A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  ‘That’s me?’ he said, pointing to the left-hand side of the photo.

  Geneva nodded. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Where did you find this?’ He tried to make out the two dark body-shaped smears with their arms round each other at the centre of the print.

  ‘Press took it when you left Uganda.’

  He turned towards her. ‘Did Branch ask you to do this? To investigate me?’ He dropped the clipping onto the table.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she replied, though that was exactly what Branch had asked her to do – how to explain that she’d fudged her reports in Carrigan’s favour? ‘I stumbled on it while looking into Ngomo at SOAS.’

  Something crossed his face. ‘But we weren’t in one of Ngomo’s camps, we were in an army camp.’ He picked up the photo and looked at it again. She could see the sudden concern darkening his expression.

  ‘They get it wrong a lot of the time,’ she offered, realising that something had changed between them and that what she’d thought would be a peace offering had turned out to be anything but.

  ‘You should have been looking into Ngomo, not wasting your time on me.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’ Geneva began as the door opened and DC Jennings walked in then stopped, sensing he’d disturbed something.

  ‘What is it?’ Carrigan snapped.

  Jennings looked down at the floor, unprepared for Carrigan’s tone, the icy silence between the two detectives. ‘I . . . I’ve just come back from—’

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ Carrigan wiped some Chinese food off his shirt and stared at the young DC.

  Jennings started to say something then changed his mind. ‘DC Singh’s out at SOAS trying to track down Bayanga. Berman’s getting a fix on where Bayanga sent his emails from. Um . . . I’m not sure where Karlson is, said he was following a lead.’

  Carrigan nodded. ‘And what about Gabriel?’

  Jennings stared down at his shoes. ‘He hasn’t been to lectures today, hasn’t been seen at SOAS at all and he missed his weekly AAC meeting.’

  ‘Shit.’ Carrigan looked up at the whiteboard. Gabriel had been either the last or the last but one person to see Ngomo alive.

  ‘He’s gone, sir,’ Jennings continued. ‘I tried his flat, no one there, his phone’s been disconnected and the mobile’s just going through to a dead tone.’

  Was it possible that Bayanga and Gabriel were working together? Carrigan rested his head in his palm – nearly two weeks into this case and there was still so much they didn’t know. He thought about the surveillance car he’d reassigned to Ursula’s house – would they have seen Ngomo’s killer if he’d left them to do their job? How long before Branch found out?

  ‘We’ve got to keep trying,’ Carrigan muttered pointlessly, then saw that Jennings was still there, shuffling nervously as if trying to dance without moving his feet. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Umm . . . sir . . . I was trying to tell you when I came in.’ He stopped, looked for confirmation to go on, took the silence as such. ‘I’ve just talked to the SOCOs. They’re almost done in the general’s flat. They found some letters hidden under the carpet in the top room.’

  Carrigan frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

  ‘I tried, sir.’ Jennings was looking paler and paler.

  ‘Well?’ Carrigan had retrieved the photo of himself and now held it in his hands as if it were some obscure talisman, his fingertips daubed black by the printer’s ink.

  ‘There were seven letters, sir. They found them under a loose bit of carpet next to Ngomo’s desk. They’re going over them right now, said they’ll be done in a couple of hours and have them delivered to you.’

  Carrigan checked his watch, he wanted to go over to the SOCO lab immediately and see why the letters were the only thing Ngomo had bothered to hide but he was due to meet Myra Bentley for the results of the post-mortem on Ngomo. ‘Did you at least get a chance to look at them?’

  Jennings nodded. ‘Only a brief glimpse, you know what the SOCOs are like – but enough to see that each letter started with Dear Daddy,’ he paused as Geneva and Carrigan took this in, both of them looking down at the photos chronicling the moments of Grace’s life, ‘and each was signed, Your loving daughter.’

  31

  Carrigan stared at the shrivelled lump of meat on the table. Spotlights bathed it in harsh white glare but couldn’t hide the labyrinthine passageways and dappled folds of the dark-hued tissue.

  They’d had to cut open Ngomo’s neck to remove it.

  He bent down but there was no smell to it, the thing already worn and dry as antique leather. He tried to imagine it once beating, a small red muscle sustaining life, and a sharp pain flared behind his eyes. He stepped back, felt the iron grip of Myra Bentley’s fingers on his arm.

  ‘Too much last night, huh?’

  He could swear she was enjoying this. He steadied himself on the table and nodded, it was easier than trying to explain the real reason. He popped two more painkillers, the bitter residue coating his tongue, the taste of Chinese food still lingering in his mouth. He couldn’t wait to get out of here, back to the incident room, wondering if the letters had arrived from forensics yet, what new secrets they would reveal.

  ‘I do love you, Jack Carrigan,’ the pathologist smirked, taking a long flat spatula made of shiny steel from her instrument table. ‘Never fail to surprise me.’ She used the spatula to prod and poke at the heart. ‘Can’t wait to tell my colleagues about this.’

  Carrigan waited for her to expand but she was hunched over the table like a human comma. He stared down at the heart – it looked like something you would find in a field, a fire-blackened root vegetable of some sort.

  ‘It’s what killed him, in case you’re wondering.’ She put the scalpel to one side. ‘Stuffed deep down his throat, crushing the windpipe. Someone held it down until the job was done.’ She pointed to two shallow indentations on the surface of the heart. Carrigan leant forward and saw the distinctive ridges belonging to a set of fingerprints.

  ‘Forty years I’ve been doing this and I’ve never seen a person choked to death on someone else’s heart.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re entertained.’

  Bentley continued prodding, making the organ emit small popping sounds. ‘Made my day, this has.’

  Carrigan looked down, saw the floor spinning away from him and blinked. All he could smell was the sharp bite of disinfectant and underneath that something sweeter and far more sickly.

  ‘It’s definitely Grace Okello’s heart,’ the pathologist continued, her voice as affectless as if she were reading out train times. ‘Not that we have that many stray hearts, but we did check.’

  ‘This was her father.’ Carrigan was glad to see – if only for the slightest of intervals – the look of professional curiosity wipe itself from Bentley’s face.

  ‘A poetic sense of humour, your guy.’

  Carrigan looked at the old woman. ‘Too poetic.’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Bentley continued, interrupting his thoughts. She was still using the blunt end of the spatula to prod the heart. ‘To get it down Ngomo’s throat it was pummelled and squashed totally out of shape and yet look,’ another prod, the black muscle collapsed then went back to normal as if nothing had happened, ‘even dried out as it is, it retains its shape.’ She finished her inspection and turned towards Carrigan. ‘The resilience of human tissue is really a thing to behold, don’t you think?’

  It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed how she spoke about the human body as if it were some deity, enthralling in its absolute mystery. He stared down at the organ and thought how small it was, he’d never thought a heart would be that small. That feeling crept into his belly again, uneasy and memory-soaked, but he told himself it was only too much coffee, too many pills, too many days in a row.

  ‘Oh, and I thought I probably should mention it,’ the pathologist continued, ‘not that it has any bearing on the case, or none that I can see anyway . . .�
��

  ‘Please.’ He just wanted to get out of there, out of the harsh bright lights, the gleaming metal furniture, the humming of the dead behind their freezer doors.

  ‘Ngomo had cancer.’ Bentley coughed into her handkerchief. ‘Pancreatic, pretty far gone, probably knew he had it too. Only a few months left. It would have been very painful . . .’ She stopped for a moment as if to contemplate the gravity of this. ‘Though, I dare say, this was probably worse.’

  32

  He came in soaked as a dog, his hair matted and wild, shirt stuck to his skin, his jacket droopy and waterlogged. She smelled the coffee before she saw him. Turned and there he was, wet with hooded eyes, two small cups of espresso in his hands.

  Geneva looked up from the table where she’d been separating and arranging the letters. ‘Managed to hold your lunch down this time?’

  Carrigan smiled and put the coffee down next to her, unwrapped a massive Florentine encrusted with pistachios and broke it in half. ‘Get your blood sugar up,’ he said, passing it to her.

  She took it, bit in and let the wonderful taste submerge her senses as Carrigan told her what the pathologist had found. The biscuit suddenly tasted flat in her mouth, bitter and dull. ‘It’s as if he had it planned all along,’ she said, using a napkin to wipe the crumbs and coffee stains off her lips.

  But Carrigan didn’t answer – he was looking down at the table, the neat row of letters flattened and laid out side by side, the same handwriting, cursive and stylish, adorning each envelope. ‘The SOCOs find anything?’

  She finished the Florentine and rubbed her hands on her jeans. ‘Only Ngomo’s fingerprints. Everything else was too smudged.’

  He took one of the letters and held it up. The paper smelled of chemicals and dripped a white powder like dandruff. He sniffed the envelope, luxuriating in the sharp odour of the fingerprint reagent, wondering how long the SOCOs had spent with these letters, white hooded figures in a silent room poring over yellowing vellum with their powders and brushes as if divining some ancient mystery; modern-day alchemists transmuting invisibility into identification. ‘You’ve read them?’

  Geneva nodded. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure how long you’d take.’

  ‘Glad you did, save us some time.’ He took a last sip of his espresso and binned the cup. ‘So, anything we can use?’

  Geneva looked down at the letters spread in front of her. ‘You want the long or short version?’

  ‘How about medium?’ Carrigan smiled.

  ‘I’ve put them in chronological order. The first one’s from eighteen months ago and the most recent from two weeks back.’

  The envelopes were almost identical: white, rimmed with a border of blue flowers, their stamps peeling from repeated handling. The paper inside was thick and watermarked but otherwise showed no peculiarities. It had been folded and refolded so many times that creases ran like scars through each third of the letter.

  ‘The earliest one sounds like it’s the first time she’s written to him since Ngomo left her and her mother seven years ago.’ Her voice had thickened from the coffee and Carrigan sat back in the chair, listening as Geneva recounted Grace’s attempts to reconnect with a father who she’d thought was lost to her.

  ‘In the first letter, Grace tells Ngomo that she’s studying in London. She talks about how she spent her teenage years trying to understand who he was. The father she remembered or this man whose name people only ever mentioned in whispers. It feels quite cold and formal, as if she’s writing to an old teacher or something.’

  Geneva put the letter carefully back in its envelope and Carrigan finished writing his notes. The sound of the pipes mumbling in the walls, the hiss and steam of the motorway outside, their own breathing in the small room. The silence filled with images of Grace lying on her death bed, the bite marks, the hair matted with blood, the last words of the video, Grace’s final words – Help me, Daddy. Please help me – now exploding like a depth charge in their heads.

  Geneva picked up the next three letters. ‘She writes a lot about being in London.’ She looked up at Carrigan and began reading: ‘There is a coldness to this city that is like death. I feel it in the huddle of crowds on the Underground, in the faces of the people serving in shops, in this dark block of flats that feels like a thousand coffins buried in the earth. I do not think I will ever grow to like it here. They tell me‚ how can you say this when your country is full of poverty and violence and chaos‚ but I do not see anything to replace it here but brightly-lit shops full of things I would never need. Where is the colour and light of Uganda? The long nights of autumn?

  ‘I am practising getting my accent right. Our vowels and consonants are like the land we lived on; harsh and staccato, full of sudden stops and empty spaces. When I open my mouth I can see their eyes shade, the whole history of Africa coming back to them in the lilt of a sentence, something they would rather forget. So now I am learning to speak like someone who belongs here and I have noticed how it changes the very things I say, not just the way I say them. Maybe this is what happens to all immigrants – what they love to call assimilation – but I feel as if I am stranded at some point I will never be again, my past and homeland only a memory to me now and this country still so distant.

  ‘But I am becoming too broody, that’s what this weather does to you, you sit inside all the time and stare at the world from your window as if it were something other from you, and you will always be the figure behind glass trying but never fully understanding the events that take place without. I think windows are what separates them from us. I think when they invented windows they began to shut out the world, to enclose themselves, and that is how these Europeans lost track of the world and became only interested in themselves. I blame the window! Okay, Daddy, I’m rambling now and I really began this letter to say something else but somehow I kept pushing it back.’

  Geneva stopped, took a sip of her coffee. ‘She wants to meet him, settle the past. The fourth letter, dated just after Christmas, talks about their first meeting. She remarks on how good he looks. A lunch they enjoyed in town.’ Geneva paused, dying for a cigarette. ‘From her account, the first meeting was tense but by the next letter she talks about Ngomo’s interest in her thesis, her unexpected delight that he supports what she’s doing. This is where it gets interesting.’ She slid one of the letters towards Carrigan. ‘We thought it was Gabriel who got Grace involved in the AAC but it was the other way round.’

  ‘Grace set up the AAC?’ He fingered the letter, wondering how many times Ngomo had read it, all those nights alone in that house, the train thundering past every few minutes like a hard jolt of memory.

  ‘She and Ngomo talk a lot about direct action, setting up a group that would address the problems in Uganda. She tells Ngomo about Gabriel and how he would be the perfect frontman for this group. Ngomo agrees and promises he’ll send money for the cause. Something happens here, just after the Christmas break.’ Geneva picked up another envelope. ‘In those first letters Grace is very cool and withdrawn, but after they’ve met a few times she accepts Ngomo’s justifications wholeheartedly, no longer questioning him – listen to this:

  ‘You told me that I was doing a good thing, not just for our country but for you too, and then when I looked surprised you told me how much the past weighs on you, how the stories of who you are have become the truth. I know you did bad things, you told me yourself some of these. But that is who you are. This I accept. And that is who we are too. Ugandans. We have to live in a world that is so different from the one of my fellow students that they cannot understand it as we cannot understand the lives of ants. Our country has been ripped apart from every side and I believe you when you said joining Kony was the only way to protect your family and your people.

  ‘She goes from questioning his actions to being an apologist for them.’ Geneva explained. ‘There’s one letter where she talks almost exclusively about the aid workers’ murder:

  ‘I thank you for your honesty. Th
at means more to me than the deeds you have done. I believe you when you say you had nothing to do with the death of the aid workers in your camp and that you can prove this. I look forward very much to our next meeting and the documents you promised to hand over. I think you thought at first that this project of mine will separate us forever but, Father, it has only brought us closer together here in this grey city and I will always be your daughter, the past cannot change that—’

  The door to the incident room crashed open, ripping them both away from the spell of Grace’s words, the sound of massed footsteps and heavy breathing suddenly filling the small dark room.

  Branch was holding the door open for the two Ugandan diplomats who’d been in his office a couple of days ago. The older diplomat caught Carrigan’s eye and smiled.

  ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Carrigan bolted up from the chair.

  Branch raised his hand as if to shoo a pesky child. Carrigan saw the calluses and bruises on his skin, the florid complexion of his face, the way Branch’s eyes couldn’t meet his. ‘This is Mr Ondutu and Mr Akimbi from the Ugandan embassy.’ Branch looked down at the table where the letters lay spread out. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ he said, his voice stumbling.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  Branch shrugged. ‘They have permission to take all material found in the house in Willesden Green.’

  ‘What?’ Carrigan exploded. ‘This is bullshit.’ He placed his body between the table and the men. ‘This is our case and important evidence in a murder. No fucking way are you going to confiscate it.’

  Branch put his hand softly on Carrigan’s shoulder. ‘There’s nothing I can do, Jack; this is higher than me. I’m afraid you’ll have to hand over those letters.’

  Carrigan knocked Branch’s hand off. The super was sweating heavily though the room was cold.

  ‘Please take your hands off those,’ the older Ugandan commanded Geneva, who was busily trying to fold and sequester the letters. ‘They are no longer your property.’ He made a move past Branch but Carrigan stopped him, laying an arm across the man’s chest.