A Dark Redemption (3 page)

Carrigan walked up the stairs to the next landing, his heart sinking, his feet dragging behind him. He couldn’t see where the hallway ended. The mangy carpet disappeared into a funnel of darkness a few flats down. It reminded him of those long nightmare corridors in
The Shining,
a film he wished he’d never seen; its images promiscuous and relentless long after the watching was over
.

The hallway was lit from above by twitching fluorescents recessed under a metal grille that rained down the light in black spears against the walls and carpet. The air seemed packed tighter here than on the floor below, filled with heavy, textured smells, the various scents commingling and forming new alliances in the corridor. All around buzzed the noise and hum of lives lived behind closed doors. Muffled announcers on blaring TV sets, broken conversations, pounding drum and bass. The rotten reek of cooked cabbage and garlic. Arguments and shouting. A faint whiff of weed.

He heard the two constables come up behind him, their faces pale with what they’d seen and what they were about to see. He stopped in front of number 87 and knocked. Two old ladies wrapped in thick muslin that made them look mummified walked past, their eyes lingering on Carrigan, unspoken suspicion in every muscle twitch. He ignored them, knocked once more, then got to his knees.

There was no letter box, but he could see a half-inch gap between the front door and the hallway’s filthy carpet. He pressed his face against the floor, feeling the sticky shag-pile grab at his beard, but he couldn’t see any light coming from inside the flat. He moved, pressing his face closer, took a deep breath and immediately started coughing. He took one more to be sure, then got up, brushed the dirt off his clothes, and called it in.

He sent the constables back downstairs and waited for the SOCOs to arrive. He spent the time watching the flow of bodies in and out of flats, a constant shuffle of lives enacted in this dim and dank hallway. He knocked on adjacent doors. There was no answer from the flats either side of 87. He knocked on the flat directly opposite. The door opened and an unshaven man with a cigarette that seemed moulded to his lips looked at Carrigan and said, ‘Huh?’

Carrigan showed him his warrant card, asked if he knew who lived opposite. The man wouldn’t make eye contact with him. Somewhere inside the flat Carrigan heard a woman shouting in Greek, Romanian, he didn’t know, the man’s eyes narrowing as if each word were a splinter driven into his flesh. ‘No police,’ he said. ‘I done nothing wrong.’

Carrigan wedged his foot in the door as the old man tried to close it. The old man looked up at him, a rabbity fear in his eyes. ‘I’m not interested in you.’ Carrigan pointed to the flat across the hall. ‘I want to know who lives there.’

The man looked down at his slippers, torn grey things exposing yellowed and cracked toenails. He shook his head but the action seemed to be commenting on something bigger than Carrigan’s question. ‘I seen nothing and I don’t want to see nothing.’

This time Carrigan let him shut the door. People in these blocks never heard or saw anything; he knew that from experience. It wasn’t that they had anything to hide, not like trying to canvass witnesses in a hostile estate, but in the countries they’d fled from a knock on the door could mean imprisonment, torture and often worse. How were they to know that police all over the world weren’t the same?

The SOCOs and DS Karlson arrived a few minutes later. They suited up in the stairwell and gave Carrigan his oversuit, latex gloves, and foot protectors. The starchy chemical smell filled his nostrils as he unsnapped the gloves and slipped them on.

‘Any idea what’s in there?’ Karlson was filling the sign-in sheets, smiling that thin begrudging smile of his. He’d never liked Carrigan‚ couldn’t understand why someone with a university degree would want to be a policeman. Didn’t like the fact that Carrigan hated sports, wouldn’t drink the station’s Nescafé
and rarely joined the others for after-work drinks down the pub.

‘We’ll see when we break down the door, won’t we?’

Carrigan moved back as the two constables took hold of the ram. The door was old, had been painted over so many times it cracked in two like a rotten fingernail. The stench hit them immediately.

‘Jesus Christ.’ One of the constables, Carrigan always forgot his name, pedalled back so quickly he ran right into Carrigan, his body warm and taut like a greyhound’s.

Carrigan stepped past him, taking a deep breath. His nostrils filled with a metallic sweetness and he wished he was in the corridor again with the garlic and cabbage, anything but this.

It was a studio flat. Small and self-contained. A narrow hallway, kitchen to the left and bathroom to the right. The bedroom/living room stretched out in front of them. At the far end a small window opened out onto a rectangle of sun and trees. Carrigan focused on the leaves, golden brown already, as they swayed and trembled on the branches. Then he looked back towards the bed.

Her arms were tied to the ends of the headboard. Her arms looked as if they’d been stretched beyond their capacity, the skin tight against the bone. Translucent plastic ties snagged her wrists to the brass. He could smell the dark heated mulch of blood, ammonia and sweat. He tried breathing through his mouth as he stepped closer.

He could hear the constables cursing behind him, Karlson taking deep swallows of air, the clutter and clump of the SOCOs setting up their equipment, but they all seemed as far away as the detonation of trance music that was coming from an upstairs flat.

He stared at the girl as flashbulbs popped and burst. Her body was sporadically revealed by the light then disappeared back into darkness.

Her nightdress had been cut down the middle so that it hung on either side of her torso like a pair of flimsy wings. The knife had gone deep into her chest, a dark red line running from navel to ribs. He stared at the wide canyon carved into her stomach, the dark brown shadows and glints of white poking from within. He felt last night’s dream rise in his throat and he swallowed hard to keep it down, taking short breaths, keeping his feet evenly spaced. He saw Jennings, one of his young DCs, catch a glimpse of the bed, then rush straight to the bathroom. Outside he could hear doors being slammed, the shuffle of feet and ongoing lives, but in here there was only the stillness of death.

He didn’t want to look at her face so he looked at her legs. It was almost worse. Small puncture wounds ran like bird tracks criss-crossing her skin. He leant closer. Too small to have been made by a knife or blade, grouped in pairs. He moved back and saw that they continued up the torso and along the undersides of her arms. Small pointed punctures, black with blood, evenly spaced, the flesh around them mottled, torn and weeping. They looked like animal bites, he thought with a shudder.

‘Christ, what the . . . ?’ Karlson stared down at the open cavity of her chest, the perforation of her limbs, her cracked front tooth.

Carrigan said nothing, headed for the window, took a deep breath as he watched the laundry flutter in the courtyard. He could see people going about their daily chores oblivious and unconcerned. He turned back, finally ready to look at her face. He stood next to Karlson, smelling the man’s sweat and fear, the reek covering his own. He tried not to look at her chest, the gaping hole, white shards of bone poking out like stalagmites, but the wound had its own terrible gravity. He heard Karlson curse under his breath and turn away.

Behind him, a scene-of-crime officer was setting up his video camera, his colleagues drawing out strange containers of powder and unguent, miraculous dispatches from the frontiers of science. One man was unpeeling a roll of sticky tape, the horrible screaming sound filling the room as he cut it into strips in preparation to ‘tape’ the body; a slow and painstaking job intended to capture any rogue hairs or fibres caught on the skin. The man looked up at Carrigan and shrugged. The SOCOs wanted them out, they had work to do, evidence to collect. They didn’t even see the girl, she was only a surface from which information could be gathered, conclusions drawn.

Carrigan bent down again, ignoring them. He put his mouth to the dead girl’s ear. They heard him whisper something to her but not what he said. They looked at each other uncomfortably. This was hard enough without the senior investigating officer talking to the dead, but Karlson and Jennings only shrugged; they’d learned to ignore the idiosyncrasies of their DI. Carrigan surveyed the girl’s body once more then leant back in and froze.

‘Karlson, over here,’ he said in a dry, raspy voice. He stood over the body as the sergeant looked at the cavity in her chest.

‘What?’ Karlson said. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Exactly,’ Carrigan replied, pointing through the ribs at the empty space underneath. ‘It’s not there.’

Karlson stared at him, confused, then looked back down at the body.

‘Her heart,’ Carrigan said. ‘It’s gone.’

This was it. Her last day. She could feel it in the way people walked past avoiding eye contact. People she knew. It was like being made to wait outside the headmistress’s office while everyone shuffled by, whispered to each other, glanced, giggled, and went on about their business while you sat suspended between your life as it was and whatever awaited you behind the door.

She stared at the posters on the wall opposite her, trying to stop thinking about what was coming. Couched behind glass they seemed like museum exhibits, not bulletins from the inner city. The slashed face of a teenager, the scar like a centipede crawling up his left cheek; below him locations where knives could be handed in. The eyes of a drink-driver watching the stretchered bodies of his victims being taken away from the smouldering wreck. The appeal for vigilance on the Tube.

It wasn’t working. She couldn’t stop looking at the door to the super’s office. Waiting for it to crack open and unleash her fate. She stared down at her shoes, remembering she hadn’t had time to polish them, thinking about last night, coming home after getting the super’s request for this meeting, sitting down on the green cushion, opening a bottle and then what? She woke up fully clothed in her bed, half an hour to make the meeting. She didn’t remember a thing. The bottle was almost empty and her shoes looked terrible. It was acceptable for a man to come in looking dishevelled but for a woman it could only count against you; the higher-ups hadn’t yet managed to divorce the notion of sex from that of capability.

She watched the clock, the slow spin of seconds accruing into minutes and hours. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to untangle last night’s knots. She wondered if he’d finally decided to press charges. How happy her mother would be at this turn of events.

‘Detective Constable Miller!’

She jerked up and saw Superintendent Branch leaning out of his office, entirely filling the space left by the door, looking exasperated. She must have zoned out. Christ!

Her smile was wasted; he’d already stepped back in by the time she realised he was calling her. She straightened her shirt and followed him in.

This was her second time in his office this year. The last meeting hadn’t gone well. He’d had a stack of files on his table, all with her name on them. He had detailed witness statements and DI reports. He said he had photographs. She’d looked through the window at the empty space left by the recently demolished church and wondered who’d informed on her.

‘You hit a superior officer,’ Branch had said.

‘He was out of line, sir. He would have killed the boy,’ she’d countered breathlessly, unable to meet his eyes.

‘You blew your cover. You could have both been killed.’

‘I couldn’t let him do that, sir, even if it meant blowing the operation.’

‘Yes.’ He sat back down, put one hand to his temple as if aware of a sudden pain there. ‘I’ve read your report. You should have waited until you were both alone. He was your commanding officer, for God’s sake.’

Then he’d told her about the demotion. Detective sergeant to detective constable. Five years of hard work reversed just like that. She’d kept quiet, knowing any argument on her part would only increase their fears, make them even more wary of her. So she shut her mouth, nodded, and took her punishment.

Now, sitting down in the same chair, staring at the same wall, she couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been.

‘Geneva.’ Branch was leaning back, his massive bulk making the chair look like it was about to collapse. His North Riding accent crunched down hard on the vowels, stretching them so that her name no longer sounded as if it belonged to her. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Geneva, do you, Detective?’

She shuffled forward on the seat. It was too low, forcing her to arch her neck uncomfortably. She flashed back to being a girl again, sitting in class, the teachers looking down from their high perches demanding an answer they knew you didn’t have, the rest of the girls just waiting to burst out laughing.

‘It’s my name.’

Branch smiled and pointed to her shoulders. She looked down and saw that her earphones were still slung across her jacket and looped around her neck. She snatched them off but they got caught and she flinched, feeling several strands rip. Her face was hot with blood as she shoved them into her pocket. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Branch nodded, eyes partly closed as if assimilating some vital new piece of information. ‘And how have things been since your reinstatement?’

She knew it was a question but also not a question. She wasn’t sure what was expected of her. Humility? Gratitude? Resentment? ‘It’s a different pace. I’m getting used to it. I was a DS for two years. It’s like going back to school.’

Branch smiled, leant forward in his chair so that she could smell the dark tang of stale cigar smoke on his breath. ‘Very well put. I think we should all go back to school at some point. Good for the soul, you know. I spend a week every year out on the streets in uniform. Sometimes you climb so fast you forget what you leave behind.’

She nodded but wasn’t sure what point he was making. Branch was notorious for his gnomic non sequiturs; it was a clever technique, never quite pinning anything down, letting the other person join the dots, and if they screwed up – well, obviously they’d misinterpreted him.

‘A woman’s body was discovered this morning in King’s Court, Queensway.’

Why was he telling her this? Did he expect her to know the case, only a few hours old, the other side of the Westway from her normal patch? She half-nodded – let him interpret that – and scanned the table in front of her, the boxing gazettes and grey match programmes, the multitude of mobile phones lined up square and precise.

This wasn’t what she’d expected. Waiting outside, she was certain this was going to be the beginning of the dismissal procedure. That he’d finally put in a formal complaint. She’d begun thinking of other jobs, what she would do, the naked horror of being flung back into the world.

One of the phones rang, breaking the silence, but Branch didn’t even glance down at it. ‘This is one of those cases that has the potential of turning into a major fucking headache.’ He leant forward across the desk and a stray bit of tobacco caught onto his blazer cuff and hung there like an ornament. ‘She was African. A student. You remember the murder of the two French students a couple of years ago? Young, good-looking foreign students being tortured to death in their London flats is the last thing we fucking need on the front page of the
Standard
. We’ve got to keep this small and close. No press releases, no blazing blue-light entrances. You understand?’

She didn’t know where he was going with this, what it had to do with her, but at least he wasn’t dipping into a file with her name scrawled in red on it, pulling out a form waiting only for her signature.

‘It’s DI Carrigan’s case. You know him?’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ she replied neutrally.

Branch nodded, his eyes glistening behind his round-framed glasses. He put his fists together in a gesture almost akin to praying and she noticed the scuffed knuckles, bulbous and round like the skulls of midgets. ‘Yes, I dare say most detectives working out of West London have. Something of an office legend, our Carrigan. Takes files home with him and studies them at night. Cases that aren’t his. Thinks he’ll work out what other men couldn’t. You can see how that would not endear him to his peers,’ Branch darkly confided, ‘but if it was just that . . .’ He pressed something on one of the phones and a red light started blinking. Geneva noticed that his fingers were scored with tiny white lines as if they’d been tied up. He leant forward, his shadow stretching across the table towards her. ‘Frankly, Detective Miller, I’m worried about him being in charge of this case. I don’t know how he got to the scene first, how he always manages to get to the scene first, but I would have been much happier if a DI with a little more discretion was in charge.’

Was he insinuating something? Geneva stared at Branch, trying to gauge the tenor of his comments, but either she was too hungover or she just wasn’t good at reading faces. Instead, she flashed Branch her favourite smile. The smile she liked to give men in bars. It seemed to work; the super was momentarily flustered, resorting to shuffling papers and clearing his throat. ‘This is all between you and me, not your DI, not your husband . . . understand?’

Her skin flushed hot and itchy at the mention of Oliver. Her heart double-timed as she finally understood she wasn’t here to be fired.

‘Carrigan’s been getting sloppy. His cases have begun overlapping and his reports don’t make any sense. He keeps photos of all the murder victims he’s investigated at his house. At first we humoured him, what with what happened and all, but recently he’s been getting worse, more secretive. He’s never been one of us. Never wanted to. His main concern isn’t going to be keeping this out of the press.’

‘I thought our main concern was to catch the killer.’ It tumbled out before she could shut her mouth. She bit the insides of her cheeks until it hurt.

‘Yes, of course, but don’t act so gauche, Detective. You know as well as I do that keeping this out of the public eye will greatly enhance our chances of catching whoever did this.’ He looked up at the wall, lost in silent thought. Photos of boxers lined the perimeter of the room. Bloody and sweat-soaked, caught in a flash of action, their faces grimaced into scowls that made them look like dying dogs. Each of the photos had been signed and dedicated to Branch. ‘I’m going to second you to Carrigan’s team as DS,’ he continued. ‘I want you to work closely with him on this.’

She wasn’t sure she’d understood correctly, or that she liked what he seemed to be saying. ‘And report back to you, sir?’

Branch smiled, his eyes crinkling behind the glasses. ‘Yes, exactly.’ He picked up a stack of files and evened the edges. ‘I’m glad you share my concerns.’

‘You want me to spy on him?’ She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

Branch shook his head as if she’d misunderstood something incredibly basic. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic, Miller. All I want is your report every week. No different from the report you’d hand your DI.’ He stopped shuffling papers and met her eyes. ‘I’m offering you a chance to get back to detective sergeant. On probation, of course.’

She looked out of the window but the space created by the demolition of the church was now filled with a gleaming tower of mirrors. All she could see was their own building reflected in the shimmer. She turned away, focused on the still point of the super’s table, breathing her nausea down. ‘Can I take a day to think about it?’

Branch pursed his mouth, his lips smacking silently against each other. ‘I assume at some point you’d like to resume your former position permanently. I’ve read your file; there’s no reason you shouldn’t go as high as you want.’

She took a deep breath. Her chest ached and her head throbbed. This was one of those moments – life before and life after – except this time it was in her hands, her choice. She wanted to say no, to stand up for what she believed in, but when she opened her mouth the opposite came out.

Branch frowned. ‘I thought you’d be more pleased.’

‘I don’t like the idea of spying on my direct superior.’

‘But you don’t mind hitting them.’ A small smile curved the edge of Branch’s top lip.

‘He was out of line, sir. He did things he shouldn’t do.’

‘Why do you think I chose you for this case, Detective?’

She walked out into the blazing September sun. Her eyes immediately squished inside their sockets, pulsing. She’d left her sunglasses at home. Alka-Seltzer too. She took the earphones out of her pockets and set about untangling them but her fingers were too clumsy and she ended up putting them in lopsided and looped. She scrolled through the iPod’s playlist, couldn’t make her mind up, put it on shuffle. A scratchy guitar twanged and wailed in her left ear as she jumped onto the bus.

She almost missed her stop. She spent the journey neck craned, trying to see through the condensation and breath-mist, but she only recognised the road after they’d passed it. She ran up to the bus driver, pleaded and cajoled until he let her out. She took a minute to find her bearings, the houses and streets all looking identical to her, then headed down the narrow tree-lined avenue towards her block of flats. She searched through her purse until she found the key that was more like some science-fiction gadget than any key she’d previously used, slid it into the lock and heard it click and tumble. At least locks still do that, she thought as she climbed the stairs to her flat.

Her flat. She needed to get used to saying that even though it was only a rental and she’d probably move when the contract was up. The house would be put on the market when the divorce went through and then she would use her share to buy somewhere else if the prices didn’t go nuts in the interim. But that would take a while. And there had been no question of staying on at the house; they’d tried it for a couple of weeks, sleeping in separate rooms, but even that, seeing him every morning, hearing him every night, had been more than she could bear.

She sat down on one of the large green cushions her sister had given her when she’d moved in. She hadn’t had a chance to buy an armchair or sofa yet, kept meaning to do it but was always busy. Just as she’d promised herself that this weekend she would unpack the boxes lying haphazard across the room like obstacles in a maze. All her life was contained in these boxes. Her clothes, photos, books, memories. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to open them yet and besides they doubled as tables and TV stands and places to throw all her work junk.

In the fridge she found half a pint of milk. She sniffed it and it seemed all right; she couldn’t remember when she’d bought it. There was still some vodka left from last night and enough Kahlua for a couple of drinks.

She sat on the couch savouring the rich smell rising from her glass, picked up the King’s Court file, lit a cigarette, and was about to take her first sip when the landline rang.