Eleven Days (31 page)

The next morning he dismissed the entire team. He pulled down the action sheets, scrawled lists and minutely delineated graphs from the walls, and shut down the incident room. He sent the HOLMES analysts away and rotated the uniforms back to regular duty. He told everyone to go home and enjoy their Christmas holidays.

He’d explained his reasons and they’d been surprised, some even outraged, but Carrigan could see that they all accepted it with the same snap of logic he had. There were stunned looks, evident relief and many questions, but Carrigan shut himself off in his office, the door, for once, closed. The snow was falling thickly outside, obscuring the buildings and greater city beyond, and he spent the rest of the morning going through the case files again, trying to find any way he could be wrong, any other answer that would fit the facts, any other option but this. He focused on the interview statements, reading and rereading each phrase and sentence, then listening to the recordings, hoping to isolate any peculiarity of intonation or tone that would give lie to the printed word, but everything he read and heard only made him more certain.

Geneva was knocking on the door. The sound registered but only obscurely, as yet another minor distraction, a faint tap at the edge of consciousness. He looked up and saw her standing halfway into his office, tall black boots reaching almost to her knees. She took out her earplugs and looped them around her index finger, a fluent and practised gesture that nonetheless carried a hint of irritation about it.

‘Can you please explain to me what’s going on?’ Her voice was sharp and fierce.

‘We’ve been wrong from the start,’ Carrigan replied, thinking back to last night, the smell of wet soil and ice, the way his body had shaken uncontrollably for a long time after Viktor had left. He’d walked out of the shed and trudged through the snow-bound fields until he’d reached the motorway. He’d walked a further mile before he found a service station. Back home, he’d paced the rooms of his flat, unable to sleep, to stop the incessant flickering of his eyelids, thinking about what Viktor had said, running it through his head, trying to find a fault or crack that would split apart the man’s story, but no matter how hard he tried, how many ways he looked at it, he could not. As dawn filtered through the gaps in his curtains he’d slowly and unwillingly come to the realisation that the case had been over before it had even begun.

‘You’re shutting down the investigation?’ Geneva was looking at him, perplexed and a little piqued. She’d forgotten to turn off her iPod and he could hear a faint hiss coming from her top pocket.

She listened intently, didn’t say a word, didn’t blink, but bit down on her lip as he told her Viktor’s story.

‘Emily killed someone?’ She couldn’t hide the tremble of disappointment in her voice, a muzzy deflation of pitch dragging down each vowel. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Carrigan closed his eyes and shrugged. ‘I’ve been going through it all night, running the different scenarios, trying to see where we went wrong. All morning I’ve been rereading the witness statements and forensic results, going over them so many times I could recite you the exact height and weight of each nun along with their favourite saints.’ He stopped, took a sip of coffee. ‘Viktor’s story is the only explanation that makes sense of what we know.’

She hadn’t heard him, or was pretending not to, her body tilted forward, a hard bright gleam in her eyes. ‘What else is he going to say?’ Her voice trembled. ‘You need to report this, and then we can get a warrant for Viktor and arrest him and find out what the fuck he has to do with the fire.’

He could see the rushing excitement in her face, the scent of prey, and felt bad for deflating it. ‘I’m not going to report it.’

She glared at him, a strange rumbling in her eyes. ‘You have to.’

‘Like you reported the other night?’

She stopped her pacing and frowned. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘No, you’re right, it wasn’t,’ Carrigan admitted. ‘But I’m not reporting it.’

Geneva drummed her fingers against her thigh. ‘You’re not telling me something. I can tell by the way you won’t look at me.’

He thought about it, had been thinking about it all night. ‘Viktor’s not who we think he is.’

‘Who the fuck is he? Santa Claus?’

He ignored her comment. ‘Viktor’s undercover, working for or with Byrd. He’s been in Duka’s organisation for three years. We nearly blew his cover. He told me they had nothing to do with the fire and at first I didn’t believe him either, but when I subtracted Duka from the equation everything suddenly fell into place.’

Geneva shook her head. ‘You’re going to have to do a better job of convincing me than that.’

‘Think about what Father McCarthy said.’ Carrigan felt a delayed rush of energy exploding in his chest. It was always like this when she challenged him, when he had to put his own inchoate thoughts and suppositions into the thin bindings of language, and he loved to see her eyes spark as she made the connections.

‘McCarthy said that the third time Emily tried to rescue one of the women, something went wrong, and she came back with blood on her clothes. And we know the visits from Duka’s men started right after that.’ He picked up Emily’s arrest sheet and glanced at it, that first contact he’d had with her, the snarled look she’d hurled at the camera and the black tunnel of her gaze. ‘Besides, the Albanians would have wanted Emily alive. They’d want her to suffer and to make an example of her. An anonymous body found in a possibly accidental fire wouldn’t serve their purposes.’

Geneva sat down, pulled out her cigarettes, looked at the packet, then put them back, realising that everything she knew about the case was wrong. She tried to fight the rush of logic and reason pouring in from all directions but it was hopeless. She could feel things clicking, an almost physical sensation of interlocked threads – the loose ends and anomalies suddenly resolving themselves – yet there was something about it that felt too neat, that felt wrong, and she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. ‘If Duka didn’t set the fire, then who did?’

Carrigan looked down at the table and didn’t reply. This was the part he’d been dreading – he knew that once he uttered the words there would be no going back. He rubbed his fingers through his beard, noticing he’d forgotten to trim it recently, and leaned forward. ‘All along we’ve been thinking that the fire had something to do with the nuns’ activities in Peru. The more we looked into it the more certain we became, the more the clues pointed in that direction. We got swept away by the pull of narrative – it makes sense so it must be true. We focused too narrowly and ignored the other possibilities.’ He knew it was his fault, he was to blame, no one else. The case had been his and he’d led them all down the wrong path.

He stood up, the failure rushing hot and tight in his throat, and turned to the whiteboard. One by one he peeled off the photos of Viktor, Duka, Eagle-neck, Father McCarthy and Geoff Shorter, then he took several steps back.

The board looked bare and stark. Geneva stared at Carrigan then at the whiteboard. She looked down at the floor, then out the window at the snow-dazzled sky. She didn’t want to say it but she did.

‘You’re not seriously suggesting . . . ?’

She stared at the whiteboard again, then at Carrigan.

‘There has to be another explanation . . .’

She looked at the one face left pinned up on the board as she tried to fight the thoughts tumbling through her head.

‘Emily?’ she finally said, her voice pinched and flat and disbelieving. ‘Emily Maxted set the fire?’

Carrigan nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Put yourself in her shoes.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper so cross-hatched with scribbles and jottings it looked an impenetrable slab of black. ‘Emily is in major trouble, easily the worst of her life. She’s killed someone and now the Albanians are looking for her. She knows they do not forget, that they will hunt her down for however long it takes. She goes to the nuns, perhaps seeking sanctuary, but they turn against her. They’re threatening to go to the police and report the murder if she doesn’t hand herself in first. She’s in an impossible position – on one side there’s the prospect of torture and a very bad death, on the other a life sentence for murder.’

Geneva shook her head vigorously as if trying to rid herself of some buzzing insect. ‘You think she committed suicide?’

‘No, I don’t,’ he replied. ‘Remember how Mother Angelica told her she wasn’t welcome any more? Maybe one of the nuns spotted her and there was an altercation. Maybe the pricket stand got knocked about in the struggle.’

‘Then how did she end up in the confession booth?’

‘I don’t know,’ Carrigan admitted. ‘It’s likely we’ll never know what exactly went down that night.’ He glanced over at the photo of Emily that Donna had taken a few weeks ago.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Geneva asked.

‘I’m going to pack up the files, put them in a box and go to Quinn with this. Tell him we’ve closed the case and that Emily set the fire. He won’t like it but that’s the way it is. Then I’m going to drive over to the Maxteds and tell them before they find out about it in the press.’

‘Some Christmas . . .’ Geneva said, and Carrigan saw her eyes crumple and fall, the drag and slant of her mouth, a hundred emotions whirling through her skull.

‘Some Christmas, all right . . .’

He started putting the cascading mountain of papers, interview transcripts, statements and photocopied reports back into the large box file at his feet after she’d gone. His movements were slow and grudging, his head aching with the fatigue of too many days and too little sleep.

They had looked for complexity and collusion but in the end there were only the actions of one damaged individual who’d kept closing doors on herself until there was only one door left.

In that sense, it had turned out well for everyone, Carrigan thought sourly. Holden and the bishop would be happy that the nuns’ activities in Peru remained a secret. Quinn would be pleased that the solution hadn’t opened up an entire can of worms containing Albanian people-smugglers and young girls enslaved and raped in the heart of London. No one wanted to read about that in their Christmas papers and no one would, but the girls would still be sold, the brothels running at full capacity over the holiday season, new recruits coming in all the time, a quivering legion of the silent and the damned.

Carrigan picked up some more sheets of paper and placed them in the long cardboard case box and it felt as if he were filling a grave. There was always something bittersweet about closing a case but this time it was different – he didn’t feel happy, satisfied or even relieved.

He drained the last of his coffee and cleared the last of the papers. He stared again at the photos of the fire – the dining room, bodies curled up like children, dripping walls and cracked statues, the confession booth’s dark interior, the collapsed floors and smouldering crucifixes. Then he put them away, glad he wouldn’t ever have to look at them again.

There would only be a skeleton crew operating from the station over the next few days, the city hushed in snow and festivity, and then it would start up all over again, the arguments and stabbings and pub fights and petty murders and phone calls waking him in the middle of the night. He thought about Geneva and how he’d need to have a serious chat with her in the new year, sort out the problem before it was too late, but, in spite of all that, he’d been impressed by her yet again, her rugged determination and needle-sharp instincts, the way she could see clear through his blind spots.

He put the lid on the case box, ready for it to be shipped to some mouldy basement. He thought of his own flat, the dark silent rooms and boxes of memories packed away in the attic, the squandered years sequestered behind cardboard and cobwebs. When he was finished he longed for a cigarette but those days were gone. He emailed his report to Branch and Quinn, then got up and faced the whiteboard. There was only one photo left and he gently peeled it off, the snap that Donna had taken of her sister two weeks before the fire.

He stared at Emily’s face, those deep piercing eyes and slanted mouth, and then he noticed something in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo and his breath stopped.

He stared at it for a long moment, everything else forgotten.

A stray conversation echoed through his head. He strained to hear the words and understand their significance. Time seemed to contract and slow. Sentences ran jumbled through his brain, inflections and facts, things that didn’t mean much at the time now magnified to disproportionate size. His mouth felt dry, his hands slick and clammy. He knelt down and started taking the files back out of the box, throwing them onto the floor, going through the reports and statements until he found what he was looking for.

He pulled out the printed transcript of Geoff Shorter’s interview and started reading it again. Halfway through he came upon that suddenly remembered phrase and he stopped and his whole body shook as he realised what it meant.

For a moment, it seemed he couldn’t move, and then he put the report down and pulled out the photos of the burnt-out convent. He flicked through them until he got to the one he wanted. He stared at it and couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before.

But he had to be sure, absolutely sure.

He wrenched open his desk drawers, pulling them all the way out and upturning them onto the tabletop. He started going through months of accumulated junk – stray staples, Post-It notes, coffee loyalty cards, half-filled forms and bus tickets – flinging everything onto the floor, and he was getting more desperate and frenetic as he neared the bottom and then he saw it, lodged between the pages of a week-old newspaper.

He reached for it, but pulled his hand away just in time and snapped on a pair of gloves from the nearby dispenser, realising how his impatience had nearly ruined everything.

He picked it up, placed it carefully in an evidence bag, and called the lab.

He texted Geneva early on Christmas Day. He’d gone straight home from the station the previous night and hadn’t slept or eaten or done much of anything until the lab had called back. When the first faint light of Christmas morning lit up the motorway ramp outside his flat, he knew it couldn’t wait.

He called Karen and apologised for having to cancel Christmas dinner. There was a long silence and then she said she understood, and he knew she did.

He picked Geneva up from her mother’s house. She was dressed in clothes he’d never seen her in before, sedate and somehow formal, and it took him a moment to recognise her. An older woman was leaning out the front door, staring in his direction.

‘My mom wanted to come out and give you hell,’ Geneva said, but Carrigan could tell she was only half as pissed off as she was pretending to be.

The city was empty, the shops closed, the roads stripped of the constant honk and whine of traffic. As they headed north through the abandoned streets and holiday hush they could feel the muted sense of anticipation leaking from every Christmas tree-lit window, eager young faces pressed against the glass, watching the skies, their features distorted like stockinged bank robbers. It had been snowing for ten days but it hadn’t yet snowed today.

‘This is all very nice,’ Geneva said. ‘But where exactly are we going?’

‘It’s Christmas,’ Carrigan replied. ‘And I have one good deed left to do.’

She knew there would be no point pressing him further and so she sipped her coffee and stared out of the window, recognising streets and junctions they’d passed through less than a week ago, the large houses rising out of the mist like the prows of doomed ships, the high street gloomy and shuttered, the sprawling expanse of heath blanketing them on both sides.

‘I feel like such an idiot.’ Carrigan shook his head. ‘Two days ago I was telling them their daughter died trying to do something good.’

The maid opened the door and led them into the dining room. The scene looked as if nothing had changed from a few days ago, as if it were a painting slowly drying in its frame.

What was left of the Maxted family was gathered around the table, in the middle of Christmas lunch. Miles Maxted sat at one end, Lillian at the other. Donna, wearing a red dress, was stranded in the yawning gap between them.

The Maxteds hadn’t started on their main course, the food still steaming from the oven, the maid laying out the final pieces then silently taking her place in the corner of the room. Lillian was twirling a lock of hair in her fingers and didn’t even notice their arrival, but Donna looked up and her eyes grew wide and soft as she recognised Carrigan.

Geneva caught the look, the longing in it, and felt a hot rush of something she couldn’t quite name.

‘What do we owe this pleasure to?’ Miles Maxted’s voice was already thick with alcohol.

‘I’m sorry to intrude like this,’ Carrigan said quietly. ‘But something’s come up.’ Carrigan kept his face blank. The food smelled wonderful but it was obvious no one was eating, their plates full, contents untouched, the cutlery still perfectly arrayed on either side.

‘The investigation into the fire at the convent is about to be officially closed. There’s going to be a press conference tonight but I thought it best you hear it from me first.’

Miles Maxted looked up. ‘Just tell us what you have to tell us and leave us in peace.’

‘Remember how I said that Emily was working with the nuns and that she was killed by the Albanians because of this?’

‘You caught them?’ Donna asked breathlessly.

Carrigan shook his head. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘The Albanians were involved in all this but not in the way we thought. They didn’t set the fire.’

‘Then who did?’ Donna asked.

Carrigan took a deep breath. ‘I hate to be the one to say this, but we now believe Emily set the fire herself.’ He watched the reaction on Miles Maxted’s face, the sudden darkening in the man’s eyes, the twitch that made his lips snap against one another.

‘What on earth would she do that for?’

Carrigan had put the last details into place as he’d sat waiting for Geneva that morning. ‘We don’t know for sure. It could have been an accident. Emily was helping the nuns shelter escaped sex slaves, as I told Donna, but since then we’ve found out that Emily had taken it a step further.’ He ran through what Viktor had told him about that fateful night. ‘Emily killed one of the men in the ensuing struggle, stabbing him.’

‘Oh my God,’ Donna blurted, her face white as a candle. ‘No . . . no . . .’ she kept repeating to herself, ‘Emily would never . . .’

‘I’m afraid she did,’ Carrigan replied. ‘But, if it’s any consolation, the man she killed was probably trying to do the same to her.’ He watched Miles taking this in, eyes blinking rapidly. Carrigan could see that however much he didn’t want to believe it, his heart was pulling him in the opposite direction. Donna was quietly sobbing and she reached over and took her mother’s hand as Carrigan continued.

‘The Albanians didn’t take kindly to the murder of one of their own. They obviously didn’t go to the police either.’ Carrigan explained about the visits to the convent and demands to hand over Emily.

‘Oh God, poor Emily,’ Donna said, her arms dropping to her sides and hanging there uselessly like a rag doll’s.

Carrigan stared at her, the beauty he’d noticed the first day not diminished but somehow ennobled by her grief. ‘But, you see, I have this annoying thing where I can’t sleep very well when I’m on a case, and I kept thinking about this, thinking about Emily, what we knew about her, pacing my room, making myself coffee after coffee, but no matter how I looked at it, it just didn’t make sense.’

He turned to see Geneva’s eyes wide and alert, her gaze focused exclusively on him, a slight rebuke in the tilt of her head. ‘Emily was a survivor, everything we know about her tells us this. So, I had another coffee and looked out the window and knew that someone who’d defend herself so aggressively against one of Duka’s gangland thugs would never give in so easily. And it kept bugging me – why didn’t she run away? Why didn’t she simply disappear? From her years in the protest movement she would have known a lot of safe houses and hiding places, a lot of comrades who would ask no questions and gladly help her vanish.’ Carrigan stopped pacing the room and turned towards the table.

‘The next morning it was still there, in fact the nagging feeling had got stronger, but there was nothing I could do about it and so I started to clear the incident room, taking the photos off the wall, and as I peeled off Emily’s picture, the one that Donna took, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before and that’s when I knew.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Miles Maxted said.

‘When I looked closely at the photo I realised Emily couldn’t have been the eleventh victim.’

He paused, watching everyone’s expressions freeze and flicker, Geneva shooting him a dark stricken look that spoke of deep frustration and backhanded betrayal. ‘And then I remembered something. It was barely there but I could sense it, buried under layers of useless information. I pulled up the transcript of the interview we did with Emily’s boyfriend, Geoff Shorter, because I was sure he’d said something that we’d not taken in at the time. I scanned through the transcript and found it. But I had to be sure,’ Carrigan continued, ‘and I knew one way I could be certain. I was only worried I might have thrown it away but it was there in my desk, the small white card that Donna gave me last week. I had the lab look at it and they managed to get a usable print from it.’

‘But . . . but why on earth would you do that?’ Miles protested and, despite all the bluster and front, Carrigan could see he was upset.

‘We had Emily’s fingerprints on file from her arrest. We couldn’t compare them to those belonging to the body of the eleventh victim because the skin had been too badly burned, but I did a comparison between Emily’s arrest record and the print found on the piece of paper Donna gave me. They were the same.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Miles said.

‘No, neither did I,’ Carrigan replied. ‘So I got on the phone to someone at King’s College who’s an expert on these things and he told me something very interesting. Apparently, twins have identical DNA but not identical fingerprints. Your fingerprints are shaped by what you do, how you use your hands during the formative years of childhood. I guess you never knew that, did you . . . Emily?’