A Dark Redemption (19 page)

Carrigan read the grease-splattered menu though he knew every item on it by heart. He’d been coming to this small Chinese restaurant for as many years as he could remember, though Louise had never liked it, preferring one of the trendier establishments up the road. But he liked the dinginess, the steamed-up windows, the waiter who was always popping down the road to the local casino between orders, the tourists put off by the dangling strings of bright orange and yellow intestines hanging in the window, and the cough-wracked cook presiding over the soup by the entrance.

He nodded over his favourite waiter, a skinny pock-marked twenty-year-old with pale eyes and ferocious weed breath, and ordered a plate of Ho Fun dry, won ton soup and chilli dumplings.

His food arrived and he started feeling better, the familiar wallpaper and unsmiling faces making him feel at home, the closest he ever got anyway.

And then he saw her coming in, holding something in her hands, talking to the waiter, his long bony arm pointing towards Carrigan’s table.

She was the last person he wanted to see right now so why did he feel a sudden quickening as he saw her approach, unconsciously rubbing his beard free of crumbs and finally noticing what it was she was holding in her hands.

‘I thought you might need one.’ Geneva placed the small coffee cup in front of him. ‘A triple,’ she added, ‘from that place you like.’

He was about to lay into her, his face tightening, and then he smelled the coffee and all those feelings were quickly washed away.

Geneva sat down slowly, still unable to meet his eyes, doing everything she could, sorting through her things, playing with her drink, staring at the unfamiliar, chaotic restaurant. ‘Jennings told me you’d be here.’

‘Good coffee,’ he replied, taking a sip, feeling the caffeine kick through his system. ‘Now tell me what you told Branch.’

She lay her hands flat, curling up her fingers at the stickiness of the table mat, surprised by his sudden brusqueness but knowing she deserved it. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, flustered, squeezed into a corner table, the heat and smell making her dizzy. ‘I didn’t know Branch was going to spring that on you, I swear. I didn’t tell him anything that would compromise the investigation.’ She paused, trying to gauge his reaction but his face was buried in the menu. ‘Or that would compromise you.’

He looked up, thinking about this, and waved her qualms away with his hand. ‘No need to apologise.’ He knew he’d been too snappy with her, that she’d been played like he had and that there was nothing to gain by making an enemy out of her. ‘I should have realised he’d have something like this planned.’

She took a sip of coffee, wiped her top lip. ‘He’s asked me to do the press conference but I told him no.’

Carrigan was impressed by the steel in her voice, the cold gleam of her gaze. ‘You should do it,’ he replied. ‘Don’t let my problems with Branch get in the way of your career.’

She was surprised by his words, searching for hidden meanings or slights, but there were none she could see. ‘If you don’t want me to . . .’

‘Nonsense. It’ll be good for you to experience what one of those circuses is like. Nothing to be gained by going against Branch.’ He paused, looking up at the fuzzy TV. ‘Not for you, anyway.’

‘You really think the press conference is a bad idea?’

Carrigan put the menu down. ‘It’s not a great one.’ He called over the waiter with a practised flick of the wrist. ‘But Branch is half right, I just don’t like anyone telling me how to run my investigation. Especially as it’s my head on the line and not Branch’s if this fucks up.’

‘I don’t think I realised what I was getting myself into.’ A shade of doubt crossed her face then just as quickly disappeared.

‘I don’t think any of us do, ever,’ he replied but it seemed to her he was thinking about other things when he said it, his eyes staring up towards the yellow ceiling. ‘You hungry?’

She nodded – the stress of the day, the smells around her – horrified at the thought that perhaps he could hear her stomach rumbling.

Carrigan slid over the menu but as far as she could see it was written in Cantonese with no English explanations or useful diagrams. He told her about finding the suspect’s photo on Facebook as he jabbed his finger at different entries, saying ‘try this’ or ‘I think you’ll love this’ until it all began to spin and flicker and she asked him to order. She watched as he told the waiter what he wanted, the man making quick slashing marks on his white pad. She thought about what had gone on in Branch’s office and what she’d found out before that. She knew it was probably the last thing Carrigan wanted to hear.

‘I know you’ve dismissed this, I know all that . . . but I’m convinced that Ngomo is part of this case.’ She told him what she’d found out about the general. ‘It can’t be coincidence,’ she explained. ‘Grace is writing a thesis about his crimes and then we find her murdered with her heart cut out, the same signature Ngomo was notorious for back in Uganda.’ She sat back, watching the food, watching Carrigan, expecting him to explode and dismiss her theories with another of those practised brushes of his hand, but instead his whole body seemed to fall into focus. He pushed his plate aside and laid his arms squarely on the table.

‘This is your theory, right, not Branch’s?’

She nodded, unfolding one of the napkins which seemed made out of cheap toilet paper; she dreaded to think what they stocked the toilets with. ‘You’ve seen what Branch thought of my ideas.’

Carrigan scratched his beard and took another sip of coffee. ‘It still doesn’t make any sense,’ he said. ‘Grace is writing a thesis that in all likelihood only two people will ever read. Do you know how improbable it is that Ngomo somehow stumbled on it?’

‘I don’t think he stumbled on it, I think Gabriel told him.’

Carrigan looked up. ‘It’s still barely a set of coincidences, circumstantial at best.’

‘You going to give me the nearly-all-murders-are-simple-and-basic spiel?’

He noticed she was smiling. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I assume you’re aware of that. But we have a photo of our suspect, what more do you want?’

‘An explanation as to how someone like that could get Grace’s body released from the morgue.’

Carrigan stopped what he was doing and put down his cup. She told him how the body had been claimed and how Branch had assured her it had not been family. ‘If Grace’s source is everything we think he is,’ she continued, ‘then there’s no way he could have done all this alone. He must be working with someone, someone who has access.’

‘We shouldn’t rush to a conclusion just because it appears to make sense of things,’ Carrigan replied, but she could see a subtle shift in his expression as if he were trying to convince himself of something he knew to be false. He’d filled his mouth with noodles before she could ask him to elaborate, at the same time using his other hand to point out to her a small dish with three round dumplings on it. He swallowed his mouthful and used one of the napkins to clean the grease from his beard. ‘The man we have in the photo killed Grace, I’m sure of that. I don’t think there’s any doubt. But I agree that there’s too many loose ends to this case, things that just don’t make sense.’

She tried picking up the dumpling with her chopsticks, failed miserably and, humiliatingly, had to ask for a fork. ‘Such as?’

Carrigan poured them both some dark tea. ‘Why are the Ugandan embassy involved in this case? Why are they pressuring Branch? That’s for starters . . . it’s the inconsistencies I’m more worried about – the killer savagely rapes and tortures this girl yet calmly films it, then edits the clip and uploads it onto the internet. Not the behaviour of a compulsive sex killer at all. The computer missing and yet all of Grace’s notes untouched. The ungagging – I’m always coming back to that – why does he do it, why put himself at risk like that?’ Carrigan noisily slurped some soup, put something that looked like a baked dog paw in his mouth. ‘I don’t think this has anything to do with her thesis,’ he said, ‘but I agree that there’s more to this than we first thought.’ He told her about the photos left in his flat, Penny’s surprise ride home. ‘I’m being followed and whoever’s doing it is using me to clean up. What scares me is that he’s not even trying to hide it.’

‘But if it’s more than one man then we’ve got to be talking about something in her work,’ Geneva objected. ‘Something not only Ngomo but the Ugandan government are desperate to suppress.’

Carrigan took a long drink of tea and picked at a dumpling, shaking his head. ‘Crazy to think that writing can get you killed.’

He’d meant it ironically‚ but he saw that Geneva had taken him seriously, a shadow darkening her face almost immediately.

‘Writing is a dangerous business,’ she replied.

He speared another dumpling. ‘Who said that?’

‘It’s what my mother always used to tell me,’ she said, finally working up enough courage to go for the entrées. ‘She nearly got killed for her writing.’ She enjoyed the look of momentary surprise on Carrigan’s face – she’d been wondering if someone as undemonstrative as him was even capable of such an emotion. ‘My mother is Katrina Valenta. You wouldn’t have heard of her but back in Czechoslovakia she was the most popular female poet of the sixties. She was friends with Havel and Dubček and a lot of the young writers and revolutionaries of the time. She wrote these long epic poems about freedom and mountains, about eastern Europe and Lenin’s beard. She spent two years in a Soviet-controlled prison for dissidents in the Czech woods. She was freed just before ’68, the Prague Spring. She quickly got back into the fray and was there at the barricades, throwing rocks at the Soviet tanks. But it wasn’t for this she had to leave the country in the middle of the night, it was for a short ten-line poem she wrote depicting Stalin as a child abuser and Czechoslovakia as his victim. They issued a warrant for her arrest. Friends of hers helped her get across to Austria. She eventually made it to London where a lot of Czech dissidents lived.’ Geneva crunched down on the meat‚ recoiling at the sound of snapping tendons in her mouth and continued. ‘It’s not too different from the African diaspora. London has always been a safe place to write, argue and agitate. She continued writing poems but she was never the same after that. The poems were never the same. Her critics loved the new work, the poems about walking through Highgate cemetery and sitting by Marx’s grave, the sonnets about crossing Europe in cars and buses – but she never thought they were worth anything. She once said to me that the only poems that count are the ones that can get you killed.’

It was the most he’d heard her talk about her own life and when he saw the sadness and droop of her eyes he understood why. ‘Growing up must have been a lot of fun.’

She stared at him and, for a split-second, all the days they’d worked this case were rendered mute, then she smiled, a thin grudging smile, and shrugged as if to say growing up is never fun.

He thought about David, the look in his eyes that day when he saw the man being beaten by the soldiers in Masindi. Their refusal to take a stand, to risk their lives for something they believed in. ‘She must have been delighted when you joined the Met.’

‘She almost disowned me,’ she laughed, though Carrigan could tell there were things lurking behind that laugh that weren’t so funny, nights of arguments and slammed doors and words you wish you hadn’t said. ‘For a dissident like her, for someone who was always on the run from the police, it was as if I’d gone and joined a cult or become a heroin addict – much worse, actually.’ Something crossed Geneva’s face and her voice stumbled. ‘We all have to learn to live with things. She’s learned, but that doesn’t stop her sending me neatly clipped job ads from the
Guardian
at every opportunity.’ She put down her fork and looked up at Carrigan. ‘All I wanted to do was prove to my mum that the police were the good guys.’

Carrigan stared at his plate, something suddenly gone out of him like a popped balloon. ‘I think I wanted to prove to myself the same thing,’ he replied, thinking about that road again and the look on David’s face as he was being led away.

‘It must have been nice to have always known what you were going to do, though; you can’t imagine the shit I went through before I decided.’

His laugh caught her off-guard, there was so little mirth in it. ‘It was the last thing I had in mind. I was a singer once, played some instruments. I made an album.’

‘You’re kidding. What happened?’ She remembered DC Singh’s comment about the wildest rumour she’d ever heard about Jack Carrigan.

A look of regret poured into his face, making him almost unrecognisable. ‘Life happened. The way it always does. I used to do that and now I do this.’ He wiped his mouth, ran his fingers through his beard and finished his tea. ‘I’m meeting DI Spencer in Peckham tomorrow. He’s supposed to be an expert, or the closest the Met have got to one, on the African diaspora.’ He looked up at Geneva, saw her eyes flash blue. ‘I think we’re getting close now,’ he said, his face softening for the briefest of moments.

She could feel the sense of excitement and resolution coming off him. ‘You want me to come with you?’

He shook his head, called over the waiter. ‘We need to find out more about Grace herself. I want you to go back to SOAS. I want to know why she visited Willesden Green so often – did she have a boyfriend or family there? Someone’s bound to know. And I’m uneasy about how little information the university seems to have on her. Talk to the registrar, lean on them if you need to – but there must be more official documentation. She was under eighteen when she started her course, there’s got to be a signed consent form somewhere, application papers, qualification records, references.’

She nodded, secretly pleased that she would have a chance to go back to SOAS. She watched Carrigan wave her away when she tried to pay, she saw a couple of hapless tourists trying to decipher the menu, being shouted at in Cantonese by one of the waiters, and decided she liked this place. ‘This was nice.’

Carrigan looked up and smiled.

It was like another country dropped down in the middle of London. A different city existing independently and yet congruent to the larger metropolis. Rye Lane, Peckham, on a Tuesday afternoon. Carrigan had lived in London for over forty years and yet he’d never been here. It was one of the things he loved about the city, the way you could turn a corner and fall into another world. But this morning he had no time to savour this nor the way the sun seemed a different shade here, reflecting off the bright multicoloured awnings like something from a lower latitude.

He’d seen him again.

Carrigan had come out of the train station half an hour early for his meeting with DI Spencer. He bought some bad coffee and was staring into the window of a shop advertising African DVDs when he noticed him in the reflection, the man who’d been eyeballing him at the AAC meeting. He turned round but the man was gone. He scanned the pavement but the faces all blurred. He thought back to the two Ugandan diplomats in Branch’s office, the men in the car outside his flat, Grace’s missing body. He checked his watch, saw that he had enough time, and started walking down the street at a relaxed pace, not looking back. He turned into a small alley at the end of which he saw the elongated shadows of garages darkly delineated under a railway arch.

As he’d expected, behind him he could hear footsteps, a single pair, steady and resolute, getting louder. He felt the bloodbuzz rush through his head as he walked down the alley then quickly turned into a sheltered niche reeking of oil and spilled petrol, flattening himself up against the wall.

He waited, holding his breath. When his pursuer passed, Carrigan leapt out, grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it up against his back. He slammed his own bodyweight against the man, causing him to crash against the wall.

He was pulling out his handcuffs when the man spoke.

‘Second pocket, right.’

Carrigan held the man’s arm up against his back and pulled to tighten the pressure. The man just grunted and tried to ease the strain on his arm.

A couple of school kids watched as Carrigan reached in and extracted a thin wallet from the man’s pocket. He flipped it open with his teeth and was surprised to see the face of the man he was holding against the wall staring back at him from a police warrant card.

‘How about my arm?’

Carrigan let go, gave DI Spencer back his warrant card and apologised. He explained about the man he’d seen following him.

‘It’s ’cause I’m black, right?’ Spencer eyeballed him, his face rigid as rock. Carrigan averted his gaze.

And then Spencer couldn’t hold it in any longer and burst out laughing. ‘Just fucking with you,’ he said, big saggy pouches under his eyes as if they held a reservoir of tears he’d been unable to cry. ‘Damn, it was worth it to see your reaction.’ He shook his hand vigorously, letting the blood flow back into circulation.

‘You were at the AAC meeting.’ They stood opposite each other in the small dank alley. Carrigan felt that peculiar after-effect of adrenaline, the enervation and relief coursing through him.

DI Spencer straightened his fleece, lit up a cigarette. ‘I’m looking into them, part of a case we’re working on. When I saw you and your partner I thought you were going to fuck everything up for us. I wanted to know why you were interested in the AAC, so imagine my surprise when I get this call yesterday from a DI out west who wants to meet and then when I get here I see you.’

Spencer explained that his team, based in Hackney, were looking into the AAC. ‘Reports of troublemaking, sending threatening letters, that sort of thing. But what really interests us is how did this Gabriel Otto get his funding. He’s just a student but this is a well-organised and well-financed group.’ Spencer finished his B&H and ground it under his size-fifteen shoe.

‘Well, I’m glad you agreed to meet me,’ Carrigan said.

Spencer laughed, a deep and resonant sound that Jack could feel in his chest. ‘Couldn’t let you come out here all by yourself, they’d eat you alive.’ He pointed to two skinny kids standing lookout on a corner. ‘You don’t exactly blend in.’

All around him Carrigan could hear the whirling maelstrom of voices, the hard and soft staccato of Swahili, the languid tones of Luganda, the eerie musicality of Arabic, a mix of accents and intonations that felt as strange and otherworldly as the smells of spices and herbs saturating the damp air. There was a density and concentration of shops and people found nowhere else in the city, every available surface crammed with a bustle of colour and language.

Yet there was also something desperate about this place and he felt an overwhelming pity for everything – the shops with nothing anyone wanted to buy, the immigrant owners’ hopes faded like the once-bright signs adorning their storefronts.

‘We headed anywhere in particular?’

Spencer stopped, lit another cigarette. ‘There’s a house round the back of the high street, a lot of ex-child soldiers doss down there.’

‘Child soldiers?’

‘I’ve worked up a basic profile on your guy from the info you faxed me yesterday.’ Spencer pulled a sheaf of folded papers out of his jacket.

‘Thanks.’ Carrigan took them, placed them in his own pocket. ‘Give me a quick rundown.’

‘Well, I didn’t have too much to go on,’ Spencer replied, ‘but from the information you gave me I think your informant is right: the man you’re looking for is an Acholi from northern Uganda.’ Spencer paused. ‘Which is bad news in the scheme of things. Not sure this morning’s press conference would have helped.’

Carrigan mumbled something Spencer didn’t catch.

‘Saw your girl on telly. Looked good but the whole thing might have scared off your suspect.’

Carrigan flashed back to the press conference, the killer’s face flickering across millions of TV screens. He’d watched it in a small cafe while eating breakfast. Geneva had looked composed and radiant under the flash-pop of camera lights. She stood behind the big Met logo, Branch and the ACC flanking her, but her eyes were centred on the camera and her voice was steady and calm. She was assured and convincing – Carrigan could tell she’d go far if only she would allow herself to. ‘Wasn’t my decision,’ Carrigan replied, giving Spencer one of those looks that said everything in the curl of an eyebrow.

‘Yeah,’ Spencer replied, ‘never is, is it? Always the people furthest from a case think they know best how to investigate it. Anyway, in all likelihood, this man you’re after is an ex-child soldier, or ghost soldier as they’re known. From looking over the post-mortem report I don’t think there’s any doubt; the level of violence certainly fits. This is a growing problem we’re having to deal with. Look,’ Spencer pointed through the steamed and grease-rimmed windows of a closed-down greasy spoon. Inside, a huddle of men, skinny as spiders, sat crouched around a large table. Their skin shone under the light, their eyes bloodshot, all of them chewing with serene concentration then spitting out strings of thick green juice. Carrigan remembered the bitter taste of Khat that first day in Kampala, the white rush that came after the juices sank into your gums and then the instant need for more.

‘They’re kidnapped from their homes when they’re very young. They’re forced to either watch or more often participate in the killing of their own family, then they’re shackled and marched to one of Kony’s camps up in the north, taught to fight, beaten and bullied until there’s nothing left in them but hate. The girls are taken for use as sex slaves. Your man will not stop, will not listen to reason or compromise, you have to realise this. They come from war and just because they’re in London now doesn’t mean anything changes. War is all they know. They’re brutalised at such a young age that this is what they’ve become.’

Carrigan shook his head as he stared at the cafe’s interior, the lost vacancy in these men’s eyes.

‘Those scars,’ Spencer pointed to the photo of Grace’s source, the asymmetrical lines carved into the man’s face, ‘they’re typical of people who’ve been fighting in the bush. It’s the teeth I’m more worried about.’

‘The teeth?’

‘Some African tribes still use teeth filing as an initiation rite but not in this part of Uganda. We’ve heard stories. An elite group of child soldiers, Ngomo’s shock troops, survivors of countless bush skirmishes, their teeth filed to resemble the name they chose for themselves – the Wolves. If your man’s an ex-Wolf then you’ve got a big problem.’

Spencer led him to a gutted house standing on a corner two streets down from the market. A recent fire had painted its facade black and sooty, making it resemble some old Gothic greystone from the nineteenth century. The windows were missing and in their place grey Sitex screens had been mounted by the council to prevent squatters. But there was smoke and noise coming from inside, a sense of movement and life.

‘You sure about this?’ Carrigan asked as they climbed the stairs and Spencer prised open the door.

‘The ones in here are too fucked up to do anything.’

But this didn’t reassure Carrigan in the slightest as he ducked under the splayed door and into a dark unlit hallway reeking of sweat, ammonia and the bright acrid tang of burning crack.

They entered the main room. The smell and stench of bodies, of toilets that no longer worked, of drug sweat and fear and sex and hopelessness, made Carrigan gag. He’d smelled it once before and his life had never been the same since. On the floor, wherever they looked, prone bodies, thin and delicate as Giacometti sculptures, lay on flattened-out cardboard boxes.

‘Give me the photo,’ Spencer said and Carrigan didn’t argue. He knew he was totally out of his element. This was his city but this was not his city, not here. He tried to breathe slowly through his mouth, to be invisible, a white man in this room of misery and surrender. He watched as Spencer bent down and gently talked to the few who were still awake or lucid enough to even note his presence. Carrigan wondered about their homes, their villages, the mornings waking up under the glaring African sky, the endless plains and hunting grounds and now they were here, poor, bedraggled, and lost in a civilisation that didn’t understand them and didn’t want to. So, like spiders they found the dark corners, the out-of-the-way places, the waiting rooms where their hours leaked out slowly until there was no difference between death and life.

Spencer approached him, grabbing his arm, bringing him back to the present. ‘I got something.’ He led Carrigan to an empty corner. ‘A few of them definitely recognised him,’ he said, handing back the photo of Grace’s source. ‘They looked scared shitless when they saw it. One told me that your suspect used to hang out at the Drillmaker’s.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A nasty pub across from here. Not the kind of place you’d go for a quiet drink.’

Carrigan smiled. ‘What are we waiting for?’

The Drillmaker’s Arms was once an old-fashioned London pub. That was apparent from the sign hanging loosely at the front but nothing inside resembled any pub Carrigan had seen since the mid-seventies. The heavy plush sofas were ripped and worn and of a colour not easily identifiable. The pall of cigarette smoke hung over the tables though it’d been a while since the smoking ban came into force. There was a raised stage to the left of the bar, and on it, under a splash of gaudy lights, a middle-aged bleached blonde was slowly taking off her clothes.

A group of young African men sat around the stage, staring into bottles of Primus, pulling on long white-tipped cigarettes and watching the floorshow. Carrigan felt a sharp pang of sadness, this whole scene, the stripper that no one in his right mind would want to see stripped, the dark and gloomy bar, the measure of cigarettes and spark of bottles being opened in the musty air.

The woman took off her bra to reveal scars and stretch marks. The crowd cheered listlessly like it was something they’d been instructed to do. It was only two in the afternoon, a bright glaring October day, but in here it could’ve been the middle of the night. The stripper smiled and tripped, falling over her own discarded clothes. No one looked up from their beers.

Carrigan found a seat as Spencer went round trying to get some sort of reaction from the customers, shoving the photo under their eyes, standing in front of the stripper, blocking their view. Carrigan felt the mood change in the bar like a sailor could feel the tiniest splash of rain in a cloudless sky. Men were shuffling in their seats, some looking nervously behind them, others shaking their heads and raising their voices. They all shared a certain expression despite their differences, a surly nonchalance bubbling at the surface, a wariness like that of predatory birds.

Carrigan moved next to Spencer, waiting for the first flare of fist or knife, but everything was muted here, the rage and violence distilled into stares and shrugs and monosyllabic rebuttals. The stripper continued her act but no one was really watching or they were only watching in the way you look at something but don’t see it.

‘What kind of black are you?’ One of the young men challenged Spencer.

Spencer leant down into the youth’s face. ‘The kind you’ll never be.’

It happened so fast Carrigan was caught completely unprepared. Suddenly‚ Spencer was surrounded. Fists flying and the silver flash of something worse. Carrigan stepped into the swirling mass of bodies, pulling out his baton, hearing the click of its extension as he slammed it into one man’s forearm.

The crack of bone splintered cleanly and the man fell to the floor sobbing and massaging his useless arm. Carrigan turned and hit another assailant in the face but the man barely reacted, just smiled and jumped on top of Carrigan. Their bodies crashed to the floor. Carrigan felt the man’s breath on his face, twisted, and shot his knee into the man’s crotch. The African’s eyes bulged but he didn’t relax his grip on Jack’s neck. Carrigan saw black skies explode in white star showers, then heard a sharp tattoo of cracks.

Blood from his attacker’s head began streaming down onto his own face. He pulled away to see Spencer standing with a truncheon in his hands, wide smile plastered on his face.