taken aback by the sheer sense of space in the room as it tapered into a wall made entirely out of glass behind which the river glistened like molten metal.
The afternoon sun sliced through and illuminated Ben, crouched in his favourite armchair, a pair of headphones clamped to his head. Jack stopped at the threshold, not quite ready yet. It was a place he knew as well as anywhere and yet he’d never felt comfortable here. These days he preferred small rooms, dark garrets and subdivided office spaces, places where the world was contained without.
Ben jerked up when he saw Jack, catching the headphone cord on the side of the chair, apologising and awkwardly extricating himself from the spaghetti tangle of leads.
‘Hey.’ Jack took off his jacket and sat in the chair opposite Ben. The fabric settled and moulded itself around him; over the years it had taken on his shape, changed as his body had, accommodating the middle-age spread around his waist, the years of too many coffees heavy with sugar.
‘I’m really glad you called.’ Ben’s smile was the first thing everybody noticed about him. The gleaming white teeth. The way his eyes crinkled. It was the smile that had made him a regular on early evening TV, always in a white suit, his eyes blue as azure. He’d started by making documentaries about civil war and genocide and then a one-off special about the origins of man had led to his own show, The Risen Beast, a mix of erudite anthropology and narrative history that had proved wildly popular.
‘Sorry if Ursula was a bit snappy,’ Ben apologised while pouring the drinks. ‘She’s pissed off at me. We were supposed to be seeing some friends of hers for an awfully tedious dinner party in bloody Greenwich of all places.’ Ben laughed and Jack remembered not just the smile and charm but the laugh too; even in their darkest moments that laugh could be guaranteed t
o lift them. It was working now and the day began to slough off with the first drink like the rain trickling from the folds of his jacket.
‘I can go if it’s a bad time.’
Ben shrugged. ‘Your phone call saved me, don’t you dare leave!’
They both laughed. They settled down into patterns. They settled down into routine. Repetition comforted them in this room that hadn’t changed over ten years, belying the fact that they had. They fell into small talk, into catch-up and miscellaneous chatter as old friends do, picking up conversations from last week, last year, a lifetime ago. Jack felt the whisky diminishing the din of the day, the languorous rhythm of their conversation dragging him back into the world.
‘So you’re off next week?’ Jack said. ‘Finally got your chance to teach at Berkeley.’
Ben’s face gleamed. ‘You know how long I’ve been waiting for this.’
Carrigan smiled. ‘Good for you.’
‘How’s your mum doing?’
Jack rubbed his head, saw real concern in his friend’s eyes. ‘I was supposed to visit her today but this fucking case . . . last time I visited her she didn’t even recognise me. Kept shouting to the nurses that someone had broken into her room.’ He didn’t need to say more – you reached a certain age and these conversations were always hovering in the air, a kind of heavy weather everyone ignored until it was too late.
‘I’m sorry.’ Ben set his glass down on the table, uncrossed his legs and leant forward. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ His wiry frame seemed to take in all the space around him, gangly arms and legs extruding at impossible angles like some altarpiece Jesus. ‘You look beat.’
