A Dark Redemption (2 page)

‘No!’ Ben grabbed David the moment he stood up, held him firmly by the arm. ‘It’s not our business.’

David swayed and shuddered in his grip. The soldiers had regained their momentum and were swinging on the man as if breaking rocks. Jack shook his head. ‘Sit down before they notice us.’

David pulled away. ‘They’re going to kill him,’ he said, his voice pinched. ‘Of course it’s our business.’

‘David!’ A thin line of sweat broke out on Ben’s forehead and his voice caught in the sticky air.

Jack sat and watched the soldiers beat the man. His legs felt like they were on fire, as though the only thing that would make them better would be to get up, cross the road and stop this terrible thing, but he couldn’t move. The heat and dread sealed him to the spot. With every blow he felt something inside him rip. He gripped the rough splintered edges of the chair until he felt a warm trickle of blood covering his fingers.

Suddenly the policemen stopped, noticing their audience for the first time. They turned towards the three white boys drinking at the bar and started clapping their hands as if they were the ones watching and not the other way round. Jack stood up.

‘No!’ Ben was almost shouting. ‘What the fuck do you think will happen to us if we interfere?’

Jack looked at David, saw his own thoughts and fears wheeling through his friend’s eyes, the space between them, the time it would take to cross the road. He sat down. ‘Christ!’ he ground his feet into the dirt below him, beetles cracking like eggshells under his heels.

David stood for a few seconds staring at the policemen, then shook his head and sat down too. They opened their beers and drank them without saying anything. The policemen eventually stopped and walked off. A woman came and knelt by the bleeding man, crying and shouting at the empty road. They finished their beers and headed upstairs to their rooms.

The next day they drove across dusty dirt roads, bumpy and bone-rattling, the tall weeds bordering them on both sides, trees rising out of the sea of grass like the masts of sinking ships. The land was flat, the mountains always shimmering on the horizon. Their heads raged with pain, last night’s beer barrelling through their skulls. Trucks laden with people and clusters of jerry-cans passed them every hour or so, men and women strapped to the roofs like wayward luggage. The passengers waved and they waved weakly back, smiling though the locals weren’t. Every now and then an army truck screamed by laden with scowling soldiers, whipping up dust and rocks, heading north. They passed small villages, all identical, a circle of mud huts by a stream and nothing more. They ate peanuts and crackers and cheese squeezed out of a tube like toothpaste. The sun sank somewhere in the west, blazing the mountains red like a caul stretched over the rim of the world.

The landscape began to close its arms around them. They found themselves climbing through high valleys and twisting ravines, the jungle almost imperceptible in its embrace until, all at once, they noticed it was there, right above and to all sides of them and they couldn’t remember how the land had changed so quickly or when.

They passed a village of burning huts just before the light finally died, thick black plumes of smoke emerging like serpents from their roofs. An eerie stillness in the air. They drove a little faster and didn’t say a word to one another.

Dark came suddenly, not like back home with its languorous twilight, but like a switch being flicked – one minute they could see the mountains and fields, the next only the tunnel of white illuminated by the car’s headlights as if they were carving out the road from the darkness itself.

They stopped at a place where the road widened and switched on the in-car light, spreading the map out across elbows and knees.

‘We won’t make it,’ Jack said, looking at the multicoloured squiggles, the distance they still had to cover before reaching the park.

David sighed, turning his face away.

‘What’s up with you?’ Jack snapped, the tension of the day making itself felt in his voice.

‘I just wish you’d stop being so negative. Just for once.’

Jack stared out into the night. ‘You want to try driving another six hours in this?’ He felt bad as soon as he said it and saw the hurt look on David’s face.

‘What are our options?’ Ben asked, diplomatic as ever, though Jack could sense a tremor of unease in his voice.

‘We can camp here,’ Jack replied, looking around at the dark bush, then back down at the map. He lit a cigarette and traced the small lines like capillaries branching out from the main road. ‘Or there’s what looks like a short cut.’ He pointed to a thin ribbon of red that veered out towards the left. ‘We passed the turn-off about fifteen minutes ago.’

Ben stared at the dark bush surrounding the car, the rustling of the grasses like old women whispering to each other, the scary smear of galaxies above. ‘Fuck camping out here.’

They backtracked and found the turning. There were no signs marking which direction the road headed or even what its name was and they had to take it on faith and an old map that this was indeed the Jango road. They drove slowly over the dark surface of the land. The grasses hissed in the wind, a flickering chatter that made them roll up their windows.

‘It sounds so human,’ David said, his face pressed up against the glass.

Ben looked at him strangely, then turned back to the road and braked suddenly, the car’s wheels spinning out from under him. Jack flew forward, arms crashing hard against the dash.

Ahead of them the road forked. There were no signs and each branch seemed of equal width, both disappearing into blackness at the edge of the headlights’ domain.

‘Shit,’ Ben said, pulling out the map, spreading it on his knees, his hands shaking. ‘There’s no fork marked on the fucking map.’

‘Africa,’ David replied with a sigh. It had become their code word for anything that defied logic, that did the opposite of what it said it did.

Jack unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car, the ground crunching and squirming under his feet like something living. He walked up to the fork, trying to see whether one side was more used than the other, looking for tell-tale tyre tracks, but there was nothing to distinguish between them. Something flickered across his vision – an antelope? Gazelle? – and just as quickly disappeared, bounding up the left fork, its white hoofs illuminated by their headlights. He stared into the black distance where both roads disappeared then walked back to the car.

‘There’s nothing to tell them apart. We’ll have to guess.’

David looked at him, his eyes sagging with sleep and frustration. ‘You liked the way it sounded; shit, you choose.’

Jack stared at the place where the road divided, thinking: left or right? Trying to work out which direction they were facing, looking for a sign, a hunch, a spasm of intimation, but there were only the odds. Fifty-fifty.

The others were waiting for him to make the choice. The hours on the road were weighing on them and they just wanted to keep moving. He thought of the ghostly gazelle he saw, the small circle of hoofs flashing in the black night. ‘We’re taking the left,’ he finally said, trying to sound authoritative.

‘You sure?’

He turned to Ben, about to answer, then saw that Ben was joking and for a moment all the fear and nervousness was gone and they were three friends in a car again, hurtling towards the next adventure.

Ben turned the engine back on and shifted into first. The road felt crinkled and folded beneath them as if loathe to let them go. They swung onto the left fork and disappeared into the night.

They had driven for an hour on the fork when they saw the first flicker of the fires.

Ben slowed the car instinctively, the wild raging light making them blind to the darkness. When their eyes adjusted they saw the roadblock, the logs stretched across the dirt track, the blazing fires crackling wildly in the breeze, and then they saw the eyes of the soldiers glaring at them, guns drawn and pointed. Ben brought the car to a stop and they began to make out voices, barking orders, shouting
Get out!
, shouting
Mzungu!
, the soldiers’ guns flickering in the firelight, the black barrels staring at them like the gouged-out eyes of some implacable god.

The coffee machine wasn’t working. It burbled, hissed and spluttered to a stop. Jack Carrigan stared at it in disbelief. He’d bought it only three months ago and it was supposed to last a lifetime. He turned it on and off, jiggled and gently shook it, and when that didn’t work he hit it twice with the side of his fist. The machine coughed, hummed, and then, miraculously, started pouring what looked like a passable cup of espresso.

The sound of the coffee slowly oozing through the steel and silver pipes always made him feel better. He began to notice the morning, the thin streamers of sunlight leaking through the gap in the curtains he’d never got round to fixing, the sound of cars being put through their morning shuffles, coughs of cold engine and shriek of gears, the doors of houses closing, the patter of tiny feet on the pavement, the clatter of human voices arising from the early-morning air.

The machine groaned once and stopped. He reached for the cup, the smell making his mouth tingle, and was just about to take his first sip when the phone rang.

London came back with a rush of clanging decibels. His left ear began its metronomic buzzing. He staggered over to the table, his fingers brushing lightly over Louise’s photo, picked up the receiver and held his breath.

Carrigan walked through the park trying to shake off the previous night. He’d arrived back from the coast late, scraped the mud from David’s grave off his shoes and fell heavily onto the sofa where he’d awoken crumpled and cramped this morning. It had been a last-minute decision; he’d be down there with Ben in a couple of weeks but something yesterday had called him, a pulse beating behind his blood.

He spent a few minutes staring at the trees, soaking in the heat, trying to ignore what lay waiting for him on the other side of the fence. Late September in Hyde Park was his favourite season, the grass still scorched by summer’s sun, the trees heavy, the first leaves fluttering down to the waiting ground. He closed his eyes and Louise’s face rose out of the dark, this park her favourite place, holding hands in snowstorms, watching kids playing by the pond, both of them thinking this life would last for ever.

Carrigan exited the park and walked on the road to avoid the clots of tourists emerging from Queensway station. He watched them huddling in tight packs, wearing the same clothes, staring up at the same things. He envied them their innocence, seeing London for the first time, a city with such history yet without personal ghosts. When you’d lived here all your life you stopped seeing the city and saw only the footsteps you’d carved through it, a palimpsest traced in alleyways and shop windows, bus stations and bends of the river.

He reached the building and looked around for DS Karlson, whose call had interrupted his morning coffee, but he was nowhere to be seen. He took out his phone and made sure he had the right address. Two PCs had been called to a flat in King’s Court earlier. When they saw what they were dealing with they immediately called in CID.

Carrigan looked up at the towering facade and pressed the porter’s buzzer. He knew the building well. They received a call every week about something, mainly waste-of-time stuff, noise complaints, funny smells, burglar alarms going off for no explicable reason in the middle of the night, but, like any building with over five hundred residents, it had its share of domestic abuse, suicide and small-time drug dealing. He tried the buzzer again. He could hear voices crackling faintly through the intercom, conversations in languages he didn’t recognise, floating in and out of hearing, criss-crossing each other until they dissolved into static and white noise.

A woman with a pram was wrestling the door from inside. Carrigan held it open for her and, as she thanked him, slipped past into the marbled lobby, its cool mirrored surfaces and swirling carpets making him feel instantly dizzy. He knocked on the door to the porter’s booth but there was no answer. He peered through the frosted glass, squinting his headache away, and saw the slumped shape of a man inside. This time he gave it his four-in-the-morning police knock.

When the door opened the stink hit him like a fist. Body odour, cigarettes and despair. The porter was a small withered man with three-day stubble and eyes that looked as if they never stopped crying. His face twitched intermittently, revealing dark gums and missing teeth as he struggled to pull himself back together. Jack knew exactly how he felt.

‘Detective Inspector Carrigan.’ He showed the man his warrant card but the porter only nodded, not looking at it or at him, and shuffled back into his room, collapsing onto a chair whose stuffing poked out like mad-professor hair.

The porter’s cubicle looked as if it had once been a luggage locker. There were no windows, no room for anything but a table, a chair and four small TV monitors with a constantly running video feed of the building’s entrance. The porter was breathing heavily, lost in the screen, watching the unpeopled doorway with such riveting poise it could have been the last minutes of a cup final he was witnessing.

Carrigan shuffled a few steps forward, bending his head to avoid the low ceiling. He took small, shallow gulps of the stale air. ‘You keep spare keys to individual flats?’

The porter barely acknowledged him, a faint turn of the head, nothing more. He eventually looked up from the screen and scratched his stubble. ‘Not no more. Used to be everyone left them with me, but things change.’ He didn’t elaborate how.

‘Flat 87’s the one directly above 67, right?’

The porter nodded. ‘I thought you guys were in 67?’

‘We are,’ Carrigan replied tersely, wishing he’d had time to get breakfast. ‘Do you have keys for flat 87 or not?’

The porter opened a drawer and pulled out an old ledger. He rapidly flicked through the pages. Sweat poured down his face as he squinted at the shaky handwriting. He ran one yellowed finger down a list of numbers, then stopped. ‘Uh-huh. Flat 87. No spare.’ He zoned out in front of the screen again. Carrigan craned his neck but there was only the image of the front door, fish-eyed, black and white, empty. He thanked the man, found out when his shift ended, and left the sweatbox of an office.

He saw the two constables nervously chatting outside the door to 67. The look in their eyes told him this wasn’t just a prank, something they could all laugh about on their way back to the station. He nodded, walked past them and knocked on the door. He waited as a series of locks tumbled and unclenched until the door finally opened and an old woman stared at him as if she’d never seen a man before. It took him a few seconds to realise she was or had been a nun, the habit faded and worn, the crucifix dangling like a medallion from her thin wattled neck.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Carrigan.’ He showed her his warrant card. The old nun didn’t acknowledge, just turned and walked back into her flat.

He was never surprised at how people lived and yet he was always surprised. Fifteen years on the job, how many flats, houses, mansions had he been into? How many lives marked out by the geography of walls? He told all his young constables that the key to a person was in how they lived their lives – study their surroundings, how they chose to arrange themselves in this world – you’ll learn much more from that than from listening to them talk or staring deeply into their eyes.

He walked through the small hallway and into the living room. The furniture was mismatched, as if collected over time from disparate sources. Chipped and cracked paint everywhere. Pieces of drawers and light fittings missing, replaced if at all by masking tape. The carpet was worn and thin, showing through to the floorboards. Stains described maps across the floor like countries never visited, dark and sticky spots where tea or ketchup or custard had landed. The old nun coughed, hacking into her hand. She lit a cigarette, the smell instantly filling the room.

The mantelpiece and bookshelves held no books, only a staggering variety of porcelain dogs. Carrigan stepped closer and saw they were all West Highland terriers, produced in a variety of finishes and styles. A few looked almost real while others were the product of some kind of artistic myopia, resembling sheep or clouds more than they did dogs.

But it was the two pieces at the far end of the mantelpiece he couldn’t keep his eyes off. It was these two that the old lady was silently pointing to with the end of her cigarette. These dogs weren’t white like the rest. They were red. A crimson caul covered their bodies.

The old nun was gesturing at them, speechless, as if such a thing had no referent in language. Her eyes had receded deep into their sockets and when she pulled on the cigarette she looked like a Halloween skull. Carrigan inched forward. He looked at the dogs and then he looked up.

A patch of red, in the shape of a teardrop, was slowly spreading from one corner of the ceiling. The constables followed his gaze and, as they watched, a single red drop fell, exploding against the white mantelpiece like an exotic flower.