The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  ‘That’s how easy it is to disappear.’ Detective Sergeant Maria Lando leaned back in her chair and brushed the top of her thumb along the crucifix dangling from her neck. ‘Someone found her staggering around Walthamstow sixteen hours later. No idea how she got there or what happened to her in those missing hours. They took her to the local station when they realised the state she was in. The local station called us and a doctor examined the woman. She’d been gang-raped. The man who picked her up took her to his friends and they had their fun with her then put her back in the car and dropped her off outside the train station.’

  Geneva couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. The woman wobbled on pause. If she could only have stayed frozen in that one moment she could have arrested the pull of the future, but the second she’d opened the car door, it had snapped shut for good.

  ‘There’s more if you’re interested.’ Lando turned on a sleek chrome espresso machine and popped a capsule in the slot. She was small and slight and bubbled with a fizzy energy as if all her molecules had been more densely compacted within her tiny frame. Her hair exploded from her head in thick black tangles. She wore a tight black polo neck, black jeans and black boots that reached up to her knees. The crucifix was small and silver and her movements were precise and measured. They’d known each other since Hendon, often cruised bars together, but Geneva was here today because Lando worked for Sapphire, the Met’s sex crimes unit.

  After the briefing, Geneva had taken Carrigan aside and explained that there was something about the abduction she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but which felt a little off. She’d expected him to disagree but he’d simply nodded. If she didn’t know better she would have thought him drunk.

  Geneva turned away from the screen. ‘I think I’ve seen enough. I just wanted to know if it was plausible.’

  ‘Any crime you can think of – someone’s already committed it. That’s my guiding principle when I’m not sure. I call it Lando’s Law.’

  They shared the kind of smile that allows you not to go mad, not to let the anger and frustration drown your heart when you’ve just watched a movie of someone’s life being stolen in the blink of an eye.

  ‘How often do you get these cases?’

  ‘A lot more than people realise.’ Lando sipped her latte, fingers of steam curling through her hair. The wall behind her was entirely covered in photos. Glossy 8 by 10s of both male and female faces.

  ‘People disappear and most of them, despite our best efforts, never come back.’ Lando looked over at Geneva. ‘Not quite what we signed up for, is it?’

  Geneva exhaled slowly, the movement barely registering on her body. ‘No, but I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.’

  ‘Me neither. Imagine how boring civilian life would be?’ Lando took another sip. ‘Now, tell me about your case.’

  She listened intently as Geneva recounted Madison’s story, her thick black eyebrows crossed in concentration, her right hand flicking up to her chest every now and then.

  ‘Does that seem like a typical MO to you?’

  Lando put down her cup. ‘Yes and no. Everything you’ve told me sounds like the kind of thing we see every day. Everything apart from that there’s two of them. Predators like to pick off strays. This is unusual and suggests someone bolder, more experienced. What connects the girls?’

  ‘They were both staying in the same hostel.’

  Lando sighed. ‘We see it a lot in those places. It’s the perfect victim pool. They’re transient, away from home, don’t recognise danger because the cultural signifiers are so different and no one reports them missing because no one knows where they’re supposed to be at any given time.’

  Geneva stared at the wall of faces. ‘What happened? Was it always this bad?’

  ‘We stopped believing God was watching our every step. We realised we could get away with anything as long as we weren’t caught. That’s what happened.’

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to be safer nowadays? With CCTV?’

  Lando stopped and thought about this. ‘Probably. But what technology gives with one hand it takes away with the other – we may think we’re safe but how is a camera going to stop a rapist?’

  Geneva frowned. ‘How many of these cases get closed?’

  ‘Less than three per cent. It’s almost impossible to prove anything unless you have physical evidence and most victims don’t come directly to us – they’re too ashamed and stunned by what’s happened. They go home and take a hot shower and scrub themselves clean and there goes all our evidence. With drug-facilitated rape, three in four don’t seek help until at least twelve hours later. By then there’s not much we can do except take their statements and file them away with all the others.’

  ‘Drug-facilitated rape?’ Geneva looked across at the faces staring back at her, wondering whether they were victim or perpetrator.

  Lando brushed her crucifix and nodded. ‘We don’t like to call it date rape any more – that suggests there’s a link between the rapist and his vic. DFR is a more neutral term, doesn’t skew the jury. But, shit, even if they go down they’re out in four or five years and this sort always do it again.’

  ‘We should lock them up for good?’ Geneva smiled but Lando didn’t seem to get the joke.

  ‘Retributive rape,’ Lando replied. ‘For every rape the perp commits he gets sentenced to two rapes – only he doesn’t know when they’ll occur. He might be raped on his way back from the courtroom or in ten years’ time when he’s forgotten all about it. Let those bastards feel for the rest of their lives the kind of fear they make their victims feel. That’s the only true justice there can possibly be.’

  Lando stared at her, freaking Geneva out a little. She checked back through her notes. Found question marks and inconsistencies. ‘What about the drugs they use?’

  Lando shook her curls loose. ‘What do you think the most popular date rape drug is?’

  ‘Rohypnol?’

  ‘You’ve been reading too many trashy newspapers. Rohypnol only accounts for one per cent of cases. Over ninety per cent are alcohol-related. Couldn’t be easier – buy the girl a drink then another and another. Or watch and wait.’

  ‘Watch and wait?’ Geneva thought of all those nights she’d spent in bars, letting a man buy her drinks until she got bored of him or didn’t and took him home.

  ‘There’s two types of drug rapist,’ Lando said. ‘One type spikes the drinks then waits for them to take effect. The second type, much more common, simply lets nature go about its business. Hang around any pub at closing time and you’ll see women stagger out who’ve drunk themselves into a state where anyone can take advantage.’

  ‘It wasn’t booze,’ Geneva said and explained about the vial she’d found. ‘This was planned and highly organised.’

  Lando wrote something down on a pad in front of her. ‘How did the girl seem to you when you interviewed her?’

  Geneva thought back to the hot room, the rasp of fingernails echoing across grey walls. ‘She was both spaced out and quite lucid at the same time, which was weird. She’d nod off then snap back into normality. She was paranoid, scratching herself, touching things, the table, the chair. She seemed to have lost all sense of time.’ Geneva saw Lando’s mouth curl tight. ‘What?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good at all.’ Lando pulled a large reference book out of a drawer and started flicking through the pages.

  ‘You see this kind of drug often?’

  ‘No. And that bothers me. From what you’re describing this is some form of hallucinogen. Rapists nearly always favour drugs that subdue and make their prey pliant.’

  ‘The opposite of an hallucinogen?’

  Lando nodded, her eyes small and black. ‘An hallucinogen or psychotropic would produce a very different reaction from a sedative like Rohypnol or alcohol. With the latter two you might not even know what was happening until you woke up in agony the next morning. With a psychotropic like you’ve been describing, you would not only b
e acutely aware of everything happening to you but it would be magnified a thousand times.’

  11

  Two bouncers stood either side of the entrance like tuxedoed columns. A sign depicting a pair of stylised lips hung above an unmarked white door. The bouncers didn’t say anything when he flashed his warrant card. The door opened onto a set of stairs. Music and heat rushed up to greet Carrigan as he made his way down into The Last Good Kiss.

  Lasers and flickering neon reflected off swirling mirror-balls. Fluorescents hissed and blinked. A set of coloured lights pulsed to the beat. To Carrigan’s left was a wide horseshoe bar. Four men in suits were draped over it like figures from a painting. A bartender was going about his business, moving with precise calm between the dirty glasses and stacked-up bottles.

  On the dancefloor, a girl was swaying alone, slow and drunk, her hair obscuring her face. Booths lined the walls, velvet chairs hiding tables replete with buckets of champagne and gold-ring-encrusted fingers. The soundtrack was early eighties pop, synthesisers and strained falsettos, thin and alien, a music consisting of hiss and sputter only.

  Carrigan scanned the walls and ceiling but saw no sign of cameras. The most surveilled city in the world and yet when you needed coverage there wasn’t any. CCTV prowled public spaces but the job drew you into darker provinces where neither God nor cameras could penetrate.

  He took a seat at the far end of the bar, away from the slumped drunks and migraining mirror-balls. The double espresso he’d sunk was counteracting the pills, shaking his body with mild electric rushes, but it couldn’t make him forget.

  If only he’d listened to Geneva then maybe Anna would still be alive. He’d fucked up. His mind had been on other things – the audit, his mother, the blue DPS file – but none of that mattered. The world didn’t grant you any dispensations. Geneva had been right and he’d been wrong not to listen to her.

  The bartender was tall and so heavily muscled it looked as if his shirt was about to split open. A small name tag said Alexi. He finished making an enormous red cocktail, handed it over, then asked Carrigan what he wanted.

  ‘I want to know if you were working here on Friday.’ Carrigan moved closer so that the bartender could hear him above the shrieking synths.

  ‘What you care?’ The man’s accent was old-worldly and heavily vowelled. The muscles on his neck grew taut as he leaned forward, only an inch or two separating him from Carrigan, his fingers strangling the dark rag in his hands. ‘I have my visa. I am legal here.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ Carrigan replied, not moving a millimetre. ‘But that’s not what I’m interested in.’ He took out his warrant card and laid it on the bar, making sure the drinkers opposite could see what he was doing. ‘Again. Were you working here Friday?’

  The bartender put down the cloth. He cast a quick glance at a red door near the back of the club. ‘I’m always working here. Seven days a week. Why?’

  Carrigan took out the photo of Anna and Madison. He laid it flat on the bar, feeling the sticky residue of spilled drinks cling and suck at the paper. ‘Did these two women come in here on Friday night?’

  The bartender leaned over and looked at the photo. ‘They were here.’

  ‘What state were they in?’

  Alexi smiled. ‘What do you think? This is a bar. They were drinking. Having fun.’

  Carrigan forced himself to unclench his fingers. ‘Did they seem drunk at all? Out of it?’

  The bartender shrugged. ‘Friday night, I don’t remember. Too many people. But these two, they come in here often and they like to drink. Why you interested in them? What have they done?’

  ‘They came in together?’

  Alexi nodded then changed his mind. ‘The blonde came first. The other, maybe ten, fifteen minutes later.’

  ‘Did you notice if the blonde had finished her drink by the time her friend arrived?’

  Alexi squinted. ‘No idea. But they didn’t order the next round for maybe five minutes after the second girl showed up.’

  Carrigan wondered if Madison had helped Anna finish off her first drink. It would explain one mystery at least. He looked down, noticing the ridge of bruises on Alexi’s left hand. ‘Were they doing drugs?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Carrigan glanced down the bar. The men were staring at their drinks with a remarkable degree of concentration which, if they’d utilised it in life, would surely not have led them here. ‘Was there anybody with them on Friday night?’

  Alexi laughed. ‘Look around you. You think people come for the atmosphere? The music?’ The drunk dancer had been joined by an older man, his pot belly protruding from his torso like a shelf. The two were swaying silently to the music.

  ‘Were they that type of girl?’ Carrigan knew clubs like this honeycombed the wealthier parts of the city, places where rich men and young women could meet and transact. ‘Were they the type to pick up older men?’

  ‘I never seen them do that, no,’ Alexi replied, nodding to a customer across the bar. ‘But they come here, not go to some other bar, you know, and they’re happy to receive a few free drinks on any night, so who knows?’

  ‘Anything unusual take place this Friday night?’

  The bartender shook his head and turned to serve the other customers. Carrigan shot his arm across the bar and grabbed Alexi’s wrist. He waited until the bartender realised struggle was useless and pointed to the photo on the counter. ‘This girl was murdered. We found her body this morning. So, forget your customers for a moment, close your eyes, and think.’

  Carrigan let go and saw Alexi take another look at the photo, his eyes squinting deep into memory. A moment of deliberation hung in the bartender’s eyes. ‘There was someone.’ He glanced up at Carrigan, his lips slightly parted. ‘Middle Eastern guy, maybe late fifties. He was talking to them and they were making fun of him but I don’t think he realised. They argued some. Finally, I guess he’d had enough because he slammed his drink down and walked off. That’s how I remember, shit, the fucker left orange juice all over my bar.’

  ‘He wasn’t drinking alcohol?’

  ‘No. Just orange juice.’

  Carrigan wondered whether this was because the man was Middle Eastern and therefore likely to be Muslim or because he wanted to keep himself sober for later. ‘Was he a regular?’

  The bartender nodded.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have CCTV in here?’

  The bartender laughed.

  ‘Did you see him get close to their drinks?’

  ‘Drinks?’

  ‘Someone spiked their drinks then abducted one of the girls from the alley behind your club. We found her body in an abandoned house this morning.’

  Alexi leaned forward, the rag squeezed between his fingers. ‘Someone messed with my drinks?’ He seemed more chagrined by this than by the murder.

  ‘Easiest thing in the world for a bartender to do – mix the drinks and add a little surprise for the pretty ones.’

  Carrigan saw Alexi’s jaw clench, veins surfacing in his neck. ‘This is bullshit. You think if someone was messing with my drinks, I’d not notice? I work hard, okay. I work here all week so my father – no, fuck it. I don’t have to explain myself to you.’ He glared at Carrigan, his eyes blazing cold pale blue.

  Carrigan slid his card along the bar. ‘No, you certainly don’t,’ he replied. ‘And a man like you wouldn’t let the murder of a young girl go unavenged either, am I correct?’

  12

  There were over a hundred registered hostels in the Bayswater area and probably twice as many that weren’t. Carrigan could see at least ten punctuating the treeless street, some marked with a bouquet of foreign flags, others with nothing more than a small brass plaque or a list of pencilled rates tacked up in the front window.

  The Milgram was different. It was one of the oldest buildings in Bayswater, dating back to Victorian times, and had housed one of the most prestigious private schools in Lon
don. The school closed down during the eighties recession and lay derelict until the mid-nineties boom when it was converted into a large and sprawling hostel. It occupied its own block on a street midway between Queensway and Paddington and lodged up to two hundred guests. Guidebooks and websites raved and five-starred it, but Carrigan knew it was less for the architecture and history than for the infamous all-night parties that regularly took place there.

  The outer building was dark and sprawling, composed of several wings, all in different styles, the upper floors trailing off into sculpted cornices and gothic turrets. A strange not-quite-right sense of perspective gave the appearance that it was leaning towards you regardless of where you stood. The main structure was surrounded by a large gravel drive and a ring of oak trees shielding it from the street. The front yard held a scattering of lawn chairs and rusty picnic tables. At the far end, two young women were engaged in conversation, bowed towards each other, a taut intensity in both gesture and facial expression. Their heads shot up when they heard Carrigan unlatch the gate. They looked from Carrigan to each other then disappeared down a small alley that led to the garden. As Carrigan and Geneva crossed the courtyard they caught the heady smell of weed suspended in the still air, sharp and sweet and slightly caustic.

  They climbed a wide set of stairs flanked by enormous armatures, the stonework cracked and crumbling. The front door was open and they stepped into the main hall. A high panelled ceiling arched above, criss-crossed by dark beams, barely visible in the gloom.

  ‘How come you didn’t send Singh or Jennings to do this?’

  ‘You know why,’ Carrigan said and Geneva nodded as they made their way across the empty hall towards a small reception desk at the far end. ‘Any luck getting hold of Madison?’