by Stav Sherez
‘How did you feel out on the street?’ Geneva interrupted.
Madison shook her head. ‘It wasn’t the street. After a certain hour you can only leave through the back. There’s a little alley where everyone goes to smoke.’ Madison closed her eyes. ‘We had to hold each other steady to make it up the stairs.’
Geneva flashed back to all those times she’d had one too many in a bar, the bright lights and spinning ceiling – it could take you by surprise – one minute you’re feeling as if this is the best night of your life and a sip or two later everything turns into a funfair ride. ‘Did the fresh air help?’
‘No. God, no. I felt worse. The entire alley started to spin. Anna dropped to her knees and puked. I tried to help her but my heel snapped and my leg buckled and I fell over. Bright white light flashed across my eyes. Everything was extremely fast and extremely slow at the same time. I saw Anna on her knees being sick and then I heard the van door slide open.’
‘Did you see him?’
Madison scraped her chair back and shook her head. ‘He was wearing a cap of some sort. It was dark. I’m sorry.’ Hot tears splashed down her face. She did nothing to wipe them away. ‘I could hear the sound his shoes made, slapping on the pavement as he got out of the van. It was like someone had turned up the volume on the world. Anna was still on her knees, saying Something isn’t right, over and over again. The footsteps were so loud they hurt my ears. He passed in front of me and there was nothing I could do. He crouched down and I saw him take out a syringe and plunge it into something. I remember it flashing in the light and, as he slid the needle into Anna’s shoulder, I thought for a moment that someone had sent for an ambulance, that he was a paramedic here to help us, but then he gently took Anna’s hand and helped her up and led her towards the van. As he walked past me, he stopped and said: Don’t feel bad. I’ll be back to claim you. I heard the door slide shut and, for a split second, I saw Anna on her knees in the back of the van, being sick again, and then the engine started and the van was gone. Anna was gone.’
4
Carrigan sat at his desk and stared at the blue file. He’d forgotten about his appointment with the doctor, the calls he had to make and bills to pay, the slow accretion of the day’s chores. There was always too much to do and too little time and every day the debt increased as more hours were subtracted from your life. He straightened the stack of incoming files and squared the keyboard and mouse. He put the pens away and tidied the cable cords. He was becoming less tolerant of clutter as he got older, or perhaps just less tolerant.
‘Look, I know what you’re going to think and I know what you’re going to say but—’
Carrigan glanced up. He hadn’t heard her come in. ‘Then why bother asking?’
‘You might surprise me yet.’
There was almost a smile on Geneva’s face, though he could tell she was doing her best to hide it. Her morning hair swirled around her shoulders, unruly and with a mind of its own, deep black pouches sinking her eyes. He gestured for her to sit down but she was too hyped up for a chair or any piece of furniture to contain her. She paced and fidgeted as she recounted Madison’s story – the drinks, the dizziness, the alley, the van.
Carrigan put the blue file to one side and reached inside his desk drawer. He took out a strip of pills and snapped two from the blister pack. The foil rasped as he dry-swallowed them. ‘What exactly do you think we can do for her?’
Geneva stopped pacing and sat down. ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. Maybe none of this even happened and it’s just another case of taking the wrong drugs, or too much of the right ones – but there’s a terrified young woman in the room downstairs and that is real.’
‘Is she high now?’
‘Yes. But she says she was spiked. Three days ago. Says they both were.’
‘A lot of people say that because they don’t want to admit they’ve been taking drugs or because they’re embarrassed they got so blotto on booze and need to blame it on something else. Besides, any drug would have worn off by now.’
Geneva pressed herself up against the table. ‘I know all that, but her account of the abduction is far too detailed, it’s not like something you’d make up.’
Carrigan frowned. ‘That’s the nature of drug hallucinations. People construct incredibly detailed realities. And what’s more, it doesn’t make any sense. Someone this slick at performing an abduction wouldn’t leave an eyewitness. And that stuff about coming back to claim her? Who says that kind of crap? If he was going to take her, he would have done it there and then.’ Carrigan glanced out the window, the sky grey and misted with drizzle. ‘Have you considered the possibility she saw her friend go off with some guy and the drugs warped it into this?’
‘Of course I have,’ Geneva replied. ‘But her fear’s real. That’s not an hallucination. She witnessed something. Something which scared her badly.’
Carrigan could tell Geneva wasn’t about to give up. He wanted to go back to the blue file. He needed to call the doctor, write up several reports, an endless list of chores running like a ticker-tape at the back of his head. ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’
‘I want to take her statement formally.’
‘The last thing we need right now is a new case. We don’t have either the time or the remit to look into every missing person. Let the uniforms deal with it. If it turns out to be anything more than a bad trip they’ll pass it back on up to us.’
‘They’ll miss something, you know that – and if what Madison says is true, it’ll be too late for Anna.’
‘If you hadn’t been downstairs at that particular moment this wouldn’t have even reached us.’
‘But I was.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Carrigan replied. ‘But we’re halfway through an audit. People are watching us and I can’t allocate resources to something this flimsy.’
‘That stupid bloody audit.’
Carrigan sat up. ‘The audit is bullshit, yes, you’ll have no argument with me on that, but if we don’t complete it we’re going to miss out on some of next year’s allocations. There’ve been enough cuts as it is.’
‘That’s not a reason to neglect a potential murder.’
Carrigan sighed. There was nothing he could say to change her mind. She was right and she was wrong but it was too early in the day to disentangle one from the other. ‘Okay, fine. Go ahead and look into this girl’s story – send her back to the hostel and reinterview her when the drugs have worn off but I don’t want this distracting you from the audit.’
‘Someone else can do that. I don’t see why I had to be pulled off rotation.’
Carrigan noted the downslope of jaw and clenched muscle, the resolute simmer behind her eyes. ‘You think I put you on this as some kind of punishment?’
Geneva nodded.
‘Really? Jesus. You know that’s not . . . shit, I put you on this because I don’t trust anyone else to do it right and because, like it or not, this is crucial to how we go about our job in the next twelve months.’
Geneva looked down at the floor. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘It’s okay. I’m sorry too. It’s been a crap day all round.’
*
Carrigan took off his jacket and draped it on the back of the grey plastic chair. For a few minutes he did nothing but watch her breathe. The mounded sheets swelled and ebbed and he was surprised that such a frail body could create even this small disturbance.
His mother’s condition hadn’t changed. A stroke had crackled through her brain five days ago. Her heart stopped and was restarted but by then she’d slipped into a deep coma. He’d talked to two different specialists and they’d both explained that due to her advanced-stage dementia and the severity of the stroke, the chances of regaining consciousness were almost zero. They began to talk about options and he’d zoned out.
He’d had a brief conversation with her consultant in the alarm-shriek and body spill of the A & E ward an hour ago, but
there were no new developments. The consultant told him there was little point being in the room. Carrigan bought a coffee and a stale croissant from the hospital cafe, a stilled silent place of permanent suspension, each customer lost in their own private anxieties and newly cancelled futures, then took the lift to the seventh floor.
In the room it was different. In the room there was just him and his mother and the circling array of machines that did what once only God and prayers could. No one could reach him here. The grey chair was hard and cold and focused his thoughts. The file in his hand honed and sharpened them. He reread the statements, depositions and accusations. Quinn had done his homework. Everything in the file was true.
Carrigan drained the sludge of undissolved sugar at the bottom of his cup and got up. He approached the bed and stood over his mother and pressed his lips to her forehead, shocked by how cold and dry her skin felt, like kissing a stone.
‘Please wake up,’ he whispered into her ear, its delicate labyrinth so familiar from childhood confidences in dimly lit rooms. The machine beeped, her constant companion in the land of suspended time. Soon, he knew, she would be only memory and a gap that could never be filled. It had been five years since he’d stood graveside and watched Louise plunge into the earth. He’d never imagined he’d be back here so soon nor that the decision, this time, would be his to make. Life was the process of learning to live with less and less. You lost everyone close to you or they lost you. There were no other alternatives. Death had been his career but he’d never been this close to it since Africa, unshielded by the job, here in the raw daily panic and prayer.
His knees ached against the cold floor but this was an important part of it, he knew, and as he looked up at the bed he began to recite a jumble of prayers and entreaties, half-remembered words and mangled verses. He bowed his head and shut his eyes tight. He pressed his palms together and made desperate bargains. He waited, but no light came. He stilled his breathing but there were no thunderbolts or ecstatic visions – perhaps he wasn’t trying hard enough, or maybe once you gave up on God, God gave up on you?
And then he felt a change, a slight shift in the room’s current. His body tensed. A breeze rippled against the back of his neck. Something creaked.
Carrigan turned just in time to see the door closing, a flicker of black hair disappearing into the hallway. He was immediately up and running. He rounded the bed and crossed the room and opened the door and looked both ways down the corridor, but it was empty all the way down to the gaping mouth of the lift.
5
She’d been looking forward to this all day but now the rain was ruining her hair. Geneva tried standing under the awning but had to keep stepping aside to let people by. Couples with arms wrapped around each other broke out of love’s delirium to look at her, small and drizzled, then rushed inside for popcorn and beer. She ignored their stares, the feeling in her gut, and checked her watch again.
The film was due to start in ten minutes and Jim was late. Geneva scanned the rain-sprayed street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him alighting from a bus, running towards her, a look of contrition on his face and a bunch of flowers in his hand. But there was only the ragged march of workers heading home like defeated soldiers, slumped and shuffle-stepping in the heat. These last two weeks the city had felt like an extra layer of clothing depositing itself on your skin in sweat and dust. You’d take a shower, cross the room, and need another shower. A heatwave whipped up from the Sahara and flung across the plains of Europe, broken only by sudden torrential downpours. The worst of both worlds. Geneva looked at her watch but only two minutes had passed since she’d last checked it.
It was supposed to be their third date and she’d begun to think Jim was someone she might want to see, and see often. Some men were only made for one-night stands. But this one. This one had ravished her so deeply she’d let go all caution in one dizzying tumble.
She’d started going to night classes a couple of months ago, scrutinising poetry again, stuffed into an abandoned classroom in Archway with four or five others and taught by an arthritic professor who claimed she was the only woman Auden had ever slept with. It had begun as a kind of therapy, a suggestion by her counsellor after last year’s alley attack that she needed to do an activity entirely unrelated to the job, but it had turned into something else, unexpected and surprising, a part of herself she’d become stranger to.
She’d bumped into Jim at her second class. They’d clashed heads as they both went for the door at the same time, her ears ringing rudely as the pile of books spilled from his hands. She bent down to pick them up, the collision had been her fault, and was stunned to see herself staring up from the cover of an old paperback. It took her a few seconds to realise it was her mother not her, though the same age she was now, and she’d never really thought before how similar they were or about those traits and skin-quirks that had been handed down.
‘Do you mind if I have a look?’ she’d asked, and Jim had introduced himself, shaking hands, his palm warm and strong and slightly clammy from the heat.
‘I’m surprised you’ve heard of her,’ he said.
She stared at the photo, seeing the small differences that had been bestowed by her father, a slight dimple of chin and slant of eye. ‘Where did you find it?’
Jim smiled as if a lock had been undone in his jaw. ‘This is so weird. I’ve been searching ages for it and this morning I was a bit early so I popped into Oxfam and there it was!’ He mimicked his reaction on finding the book with a wide-eyed cartoon stare. ‘I search years for this and the morning I find it I bump into another fan – how strange is that?’
‘I’m not a fan,’ Geneva said, passing it back to him. ‘I’m her daughter.’ She loved the crease of surprise on his face and the way his eyes danced between the book and her.
‘Are you a poet too?’
She didn’t want to spoil the moment by telling him what she did so she asked him out for a drink instead. They’d gone to a funfair on Hampstead Heath and got lost in the sparkled night of candyfloss and rollercoaster screams. They’d sat on a metal scaffold and shared terrible coffee and hot fresh doughnuts and told each other about their lives and it had all come out. Had she said too much? Frightened him off with any of the hundreds of horrible little details she kept stored away in her brain?
It was so hard to know. The relationship was moving far quicker than she was used to but it was her doing as much as his. She saw herself drifting into a life she didn’t want – working late, a string of disappointing boyfriends, the confines and comforts of a one-bedroom flat. Time was different in your thirties. Men were harder to find. The good ones were all gone and the bad ones were more desperate. Dating was also different. She wondered how many of the couples entering the cinema had met online and if people in the future would look at the old methods of dating – alcohol and chance – in much the same way as we regard surgery before the use of anaesthetic.
She glanced up to see a couple of girls, painted for the night, cross the road with such abandon and fervour she couldn’t help but feel a little diminished and it made her think of Madison, scared out of her mind, unable to trust her own head, scratching away at herself in the tiny interview room. A nurse had finally come and given Madison a shot of Valium. Geneva detailed a uniform to drive her back to the hostel but, at the last moment, had decided to accompany them. Madison didn’t speak throughout the entire journey. Geneva left her outside the building, saying she’d be back to reinterview her tomorrow. Madison nodded and Geneva had watched her disappear into the dark hostel grounds but she couldn’t get rid of the girl’s story quite so easily.
If what Madison said was true then another girl was out there and no one was looking for her. She’d been hoping Carrigan would be hooked by Madison’s tale and that he’d pull her off the audit and they would talk it through the way they always did, but he’d seemed strangely absent earlier, as if he’d left a part of himself back at home.
She took out her phone.
There were three missed calls from her solicitor. She was suing her husband for her share of their former home. With only a week to go until the case was due in court, this could only be bad news. There were no messages from Jim. She went back and forth between wanting to text him and not wanting to seem too desperate and needy – but what if they’d got their timing mixed up?
Where are you?
Geneva gripped the phone and stared at the screen. The reply came back almost immediately.
You didn’t get my email?
What email?
Shit. Sorry. I have to stay back at work. Will call you later.
Queensway was roaring with backpackers and gamblers, pimps and waiters, drunks, pick-up artists and dazed tourists. Hot rain splashed the pavement but provided no relief from the humidity. The Last Good Kiss was located on a side street from the station, one of those interstitial zones of the city, neither Bayswater nor Paddington, yet catering to and determined by both. It occupied a basement next to a souvenir shop full of snow globes, bobby hats and union jacks. But it wasn’t the nightclub Geneva was interested in tonight.
She’d thought about going home. She’d thought about seeing the film by herself. She’d almost hidden away in a dark pub behind a wall of White Russians and then she’d remembered the alleyway and how close it was. Something wouldn’t let her dismiss Madison’s story as readily as Carrigan had done. It was a matter of logic as much as gut instinct. If Madison was telling the truth then the consequences of not acting far outweighed the expenditure and hassle if it turned out to be nothing. So far, she only had what Madison had told her. A girl afloat on a sea of drugs. She needed evidence. Something to convince Carrigan.
