A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  ‘We must make our land a graveyard for all intruders. There is no other way. This is the way of God and the way of man.’ Booing. Screaming. Insults. Jeers. ‘We must take the Lord to Kony as he has taken it to us. No more . . .’ Gabriel Otto stepped back, watching with delight as the crowd erupted. ‘No more blood. No more villages burned to the ground. No more of our children recruited for his war.’ Booing and cheering filled the packed room until it was hard to distinguish one from the other. Two men, both dressed in ill-fitting grey suits, started fighting near the front, punches were thrown, glasses crashed to the floor, blood streaked the wall. Carrigan saw Geneva’s eyes flicker with fright, wondering what they’d got themselves into.

  It had now been twenty-four hours since they’d seen the YouTube video. Twenty-four hours of flashed images, scrolling film, echoed screams. Twenty-four hours of newspaper headlines and breathless news reports. By the time they’d seen the video, it was being watched all over the world. Branch explained that although YouTube yanked the clip, a host of mirror sites were already streaming it, an exponential splash of horror bouncing across the web from one site to the next. Atrocity sites. Sites where you could watch the flicker of your sickest nightmares. Carrigan had spent an hour going through these sites earlier that morning, entering a realm that fed on and relished what the normal world abhorred. He’d thought he’d seen the worst in his years as a detective‚ but he now realised he’d seen nowhere near the worst; with each click of the mouse there were darker worlds and blacker provinces yet. It had started with photos of car crashes, DIY accidents and impaled bodies on park fences. From there it was both inevitable and logical that smuggled photos of torture and executions in South American prisons should appear, that people filmed their friends overdosing rather than trying to help them.

  The morning’s newspapers had all carried Grace’s face, frozen mid-frame, splashed across their front pages, the headlines each trying to trump one another: WEREWOLF OF LONDON STRIKES, THE IPHONE KILLER, and the one Carrigan liked the best, THE VALENTINE SLAYER. People’s faces on the Tube were rapt with a deeper concentration than usual as they scanned the latest edition of the Standard, the steady pulse of their lives hiccuping for just one moment and then returning to normal. Phone calls had come in like artillery barrage; impossible sightings and hoaxes, fake confessions and religious ravings.

  Carrigan could feel the case starting to slip away from them. There was so much they didn’t yet know. So many moments lost to them. The only thing they knew for sure was that the man standing on stage, Gabriel Otto, head of the African Action Committee, was probably the last person to see Grace Okello alive.

  Carrigan had obtained a copy of Gabriel’s photo from SOAS and shown it to Mrs Najafi in King’s Court. She had confirmed that Gabriel was the man who’d been shouting and cursing outside Grace’s door the night she was killed.

  Carrigan stared at Gabriel. His hair was cut tight against the skull, his eyes unnaturally bright as if a fire smouldered silently beneath them. He wore a neatly tailored brown suit. He was short and wiry yet gave the impression of someone bigger, something in the way he moved, a feral sort of calm and poise. Could this be Grace’s killer? Was it possible to look someone in the eyes and see the residue of their history illuminated there?

  ‘Next time they come for our children – we will be ready.’ Gabriel’s voice had soared above the maelstrom, effortlessly enunciating each syllable, the sibilants crackling against the microphone like lightning strikes. ‘Not just Kony and his men but Museveni too.’ A loud cheer rippled across the room. Several men stood up and shouted in Swahili, their arms outstretched, making shapes in the air as if too incensed for language. ‘Yes, our president who helps us with our milk and babies. Our president who hires mercenaries and sends them into the northern jungles to hunt for Kony. Who tells them, Anything you come across on the way is yours. And where are we in all this? Where do we fit in between one madman armed with the ten commandments and a machete and another armed with UN resolutions and IMF funding? It is time to take action. We must arm each and every villager. The old man who does nothing but stare at the river. The young girl who only wants to meet her boyfriend in the bush. This is the true gospel, brothers and sisters, the gospel of blood and retribution. This is how we will earn our place in heaven.’

  Gabriel bowed theatrically as the room exploded into clapping, booing, the smack of fist against flesh, a rushed and cramped pandemonium that brought a huge smile to the young man’s face.

  Carrigan watched as a group of men immediately surrounded Gabriel. Black-suited, his bodyguards or disciples, it was hard to tell which. People got up from their seats still arguing with their neighbours, trading insults in both word and gesture, gathering their things, making their way out into the frozen London night. Some tried to shake Gabriel’s hand or say something to him but the bodyguards kept him inviolable. He spoke to his congregation through the curtain of bodies like John-Paul II in his Popemobile.

  Carrigan and Geneva waited until the crowd thinned out. They scanned the room, watching the people, all of them averting their gaze except for one man, standing against a side wall, a big rangy brute with bloodshot eyes, cropped black hair and white beard. Every time Carrigan looked, the man was staring directly at him, unabashed and with a smile on his face. It wasn’t the man he’d seen outside King’s Court and near Cecilia’s flat, he was certain, but there was something vaguely familiar about him, a feeling that made the back of Carrigan’s neck itch.

  He crossed the hall, Geneva at his side as every face turned to watch them, immediately making them for what they were: white and police. As they approached Gabriel, the bodyguards seemed to contract like a curtain being pulled shut. Carrigan flashed his warrant card but the bodyguard in front of him didn’t even glance at it. He stood, arms crossed, his head round and shiny as a bowling ball, a look of surly indifference learned from the bouncer’s rulebook, plastered across his face.

  ‘We’d like to talk to Mr Otto,’ Carrigan said, his voice flat, brooking no argument, but the bodyguards didn’t budge until Gabriel himself tapped the two in front of him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘You don’t like what I’m preaching?’ he said to Carrigan, ignoring Geneva, his accent pure North London sass and glare.

  ‘I couldn’t care less about that,’ Carrigan replied. ‘This is about Grace.’

  He caught the slight squint in Gabriel’s face and the one-word command that sent the bodyguards back into formation, impenetrable as a concrete wall. He saw Gabriel disappear through the stage door, flanked by two massive acolytes. He pushed against the curtain of bodyguards, calling after Gabriel, but it was like trying to walk through a brick wall. He began to reach for his truncheon when he felt two hands, cold and hard as steel, clamp themselves around his arms and then, before he could take another breath, his feet were off the ground. The bouncer lifted him until they were eye level.

  ‘Mr Otto does not want to see you,’ he said, his breath dank and rotten like something found under a rock. Carrigan tried to twist out of the bouncer’s embrace but it felt like his arms were trapped in a vice.

  ‘Get your hands off him, now!’

  The bodyguards looked at Geneva and laughed. Carrigan stared at the bouncer’s eyes and twenty years peeled back like a curtain as he felt the blood filling his mouth again, the stench of the cell, the broken teeth scattered across the floor. The bouncer’s voice snapped him back to the present.

  ‘Please, go home, this is no place for you. This is our affair, our history, our future. None of this is your business.’

  ‘A girl has been murdered. That’s our business.’ Geneva stood to the right of Carrigan, fingers cradling her can of pepper spray, trying to slow her heart so that her voice wouldn’t tremble and falter.

  The bodyguard put Carrigan down and examined Geneva as if she were a strange dish he was surprised to find on his plate. His voice, when he spoke, was surprisingly gentle. ‘Our girls are being murdered ev
ery day back home. Kony’s troops come and rape them until they die. Then the government comes and those that have survived are accused of collaboration. This happens every day, for every week and every month of every year, and here you come and tell us a girl has been murdered and you’re all concerned and you want to talk to Mr Otto. Well, one girl is nothing. You do not live every day with death. You do not know how death becomes your life, how it loses its power when you rub shoulders with it every moment of your existence.’

  Carrigan couldn’t help thinking he’d just summed up what it was like to be a murder detective while Geneva looked stymied by the bodyguard’s eloquence and reasoning. Carrigan could see her weighing options, her hand fidgeting her belt. There was no way past the bodyguards. Gabriel was probably long gone via a back door, vanished into the London night. All Branch needed now was a race riot, accusations of racial insensitivity. He looked at Geneva and with relief saw that she’d come to the same conclusion.

  ‘Every murder. Every single body we take seriously here,’ he said. ‘Maybe if you did that over there things wouldn’t have got so out of hand.’

  The bodyguard’s fist came so fast he had no chance to duck or flinch. The blow landed square on his jaw and suddenly the world was black and silver.

  ‘Tell Gabriel I’ll be waiting for him,’ Carrigan said through a mouth filled with blood and pain. He rubbed his jaw and nodded to Geneva. They turned and walked slowly through the now empty hall, waiting for the lunge of a knife, another fist, but there was nothing, and when they entered the chill evening air it felt as if they’d been trapped inside that room for ever.

  14

  Carrigan stared up at the grey tower blocks stacked against the dismal sky. Winter was finally here; frost on the ground crunching under their feet, a chill in the air which required gloves and face protection. He took a sip of watery coffee then spat it back out, watching it melt the frost surrounding his feet. He stared back up at the towering estate, counting floors, wondering if Gabriel Otto was at this moment staring back at him from one of the high blacked-out windows, watching the team stamp their feet as they waited for tactical to arrive.

  It hadn’t been Carrigan’s idea. Branch had called him in this morning, all pained smiles and polite chit-chat, but he’d got to the point quickly enough. He’d heard about the AAC meeting, the bodyguards, the rebuff, and was sending a team to arrest Gabriel. How had Branch found out? Carrigan took out a pack of Tic-Tacs and swallowed several. It wasn’t something he wanted to consider right now.

  He waited as the tactical support team arrived and kitted up out of the back of a police van like gladiators preparing for some dark spectacle. He stood in the cold wet wind watching the spitting rain carouse off the pocked concrete buildings, the early-morning straggle of workers hunched into themselves, eyes red and bleary, setting out into another day, knowing that at the end of it they’ll return here, to the grey gloom and cramped rooms of this dying estate.

  They split into three teams. One for the stairwell, another for the lift, one outside to catch any runners. They talked and chatted for as long as possible, putting off the moment, but Carrigan could see they were all fired up and waiting to go. He remembered days when he’d arrived at work in the same state, couldn’t wait to knock heads, break doors, chase leads, but those days now existed only in memory.

  ‘We ready?’ The TAC-team commander’s voice cut through the drizzle and mist. Carrigan knew him but couldn’t remember where from, the years and cases running into one.

  The smell of piss and vomit surrounded them as they split between stairwell and lift. That the lift even worked was a miracle in itself. Nothing had been done to prettify these common spaces. There were only old chicken cartons reeking of oil and fat, broken vials cracking under their feet, graffiti so impenetrable it could have been conceptual art.

  The door splintered with one swing of the ram, snapping the morning with a scream of cracking wood. Carrigan went first, into a narrow humid hallway, books and magazines stacked up on either side of the floor, the smell of old laundry heavy in the air. He could hear the stuttered footsteps of his men behind him, see the fogging of the windows against their breath, heard shuffling and swearing in the room off to his right. He signalled the sergeant and together they took the door.

  Gabriel Otto was sitting upright in bed, bare-chested and sweat-slicked, smoking a joint. His eyes turned hard and shiny as marbles when he recognised Carrigan. The bed began to move, the sheets rippling and snagging, slowly revealing a foot, an ankle, the pale white skin of a girl, her legs blue-veined and alabaster.

  She raised her head, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes with a clenched fist and registered Carrigan and his men, blinking and staring at them as if they were alien creatures, things that weren’t meant to be seen when awake. Gabriel took another toke and laid the spliff in an ashtray beside the bed.

  ‘Put your clothes on, we’re going to the station.’ Carrigan tried not to look at the girl, her sleep-rumpled body slowly unfurling into the morning.

  ‘What’s going on, Gabriel?’ she said, her voice wispy and accented in the stuffy room. Gabriel ignored her, reached for the joint, about to take another drag, when Carrigan slapped it out of his hands.

  ‘You better get dressed.’ Carrigan smiled as he picked up a pair of trousers hanging off the back of a chair and handed them to Gabriel.

  ‘You’re making a big mistake‚’ the young man replied, struggling into his trousers.

  Carrigan threw him a shirt. ‘Get some new lines, Gabriel. Heard that one countless times.’ He looked away, disgusted. The girl grabbed Gabriel’s hand and asked him when he’d be back, her eyes milky and unfocused, still lost in dream-melt. She pulled him down and whispered something in his ear. Gabriel turned towards her, a smile lighting up his eyes, then struck her cleanly across the face.

  The sound cut through the room, through the bustle of policemen searching the flat, the buzz of the elevator and the garbled talk of neighbours gathering outside the door. The girl’s face blushed red, Gabriel’s handprint visible on her left cheek.

  Carrigan leant forward and took Gabriel’s arm, twisting it behind his back and snapping on the cuffs. He used his body as a weight to pin Gabriel to the wall, breathing heavily, feeling as if his heart was about to explode. Gabriel made some kind of clicking sound with his teeth and Carrigan brought his foot down hard on the young man’s instep, feeling a small measure of satisfaction as he let out a long agonised moan.

  15

  Ex-boyfriends can be a pain but they certainly have their uses, Geneva thought, stubbing out her cigarette. She watched the people walk by, their day unclouded by death, and though she envied them this, she knew her life could be no other way. Mothers with prams, postmen and Polish builders, a young black man talking into a mobile phone across the street from her. She looked back, sure that he’d averted his eyes the moment she looked at him, and she remembered Carrigan’s reaction outside Cecilia’s flat. She looked up but the man had gone, and she shook her head, knowing she was imagining things, putting it down to her nervousness at meeting Lee again after all these years. She smoked two more cigarettes outside his house, turning up the volume on her iPod until it was so loud she couldn’t bear it. When she stubbed out the third cigarette she knew there was no more time to prevaricate or wander round these old familiar streets. She was here because a girl was lying dead in a West London morgue. She was here because no one else thought that Grace’s thesis had anything to do with her murder.

  She knew Carrigan didn’t think much of her theory. He still saw it as a sex murder, lust and compulsion not politics the motivator. She didn’t think he trusted her. Branch’s involvement had pretty much guaranteed that. Yet it was strange how every time Africa came up Carrigan’s face pursed and his lips turned white. Was this something she needed to put into her report to Branch? She crushed the cigarette under her shoe until the tobacco and paper disintegrated. She thought of her mother’s constant tirades against
collaborators and cowards, the usual dinnertime refrain over a couple of bottles of wine. Her mother would never forgive her. Would she be able to forgive herself, she wondered as she walked past the swinging gate and up to the front door. Are there acts you commit which cannot be forgiven – even by yourself?

  The doorbell chimed a melody of something trite and heard on too many adverts. She made an effort to stand straight, stop her hands from fidgeting, her voice from cracking.

  Ten years since she’d last seen Lee. Ten years and different lifetimes. But here she was. He was surprised but not that surprised when she’d called late last night. Lee could never really be surprised, she remembered, not when you believe the world is as unpredictable and chaotic as he did. Or maybe he’d changed. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been when they first met at East Anglia. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been when they moved back to London, set up in a flat off the Kilburn High Road, her walking the uniformed beat, day in, day out, in wind and rain and snow, and him packing his leather bag, furiously writing notes through the night, calling sources, off to another war zone to write his pieces on misery and suffering and pain.

  But he knew Africa, she reminded herself, fighting the urge to light another cigarette, and, last night, going through the notes she’d made at the African Action Committee meeting, going through Grace’s folders full of references and citations, she realised how hopelessly lost she was in all this. To understand Grace’s death she needed to understand the context of her life.

  ‘Oh my God, Geneva,’ Lee said, opening the door, his face still a young man’s, breaking into a smile she remembered so well, a plump pink baby cradled in his arms.

  ‘Lee,’ she replied, and for a moment neither said a thing, standing frozen on either side of the door.