by Stav Sherez
The Intrusions
Stav Sherez
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
II
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
III
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
IV
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
For Lesley Thorne,
who pulled this one out of the fire
more times than I can count.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Psalm 139:7–8
Prologue
It happens when she leans in to talk to her best friend. It is quick and practised and she doesn’t notice. Fifteen minutes later she starts to feel sick. The room wobbles. She almost falls off her stool. Her friend catches her just in time and wants to know what’s wrong. She tries to answer but discovers she no longer remembers how to use her mouth.
Bowling balls collide against wooden pins, flinging them across the glossy floor and into the gutter. Players whoop and cuss and crane their necks to check the score on overhead monitors. The song changes, crashing chords shake the room, people scream into each other’s ears and gulp down beer. London. A Friday night. In a bar in a bowling alley in Bayswater, a young woman clutches her best friend’s arm and tries not to throw up as the klaxon announces another strike.
She realises she’s drunk too much when she forgets her best friend’s name. She looks at the girl she’s known since they were seated together on the first day of school, the girl she’s confessed her darkest secrets and wildest fears to.
She can’t remember her name.
This scares her far more than the sudden churning in her stomach. She leans on the bar for support. Everything is too loud and too fast as if the room with all its noise and chatter is being poured into her skull. She turns and the room turns with her, people smearing into carousel horses, their faces thorny and beaked. Her friend is calling out her name but she doesn’t hear it. She shuffles off the stool, tries to regain her balance, sways forward and collapses to the floor.
The sudden warmth of an outstretched hand snaps her back to the bowling alley bar. Her friend helps her up and wipes the hair from her forehead and she still can’t remember her name. She looks around and there’s a hundred eyes raking her body, people pointing at her, laughing and taking photos and she briefly sees a beach in another country and another girl fleeing the cruel mockery of drunks.
She looks at her glass; the dark, sticky rum. She’s sure this is only her second but that can’t possibly be right. The phone in her pocket vibrates. She turns it on and plays the message, the receiver pressed tight against her ear, hoping it’s that Sicilian boy she met last weekend – but it’s not the boy, it’s a man’s voice, cool and careful. She assumes it’s a wrong number because he’s talking in a foreign language but, as she listens closer, she realises it’s not a foreign language – it’s English – only the man is speaking backwards. He makes a strange sibilant sound halfway between a hiss and a clearing of the throat and then she hears the beep and feels someone tugging at her arm.
Her friend asks her who the caller was. She shrugs and points to the exit and her friend laughs and mimes sticking two fingers down her throat. She can’t explain so she simply walks away, leaving her handbag on the floor and her best friend staring in surprise.
The door is only a few feet away but it takes an eternity to get there. She squeezes and staggers between men ordering drinks or checking the heft of bowling balls. They wink and snicker as she passes but she’s too far gone to notice, her only goal the door, the door with the bright green neon spelling EXIT as if it were a promise.
She climbs the stairs and finally she’s out on the street, the rush of cabs and cars howling in her ears. She thinks about the message on her phone – a technical glitch of some kind or is it just this, the way she’s feeling, her brain mixing up the words and hearing them backwards?
A man calls out to her from across the street. He smiles and points to his car and says Taxi? but she doesn’t like the look of his hands and quickly turns in the other direction.
She walks these streets daily but they seem different tonight, as if every surface were alive, faintly throbbing. She hums songs to herself to stop her mind from dwelling on all the crap she doesn’t want to think about but the bad thoughts keep coming and she can’t make them stop.
The streets all curve and twist and double back on themselves. There are several ways to get from the high street to her room and many more ways to get lost in between. The stiff-necked Georgian townhouses frown at her as she passes them, the trees sway and scratch the sky. Everything spins. She clutches a lamp post, bends over and vomits. The nausea lifts momentarily as she wipes her eyes. The curb looks so tempting, all she wants to do is curl into a ball and wait for this to be over, but instead she uses the curved tops of parking meters as support and slowly makes her way towards the junction.
She sees the men before they see her but it’s too late to turn back.
She reaches the corner and considers taking the long way round, through the gardens and across the playing fields, but that would mean another ten minutes and she’s not sure how much more of this she can stand.
There’s no choice, she’ll have to walk past them.
They’re squatting on the opposite curb, bare-chested and covered in plaster dust, passing around a bottle of vodka, their eyes glazed and starved. One of them lifts the bottle up in a gesture of hospitality. She can see the streetlight reflecting off his teeth and knows it won’t be long before he feels the need to approach and make conversation.
She closes her eyes, forces her legs and arms to obey, and strides past them, deaf to their entreaties and blind to their stares. She feels the skin around her neck constrict at the very thought of their crude square hands and she holds her breath for the entire time she’s passing them, willing her feet to propel her safely out of their reach.
She looks back once, but they’re not following, and she’s furious at herself for being thankful for something so basic as the right to walk down a street without being molested. She stops to catch her breath and that’s when she hears the baby crying.
It’s the oddness of the sound that raises it above the cacophony of a Friday night, above the arguments and music and smack of hot stolen kisses seeping from high windows and idling cars.
There it is again. A sharp, plaintive plea emerging from the darkness to her left. She tilts her head and traces it to a small alley – but she can’t understand what a baby would be doing there.
>
She feels a tight little contraction in her stomach as the baby continues its lament, the tone increasingly urgent, a panic obvious even without words. She glances across the street towards the windows of her room and she can almost feel the pillowy embrace of her duvet, but when the baby cries again she turns in the opposite direction.
It’s only once she’s halfway down the alley that she wonders what kind of person would leave a baby in a place like this but, by then, she’s already committed, swallowed by darkness and concealed from the cold comfort of cameras.
She lets her eyes slowly adjust to the dark but all she sees is trash and gloom. She calls out – first, normal words, then baby talk – but the only reply is the distant complaint of cats. She is about to turn back, chalk this up to whatever’s running riot through her system, when the baby screams again and this time there’s something different about it, something metallic and clipped and wrong and she understands she needs to get out of here but, before she can make a move, a man emerges from the shadows, holding a phone. He pushes a button and the crying stops.
I
1
We believe in the certainty of numbers the way we used to believe in God, Geneva thought as she watched the accountant point to a row of flickering digits on the monitor in front of him. He stopped halfway down and tapped the screen.
‘Could you please explain why a night in a four-star hotel was deemed necessary for the investigation?’
Geneva squinted, squirmed and tried to remember. The numbers squiggled and slid across the spreadsheet. She turned and focused on the still space of the wall, trying to stop the room from spinning.
‘Detective Sergeant Miller?’
‘It was for an informant.’ She cleared her throat. The taste of last night’s tequila stung her lips. She was desperate for a cigarette and some hot tea. Her eyes kept drifting, lulled by the rows of columned numbers and less than four hours’ sleep. A little better than the night before, but still. It had been going on for two months. Lying in the dark, gazing at the ceiling, then waking up at two, three, four in the morning, sweat-soaked and riddled by dreams. She glanced over at the accountant. He had the face of a man who slept well, alert and conscious of his own good luck. At that moment, she couldn’t help but hate him a little bit. ‘We needed to put her up for the night. She hadn’t finished giving her testimony.’
The accountant scrutinised Geneva from behind thick Coke-bottle lenses and double-clicked the mouse. ‘And she couldn’t have simply gone home and come back in the morning?’
Geneva placed both hands on the table, leaning in towards the accountant, knowing it made him uncomfortable. ‘She wouldn’t have come back.’ She felt a momentary dizziness and pressed her fingertips hard against the wood. ‘You don’t understand the situation or the context. He would have got to her.’
‘£145 seems rather excessive?’ The accountant double-clicked the mouse again, a maddeningly precise rhythmic tick that poked at her hangover. She felt like shoving the device down his throat but instead took a deep breath and reached into her pocket.
‘What? To solve a murder? Which we did, incidentally. I’d say that’s a pretty good return.’ Geneva pressed down on the stress ball nestled in her pocket.
The accountant’s lips twitched as he clicked the mouse. ‘That’s not your decision to make. You’re not the one paying the bills.’ He clicked several times and highlighted the figure in red. Half the screen was red. He clicked again. ‘What about this? £280 per month. That seems an awful lot to spend on coffee, don’t you think?’
Geneva squeezed the stress ball until she felt the plastic rip. ‘You’ll have to ask my boss about that.’ Her phone vibrated against her leg. ‘I’m going out for a cigarette.’
The accountant looked up from his screen and checked his watch. ‘You went for one only an hour ago.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You do know they’re bad for you?’
‘Really? Where did you hear that?’
*
She waited for the lift, a cup of tea in her hand, the Styrofoam burning her fingers. She was dizzy and tired and sick of answering questions from myopic accountants who wanted her to justify every investigative lead and expenditure. Each time she blinked, snaky black squiggles wobbled across her vision. It was as if the numbers themselves were swimming in her eye. If this was the future she wanted no part of it. The people upstairs thought they could control crime with flowcharts and spreadsheets but they didn’t understand that policing wasn’t about the financial viability of pursuing a particular lead – it was about that sudden bolt to your stomach, the sizzle in your teeth as patterns began to emerge out of the chaos.
The lift shuddered, depositing Geneva on the ground floor. She checked her watch, wondering how long she could stretch the smoke break for. The longer she was down here, the fewer questions she would have to answer upstairs. Her iPod was fully charged, the tea was hot and exactly what she needed to get her through the rest of the day. The thought of later tonight sent a blush of heat through her chest as she headed for the back door. Seeing Jim again. Maybe later going for . . . Her phone buzzed, its sudden intrusion startling her wrist, the tea splashing across her shirt and down the front of her jeans. She quickly wiped her hands then answered.
‘I thought you said you’d call on Friday?’
Two more hours with the accountants suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea. ‘I’m so sorry. I totally forgot.’ She’d got home Friday evening after a mind-numbing day of number crunching and immediately headed for the sofa, a bottle of warm tequila and a schlocky slasher DVD.
‘I waited all night.’
‘Mum. You could have called me.’
‘You know I don’t like to disturb you.’ At these moments her mother’s voice always slid into its previous incarnation, heavy with middle-European vowels, lengthy pauses and oblique sighs; a hidden lexicon of intonations from a century that had gone up in flames.
‘Sorry. It’s this stupid audit. Feels like I left my brain back in the office, minute I walk through the door.’
‘You’re still on that? I thought you were going to talk to him?’ Her mother had a special way of saying him when she meant Carrigan, squeezing more syllables into that one word than Geneva would have thought possible.
‘I will. I just haven’t had the chance.’ She touched the cigarette packet in her pocket, reassured by its familiar shape.
‘You think he’s punishing you for something, don’t you?’ The slightest of pauses. ‘Don’t deny it, I can hear it in your voice. I always said you were wasting your talents and look what you’re—’
‘Jesus! Can we not have this conversation every single time?’ Geneva took the first right and continued down the central corridor, walking past areas thick with the shuffle of handcuffed bodies and clacking keyboards.
‘We have this conversation every time because I pray and hope maybe one day you’ll listen. I know you, Genny—’
‘Mum, I’m in the middle of something. I have to go.’
‘Will I see you tonight?’
Another thing she’d forgotten. Christ. She took out her cigarettes. ‘I can’t. I’m meeting someone.’
‘A date?’ Her mother’s voice rose a half-note.
‘Mum, I really have to go.’
She put the phone back in her pocket, wishing she could smash it against the wall instead, be able to go for a cigarette or walk in the park without its shrill alarm yanking her back into the world.
She was halfway there when she heard it.
She could see the back door, a slice of sunshine slanting across the glass, two constables smoking outside. The woman screamed again and Geneva cursed, put the cigarettes back in her pocket, and turned around, the noise becoming more distinct the closer she got – chairs crashing against the floor, raised male voices, a baby bawling.
She turned the corner and didn’t know where to look. The entire reception hall was in motion. The duty sergeant emerging fro
m the booth, sweat dripping down his forehead. A man sitting on the floor filming with his mobile phone. The young couple running with their pram towards the door. They were all watching the girl.
She was on the floor, in the centre of the room, wrestling with one of the uniforms, a frantic blur of elbows and hands. The girl bit into the constable’s jacket and broke free of his grip. She scanned the room, her eyes stricken and cornered. She saw the uniform getting up, coming towards her, the desk sergeant following close behind – and ran.
Before Geneva could react, the girl slammed into her. Geneva felt gravity briefly disappear then snap back as they crashed to the floor. Her spine cracked against the concrete, pain so bright it made her eyes roll back. The girl landed on top of her, her breath and hair hot in Geneva’s mouth. She grabbed Geneva by the shoulders.
‘Please. Help me.’
Her accent was Australian or Kiwi and her eyes were like empty swimming pools. Geneva tried to extricate herself but the girl’s bony fingers were sunk deep into her flesh. The girl lowered her head until they were so close they could have been kissing.
‘He took Anna.’
Before Geneva could reply, two uniforms pulled the girl off. Geneva got up, rubbed a sore spot on her knee and collected the scattered papers. The tea was all gone, she’d have to smoke the cigarette dry.
‘He claimed her.’
Geneva looked up. The girl had managed to get one arm free from the desk sergeant’s grip and was reaching out as if trying to stop herself from falling. Her hair was stuck to her face, her clothes ravelling from her body, her eyes beseeching Geneva.
‘He said he was coming back to claim me.’
2
Carrigan could tell Branch was in a bad mood because the pipe was back in his mouth after two months of surly abstinence. The super was on the phone, arguing and apologising, his jaw tightening over the pipe stem, the words emerging through clenched teeth. He glanced up, acknowledged Carrigan, and went back to his call.
