A Dark Redemption (6 page)

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘Stand the fuck up.’

Monroe got up reluctantly, his face white and stretched, as Carrigan bent down and lifted the seat cushion. His stomach yawned against the constraints of his trousers and he felt the blood drain from his head. Underneath the cushion was a square white photo album.

Monroe was staring anywhere but at the armchair. Carrigan could smell his fear now, the rank meaty scent coming off the man in waves. He felt every muscle in his own body tense and sizzle as he picked up the photo album.

‘No . . . please,’ Monroe mumbled, sitting back down as Carrigan opened the book and saw a six-year-old boy modelling a pair of swimming trunks, the image ripped out of a catalogue. His breath stuck in his throat and he could feel the pulse in his fingers as he turned the pages.

Photos of young athletes torn from newspapers. Olympic swimmers, glistening in dewy relief against blue swimming pools. More pages from catalogues, young blond boys playing board games, modelling T-shirts and underwear, each page ripped out and then carefully neatened up, pasted into the book with little translucent butterflies.

Carrigan cursed himself for running out half-cocked like this, knew he’d been slipping these last two years. His arms came down so quickly that even he was surprised. He picked up Monroe and slammed him against the wall. The photo book fell to the floor. Monroe’s face crashed against a framed Elvis print and his body buckled in Carrigan’s grip.

‘When did you last see her?’

Monroe turned, his eyes misty and his lip split at the edges. ‘She’s not my type.’ Blood poured down the side of his cheekbone. ‘Get your facts right, Inspector.’ He spat out some more blood. It landed on Carrigan’s shoe. ‘You show me this fucking picture, ask me when was the last time I saw her. You fucking pricks, you don’t even do your homework, do you?’ Monroe’s teeth glinted red. ‘I don’t like girls, Detective; never have, never will. And I don’t like anyone this old.’

Carrigan felt the pulsing of the blood in his fingers, the heat of the flat, the whine in Monroe’s voice. He buried his fists in his pockets, felt them jumping inside. He stared at Monroe, cursing himself. Monroe pointed at the TV, two boys running together on a railway track, and emitted a high-pitched cackle. ‘That’s right – come to Daddy.’

Carrigan shoved him hard against the wall, feeling a shock of electricity rip down his arm and through his chest. He saw Grace falling to the floor, blood trickling down her cheeks. He heard her scream. He let go of Monroe and exited the flat, slamming the door behind him.

Geneva made her way through the press of bodies and up the stairs. Her stomach reeled and rolled, her palms clammy and hot. She stopped and took a deep breath of hazy London air, her vision going scrambly for a split second. She couldn’t believe how nervous she was. Knew she was going to fuck it all up. She stared at the cool columns and smooth steps leading up to SOAS’s main entrance, trying to focus on nothing, just the blankness in front of her, but it wasn’t helping. Her first interview working a murder and she felt like a schoolgirl about to be reprimanded.

She’d been surprised when Carrigan had called an hour ago, told her to conduct the interview by herself. He’d sounded distracted and tense, she’d tried asking him what he was up to but he’d hung up before she’d even finished the sentence. It had been a while since she’d had a new DI and she’d forgotten how hard it was; how it would take weeks, months sometimes, before you clicked, understood every unsaid thing. She didn’t know what to make of him yet – he didn’t dress like a policeman, he didn’t look like one. A depressed lecturer in medieval history perhaps, with his crumpled clothes and even more crumpled face, the hair that wouldn’t sit still in the wind, and his ridiculous fake Barbour interlaced with biscuit crumbs. He wore a wedding ring but didn’t look like a man who went home every night to a loving wife.

She took a swig of her Coke, binned it and entered the building. The hum of student life surrounded her, the frayed newsletters, wanted notes, mimeographed posters for bands with unpronounceable names and political pamphlets, their covers stark with 20-point headlines in black capitals, so sure of their messages it made her heart shrink a little.

A secretary guided her to a chair and paged Professor Cummings. His office was on the top floor of the building, encased by corridors and bookshelves. In front of her a large window opened out onto the square below and she watched the students gather, chat and slurp soft drinks in the late-afternoon sun, their faces filled with exhaustion and wonder. She thought back to Norwich, her time at the University of East Anglia, the shadow of her mother far away and the screaming riotous nights of music and laughter that engulfed her fresher year.

‘If only we could . . .’

She turned from the grease-smeared window and looked up at the man addressing her. Mid-forties, prematurely grey but dressed in a Grateful Dead shirt and sporting a ponytail.

‘Pardon?’

‘Go back.’ Professor Cummings smiled. ‘Change the past, take the other turning, the one we never took. But we can’t. Just as they . . .’ he pointed out of the window, the nails on his hand long and curved like a guitar player’s, ‘. . . just as they won’t be able to go back to this day. You think they know this? Did we? Do you think it would make us enjoy each day more or less?’

The professor’s office looked as though it had been caught in the maw of a hurricane. She stepped inside and her feet scraped and jostled against the loose papers, photocopies and pamphlets spotting the floor. More piles of paper and spiral-bound dissertations leant and quivered in corner stacks.

Cummings took his seat, apologised for the mess, but she could tell it was always like this. His T-shirt had blue clouds and yellow skulls against a purple background. His cargo pants were loose and hung asymmetrically, pens and who knows what else weighing down the side pockets. ‘Bloody smoking laws,’ he muttered as Geneva took out her voice recorder. ‘Used to be I could smoke in my own office, didn’t harm anyone. Now I have to go down ten floors and stand outside in the rain. You know how much valuable time I lose every day?’ Cummings let out a deep sigh as if only now realising this wasn’t another student sitting in front of him. ‘No, of course, you don’t want to know about that.’ She watched as he shuffled on the seat, making himself comfortable, slouching one leg over the armrest. ‘You said you wanted to see me in relation to Grace Okello‚ but you didn’t say what she’s done wrong, detective.’

Geneva took out her notebook, flipped through the pages. ‘Why do you think she’s done anything wrong?’ she asked, looking directly into his eyes.

‘I get a call from the police asking to speak about Grace, what else would I think?’

‘I’m afraid Grace was killed on Sunday evening,’ Geneva stated flatly.

Cummings dropped the pen he’d been kneading between his fingers the last few minutes. He stared at Geneva, waiting for a smile, relaxation of facial muscles, any indicator that this was some elaborate practical joke. ‘She’s dead?’

Geneva nodded, watching Cummings’s eyes turn dark and hooded. He reached into the pocket of his cargo pants and extracted a pack of Gitanes. Without looking at Geneva he took one out, tapped the end on the table several times to let the tobacco settle and lit it with a lighter in the shape of a rhinoceros horn. ‘Jesus,’ he said, taking three deep drags in succession as if he were a dying man sucking oxygen. He coughed into his hand, his eyes turning red and watery.

‘What happened?’ he finally asked, the ash on his cigarette now longer than the unsmoked portion. Geneva stared at it, waiting for it to fall. She related the basic facts: Grace found dead in her flat. Said she couldn’t go into details or theories, which was true, though she also wanted to see how much Cummings could fill in.

‘You were Grace’s dissertation supervisor?’ She looked down at her notes though she knew the questions off by heart.

Cummings took another drag and cleared his throat. ‘Yes. It was transferred to me when she proposed it. Anything East African gets parcelled out to me.’ He looked past Geneva, to a point on the wall, a poster of a desert scene, camels trudging through a sea of sand. ‘My accounts of Grace will inevitably be biased, so be forewarned.’

Geneva watched Cummings carefully as he told her about Grace Okello. When he began speaking, his face lost a couple of years and sleepless nights; something in his eyes lit up and she could tell that he’d be a favourite among students. He had a way of talking, imparting information, that wasn’t condescending and yet guided you along so that when you came to the conclusion you thought you’d got there yourself.

‘Grace was bright, articulate and funny, that was easy to see, but I don’t think I really spoke to her alone until it came time for the students to hand in their dissertation proposals. You work here ten years as I’ve done, you see the same ideas and theories recycled every year, so when something new comes along it leaps out at you. Grace was that kind of student. International students tend to be far less trouble than English ones. They understand what a privilege it is for them to be here studying while their friends are facing hunger, war and unemployment back home. They don’t use their three years as an opportunity to get drunk, stoned and laid every night.’

Geneva scribbled some notes in her pad though the digital recorder was preserving every utterance of the conversation. She sometimes found that her notes were wildly divergent from the recordings. One was for facts, the other for feelings, hunches, suppositions. She was also aware of the effect it had; how people got nervous when the person opposite them was writing things they couldn’t see. ‘You mentioned her dissertation. What was it about?’

Cummings leant back in the chair. ‘She was interested in rebel groups. Revolutionaries. The thesis was a study of post-colonial African insurgencies and coups.’

‘You said it struck you as original. What made it so?’

Cummings took a few seconds to think, rubbing his hands through what was left of his hair and nodding to himself. ‘Most of these students, most young people, are enamoured by men with guns who come bearded and filthy out of the bush after years of fighting and take control of the country. I bet one in three students still have posters of Che Guevara on their walls.’

Geneva smiled, thinking of the Che poster her mum had in the kitchen, the letter the Argentine doctor had written to her mother before he set off on his fateful Bolivian journey.

‘Well, Grace saw beyond that,’ Cummings continued, more at ease now he was back in his area of expertise. ‘She didn’t think that Che and Mao were such heroes. She saw how African insurgencies, like all insurgencies, began with good intentions and ended in blood, torture and jail cells. How every rebel regime that came to power became the very thing they’d sworn to destroy. She was looking primarily at her homeland, Uganda, at Museveni who grabbed the presidency sixteen years ago after fighting as a bush guerrilla. She looked at Charles Taylor in Liberia and Laurent Nkunda in the Congo, Gaddafi, Mugabe and Mobutu. And she was very interested in Joseph Kony.’

‘Joseph Kony?’ Geneva was lost, history never her strong point, African history a total blur to her like Conrad’s white map.

‘The papers like to call him Africa’s Most Wanted Man, though there’s a new contender for that crown every day. He’s a northern Ugandan who began a rebel offensive in the mid-eighties against the government of Museveni. His soldiers are called the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA for short, and most of them are abducted children. He says he wants to bring the rule of the ten commandments to the region but in twenty years he’s achieved just the opposite.

‘What was so original in Grace’s work was her take on these rebel movements. She saw them not as some glamorous Marxist emancipation but as men who were only interested in blood, money and power but who had learned to disguise their motivations in ideology and charisma. You see, Grace understood rebel movements not as political forces but as death cults.’

Geneva made illegible notes, acronyms and names skipping by her like station signs through a train window. She knew she’d need to get a handle on some of this material later and kicked herself for falling into the professor’s soothing tones when she was supposed to be interrogating him. ‘And how was her work going?’

‘She was having problems these last few months,’ Cummings admitted, looking down at the table. ‘She kept coming to see me, tearing out her hair, wanting to give it all up.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘She was a perfectionist. She kept criticising her own work, much more than I ever did. She wanted it to be perfect, to take account of everything. She thought that if she had all the facts about a given subject, the answer would be bound to reveal itself.’

Geneva nodded, thinking back to her own time at university and to how similar Grace’s ideas were to hers concerning police work.

‘But it doesn’t work that way,’ Cummings continued. ‘We can never have all the facts. There’s too much information and it’s constantly changing. And even if in some way you could gather all the information, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to an answer. I tried to explain to her that undergraduate work was about realising this. Finding the limitations of your methodology. It’s more about unlearning than learning‚ but Grace had a hard time with this. To be honest, most of our international students do. They come to London expecting certainty and accuracy and we tell them it’s impossible, a chimera.’

‘Did Grace have any arguments? Any falling outs?’ She remembered her own days at university, the heady shuffle of people, late-night discussions fuelled by booze and slogans, the shouting and placard waving. She watched as Cummings took a moment to think it over.

‘Most students like to take a bite out of us former colonisers, the white man,’ he replied without a hint of irony. ‘Grace wanted to take modern African leaders, the modern African system, to task. She wasn’t interested in colonialism or its after-effects.’

‘Did that get her in trouble?’

‘Occasionally. I remember one day at the refectory, I was sitting at a table with Grace and some of her friends. They were having a debate – no, it was an argument really. One of her fellow African students harangued her for going after black men. Said their job wasn’t to attack their own but the white man. It got quite heated for a while until another friend calmed them down. But these are students, Miss Miller, they get heated over which brand of coffee the canteen uses, if there are too many black cleaners in the building. I’m not sure this has anything to do with what happened.’

‘Everything has something to do with what happened, Professor, we just don’t know it until we have all the details.’

Cummings shook his head mournfully. ‘You sound just like Grace, Detective. I’m sure the two of you would have got along very well.’

Geneva ignored the comment, not sure whether it was intended as rebuke or compliment. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

Cummings laughed. ‘I have no idea. They don’t tell us these things. She was a very pretty and highly intelligent girl. I would think she had one or maybe several‚ but you’d have to talk to her friends about that.’

Cummings riffled through his notes again but Geneva could see he wasn’t really looking at them, his eyes clouded as if some debate were raging inside.

‘But something changed, right? Something happened?’ She was guessing but she saw him flinch, then shake his head.

‘I don’t know how relevant this is but you say you want to know all the details.’ He took a deep breath as if making some kind of inner decision. ‘The last couple of terms she’d been slipping a bit. Grades down, a few essays not handed in on time. It happens to a lot of students but I never thought it would happen to Grace.’

Geneva felt a blast of heat rushing through her. ‘When was this?’

Cummings thought it over. ‘When she came back from the Christmas break. There was something . . . something different about her.’

‘Different how?’

‘She seemed less communicative, more fervent, I don’t know – maybe I’m just imagining it.’

It was probably nothing, a break-up with a boyfriend, the pressures of work. ‘Did you ever meet her parents?’

‘No. We rarely do. Even with domestic students. She hardly ever talked about Uganda or her childhood. Not to me, anyhow. She was a member of the East African Association but that’s normal for students from her part of the world. Most of them stop going after a year, they start making friends because of shared interests and hobbies rather than history and genealogy.’

‘Drugs?’ Geneva stared at the professor.