Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  He unfolded it carefully and read what Donna had written:

  We need to talk. Somewhere without my parents. There’s a lot about Emily I couldn’t tell you in front of them.

  And, below that, she’d written her phone number.

  21

  She held him by the throat and stared into his eyes as he strained and struggled and moaned. She wanted them – his eyes – to speak to her, to tell her all the things his mouth wouldn’t, but they were impenetrable as stones. She grabbed his wrist and held it firmly, feeling the smooth skin on his forearm, the slight ripple of veins, the weight of it lying in her palm. Then she brought it up to her lips and kissed it softly, running her tongue across the scars on his skin, the shrapnel bites from some dusty forgotten war, past the inoculations he’d received as a child, and then she fell onto him, her whole body forced into one deflation, spirit and muscle together, and the room melted away from her, the day, the week, the life, everything she thought about and didn’t want to think about, everything that was keeping her awake at night, that was running through her brain like crazed viral screams – all of it forgotten and lost as she lowered her head and tasted his mouth.

  Blue Valentine was playing in the background. He’d brought the LP with him, knowing her copy would be lost somewhere among the boxes and bags, the unpacked strata of her life. She could barely hear the music and didn’t want to. It bought back too many memories, good memories and bad ones, the whole arc of a love affair contained on two sides of spinning plastic.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Lee said, twisting away, taking the duvet with him, reaching out and picking up one of her cigarettes from the table by the bed. He lit it and then passed it to her and lit another for himself.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’ The words came out mixed with smoke and sting. She looked away, out the window into the falling confusion of snow.

  ‘If you wanted someone to lie to, Geneva, you should have picked a stranger.’

  She said nothing, dragging tight-lipped on her cigarette, and continued to watch the spiralling squalls of snow. All that freedom, each flake spinning and dancing in the air, its own individual steps, but it didn’t matter how well you danced, she knew, you’d always end up crashing to the floor in the end.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more,’ she said and was immediately aware of the weakness of that line, the way it had been said a million times before, and wasn’t that partly why she was so discontented? Her life as the other woman turning her into a cliché with every passing day?

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Lee said, sitting up, the duvet falling and revealing his chest and she had to turn away again because it was too much.

  ‘It means exactly what it means.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in one hard stab and gasped as the cherry burned her fingers.

  ‘Geneva?’ He tried to take her hand but she retracted it, sat up, pulled the sheets over her body and shook her head.

  ‘It means I’m sick of waking up in the middle of the night and turning around and you’re not there. Slipped out like some thief or gigolo. It means I’m sick of closing my eyes and holding you and imagining your wife waiting up half the night, not sure where you are, suspecting, the baby crying for Daddy and Daddy stumbling home at four in the morning reeking of sex and booze.’

  ‘That’s not your concern, Genny, that’s mine.’

  ‘Of course it fucking is! What do you think I see when I look in the mirror? The person I wanted to be? Or the person I am? This woman breaking up another woman’s life. And it’s not just her. You have a son, Lee, you have a life that you can’t just sunder any time you want.’

  ‘That’s my choice,’ he said, and she was pleased to see a flash of anger roil through his body, the muscles tensing against the skin making him look young and hungry again.

  ‘And this is mine,’ she replied, staring at the rumpled duvet, the late falling snow, the unpacked boxes and ex-lover inhabiting her bed. ‘And please,’ she took a swig of tequila and lit another cigarette, her head spinning in time with the music. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s not working between the two of you. Don’t tell me you’re only staying with her because of the baby. Don’t fucking tell me you were going to leave her anyway. I don’t want to hear it, Lee. I don’t want you to leave her for me. I don’t want to start it all over again. We tried that, remember, we tried it once and we both know what happened.’

  All pretence at post-coital murmur and cuddle were gone. Lee sat up and swigged from the bottle. His eyes had grown small and cold. ‘And what about you, Genny? You were the one who texted me tonight. You’re the one who keeps calling. Sometimes I think I’m no more than a convenient excuse for you to escape your life.’

  And this time there was nothing she could say because she knew he was right.

  ‘You like this,’ he continued. ‘You like the fact you can call me when you want or not call me when you don’t. You like it that there’s no commitment on your part.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  He slid over toward her and nodded. ‘Sorry, perhaps it wasn’t but, Genny, you need to find something in your life to make you smile again. Christ, I remember what you were like once, before all this fucking work of yours dragged you down. You need to find something or someone that makes the rest of it worthwhile. You can’t go around like this all the time.’

  She sprang up from the bed, suddenly and uncontrollably furious. Because he was wrong? Or because he was right? ‘You expect me to smile and bounce and say hi, how’s your day after I’ve spent twelve hours looking at dead bodies? After I’ve talked to the worst scum this city has to offer and watched them walk away free to ruin more lives? Jesus Christ, Lee, you know what it’s like. You weren’t any different when you used to come back from those trips to Bosnia, Colombia, the Congo.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I stopped, Geneva. That’s why I don’t do it any more. You have to make your accommodations with the world at some point. You have to stop doing the things that tear you apart and settle for the ones that don’t.’

  ‘Then why are you still here? Why are you even answering my calls?’

  ‘I didn’t say it makes you happy, just less unhappy.’

  She started putting on clothes, the scatter of shirts and socks under her feet. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do. The fucking day I had.’

  ‘We all have days.’

  ‘But did yours involve spending hours looking at photographs of corpses burnt to a crisp? Tell me. Using a magnifying glass to stare and stare at scratch marks on dead women’s shinbones? That’s what I’ve been doing. You really think . . . what?’ She saw his face turn white as the sheets, his mouth hanging half-open. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘What kind of marks?’ Lee asked in a whisper.

  ‘Shallow vertical cuts along the shinbone.’

  Lee sighed deeply and shook his head as if trying to shrug off a bad dream. ‘Tickling the bone . . .’ he said, and he said it so softly that Geneva had to ask him to repeat it.

  ‘What the fuck is tickling the bone?’ She tried to make light of it but saw something in his expression that stopped her dead.

  ‘It’s a very painful method of extracting information or of just plain hurting someone. The torturer makes a small incision in the skin just above the shinbone. He then takes an ice-pick or something similar, and gently presses it into the wound until it comes into contact with the bone. Normally, this is when he will look up and ask the first question. Then, slowly, he rakes the tip of the ice-pick against the bone, scraping and chipping away, causing excruciating pain.’

  Geneva wrapped the duvet around her but it didn’t stop her shakes. ‘You know this?’

  Lee nodded gravely. ‘When I was doing my pieces on Mexico, I came up against this a lot. Tickling the bone was originally a speciality of South American dictatorships. These days it’s used mainly by the drug cartels.’

  22

  The book was waiting for him as he’d known i
t would be. He saw the padded envelope and recognised it for what it was immediately. There’d be no return address, he knew, no fingerprints, and the postmark would be different from the previous time.

  Each month, for the last year, he’d been receiving a book in the post. There was just the book and the envelope, his name and address typed out and pasted to the front. There was no note inside and the books were new, unhandled, even though some, Carrigan had checked, had been out of print for years. The first book had arrived just before last Christmas and he’d thought it had been mis-delivered, even after reading his own name off the front of the envelope – because who would be sending him books anonymously? That first offering had been Plotinus, the Enneads, and he’d pored over the text looking for some indication of who its sender may have been but there were only the words, etched out almost two thousand years ago.

  He took the envelope out of the box, along with a handful of bills and a flyer for a canine cancer charity. He ripped open the envelope, unable to wait until he got inside, and pulled out a dark-jacketed paperback. God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel. He’d never heard of it and it seemed forbidding, its opaque cover and even more opaque language. He flicked through it briefly then put it under his arm and entered the flat.

  He’d left the lights on again. The bills would remember that. He’d left the window slightly open and blowing snow had frosted the ledge and buckled a series of newspapers he’d saved, meaning to read them when he finally had some time to himself, but they were now useless, the words melting into each other, the ink running and mixing, the pictures all but unrecognisable. There were no messages on his answering machine, no voices to greet him.

  He spent a few minutes telling Louise about his day then took the burrito out of his bag and stripped it of packaging and placed it in the microwave. The beep reminded him it was there. He ate facing the window and was finished before he’d even begun to taste it. Everyone kept telling him he’d reached an age where he needed to watch what he ate and how much, but these little treats were often the only moments of calm and pleasure in his day. He turned on the TV but he couldn’t concentrate, his head unable to stop spinning, running the latest facts and finds through each scenario and possibility.

  Something about Emily’s arrest sheet didn’t make sense. It was a feeling, more than a feeling – a small black stone lodged in his brain. There had been so much new information today that he was finding it hard to keep track. But that was good. The initial logjam had been broken and now they were awash in a cascade of data, the kind every investigation needs to propel itself in the early days. He knew most of the leads would go nowhere. He knew that any life would open up to mystery and confusion if you looked at it hard enough, but he also knew that there was something he’d missed.

  He cleared the dishes and then the night was all there was and he sat staring at the motorway ramp outside his window, jewelled with the lights of passing cars, a steady exodus from the choke and cram of the capital.

  After the third ginger beer, he picked up the phone and called her.

  ‘Wanted to say thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, her voice slightly slurred, and he felt suddenly guilty, knowing she worked shifts, and wondering if he’d awoken her from a long-cherished sleep.

  ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you.’

  She laughed, a carefree chuckle that crackled through the receiver. ‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘Back on at two tomorrow but I can’t sleep.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  ‘Lucky we have the phone.’

  They talked about things that were part of their daily lives, about time and space and the pressures of shiftwork, and as he heard her soft exotic voice he felt better, calmer and less hassled, and he flicked idly through the files on his desk, Emily’s record, and listened to Karen telling him stories from the three in the morning A & E wards, sad tales of late-night mistakes and stumbles, and even sadder, those who had nothing wrong with them and had just come in for some company to get them through the night. She told him about her sister who’d died and how it had changed her – not in one big explosion but in a million small yet significant ways, and of the men she’d been with, both kind and cruel, and countries she’d visited and the ones she still wanted to, and he imagined her standing in some lost forgotten desert out on the edge of the world, amidst the dust and heat, her black hair crackling in the wind.

  And then he stopped. Karen’s voice faded to a whisper as he stared at the page in front of him.

  He looked at the mugshot photo, seeing the pain and long nights of battle in Emily’s eyes, and then he knew what had been bothering him about the arrest sheet and cursed himself for not having seen it earlier.

  ‘I’ve got to go, I’m sorry,’ he said, and she said she was tired too and the night was getting shorter and that they would talk again. He listened to the dead hum of the phone after they’d said goodbye, and then he got up, cleared the table of junk and paper, and spread out Emily’s arrest sheet and warrants across the scratched plastic surface.

  *

  Emily had been arrested in March 2008, outside Whitehall. She’d been smoking a joint when a uniformed officer walked past. He arrested her and took her to the nearest station. Carrigan stared at the page, puzzled. Cannabis was a low priority for the Met and a huge waste of resources. Four hours of processing paperwork and a beat constable off the streets for half his shift over a single joint. Which was why, in most cases, a caution was often enough.

  But there was something about the date of the arrest that was vaguely familiar. He noted the day, time and exact location, then picked up the phone.

  The desk sergeant sounded tired and pissed off and reluctant to do anything that meant moving from his chair. He eventually grunted an acknowledgement and wrote down the date and postcode Carrigan had recited.

  Jack could hear the man slowly punching in letters and numbers on the other end of the phone. He stared out at the cars gliding through the night, and then the sergeant was back on the line. Carrigan had asked him to perform a search for all arrests on the same day as Emily’s and within a half-mile radius of her location.

  ‘How many?’ He leaned into the phone as if that would make the answer more understandable.

  ‘Four hundred and fifty-six.’

  ‘Four hundred and fifty-six arrests on that day?’

  ‘Yes.’ The sergeant paused as he scrolled through the list. ‘Pretty much all of them for public nuisance or disorder breaches.’

  Carrigan thanked him and put the phone down. Four hundred and fifty-five other people had been arrested on the same day and in close vicinity to Emily. He opened a new window, typed in the arrest date and location into Google, and watched as a list of web pages and news articles appeared.

  The websites all belonged to student and anarchist groups. The news articles made him remember why the date had seemed so familiar. An anti-war march had been held that day which had left many police injured and half the shops on Oxford Street destroyed. Pacifists fighting against war. Carrigan had been there that day, along with every other policeman who wasn’t on leave and most of those who were. The march was supposed to be peaceful and yet, within a couple of hours, it had turned into a battlefield. The police were attacked from all sides, objects and projectiles raining down, fists and legs and angry scowling students in black balaclavas wielding metal poles and Molotov cocktails.

  He stared at the screen, remembering the chaos and fear. Amid all the lawlessness and looting why had Emily been arrested for smoking a single joint?

  He made another coffee and paced the flat. Sometimes it was easier to arrest someone for drugs than public disorder, he reasoned. The weed would put her in a cell while they checked the CCTV to see if a further charge was warranted. It made sense and yet it didn’t make any sense.

  He walked over to the chair and picked up his jacket. He went through the pockets, getting rid of the amassed junk and twists of chocolate
wrappers, and then he found the card. He stared at the words Donna had written – There’s a lot about Emily I couldn’t tell you in front of them – and picked up the phone.

  He spent the next hour going through his policy book, making sure there were no avenues left unexplored, no timebombs ticking in anomalous timelines or misrecounted fact. He popped two pills for the headache erupting from his left temple. He went back to Geneva’s notes and read through them again – her account of the nuns busting up a drug-dealing operation in their backyard, the picketing and leafleting – and he turned on the computer and waited for the PNC screen to boot up.

  A couple of years back, he’d got Berman to fix access to the PNC through his home computer and he now logged on. As he waited for the system to recognise him, he opened a packet of German biscuits, half-moons dusted with crushed hazelnuts and powdered sugar. He took out exactly half the biscuits and put them on a plate. The rest he bagged and returned to the kitchen. This was how you went about a diet, in small and manageable steps, in learning to resist easy temptation. He ate the biscuits and began searching. He analysed patterns of recent drug activity in west London. The ever-shifting flowchart of alliances and feuds. He drank black coffee and trawled through out-of-date arrest sheets and old serials looking for something, he wasn’t quite sure what. He finished the biscuits and got up and fetched the rest from the kitchen. He read reports of petty turf wars, stabbings or beatings over nondescript street corners in Kensington or Kilburn or Kensal Rise. Market forces and the myth of a recession-proof business. New groups coming from every part of the world to contest such rich territory, the inexorable globalisation of criminal enterprise. He finished the last biscuit and started going through twelve months’ worth of drug squad reports. He was focusing on St Peter’s Square and the neighbouring streets when he found mention of an altercation the uniforms had been called to a couple of weeks earlier.