A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  Gabriel put his hands on the table, his fingers skinny as pencils. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  Geneva leant forward and pushed a stray hair neatly behind her ear. ‘When did you last see Grace?’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ he replied, his voice steady and even. ‘Maybe the day before she was killed, maybe the week before . . . who keeps track?’

  ‘How about on the night of her murder?’ Geneva kept her hands on the table, noticing Gabriel staring at her fingers, admiring her nails. ‘We have witnesses who saw you, who heard you arguing with Grace the night she was killed. Those courtyards carry sound. You were Sunday night’s entertainment, the building’s very own reality show. Then she threw you out. You banged on her door and shouted and threatened to kill her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a relationship if you didn’t threaten to kill the little woman every now and then.’ He glanced at Carrigan.

  ‘Except this time you went ahead and did it.’

  Gabriel sighed theatrically, his eyes roving Geneva’s neckline. ‘You’ve got nothing,’ he said, his voice like a kid who didn’t get the birthday present he’d been expecting. ‘How do I know that? Because I did nothing apart from argue with her and bang on her door a few times.’

  ‘So you admit you were there that night,’ Carrigan said.

  Geneva tapped out a cigarette and offered Gabriel one. ‘Just as long as you don’t destroy my pack.’ She lit it for him, his hand cupping hers before she could pull away.

  ‘I told you. I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘You need to convince us of that. Everything says you did it. The witnesses, the forensics, the video footage.’

  Gabriel slammed his hand flat on the table. ‘When I left she was still alive. Alive enough to fucking shout and call me a collaborator.’

  Geneva’s eyes flicked up. ‘Collaborator? What did she mean by that? Who did she think you were working for?’

  They both caught the momentary look of panic in Gabriel’s expression. ‘Okay, okay, fuck it‚’ he finally said, looking down at the table. ‘If I tell you what happened then you’ll let me go, right?’

  Geneva nodded.

  ‘We were supposed to be going out that night but at the last minute she called to say she couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Seems you’re not short of company,’ Carrigan interrupted, liking Gabriel less and less. ‘Why didn’t you take one of your other girlfriends?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Gabriel replied. ‘White girls are good for sex,’ looking directly at Geneva. ‘A bit of fun here and there. Grace was different. She was from home.’

  ‘You mean Harlesden?’ Geneva flashed her teeth.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Gabriel snapped.

  ‘Why do you call Uganda home, Derek, when you were born and raised in North London?’ Carrigan was impressed by her change of tone, hard and sharp one moment, the next sounding like a kindly schoolteacher, the type you’d spill all your secrets to.

  ‘My father is Ugandan,’ he replied. ‘Your country brought him here to work, he never had a choice. Africa will always be home to black-skinned people, makes no difference where you ship us to.’

  Geneva didn’t want to hear his brand of fashionable rebellion; she was sure it went down well with the home-county kids at SOAS but both she and Carrigan had seen enough not to be moved by rhetoric and imprecation. ‘Tell me about Sunday night, Derek.’

  ‘Don’t call me that again.’

  Geneva smiled. ‘I promise.’

  Gabriel seemed to take this at face value. ‘There was a Ugandan band playing at the Empire that Grace wanted to see but it was sold out. I’d managed to get a couple of tickets. Then she calls me up that afternoon, says she can’t make it. Just like that. I said‚ What the fuck? She told me she was meeting someone and then she hung up on me.’

  ‘So you went over to King’s Court to talk to her?’

  Gabriel nodded. ‘She was seeing someone else, I was sure of it. Why else break such a date?’ Carrigan could think of a multitude of reasons but kept his mouth shut; Gabriel’s bitterness towards Grace was serving them well. ‘She let me into the flat. She was all dressed up. She’d never dressed like that for me.’

  ‘Dressed how?’ Geneva stubbed out her cigarette, her eyes never leaving Gabriel’s.

  ‘She was wearing traditional clothes, her mother’s. It’s a sign of respect back home. I asked her who was she seeing tonight, who was so fucking important? She refused to tell me, asked me to leave.’

  ‘So you got mad at her, well that’s understandable,’ Carrigan muttered conspiratorially.

  ‘Of course I got mad. I paid a lot for those tickets, even booked a restaurant for afterwards.’

  ‘Lucky girl didn’t know what she was missing,’ Carrigan replied.

  ‘I said to her, tell me who you’re meeting, all dressed up like that,’ Gabriel continued, oblivious now to the detectives, his mind reliving the evening’s slight. ‘She just stood there shaking her head, saying‚ You don’t understand. I told her I understood fine. She said‚ You never understand. And then she started laying into me about the AAC, saying I was only doing it to get girls, that I had no heart, that it didn’t matter to me what was going on in Uganda. I told her I wasn’t leaving. I wanted to see who her new man was. She told me it wasn’t a boyfriend. She said it was work. I laughed. This is not an original excuse. This is half past six on a Sunday evening. She said she was meeting an important source, someone who knew stuff they shouldn’t. She said the man only agreed to meet at her flat. She said this would bring it all together. I didn’t believe her. I called her a liar and a whore. She pushed me out of the room. She slammed the door and said she never wanted to see me again. I banged on her door and told her exactly what kind of girl she was.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I went home. I called Greta, this girl I sometimes hang with, and we went to the show. She didn’t get it but we had a nice time and I went back to her place. That’s all. I never saw Grace again until I switched on the news.’

  Gabriel crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. The room was cloudy with smoke and Carrigan felt that old hunger rising up inside him as he thought about what Gabriel had said. ‘Try this for a minute,’ he suggested. ‘Imagine you’re the policeman and I’m the one feeding you this bullshit story. Would you believe me?’

  Gabriel shrugged, his shoulders angular and spiky, tiny knots of bone.

  ‘You weren’t particularly upset when we saw you at the AAC meeting.’

  ‘Don’t give a fuck for her any more. She used me. She fucking used me and then when she had someone better she let me go. You think I’m going to cry over something like that?’

  ‘What do you mean she used you? You sound like a girl,’ Carrigan said.

  ‘Not like that, man. She used me for my connections. For her fucking thesis. She cosied up to me, came to all the meetings, hooked up with a lot of émigrés from back home. She was always looking for information, always working out who could help her and who couldn’t.’ Gabriel’s smile was strange and unsettling. He leant back in the chair. ‘At first I really thought she had another boyfriend, then I realised no, she was right when she said she didn’t care about that. It was this source that mattered to her more.’

  ‘And she didn’t tell you anything more about this man she was supposed to meet, this “source”?’

  ‘Nah. And if she did, by that point I wasn’t listening. All I know is she seemed excited, and Grace only ever got excited when it was about her work. It was like some fucking mission for her.’

  Geneva opened the green file lying on the table, thinking back to how Cecilia had used almost the same words to describe Grace. She took a grainy photograph from the file, looked at it for a few seconds, then slid it towards Gabriel.

  Gabriel sprang back and almost toppled from his chair, as if the photograph were a snake thrown across the table.

  ‘So, you do recognise him?’ Geneva said, watching
Gabriel’s face drop for the first time that afternoon.

  Carrigan briefly glimpsed an image of a black man with a small moustache and receding hairline. They hadn’t talked about this before starting the interview. He wondered who the man was as he watched Gabriel looking everywhere but the photo. Geneva was biting the inside of her lip, trying to keep her face blank, but there was no disguising the glee in her eyes.

  ‘Of course I recognise him,’ Gabriel said, still avoiding the photograph. ‘Find me anyone from Uganda who doesn’t recognise the Black-Throated Wind.’

  Carrigan looked at the photo, seeing a grainy image of a man who could have been any of a thousand men. Where had she got it from? Was this Branch’s idea or had she found it in the box of Grace’s work notes? Was she still pursuing her thesis theory despite his objections and all the evidence to the contrary?

  ‘Tell me about him.’ Geneva placed her hands on the table, fingers slowly spreading like a fan. Gabriel scraped his chair forward. He took a deep breath, turned over the photo so that only the gleaming white back reflected into the room. ‘The Bible says thou shalt not murder, not, as is commonly thought, thou shalt not kill. You understand the difference?’

  ‘I understand that everyone has a different understanding of the difference,’ Carrigan replied. Geneva looked at him, a smile of mild surprise perched on the left side of her mouth.

  ‘Well Ngomo certainly understood,’ Gabriel continued. ‘The Black-Throated Wind.’ He said the name with a chilly reverence, a name only to be whispered in shadowed rooms and subterranean spaces. ‘You know why the Bible speaks to us Africans? Why we believe in it as a literal thing?’ He didn’t give them a chance to answer, in full oratory mode now, his fists clenching the table. ‘The Bible speaks to us because we live in a biblical world, a world of flood, famine and plague. The Bible is never metaphor for us, it is always a literal telling, the flesh and blood of God. You need to understand this if you want to understand Uganda. If war is your god then the battlefield becomes your church, the blood and bullets your sacraments. A man like Ngomo who has no ideology, no politics, whose world isn’t filled with complications and mitigations – for a man like that, it is easy to succeed. With only one road ahead, you make many miles.’

  ‘Do you think that Grace’s source may have been Ngomo? Do you think it’s possible Ngomo set up a meeting and killed her?’ Geneva turned the photo over, General Ngomo somehow looking more sinister now, his face peppered with stray ash from the table.

  Gabriel laughed as if he’d just heard the world’s funniest joke. He shook his head. ‘You cops are so stupid.’ He took Geneva’s empty cigarette pack and began stripping it. ‘I’ve told you everything I can about that night; now either release me or charge me and let me see a lawyer.’

  There was a collision on the south side of the Great West Road, almost directly opposite his flat. A still-steaming snarl of metal and glass spread across two lanes. The rain had turned from drizzle to downpour. Red and blue lights cut through the mist and haze like lighthouse beacons. Carrigan locked his car, briefly considered crossing over to the accident site where two constables were stretching crime-scene tape while medics crouched on the ground, their arms in frenzied movement, their faces intently clenched. But there was no need for him there. They were doing what they could. The traffic was filtered through the left lane and already there was a chorus of horns, a symphony of different timbres and tones clashing against the bullet spray siren of the approaching ambulance.

  He could see the vehicle involved, a family SUV, the tyres shredded, thin black tendrils hanging from the undercarriage. A dark smear of blood on the asphalt was already washing away in the rain. Slivers of glass sparkled and shone in the paramedics’ searchlights like tiny stars against the deep black ripple of tarmac. There was blood on the inside of the windscreen, shrill and bright compared to everything else in the night. In the back seat there were children’s toys scattered and upside down, handbags and summer hats. He tried not to stare but there’s no way you can look away. He could see it in the cars that were passing at a crawl, their occupants’ eyes all turned towards the scene trying to glimpse something while hoping not to. They’d drive a little slower tonight, he knew, hold their wives’ and husbands’ hands after dinner, have trouble falling asleep hearing their child in the cot next to the bed breathing a little too heavily. But tomorrow they’d be driving again as they always did, convinced of their immortality. He didn’t begrudge them their curiosity; in the deepest nights he knew this was part of the reason he’d become a policeman. He turned, shaking the images from his eyes, and that’s when he saw the car.

  It was the fact that they weren’t looking at the accident which made him notice them. Parked on the other side of the flyover, the two occupants shrouded in dark and breath mist. From where they were sitting they had a clear view of his front door. He tried to think of other reasons for them being there, then crossed the road and headed towards his flat.

  He’d bought it for the view. That was the joke he told everyone who came here. Except it wasn’t a joke. The three-bedroom terraced house sat alongside the Great West Road overlooking the Hogarth roundabout and M4 flyover. His living-room window looked out onto the grey stretch of the approach ramp as it spiralled high into the drizzled sky. The traffic never stopped. The city never stopped. He liked nothing better than to sit in the evenings and stare out at the snake of cars hitting the ramp at sunset, the majority heading for the airport, for queues and flights, sunshine and wonder. It had been twenty years since he’d been abroad but he loved looking at their faces, rapt in streetlight fix, staring exultantly at the black road ahead and the sky above as if they’d already forgotten who they were.

  He picked up his mail and entered the flat. He sensed a difference as soon as he stepped into the living room. He stopped and looked, sniffed. Nothing he could point a finger to, a subtle disturbance of air, a vague unfamiliar smell. He felt the sweat rolling down his back as he checked the front room and bedroom but everything seemed in place. He stared through the window out into the night but the car that had been parked there was gone, a pale scar where it had sealed the asphalt from the rain. He checked the other rooms and then made himself a drink. It was only when he was sitting in his chair that he saw it.

  A small brown envelope lying underneath the phone. He put his glass down slowly, careful not to make a sound. He walked over, pulled out a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket, snapped them on and picked up the envelope.

  There was no name written on the front and it hadn’t been sealed. He felt his fingers tremble as he took out the photographs and stared at them. A picture of him standing outside Ben’s house a few days ago. Another of him greeting Ursula at the door. He glanced to the left, thinking he’d heard something, but it was just the boards settling. There was another photo of him saying goodbye to Ben by his front door. Then a new set. Susan and Penny, Ben and Ursula’s daughters, on their way to school, standing around the playground, waiting to be picked up outside the gates. Carrigan took a deep breath, flicked through the photos again and carefully placed them back in the envelope.

  He poured himself a long drink of whisky and sat down in front of Louise. He touched her photo, feeling a slight electric charge leap across his fingers, and told her about his day, the weather and the lunch he’d had – omitting the three Dime bars – and then he told her like he always did how much he loved her, how the days dragged interminably without her. Finally, he kissed his fingertips and pressed them against the cold glass. He took a deep breath, feeling her in every crevice and fold of his heart, then made himself a microwave meal which he binned half-eaten, the taste bitter and lingering. He checked the flat again, room by room, until he was satisfied there was nothing else amiss, and then he moved the armchair so that it was facing the door. He sat there until morning, waiting and watching.

  17

  More paperwork. Geneva loved it. Most other cops dreaded the moment they had to sit behind a de
sk and go through pages and pages of seemingly pointless information. They would rather be out on the street, chasing the case, but Geneva knew the case lay in these pages and not out in the greater city beyond.

  The music screamed loud, too loud, on her earphones, drowning out the drone of the cranes outside. The light glowed green and sickly no matter how many fluorescents and table lamps were switched on. The pages began to merge, words and dates no longer differentiated among the mass of notes, ticks, coffee stains, ash and heat. She kept rubbing ointment on her fingers: the stress of the last few days making her skin break out in rashes, red patches and migrating itches.

  Grace had begun her thesis with the intention of covering ten or so rebel movements from different African countries. It was a compare-and-contrast exercise. Charles Taylor. Joseph Kony. Robert Mugabe. The names were familiar and not, sound-grabs caught in passing from TV sets and stray conversations. She read long detailed descriptions of factional dissent, bush tactics, demographic fixing. She flicked and faded, faded and flicked, Coke keeping her wired, too far to sneak out for cigarettes.

  She was going through Grace’s recent notes when she noticed that something had changed in her approach. She flicked back, scanned and skimmed the previous term’s work, noted that the change had occurred around last January.

  She leant back and thought about this. She shuffled songs until she found one that suited her. She tried to recall what both the professor and Cecilia had said. She thumbed through her notebook, seeing the scrawled reminders of the two interviews, desperately hoping she’d written it down.

  Miles Cummings had mentioned that Grace’s appearance and performance had begun to change when she came back from the Christmas holidays. Geneva took a long drink of Coke and flicked to her notes for Cecilia. There it was again: the Christmas holidays.

  Grace had gone off to the Christmas holidays the same Grace she had always been, yet when she came back everything was different. Not only that, but the scope of her thesis began to change radically. From looking at ten different rebel groups, Grace had focused on just one: a small splinter faction of the Lord’s Resistance Army led by General Lawrence Ngomo, aka the Black-Throated Wind.