A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  The team filed in slow and stooped looking like reluctant night-shift workers, their feet dragging behind them, trying to delay the moment for as long as possible. They all knew how he worked, what awaited them in this room. He watched them shuffle to the mismatched desks, temporary solutions salvaged from some bankrupt school. He was proud of them, these moments making him realise he could never do this alone and how they had forced him to accept this over the years.

  Karlson sat at a table to his right, fingers trailing through his stubble as he watched Carrigan. Next to him sat DC Jennings, DC Singh, and some of the younger constables. DC Berman, their internet whiz, sat, as always, in the back, his face half on Carrigan, half glued to the computer screens in front of him.

  While they organised themselves, found somewhere to look at that didn’t have Grace staring back at them, Carrigan gazed out of the window but saw only a greenish mist. Outside the sun was sizzling low in the autumn sky, maybe one of the last days of pure sunshine before winter set in, but it didn’t penetrate the green builders’ mesh stretched taut and firm around the building’s scaffolding like an oversized pair of tights.

  Three months now they’d been covered in green. The station was undergoing major refurbishments and Carrigan’s Murder Incident Team as well as most of CID had been moved to the new extension, promised that it would be the latest in office environments. Unfortunately, it was still in the process of completion and they had to make do with what they could scavenge and hope the builders would be finished soon. The mesh cast a greenish glow on everything. Their computer screens. The food they ate. Their skin.

  He turned back to the room, saw them sitting, faces at strange angles, staring down at their notebooks. He pointed to the blown-up image of Grace Okello’s face that he’d pinned to the whiteboard directly behind him. His mouth still tasted sour from this morning at the morgue, his suit smelling faintly of sweat and vomit. ‘Most of you already know that Grace Okello was discovered dead in her flat at 87 King’s Court on Queensway at 10.34 yesterday morning.’ He looked down at his hands, trying to stifle the sensation in his throat, the sick memory taste of her blood in that small hot room, the pathologist’s final revelation.

  ‘Ms Okello was brutally beaten then tied down to her bed. The perpetrator raped her several times, secreting O-positive semen. It seems he bit her as he was doing this.’ He paused, watching the silent faces of his squad, the realisation in their eyes of what they were dealing with. ‘When he was finished, he used a curved blade to open up her chest, then reached inside and extracted her heart. We can only presume he took it as a souvenir.’

  Jennings and Berman were shaking their heads, trying to look anywhere but the walls. The photos had been bad enough but now they knew the sequence of events that had produced this abstract display of horror and atrocity it was much worse.

  ‘The SOCOs are just finishing up in the flat now so we should get the preliminary results soon. The HOLMES team are coming in this afternoon. Berman, I want you to go through the CCTV footage from the building’s entrance. The porter handed over the tapes from the last seven days; after that they record over the old ones.’ He’d checked the camera on his way out. Trying to save money, the management of the building had installed only one CCTV camera at the front entrance. It recorded who came in and who went out, but gave no indication of whom they were visiting. ‘I know it’s a pain in the arse, I know we probably won’t get anything from it, but we need to do it.’

  Berman nodded, his fingers already tapping furiously at the keyboard.

  ‘Jennings, run a list of the tenants against the PNC – also, talk to the porter. He was drunk, way beyond drunk actually, when I approached him. Find out if he’s a lush or he only got blotto that night. Check him out too, most of these porters have form of one kind or another. Talk to the neighbours; they won’t be very cooperative but push them – someone must have seen or heard something.’

  ‘We tell them it’s a murder enquiry?’ Jennings asked hesitantly.

  Carrigan shook his head. ‘I know, this makes our life harder, but not a word as to why we’re asking about Grace. The super was very adamant about that. The papers find out about this, we’re all fucked.’ Everyone laughed at Carrigan’s rare lapse into profanity, the tension in the room dissipating for the briefest of increments. ‘DS Miller and I will be looking at the victimology, trying to find out what we can about who Grace was, why anyone would want to do this to her.’

  Karlson had his hand up. In the other, an unlit cigarette jumped like a child’s toy. ‘She was a pretty girl, isn’t that enough?’

  Carrigan rubbed his temples. ‘We don’t want to start making too many assumptions yet, John.’ His words sounded false to him, he knew they all had their theories, and that often it was those primary assumptions, based on nothing more than a feeling, which opened up a trail of clues that would eventually lead to the killer. ‘On the surface this does indeed look like a sex killing. He raped her brutally. The force of the injuries, the anger and personal nature of the attack, the fact he took a souvenir. What we have to ask ourselves is whether this is a one-off, perhaps someone known to Grace, or is this the first in a series? There were no marks of forced entry so we have to assume that either Grace knew this person or he got in under false pretences. The SOCOs found two half-drunk glasses of milk in the kitchen – hopefully we’ll get the DNA results before the end of the next millennium. In the meantime check all the usual utility companies, see if they report anything strange, stolen uniforms, that sort of thing. I’ll be looking at recent unsolveds to see if there’s a similar signature.’

  ‘Then you don’t think this has anything to do with witchcraft?’

  Carrigan stared hard at Karlson, not sure if he was taking the piss or not. As usual, the sergeant was immaculately dressed and groomed as if he’d just stepped out of a glossy men’s magazine. ‘Why do you say that?’

  Karlson had been waiting for this, Carrigan could tell. ‘The mutilations, the missing heart, the fact she’s African—’

  ‘This isn’t witchcraft.’

  The voice had come from somewhere at the back. Carrigan scanned the room until he spotted Miller, hunched down into her table, taking notes, a can of Coke obscuring her face. He hadn’t even noticed her come in, impressed at how well she’d been able to conceal herself. ‘Enlighten us, DS Miller.’

  Karlson and one of the constables shared a joke, the kind of joke which has no words, only facial expressions and common prejudices. Geneva sat up in her chair, ignoring them, scanned her notes and took a sip of Coke, aware that everyone was watching her.

  ‘First of all, there’s almost no proven cases of African witchcraft in England. Not on this scale. Amulets, herbs and potions on sale in markets, yes. Murder, no. It’s too far-fetched, too small a possibility. Also, this is too messy.’

  ‘Too messy, DS Miller?’ Carrigan tried to keep his voice neutral but it wasn’t working; he could still remember his embarrassment in front of her at the morgue, his conversation with Branch that morning.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘In African ritual murder the perpetrator kills so he can use body parts or blood for his magic. He wouldn’t go for all this overkill. Certainly wouldn’t have raped her, which I’m sure diminishes whatever power they think the body parts hold.’

  Carrigan nodded to himself, having come to the same conclusion. Witchcraft and ritual were a fool’s last hand hold when everything else fell through. He knew that people mostly killed for petty reasons: to protect their position, to avenge an imagined slight, for money or for sex.

  ‘What we should be concentrating on,’ Miller continued, finding her voice now, ‘is why he did the things he didn’t have to do.’

  ‘He didn’t have to kill her at all.’ Jennings tried to make a joke of it but no one laughed.

  Miller sighed. ‘True, but not very useful.’ She checked to see if Carrigan was about to stop her but he seemed lost in thought, staring out of the window into the green s
ky. ‘He raped her and killed her. If we accept that this is a sex killing then we have to ask why the overkill? Why not just rape her and strangle her? The things he didn’t need to do but did – the bites, the physical assault, the missing heart – we have to ask why did he do those things specifically? What does it tell us about what kind of man this is? Did they have some symbolic value for him? Did something about Grace so enrage him that he felt he needed to kill her twice, three times?’

  ‘Very well put,’ Carrigan interrupted. ‘It bothers me too. Why beat her, bite her and then extract her heart?’ A hush descended over the gathered detectives. Outside the builders were laughing, joking, playing the radio. The music made Carrigan wince even though it was only a faint flutter of notes, barely audible. He thanked DS Miller, then pointed to the photos tacked up around the room. He waited until everyone had turned their heads and was staring at Grace Okello.

  ‘Whoever did this we need to catch quickly. This is the sort of thing you don’t do on impulse. This kind of slow and deliberate murder, the perpetrator’s been building up to it. Rape. Assault. He’ll probably have form. And even if this is his first time, he’ll do it again. That’s beyond doubt. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in isolation. You don’t rape, torture and kill a girl then go back to your wife and kids and ordinary life. There is no life after this but more of the same.’ He stopped, acutely aware he was going off into a rant again. ‘I’m sorry for the shitty desks and the building site but that’s what we have. There’ll be daily briefings here at 8.30 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. so that we can review where we are.’ He turned to the whiteboard. ‘Remember these photos. We can’t bring Grace Okello back but maybe we can tell her we caught him. And maybe, if we’re lucky, she’ll be listening.’

  6

  He sat at his desk, an Everest of paperwork in front of him, a deep simmering in his blood, the phone lying silent. He’d pushed his other files to the side, the growing mountain of unsolved cases, only the occasional phone call from a distraught relative to remind him they were still active. Each was accorded a separate coloured folder and as he placed them to the side he felt a spasm of guilt. He held the black file in his hands for a moment longer.

  This one was different. This one wouldn’t go away. No one else reckoned its contents amounted to a crime but Carrigan thought otherwise. He briefly flicked through the pages inside, the missing-person reports, the detectives’ summaries, the relatives’ statements. There were four photos, uncannily similar. Four teenage boys, three reported missing and one found dead. No one else thought there was a connection. The cases were spread too far apart, up and down and across the country, several years between them. Boys that age often disappeared for their own reasons. Many were never found because they didn’t want to be. But these four, something about them, the way each boy looked like the others, black glasses, long brown hair, something in their gaze. He slipped the pages back inside and put the file to one side.

  The drinks machine was at the other end of the building and he walked through empty corridors and the smell of fresh paint then into the old part of the station. Immediately he felt the buzz of the busy squad room, the constant ringing of phones and voices of his colleagues, ears pressed against mobiles, fingers busily tapping keyboards. He nodded and said hello, checked the daily incident logs to see if there was anything that related to his case, then walked past more incident rooms filled with other detectives pursuing killers, drug dealers and internet fraudsters. The walls around him were covered in photos of valorous heroes, injured or killed in the line of duty, and he walked past these sombrely as he always did, not wanting to see their faces and read the futures that would befall them in those eager poses. He waited for his drink to dispense and stared at the crime-stat sheets lining the walls, the rotas crossed out and replaced by illegible scrawls, the reminders of best-practice procedures.

  He returned to the incident room and sat back down in his chair, turning on all the lights to offset the gauzy green mist, took a sip of his drink and began going through the stacks of paper amassed on his desk.

  He’d faxed Grace’s details, what little they knew, to all the London universities and colleges. The replies had come back quickly. Grace was enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies studying East African History, in the third year of a four-year course. He’d stared at the smudged fax and felt his heart beat a little faster. A coincidence, he told himself, that was all. He crushed the polystyrene cup in his hands and sent it flying towards the bin.

  Jennings had secured a list of all the tenants in the block from the management company. He’d fed it through the computer, looking for hits, criminal records, complaints, the usual. Carrigan leafed through the printouts – he had an hour until he was supposed to meet Geneva outside SOAS to interview Grace’s professor. He ran through the list floor by floor; small-time drug offences, a few fraud cases, benefit dodgers, noise complaints.

  The names of the tenants were like a roll call at the UN; it seemed that every nationality was resident in King’s Court, names that were too long for the forms, names with diacritics and letters not found on police-issue keyboards, names and more names. The case, he knew, would centre around Grace herself – who she was, what she did, her friends and acquaintances. He looked down at the page, the list of names, the floor below Grace’s, then back up at the photos pinned to the walls of the incident room. Then he looked back down again. Read the words twice to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. He couldn’t believe Jennings hadn’t picked up on it, then realised it was his fault, he’d only told the DC to print out the results, not go through them.

  It was there among the small-time crooks and weed pushers. It was there in black and white and in capitals. George Monroe. Flat 62. Three years for sexual assault and battery. Released from the Scrubs two years ago. Carrigan’s fingers twitched. He stared down at the page, read sexual assault, wondering if Monroe had bumped into Grace in the lift or maybe downstairs in the lobby. Perhaps they said hello to each other, Monroe thinking there was more to it. If she knew him by sight she might have opened the door for him, invited him in for a glass of milk.

  Carrigan felt a sharp electric flash spark through his fingers. He turned to the computer and typed in Monroe’s name but the mainframe was down and he was left staring at an infuriating egg timer telling him the system would be back online soon. He punched the keyboard in frustration, the R and Y flying out from under his fist, texted Geneva that he couldn’t make the interview, grabbed his coat and paged Jennings.

  The rain had started as he left the building and was now coming down hard on the grey pavements of Queensway. Carrigan sipped his coffee, chewed on a Kit-Kat, and manoeuvred through the evening crowds. A shop that hadn’t been there yesterday was already open for business, the city continually remaking itself. He walked past the souvenir stalls and kebab joints, the Russian supermarkets and money changers. Most of the signs made no concession to English – even the alphabets were unrecognisable, a wondrous riot of crazy squiggles that could have been advertising anything.

  He surveyed the building’s entrance from the other side of the road, scanning the faces, hoping to see something that didn’t feel right, but there was only the rush and bustle of the crowd, too many people, too many eyes.

  Jennings was waiting by the front entrance of King’s Court. Carrigan saw that he had two cups of McDonald’s coffee in his hand and squirmed. The steam covered the constable’s schoolboy face, wilting the lick of hair that rested on his forehead like an upside-down question mark. Carrigan thanked him, said he’d already drunk too much, and tossed the cup into the nearest bin. Jennings didn’t seem to notice and kept fidgeting with his mobile. He was young but one of the better constables assigned to him. Carrigan had seen a glint of something on the last case when Jennings had spent days going through useless computer records, a job no one else wanted, and then came back with the one piece of evidence that the jury would accept. Carrigan had learned not to judge the young
DCs by their looks, his own advancing years making them seem that much more naive and callow.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t go through the list,’ he apologised.

  Carrigan waved him off as they entered the building. ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘I know, sir. But I should have done it anyway.’

  Carrigan nodded, kept walking, staring up at the CCTV camera, heading towards the porter’s cubicle.

  ‘You won’t find him in there, sir.’

  Carrigan stopped and turned towards Jennings.

  ‘He’s at the Rat and Firkin down the road. Next door to McDonald’s. I saw him going in there while I was getting this.’ He lifted the coffee he was still holding. ‘There’ll be no point talking to him till he’s sober.’

  ‘We need to check his alibi‚’ Carrigan stated flatly.

  ‘You think he was involved?’

  He could never get over Jennings’s naivety. He knew the young DC would have it ironed out of him if he stayed another couple of years, but he liked it, the sense of genuine surprise at the world and its turnings. It reminded him of an old friend but the memory was sour and filled his heart with pain. ‘No, I don’t, but we need to check anyway.’

  Jennings was smiling now. ‘Actually, I already did. When I saw him going in, I thought I’d have a word with the landlord. He was at the pub Sunday night too; apparently he’s something of a fixture. I talked to the barman and three regulars, all alibied him for the whole night. Dead drunk, had to be helped home.’

  Carrigan thought about this. ‘Good work.’ Jennings smiled. ‘I want you to wait in Grace’s flat for me,’ Carrigan continued. ‘The SOCOs are done but I’m not. We need to go through her things. I’ve got a call to make on the next floor down; I want you to start making an inventory.’