by R.J. Ellory
I raised both my hands, a gesture that was both placatory and a desire to hear no more. At least for now. ‘I’m leaving,’ I said, getting up. ‘I’ll go see Dennis Powers, see what these films are. I’ll speak to you some other time.’
I turned and started toward the door of the apartment. I knew she would call after me, that she would make some half-hearted attempt to apologize for being so didactic and overbearing. Or so I believed. I even hesitated in the doorway so she could say something, but she did not.
I did not know Catherine then. Believed I did, but I was fooling myself. Later, I considered that Powers had gone through the whole scenario with her. ‘And when he says so-and-so, then what do you say?’ I was wrong. No-one had ever told Catherine Sheridan what to say or think. Twenty years before she would have been in Haight-Ashbury, but only for so long as it took her to realize that those guys were all talk and no action. They wanted revolution, but they were too stoned to make molotovs. Catherine wanted to stand for one thing and against something else. She wanted to live a life that would be remembered. She even quoted Martin Luther King at me: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’
After I saw the films that evening I knew without doubt that she was the one.
Twenty-one years of age, and the real world and I were about to collide.
TWENTY-TWO
Corner of A Street NE and Sixth. Bitter wind whipping down the sidewalk, almost knocked Miller off his feet as he came out of the driver’s side door and started across the sidewalk. Roth hurried after him, the two of them up the steps and through the double doors at the top.
Miller went to the desk first, smiled at the immaculately dressed man seated behind it; produced his pocketbook, showed his badge, smiled again when the man looked down his nose and raised his eyebrows.
‘Yesterday morning,’ Miller said. ‘A young woman named Natasha Joyce came and made an enquiry here. Understand she was seen by a woman named Frances Gray.’
The man nodded.
‘I wondered if we could speak to Ms Gray.’
The man turned to his computer keyboard, the flat-screen monitor ahead of him. ‘Yesterday?’ he echoed. He tapped on the keyboard. ‘Gray with an “a” or an “e”?’
‘An A,’ Miller said.
The man tapped on the keyboard some more. He paused, scanned data, paused again, smiled and shook his head. ‘Noone here of that name,’ he said. ‘Tried Frances with a “e” and an “i”, also Gray with an “a” and an “e”. We don’t have anyone employed within the unit by the name of Frances Gray.’
‘Perhaps she was from another agency?’ Miller suggested.
The man shook his head. ‘If she was she wouldn’t have been seeing anyone here. I don’t have any record of anyone named Natasha Joyce coming here, and I can assure you that even if there has been some error in our records and she did attend these offices, then she was not seen by anyone named Frances Gray. Perhaps this young lady made a mistake with the name?’
‘You have a record of all interviews that were held here yesterday?’ Miller asked.
‘For what it’s worth, yes,’ the man replied. He pivoted the screen so Miller could see it. ‘Twelve forty-five, a meeting in Office 13. An appeal against disallowance of continued disability pension. Three-thirty, a meeting in Office 8, and that was for the collection of some documents relating to an ongoing firearms tribunal. That’s all we had here yesterday.’ The man smiled. ‘Tuesdays are generally pretty quiet for us.’
‘And you’re sure there’s nothing else?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Who was on this desk yesterday?’ Roth asked.
‘I was.’
Roth took out his notebook. ‘And your name is?’
‘Lester Jackson.’
Roth made a note of it.
Miller stepped a little closer to the desk. He tried his best to look authoritative without appearing condescending. ‘Mr Jackson,’ he said. ‘A simple question which I kind of know the answer to, but do you consider there might be any possibility in the world that you have forgotten this woman coming here?’
Lester Jackson started to smile in a surprised fashion. He opened his mouth to speak but Miller was there first.
‘Things happen,’ he said. ‘I know how it is . . . I interview someone one day, and then something else happens, and I’m sure that the interview was not yesterday but the day before, and—’
Jackson raised his hand. ‘Everyone that comes into this building is logged in and out,’ he said quietly. ‘Every interview that takes place is registered on the computer system without fail. I would be very lax indeed if I did not ensure—’
Miller stopped him. ‘I can assure you, Mr Jackson, that there is not the slightest consideration that there was a failure to abide by department protocol, it’s simply that we interviewed this woman yesterday and she said she’d been to this building, to this very department, and she was interviewed by a woman named Frances Gray who represented herself as an official of the Police Department Administrations Unit.’
Jackson shook his head. ‘It can’t possibly have been that way,’ he said patiently. ‘Believe me, detective, if a young woman named Natasha Joyce came here yesterday I would be able to confirm that she did in fact come, and if there was a member of our staff named Frances Gray then she would be right here on the system. As it is, neither Natasha Joyce’s appearance nor this alleged interview have been recorded, and I think the only thing to do is go back and talk to this young lady and see if she hasn’t made a mistake—’
‘Can’t do that,’ Miller said.
Jackson frowned.
‘Got herself murdered, you see? That’s why we’re here. She got herself murdered, and as far as we can tell this was one of the last places she went to, and if the information we have is correct and she did in fact come here then that also means that you must have been one of the very last people she saw.’
‘You can’t possibly be suggesting—’
Miller smiled patiently. ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Mr Jackson. I just find it very hard to believe that the young lady was so very specific about where she went and who she spoke to, and now we find ourselves in a situation where these two things appear not to have happened at all.’
‘I don’t know what to say, detective. I wish there was something I could do to help you.’
Miller smiled. ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr Jackson, very helpful indeed.’ Miller turned, nodded at Roth, and they walked away toward the exit without speaking.
Once outside, the wind battering them as they made their way to the car, Miller looked at Roth and raised his eyebrows.
‘He’s lying,’ Roth said.
‘No doubt about it,’ Miller replied.
‘The question is why.’
‘The Fourth,’ Miller said. ‘Next we go to the Fourth?’
‘And find out if Natasha Joyce didn’t exist there as well.’
‘Gerrity,’ Sergeant Richard Atkins said. ‘He was on the desk yesterday from noon ’til six in the evening.’ Atkins leaned forward, picked up the phone, punched a couple of numbers and waited. The line connected. ‘Who’s that? Untermeyer? Hey there, you got Ron Gerrity up there?’ Atkins nodded. ‘Good enough. Tell him come down here . . . got a couple of suits from the Second wanna speak to him.’
Atkins replaced the receiver and indicated chairs to the right of the reception foyer. ‘Take a seat over there, he’ll be down in a moment.’
Miller and Roth sat down. Neither spoke for a minute or two, and then Roth said, ‘Something about this has to make sense.’
Miller smiled sardonically. ‘No it doesn’t.’
‘Okay, so it doesn’t have to make sense as such, but there has to be something about this that is understandable.’
‘It feels like it’s been arranged this way, you know what I mean?’ Miller paused, looked across the foyer, glanced to his left and right. He could not escape the sense of paranoia he’d felt since Nat
asha’s death. A sense of being watched.
A middle-aged police officer approached the reception desk, shared a few words with Atkins, and then turned and looked at Miller and Roth. He walked towards them.
‘Sergeant Gerrity,’ he said, looking at Roth. ‘You’re Miller, right?’
Roth shook the man’s hand. ‘I’m Roth, he’s Miller.’
Gerrity fetched a chair from the corner of the foyer and sat down. He looked Miller and Roth over for a moment, and there was that all-too-familiar anxiety. They were as good as IAD, perhaps the deeper end of the gene pool, but still they were some kind of trouble.
‘Woman came here yesterday,’ Miller started. ‘Black woman named Natasha Joyce.’
‘What about her?’ Gerrity asked.
Miller seemed surprised, hesitated for a moment. ‘She came here?’ he said.
Gerrity frowned. ‘You said that. Black woman named Natasha Joyce.’ He looked at Roth. ‘I got the name right?’
‘We just came from somewhere else,’ Roth said. ‘We were just told by someone that they hadn’t seen her.’
Gerrity shrugged. ‘Whatever . . . she came here yesterday, asked a coupla questions, left again. No big deal.’
‘What time was it?’ Miller asked.
Gerrity rose from the chair. ‘I’ll go see.’
Miller looked at Roth. Roth was expressionless.
Gerrity checked at the desk, came back and said, ‘She came in just after one-forty, here for about five minutes, and then she left.’
‘And what did she want to know?’ Miller asked.
‘Something about a retired police officer. Guy named McCullough.’
‘And what did you tell her?’ Miller asked.
‘Only what I’m permitted to tell anyone. They’re looking for an active officer I can give them the precinct, a phone number, if they’re on-shift or not. The retireds I can tell them which precinct they last served at, when they left the department, and that’s all. We don’t keep home addresses on the system for obvious reasons.’
‘We’re not here in any kind of investigatory capacity,’ Miller assured him. ‘This isn’t IAD, okay? We just went to the PD admin unit, the place Natasha Joyce went to before she came here. They deny all knowledge of her. Fact of the matter is that we’re relieved you can confirm that she was even here.’
‘Something happen to her?’ Gerrity asked, and then he raised his eyebrows suddenly. ‘Oh shit, she wasn’t that—’
‘Yesterday,’ Miller said. ‘Not an awful long time after she left here. Murdered in her own apartment.’
Gerrity whistled through his teeth. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘That’s just fucking unreal. God, I don’t know what else to tell you. She asked about this McCullough, I told her he was retired . . . from the Seventh, right?’
‘The Seventh, yes,’ Roth confirmed.
‘That was all she wanted to know. Asked me if we had an address, which we didn’t, and that was that.’
‘And if you had to find him?’ Miller asked.
‘I’d go back to the PD admin unit,’ Gerrity said. ‘They’re the people who deal with pension records, all that kind of stuff. How many years did he do?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Who the fuck retires four years short of a twenty-year pension?’
‘We had the same thought,’ Roth said.
‘And he has something to do with this Ribbon Killer thing?’ Gerrity asked.
‘We don’t know what part he plays in this,’ Miller said. ‘We don’t know that he plays any part at all. We just need to speak with him.’
‘As did your woman,’ Gerrity said. He hesitated for a moment, waiting perhaps for any further questions, and when he sensed there were none he rose from the chair.
Miller stood up, shook hands with the man, thanked him for his time and help.
‘No big deal,’ Gerrity said. ‘Know where I am if there’s anything else I can do.’
‘Appreciated,’ Miller said.
Gerrity out of earshot, Roth asked Miller if they were heading back to the admin unit.
‘Want to see Marilyn Hemmings first,’ he said. ‘Then back to see our friend who doesn’t remember Natasha Joyce.’
Dennis Powers smiled knowingly. There was something in his expression that told me he’d heard everything before.
I had watched the films, sat there in a small room in the Langley complex, a small room fitted out like a movie theater, and on the screen ahead of me Dennis Powers had instructed that several 16mm reels be shown. I watched silently. Powers sat beside me, chain-smoking as always, while decapitations, summary hangings, living burials, disembowelling, rapes and roadside executions were played out before my eyes. Perhaps he expected me to be sick. Perhaps he believed I would look away in horror as people were butchered before my eyes, but I did not. A young man - couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen - was dragged from a doorway where he had been hiding. His throat was cut, and then two men proceeded to hook the base of his tongue through the wound in his neck. Blood erupted, running in wide rivulets and drenching the front of his shirt. The body was cast aside, and the men then took it in turns to kick it. A girl of seven or eight was tied into a canvas sack much like a mailbag. Laid on the floor, unable to move within her constraints, she was stamped on repeatedly. Within seconds she had stopped wrestling against the sack, but still they kicked. After a while the bag was nothing more than a map of bloody bootprints.
In a brief pause between the end of one film and the beginning of another, Powers leaned toward me and whispered, ‘Collaborators . . . they believe that these children are collaborating with the Americans,’ and before I could respond another film had started up, the same monochrome flickering, the same descending numbers from five to one, then images flashing at me, one after the other. Images of headless torsos, of feet hammered to a bloody pulp, of children without their eyes . . . such things as these, over and over, keeping me transfixed, unable to avert my gaze.
And when it was done, and when the lights came up and the sound of the whirring projector was silenced, Dennis Powers turned his chair to face mine and looked at me without speaking for a very long time.
‘From this,’ he eventually said, ‘we can conclude that there are some places in the world where it’s not so good to go.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘What we have here is a situation of enormous significance about which no-one knows. This is not an important country, but in a way it is of greater significance even than Poland in ’39.’
‘Poland?’ I asked.
‘The Allies and the Axis powers in 1939. An agreement was made that Hitler would not invade Poland, but he went ahead and did it. That was what the world saw, what the world was aware of. Before that there had been other attempts to assume right of possession in other territories. Hitler was already at work in ’37 and ’38. Churchill knew about him as far back as 1931, even earlier when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. He knew what this National Socialist maniac upstart was capable of doing, and yet despite all his protestations, despite everything he said and the number of times he said it, no-one took a damn bit of notice until Hitler moved into Poland in 1939.’
‘And how does this relate to—’
‘This is not Poland,’ Powers said. ‘Guatemala would be the equivalent of Poland, right there alongside the Mexican border. If someone came along and invaded Guatemala there would be no question in our minds about what we had to do, but this one is fine. This is three removed from Mexico, and the distance is enough not to concern ourselves.’
‘Prevention is better than cure,’ I said.
Powers shook his head. ‘There is no cure, my friend. There is only prevention. Thirty years of Cold War has proved beyond any question that there is no cure for this thing. You either do something about it before it starts, or you just watch it grow like a cancer. There is nothing that can be done about it once it has got its roots into a culture. It is a disease. Slow, insidious, this thing is amazing to watch. It’s like
a virus. It ascribes to equality. It ascribes to cultural and social strength. In reality, it is nothing more than an excuse for a select few to remove those they oppose from a society, and to do it in the ways you have witnessed this evening. What you saw on the film is happening about eighteen hundred miles from where we’re sitting, and it’s happening to people who never agreed for it to happen.’ He drew on his cigarette. The ash fell onto his jacket but he ignored it. ‘Fact of the matter is that there are very few people who can face such things as this. There are very few people who are strong enough to actually look at this thing and see it for what it is. Catherine saw this. She sat in this room just like you and watched this, and even before the end of the first reel she’d decided to go.’ Powers laughed drily. ‘Far as I can tell, she’d decided she was going to do something long before she got here; she just didn’t have any clear idea of the direction to take.’
Powers expected a hundred questions, all of them important, all of them difficult to ask. I said nothing.
‘Why you?’ he asked, perhaps voicing a question he saw in my eyes.
I shrugged. ‘Tell me.’
‘No family to speak of. Very high IQ. No communist background or affiliations. You’re a loner. You’ve never really been involved with any women that have meant anything. Your politics are undecided. You are driven, committed to doing something useful and important with your life, but you don’t have the faintest clue what that might be . . . that, and other reasons that are not important.’
‘Not important?’ I said. ‘What reasons could be unimportant?’
He dismissed my question with a wave of his hand. He seemed nonchalant and unperturbed about the films we had seen. He seemed effortlessly at ease all the time. His self-assurance and balance annoyed me greatly.