A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  ‘We are doing something. We’re following viable leads.’

  Branch shook his head sadly. ‘I said look like we’re doing something. I’m sure you’re aware of the difference. This is no longer just about you, Carrigan. I’m getting fucking pressure you wouldn’t believe because this fucking video happened to have been filmed on our patch.’ Branch looked down, concentrating on his papers, scribbling furiously. ‘Do you have anything to say, Miller?’

  Carrigan turned his head, caught Geneva trying to avoid his eyes. ‘I . . . I agree with Carrigan,’ she replied hesitantly, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘I think it’ll drive our suspect under.’ She finally looked at Carrigan but there was nothing he could read in her expression and he didn’t bother acknowledging her.

  Branch took off his glasses. The sound of the rain punctuated the silence in the room, each drop like the heartbeat of the world. ‘Well, it’s already set up for tomorrow morning, nothing I can do about it now.’

  ‘There was never was anything you could about it, was there?’ Carrigan pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘Who’s pressuring you? The Ugandans?’ He glared at Branch but the super was staring through the window. ‘Why the fuck are they so interested in our case?’

  ‘I wish it was just that, Carrigan,’ Branch replied. ‘Believe me, this is something I have as little control over as you do.’ Branch coughed into his hand. ‘I’ll see you at the press conference.’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’ Carrigan’s voice was stronger than he’d intended. ‘I’m meeting a DI in Peckham tomorrow, following a real lead. I’m not going to fuck that up for a stupid piece of theatre to please your bosses.’

  Branch was smiling now, a thin serpentine smirk that stopped Carrigan in his tracks. ‘Which is exactly why I’ve asked Detective Miller to stand in for you.’ Branch finished writing something and evened the pages out, tapping them squarely on the table.

  Carrigan stared at Geneva but she looked just as surprised as he was, her eyes blinking fast. He shook his head and left the room without saying another word.

  23

  Carrigan read the grease-splattered menu though he knew every item on it by heart. He’d been coming to this small Chinese restaurant for as many years as he could remember, though Louise had never liked it, preferring one of the trendier establishments up the road. But he liked the dinginess, the steamed-up windows, the waiter who was always popping down the road to the local casino between orders, the tourists put off by the dangling strings of bright orange and yellow intestines hanging in the window, and the cough-wracked cook presiding over the soup by the entrance.

  He nodded over his favourite waiter, a skinny pock-marked twenty-year-old with pale eyes and ferocious weed breath, and ordered a plate of Ho Fun dry, won ton soup and chilli dumplings.

  His food arrived and he started feeling better, the familiar wallpaper and unsmiling faces making him feel at home, the closest he ever got anyway.

  And then he saw her coming in, holding something in her hands, talking to the waiter, his long bony arm pointing towards Carrigan’s table.

  She was the last person he wanted to see right now so why did he feel a sudden quickening as he saw her approach, unconsciously rubbing his beard free of crumbs and finally noticing what it was she was holding in her hands.

  ‘I thought you might need one.’ Geneva placed the small coffee cup in front of him. ‘A triple,’ she added, ‘from that place you like.’

  He was about to lay into her, his face tightening, and then he smelled the coffee and all those feelings were quickly washed away.

  Geneva sat down slowly, still unable to meet his eyes, doing everything she could, sorting through her things, playing with her drink, staring at the unfamiliar, chaotic restaurant. ‘Jennings told me you’d be here.’

  ‘Good coffee,’ he replied, taking a sip, feeling the caffeine kick through his system. ‘Now tell me what you told Branch.’

  She lay her hands flat, curling up her fingers at the stickiness of the table mat, surprised by his sudden brusqueness but knowing she deserved it. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, flustered, squeezed into a corner table, the heat and smell making her dizzy. ‘I didn’t know Branch was going to spring that on you, I swear. I didn’t tell him anything that would compromise the investigation.’ She paused, trying to gauge his reaction but his face was buried in the menu. ‘Or that would compromise you.’

  He looked up, thinking about this, and waved her qualms away with his hand. ‘No need to apologise.’ He knew he’d been too snappy with her, that she’d been played like he had and that there was nothing to gain by making an enemy out of her. ‘I should have realised he’d have something like this planned.’

  She took a sip of coffee, wiped her top lip. ‘He’s asked me to do the press conference but I told him no.’

  Carrigan was impressed by the steel in her voice, the cold gleam of her gaze. ‘You should do it,’ he replied. ‘Don’t let my problems with Branch get in the way of your career.’

  She was surprised by his words, searching for hidden meanings or slights, but there were none she could see. ‘If you don’t want me to . . .’

  ‘Nonsense. It’ll be good for you to experience what one of those circuses is like. Nothing to be gained by going against Branch.’ He paused, looking up at the fuzzy TV. ‘Not for you, anyway.’

  ‘You really think the press conference is a bad idea?’

  Carrigan put the menu down. ‘It’s not a great one.’ He called over the waiter with a practised flick of the wrist. ‘But Branch is half right, I just don’t like anyone telling me how to run my investigation. Especially as it’s my head on the line and not Branch’s if this fucks up.’

  ‘I don’t think I realised what I was getting myself into.’ A shade of doubt crossed her face then just as quickly disappeared.

  ‘I don’t think any of us do, ever,’ he replied but it seemed to her he was thinking about other things when he said it, his eyes staring up towards the yellow ceiling. ‘You hungry?’

  She nodded – the stress of the day, the smells around her – horrified at the thought that perhaps he could hear her stomach rumbling.

  Carrigan slid over the menu but as far as she could see it was written in Cantonese with no English explanations or useful diagrams. He told her about finding the suspect’s photo on Facebook as he jabbed his finger at different entries, saying ‘try this’ or ‘I think you’ll love this’ until it all began to spin and flicker and she asked him to order. She watched as he told the waiter what he wanted, the man making quick slashing marks on his white pad. She thought about what had gone on in Branch’s office and what she’d found out before that. She knew it was probably the last thing Carrigan wanted to hear.

  ‘I know you’ve dismissed this, I know all that . . . but I’m convinced that Ngomo is part of this case.’ She told him what she’d found out about the general. ‘It can’t be coincidence,’ she explained. ‘Grace is writing a thesis about his crimes and then we find her murdered with her heart cut out, the same signature Ngomo was notorious for back in Uganda.’ She sat back, watching the food, watching Carrigan, expecting him to explode and dismiss her theories with another of those practised brushes of his hand, but instead his whole body seemed to fall into focus. He pushed his plate aside and laid his arms squarely on the table.

  ‘This is your theory, right, not Branch’s?’

  She nodded, unfolding one of the napkins which seemed made out of cheap toilet paper; she dreaded to think what they stocked the toilets with. ‘You’ve seen what Branch thought of my ideas.’

  Carrigan scratched his beard and took another sip of coffee. ‘It still doesn’t make any sense,’ he said. ‘Grace is writing a thesis that in all likelihood only two people will ever read. Do you know how improbable it is that Ngomo somehow stumbled on it?’

  ‘I don’t think he stumbled on it, I think Gabriel told him.’

  Carrigan looked up. ‘It’s still barely a set of coincidences,
circumstantial at best.’

  ‘You going to give me the nearly-all-murders-are-simple-and-basic spiel?’

  He noticed she was smiling. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I assume you’re aware of that. But we have a photo of our suspect, what more do you want?’

  ‘An explanation as to how someone like that could get Grace’s body released from the morgue.’

  Carrigan stopped what he was doing and put down his cup. She told him how the body had been claimed and how Branch had assured her it had not been family. ‘If Grace’s source is everything we think he is,’ she continued, ‘then there’s no way he could have done all this alone. He must be working with someone, someone who has access.’

  ‘We shouldn’t rush to a conclusion just because it appears to make sense of things,’ Carrigan replied, but she could see a subtle shift in his expression as if he were trying to convince himself of something he knew to be false. He’d filled his mouth with noodles before she could ask him to elaborate, at the same time using his other hand to point out to her a small dish with three round dumplings on it. He swallowed his mouthful and used one of the napkins to clean the grease from his beard. ‘The man we have in the photo killed Grace, I’m sure of that. I don’t think there’s any doubt. But I agree that there’s too many loose ends to this case, things that just don’t make sense.’

  She tried picking up the dumpling with her chopsticks, failed miserably and, humiliatingly, had to ask for a fork. ‘Such as?’

  Carrigan poured them both some dark tea. ‘Why are the Ugandan embassy involved in this case? Why are they pressuring Branch? That’s for starters . . . it’s the inconsistencies I’m more worried about – the killer savagely rapes and tortures this girl yet calmly films it, then edits the clip and uploads it onto the internet. Not the behaviour of a compulsive sex killer at all. The computer missing and yet all of Grace’s notes untouched. The ungagging – I’m always coming back to that – why does he do it, why put himself at risk like that?’ Carrigan noisily slurped some soup, put something that looked like a baked dog paw in his mouth. ‘I don’t think this has anything to do with her thesis,’ he said, ‘but I agree that there’s more to this than we first thought.’ He told her about the photos left in his flat, Penny’s surprise ride home. ‘I’m being followed and whoever’s doing it is using me to clean up. What scares me is that he’s not even trying to hide it.’

  ‘But if it’s more than one man then we’ve got to be talking about something in her work,’ Geneva objected. ‘Something not only Ngomo but the Ugandan government are desperate to suppress.’

  Carrigan took a long drink of tea and picked at a dumpling, shaking his head. ‘Crazy to think that writing can get you killed.’

  He’d meant it ironically‚ but he saw that Geneva had taken him seriously, a shadow darkening her face almost immediately.

  ‘Writing is a dangerous business,’ she replied.

  He speared another dumpling. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘It’s what my mother always used to tell me,’ she said, finally working up enough courage to go for the entrées. ‘She nearly got killed for her writing.’ She enjoyed the look of momentary surprise on Carrigan’s face – she’d been wondering if someone as undemonstrative as him was even capable of such an emotion. ‘My mother is Katrina Valenta. You wouldn’t have heard of her but back in Czechoslovakia she was the most popular female poet of the sixties. She was friends with Havel and Dubček and a lot of the young writers and revolutionaries of the time. She wrote these long epic poems about freedom and mountains, about eastern Europe and Lenin’s beard. She spent two years in a Soviet-controlled prison for dissidents in the Czech woods. She was freed just before ’68, the Prague Spring. She quickly got back into the fray and was there at the barricades, throwing rocks at the Soviet tanks. But it wasn’t for this she had to leave the country in the middle of the night, it was for a short ten-line poem she wrote depicting Stalin as a child abuser and Czechoslovakia as his victim. They issued a warrant for her arrest. Friends of hers helped her get across to Austria. She eventually made it to London where a lot of Czech dissidents lived.’ Geneva crunched down on the meat‚ recoiling at the sound of snapping tendons in her mouth and continued. ‘It’s not too different from the African diaspora. London has always been a safe place to write, argue and agitate. She continued writing poems but she was never the same after that. The poems were never the same. Her critics loved the new work, the poems about walking through Highgate cemetery and sitting by Marx’s grave, the sonnets about crossing Europe in cars and buses – but she never thought they were worth anything. She once said to me that the only poems that count are the ones that can get you killed.’

  It was the most he’d heard her talk about her own life and when he saw the sadness and droop of her eyes he understood why. ‘Growing up must have been a lot of fun.’

  She stared at him and, for a split-second, all the days they’d worked this case were rendered mute, then she smiled, a thin grudging smile, and shrugged as if to say growing up is never fun.

  He thought about David, the look in his eyes that day when he saw the man being beaten by the soldiers in Masindi. Their refusal to take a stand, to risk their lives for something they believed in. ‘She must have been delighted when you joined the Met.’

  ‘She almost disowned me,’ she laughed, though Carrigan could tell there were things lurking behind that laugh that weren’t so funny, nights of arguments and slammed doors and words you wish you hadn’t said. ‘For a dissident like her, for someone who was always on the run from the police, it was as if I’d gone and joined a cult or become a heroin addict – much worse, actually.’ Something crossed Geneva’s face and her voice stumbled. ‘We all have to learn to live with things. She’s learned, but that doesn’t stop her sending me neatly clipped job ads from the Guardian at every opportunity.’ She put down her fork and looked up at Carrigan. ‘All I wanted to do was prove to my mum that the police were the good guys.’

  Carrigan stared at his plate, something suddenly gone out of him like a popped balloon. ‘I think I wanted to prove to myself the same thing,’ he replied, thinking about that road again and the look on David’s face as he was being led away.

  ‘It must have been nice to have always known what you were going to do, though; you can’t imagine the shit I went through before I decided.’

  His laugh caught her off-guard, there was so little mirth in it. ‘It was the last thing I had in mind. I was a singer once, played some instruments. I made an album.’

  ‘You’re kidding. What happened?’ She remembered DC Singh’s comment about the wildest rumour she’d ever heard about Jack Carrigan.

  A look of regret poured into his face, making him almost unrecognisable. ‘Life happened. The way it always does. I used to do that and now I do this.’ He wiped his mouth, ran his fingers through his beard and finished his tea. ‘I’m meeting DI Spencer in Peckham tomorrow. He’s supposed to be an expert, or the closest the Met have got to one, on the African diaspora.’ He looked up at Geneva, saw her eyes flash blue. ‘I think we’re getting close now,’ he said, his face softening for the briefest of moments.

  She could feel the sense of excitement and resolution coming off him. ‘You want me to come with you?’

  He shook his head, called over the waiter. ‘We need to find out more about Grace herself. I want you to go back to SOAS. I want to know why she visited Willesden Green so often – did she have a boyfriend or family there? Someone’s bound to know. And I’m uneasy about how little information the university seems to have on her. Talk to the registrar, lean on them if you need to – but there must be more official documentation. She was under eighteen when she started her course, there’s got to be a signed consent form somewhere, application papers, qualification records, references.’

  She nodded, secretly pleased that she would have a chance to go back to SOAS. She watched Carrigan wave her away when she tried to pay, she saw a couple of hapless tourists trying to deci
pher the menu, being shouted at in Cantonese by one of the waiters, and decided she liked this place. ‘This was nice.’

  Carrigan looked up and smiled.

  24

  It was like another country dropped down in the middle of London. A different city existing independently and yet congruent to the larger metropolis. Rye Lane, Peckham, on a Tuesday afternoon. Carrigan had lived in London for over forty years and yet he’d never been here. It was one of the things he loved about the city, the way you could turn a corner and fall into another world. But this morning he had no time to savour this nor the way the sun seemed a different shade here, reflecting off the bright multicoloured awnings like something from a lower latitude.

  He’d seen him again.

  Carrigan had come out of the train station half an hour early for his meeting with DI Spencer. He bought some bad coffee and was staring into the window of a shop advertising African DVDs when he noticed him in the reflection, the man who’d been eyeballing him at the AAC meeting. He turned round but the man was gone. He scanned the pavement but the faces all blurred. He thought back to the two Ugandan diplomats in Branch’s office, the men in the car outside his flat, Grace’s missing body. He checked his watch, saw that he had enough time, and started walking down the street at a relaxed pace, not looking back. He turned into a small alley at the end of which he saw the elongated shadows of garages darkly delineated under a railway arch.

  As he’d expected, behind him he could hear footsteps, a single pair, steady and resolute, getting louder. He felt the bloodbuzz rush through his head as he walked down the alley then quickly turned into a sheltered niche reeking of oil and spilled petrol, flattening himself up against the wall.

  He waited, holding his breath. When his pursuer passed, Carrigan leapt out, grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it up against his back. He slammed his own bodyweight against the man, causing him to crash against the wall.