by Stav Sherez
It was as if the entire world had been compressed into this chaotic kitchen yet they all shared one essential thing – nationality in the country of youth whose borders, Carrigan knew, when they closed, closed for ever. They were lucky they couldn’t see the disappointments and setbacks waiting for them. The bump in the road that sent you flying into another life. But he was here because that was exactly what had happened to one of their fellow residents.
Carrigan flashed photos, asked questions, trying to refresh drug-stunted memories, going from group to group, looking for someone who might have known Anna. There were nervous shuffles and sudden losses of English but mainly there was concern and shock that something like this had happened to a girl who’d walked these halls only a few days ago. Most of the residents were new arrivals and didn’t recognise her. Others had seen her around but not for several days and didn’t know her name let alone anything else. Carrigan could see it in their eyes – this’d be the moment they remembered and would tell stories about when all the other memories of their trip had faded. He was about to call it a day when a young man approached him.
‘I knew her,’ he told Carrigan. ‘I helped her get work.’ He introduced himself as Bob. He had long black hair and was so skinny that if he turned sideways he’d probably disappear. He wore a Snoopy T-shirt and sported a pair of glasses with wide rectangular frames, the kind eighties snooker players used to peer over as they lined up a shot. He shook his head several times, as if by doing so he could dislodge the bad news from his brain then reached into his pocket and took out a card and handed it to Carrigan. ‘I make a little extra going round the hostels handing them out. That’s how I met Anna.’
Carrigan studied the white business card. The words Sparta Employment Agency across the top in ersatz Greek lettering, an empty room, spotless and modern, depicted below. ‘She was working for you?’
‘For the company,’ Bob said. ‘Fuck. I knew I should have told you earlier.’
‘Told me what?’ Carrigan glanced across the room. Two girls were sitting at a far table, seemingly deep in conversation. Carrigan recognised one of them – she’d been smoking outside when he and Geneva had entered the courtyard. He could tell she was pretending not to notice him, her rigid refusal to look in his direction giving her away.
‘Anna came up to me in the common room one day, wanting to know what the hourly rates were,’ Bob explained. ‘She wanted to start right away. I think she really needed the money. That first week she must have clocked in like sixty hours at least.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Whatever was going. Various cleaning jobs. Some of them pretty nasty, hospitals and shit.’
Carrigan stole a look at the two girls. ‘And she was still doing this right up till her disappearance?’
‘She quit two weeks ago.’
‘She say why?’
Bob looked down at the floor. ‘She’d had some trouble. She told me that one of the places she was cleaning, the owner had made an inappropriate remark. I said I could talk to my boss and she could file a formal complaint but, I don’t know, maybe Anna thought she’d lose the job or maybe she was just the forgiving type. She told me to forget it.’ Bob kneaded his hands together. Carrigan could see him battling with the guilt of not having done more at the time but hindsight always pointed the finger. How could you know in advance? How could you tell which small misstep would be the one that derails your life?
‘A week later she tells me it’s happened again,’ Bob said. ‘That this time the client had made a pass at her and when she refused, he grabbed her arm and squeezed it and told her that next time she’d better do what he said. She quit right after that.’
Carrigan heard a soft ticking in his skull. ‘Do you know if it went any further? If this man tried contacting her again?’
‘You’ll have to ask my boss,’ Bob replied. ‘She’d be the one who would have dealt with any complaint.’
‘Do you get a lot of this type of complaint?’
Bob nodded. ‘Unfortunately, yes, quite a few. It’s been getting worse recently. Some clients, they see a foreign girl cleaning their bathroom, they think she’s easy prey.’
Carrigan took his details and thanked him. He felt the information buzzing in his notebook and wanted to get back to the station so he could make some calls, but there was one more thing he needed to do here.
Carrigan approached the table with the two girls. He introduced himself and flashed the photo. The girls shared a brief glance, their faces turning pale.
‘But . . . I only spoke to her last week?’ the one from the courtyard said. She gave her name as Barbara and seemed utterly transformed by Carrigan’s words. It was all you ever saw in the job – people collapsed by grief and shock, their perfect world crumbling into ashes right in front of you, or people deranged by greed and lust and anger.
‘You never think . . .’
‘Oh God . . .’
Death turned everything into cliché. Carrigan took notes and filtered out the platitudes. Barbara tried to avoid Carrigan’s gaze. The other girl, Liv, hid behind the strict curtain of her fringe and nibbled at her cuticles. They spoke of Anna with hushed reverence and muted shock. They recalled drunken nights in scuzzy Camden bars or trawls through the heart of Soho at four in the morning, but they had nothing new for Carrigan.
He studied them for a long moment. Silence was an interrogator’s best tool. He counted off the seconds in his head.
‘Where do residents get their drugs from?’
The two girls looked at each other.
Carrigan turned towards Barbara. ‘I saw you outside. I know what you were smoking. I don’t care about that. I’m only interested in finding out who killed Anna. The rest is your business.’
Barbara crossed her legs, her dress snickering in the silence. ‘You really mean that?’
‘You think I give a damn about weed when I have a murder to investigate?’
Barbara pulled a how-should-I-know face and sighed. ‘There’s no problem getting hold of it. Guys come around most evenings, two or three regular guys, they always have stuff on them.’
‘What kind of stuff are we talking about?’
‘Mainly weed. Some X, nothing too crazy.’
‘What about designer drugs?’ Carrigan recalled Geneva’s initial suspicions. It was a problem that hadn’t existed ten years ago and now they saw it everywhere.
‘Wouldn’t touch those,’ Barbara said. ‘Never know what you’re going to get from one pill to the next.’
‘Isn’t that what everyone’s taking these days?’
‘What do you expect?’ she replied. ‘Criminalise drugs we know about and people start taking unknown shit. Everybody becomes the guinea pig, the guy in the cave who gets to see if the shiny red toadstool is good for eating.’
Carrigan laughed. Interviewing teenagers had changed too. A sense of bitter entitlement and anti-authoritarian cant pervaded their every sentence. ‘That’s all very interesting but I don’t really have time for social analysis.’ Carrigan gave Barbara his least threatening smile. ‘A girl is dead. She was spiked with something and then she was abducted and killed. So drop the crap. You heard about anyone having their drinks spiked at the hostel? Maybe a little touch and feel thrown in for free?’
They both shook their heads. ‘There’s always too many people here,’ Liv said. ‘You couldn’t get away with it.’
And yet someone had. They’d managed to slip inside Anna’s room and carefully snip out her passport photo. This wasn’t random. This smelled of obsession and desire. The patience to make these things happen. The cruelty to stretch it out.
‘Did Anna take drugs?’
The two girls looked at each other.
‘You might as well tell me. She’s dead. I can’t arrest her.’
Barbara performed a dismissive head-wiggle. Liv parted her fringe and leaned forward. ‘I would never have thought so, not Anna, so I don’t know, but last week I bumped into her and she seemed
pretty fucked up.’
‘You’re sure it wasn’t just booze?’
‘I didn’t smell anything and no, this was different – she was slurring, jittery, her pupils heavily dilated. I’m not sure she even recognised me. I said hello as we passed in the hallway but she just walked right past me as if I didn’t exist.’
17
She heard a man scream. An animal howl reverberating through the tiled room. Geneva stood back as a guitar erupted from a speaker on her left, making the instrument tables vibrate and hum. She recognised the song: Hüsker Dü’s ‘New Day Rising’ – two and a half minutes of sheer frontal assault and the joy of noise. She knew it well but she’d never heard it like this. The recording was muffled, saturated with hiss and crackle, the music distant and distorted.
Milan, the chief pathologist, was crouched over a gurney on the other side of the autopsy room. He was peering into a woman’s stomach, gently holding up a flap of yellow skin with two fingers. He hadn’t noticed Geneva’s entrance nor could he hear her shouting his name.
She approached the gurney and placed a hand on his shoulder. He jumped and dropped his scalpel. It clattered against the table and span down to the floor, hitting the front of her shoe. Milan spat out several imprecations in Serbo-Croat then broke into a large garrulous smile when he saw Geneva standing beside him, trying very hard to stop herself from laughing.
‘You always have it this loud?’
Milan smiled, his lips disappearing behind his beard. ‘It’s so I won’t be able to hear them.’ He pointed to the wall of slabbed bodies and reached for the remote.
‘It sounds awful.’ Geneva studied the ancient tape deck, already an artefact from the edge of memory. ‘I have this on CD. I can make you a better copy.’
Milan muted the music. ‘It sounds to you like a shitty old cassette, right?’ He snapped off his gloves and draped the dead woman with a sheet. ‘To me . . .’ He looked up at the buzzing fluorescents as if memory were merely an object that needed illumination like any other. ‘It reminds me why I’m here.’
Geneva smiled but Milan shook his head sternly. ‘You take me for some sentimental old idiot, right? Listening to crappy cassettes? But that is not why.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘It’s not a nice story.’
‘It never is.’
Milan walked over to the sink and washed his hands several times under scalding jets of water. ‘During our war, I did some bad things. A lot of bad things. It was not my choice to do these things but that makes no difference to the people I did them to. When I lay in bed in our compound at night, I would close my eyes and curse my parents – every name and disease and misfortune I could think of. I did not curse my enemies, nor my commanders who made me do those bad things, nor even my country which plucked me out of medical school so I could be of use in this camp somewhere in the dark forest – but my parents – because it was they who forced me to become a doctor and if I hadn’t been a doctor then I would not be here and they would not ask me to do such things.’ He stopped and wiped the back of his hand across his beard. ‘Though, of course, I now realise that none of it mattered and that they would have made me do other things instead because war can always find new uses for old skills. The only tape I had with me in the forest was this one. We did not have British and American records in Belgrade those days and when someone met up with a tourist and dubbed one of their tapes it was big news. The tape would be copied all across the city, each copy getting more muffled, more distant from the source. You could always tell who was who in the capital by how many generations their tapes had. And the singer screaming? That was me because music is how we speak to ourselves, no?’
Geneva looked at the gleaming instruments resting on the table. ‘Without music, I don’t think I could stand this world.’
Milan smiled. ‘Yes, indeed. After the war was over, I swore I would never work with live patients again. When I’m alone in this room and I start to wonder how I got here, this tape reminds me.’
Sudden confidences always unsettled her, the way they wove themselves into your life and demanded things of you. ‘After all that, this is going to sound pretty banal. But my boss sent me and . . .’
Milan waved her off. ‘No need to apologise. Your boss is the one with the beard, yes? I deal with him often. Can’t be an easy man to work with?’
Geneva shrugged. Milan winked conspiratorially and walked over to the freezer. He wheeled out a slab from the middle row. The runners hadn’t been oiled in a while and the gurney screeched and rattled as it slid out.
Geneva looked down and saw Anna staring back up at her. Beseeching her. Blaming her. Because even the dead carry grudges. Anna’s hair lay limp across her shoulders and her mouth was almost closed but not quite, one tooth showing.
‘First of all,’ Milan said, ‘there was no sign of sexual assault. This is the good news. But it’s also strange because the killing otherwise bears the hallmarks of a sexually motivated slaying.’
Geneva studied Anna’s neck. It was long, slender and shapely – until your eyes came to rest on the small black mouth gaping midway down the right side. She looked away. ‘Why do you say that?’
Milan took a deep draught of air. Small black hairs twitched in his nostrils as if he’d inhaled a spider. ‘She is a woman,’ he said flatly. ‘When a woman is murdered, you always have to ask is there a sexual motive to this? It is not how it should be but it is how it is. That’s number one. Number two, there’s something very personal and, yes – don’t take this the wrong way – sensual about putting a knife to a woman’s throat, holding her body with your other hand, slowly pressing the blade, feeling the skin part to let you in, and then the hot gush of blood flowing over your fingers and across your chest.’ Milan looked up and his eyes were small and hard. ‘Don’t you agree, this is something?’
Geneva nodded, wondering what that first soft scratch had felt like and how much of what was about to happen Anna had understood. ‘What can you tell me about the incision?’
‘It’s very precise. Almost a work of art, if you’ll excuse the expression. Just the right length and depth to make it fatal.’
‘Someone with a knowledge of anatomy?’
‘Twenty years ago I would have said yes. These days? Anyone can learn how to do it off the web in fifteen minutes – but there’s no hesitation marks and it was done very cleanly, so who knows?’ Milan pointed to Anna’s collarbone. ‘He held her up as she bled to death. There are bruises on her shoulder and underneath her chest.’
Geneva saw what Milan was referring to, a curving constellation either side of Anna’s ribcage, the unmistakable span of human hands. It confirmed Carrigan’s theory about the killer angling Anna’s body so that her escaping blood would drench him. Milan lifted Anna’s right arm and turned the wrist towards Geneva. Small red bands criss-crossed the skin.
‘Restraint marks. From a leather ligature. We took a sample. Leather’s unique so it might provide a match at a later date. It tells us he held her captive. I also found two small puncture marks that could be from a hypodermic.’
‘Two?’
‘Yes. Why? Were you expecting more?’
‘We know from Madison’s account that he injected Anna with something before he abducted her, this was on top of whatever he’d put in her drink. Why would he need to inject her again? To keep her docile?’
‘He had her tied up. He wouldn’t need it for that. I think once you know what combination of drugs he used, you’ll know a lot more about why he does this, why he needs to do this. There’s a period of roughly forty-eight hours between her disappearance and the probable time of death. What happened to her in these hours? Where did he take her? What did he do to her?’
Geneva nodded. She knew they had to start asking these questions but she also knew that the answers would only ever come, if they did at all, when they’d apprehended the killer.
‘I also found tiny bits of wood splinter stuck to the back o
f her legs. Trace are examining them but if I had to guess I’d say the killer strapped her to some kind of tortureboard.’
‘Tortureboard?’
‘The majority of serial killers use some kind of restraining device to incapacitate their victim – you see it especially in the sadistic variety. They need the torture to go on for as long as possible and they need to keep the victim in place to do this. So they modify existing furniture or make their own. Dean Arnold Corll created an elaborate contraption to keep young boys immobile – while they were strapped to it he could do anything he wanted to them, and did. Fred West made one out of metal at his job then took it home and tried it on his daughter.’
Geneva shook her head but the words wouldn’t leave so easily. She thought of generations of women locked in cells and basements across the centuries. Fingernails breaking against brick walls. Screams that no one hears. Berlin, Smyrna, Ravensbrück. Richard Ramirez singing along to AC/DC as he stalks the LA streets, Wayne Clifford Boden, the vampire rapist of Montreal, gorging on blood. The planning and persistence. The savagery of men when they know no one’s watching. ‘So, let me get the sequence straight,’ Geneva said. ‘He drugs her once with the spiked drink, then again as he’s taking her to the van. He injects her at least once more and keeps her strapped to a tortureboard for an indeterminate period of time. Then he takes her to the abandoned house, strips her, cuts her neck just so, holds her in place so he can shower in her blood, then dresses her back up and positions her on the floor with arms and legs at forty-five degree angles. Finally, he closes her eyes.’
Milan nodded.
‘Carrigan suspects it’s all about the blood.’
‘Undoubtedly, that’s a large part of it,’ Milan said. ‘But if it was just that he’d have no reason to keep her captive and yet he did. He closed her eyes after she was dead. Why undress her? There’s something else that’s making him tick and we’re not seeing it yet. It is unfortunate that for a pattern to be discernible there needs to be several bodies for comparison. It may, of course, also be a misdirection.’
