Eleven Days (15 page)

The book was waiting for him as he’d known it would be. He saw the padded envelope and recognised it for what it was immediately. There’d be no return address, he knew, no fingerprints, and the postmark would be different from the previous time.

Each month, for the last year, he’d been receiving a book in the post. There was just the book and the envelope, his name and address typed out and pasted to the front. There was no note inside and the books were new, unhandled, even though some, Carrigan had checked, had been out of print for years. The first book had arrived just before last Christmas and he’d thought it had been mis-delivered, even after reading his own name off the front of the envelope – because who would be sending him books anonymously? That first offering had been Plotinus, the
Enneads
, and he’d pored over the text looking for some indication of who its sender may have been but there were only the words, etched out almost two thousand years ago.

He took the envelope out of the box, along with a handful of bills and a flyer for a canine cancer charity. He ripped open the envelope, unable to wait until he got inside, and pulled out a dark-jacketed paperback.
God in Search of Man
by Abraham Heschel. He’d never heard of it and it seemed forbidding, its opaque cover and even more opaque language. He flicked through it briefly then put it under his arm and entered the flat.

He’d left the lights on again. The bills would remember that. He’d left the window slightly open and blowing snow had frosted the ledge and buckled a series of newspapers he’d saved, meaning to read them when he finally had some time to himself, but they were now useless, the words melting into each other, the ink running and mixing, the pictures all but unrecognisable. There were no messages on his answering machine, no voices to greet him.

He spent a few minutes telling Louise about his day then took the burrito out of his bag and stripped it of packaging and placed it in the microwave. The beep reminded him it was there. He ate facing the window and was finished before he’d even begun to taste it. Everyone kept telling him he’d reached an age where he needed to watch what he ate and how much, but these little treats were often the only moments of calm and pleasure in his day. He turned on the TV but he couldn’t concentrate, his head unable to stop spinning, running the latest facts and finds through each scenario and possibility.

Something about Emily’s arrest sheet didn’t make sense. It was a feeling, more than a feeling – a small black stone lodged in his brain. There had been so much new information today that he was finding it hard to keep track. But that was good. The initial logjam had been broken and now they were awash in a cascade of data, the kind every investigation needs to propel itself in the early days. He knew most of the leads would go nowhere. He knew that any life would open up to mystery and confusion if you looked at it hard enough, but he also knew that there was something he’d missed.

He cleared the dishes and then the night was all there was and he sat staring at the motorway ramp outside his window, jewelled with the lights of passing cars, a steady exodus from the choke and cram of the capital.

After the third ginger beer, he picked up the phone and called her.

‘Wanted to say thanks for the coffee.’

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, her voice slightly slurred, and he felt suddenly guilty, knowing she worked shifts, and wondering if he’d awoken her from a long-cherished sleep.

‘I hope I didn’t disturb you.’

She laughed, a carefree chuckle that crackled through the receiver. ‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘Back on at two tomorrow but I can’t sleep.’

‘Me neither,’ he said.

‘Lucky we have the phone.’

They talked about things that were part of their daily lives, about time and space and the pressures of shiftwork, and as he heard her soft exotic voice he felt better, calmer and less hassled, and he flicked idly through the files on his desk, Emily’s record, and listened to Karen telling him stories from the three in the morning A & E wards, sad tales of late-night mistakes and stumbles, and even sadder, those who had nothing wrong with them and had just come in for some company to get them through the night. She told him about her sister who’d died and how it had changed her – not in one big explosion but in a million small yet significant ways, and of the men she’d been with, both kind and cruel, and countries she’d visited and the ones she still wanted to, and he imagined her standing in some lost forgotten desert out on the edge of the world, amidst the dust and heat, her black hair crackling in the wind.

And then he stopped. Karen’s voice faded to a whisper as he stared at the page in front of him.

He looked at the mugshot photo, seeing the pain and long nights of battle in Emily’s eyes, and then he knew what had been bothering him about the arrest sheet and cursed himself for not having seen it earlier.

‘I’ve got to go, I’m sorry,’ he said, and she said she was tired too and the night was getting shorter and that they would talk again. He listened to the dead hum of the phone after they’d said goodbye, and then he got up, cleared the table of junk and paper, and spread out Emily’s arrest sheet and warrants across the scratched plastic surface.

Emily had been arrested in March 2008, outside Whitehall. She’d been smoking a joint when a uniformed officer walked past. He arrested her and took her to the nearest station. Carrigan stared at the page, puzzled. Cannabis was a low priority for the Met and a huge waste of resources. Four hours of processing paperwork and a beat constable off the streets for half his shift over a single joint. Which was why, in most cases, a caution was often enough.

But there was something about the date of the arrest that was vaguely familiar. He noted the day, time and exact location, then picked up the phone.

The desk sergeant sounded tired and pissed off and reluctant to do anything that meant moving from his chair. He eventually grunted an acknowledgement and wrote down the date and postcode Carrigan had recited.

Jack could hear the man slowly punching in letters and numbers on the other end of the phone. He stared out at the cars gliding through the night, and then the sergeant was back on the line. Carrigan had asked him to perform a search for all arrests on the same day as Emily’s and within a half-mile radius of her location.

‘How many?’ He leaned into the phone as if that would make the answer more understandable.

‘Four hundred and fifty-six.’

‘Four hundred and fifty-six arrests on that day?’

‘Yes.’ The sergeant paused as he scrolled through the list. ‘Pretty much all of them for public nuisance or disorder breaches.’

Carrigan thanked him and put the phone down. Four hundred and fifty-five other people had been arrested on the same day and in close vicinity to Emily. He opened a new window, typed in the arrest date and location into Google, and watched as a list of web pages and news articles appeared.

The websites all belonged to student and anarchist groups. The news articles made him remember why the date had seemed so familiar. An anti-war march had been held that day which had left many police injured and half the shops on Oxford Street destroyed. Pacifists fighting against war. Carrigan had been there that day, along with every other policeman who wasn’t on leave and most of those who were. The march was supposed to be peaceful and yet, within a couple of hours, it had turned into a battlefield. The police were attacked from all sides, objects and projectiles raining down, fists and legs and angry scowling students in black balaclavas wielding metal poles and Molotov cocktails.

He stared at the screen, remembering the chaos and fear. Amid all the lawlessness and looting why had Emily been arrested for smoking a single joint?

He made another coffee and paced the flat. Sometimes it was easier to arrest someone for drugs than public disorder, he reasoned. The weed would put her in a cell while they checked the CCTV to see if a further charge was warranted. It made sense and yet it didn’t make any sense.

He walked over to the chair and picked up his jacket. He went through the pockets, getting rid of the amassed junk and twists of chocolate wrappers, and then he found the card. He stared at the words Donna had written –
There’s a lot about Emily I couldn’t tell you in front of them
– and picked up the phone.

He spent the next hour going through his policy book, making sure there were no avenues left unexplored, no timebombs ticking in anomalous timelines or misrecounted fact. He popped two pills for the headache erupting from his left temple. He went back to Geneva’s notes and read through them again – her account of the nuns busting up a drug-dealing operation in their backyard, the picketing and leafleting – and he turned on the computer and waited for the PNC screen to boot up.

A couple of years back, he’d got Berman to fix access to the PNC through his home computer and he now logged on. As he waited for the system to recognise him, he opened a packet of German biscuits, half-moons dusted with crushed hazelnuts and powdered sugar. He took out exactly half the biscuits and put them on a plate. The rest he bagged and returned to the kitchen. This was how you went about a diet, in small and manageable steps, in learning to resist easy temptation. He ate the biscuits and began searching. He analysed patterns of recent drug activity in west London. The ever-shifting flowchart of alliances and feuds. He drank black coffee and trawled through out-of-date arrest sheets and old serials looking for something, he wasn’t quite sure what. He finished the biscuits and got up and fetched the rest from the kitchen. He read reports of petty turf wars, stabbings or beatings over nondescript street corners in Kensington or Kilburn or Kensal Rise. Market forces and the myth of a recession-proof business. New groups coming from every part of the world to contest such rich territory, the inexorable globalisation of criminal enterprise. He finished the last biscuit and started going through twelve months’ worth of drug squad reports. He was focusing on St Peter’s Square and the neighbouring streets when he found mention of an altercation the uniforms had been called to a couple of weeks earlier.

A group of concerned residents in a residential street off Pembridge Square decided they’d had enough of dealers doing business in their front gardens. They organised themselves and made a nuisance whenever anyone came down the road looking to make a buy. They found out the address of the local dealer and plastered posters outside his house and all across the street, naming and shaming him in photographs and deeds. They assiduously reported all offences and suspicions to the local station. A week later, the uniforms were called to the scene of two residents lying beaten, bloody and battered on the pavement. The assailants were nowhere to be seen and the victims had been too stunned and shocked and scared to say who did this to them.

Carrigan sat back and rolled his shoulders, waiting for the welcoming pop that would untangle his muscles. There was no mention of nuns in the report but the residents’ actions were very similar to the nuns’ initiatives in combating drug dealing in the neighbourhood. Carrigan looked up from the screen into the starless sky. Could it be that they’d got it all wrong? That Emily and the nuns’ tangled history had nothing to do with the fire? That it all came down to something as stupid and pointless as this?

He turned off the computer and stood by the window. He didn’t want to think about it but it was all he could think about. He knew sleep would not find him tonight and he didn’t bother looking for it. The snow was falling in thick spinning clusters, obscuring the motorway ramp and street outside. Somewhere above, he could see the faint blips of light marking another plane leaving the city and disappearing into the sky, a tiny metallic cylinder, crammed with people and hopes and histories, on the way to somewhere else.

The incident room was empty at this time of the morning and that was exactly the way she liked it. The antiseptic white spaces were silent but for the buzz and murmur of computers left on overnight, hard drives wheezing like exhausted workers at the end of a long and gruelling shift. Geneva could hear the splash and fizz of the Coke in her can, the steady pulse of the fluorescents above her, and popped two more pills, trying desperately to focus. She’d had way too much tequila last night and she’d woken, alone, at 4 a.m., with a blazing headache. She didn’t want to think about the flung words and accusations between her and Lee last night, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d told her after she’d mentioned the pathologist’s findings.

She fought back a wave of nausea, spread out her notes either side of the keyboard, checked her to-do list and sent out a request to Westminster and to Kensington and Chelsea for parking tickets registered to the fake SUV number plate. The chances were almost zero, the men in the SUV probably changing plates with great frequency, but nonetheless it annoyed her that no one else had bothered to check this. Once this was done she opened the box sitting at her feet. The diocese had sent further files on the convent yesterday and she went through these now, reading about their charity endeavours, anti-drug initiatives and numerous commendations. She flicked through the files until she saw a folder for travel requests. She took out the crumpled photocopies within and scanned them. For each trip out of the country, the nuns had to fill out a form requesting leave. One copy was sent to the diocese and another to the order for approval. There were nearly fifty such forms and Geneva went through them slowly, making notes of which countries the nuns had visited.

Twenty-three requests had been made for travel to the Vatican, twelve to the Holy Land and three to Ireland. The remaining eight requests were for travel to Peru.

Geneva pulled out the earliest request and scrutinised the handwriting. The form was a request from Sister Glenda Waldron for a six-day leave to go to Lima during the last week of November 2011. The reason for the trip was given as
conference
. There was an identical form for Sister Rose McGregor.

She remembered the name from the files at the diocese. Sister Rose had been the last nun to leave the convent, just over a year ago. The requisition forms had two signature boxes at the bottom, one for departure and one for arrival. Sister Glenda’s signature filled both boxes but Sister Rose had only signed the departure box. Geneva briefly wondered if Sister Rose had forgotten to fill in the form on her arrival, but the records were too well kept and organised for this to be likely.

She read through the other six travel requests. Each was signed, arrival and departure, by Sister Glenda. She went back to the main set of files but there was no record of Sister Rose anywhere.

Geneva pushed her chair back and rubbed her eyes. Two of the nuns had travelled to Peru in the last thirteen months, one of them on seven separate occasions. She felt a tingle in her stomach. She knew this changed everything. The Peruvian connection was no longer just ancient history. She jotted down the dates and made a note to call Holden, then, thinking back to last night, the look in Lee’s eyes, the way the words seemed so reluctant to leave his mouth, she entered
tickling the bone
into the search engine.

There were many references to comedians and funny bones but, hidden among the humour and jape, was an article about how drug cartels were getting more sophisticated and grimly medieval by the day. How the violence and torture had left the private sphere and was now occurring in the worldmesh of YouTube and Flickr. The article described this particular method of torture exactly as Lee had. The use of an ice-pick, the breaking of the skin, the point of the pick inserted through the tender flesh until it came up against the bone. She read reports from undercover DEA agents who’d undergone this ordeal. She thought about the nuns’ trips to Peru, her heart beating a little faster.

There was a sidebar detailing history and uses. Tickling the bone had been the favoured method of torture used by right-wing paramilitaries against leftist agitators, or folk singers, or writers, or people who’d been mistaken for someone else. This technique, the report stated, was primarily used in Central America, in El Salvador and Nicaragua, but it had also been adopted by Pinochet’s men in Chile and had spread to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.

She clicked on the word
Peru
, her breath held and body tensed, and read tales of military coups and counter-coups, repression and poverty, oil and torture and bicycle bombs in the marketplace. The phrase ‘liberation theology’ kept cropping up between the margins and across the texts. There was a whole section about armed insurgents in the Inca hills, a band of Maoist guerrillas called the Shining Path, led by an ex-professor of philosophy, cutting a swathe through the Andean heartlands, burning the bourgeois blight from the ground as if it were weeds and enmeshing the country in a twenty-year civil war. She sat back, the lights washing over her, as she thought about what she’d learned in the diocese archives and what she’d just read.

Seven of the nuns had been stationed in South America. Their stay had only overlapped for four months, during the autumn of 1973, in the San Gabriel province in the south-central section of the country. All seven of them had been relocated shortly afterwards.

Five of the nuns had identical torture scars. The pathologist had estimated the scars to be thirty or forty years old. Geneva looked at the flickering screen, willing to bet her salary, her iPod, whatever she owned, that the scars dated from the autumn of 1973. Something had happened in those cold mountains, up near the roof of the world, something which had followed the nuns all the way to London and the twenty-first century.

She felt a surge in her chest as she punched in the nuns’ names, dates of deployment and locations in varying sequences. She came up with nothing or with so many results it amounted to the same thing. She stopped, thought about it‚ and recalibrated her search parameters, this time substituting the word
political
for
religious
.

There were seventeen major political incidents in Peru during the timeframe she was looking at but only one in the remote San Gabriel region. She clicked on the link and was taken to a page devoted to analysing the dialectics of the September ’73 strike at the Chiapeltec mine. She cross-checked the dates, feeling more and more certain, and began reading.

The Chiapeltec gold mine had been worked continually since the days of the Incas. The Spanish had stumbled upon its natural bounty and duly co-opted it for the Crown, using native Indian slaves to harvest the shiny flecks of metal embedded in the rocks. The mine had been in operation since then, closing down only intermittently, changing hands and countries of ownership with striking regularity, bought and resold and bought again.

In 1973, the mine was in full production, the latest drilling and scouting technology applied to go even further down into the folds of compacted earth searching for the elusive dust. The death rate for miners was the highest in South America at the time, comparable to the mortality rate for slaves during the Spanish occupation. Geneva read dour reports of silicosis, cave-ins, noxious fumes, bar fights and strange cancers.

By the sizzling, scorched summer of 1973, things had come to a head. Twelve miners and two priests from the local village who’d tried to organise a strike disappeared. They were found three days later hanging upside down, naked and mutilated, in the village square.

Geneva glanced out the window, measuring the spindrift and gather of snow on the sill, trying to clear her head of the dread images the words had conjured. The phones kept ringing on the empty tables and she stared at them until the answering machines kicked in. Her private mobile hadn’t stopped buzzing and she checked the display but it wasn’t Lee and, despite herself, she felt a little sink of disappointment. Oliver had rung five times in the last hour and left three messages. She switched off the phone and continued reading.

The news of the murders had quickly spread from village to village, mine to mine, up mountains and down the long ancient river, and soon strangers started turning up at Chiapeltec, bearded burly men with serious brows wrinkled in righteousness and rage, priests and nuns and ordinary people. Journalists made the trek up to the high country with their cameras and microphones, their big-city certainties and beliefs safely in pocket. The village swelled and roared during the night with the megaphoned voices of political agitators, Marxists and Castroists, anarchists and liberation theologians, the crazed and God-touched. A committee was formed by a leading Peruvian bishop and a strike was called for the following day. There was a party atmosphere that night, a feeling of comradeship and unity, of purpose and prophecy, a swelling together of farmers and miners, intellectuals and holy men.

The first day of the strike went by peacefully, the workers lined up either side of the only paved road in the province, the atmosphere one of genial protest rather than anger or violence. Everyone went back to the village that night and celebrated their success with loud music and laughter so that no one heard the bomb go off.

There was a house at the far edge of the mine company’s property that the owners and management used for lunch and to conduct meetings. It was only in use during business hours. The bomb had been set to explode at midnight. It destroyed the building, leaving only grey ash and fingers of smoke curling up into the dark sky. It also destroyed the lives of twelve women and thirty-four children who’d been secretly relocated there in case their homes were targeted during the strike.

No one knew who’d set the bomb and squabbling and blame broke out among the strikers the next day, all of them knowing that the stakes had changed overnight. The bosses buried their wives and children that morning, and then they called in the army but the army was busy killing leftists in the dappled Inca hills. The government sent the next best thing. A battalion of death-squad veterans.

They came with blowtorches and machine guns, machetes and cattle prods, grudges and century-old hatreds boiling in their blood, but the villagers had their own weapons, clubs and pitchforks and hammers and anything they could find lying about in the sheds or stony fields. The battle raged across the day and deep into the night.

The army was sent in on the second day and two hundred strikers disappeared and were never seen again. The mine owners shipped in workers from the mountains, tough gnarled Indians who didn’t care about conditions and safety as long as they got paid. The murdered strikers’ families were booted out of their homes and the village that very night.

Geneva squinted as she finished the article and skimmed the footnotes, the long lists of the disappeared, the rumours of swirling moaning pits out in the hills, the flowcharts of red terrorists and religious institutions. The government blamed the insurgency on Marxist agitators, calling the bomb a terrorist outrage, the president appearing on national TV and saying that when the body had a sore, you had to cut it out quickly or it would spread to the rest of the body.

She sat back, queasy and shaken, the story reeling through her blood. She made notes and opened another can of Coke, then logged into the Press Association website with the password she’d got from Lee last night. She searched for images from the Chiapeltec massacre.

To her surprise, there were many, taken by brave and foolish photographers, and you could tell it hadn’t been an easy assignment, the shots often blurred and out of focus, a jostled sense of panic in each frame, a feeling that this was something photography couldn’t capture, that it was too quick and mercurial and real. There were photos of picket lines, army gunboots, vapour trails, grinning soldiers, and one of a woman holding her screaming baby as she lay sprawled and dead on the railroad track.

There were hundreds of these photos and Geneva scanned through them quickly, her hangover coming back hard and strong, the blood and screaming faces making her feel as if she could taste her own stomach, and then she stopped and zoomed and clicked on a thumbnail of a photo near the bottom of the page.

She tapped her foot as the full-size file slowly unscrolled on her screen.

The image was of a bristling picket line, all grimaces and clenched fists, maybe twenty or thirty people standing out in the bright dusty sun, arms raised heavenwards or holding handmade banners with skulls and demons crudely daubed upon them, and it wasn’t until Geneva zoomed in closer and studied the faces one by one that she recognised her.

She was much younger, of course, but there was no doubt it was the same woman.

Mother Angelica stood left of centre, wearing the full habit, wimple and cincture, and those tight round glasses that had led to her being nicknamed the Owl. Her mouth was twisted in a snarl of indignation and she had one arm raised, her fist pumping the empty sky.

Geneva looked at Mother Angelica for a long moment, then studied the faces of the people standing beside her, time and the piled emotions of the occasion making everything seem both dreamlike and utterly vivid at the same time. Behind the nuns was a group of priests. One of them was a full head taller than the others and in his fist he held a large wooden club studded with nails. Even across forty years, Geneva recognised the penetrating stare of Father Callum McCarthy.