Eleven Days (14 page)

She was descending the staircase slowly, her eyes roaming the room below, alighting on the unexpected faces of the detectives and the muted expressions of her parents. She had sunset blonde hair, dark sparkly eyes and a small nervous mouth. Her long flowing dress covered her feet and made it seem as if she were floating above the ground. She hesitated halfway down then continued, each step taking a fraction longer than the one before, and it was clear from her expression that she knew there was nothing good waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Donna! Go upstairs now!’

The snap of Miles Maxted’s voice broke the spell. The woman stopped halfway down the stairs, torn between obeying her father and her curiosity regarding the two visitors. ‘Donna!’ Miles Maxted’s tone was sharp and firm, his eyes turning small.

‘What’s . . . what’s happening?’ Donna looked at her parents, at the detectives, at her parents again. ‘Mum? Is everything all right?’

Lillian Maxted didn’t reply. She was sitting slouched in her armchair, silent sobs racking her body, her fingers tangled around a loose knot of hair.

‘Dad? What’s going on?’

Carrigan looked over and saw that Miles was enjoying the confusion and surprise on his and Geneva’s faces. ‘Detective Carrigan, this is my daughter Donna.’ He pursed his lips and seemed to be studying them as he spoke. ‘Emily and Donna are twins, as you may have surmised.’

‘Emily? . . . Is . . . is Emily okay?’ Donna came to a stop next to Carrigan and he could feel the heat of her body in the space between them. She looked up at him and he saw the moment it clicked in her eyes and it was an awful thing to witness. ‘Please. Someone tell me what’s going on?’ She looked over at her mother but Lillian Maxted’s blank stare and slumped posture only confirmed Donna’s worst fears.

‘I’m afraid we found your sister’s body at the site of a fire.’

Donna Maxted shook her head. She blinked. Shook her head again. Looked at her parents. Her skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones and seemed as fragile as the most delicate china. She walked over towards Lillian, her gait unsteady, catching her heels against each other, a stagger-stumble that almost made her lose her balance. She took her mother’s hands and held them as she searched Carrigan’s face for an answer or a joke or a mistake. ‘What happened? How did she . . .’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Carrigan replied. He knew that at this stage distraction and facts were all that kept the bridge from collapsing. That was yet to come, when the family was alone, when the sirens and phone calls stopped, when they were left with only the night and the unassailable weight of memory and space. ‘We need to ask you a few questions, but it’s okay if we do this later, I know this must be . . .’

Donna met his eyes. ‘You said she was killed in a fire but that doesn’t explain why you’re here.’ And then she stopped as it dawned on her. ‘You mean it wasn't an accident?’

Carrigan nodded. ‘I can’t imagine what’s going through your head at this moment, I can’t even begin to imagine. There’s a family liaison officer who’ll be here soon and help you with anything practical you need.’

‘Do you know of anyone who may have had cause to harm Emily?’ Geneva’s voice was sharp and clipped, cutting Carrigan off. Donna shook her head but Miles snorted, a harsh expulsion of air in the silent room.

‘Miles, really!’ Lillian had recovered herself and shot her husband a look dense with broken promises and bedroom history.

‘Oh come on, Lillian, you’ve been living in this fantasy world, thinking that one day Emily will come to her senses, that she’ll knock on the door and be the daughter we always wanted. But that was never going to happen and, Christ, now it never will.’ Miles looked down at his feet. ‘You asked me if anyone would harm her, Inspector. Well, I believe you’ve got your work cut out for you. The people she hung around with, the things she got up to . . . so many times I explained to her the damage she was doing to herself and to this family but she just went harder and faster down the road she’d chosen and there was nothing I or her mother could do about it.’ His fingers picked at the chair with increased vigour, his lips almost disappearing. Donna’s phone started beeping. She ignored it and eventually it stopped.

‘Have you any idea what Emily would have been doing in a convent?’ Geneva asked.

There was a look of confusion on Donna’s face, quickly followed by a faint glimmer of something which almost resembled hope. ‘Emily in a convent? She hated religion, always did. Are you absolutely sure it was her?’

‘We have witnesses who saw her visiting the convent regularly over the last year.’ The phone started ringing again.

‘For God’s sake, turn that bloody thing off,’ Miles snarled at his daughter.

‘Actually, it’s mine,’ Geneva said, getting up and answering it as she shuffled off to a corner of the room.

‘When did you last speak to your sister?’ Carrigan could see Donna falling apart by the second, a drawing in of body and spirit that was painful to watch.

When she answered her voice was choked and stumbled, air and tears and the broken-off bits of words all mixing together. ‘Not for a long time. Maybe eighteen months, maybe more.’ She stared down at her hands and Carrigan knew what was going through her head at that very moment – how easy it was to pick up a phone, how hard to go back and make up for the things you never did.

‘Was there any particular reason that you or your parents hadn’t spoken to her for so long?’

Donna looked over at her father. He returned her stare and though the meaning of his expression was hard to read, its tone left nothing to be deciphered.

‘We haven’t spoken since Dad cut her out . . .’

‘Donna! That’s enough.’ Miles turned towards his one remaining daughter, his mouth small and pursed.

‘We’re going to find out anyway, so it’s best you tell us in your own words.’

Miles’s top lip curled slightly as he appraised Carrigan. ‘I cut her out of my will, okay? Satisfied?’

‘Can I ask why?’

Miles’s mouth got even tighter. ‘No, you cannot. Some things are private.’

‘I’m aware of that, but the more information we have, even if seemingly irrelevant, the quicker we’ll find out who did this to your daughter and punish them.’ Carrigan used the penultimate word carefully, watching the man’s eyes flicker as he said it.

‘Absolutely not.’ Miles’s nostrils flared and he gripped the edges of his chair. ‘What I did or didn’t do is none of your business and if you have any more questions I suggest you contact my solicitor.’ Miles Maxted stared up at Carrigan, his eyes simmering and bright. ‘I think it’s time you left.’

The maid appeared out of nowhere, silent and grey, and if she knew what had happened then she didn’t show it at all. She took them through the long corridor and just as they were turning into the hallway, Carrigan heard loud, uncontrolled sobbing coming from the main room and he was glad when they were finally out of earshot.

Donna met them in the foyer. She handed them their jackets and apologised for her parents. She managed to appear calm and lucid and even a little charming but as soon as she walked away they both saw the grief and pain sag her body again as she headed back to the living room.

They’d driven back in silence, not much left to say to each other. Carrigan had always felt like this after delivering a notification of death, slumped and slightly soiled, the herald of slammed doors, unspoken guilt and painful longing. He parked the car in his usual spot and was putting the keys back in his jacket pocket when he felt something rustling inside. He pulled out the wrinkled piece of paper, assuming it was a stray bit of litter, a chocolate wrapper he’d neglected to chuck, and was just about to bin it when he noticed the handwriting.

He unfolded it carefully and read what Donna had written:

And, below that, she’d written her phone number.

She held him by the throat and stared into his eyes as he strained and struggled and moaned. She wanted them – his eyes – to speak to her, to tell her all the things his mouth wouldn’t, but they were impenetrable as stones. She grabbed his wrist and held it firmly, feeling the smooth skin on his forearm, the slight ripple of veins, the weight of it lying in her palm. Then she brought it up to her lips and kissed it softly, running her tongue across the scars on his skin, the shrapnel bites from some dusty forgotten war, past the inoculations he’d received as a child, and then she fell onto him, her whole body forced into one deflation, spirit and muscle together, and the room melted away from her, the day, the week, the life, everything she thought about and didn’t want to think about, everything that was keeping her awake at night, that was running through her brain like crazed viral screams – all of it forgotten and lost as she lowered her head and tasted his mouth.

Blue Valentine
was playing in the background. He’d brought the LP with him, knowing her copy would be lost somewhere among the boxes and bags, the unpacked strata of her life. She could barely hear the music and didn’t want to. It bought back too many memories, good memories and bad ones, the whole arc of a love affair contained on two sides of spinning plastic.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lee said, twisting away, taking the duvet with him, reaching out and picking up one of her cigarettes from the table by the bed. He lit it and then passed it to her and lit another for himself.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ The words came out mixed with smoke and sting. She looked away, out the window into the falling confusion of snow.

‘If you wanted someone to lie to, Geneva, you should have picked a stranger.’

She said nothing, dragging tight-lipped on her cigarette, and continued to watch the spiralling squalls of snow. All that freedom, each flake spinning and dancing in the air, its own individual steps, but it didn’t matter how well you danced, she knew, you’d always end up crashing to the floor in the end.

‘I don’t know if I can do this any more,’ she said and was immediately aware of the weakness of that line, the way it had been said a million times before, and wasn’t that partly why she was so discontented? Her life as the other woman turning her into a cliché with every passing day?

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Lee said, sitting up, the duvet falling and revealing his chest and she had to turn away again because it was too much.

‘It means exactly what it means.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in one hard stab and gasped as the cherry burned her fingers.

‘Geneva?’ He tried to take her hand but she retracted it, sat up, pulled the sheets over her body and shook her head.

‘It means I’m sick of waking up in the middle of the night and turning around and you’re not there. Slipped out like some thief or gigolo. It means I’m sick of closing my eyes and holding you and imagining your wife waiting up half the night, not sure where you are, suspecting, the baby crying for Daddy and Daddy stumbling home at four in the morning reeking of sex and booze.’

‘That’s not your concern, Genny, that’s mine.’

‘Of course it fucking is! What do you think I see when I look in the mirror? The person I wanted to be? Or the person I am? This woman breaking up another woman’s life. And it’s not just her. You have a son, Lee, you have a life that you can’t just sunder any time you want.’

‘That’s my choice,’ he said, and she was pleased to see a flash of anger roil through his body, the muscles tensing against the skin making him look young and hungry again.

‘And this is mine,’ she replied, staring at the rumpled duvet, the late falling snow, the unpacked boxes and ex-lover inhabiting her bed. ‘And please,’ she took a swig of tequila and lit another cigarette, her head spinning in time with the music. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s not working between the two of you. Don’t tell me you’re only staying with her because of the baby. Don’t fucking tell me you were going to leave her anyway. I don’t want to hear it, Lee. I don’t want you to leave her for me. I don’t want to start it all over again. We tried that, remember, we tried it once and we both know what happened.’

All pretence at post-coital murmur and cuddle were gone. Lee sat up and swigged from the bottle. His eyes had grown small and cold. ‘And what about you, Genny? You were the one who texted me tonight. You’re the one who keeps calling. Sometimes I think I’m no more than a convenient excuse for you to escape your life.’

And this time there was nothing she could say because she knew he was right.

‘You like this,’ he continued. ‘You like the fact you can call me when you want or not call me when you don’t. You like it that there’s no commitment on your part.’

‘That’s not fair.’

He slid over toward her and nodded. ‘Sorry, perhaps it wasn’t but, Genny, you need to find something in your life to make you smile again. Christ, I remember what you were like once, before all this fucking work of yours dragged you down. You need to find something or someone that makes the rest of it worthwhile. You can’t go around like this all the time.’

She sprang up from the bed, suddenly and uncontrollably furious. Because he was wrong? Or because he was right? ‘You expect me to smile and bounce and say
hi, how’s your day
after I’ve spent twelve hours looking at dead bodies? After I’ve talked to the worst scum this city has to offer and watched them walk away free to ruin more lives? Jesus Christ, Lee, you know what it’s like. You weren’t any different when you used to come back from those trips to Bosnia, Colombia, the Congo.’

‘That’s exactly why I stopped, Geneva. That’s why I don’t do it any more. You have to make your accommodations with the world at some point. You have to stop doing the things that tear you apart and settle for the ones that don’t.’

‘Then why are you still here? Why are you even answering my calls?’

‘I didn’t say it makes you happy, just less unhappy.’

She started putting on clothes, the scatter of shirts and socks under her feet. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do. The fucking day I had.’

‘We all have days.’

‘But did yours involve spending hours looking at photographs of corpses burnt to a crisp? Tell me. Using a magnifying glass to stare and stare at scratch marks on dead women’s shinbones? That’s what I’ve been doing. You really think . . . what?’ She saw his face turn white as the sheets, his mouth hanging half-open. ‘What did I say?’

‘What kind of marks?’ Lee asked in a whisper.

‘Shallow vertical cuts along the shinbone.’

Lee sighed deeply and shook his head as if trying to shrug off a bad dream. ‘Tickling the bone . . .’ he said, and he said it so softly that Geneva had to ask him to repeat it.

‘What the fuck is tickling the bone?’ She tried to make light of it but saw something in his expression that stopped her dead.

‘It’s a very painful method of extracting information or of just plain hurting someone. The torturer makes a small incision in the skin just above the shinbone. He then takes an ice-pick or something similar, and gently presses it into the wound until it comes into contact with the bone. Normally, this is when he will look up and ask the first question. Then, slowly, he rakes the tip of the ice-pick against the bone, scraping and chipping away, causing excruciating pain.’

Geneva wrapped the duvet around her but it didn’t stop her shakes. ‘You know this?’

Lee nodded gravely. ‘When I was doing my pieces on Mexico, I came up against this a lot. Tickling the bone was originally a speciality of South American dictatorships. These days it’s used mainly by the drug cartels.’