Eleven Days (32 page)

‘You need to get out of my house right now, Inspector.’ Miles Maxted shot up, his chair flying back, his face tight and flushed, eyelids fluttering like maddened butterflies. ‘I can see what you’re trying to do and I won’t allow it.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Please calm down, Mr Maxted, I haven’t finished yet.’

‘How dare you . . .’

‘Sit down, Mr Maxted, and I promise I’ll explain it to you or, perhaps,’ Carrigan looked across the table, ‘perhaps Emily can explain it better than I can.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.’

Her voice sent a shiver down his spine, coarse and rough, the way she used his name like an insult hurled in a fit of anger. It was a voice he hadn’t heard before. Emily’s voice. He forced himself to look at her but it was a totally different woman who was now looking back at him. ‘It won’t be hard to prove. We can take your fingerprints right now and settle this.’

She held his stare and said nothing.

‘What on earth happened to you?’ Carrigan said, and Geneva could hear the concern and mystification in his voice. ‘You seemed to have turned your life around, to have started doing something good.’

Emily looked at her parents but they refused to meet her stare. She turned towards Carrigan. ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.’

‘It never is,’ he replied, thinking of all the times he’d heard that line. ‘What was Donna doing in the convent the night of the fire?’

‘She followed me there. I told her to stay at home and wait for me but she didn’t.’ Emily shook her head and stared down at the table. ‘I was going to return the cocaine. I don’t even know why I took it that night, everything was so crazy. I knew it wouldn’t get the Albanians off my back but I thought it might be a useful bargaining tool. And I didn’t want the nuns to find it. Donna insisted she come with me. I tried arguing with her but it was no use.’ She kept scratching her forearm and taking shallow quick breaths, trying to catch her parents’ eyes.

‘Nigel was waiting for us at the convent. I’d talked to him the night before. Told him that, if we used the cocaine as a bargaining chip, the Albanians might let us go. He laughed and said I was nuts. He wanted us to sell the coke and use the money to get out of the country before the Albanians found us. I didn’t expect him to turn up at the convent. He was halfway out of his head, all amped up on speed and fear and adrenalin. He told me the nuns wouldn’t be disturbing us, he’d made sure of that by locking the door. He said the cocaine would help us start a new life. I knew any life I began with him would end up exactly the way this one had.

‘We argued and screamed at each other. I had the bag in my hand and I swung it at his head. The bag caught the candles and pricket stand as I threw it. Nigel staggered backwards. I started to run but he caught me and pinned me up against the wall and started to strangle me. I heard Donna scream as she jumped him. He turned and punched her in the face and she spun and fell forward and hit her head on the side of the pricket stand as she crashed to the floor. She didn’t make a sound. Nigel started coming for me again. And then he stopped. He was staring wide-eyed at the niche behind me. I turned and saw that the candles had ignited the drapes. Big shooting flames ran up the walls and were spreading across the ceiling. Nigel took one last look, laughed and ran out through the back window and into the garden.’

Emily shook, her entire body crumpling as she continued. ‘I went to where Donna was lying. There was blood circling her head. I couldn’t find her pulse. The flames were spreading across the room. I tried lifting her, tried slapping her face to wake her up but there was no reaction. I tried dragging her but the flames were all around us now. There was nothing I could do. If I hadn’t left that moment the fire would have got me too.’

‘And as you knelt there and saw Donna you realised how convenient this would be,’ Carrigan said, his voice calm and reassuring, belying the words coming from his mouth.

Emily shook her head. ‘It wasn’t like that. There was nothing I could do. Donna was dead.’

‘She was alive,’ Carrigan said. ‘She woke up.’

‘What?’ All the blood drained from Emily’s face.

‘She came to before the fire reached her. She crawled into the confession booth thinking she’d be safe there. She was burned alive inside, screaming and flailing and ripping her fingernails against the hissing metal,’ Carrigan explained. ‘It’s my fault. I should have seen it earlier. Her long nails scratched and tore at the interior of the booth as she was burning to death. But you, Emily, you bite your nails. They wouldn’t have made a mark. Geoff Shorter mentioned in his interview that it was a bad habit of yours. And it reminded me of something I heard a few days ago – how there are no hidden meanings, only actions and their consequences.’

Emily’s hands slid under the table but her face told Carrigan all he needed to know.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Lillian’s voice was cold and dismissive, the same tone Carrigan had heard her use with the maid.

A single tear ran down Emily’s cheek. ‘I was going to, I swear, but then you were so nice to me when you thought I was Donna and I didn’t want that to change. I’d never felt that from you or Dad. I knew that Donna’s death would break your hearts and, despite the way you’d always treated me, I couldn’t bear to do that to you. I knew you’d far prefer it if it was me who was dead.’

She looked at both parents but neither said a word nor denied her accusations. ‘I just wanted you to love me like you did her.’ Emily’s arms reached across the table into empty space. ‘I thought if I pretended to be her . . . If I said the things she said and did the things she did then maybe I would grow to be a bit more like her . . . I hoped . . .’ Emily stopped and looked up as Miles and Lillian Maxted rose from their seats. ‘Please? . . . Mum? . . . Dad?’

Lillian followed her husband out of the room. Emily watched them disappear down the dark hallway. She kept staring long after they’d gone, and continued to do so as Carrigan handcuffed her and led her outside to the waiting police car.

He walked through the snow and howling wind until his feet were numb and he kept walking, oblivious to direction or purpose, a solitary man trudging through the deserted city, and as he walked he turned his face away from the lighted windows, silhouetted Christmas trees and happy screams of children opening their presents. He pulled up his collar and buttoned his jacket as the wind came careening down the long empty street. The temperature had suddenly dropped and he could feel his wrist, broken five years ago in a bar fight, begin to throb and ache with the memory of that night. He wanted the wind to rip through his skull and blow everything away – all the years and nights and days, the dreams and disappointments, memories and missed chances – but most of all he wanted to forget this case and all its dark and twisted layers.

He walked as if the very act of walking could shake off the last two weeks as easily as it did the snow gathered in the folds of his raincoat. He walked in ever decreasing circles, traversing the shuttered shops and barren canals, the darkened office buildings and silent motorways, losing all track of time and space as the snow began to fall on Christmas Day, until he realised he was back at the station and that’s when he saw her.

She was sitting on a ledge, smoking a cigarette. The snow had woven ribbons of white through her hair and, unaware that he was there, she was swaying silently to the music, the twirled straps of her earphones framing her neck.

Carrigan felt a rush of heat and memory flood his chest and quickened his step.

Stav Sherez is the author of three previous novels.
The Devil’s Playground
(2004), his debut, was described by James Sallis as ‘altogether extraordinary, it introduces a major new talent’, and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. His second novel,
The Black Monastery
(2009), was described as ‘dynamite fiction’ in the
Independent
and ‘truly exceptional’ by Lee Child.
A Dark Redemption
, the acclaimed first book of his Carrigan and Miller series, was published in 2012. You can find him on Twitter @stavsherez and at www.stavsherez.com