The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  Geneva shook her head. ‘It’s too precise and controlled for it to be him trying to trick us.’

  Milan smiled. ‘The misdirection comes from our own minds, not the killer’s intention. The way we see a thing and think it is the primary thing because it seems so. But what seems so is not necessarily what is.’

  Geneva took one last look at Anna. She wanted to whisper a promise to her the way she’d often seen Carrigan do but thought better of it. ‘Did you clean her when she first came in?’

  Milan turned, surprised by Geneva’s question. ‘No, of course not. Why?’

  ‘She should have been covered in blood.’

  ‘There was barely a trace of it on her skin. A few drops and smears on the neck and collarbone, but that’s all.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ Geneva studied the white cold flesh. ‘We know he took her clothes off – they were spotless. Could he have scrubbed her after she died?’

  ‘Not in that place. Not without leaving a trace.’

  ‘But even if he angled all the blood towards him, surely more than a few drops would have landed on her skin?’

  ‘I agree. But the evidence doesn’t.’

  Geneva thought about this. ‘You sent her clothes to forensics yet?’

  ‘All packed and sealed and ready for them to pick it up.’ Milan pointed to a steel shelving unit.

  Geneva scanned the shelves. Everything was bagged and tagged, all these clothes no one would ever wear again. She found Anna’s on the third shelf down. They were individually sealed in separate evidence bags. Geneva pulled them off the shelf and laid them out on a nearby table. She peered through the clear plastic and shifted the contents and examined what she could of the material.

  The dress was white and looked like a rare leaf, pressed inside the plastic. The shoes were in a separate bag, as was Anna’s blouse and underwear. She’d seen these clothes in the death scene photos but she’d been focusing primarily on the wound in the girl’s neck at the time. She thought back to the clothes in Anna’s wardrobe as she scrutinised the long old-fashioned dress. Anna wore skin-tight jeans and a Pixies T-shirt in the photo with Madison. Geneva remembered seeing more of the same in Anna’s wardrobe. She didn’t remember seeing anything like this.

  The clothes were drab and curiously child-like, but without a hint of sexualisation, almost the opposite in fact, chaste and grey – a high-necked T-shirt, a dowdy dress and headmistress shoes.

  Geneva jiggled the clothes within the plastic, wasn’t supposed to, but she had to know. She glanced at Anna’s body but there was no way to tell from here.

  ‘Do you know her measurements?’

  Milan looked momentarily confused as he shuffled over to the desk. He pulled up a file and read out the numbers.

  Geneva double-checked her notes and asked Milan to read them out again. She picked up the bags and squeezed and manipulated the clothes within until she found what she was looking for.

  She read the sizes off the small printed label.

  She went back to the slab and studied Anna, a slow eye-crawl and silent reckoning, then pointed to the bagged clothes. ‘Are you sure this is what she was wearing when she came in?’

  Milan walked over to the table and examined the bags. ‘Yes. I cut them off her myself. Why?’

  ‘They’re two sizes too big. These are not her clothes.’

  18

  The incident room, 6.30 p.m. Rain crashing against the windows. Distant thunder on the motorway.

  The case was gaining momentum. Clues and leads rolling in, a faint glimpse of the man they were chasing in the things he’d done and the things he’d left behind. Anna being harassed at her job was their first strong lead. It felt good. It felt right. A forensics team was currently searching the alley behind The Last Good Kiss. Uniforms were rechecking the alibis of Max and the other hostel staff. CCTV footage from neighbouring streets was being scrutinised by video techs. Geneva would soon be back from the pathologist.

  Carrigan tried to update his notes but the facts were coming in too fast to properly process. He needed to control the flow of data. The brass called it creating slow time – the eternal dichotomy between fast-track actions necessary to secure ephemeral evidence versus the danger of too much information causing them to miss a vital clue. Sharp hooks wriggled under his eyes. He slid open his drawer and looked at the pills. He promised himself he’d quit tomorrow and quickly swallowed two. He called the doctor and was told there were no new developments. He avoided the one call he knew he had to make. He drew graphs and made lists of people to interview, people to rule out. He was in the middle of writing a summary for Branch when the door to his office burst open. He looked up and saw two men he didn’t recognise. They both wore suits and bored, blank expressions.

  The taller of the two men took a step forward. ‘My name is DI Patterson and this is DI Larkin. DPS.’ The internal affairs detective was smiling, expecting Carrigan to be surprised, dismayed, give himself away, but Branch had prepared him for this.

  ‘We’d like to see you tomorrow afternoon.’ Patterson’s accent was pure boarding school and Sunday cricket matches and his cheeks red and smooth.

  ‘That’s impossible.’ Carrigan pointed to a stack of files on his desk. Two of the phones started ringing in syncopated time. ‘We’ve just launched a murder inquiry and as I’m sure you understand – you were once policemen too – the first forty-eight hours—’

  ‘You feeling okay, Carrigan? You’re looking a little peaky, if you don’t mind me saying. We can always get someone to replace you if you think it’s too much for you.’ Patterson’s eyes were small and expressionless.

  ‘And waste a day getting them up to speed?’

  Patterson leaned over Carrigan’s desk. ‘These are grave charges. We’re not talking about dismissal or a slap on the wrist here. You illegally hacked into a private church database. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.’

  Carrigan dropped the file he was holding. ‘I’ve got a dead woman and her killer still out there. I apologise if I’m taking that a little more seriously.’

  Patterson’s nostrils wrinkled and Carrigan knew he was trying to detect the presence of alcohol. ‘You need to hurry up and decide what’s more important, Carrigan – your career or this case?’

  ‘You came all the way down here to ask me that?’

  ‘An email seemed a tad impersonal.’

  ‘And, of course, this would be personal.’

  Patterson smiled. ‘Touché, Carrigan. But your facility for language won’t help you here. Did you really think no one would find out? That what you did wouldn’t leave a trace? You can only blame yourself. You chose to do something. You knew it was wrong. You could have chosen any of a multitude of other options but you chose this. A man makes a choice, he has to prepare himself for how that action will unravel across the remaining days of his life.’

  ‘I did what I had to do to solve a case. If you were a real police officer, you’d know that.’

  ‘That’s exactly the kind of attitude that’s caused so much trouble and lost us so many cases over the years. Wake up, Carrigan. The days of policemen like you are over.’

  Carrigan stared at the blue file as the door to his office closed. He’d almost managed to forget about it in the spin and rush of the last twelve hours. He’d known they were coming and yet the visit had rattled him far more than he’d expected. He called Branch and said he needed to see him then put the phone down. His hands were trembling – with rage or shock, he didn’t know. Dark thoughts swooped, black-winged birds cawing at his ear. At eighteen, a cop was the last thing he could have imagined himself as and yet here he was. He knew what the others in the station thought of him, how he wasn’t a proper copper, how he’d arrested his own best friend but, staring at the blue file, he was surprised at how keenly he would miss it if it were gone. The hooks in his eyes returned. The phone rang and he knocked it off the table. Everything always came at once. The moment you tho
ught your life was running smoothly you hit the bump.

  He had one more thing to do before the briefing, aware he’d been putting it off all day. Normally he would have delegated it to Geneva or Jennings, but Anna’s parents deserved to hear from the head of the investigation. It was the least he owed her.

  Anna’s passport had been scanned and indexed by forensics. Carrigan pulled out the relevant print-outs and examined the neat empty rectangle where her photo should have been. For some reason, this small act disturbed him more than anything else. Murder was often comprehensible, most killings came down to money, sex or a sudden loss of control, but occasionally they strayed into murkier places where men did things that only made sense to their secret selves and, though on one level you could understand their motivations and compulsions, on another level you couldn’t understand them at all.

  Carrigan flicked through the print-outs until he got to the last page. Next to where the photo should have been was what he was looking for. Anna’s handwriting was small and precise, her parents’ names and contact details rendered in a careful block print to make sure no one would make a mistake. Carrigan picked the phone up from the floor and dialled, his fingers hesitating for a split second before punching in each digit.

  ‘Ja?’

  The woman who picked up sounded impossibly old, or maybe it was the crackle and hum of static rushing through undersea cables and bouncing across the atmosphere over high satellites that made it so. It took Carrigan three attempts before the woman understood who he was. A part of him had been hoping no one would be in. ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ Carrigan asked, one of the only things he knew how to say in German.

  ‘Ja, ja. Who is this?’

  Carrigan took a deep breath. ‘My name is Detective Inspector Carrigan. I’m calling from London. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.’ He waited for an acknowledgement but there was only the soft rush of static. ‘Your daughter . . .’ He stopped, rubbed his head and cleared his throat. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. We found your daughter’s body this morning. We believe she was murdered.’

  At first there was no reply. Then a soft ‘Nein’ crackled through the earpiece, followed by the same word repeated over and over again. Carrigan was about to say something when the woman started wailing. He heard the phone drop to the floor, a series of shuffles and muffled words, then a man’s voice, deep and gravelly, prickled against Carrigan’s ear.

  ‘Who is this?’

  Carrigan had to go through it again, the words sticking to his tongue.

  ‘No. That is not possible,’ the man replied. ‘We only spoke to her a few days ago. She is starting in her play tomorrow.’

  ‘Her play?’

  ‘Ja, she had a role in the National’s production of Othello. She was so excited about it. She called us to say the director had come to her school – she is in RADA, you know?’

  ‘Yes, we’re aware of that,’ Carrigan said, the lie coming easily.

  ‘This director, he picked her out during an audition. He asked her to be in the production, not a big role but still good. We were so happy for her.’

  Carrigan didn’t say anything. He waited for the man to catch up to what would become the rest of his life. He felt a deep ache within his own chest as he heard the man’s breath stutter and stop.

  ‘I don’t understand?’

  He never would. Death was always a puzzle even when the answer was staring you right in the face. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The rain slashed the windows and obscured the outer world. A car alarm sang in the street below. Carrigan put the phone down feeling as if he’d left a part of himself behind.

  *

  ‘You made the decision, Carrigan.’ Branch took the unlit pipe out of his mouth and examined it. He carefully selected a metal spike from his drawer and used it to stir and loosen the tobacco. ‘What’s worse is you encouraged a member of your team to break the law.’

  ‘I ordered him to. He didn’t have a choice.’

  Branch tapped the pipe against the table.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Berman?’

  ‘They’re pressing charges against him too.’

  ‘He had nothing to do with it. It was my order.’ Carrigan stopped, sat back and caught his breath. ‘Tell Quinn if he leaves Berman alone, I’ll do whatever he wants.’

  Branch paused and a faint smile crept across his lips. ‘All very noble, Carrigan, but Quinn doesn’t give a shit about Berman – he’s using him to get at you and now it’s dragged the entire department into it.’ Branch seemed to be considering something, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Hypocritical fuck.’

  Branch’s eyes flicked up. ‘I hope you weren’t addressing that at me?’

  ‘Quinn pretends he’s the model of new policing and integrity but when it suits him he does exactly what he wants.’

  Branch’s nose wrinkled as if he’d caught an unpleasant odour. ‘You know something I don’t?’

  ‘Quinn was giving a significant amount of money to those nuns. He had to know what they were using it for.’

  ‘Is there any way you can prove that?’

  Carrigan thought back to last Christmas and shook his head.

  ‘I thought not. All you’ve got is that he donated money to a convent.’ Branch emptied the pipe into a small ceramic saucer splashed with Chinese ideograms. ‘When they interview you, make sure you don’t lie. Assume Quinn knows your every secret and it’s written down in their files. It would also be very much in your interest to have the case closed by then.’

  ‘It would be in Anna’s interest too.’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me. You know exactly what I meant.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  Branch’s jaw clamped shut as Carrigan ran through the investigation from Madison’s appearance in the police station to the latest set of leads.

  ‘You do have a way of picking them.’

  ‘It was Miller this time.’

  ‘Christ. I should never have put the two of you together.’ Branch wrote something down in his pad. ‘The press are starting to get irritating and upstairs are calling me every five fucking minutes. Have you considered bringing in a profiler?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, you haven’t considered, or no you’re not bringing one in?’

  ‘I don’t need some psychiatrist cluttering up my team’s brains.’ Carrigan knew employing a profiler was more about looking as if all avenues had been exhausted than for its operational value, a PR move to silence second-guessing in the press and pub. ‘They have more than enough data to deal with. Whatever a profiler comes up with, it’s not going to be specific enough to warrant all that extra focus.’

  Branch scraped the inside of the bowl. ‘Well, like it or not you’re going to have one seconded to the case as of today.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Not my doing. Sorry. Quinn’s order. He’s trying to cover his back with the press if this goes tits-up.’

  ‘And relishing the chance to fuck with my command, no doubt.’

  ‘No doubt. But we don’t have a choice in this. He’s already allocated someone.’

  ‘This is bullshit and you know it. We don’t need a profiler. We’ve done well enough without one for a long time. We certainly can’t afford the expense.’

  Branch waved his hand across the table. ‘This isn’t a choice.’

  ‘Is this all a prelude to being told I’m off the case?’

  Branch put the pipe down. ‘Nothing so dramatic, Carrigan. But you have more important things to be focusing on – safeguarding your future, for instance. Would you really rather pursue this case than sort that out?’

  ‘If it means catching the man who killed Anna, then yes.’

  19

  ‘Anna Becker checked her emails at 8.25 a.m. on Friday morning then spent twenty-three minutes browsing two acting employment agencies. Ten minutes later, Anna used her Deutsche Bank debit card
to buy a skinny latte and a Diet Coke at Costa on Praed Street.’

  DC Singh was pointing to the A/V screen and the timeline she’d constructed for Anna’s last day. The team watched in silence. ‘Ten minutes after that, Anna swiped her Oyster and got on the Tube. There’s footage of her reading The Seagull while waiting for the train. She swiped out fourteen minutes later at Piccadilly Circus.’ Singh stared at her notebook, trying to unravel the mystery of her own handwriting. On the screen behind her, a mixture of grainy and hi-def CCTV captures witnessed Anna’s final hours.

  ‘Anna ate a chicken curry and drank another Diet Coke at Itsu on Shaftesbury Avenue then bought a copy of Variety, Screen International and the Guardian at WH Smith’s on Oxford Street. She went to a matinee of Vertigo at the Renoir, purchasing an extra large popcorn and a super-sized full-sugar Coke. She caught the Central Line to Lancaster Gate and reached Paddington at 6.12 p.m.’ Singh glanced up, saw everyone’s eyes fixed on her and looked away. ‘Anna bought a single margarita in The Last Good Kiss at 7.45 p.m. on Friday night. Twenty minutes later she bought two more margaritas and that’s it. She leaves no electronic trace after that and her phone isn’t used again.’

  Everyone was a little subdued by the end of Singh’s rundown. There was something unsettling in watching CCTV grabs of Anna blithely walking through London, unaware that her every move was being tracked and stored. But this was the new frontier of policing. Technology had not only changed the nature of crime, it had also fundamentally changed the nature of policework, screen gazing replacing shoe leather, data crunching instead of hunches.

  Carrigan thanked Singh and scanned his notes. ‘We have a lead now. Anna was working for a temp agency, Sparta Employment. One of the houses they sent her to, the owner tried it on with her and became violent when she refused. The kind of men who react like that are exactly the kind of men who will nurse their slights, brood and plan and never forget. Miller? I want you handling this – get a list of Anna’s clients from Sparta and see if there’ve been similar complaints from other girls – if there are, you can cross-check the addresses against Anna’s list.’