A Dark Redemption (10 page)

‘Sorry if Ursula was a bit snappy,’ Ben apologised while pouring the drinks. ‘She’s pissed off at me. We were supposed to be seeing some friends of hers for an awfully tedious dinner party in bloody Greenwich of all places.’ Ben laughed and Jack remembered not just the smile and charm but the laugh too; even in their darkest moments that laugh could be guaranteed to lift them. It was working now and the day began to slough off with the first drink like the rain trickling from the folds of his jacket.

‘I can go if it’s a bad time.’

Ben shrugged. ‘Your phone call saved me, don’t you dare leave!’

They both laughed. They settled down into patterns. They settled down into routine. Repetition comforted them in this room that hadn’t changed over ten years, belying the fact that they had. They fell into small talk, into catch-up and miscellaneous chatter as old friends do, picking up conversations from last week, last year, a lifetime ago. Jack felt the whisky diminishing the din of the day, the languorous rhythm of their conversation dragging him back into the world.

‘So you’re off next week?’ Jack said. ‘Finally got your chance to teach at Berkeley.’

Ben’s face gleamed. ‘You know how long I’ve been waiting for this.’

Carrigan smiled. ‘Good for you.’

‘How’s your mum doing?’

Jack rubbed his head, saw real concern in his friend’s eyes. ‘I was supposed to visit her today but this fucking case . . . last time I visited her she didn’t even recognise me. Kept shouting to the nurses that someone had broken into her room.’ He didn’t need to say more – you reached a certain age and these conversations were always hovering in the air, a kind of heavy weather everyone ignored until it was too late.

‘I’m sorry.’ Ben set his glass down on the table, uncrossed his legs and leant forward. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ His wiry frame seemed to take in all the space around him, gangly arms and legs extruding at impossible angles like some altarpiece Jesus. ‘You look beat.’

Jack took a deep breath and gave him a brief summary of the case.

‘You telling me you want an easy one?’ Ben replied when Jack was finished. ‘The husband who stabs his wife and sits there crying at the dinner table with the knife still in his hands when you guys show up type? Come on, Jack, you’d go up the wall if the case didn’t have some nasty shit attached to it.’

Carrigan conceded the point. It was always like this, as if Ben knew the things that Jack hid from himself. ‘It’s not that. It’s not the blood, the senselessness, all the official departmental shit that goes with it. It’s none of that.’ He drained his drink and put it down a little too heavily on the table.

Ben winced. ‘What, then?’ he asked, his voice a tad uncertain.

Jack picked up the bottle and poured himself a half-glass measure then took a large gulp. The whisky burned going down and it was a good feeling, pain well earned and deserved. ‘It’s Africa.’

Ben was about to say something but didn’t. He took a sip of his drink instead and sat back on the chair. ‘The girl,’ he finally said. ‘The girl you were just telling me about was African, right?’

Jack nodded. ‘Ugandan.’

Ben’s eyes widened. ‘This can’t be the first time Uganda’s come up in a case?’

Jack shook his head, too many to recount, every one taking him back to that week twenty years ago when he and Ben and David were still young, their eyes blazing with the future they were going to write upon the world. He looked down into the dark swirl of his drink. ‘More and more these days.’

‘So why’s this one upset you so?’

Jack considered this – it was more a feeling, something he hadn’t put into words even in his own mind. ‘I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the first Ugandan murder I’ve dealt with. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . the brutality of it, the sheer fucking waste.’

‘You’re just getting older,’ Ben smiled, reaching for his glass. ‘We both are. It’s natural to get like this when you see it day to day.’

Ben was right but he knew it wasn’t as simple as that. ‘She was writing her dissertation about Kony and the LRA.’

Ben let out a long whistle of air. ‘And you think that’s connected to her murder?’

‘No,’ Jack replied emphatically, ‘but my new partner thinks it’s something we should be looking into.’

Ben’s smile softened his sun-creased features. ‘Since when do you have a partner?’

‘Got foisted on me by upstairs.’

‘What’s he like?’

Jack thought about Geneva, the way she seemed to be anywhere else but where she was, her wild hair and white earphones. ‘Her name’s Geneva and she’s good, surprisingly. Sharp and perceptive, more so than most of my regulars.’ He looked out at the grey sky. ‘But I suspect Branch sent her to spy on me.’

Ben laughed, ‘You’re joking?’

Jack hunched his shoulders. ‘He must be desperate if he’s sending rookies. Trouble is, I don’t know if she’s working to some agenda Branch cooked up or not.’ He thought of the deep concentration in Geneva’s eyes at the morgue, the trenchant questions she’d asked.

‘Pretty?’

Jack smiled. ‘It’s work, Ben,’ but the answer was clear across his face. ‘Anyway, going back to the case – I’m pretty convinced it’s a sex killing,’ he continued. ‘Raped and tortured her, classic predator stuff. The chances are pretty slim that this has got anything to do with Africa, with her politics or the dissertation she was writing. But the trouble is I don’t know what Geneva’s motives are, whether Branch is checking up on me, so I can’t rule it out either.’

‘Of course, Jack Carrigan never rules anything out; local police motto, isn’t it?’

Jack managed a smile. ‘Only thing is I called the Ugandan embassy earlier, trying to see if they had information about Grace. The first guy I spoke to was friendly and it sounded like he’d found something but then someone else came on the line, spoke better English so he must have been a superior, told me they had nothing and hung up. You’d think they’d be happy to help us.’

Ben set his glass down. ‘Don’t worry, that’s just how they are, as if secrecy was the natural order of things. You should have seen the bureaucracy and crap I’ve had to put up with when we’re filming the show. And, of course, over the phone you can’t offer a sweetener.’

Carrigan reached down into his briefcase and pulled out a thick spiral-bound file. Inside was a copy of Grace’s dissertation. ‘I flicked through it, didn’t make any sense to me at all.’ He passed it across the table. ‘You know this area better than me; I was hoping you’d have a quick look if you had the time. Tell me if there’s anything worth chasing up.’

Ben took the file, flicked through it quickly then laid it flat on the table. ‘Of course.’

Jack took another sip of his drink. ‘You ever think about it?’ It came out before he had a chance to stop himself. There was no need for him to explain what he meant by ‘it’. This was uncharted territory. This was everything they’d edged around for the last ten years in these weekly get-togethers. This was the unspoken pact that allowed them to meet at all. We don’t talk about those days. We don’t talk about Africa.

After they came back they didn’t speak at all. Not for years until Ben made the first move, calling Jack and inviting him to be his best man. Ben had never known about Jack’s infatuation with Ursula. Jack had stood smiling as the happy couple kissed and a few months after that they began meeting for drinks and through ten years of haze and life they managed to talk about everything else but Africa. They slipped into their old routines and rhythms as if no time had passed. Except, Jack thought, however much their relationship seemed to be the same, it wasn’t. Africa or Ursula or the intervening years, he couldn’t say which, had formed an invisible barrier between them, a thin line which they never crossed.

‘I think about it all the time,’ Ben said. No rebuke for bringing the subject up, no digression or equivocation. ‘But mainly I think about him.’ Ben’s face drifted to the framed photograph of David sitting prominently at the head of his table.

‘I try not to,’ Jack replied, avoiding the photo the way he always did. ‘But that never works, does it?’

The atmosphere in the room had subtly changed. A silence almost waiting to be filled with words neither of them wanted to hear. A misty look as their memories screened images from long ago: a burning laterite road, the stench of diesel and overheating engine oil, the perfume of palm fronds and cordite, the sound of breaking branches.

‘I often wonder where I’d be now if we hadn’t taken that trip,’ Jack continued, saying aloud for the first time the mantra that ran through his head every day, on the way to the bus, brushing his teeth, staring up at the ceiling when sleep had escaped for another night.

‘You’d be a famous pop star and I’d be just another overworked barrister.’ Ben tried to make it into a joke but they both knew it was as far from that as could possibly be.

Jack looked past Ben at a photo of the girls, Susan and Penny. There were photos of them all over the house, as if Ben and Ursula needed constant reminders of what their lives were for – even here in Ben’s study the bookcase was entirely given over to glossy shots drenched in sunshine and smiles. He thought of his own flat, the clean white walls, the single framed print – he’d taken all the photos down two years ago. In a corner of the attic there were four photo albums he couldn’t bring himself to look at any more, each image of him and Louise now become a lie.

‘We made a decision,’ Ben finally said. ‘What’s the point of pretending we didn’t? It shaped our lives, yes, but any other lives are inconceivable. If it wasn’t that road it would have been another.’

He’d rarely seen Ben this emotional but he knew how the past could come crashing up against the substrate of your consciousness like some unstoppable thing and that once it did, everything was changed. ‘You believe our lives are predestined?’

Ben lit a cigar, sucked in the smoke, rolling it around his mouth like a taste of fine wine. ‘I always thought you should have been a theologian not a policeman, though I’m sure you’d say they were one and the same.’ He held the cigar in front of him, watching the burning end flare in the darkened room. ‘But no, I don’t believe that. I think we have choices but the more choices we make the less choices we have left. Our lives whittle down their own paths. Would other things have happened if we hadn’t taken that trip? Yes. Would they have left us here? Well, that depends if you think personality is more forceful than circumstance. Maybe something else would have driven you to joining the Met, maybe you’d be playing Hammersmith Odeon this weekend. I don’t think we can know, I don’t think we can even guess. This God of yours that you so long to believe in, I’m not sure even He knows which way our actions will lead us. We are where we are and who we are, none of this is changeable.’

Geneva followed Carrigan across the street, through another narrow alley and into a covered market. She watched as he scanned the scene in front of them. She put her hand up against her face to shield the glare. Brightly coloured stalls selling a multitude of phone cards to countries she didn’t even know existed. Butcher shops with mysterious cuts hanging in their windows or dangling from hooks under the awning. The red explosion of flesh, white strings of fat, the marbled gloss of meat and halo of flies. The smell was different too, no longer the London she knew but something more exotic, a certain allure in the strange scents and muffled yelling in garbled languages. But Carrigan just shook his head and she followed him back into the high street, the long unremitting row of boarded-up shops and shops that looked boarded up but was in fact just the way they did business.

She checked her watch, hoping he’d get the hint. They were already fifteen minutes late for their meeting with Cecilia Odamo. Geneva had got the girl’s phone number from SOAS, called early and arranged an interview.

‘Can’t you just get coffee here?’ She pointed to an old greasy spoon, its windows fogged by steam, the badly scrawled menu almost unreadable.

He snorted as if that were answer enough and before she could voice her concern, tell him this interview was more important than his damn coffee, he was off again and she had little choice but to follow.

She remembered what Superintendent Branch had said. His concerns. The complaints from both inside the Met and outside. She’d never done anything like this before, worked both sides of the fence, and it left her feeling curiously enervated. She thought of her mother, how horrified she’d be, but her mother didn’t know what it meant to be a female police officer. The extra hoops and ladders, so hard to find, so easy to fall back down. No, her mother wouldn’t understand. But did she? As she followed Carrigan across another winding street she wasn’t sure she knew the answer any more.

And then she saw him stop, stand still, his head cocked towards a small, precariously leaning stall. A broad grin spread across his face and it so softened his appearance that all at once she was ready to forgive him for all this stress and wasted time.

‘Was it really worth the hassle?’ She asked, sipping the hot thick liquid, refusing to admit that it was pretty damn good.

Carrigan seemed to laugh, except he wasn’t really laughing. ‘This is the best part of my day,’ he replied, staring at her as if trying to ascertain something. ‘These in-between moments . . . we’ve forgotten how to enjoy them – we pretend they don’t matter when they do.’ He took another sip and continued. ‘I used to always wait for things to get better, tell myself I’d start enjoying life then, but things never really get better, they only get worse. So all we’re left with are moments . . . fragments . . .’ He suddenly looked lost, as if searching for something just outside his field of vision. She hadn’t expected this nor the sudden passion that animated his face and for a brief moment she saw the man he used to be before all the bodies and blood.

He finished his coffee and pulled out a sheaf of newspapers he’d bought at the station. She watched him scanning the
Standard
, the tabloids, rushing through the pages, his eyes concentrated as a laser guide. ‘Nothing yet.’ He looked up at her, the relief palpable in his voice.

It had been three days and the press hadn’t got hold of the story. This was the crucial time, after a few days the chances of them finding out were much smaller and by now, with the body cold and stored in a morgue drawer, the story had lost its urgency, there were new things to report, new atrocities committed in the grey city streets, and for once maybe they’d get to work this case as they should and not with every latest edition second guessing their investigation, notifying the killer, panicking the public.

Carrigan took another sip, stirring the sugar carefully, watching it swirl and sink. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking about the case or the coffee. She looked down the street at two women her age pushing brightly coloured pushchairs. They looked so happy and sun-struck. She turned back and said something but Carrigan wasn’t listening. He was staring intently at a young black man on the other side of the street.

‘What is it?’ She moved closer to get a better view but the man was already gone, disappearing into a crowd of shoppers.

Carrigan stood there, his gaze fixed as a statue’s. ‘I saw him outside King’s Court. Twice.’ His voice was soft and shaded as if worried someone would overhear.

The man had looked normal to her, nothing to set her antennae twitching. ‘You sure it’s the same person?’

Carrigan stared across the street but there were only families, traffic wardens, bin men. ‘I think so,’ he replied. 

Cecilia Odamo’s flat was in a basement off the Dalston Road. Once the area had been alive with rickety stalls, barrow boys and their unintelligible cries. Now it was another wasteland, stuck between two sets of yuppified ground, resistant to all attempts to clean up. But just fifty feet away from the main road it was quiet, almost leafy, as if this side street existed in a completely different zone.

They buzzed the ground-floor flat. They heard shuffling followed by the unlocking of several latches, heavy sliding weight and satisfying clicks. The door opened barely an inch.

‘Miss Odamo?’

‘I want to see some ID,’ was the first thing the girl behind the door said.

They waited as she scrutinised their warrant cards. ‘Did you come alone?’

It was a strange question but they both nodded. The girl looked over their shoulder, at the road behind them, then opened the door and let them into the flat. Carrigan took one last look at the street but there was no one there.

They stepped over piles of books and loose papers. They stepped over a tray of cat litter and last week’s broadsheets. The flat hemmed them in, its low ceiling forcing Carrigan to stoop as he made his way across to the sofa.

‘Tea?’ Cecilia asked, her voice shrill and taut like a bad note. ‘Or coffee if you want. I’ve got instant.’

Geneva watched with amusement as Carrigan politely refused.

‘I’d love some tea,’ she said, knowing the girl needed the act of provision as a buffer against why they were here.

The room took Geneva back fifteen years, a student at East Anglia, first time away from home, her mother calling up every night to make sure she was okay. She stared at the walls but there were no posters of cult films or pop stars or even Che or Marx. Just a single faded sampler depicting Jesus. A black Jesus with flowing dreadlocks and arms that were ready to embrace the whole of humanity no matter what grievous acts they’d committed.

Cecilia came back, two mugs of tea steaming in her hands and, balanced on top, a plate of chocolate HobNobs. She looked older than Grace though there were similarities between the two girls, the braided dreadlocks and ramrod posture, the razor-sharp cheekbones Geneva would have killed for.

‘I’m very sorry about Grace,’ Carrigan said with unusual warmth. Cecilia shuddered, the mug shaking in her hand. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. She took another sip of tea.

‘I just can’t believe it,’ she finally said, her voice barely audible.

Carrigan leant forward, his arms covering the table. ‘You were close?’ he asked, his voice soft, his body unwound from its earlier tension. Geneva could see Cecilia starting to relax, to mirror Carrigan’s pose, yet the girl kept averting her eyes to the window as if expecting a late-arriving guest.

‘I met her at freshers week,’ Cecilia continued, her hands smoothing the creases in her jeans, smoothing them even though there weren’t any. ‘We were sharing one of the doubles in Chavez House. I remember coming in on my first day and there was Grace, sitting cross-legged on the bed. Her suitcases were lying all around and she was just sitting there, smiling. I introduced myself and asked her if she was all right. She said yes, she just wanted to savour the moment; it was the first time she’d been on her own and she wanted to remember it. I started unpacking, took out some of my CDs, we discovered we both liked the same bands – that was it – we were friends from that moment on.’ Cecilia sighed and took a sip of tea. Geneva could see her spool back to those days, simpler times, Grace still there, the world ahead exciting and unexplored.

‘Did you ever meet her parents? Any family?’

Cecilia shook her head. ‘They were back home in Uganda. Never really spoke about them much but I don’t think they got on.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Geneva asked.

‘Every time I mentioned them she cut me off. Nothing dramatic but she said enough to make me realise she didn’t want to talk about her past. She just smiled in this strange way she had when she didn’t want to talk about something and say‚
That was me then but this is me now
.’

‘And you were still good friends recently?’

Cecilia nodded, opened her mouth then shut it again, her eyes briefly flicking to the front window.

‘But you saw each other less and less?’ Geneva watched the girl’s reaction closely. She flashed back to what Cummings had said about Grace changing over the last year.

Cecilia picked up a HobNob and nibbled at the edges, her teeth white and very small. ‘You know how it is, work gets more and more important. There’s always a deadline.’

‘But it wasn’t just that, was it?’ Geneva prompted.

‘Grace changed.’ Cecilia bit off a chunk of biscuit. She chewed slowly and with what seemed like great concentration. ‘She got really involved in her studies; I wasn’t lying. She was always working somewhere, either in the library or in local archives, but it became something more than just work to her. Like a mission or something.’

Geneva gently put down her tea. ‘When did you first notice this change?’

‘Over the Christmas holidays. I’d call her up, say look there’s sunshine, let’s go to Battersea Park or the river and she’d say no, she was busy, couldn’t spare the time. I only saw her a few times over the whole break. She’d changed in other ways too. She’d been so carefree and light and now there was this terrible heaviness to her. She began to lecture me on politics and human rights. I grew up with that stuff. My father teaches at the university in Kampala; I’d come to London to get away from all that. She would read something and then get all worked up about it. Obsessed. She’d tell me all these horrible, horrible things . . .’ Cecilia shook her head, her hands furrowing her jeans, pulling and straightening the seams, her eyes darting between the two detectives and the curtained window.

‘How much do you pay for this flat?’ Carrigan’s question took Geneva by surprise, almost as much as it did Cecilia.

‘A hundred pounds a week.’ She looked embarrassed, as if she’d been exposed as the victim of some scam.

‘Tough being a student. Especially in London, I imagine.’

Cecilia nodded.

‘How do you think Grace could afford to pay twice that for a flat in Queensway?’ Carrigan asked.

‘Really?’ Cecilia looked genuinely surprised. ‘She always had money. Not a huge amount but more than most students. In the first year she’d often take me to dinner. I felt guilty but she laughed it off, said it wasn’t her money anyway. I got the impression she received a sum from her family every month.’

Carrigan wrote something down. He’d already checked Grace’s bank account and there had been no sign of any regular deposits.

‘Do you know anything about this?’ Geneva took out the flyer for the African Action Committee which she’d found among Grace’s things, and laid it flat on the coffee table. Cecilia glanced at it, not even long enough to read the headline, and looked back up at them.

‘Gabriel,’ was all she said.

Carrigan looked at Geneva, then back down at the table. ‘Who’s Gabriel?’

Cecilia bit into a biscuit; crumbs rained down on her jeans and she began picking them up one by one. ‘Gabriel Otto. I guess he was as close to a boyfriend as Grace had. She met him at the end of her first year. I think she’d been impressed by something he wrote in the college paper but . . .’ She stopped.

Geneva could tell that Cecilia was unsure about betraying Grace’s confidence. She leant forward. ‘Go on.’

‘I just . . . I never trusted him. He pretends to be African but he was born and grew up here. I think he does the whole political thing to get girls but Grace seemed to like him.’

‘Do you know where Gabriel lives?’ Geneva asked.

The girl shook her head. ‘I only ever saw him at college and those African Action Committee meetings.’

Geneva watched Carrigan scribbling in his notebook, his fingers clenched white against the pencil’s stem. She knew what he was thinking – the boyfriend, the argument the night of the murder. ‘Did Grace own a laptop?’ she asked.

Cecilia nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘It wasn’t in her flat.’

The girl looked surprised, then upset. ‘She was always so careful with it, always checking she hadn’t left it someplace.’

‘There was nowhere else she might have stashed it?’

‘No, she wouldn’t even leave it in her locker, she was so afraid it would get stolen.’

‘You haven’t been to classes this week,’ Carrigan noted neutrally, but they both caught a flicker in Cecilia’s face before she answered.

‘I’ve not been feeling well,’ she replied at the same moment that Carrigan’s mobile rang, causing Cecilia to almost jump out of her seat, spilling what was left of her tea, apologising as she went down on her knees to clear it up.

Geneva watched, perplexed. Cecilia was definitely grieving for her friend but she also seemed terrified of something. Geneva could almost smell the fear coming off her. Was she scared of them, two white police, or of something else? She was about to ask her when Carrigan snapped his phone shut so hard it cracked like a whip in the airless room. He held it tightly in his fist until his knuckles turned white. ‘We need to go. Right now.’

She followed him into the street and watched as he stopped just short of Cecilia’s gate, turned and started kicking the nearby dustbin, shouting and swearing as people walked by oblivious, not wanting to get into trouble, not wanting to know, just wanting to get safely home where the news of Grace’s murder had just exploded into thirty million living rooms.