by Stav Sherez
She bumped into Carrigan in the corridor. He looked pained and drawn and she wondered, not for the first time, how long he could keep this up.
‘SOCOs found a hidden door in the kitchen pantry,’ he said. ‘It leads out into the back alley. That’s how Viktor got away. Bloody uniforms didn’t spot it.’
‘What about the girls?’
‘I want to try talking to them,’ Carrigan said. ‘Then we’ll speak to someone in immigration, see if we can get them sent back to their families. There’s no way I’m releasing them back into the arms of those men.’
Geneva felt a little bit better as they headed back to the interview rooms.
The girls they’d found had all been seen to by FLOs, social workers and other support staff. Their reports made Carrigan’s eyes water. They were mainly from Moldova, Belarus, the Ukraine. Trafficked through Sofia and Tirana, those beautifully named cities of sin and suffering. They were all in an advanced state of psychological distress, their bodies riddled with hidden bruises and cigarette burns.
Carrigan entered the first interview suite and saw the girl he’d discovered sleeping. She was the youngest one they’d found. She was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room, her back against the wall, and she was crying and talking to herself, nodding vigorously, then shaking her head in mute disagreement. The social worker was sitting on a folding chair and when she saw Carrigan she gave him a look that spoke of profound sadness and frustration.
‘I’ve got something for her,’ he told the social worker, slowly making his way across the room. The girl flinched at each footstep, burying her face deep in her hands. Carrigan leaned down and took out the Snoopy he’d retrieved from under her pillow. She looked up, her eyes red and wet, and hesitated. Then she quickly grabbed the stuffed dog and clutched it tightly to her chest, sniffling into its downy fur. Carrigan got up, nodded to the social worker and left.
He stood in the corridor and thought about what he’d seen and what he’d heard. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that they’d been wrong but he knew they were. He searched the incident room and interview suites until he found Geneva.
‘I think we’ve got this all wrong,’ he said.
Geneva was nodding before he could finish. ‘We have,’ she replied. ‘Come . . .’
He followed her into the second interview suite. He kept his distance this time, sitting at the back of the room as Geneva took the chair opposite the girl.
At least she was a bit older, this one, maybe sixteen. Geneva placed a can of Coke in front of the girl, then said, ‘Please tell us what you just told me.’
The girl opened the Coke and took a long sip. She was obviously a teenager but her eyes looked as weary as an old woman who’d seen several husbands and most of her children die.
‘We talk to each other a lot,’ the girl said, her voice heavily accented and hesitant. ‘There is no one else we are allowed to speak to. Girls are moved from house to house, every week sometimes, so that we do not form any bonds, do not get comfortable and because . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Because the men, they like, how you say? Variety? So yes, they switch us from house to house. I myself have been in about fifteen different houses since I came to this country. You never know when they’ll take you somewhere else, how much worse it will be, what kind of men keep guard in the new place. But the girls talk and there are always rumours.’
‘Rumours?’
The scrape of Carrigan’s chair as he edged forward startled the girl.
‘They say that if you manage to escape there are people who will help you hide.’
Carrigan felt the skin tighten against his bones and tried to keep as still as possible.
‘What kind of people?’ Geneva asked.
The girl laughed derisively. ‘This, you understand, is like saying if you win lottery you can buy a new house. Escaping is almost impossible, only a few girls manage it. They make sure of that.’
Carrigan remembered the bolts on the door to the upstairs room, the two bouncers whose job wasn’t to keep the customers in line but the girls. He couldn’t stop thinking about these young women, the dreams they’d have nurtured about England, the rock bands and nightclubs and glamour parties, and then they finally make it here and all they see of the country is the interior of a locked room, the sweating overweight face of the bank manager pummelling their thighs.
‘But there is this rumour that everyone keeps repeating,’ the girl continued. ‘That if you manage to escape there is a place near here where you can find shelter, a safe house, where they will keep you hidden from the men that will be sent to find you.’
‘Do you know where?’ Carrigan asked.
The girl shook her head. ‘No. These are rumours, like I said, but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that if you manage to escape there is a group of women who will provide sanctuary and that these women are not ordinary women but women of God.’
‘Women of God?’
The girl frowned. ‘Yes . . . you know . . . ?’
Carrigan leaned forward, the pulse hammering in his neck. ‘Do you mean nuns?’
The girl’s eyes lit up, ‘Yes, exactly. Nuns.’
III
‘Many of the rebels had no weapon except sand.’
Vasily Grossman
38
The nuns had been sheltering escaped women and if the women knew about it, it was almost certain their captors did too. Geneva sat, thought about this, made notes, avoided going home. She told herself it was the case pressing against her, the spinning puzzlement of facts rolling through her brain, but when she closed her mouth she could still taste eagle-neck’s fingers and feel the hot wet pulse of him on her tongue, and knew it was nothing to do with the case.
She spread the files and papers and interview transcripts across her desk. The incident room had been chaos all afternoon, the subjects from the raid being processed and booked, and now the girl’s story about the nuns sheltering escapees had changed everything yet again. Geneva looked at the grainy photos from Peru, the picket lines and clenched fists, and wondered whether she’d been wasting her time – worse – whether she’d convinced Carrigan to allocate personnel and resources that could have been better used elsewhere. She scratched her wrist until the itching stopped and opened a fresh can of Coke. She hadn’t thought it would be like this. She’d been on the murder squad just over a year now. It was what she’d thought she’d always wanted, but she hadn’t realised the responsibility embedded in every choice she made, the lives and futures dangling in the balance. She knew she had to do better – work longer hours, read through everything again – whatever it took.
She printed off a large-scale map of Peru from the Internet and spread it out in front of her. The country looked hunchbacked and folded, an afterthought in the shadow of the Andes. She remembered from Emily’s diary that the compound was located in the San Gabriel province and she quickly found the region, nestled between mountain and river. The nearest big town was Cusco. These coincidences no longer surprised her. The money from the nuns’ bank account was funding Father McCarthy’s compound.
It took her half an hour to find the right number. Another forty-five minutes to get clearance to make the call. Countless forms to fill out and endless waiting. She didn’t know what she was expecting. She didn’t know if the person on the other end would even speak English.
Commander Gamboa of the Cusco police force spoke English extremely well. He spoke it in that formal, almost stilted way that people do when they’ve learned it from old TV shows and news reports and it made her feel curiously homesick, the ghost of her mother rising through every inflection and malapropism.
‘I was on my way out,’ he said.
‘Lucky I caught you, then.’ She explained who she was and what she was working on. Gamboa kept saying yes yes yes, his impatience mounting, but when she mentioned the Tomorrow Foundation his tone changed completely.
‘We have been very int
erested in that,’ he said.
When Geneva told him about the convent and the money transfers he suddenly forgot the meeting he was rushing off to.
‘We suspect the nuns were funding some kind of compound through this foundation but we have no idea why or what its purpose is.’
She heard something that might have been a chuckle on the other end of the line but there was so much static and buzz that it was hard to tell. ‘So, you know about the compound?’
Geneva felt her stomach tumble. She wondered whether to bluff him but ended up going with the truth. ‘Yes, we do.’
‘Wait just one minute,’ Gamboa said and disappeared off the line. He came back and told her he had the files up on his computer. ‘As you can imagine,’ he continued, his voice steady and soothing and so far away, ‘we have been keeping an eye on this place for the last couple of years.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘We’re not sure,’ Gamboa admitted. ‘It first came to our attention four years ago. No one knows how it started. One day there was just the bare ground and the next there was a small wooden shack. The fence went up first. The villagers asked the workmen what they were building but the workmen didn’t know. The fence was laid over a large parcel of land. The land, when we traced it, was owned by the Tomorrow Foundation. Soon villagers reported construction day and night, power tools and diggers and bright lights.
‘In town they began to notice a steady stream of outsiders passing through. They would stop for a night then disappear into the compound and were not seen again. We, the police, began to get interested. We saw priests and bishops, lawyers and soldiers come through town heading for the compound. A very curious collection of people. No one would tell us what it was or why they were headed there. The army provided us with some aerial shots but all we could see was how well organised and constructed it was.
‘Shipments were being delivered by truck almost daily. We stopped several of these trucks and searched them but all we found were sizable quantities of food, tinned food, enough for years, even for a large group of people. There was no law against buying food so we had to let them go but then, roughly a year ago, we noticed that activities at the compound had stepped up and we began to hear rumours of priests making large purchases of guns and ammunition in Cusco and that was when we became really interested.’
Geneva thought about the timing of this, the £240,000 coming in from the convent every year. ‘Did you come across any English nuns during the course of your investigation?’
‘We came across many nuns and priests,’ Gamboa replied. ‘Did you have anyone in particular in mind?’
She told him what she knew of Sister Rose, her trip to Peru and subsequent disappearance.
‘I know of the case,’ Gamboa said. ‘We never found out who killed the priest she was travelling with and we never found her body. Unfortunately, this is not so rare here as to warrant further inquiry.’ Gamboa paused and she could hear a fan spinning somewhere in the room behind him.
‘Do you have a person named Emily Maxted in your records?’
Gamboa was silent but she could hear him punching keys. ‘Yes, here we go,’ he said. ‘She was arrested for taking part in an anti-mining protest in the Altiplana. When it was discovered she was a foreign national she was released and deported from the country.’
‘When was this?’ Geneva asked.
Gamboa took a minute to look it up. ‘October 2011.’
‘Any record of her linked to the compound?’
‘No, not that I can see,’ Gamboa replied. ‘You know, I went up there one time. They had armed guards at the gate but they let me and my partner in. We met the English priest, Father McCarthy, and he showed us around and told us that the compound was there to help minister to the spiritual needs of the people, but I saw the locked doors, the safety provisions and alarms, the frightened look in people’s faces.’
She heard the slow pulse of the phone’s static holding all the words Gamboa hadn’t been able to say. ‘What happened?’
‘We were taken off the case.’
Geneva gripped the phone tightly between her fingers. ‘Why?’
‘The federal police took over,’ Gamboa replied. ‘It’s standard procedure when these kinds of issues are involved.’
‘Issues? What do you mean?’
There was a pause and she thought he’d said all he was going to say and then she heard him light a cigarette, the slow sizzle and exhale. ‘The compound had been mentioned in connection to a spate of incidents.’
‘Incidents? What kind of things are we talking about?’
‘I’m afraid that is classified. You’ll have to go through Lima to get that information.’ He paused and she could hear him scratch his stubble. ‘Or you could use the Internet,’ he whispered, and hung up.
39
Roger Holden was on the phone, laughing at something in a booming baritone as he watched Carrigan and Miller barge into his office, his expression unaltered except for a quickly subsumed frown.
‘I would say what a pleasant surprise, Inspector.’ Holden put down the phone. ‘But somehow, I don’t think this is going to be all that pleasant.’
‘That would be entirely up to you,’ Carrigan replied.
Holden looked down at the folder on his table then carefully closed it. ‘Yes, quite,’ he answered. ‘May I ask how the investigation is going?’
‘As well as can be expected,’ Carrigan said. ‘We’re just trying to tie up some loose ends and there are a few questions you can help us with.’
Holden smiled but this time there was no warmth to it. ‘Fine, but I’m afraid we’ll have to keep this short. I have a video conference with the Vatican all day tomorrow and I need to prepare . . .’
‘Why did you lie to us?’ Geneva interrupted.
Holden turned towards her. His face was expressionless but a small muscle jumped under his right eyelid. ‘I don’t believe I lied to you, Miss . . . ?’
‘It’s Detective Sergeant Miller, as you well know,’ Geneva replied, taking a thick handful of papers from her bag. She took her time shuffling through them. They’d talked about their strategy on the way over. She would present her latest findings on the nuns, press Holden for why the church was covering up, and then Carrigan would come in swinging with the final blow. She took a little more time than was necessary finding the right papers and coughed and took off her glasses and wiped them on her blouse and put them back on. ‘You told us you only had a minor argument over theology with the convent but that wasn’t true, was it?’
Holden twirled the ring on his finger, mouth pursed. ‘What exactly do you mean, Miss Miller? I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific if you expect me to answer you.’
Geneva bit the inside of her lip. Since talking to Father Spaulding she’d been doing further research, staying up late, long scratchy hours on the Internet, waste-of-time phone calls, digging and delving into old files and dusty archives. ‘You said that it was a minor dispute but I’ve heard it was much more serious than that.’ She passed over a photocopied page of the Catholic Tribune from last July. ‘It says here that the convent was involved in a dispute not only with the diocese but also with their own order. It says the dispute went up the chain all the way to the Vatican.’
Holden considered her silently for a moment. ‘And you believe everything you read in the press?’
‘No, Mr Holden, I do not. Which is why I sent an official request for information to both the Vatican and the order’s headquarters in Rome. I didn’t think they would get back to me but they did. I was told that the convent, Mother Angelica in particular, had been censured three times in the last five years. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered that there’s a motion floating around the Vatican to excommunicate the nuns. It looks as if – had the nuns not been murdered – they would have been excommunicated from the church at the beginning of the new year.’ She passed across the relevant papers and typed transcripts. Holden picked them up and per
used them slowly, stroking his chin and nodding his head as he did so.
‘You must understand that we in the church like to keep things in house,’ he finally said. ‘I imagine it’s not too different from the police force. You have your own internal investigation department and so do we; likewise we do not publicise every little coming and going within the church.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
The edge of Holden’s mouth crumpled slightly. ‘Yes, the convent was under investigation and yes, there was a motion for excommunication that the order was going to vote on after Christmas, but I can’t see how that has anything to do with your case.’
‘Everything that happens has something to do with the case,’ Geneva said. ‘And the fact you lied to us in the initial interview is something we do not forget. You made this seem as if the nuns were just innocent victims of some crazed arsonist – wrong time, wrong place – yet the more we find out the more that theory flies in the face of every bit of evidence. The nuns had secrets, Mr Holden. These secrets leave traces. We’re giving you one last chance to explain before we take this further.’
Holden stared at her, a silent calculation clicking away in his eyes. ‘What exactly did you want to know?’
Geneva smiled to herself, relieved and a little surprised that she’d read him right. ‘What did the nuns do to get themselves excommunicated?’
‘They took things into their own hands,’ Holden said, and this time there was something else in his expression other than the usual disdain. He blinked, then pressed a button and told his secretary to hold all calls for the next fifteen minutes. ‘I wasn’t lying when I said it was a matter of theology.’ He leaned forward, sighing, his arms crossed in front of him. ‘Mother Angelica was stationed for several years in South America. I’m sure your research has led you to an understanding of this thing called liberation theology? Mother Angelica became too involved in the worldly sphere when she was in Peru. She got herself into a little trouble and had to be transferred.’