A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

The inside of St Joseph’s church was a strange mixture of smells: incense, sweat and detergent. There were two people kneeling at pews, mouthing silent prayers. The coffee felt good rushing inside him, the last two hours all piling up to that last piece of information. Grace had a boyfriend. They fought often. He was heard banging on her door and making threats the night she was killed.

  The priest confirmed George Monroe’s alibi. He was a thick-set Polish man, in his late sixties, with a face that seemed to have marked every travail in his life. He sighed and coughed as Carrigan spoke to him, said that Monroe attended Mass almost every night, was one of the few regulars. ‘You don’t ask where a man has come from when you know where he’s going,’ he added.

  Carrigan thanked him and took a seat. He felt the peace that always settled on him in a church, the deep quiet and vaulted ceilings, the hum of liturgy, the tight concentration of the congregation. He’d never worshipped as a child, his parents doing everything to pretend they were modern-day English progressives and not the newly arrived Irish immigrants they really were. He remembered the arguments, his mother always saying it would be good if he went and then his father, the heavy brogue unaffected by his years abroad, browbeating her with words like ‘superstition’, ‘magic’, ‘poppycock’, explaining that this was why they’d left the old country, to get away from all this and the violence and grief it brought.

  He sat in a pew near the back, going over the few leads they had, as people began wandering in for the evening Mass. He saw women and men, kids dragging reluctantly from their arms, workers and schoolboys, a traffic warden and two younger girls in McDonald’s outfits.

  The service was in Polish that night, the thick-set priest intoning strange conglomerations of consonants and vowels between racking coughs. Everybody but Carrigan had their heads down, kneeling, totally immersed in the moment. He sat back and listened, not understanding a word, enjoying it all the more so because of that, the dark mystery of the liturgy, its meaning only revealed in timbre and resonance. He closed his eyes and waited for something to happen.

  9

  Carrigan had told her to take the evening off, come back fresh in the morning and go through Grace’s belongings then. The last thing Geneva wanted was time off. She didn’t want to go back to her flat, to her mother’s messages on the answering machine, the empty fridge and stacked boxes crowding the floor. This was the perfect way to avoid her life. Grace crowded her thoughts like a song hurtling through her brain; she understood this was not going to be like other police work; this wasn’t something you could leave at the station, forget for twelve or so hours, then pick up again. This would be everything until it was solved – and if it wasn’t – well, she didn’t want to think about that.

  She stuck her head into the incident room, the flickering fluorescents and glare of computer monitors making her squint. Karlson was on the phone, his face scrunched up in intense concentration as he ordered curries for the constables working through the night. She sidled past Berman, tried to catch his eye, but he was hunched into his wall of monitors, his fingers playing the keyboard with such speed and dexterity he could have been a concert pianist.

  ‘Singh, you free?’

  DC Singh was suddenly engrossed in her monitor when a minute ago she’d been chatting with Jennings. She said something about following up certain leads but when she saw the look on Geneva’s face she frowned, flicked her hair back, and got up. They walked down the long empty corridor, out of the green gauze and into the sudden sunglare of the main building. It struck Geneva how peaceful the new extension was compared to the bustle of the main station, public streaming in and out, faces wracked with worry, uniforms crowding around the coffee machine, support officers standing around looking lost. The desk sergeant snorted when Geneva explained what she was here for, mumbled a room number and went back to his copy of the Sun.

  ‘They don’t like it that we’re in the new wing,’ Singh said as they surveyed Grace’s belongings, smudged and tarried by fingerprint powder, stashed in two brown boxes with a long string of numbers printed on each.

  Geneva stared at the young constable, her raven black hair and green eyes making her look a most unlikely candidate for the Met. Singh kept checking her watch and smiling to herself as if she’d just heard a piece of good news but was told to keep it secret. ‘You mean they don’t like Carrigan.’

  DC Singh looked up, thought about it, and nodded. ‘Never have, the uniforms. There’s something about him just doesn’t spell copper to them.’

  They picked up the boxes. ‘And you?’ Geneva said. ‘What’s your opinion?’

  Singh brushed her hair behind her ear. ‘He’s better than some I’ve worked with.’

  Geneva noted the tact in the statement. ‘But . . .’

  They were now back in the new wing and Singh’s voice sounded unnaturally loud as it echoed through the empty corridor. ‘You know those dogs that hang on no matter what? You admire them but at the same time you don’t want to get anywhere near them?’ She gave Geneva a lopsided smile. ‘Frankly, they’re all weird in one way or another. What being boss does to you, I guess.’

  Singh kept smiling inanely – Geneva couldn’t tell if it was because of what she’d said or something else but it was starting to get to her, this constant jollity in the midst of what they were doing.

  They entered the incident room, now smelling of curry and milky tea. Geneva took one look, sniffed, and directed Singh to take the material to one of the smaller offices situated round the back.

  ‘You worked with Carrigan a long time?’

  Singh put down the box and straightened her blouse. ‘Nearly a year now. Why?’

  Geneva looked down at the table, avoiding the DC’s eyes. ‘Just trying to get a sense of what I’ve come into.’ She stared at her hands, noticing the small red marks that had appeared overnight, a sure sign of stress, and wondered if her curiosity was because she really wanted to know or because she had a report due for Branch. She scratched her red patch.

  Singh gave her a strange look, part sympathy, part something else – Geneva couldn’t tell. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the stories.’

  Geneva had – some anyway, and what Branch had told her, couched in innuendo and knowing looks. ‘Enlighten me.’

  Singh glanced at her watch. ‘You’ve seen the scar on his arm?’

  Geneva nodded, opened the first box and started taking out Grace’s belongings, carefully laying them on the table in front of her.

  ‘Got it on 7/7,’ Singh replied. ‘Apparently he was one of the first officers down on the platforms. He was a DI out of Paddington Green at the time, opposite Edgware Road, where the bomb went off. A colleague of mine was working under him then, said as soon as they heard the bang Carrigan was out of the office, not a word to anyone. Some PCs saw him disappear down into the station but it was all smoke and noise and no one knew what was happening yet.’

  Despite herself, Geneva was fascinated. She stared down at Grace’s belongings and tried to keep her face neutral and disinterested.

  ‘Disappeared for over four hours,’ Singh continued. ‘They thought they’d lost him but, you know, it was so crazy that day, no one knew what the hell we were supposed to do. Anyway, some five hours later, Carrigan comes out of the smoke and rubble, he’s covered in soot, bleeding from a large gash in his arm and he’s got this small terrier in his hands.’

  Geneva’s head sprang up. ‘He saved a dog?’

  Singh nodded, and then they both started laughing, hard and uncontrollably, the stress of the past twenty-four hours easing if only for a moment. ‘A Yorkie,’ Singh added, gripping her sides, trying not to laugh any harder. ‘You can imagine the welcome he got at the station that evening. They called him the Dog Whisperer for about a year. You know what the lads are like.’

  Geneva had stopped the pretence of looking through Grace’s things, utterly enthralled by this unexpected glimpse into another side of Carrigan. ‘Did he explain what he’d been doing?’
>
  Singh had just about managed to stop laughing. ‘No. Wouldn’t tell the chief what happened but my colleague saw him when he came back from Edgware Road and said there was too much blood on him for it to be just his own or the dog’s.’ She looked up, shook her head. ‘But the weirdest rumour I ever heard about him was that he used to be in some indie band.’ She checked her watch again as she placed the last bundle of paper on the desk, a huge grin appearing on her face and then just as quickly disappearing.

  ‘What are you so happy about?’ Geneva finally snapped, wishing she could take it back, surprised by the tone of her own voice.

  DC Singh looked down, hiding behind the thick curtain of her hair. ‘I’m meeting my fiancée for dinner,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘We’re getting married next week. I’m just . . . I’m so excited. I know I shouldn’t be with this case and all, but I can’t help it.’ She flashed her ring, the diamond cut small and fine against its setting. ‘You with someone?’

  Geneva shook her head, she didn’t want to get into that right now, and looked down at the table, the circular stains of coffee cups and food smears, trying not to think about her own flat, the empty rooms and unmade bed, the messages stacking up on her machine. She felt bad for the ungenerous thoughts she’d had about Singh. ‘So, what do we call you when you get married?’

  ‘Singh,’ the young woman laughed. ‘Lucky thing about being a Sikh, I guess, you don’t have to change your name.’

  Geneva smiled. ‘You better go.’

  Singh shook her head. ‘It’ll take you ages to go through this alone. I can text him.’

  Geneva quietly placed her hand on Singh’s. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t let work fuck up your personal life.’

  DC Singh thanked her. ‘I hate doing this part,’ she said as she pulled on her jacket. ‘Don’t let Grace become real,’ she warned. ‘It’s much easier that way.’

  Geneva nodded and watched as Singh, flushed and bright with love and the prospect of a late-evening rendezvous, left the room. Suddenly it was quiet, she was alone again, and the weight of the case slumped back down on her like something physical and there was nothing left to do but sink into these objects, try to trace an outline of Grace from the things she’d left behind.

  Preliminary reports from the constables, a photocopy of the pathologist’s verdict, an inventory, and next to her feet, two brown boxes containing anything from Grace Okello’s flat deemed worthy of a second look.

  Tomorrow she needed to brief Carrigan on how far she’d got. Tomorrow she would need answers but tonight she wasn’t even sure which questions she was supposed to be asking.

  The SOCOs had finished their ‘walking’ of the room, the slow painstaking centimetre-by-centimetre trawl through fibres, fabrics, spills and invisible stains. Their report was due tomorrow. She would have to wait and see how much of himself the killer had left. What she had in front of her was two days’ worth of quotidian police work. Routine calls and enquiries. Hastily written reports at the end of a shift. Most policemen found this material boring, obdurate and opaque as flint, unlikely to give up its secrets, but she knew it was in here somewhere – the thing that elides your eye the first few times catches it like a loose nail the seventh.

  She scanned and reread. She made notes in a fresh notebook, drew up timelines and lists of questions. She went through Carrigan’s first-on-the-scene report, impressed by his concise use of language, so refreshing after the vague and rambling summaries of the uniforms. She scrutinised the text, forcing it to give up its meanings. This was what her mother had taught her to do. This was her childhood, squeezed into small rooms, always moving from one to the next, evenings next to her mother, scanning dense passages of Modernist poetry.

  ‘You have to learn to read closely,’ she remembered her mother saying, and she, maybe twelve or thirteen at the time, leaning forward, pressing her face up against the pages until her mother laughed. That carefree but shadowed laugh that could only have come from eastern Europe. Saying, ‘No, dear. Not like that.’ Her words both a kindness and a criticism. Evenings when she should have been watching stupid TV shows with her friends. Weekends she should have been out playing. The whole free time of her childhood pressganged into tiny rooms, books with pages coming loose, the print old and degraded, thumbprints of previous readers left like discarded secrets at the edges. ‘Read the sentence and then read it again. Interrogate it.’ She could still hear her mother’s accent, that curious Czech enunciation mixing with thirty years of North London. ‘Ask it what it means. Don’t go on to the next sentence until you’ve turned the last one inside out. A page of poetry should take hours to read.’

  She picked up a report from DC Berman, who’d gone through the building’s CCTV tapes. He’d watched hours of footage, from the day of the murder and two days before. Faces going in, backs going out, the diastolic rhythm of everyday life.

  Grace Okello entered her building at 5.24 on Sunday evening. She would be dead less than six hours later. Was there anything in her face as the camera caught its swift entrance that showed she knew? That evinced fear or apprehension or even the excitement of waiting for a boyfriend to come over? Berman hadn’t noted. He described what she wore, the time, and anyone who entered five minutes to either side of her. The problem was, they didn’t know what they were looking for. No one yet knew what they were hunting. Berman had noted anyone who seemed suspicious, who looked up at the camera on entering or left in a hurry during the timeframe of the murder. He’d printed off a few blurry stills but the closer she looked the more the images disintegrated into discrete dots like one of those French Sunday picnic paintings at the National Gallery. She would have to watch the CCTV footage for herself. The DC had done his job but it was always worth doing it twice.

  The statement from the porter was equally thin and blurry. Jennings had noted that he was a long-term drunk, halfway into some savage bender, reeking of whisky and almost incoherent. The porter said Grace seemed a quiet girl, sometimes brought friends round‚ but there were no complaints and he’d never had to knock on her door and tell her to keep it down. He said most of the tenants were animals and so the ones who kept quiet stuck out. She put the statement to one side, a steadily growing pile of leads she wanted to go through again, and moved on to the list of items found in Grace’s flat.

  It was sad what constituted a life. Sad that when all else was gone these pathetic remnants should sum up an entire span on this earth. Our belongings tie us to the world but they remain after we’re gone, mute witnesses. Things take on significance out of context. She knew this was why Carrigan had blown up the shots of Grace’s wounds and pinned them to the wall. Repeat something often enough and sometimes, eventually, a gravel of truth will slip out.

  She bent down and unpacked the next box, trying not to think about the boxes in her flat, and removed a stack of papers and books. Carrigan had asked her to take a cursory look at Grace’s university stuff, the usual shaking out of pages and scanning for underlinings or torn diary entries hiding beneath the covers. She wasn’t sure if he was sidelining her or not. This was a pointless task: the chances of finding anything among Grace’s personal belongings were slim. She remembered Branch’s comments, that she had a report to hand in to him in two days’ time. Her head began to ache.

  She unpacked the rest of the boxes. She took out books and photocopied sheets, graphs and maps. She spread them on the table, separated them into groups and started with the books that had been on Grace’s bookshelf.

  Books about torture and politics. Books about the psychology of pain and military interrogation manuals. A book on Nazi doctors, another on the Pinochet regime, one on SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s secret police force. Several books on Ugandan history, Idi Amin taking precedence. Other books on Equatorial Guinea and Libya, possibly samizdat, printed on cheap material, falling apart, the print fading, the books all buckled as if imitating the flow of water. There were no works of fiction, nothing for entertainment or leisure.
There were Amnesty International reports, photocopied hastily and randomly collected in a binder. Graphs whose abstract delineations crazed her vision. She shook the books out, riffled through the pages looking for cryptic notes or hidden messages, but nothing more was revealed. She made a note to request the books for further perusal.

  Apart from books and clothes there was little else. She ticked off all the things present on the landlord’s inventory, noting nothing missing or cracked or broken. This left her with copies of the Guardian, the Economist, the Daily Monitor and East Africa Today. A handbag containing lipstick and powder, an Oyster card, a Ugandan passport, a packet of Silk Cut and a mobile phone. She made a note to requisition the Oyster card, surprised that the DCs had been so sloppy. If it was a registered card she would be able to trace Grace’s movements over the last few weeks from this one small piece of plastic.

  The mobile phone had been scanned and the address book copied and printed onto a sheet of paper. She stared at the names, some only initials, amazed at how few people were in Grace’s list of contacts. Did she really have this few friends or could she remember the important phone numbers in her head? She made a note to find out how long Grace had owned this phone and to see whether any of the call logs could be traced. There was nothing obvious in the names, no ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’, or anything else signifying family. One of the DCs would have to spend a long morning glued to the phone.

  She unpacked the last box, the one she’d been dreading. It contained all of Grace’s dissertation work. There were hundreds of printouts from the internet. Pages of hastily scrawled notes. Photocopies of journal articles annotated and marked. She scanned through some of these, dense theoretical arguments for the use of violence, dense theoretical arguments against it. One sheaf, almost a hundred pages long, seemed to consist of nothing but names and numbers, the names all African, the numbers seemingly random as if picked from a lottery card. There were pages of graphs, economic analyses, the glyphs and scribbles like some arcane language she couldn’t decipher. Over twenty or thirty badly printed pamphlets, Marxist rhetoric in bold caps and exclamation marks. Several were heavily underlined, the name Black-Throated Wind appearing in gothic type on their covers. There was something about the phrase that made her quickly put the pamphlets to one side. She stared at the image emblazoned on their covers: a heart free of its body, suspended in space, dripping thin red strings of blood.