A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  ‘It sounds like she was after a particular bit of information. Do you know what it was?’

  ‘No. She never spoke about her thesis, even to me. It was her little secret, she used to say.’

  Carrigan stood absolutely still, the rain soaking through his coat and plastering his shirt to his skin. He’d so quickly dismissed Geneva’s theory about a connection between Grace’s work and her murder. He couldn’t tell if it was because the evidence hadn’t pointed to that conclusion or because he’d suspected that Branch had fed her the story to discredit him.

  ‘I followed her,’ Cecilia continued, her voice drawn and tired. ‘I’d waited until she left class that morning and I could tell from her mood, her expression, that she was going to meet this source.’

  Carrigan suddenly leant forward, startling Cecilia. ‘Did you say source? Was that the word Grace used?’

  ‘She called him her source. I thought she was being overly dramatic, like this was Watergate or something.’

  ‘Did the man turn up?’

  ‘Right on time. He approached her table, Grace got up, they shook hands, exchanged greetings and then both sat down. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, there was some kind of birthday party going on, loud music, but they were talking heatedly, friendly but fast. It seemed like they were getting on well.’

  Carrigan felt his heart beat in his chest, the slow fade and pulse of his own life. ‘What did this man look like?’

  ‘Acholi. Under twenty definitely, maybe only seventeen or eighteen. The moment I saw him I knew he was wrong. There was something about him. Those eyes. Everyone from my country has seen that stare before. There was nothing there. Like a ghost. He had short dreads and wore an orange T-shirt and torn jeans. I sat there hoping, wishing, that Grace would sense something too and I’d see her get up, say thank you, and walk off into the rest of her life.’

  ‘But she kept talking to him?’

  ‘For half an hour at least. Then, at the end, something strange happened.’ Cecilia looked around at the empty towpath. ‘This man, he reached his hand out across the table and Grace took it. She held his hand in hers and that’s when . . .’ She looked away, snared by some sound. ‘. . . That was when he saw me. He held Grace’s hand and stared directly into my eyes and it was like he was judging me right there and then and he’d found me wanting but that wasn’t the worst thing . . .’ Carrigan saw Cecilia shudder as she stared down at her feet, ‘The worst thing was when he smiled . . . his teeth . . . they were sharp, pointed . . . like . . . like the teeth of a vampire.’

  20

  The bar was dark and dingy, the way bars were in his memory, but this was just the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. There was only one occupied table, four male students, drunk already, their voices rising with each sip of their beers. Carrigan walked over to the bar and stood there for a couple of minutes as the barman resolutely ignored him, chatting on a mobile phone and stacking bottled ales.

  Carrigan was glad for the pause, it gave him time to think, to clear his head which was still reeling from Cecilia’s revelation. The music screamed with wailing guitars, the smell of old beer and chips hung in the dull air. He remembered another student bar, very much like this one, the three of them sitting around a table like conspirators, degrees in pockets, planning their trip to Africa. He felt a sharp pain rattle through his chest. He missed David so much and all these years of pretending he didn’t, of trying to carve out a new life for himself, made the pain all that much more acute now.

  ‘What can I get you?’ The barman looked at Carrigan with barely concealed antipathy. He was tall and wore long blond dreadlocks slung across his shoulder like a lion’s mane. His T-shirt declared capitalism is dead and his face was decorated with hoops and piercings, tattooed bar codes and silver rings.

  Carrigan pulled out his warrant card, watching the barman’s eyes turn narrow and guarded when he saw what it was. The music got louder, Carrigan sure the barman had just raised the volume. His ears began to ring, a high-pitched whine that was a constant reminder of Africa. ‘Can you turn it down, please?’

  The barman looked up from his chores. ‘Listen, old man,’ his accent pure Notting Hill, public schools and Sunday-afternoon cricket matches. ‘If it’s too loud for you, you can always leave.’

  Carrigan bit his lip, turned and walked over to the jukebox. The drunks stared up from their pints as he took the cable and wrenched the plug out of the wall with one quick snap of his wrist. The music died mid-song. The students shot him dirty looks but, drunk as they were, even they could see the tightness in his features, the thinness of his lips, and decided that, actually, no music was fine by them.

  Carrigan reached the bar and placed both his arms across the wooden surface. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Flash.’

  ‘That’s what you use to clean the toilet with. What’s your real name?’

  Flash looked left and right then whispered ‘Tarquin’ so quietly Carrigan barely caught it.

  ‘Hmm,’ Carrigan snorted, ‘I think I prefer Flash. There was a birthday party here two weeks ago, Friday the seventeenth. I need to get in touch with whoever was organising it.’

  The barman tossed back his mane of hair and looked down at the scratched surface of the bar. ‘Can’t remember,’ he replied, turning his back to Carrigan and started stacking bottles again. Carrigan laid Grace’s photo flat on the bar. ‘How about her? She was here that Friday. I don’t suppose you remember serving her?’

  Flash turned back and glared at Carrigan. He picked something out of his teeth with a long curved fingernail. Carrigan could smell the man now, unwashed clothes, stale smoke and something else, far less pleasant, underneath. ‘What? You expect I’m some fucking memory man?’ Flash replied. ‘You know how many people come here on a Friday night?’

  ‘But a big birthday party, lots of tips, you’d remember that surely?’ Carrigan could feel the moment slipping, he’d come here flushed with hope that Cecilia’s statement would be the break they’d been waiting, praying, for but now he realised he’d been as foolish as his most callow constable.

  ‘I do my job, serve up the drinks, anything else – not my concern.’ Flash turned back to the refrigerators and continued stacking.

  ‘Come here,’ Carrigan said, his voice thick with authority. Flash slowly turned and shuffled up to the bar. Carrigan reached forward and grabbed the young man by one of his long dreadlocks. He immediately regretted it, the hank of hair greasy and sticky in his grip, revulsion crawling up his throat, but he held on. ‘You know cops have this extra sense thing,’ he said, twisting the young man’s hair, ‘like a sixth sense. Like how I can see your future by just looking into your eyes.’

  Flash struggled against Carrigan’s grip but there was nothing he could do. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Carrigan replied. ‘And guess what? I see you with short hair, a suit and a BlackBerry in your hand. A nice blonde wife from Hampshire and a flat in Limehouse close to your office in the city.’

  Something in Flash’s eyes recoiled as if he’d inadvertently caught a glimpse of his true self in a passing mirror.

  ‘Serving people, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Must be hard these days,’ Carrigan continued, changing the subject, ‘what, with girls looking much older than they actually are. Would be easy to make a simple mistake, serve someone under-age, get yourself into a lot of trouble.’ He let go of Flash’s hair and wiped his hand on his trousers, registering the barman’s eyes, the way they widened then shut down. ‘Now you wouldn’t want me sending in uniforms on a regular basis, making ID checks, would you? Might drive some of your customers away, having the police in here all the time.’

  Flash’s face blanched; he tried to hide it but it was no good. ‘What do you want?’ he said under his breath.

  Carrigan pointed up at the CCTV camera. ‘How long do you keep the security tapes before you recycle them?’

  The barman smiled. ‘Wiped every week,’ he replied with great
satisfaction. Carrigan held his jaw rigid, tried not to let the disappointment show.

  ‘But you do remember the birthday party, right?’

  The barman shrugged. ‘What, someone snuck a fag? You’re here to solve the mystery of the missing Marlboro?’

  ‘No,’ Carrigan calmly replied pointing to the photo of Grace. ‘This girl was murdered last week and we believe she met her killer here.’

  The barman stopped what he was doing, stared at Carrigan as if suspecting this was some kind of joke, then picked up the photo and studied it. ‘I know the day you’re talking about but I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t remember her.’

  Carrigan nodded. ‘You don’t happen to know the name of the person whose birthday it was?’

  Flash put the photo back down, actually thought about this for a second or two. ‘’Fraid not. Some girl, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Shit!’ Carrigan slammed his fist down against the bar, making Flash jump as if he’d been on the receiving end of an electric shock. Carrigan looked down at the photo of Grace, silently mouthing an apology, and started to gather up his things.

  ‘But you should check Facebook,’ Flash said.

  Carrigan looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Facebook. You know what that is, old man?’ He smiled, revealing teeth yellow as corn husks.

  Carrigan nodded though he’d never actually been on the site himself and had no real idea what its purpose was.

  ‘They posted all the photos there. Sent us a link. There’ll be the name of the lucky girl at the top of the page.’

  But it wasn’t her name that Carrigan was interested in any more as he waited for the surly barman to copy the address off his laptop.

  He rushed into the incident room, his jacket all rumpled, hair messed up by the wind and rain.

  ‘Sir?’ DC Singh raised her head from her desk, flicked back her hair. ‘I was just wondering . . .’

  ‘Not now‚’ Carrigan cut her off, marched past Berman and Jennings and entered his office. He’d left the window open and one quarter of the room was covered in rainwater. He put his coffee down on the table, the smell making him feel human again. He could see the others staring through the glass partition, wondering what was up, but he ignored them, booted up his computer and sat there feet tapping, his fingers unable to sit still as he waited. He took a sip of the coffee, restraining himself, wanting to make it last, and thought about David again, the student bar bringing back sour memories, and then when his browser was ready he typed in the Facebook link that Flash had given him.

  He thought it would be simple. He thought it would be easy. He thought all he needed to do was type in the address and he’d find what he was looking for.

  But first he had to sign up. There was a box on the right-hand side of the screen asking for his personal details. He typed slowly: name, username, password, confirm password . . . then clicked. The screen refreshed but it was the same screen. He stared at it, frustrated, not sure what he’d done wrong. His password was highlighted in red, he must have typed it differently the second time. He corrected the mistake and pressed enter.

  Nothing. The screen refreshed and told him there was something wrong with his fields. He shook his head, ground his feet into the floor and re-entered all the information from scratch. This time the site accepted his registration but just as the new page was loading the browser crashed.

  He refreshed it and entered his details for the fourth time. Watched as a new page unscrolled in front of him. There were so many options, so many boxes to fill, and what the hell was a ‘profile’ anyway? He tried entering the address he’d been given but the site kept demanding he create a profile first. He started filling out the form, ran out of time, the page refreshed, and he lost all the data he’d inputted.

  ‘Shit!’ He punched the keyboard in frustration, catching the end of his coffee cup and sending it flying across the desk, covering the computer in thick sweet liquid. He cursed, reached into his drawers for some tissues and tried to soak up the worst of the mess but it seemed to just make it spread faster and there was now an acrid burning smell coming from his hard drive. He got up, brushed the coffee off his trousers and stuck his head through the door. ‘Berman!’ he shouted, watching as the constables snapped their heads up then quickly back down when they registered his expression.

  Berman got onto the site in less than a minute. Carrigan stood behind him, taking deep breaths, telling himself this was probably nothing, another dead-end, no reason to get too excited.

  ‘You know how Facebook works?’ Berman looked up from the screen.

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ Carrigan replied. ‘Just see if they’ve posted photos of the birthday party.’

  Berman nodded, his left hand shooting down and worrying the ends of his prayer shawl. His other hand skimmed across the keyboard, clicking furiously. ‘Two hundred and forty-four of them.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Carrigan shook his head.

  ‘Digital cameras,’ Berman replied. ‘People just snap away, doesn’t matter what they’re snapping.’

  A bit like mobile phones and Twitter, Carrigan thought, people talking just for the sake of talking, yet it was this very randomness he was pinning his hopes on. He watched as Berman clicked and a new window opened, a prompt asking whether they wanted to see the pictures individually or as a slideshow.

  ‘One by one – and slowly,’ Carrigan said, pulling up a chair and taking a seat next to Berman.

  Berman clicked photo after photo. The birthday girl was blonde and lovely. Carrigan felt something in him ache – she reminded him of Louise the first time they’d met, across an interview table, her beauty untarnished by the clients she represented, her voice the only thing he could hear that day.

  Most of the photos were blurry, indistinct, people smeared in bouts of movement or shot in such close-up all he could see was bad skin and gleaming teeth. They looked so young these students, so unencumbered by life.

  Berman quickly flicked through a set taken at the birthday table, endless bottles of wine and half-filled glasses surrounding the group. ‘Faster,’ Carrigan ordered, tapping his foot, impatient, wondering whether this was all another crazy waste of time when he suddenly grabbed Berman’s arm and said, ‘Stop.’

  There she was. Grace. Sitting at a table, a huge smile on her face, caught in the margins of the photo. Carrigan felt his heart speed up, saw that Berman was now staring at the screen with a new concentration. They both looked at the shadowed form of the man’s back. The man sitting opposite Grace. Her killer.

  The party had started to break up and the photographer was now moving around the room. Berman flicked through the next sequence but there was nothing but smiles, misty eyes and raised toasts. Then he stopped, staring at the screen, holding his breath. Carrigan pushed his chair forward and leant across Berman. ‘Oh my God.’

  They were staring at a photo of the birthday girl. She was standing to the right of the frame, holding a bottle of champagne and the waist of a young man. But it wasn’t that which drew the two detectives’ eyes, it was the background.

  They could see the back of Grace’s head, her luxurious bounty of hair, one hand raised in the middle of some unknowable gesture. Across from her sat a young black male, his face illuminated by the camera flash.

  ‘Can we get this any bigger?’

  Berman clicked some keys and the picture opened up in a new browser window. He clicked and panned until the man’s face was at the centre of the photo.

  Carrigan blinked twice as he finally stared into the killer’s face. He looked so young, terribly young, that at first Carrigan felt a slight disappointment, but there was something about his eyes, the more you looked at them the more they seemed to be looking at you.

  As he stared at the image of Grace’s killer he saw the eyes which had stared back at him that first day outside King’s Court.

  Part Two

  Back Then . . .

  Time began to move in strange currents, simu
ltaneously speeding up and slowing down as Jack opened the car door and saw the soldiers’ guns shaking in their drunken hands, the flare of birds tearing the night sky above them.

  They’d been told about these sudden roadblocks – hushed voices in their Kampala hotel relating stories of miraculous escapes, ugly situations diffused with a timely joke. He hoped this was all it was, another all-purpose story to reel out at future dinner parties.

  ‘Passports!’ The lieutenant was younger than them but the oldest of his group. He looked barely past puberty. He gestured with his rifle and watched as Ben and David got out of the car and took their place next to Jack in the clearing. The other soldiers stood by the roadblock passing a bottle of murky liquid among themselves and laughing, their voices echoing through the jungle night.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ Ben whispered as he handed his passport to the lieutenant.

  Jack saw David mumbling to himself, his head hanging down and the small blue book fluttering in his hands as if it were some rare butterfly longing for the sky.

  The lieutenant flicked through their passports, pressing his face close to the pages as if this would divine the truth of these items. When he got to Ben’s and saw the folded money, he paused, and Jack held his breath, watching the lieutenant’s eyes look up and find Ben.

  ‘You must think we are animals,’ he said, his voice surprisingly soft and melodic.

  Before Ben could reply the lieutenant turned to his men and barked an order and suddenly they were inside the car, going through their stuff, throwing things out onto the dark muddy track.