A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  Her flat. She needed to get used to saying that even though it was only a rental and she’d probably move when the contract was up. The house would be put on the market when the divorce went through and then she would use her share to buy somewhere else if the prices didn’t go nuts in the interim. But that would take a while. And there had been no question of staying on at the house; they’d tried it for a couple of weeks, sleeping in separate rooms, but even that, seeing him every morning, hearing him every night, had been more than she could bear.

  She sat down on one of the large green cushions her sister had given her when she’d moved in. She hadn’t had a chance to buy an armchair or sofa yet, kept meaning to do it but was always busy. Just as she’d promised herself that this weekend she would unpack the boxes lying haphazard across the room like obstacles in a maze. All her life was contained in these boxes. Her clothes, photos, books, memories. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to open them yet and besides they doubled as tables and TV stands and places to throw all her work junk.

  In the fridge she found half a pint of milk. She sniffed it and it seemed all right; she couldn’t remember when she’d bought it. There was still some vodka left from last night and enough Kahlua for a couple of drinks.

  She sat on the couch savouring the rich smell rising from her glass, picked up the King’s Court file, lit a cigarette, and was about to take her first sip when the landline rang.

  ‘Yes?’ She put the glass down on one of the boxes and looked around for an ashtray.

  ‘I’m glad to hear you’re alive.’ Her mother’s voice always sounded more accented over the phone, she could never understand why.

  ‘I’ve been busy.’ She looked down at her glass and cursed herself for picking up. She’d bought an answering machine with a screening feature to avoid just such ill-timed interruptions. ‘I just got in, Mum.’

  ‘One phone call? That doesn’t take much time, does it?’

  Geneva bit down on her lip, flicked ash on the floor and took a sip of her drink, not really tasting it at all. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she said, knowing this was the quickest way to end the conversation.

  ‘What was so important, then?’

  ‘I was seconded to a new investigation. A murder. You know how long I’ve been waiting for this.’ She couldn’t suppress the hope and excitement in her voice and it made her feel momentarily better, putting it into words like this.

  She heard her mother exhale a long plume of breath on the other end of the line. ‘Murder? This is what gets you excited? Blood and suffering and all these horrible things? How do you ever expect to be happy when you spend your days dealing with the worst things that are on offer?’

  It was the conversation that skirted the edges of their relationship since she’d taken the job, first year out of university. It was the reason she’d bought the answering machine. ‘I do it for the victims, Mum, you know that. You should be proud after what you went through. That someone wants justice.’

  Her mother laughed, surprising her. ‘You have too much of your father in you. I wish it wasn’t so but it is. It made him disappointed all his life and it’ll do the same to you.’

  She slammed down the phone, pleased it was an old corded model and still allowed this now-antiquated gesture. She finished the rest of her drink, made another, and picked up the file Branch had handed her. She opened it up, flicked through the three scant photocopied pages, then took out the photos and stared at the ravaged body of the dead girl, feeling a strange quickening in her blood.

  4

  He was almost at the morgue when his phone rang. He checked the display – Superintendent Branch – knew it could only be bad news. He stood outside the grey brick building overlooking the murky waters of the Paddington canal and debated answering. Sharp drops of rain worked their way under his collar. He scanned the empty plaza, the fountain that didn’t work, the shops yet to be leased, and put the phone back in his pocket. He didn’t want to hear anything Branch had to say. The meeting this morning had been enough.

  He’d been working on the initial file, going through the preliminary crime scene descriptions and photos, starting up an incident log, when Branch had called him in.

  Branch had spent the first five minutes edging the papers and photos on his desk while Carrigan ran through what they had so far. DC Jennings had got an ID from the porter’s tenant book. Personal items inside the flat confirmed it. The murdered girl’s name was Grace Okello and she’d listed her occupation as ‘student’. The constant rearranging and the concentration Branch gave it was making Carrigan irritable and jumpy. He resisted the urge to sweep everything off with a flick of his wrist.

  ‘I’m seconding a DS to come in and help you.’ Branch looked up from his organising, noted the expression on Carrigan’s face and continued. ‘You’re short on bodies and I want this wrapped up before anyone even knows it happened. You know as well as I do what kind of case this could turn out to be.’

  ‘I’ve done well enough with the team I’ve got.’ He hated the way his voice sounded when he talked to Branch, as if the super could bring out a younger version of Jack, a version he thought he’d left far behind. ‘We’re always understaffed. We’re used to it.’

  Branch picked up a brown file, met Carrigan’s gaze. ‘DS Miller will meet you at the morgue. Anything else, Detective Inspector?’

  Standing outside the morgue, waiting for DS Miller, watching the rain slough off the scaffolding and puddle at his feet, Carrigan knew that Branch no longer trusted him. It wasn’t the past that mattered, it wasn’t even the last case or the one before that. No, it was something personal, something other cops, real cops, could always sense about him. A feeling of disengagement, not one of the boys, does things his own way – every cliché they could muster for someone from such a different background. Miller would be one of Branch’s stooges, a watchful eye to hover over him.

  He stared at the new buildings going up, the skeleton frames of scaffolding poles stretched across the horizon, the grey spurt of the Westway rising like some Greek god from the huddle of flat roofs and satellite dishes. He remembered when this part of Paddington was wasteland, empty lock-ups and all-night caffs for taxi drivers. Now gleaming massifs of glasswork rose at every horizon, blocking out the sun. He binned his coffee cup, was about to go in alone when he when saw a young woman heading towards him, white iPod earphones dangling from her ears. He waited for her to shove a map in his face and ask him how to get to . . .

  ‘DI Carrigan?’ The woman asked in an accent that could have come straight from a pre-war BBC radio play, all clipped vowels and Oxbridge nights. He stood there trying to make sense of this as she offered her hand, small and perfectly formed.

  ‘DS Miller. Superintendent Branch told me you’d be waiting.’ She was shouting, her voice rising above the background hum of rain and construction work. Carrigan pointed to his ears then to hers. She looked bemused, then realised, and pulled out the earphones. They hung loose over her shoulders like the straps of some invisible backpack.

  ‘Sorry. I was in such a hurry . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he murmured, noticing how nervous she was, her hands and legs fidgeting the ground. ‘You can wait outside, you don’t have to see this.’

  DS Miller’s face scrunched up, making her nose wrinkle, and he realised she wasn’t as young as he’d first thought. ‘If I still had my ’phones on I’d think I didn’t hear you right.’ Her eyes met Carrigan’s. They flashed blue, then muted.

  ‘Okay,’ he replied softly, ‘though it’s not going to be pretty.’

  ‘They teach you that at the cop school of clichés?’ But this time she was smiling.

  Bentley, the pathologist, was expecting them. They followed her through the long white hallways and into a succession of smaller rooms. The older woman walked ahead of them, nodding to assistants, her speed belying her age. She looked as mummified and lifeless as the corpses she spent her days hunched over but they were finding it hard to keep up as s
he led them down a set of dark stairs, the smell of mouldy brickwork and old wood exploding in their nostrils, and into a dazzling basement, tiled white and lit with savage intensity by strips of fluorescents criss-crossing the ceiling.

  ‘Which one?’ Bentley said, as if she were a florist asking them to pick out a particular bouquet. The heat in the room was making Carrigan sweat, his nausea rising and ebbing in waves as the fluorescents winked and flashed like knowing eyes. All around them white-suited orderlies were laying bodies on tables, prepping skin, washing instruments. He could hear the crunch of saw on bone, the whispered notes of other pathologists, the gurgle of blood sluicing down drains.

  He watched Miller closely. He had no idea what kind of police work she’d done before, whether she’d been handing out traffic tickets or investigating murders. She looked pale and sickly, a figure made somehow more insubstantial by the bright lights. There was also a faint smell of alcohol but he couldn’t be sure if it was coming from her or from the embalming fluids and disinfectants that permeated the walls.

  ‘Trust you to always pick the worst ones, Carrigan.’ The pathologist’s voice was a strained smoker’s whisper. ‘That’s why I love you.’ Her fingers were dark yellow at the tips with nicotine stains, the skin like old leather or parchment, and what was left of her hair had been fashioned into a wavy Thatcher hairdo which was wilting visibly in the heat. When she reached for the handle Carrigan tried to help her but was quickly shooed away. She pulled hard and the slab came rolling out, the wheels squeaking against the runners, the sound amplified by the tiled surroundings and the quiet which had descended on the two detectives.

  As the pathologist lifted the sheet to reveal Grace Okello’s features, Carrigan saw Miller flinch but, he noted, she didn’t look away. He took his jacket off and wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘It’s like bloody Rangoon in here, Bentley.’

  ‘Air-conditioning’s broken. Went down this morning but the electricians haven’t shown up yet.’

  Carrigan nodded, the heat, noise and smell welling inside him.

  ‘Been working on this one since early morning,’ she continued, peering down at the body of Grace Okello. ‘As I said, you always come up with the best ones. A lot of stuff to work on. Poor girl and all, but for us it’s a bonus.’

  ‘A bonus?’ Miller asked, and Carrigan could hear the astonishment in her voice. She’d never dealt with a murder case, that much was obvious. He wondered why Branch had picked her.

  The sheet had been washed so many times the edges had turned translucent and shiny, revealing the skin beneath as if it were tracing paper. The silver instrument tray gleamed back the fluorescents’ insistent highlights. This was the part he always hated and yet it was also the best part. This was when the body started talking to you. When it was just you and them. He could have easily phoned the morgue, got all this without leaving his office, but it was his last chance to see Grace, the last chance to fix her in his mind. To remember why he was doing this.

  The pathologist slowly pulled back the sheet, making sure both sides were even. Miller’s sharp inhalation filled the room like the sound of a punctured tyre. She looked as if she were about to faint.

  ‘I can do this if you want.’ Carrigan tried to get the right tone in his voice, a mixture of compassion and authority, but Miller just glared at him, eyes blazing.

  ‘She took a long while to die.’ Bentley’s voice sounded scratchy and distracted.

  ‘Time of death?’

  The pathologist squinted. ‘Can’t say for certain yet, the heaters were turned up high in the flat. But sometime Sunday night, definitely. If I had to guess I’d say between nine and midnight‚ but I need to do more tests.’

  Carrigan shook his head and shrugged, he knew not to rely on the pathologist making everything simple and clear as they did on television. She could only give him facts and numbers. How these related to a person, a death, a time and place, that was up to him and his detectives to find out. This part of any murder investigation was like reading the map before you set out on the journey.

  He saw Miller swallowing rapidly, her throat constricting and gulping as if she’d swallowed something too big for her. She looked so ghostly, Carrigan thought, more so even than the dead body. Her eyes were scrunched in concentration and her teeth were biting down on her lower lip, turning it white as a candle. He stared back down at Grace, the torn skin, the burst blood vessels in her eyes, the broken nails on her right hand, and when he looked back up the room began to spin.

  It came out of his stomach with such force that he doubled over, vomiting all over the floor and Miller’s overshoes. When he thought he was finished his stomach spasmed again, a hot burning pain in his throat as everything rushed out. His eyes lost focus and he gripped the side of a nearby table, the metal cooling his skin. He used his hand to wipe his mouth and beard. Miller and the pathologist were staring at him. Bentley looked as if she were about to laugh, as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, but in Miller’s eyes he saw something else even though her complexion looked as green and pallid as his felt.

  Miller took a pack of hand wipes from her bag and handed him several. He felt her recoil in surprise as her fingers brushed the shiny scar tissue that ran up his arm from palm to elbow. He rubbed the wipes against his mouth, the rich sharp smell of lemon making him feel instantly better. She palmed him a small tube of mints.

  ‘Thanks.’ He balled up the wipes, dropped them in the sanitary bin and slid a mint into his mouth. A young African woman had come over and began mopping up the mess. She didn’t acknowledge the pathologist nor the two detectives, just silently carried on cleaning. Carrigan was about to apologise but Miller already had her back to him and was staring at the body.

  ‘Can you construct a sequence of injuries from what you have?’

  Bentley looked at Miller and nodded, pointing to the dark mass of dreadlocks and pooled blood on the left side of the dead girl’s face. ‘She was hit with something relatively soft – a fist, I should think. Several times. There’s intracranial bleeding, which means it happened while she was still alive. She was also raped.’

  Carrigan leant forward, staring at the long gash running up the corpse’s stomach, the bite marks and contusions, wondering why so much overkill.

  ‘We found blue cloth fibres lodged between her teeth,’ continued the pathologist. ‘She was probably gagged during her ordeal. Cause of death, however, was this.’

  Carrigan watched as she delicately lifted the skin on the left side of Grace’s torso. He swallowed hard as it revealed a mess of fat and tissue, the ribs white and jutting out at strange angles. Bentley put one gloved finger on a rib and pointed underneath. ‘He cut her open, slit her from navel to clavicle with a very sharp curved blade, then reached in and cut out her heart.’

  ‘She was still alive when he did this?’ asked Miller. She thought back to her mother’s words last night, tried to get that voice out of her head.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Bentley. ‘For a while, at least.’

  ‘He took the heart with him?’ asked Carrigan.

  ‘Yes, something of a romantic, our killer,’ the pathologist drily replied, a weird twinkle in her eyes. ‘Thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  Carrigan stepped back from the body, the dazzling lights exploding in his eyes. He could hear Miller saying something but he couldn’t make out what it was. He looked up at the doctor, knew he had to ask, didn’t want to . . . ‘What about the bites?’

  ‘I was wondering when you’d get to that.’ She pointed out the small circular bite marks on Grace’s arms, thighs and face. ‘I counted sixty-nine separate bites, quite deep, most of them. And yes, before you ask, Detective,’ and this time her smile was wide and genuine as if detailing some special talent of a favoured grandchild, ‘the bites come from human teeth.’

  Miller leant forward and examined the small punctured semi-circles wondering what kind of man got his pleasure from taking something beau
tiful and turning it into ruin.

  ‘Not just ordinary human teeth,’ the pathologist added, gesturing to one small bite mark along the inside of Grace’s right thigh. ‘Pointy teeth.’

  ‘Like a vampire bite?’

  The old woman laughed, startling them both. ‘We all know there’s no such things as vampires, Detective Carrigan. No, whoever did this has had his two front teeth filed to extremely sharp points,’ she paused as if to contemplate this. ‘Perhaps even expressly for this purpose.’

  5

  She watched him from every part of the room. Her eyes stared lifeless across the vacant desks and empty chairs. Her limbs were mute against the gloss of the blazing lights, her wounds the only story left to tell.

  Carrigan adjusted one of the photos, stepped back, and surveyed his work.

  Photos of Grace Okello were pinned to every available wall-space of the incident room. Images taken at the scene and ones with white backgrounds from the morgue. Images repeated and juxtaposed. Images overlapping. Close-ups and long shots. Eyelashes and ripped flesh. Bedposts and kitchen appliances. The room laid bare, duplicated and blown up, each element gaining significance in its isolation.

  This was all his idea, the way he always did it from the very first murder he’d worked on back in ’97, the little girl found behind the Tube depot, until now. Every case began with a body. But that body was soon forgotten amidst the pathways and tunnels lit up from clues and background work. Policemen became seduced by logic, discrepancy, coincidence. Two days into a murder investigation and they’d forgotten the victim, remembered only the MO, the errant boyfriend or estranged uncle. The photos made sure they wouldn’t forget. They weren’t here to make statistics. They weren’t here to make a living. They were here to avenge the dead. This was his only certainty, the rock that had held him for so long to this strange and surprising career.