by Stav Sherez
‘There’s no coverage at all?’
Max shook his head. ‘You think the killer took her from here?’
Carrigan was about to reply when something jumped on his lap. He felt a sharp scratch against his thigh and looked down to see a scrawny cat digging its claws into his trousers, white ruffles of fur circling its head like an Elizabethan courtier.
‘Lincoln!’
The cat hissed and jumped off Carrigan’s knees, coiling itself around Max’s feet.
‘Where were you on Friday night, between 7 and 9 p.m.?’
Max’s head shot up. ‘You think . . .? Shit, of course you do. I was here. Friday night I got to be, it’s our biggest check-in. You can ask anyone.’
‘I will.’ Carrigan brushed cat hairs off his trousers and glanced at the photo of Max onstage, guitar slung across his chest. ‘How long have you been manager?’
‘Five years this November. I was in a band before that. It didn’t work out.’
Carrigan could sense the years of frustration and disappointment hanging in that one suspended sentence. It made him think about his own life and how it might have turned out if Africa hadn’t intervened. Would his days be like Max’s? The eventual realisation that you were never going to make it followed by the slow withdrawal into disappointment and silence? The irony, of course, was that no one lived up to their own expectations of themselves. Everyone came up short. A dream is a dream precisely because it can never come true – yet how did Max feel in the midst of all these young people? What temptations, recriminations and reminders surrounded him every day? You could see the answer in his face, the sagged cheeks and jowls making him look as if he were in a perpetual state of mourning. Carrigan wondered how many of the female residents had ended up in this room.
‘What can you tell me about Anna Becker?’
Max put out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘I liked Anna. Liked her a lot. She was polite. Nice. Not like the rest of them. It’s a fucking shame is what it is. You wouldn’t have thought she’d be the kind to get herself murdered.’
‘No one’s immune to murder,’ Carrigan replied. ‘What kind of person was she?’
‘What kind of person was she? I’ll tell you what kind of person she was. One day she comes in here to get me to sort out one of the washing machines. I was sitting on the sofa listening to Faust, you know, the Krautrock . . .’
‘I know who they are.’
‘You do?’ Max’s eyes lit up in surprise. ‘She asked me if I understood what they were singing about and I said no. She then asked me for the album cover and she sat down and took out a pen and a little notebook and translated all the lyrics.’
‘Were there any problems? Any complaints?’
Max ground out his cigarette. ‘Sometimes she liked to play her music loud and people would tell her to turn it down. She rubbed a few people up the wrong way but nothing serious. Like you, I only really get to know the ones who cause trouble.’
‘You said Anna rubbed people up the wrong way?’
‘She was very forthright. Not everyone appreciated that. Always said what she thought. Very blunt. Very German that way. Whenever anything broke in the dorm, she’d be the one to hassle me till I got it fixed but she was always so nice about it, I didn’t mind.’
‘How about money? Any problems there?’
‘With these kids there’s always problems.’ Max ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Rent’s the last thing they think of. First they spend all their money partying then come and ask me if it’s okay to pay next week. Anna was late three or four weeks in a row but she was nice and I let her slide. She must have got a job because a month later she paid back all the rent she owed.’
Carrigan flipped a page in his notebook. ‘When was this?’
Max pressed his palm against his forehead as if by doing so he could physically squeeze the memory into being. ‘A couple of months ago.’
‘Do you know what kind of job?’
Max shrugged. ‘Probably temp cleaning work. They all end up doing it at one time or another. There’s several companies that cruise the hostels touting for work.’
‘When did she check in?’
‘Give me a sec.’ Max headed to the semi-office and came back a couple of minutes later, nodding. ‘November 29th. She checked in using a voucher.’
‘What kind of voucher?’
‘You know, pay three weeks and get the fourth free.’
‘Where would she have got hold of one of those?’
‘Anywhere. We got a bunch on the counter out front. Maybe someone back home gave her one. We also do e-voucher mailouts, could be she signed on for one of those or had it forwarded to her. It’s the only way we get them not to skip between hostels.’
Carrigan wrote it down and flipped the page. ‘And there’s nothing else you can tell me? No complaints of female residents being harassed? Nothing weird or out of the ordinary?’
Max looked at the magazine on the table. Nick Cave sneered back up at him.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Everything is important in a murder investigation. The more we know about the victims the more it tells us about the person who killed them.’ Carrigan stared at Max until Max looked away.
‘Anna complained recently. Told me she had trouble sleeping, said there were voices in the walls keeping her awake.’
Carrigan felt a tingle run through his fingers. ‘Voices?’
‘I told you it was bullshit,’ Max replied. ‘I explained to her these old buildings are like that. Pipes mumble and squeak, the wood contracts and expands, a conversation three floors away can sound like it’s coming from next door.’
‘And that was it?’
‘Pretty much. I went upstairs to check because she insisted and she was nice about it but I couldn’t hear anything. I just figured, you know, with all the shit these kids are taking it’s not surprising they’re hearing voices.’
‘Anna took drugs?’
‘I’d be amazed if there was anyone here who didn’t.’
15
The common room took up most of the second floor and was the gravitational heart of the hostel. A laptop playing Dave Matthews Band tried to compete with the stutter-frenzy of an Italian football commentary. Magazines were strewn across the floor and covered the coffee tables. Glossy scandal sheets and celebrity exposés. A row of unzipped backpacks hung on hooks, gaping like open mouths. People drifted in and out, an impossible number, all quietly alike in their youth and fashion, regional differences erased by a childhood consisting of the same TV shows, the same films and music and computer games. Constables would be here soon to interview them but Geneva didn’t want to wait. They would behave differently and give different answers when confronted by uniformed police.
The focal point of the room was a sofa and coffee table around which people had gathered. Wide-eyed spacegirls just back from eight months in India with an expanded consciousness and a stomach virus. Techno hipsters in ridiculous specs and headbands passing around a bottle of cheap wine and staring at an iPad. White Rastas, hip-hop wannabees and tattooed genderless wraiths.
A sweet stinging taste rose in Geneva’s throat and she was flung back to her own days of chaos and disorder, inter-railing through the stacked still cities of the Continent as a teenager, the quick spraygun rush of museums and monuments and train stations. Back then she’d felt as if she’d sailed across far and terrifying oceans, the world of her childhood kept safely at bay by the English Channel. There were no mobile phones to call your parents or update your friends, no tablets or laptops to bring up whatever information you needed. It had all been new and unexplored and experienced first-hand and she felt a little sorry for these kids growing up in this strange hurtling world so stripped of surprise.
The phone buzzed her out of daydream. The caller ID flooded her with relief. Madison had texted back:
About to get on a plane. Sorry. Don’t feel safe. Thank you for listening to
me and keep me informed. Please find Anna.
Geneva put the phone back in her pocket, ignored the body odour reek of microwaved food and tried to get the residents’ attention but her voice was drowned out by music and chatter. She walked over to the stereo system and unplugged it. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at her.
‘You shouldn’t listen to that crap. It’ll rot your ears.’ She smiled but no one got the joke. ‘I’m sorry to bother you but I need your attention for a few minutes.’ She saw shoulders stiffen and jaws clench when she announced she was from the police. ‘A woman staying here was found murdered this morning.’ She paused, scanning faces, letting it sink in as phones were put away and conversations died down. ‘Some of you may have known her. And if you did, it would help us a great deal if you could tell us anything you remember about her.’ Geneva deliberately withheld the name, curiosity forcing their faces into a semblance of concentration.
‘Someone died?’ one of the boys said. He sported three different haircuts, glasses twice too big for his face and a waxed and tapered beard.
Geneva took her time getting the folder out. No one said anything while she did this nor glanced at their phones. She placed Anna’s photo face up on the table.
‘Oh fuck,’ haircut boy said, blinking rapidly. ‘Holy shit . . . you mean all that was real?’
‘All what?’ Geneva sat down on a couch that sagged so deeply she nearly lost her balance.
‘Madison,’ he replied. ‘She was off her head Friday night, saying Anna had been kidnapped. She was trying to get anyone to listen, asking us if we’d seen Anna. Everyone thought she was just having a bad trip.’ The boy stopped and thought about this for a moment. ‘You mean . . . shit. You mean she was telling the truth?’
‘It’s certainly looking that way.’ Geneva saw small flashes of guilt ignite behind their eyes. She recounted Madison’s story and studied their expressions as they recognised the alley, felt something of the fear Anna must have felt as the man led her to the back of the van. One girl, small and dark and plump, was crying, trying to hide it, and snatching looks at another girl directly across from her. Geneva listened to the multi-accented expressions of shock and grief but all the time she kept her eye on the two girls.
When she was finished, she thanked everyone for their time, gave out her card, told them to call if they remembered anything, then crossed the room and found the two girls conferring at one of the tables.
The girl jumped when Geneva tapped her on the shoulder. She was drowning in layers of baggy clothing and she was still crying.
‘Which one was your friend?’
The two girls looked at each other, came to some unspoken agreement, then both started speaking at the same time, a rapid-fire English flattened of vowels and syllables that Geneva could barely keep up with.
‘I knew them both,’ the short girl said, wiping tears with her sleeve. ‘But I spent much more time with Anna.’
The girls introduced themselves as Sofia and Elisa, they were both from Cordoba and had been living in the hostel since last September. The table was covered in food stains, Geneva made sure to keep her hands well away. ‘What can you tell me about them?’
‘They were nice girls,’ Sofia said.
Geneva frowned and tried to hide her impatience. ‘I’m sure they were,’ she replied. ‘But, you see, when we conduct a murder investigation everyone always tells us the victims were nice. We hear this all the time. Now, they’re often just trying to respect the dead and I understand that, but no one is one hundred per cent nice and it’s often those very cracks in our personalities which allow the bad shit to creep in. You saying Anna was nice is not going to help me find her killer and that’s more important right now than protecting her reputation.’
The girls looked at each other and burst into another round of quick-fire Spanish. Sofia turned to Geneva. ‘They like to have fun. Like everyone else, okay? We’re here on holiday, most of us know when we go back home it’s going to be jobs and the rest of our lives so this is a kind of, how do you say, last chance for us? Say goodbye to being a student, party in London for a few months, then go back and try to work out how to make a living.’
‘I understand, believe me, I do. But some people like to get a bit wilder than others, right?’
‘Not Anna. Anna was always so serious, one of those girls who always looks like her dog just died. Madison . . .’ Sofia laughed and looked over at her friend. ‘Madison was more of a party girl, loved to be out all night, surrounded by lights, music, alcohol, men. She was fun.’ She described the hostel scene, the constant shuffle of bodies, chance encounters and random couplings.
‘When did you and Anna first meet?’
‘She moved in just before end of last year. There weren’t many of us staying here during the holidays so we hung out together.’ Sofia stopped and studied her hands, her head performing a slight half-shake. ‘She had these big dreams, you know. Most of us are here for a bit of fun but Anna was determined to make it as an actress. So many auditions. God, I could never imagine myself doing that.’
‘She didn’t have any luck?’ Geneva gently prodded.
Sofia shook her head. ‘It was her accent. She never got it quite right. She once told me she’d spent her teenage years listening to the BBC and practising. She was very happy with it but, every now and then, you’d hear some German, that crunch at the end of each word, you know? She would sit up nights in her bed and practise saying certain words over and over but I don’t think she realised how bad it was. She’d often come back from auditions in a terrible state, mope around her room for a day or two, but she always picked herself straight back up. That was the thing about her. She really wanted to be an actress, that was all she ever wanted, but wanting it badly doesn’t guarantee anything, does it?’
Geneva nodded. This was the way it often went. People came to London in search of dreams they’d harboured since childhood and then they got here and the city ate them up and spat them out like so much junk food. There were always more people, more dreams, more disappointments and sad retreats back home. ‘Did Anna take drugs?’
‘Anna?’ Sofia frowned. ‘God, no. Never even got that drunk. I always teased her about it, told her it was the German in her that refused to lose control.’
Geneva nodded but she knew no one ever told them the truth about drugs. ‘Did she seem at all different recently?’
Sofia and Elisa looked at each other. Two bursts of Spanish passed between them and Geneva could tell they were disagreeing.
‘What is it?’
‘Tell her,’ Elisa said to Sofia in English.
Sofia sighed. ‘Something happened to Anna these last couple of months. I think we all sensed it but no one really put it into words or asked her about it. She used to be so assertive and sure of herself. She always had opinions. Three or four opinions on every subject and never shy to voice them but she withdrew into herself recently.’
‘In what way?’
‘She became a little quieter, less engaged. She didn’t want to go out and didn’t spend as much time in the common room. Her personal habits changed too – her hair was a mess, there was dirt under her nails, she stopped wearing make-up. She’d become so nervous, jumping every time someone slammed a door, and all this bad shit kept happening to her. She got rejected from RADA. Her father was diagnosed with cancer. She got this terrible rash and she was being stalked online.’
Geneva sat up. ‘Stalked?’
Sofia looked over at Elisa but Elisa didn’t say a thing. ‘It was, I don’t know, a month ago? The middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep, gave up and came down to the kitchen to make tea. I saw Anna sitting at one of the tables. She had her head in her hands and she was crying, these really big, loud sobs. There was no way I could pretend I didn’t hear so I made her some tea and sat down next to her.’
Geneva moved her chair closer to the table as Sofia sniffed, reached for a shredded tissue secreted in her sleeve, and blew her
nose. ‘It took a few minutes for Anna to cry herself out. I asked her what the problem was. I thought bad boyfriend most likely but it was nothing like that. She told me someone had been targeting her with abusive tweets on Twitter.’
Geneva’s pen raced across the notebook’s pages as she tried to get it all down.
‘I laughed. I mean, who hasn’t been trolled, right? And I was surprised, too. I hadn’t thought something like that would get to Anna. This wasn’t like her at all. I told her to block them and forget about it but she said she’d already done that and new accounts kept appearing. I advised her to stop checking Twitter. I joked it was probably some lonely twelve-year-old loser in his bedroom in South Korea but Anna shook her head. She said No, he’s here. I asked her how she could possibly know that. She told me he’d called her mobile and left a message.’
‘Do you know what it said?’
Sofia nodded. ‘He said he was coming to claim her.’
16
Carrigan told Max he’d be back later for further questions and got directions to the common room so he could find Geneva.
He was hopelessly lost within two minutes. A spinning profusion of landings, hallways and identical corridors, all swamped in gloomy funk. The hum in his ears abruptly shifted, a low growl replacing the high-pitched whine he was used to. He took out his phone but, predictably, there was no signal. He continued past an alcove stacked with the broken bones of abandoned ping-pong tables and then he heard noise and chatter and saw light leaking out of an open door to his right.
Dinner time at the hostel. Smoke and steam and spices. Music and laughter and conversations going on in at least five different languages. Carrigan could see residents huddled around a kettle preparing mugs of tea or chatting over bubbling pots of heavily scented stew. Two men were arguing in flustered Ukrainian. A conversation conducted in raised hands and eyebrows as much as words. Three different sources of music clashed and crashed and were ignored. The sweet tang of weed overlay everything.
