Eleven Days

by Stav Sherez

  Viktor’s laugh was deep and sonorous as it reverberated around the dark interior of the shed. ‘That’s what you think?’

  ‘That’s what I know.’

  ‘Really?’ Viktor shook his head. ‘This Emily you talk about, your victim, well, did you know that she killed one of my men?’

  Carrigan’s eyes widened. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Your victim, your innocent victim, is a murderer. She killed Bratislav and she had to pay.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Carrigan thought back to Father McCarthy’s words, how things had gone wrong, the blood on Emily’s clothes.

  ‘These nuns and this girl, you were right, they were helping women who’d escaped. But that was not enough for them. They decided to take it a step further. Emily and her friend jumped my men twice and took the girls from them. We started using two-man teams. Emily and her accomplice appeared outside one of our properties on Old Street. They surrounded my men and demanded they release the girl. As you can imagine, my men refused. Then, this Emily of yours, from nowhere she leaps forward and suddenly she has this knife in her hand, this big kitchen knife, and she stabs my man. Not once, but several times.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Carrigan said, feeling his stomach drop.

  ‘I was there. I saw my friend get stabbed, holding himself in, his guts pouring out, and Emily didn’t stop. Her mouth was open and she was grinning. Her eyes were blazing as she plunged the knife in again and again. Her accomplice held me, the woman ran off, but Emily wouldn’t stop until her friend had to grab her, wrestle the knife away and slap her face to calm her down. Bratislav crashed to the ground. Emily picked up the bag he was carrying, then ran back to the van. I stood there and watched my friend die because of her.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yes, this is your innocent little victim. This is the kind of woman she was. I do not get scared of much but I was scared of her. She was crazy, she loved it, you should have seen her face.’

  ‘The bag? What was in the bag?’

  ‘Cocaine,’ Viktor replied. ‘For the customers. Bratislav was dropping off the brothel’s weekly supply.’

  ‘You’re not exactly convincing me of your innocence,’ Carrigan said, the images whirling through his brain, half-remembered conversations with the priest and the Maxteds. ‘Everything you’ve told me just gives you more reason to have wanted her dead. If you’re so innocent, what were you doing in the ruins of the convent the night you attacked me?’

  Viktor shrugged. ‘Duka had us watching the convent. He wanted to know what was happening, what the police were doing, whether there was anything there that could lead back to us. We saw you that night, we didn’t know who you were, it was too late for an official visit and you were alone. We thought you might be Nigel, the man who’d helped Emily.’

  ‘You’re digging yourself a deeper hole as we speak.’

  ‘Wrong, my friend. You think we’re stupid? You think we’re that stupid? We wanted the girl, this Emily, and we wanted the man with her, but the nuns were not our concern.’

  ‘The nuns were helping shelter your women.’

  The Albanian laughed. ‘Girls are cheap, detective, in fact you could say they are less than cheap, they’re free. So what if a few escape? This is the price of business. It is much easier for us to get ten new girls than chase down one escaped whore.’

  ‘But you would want to teach them a lesson? Isn’t that how you work? You would want to teach the nuns a lesson so that others don’t get the same idea.’

  ‘Believe me, if we had wanted to teach them a lesson, you would know about it. We would not give them the easy option of dying in flames. We would make their deaths long and drawn out and we would leave much evidence of suffering on their bodies.’

  ‘Like you did with Nigel?’

  ‘He was involved in the killing of one of our men, he got exactly what he deserved. But to burn down a convent? It would be a stupid business decision, put the spotlight on us and bring us unwelcome attention. We went and talked with the nuns. We told them we knew what they were doing but that we were prepared to forget that. We talked to the old one, the head nun, and we told her what Emily had done. I thought we would have to convince her of the truth of this but she needed no convincing. I could see that she had feared exactly such a thing. Yet she refused to give up the girl. We visited three times but she wouldn’t budge. We knew it didn’t matter, we have long memories and a lot of patience. We would wait and Emily would show herself, then we would take back what we were owed.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘I can see that you already do,’ Viktor said. ‘Whoever set the fire stole Emily from us. She belonged to Duka. If we find this person before you do, I can promise you he won’t be bringing his lawyer with him.’

  ‘Why all the charade of kidnapping me and bringing me here?’

  ‘If someone sees me with you, detective, then I am dead and my family back home are dead. It is that simple.’

  ‘Then why do it?’ Carrigan asked. ‘Why tell me all this?’

  ‘Because we are businessmen and your crusade is bad for our business.’

  ‘Bullshit. You wouldn’t take such a risk if that were true. Kidnapping a police officer is much worse for business than a few raids.’ Carrigan stopped. He thought about how Viktor had known about the upcoming raids, a stray sentence Byrd had said a couple of days ago, the risk the Albanian was taking being here, and then he knew.

  ‘You’re not really one of them, are you? You’re working with Byrd. That’s why you know about the raids.’

  Viktor looked at him without blinking. ‘Repeat those words ever again and I will find you and I will kill you, understand?’

  Carrigan smiled. ‘I understand.’

  Viktor walked away, leaving himself unprotected, the gun hanging loosely at his side. As he opened the door, he turned back towards Carrigan. ‘You want to know what happened that night? Then I suggest you think about what Nigel was trying to tell you.’ He nodded once, then shut the door behind him.

  Carrigan didn’t get up. He sat and tried not to think about what Viktor had said. Because if Viktor and Duka weren’t behind the fire, then he’d been wrong all along.

  48

  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.