by Stav Sherez
It had arrived yesterday, in his letterbox like all the others, anonymous missives posted once a month for the last year and a half. A couple of weeks ago he’d finally worked out who his mysterious benefactor was but he liked it this way, a secret conversation conducted through the printed words of strangers.
He stopped at a late-night coffee shop and picked up a quad espresso and two croissants. He parked opposite the hostel and sat in the car, sipping the hot syrupy drink, sprinkling crumbs over his jacket and rereading the case files. The killer had probably sat out here and surveilled the hostel for several days, getting to know its rhythms, when staff shifts changed and the desk was left unoccupied. Carrigan watched as a steady stream of backpackers trickled in and out, some checking in after long flights, others with crates of beer under their arms, heading out for the endless night. A building site occupied the opposite corner. It promised luxury apartments and a platinum lifestyle. He’d already forgotten what had previously stood there, the city continually remaking itself and obscuring its own past. London had changed so much since his childhood, it was almost unrecognisable. These shifts were not only topographical. As the city grew and became more unruly, it split into discrete fragments, a Balkanisation in miniature – community against community, religion against religion, the rich against the poor, man against woman. Carrigan looked up and saw the ghosts of V2s raining down on Moorgate and Morley, Limehouse and Lancaster Gate, the wobbly descent and unearthly hiss, the stunned wreckage and cold tea served in the dazed communal dawn.
The sight of Max exiting the hostel snapped him out of reverie. There was an urgency in the manager’s manner that had been totally absent earlier. Max had a spring in his step and a look in his eyes Carrigan knew well.
Max’s car, a yellow Cortina, emerged from the hostel driveway two minutes later, turning left and heading north. Carrigan waited a beat, then started the engine. He kept several car lengths between them. It was chucking-out time and the roads were clogged with taxis and buses and it was easy to follow Max without being spotted. Max took a right down Chepstow Road and drove past the elegant Georgian terraces and pet boutiques then turned the corner into another world.
The Westbourne Park estate stood dark and eerie, a deserted Crusader castle buttressed by high walls and shuttered windows. Rough sleepers squatted in bus stops and doorways, hugging a bottle, a dog or a cardboard blanket. Carrigan watched as three vagrants pulled apart a black rubbish bag, ripping into it and emerging with a chicken leg and two slices of pizza. Packs of dogs roamed freely in empty lots, fighting with the winos and each other over scraps of food.
Carrigan smelled Golborne Road before he reached it – a unique and delicious mix of smoky fish, doughnuts and skunk. He eased the accelerator and slowed to a crawl as Max swung into a narrow cul-de-sac. Carrigan cruised down Golborne Road until he spotted Max’s Cortina near the entrance to one of the estates. He parked his car and waited. The long grey shadow of Trellick Tower occluded half the street. Young men stood on corners and whispered into phones or kept their eyes peeled on the road ahead. Carrigan knew they’d already spotted him but he wasn’t here for that.
Max emerged from the estate eighteen minutes later. He looked as if all his bones had been replaced with rubber substitutes. He staggered out of the gate in a slow-motion stumble, a large beatific smile on his face. He tried to light a cigarette but couldn’t find the tip with his lighter. His jaw hung slackly and his eyes were slitted and puffy. He made it back to the car, managed to get inside, and sat there with the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
Carrigan waited. Ten minutes later, Max snapped awake with a big sloppy grin on his face. He dropped the cigarette, picked it up and lit it, then rolled down the window, The Ramones leaking out, chanting nursery-school mayhem into the night. Max pulled out and headed towards the hostel. But instead of turning down Queensway, Max continued south. At first, Carrigan thought he’d become confused, understandable given the state he was in, but Max’s driving was steady and his direction purposeful.
*
Max stopped the car outside a house on a quiet residential street in Knightsbridge. Not the kind of area Carrigan expected to see him in but Max seemed to know exactly where he was going. The house was a semi-detached Victorian, set off from the street with its own private garage and driveway. Large oak trees protected it from the prying eyes of passers-by. Carrigan stayed in the car. If Max was here to do what Carrigan thought, he’d be out in five minutes.
Forty-seven minutes later, Carrigan’s curiosity got the better of him.
He stepped out of the car into the warm drizzle and looked both ways down the street. There were no CCTV cameras and that was good. Carrigan put on his raincoat and crossed the road. He unlatched the gate and entered the driveway. Thick curtains covered the windows. There was a video intercom yet no security camera above the door. But it wasn’t just that.
There was something too neat about the house, too careful. A car went past and Carrigan flattened himself against a tree and waited for it to disappear then walked up to the front door and pressed the buzzer.
Less than a minute later, a middle-aged woman drowning in an Aran jumper opened the door.
‘What do you want?’ Her voice was harsh with years of smoke and booze, her eyes raking up and down, appraising Carrigan with a professional efficiency.
‘Where is he?’ Carrigan said.
The woman tried to shut the door. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and if you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the police.’
Carrigan smiled and pulled out his warrant card. ‘I am the police,’ he said and brushed her aside as he entered the house.
He walked down a long corridor, studded with solid wooden doors. He should have radioed it in, gone back to the station and followed protocol. But he knew what Max had in his pocket and that Max could not complain without admitting his own wrong-doing.
He heard Max’s cries coming from the second door on the left. He waited just in case it was his mind playing tricks on him but then he heard it again and opened the door and stepped into the room.
He blinked because what he saw made no sense at all.
Max was lying in a large double bed, fully clothed and in the arms of a middle-aged woman, also clothed. A duvet covered their legs. The woman was cuddling Max as he wept in her arms. Candles flickered the room into shadow. Mahler was playing at a discreet volume. Max cried as the woman hugged him tighter to her and then she looked up and noticed Carrigan in the doorway.
‘What you want from me? Why’re you following me? What’ve I done to you?’ Max’s words came out in a torrent of crushed syllables and compacted consonants as he sat in Carrigan’s car. He wailed and pleaded and begged as they drove up Knightsbridge. ‘Why me? Am I so important you have to follow me everywhere?’ He braced his arms against the windshield. ‘Why not someone else? A man is allowed to do what he wants in privacy. You had no right to go in there. None at all.’
‘You’re correct.’ Carrigan stopped at a set of lights. ‘I didn’t. I’m sorry. I heard you crying and I thought someone was hurting you.’
‘My fucking hero.’ Max glanced out the window at a homeless man puking in someone’s front garden. ‘That was private shit, man. It’s not about sex or anything weird like that. There’s nothing illegal about it.’
‘I’m not saying there is.’
‘Plenty of people do it.’
‘You don’t need to justify yourself to me.’
‘I never wanted anyone to see me like that. It fucking kills me that’s what’s in your head right now.’ Max looked away. ‘Fuck it. I bet you have nowhere that makes you feel as good? You don’t, do you? And, besides, I’m not hurting anyone, there’s far worse places than this.’
Carrigan turned down Kensington High Street. ‘Like what? Extreme cuddling? You’re telling me there’s more of these?’
‘Everywhere, man. Whatever you want, whenever you want it. You like licking women�
�s armpits? There’s a private club in Purley specialises in that. You like having your chest shaved by a beautiful woman? Places in Mayfair, Edmonton and Fulham. Like dressing in baby clothes? Perivale and Ealing. Or maybe you get off on having your balls kicked? Norwood and Earslfield. There’s an exclusive club in Haymarket where you can dress up as a concentration camp inmate while the girls strut past you in SS uniforms. In Walthamstow there’s one set up to be an exact replica of the Central Line so you can grope the women as if you were on the 5.15 back from work.’
Carrigan shook his head and parked by the south entrance to Holland Park. The street was deserted apart from the occasional bus and stray cab.
Max looked at the swaying trees outside. He’d put his T-shirt on back to front and his hair was matted down where he’d been lying. ‘You bastard,’ he hissed at Carrigan’s reflection in the window. ‘You can’t do this to me. What went on in there, it wasn’t illegal.’
‘No,’ Carrigan replied. ‘It probably wasn’t, but what you have in your pocket from Golborne Road is.’
Max slumped in his seat and Carrigan knew he was finished. ‘Now, you can come with me to the station and we can process the heroin, or you can tell what you didn’t tell me earlier.’
‘I told you everything I know. I swear.’
Carrigan leaned across the seat. ‘No, Max, you didn’t. You were far too nervous and evasive. At first I thought it was because your place reeked of weed but it wasn’t that, was it?’
‘I’m a nervous guy.’
‘Enough bullshit.’ Carrigan slammed his palm into the dashboard. ‘What didn’t you tell me?’
Max took several deep breaths, the smell of stale cigarettes filling the car, and Carrigan waited to hear how Anna had really loved him and he’d loved her and how age didn’t matter when two people find each other and so it took him a moment to realise what Max had just said and when he did it changed everything.
II
22
There was another girl. Anna wasn’t the first to disappear from the hostel.
Max’s late-night confession rattled through Carrigan’s head as he shut the door and pulled the blinds. Jennings switched on the fluorescents and everything turned buzzy and bright. They were in one of the smaller rooms off the main incident room. It was supposed to be for interviews but Carrigan liked to keep it empty – the one room in the station where you were guaranteed not to be disturbed because it was too far down the corridor for most people to bother.
Carrigan had a double espresso by his side and a raging headache. He couldn’t stop thinking about the mistakes he’d made. He’d ignored the obvious. They should have been looking for patterns, not anomalies. The abduction had been too slick for it to have been the killer’s first time. An investigation had its own momentum and the minute you let up, it slipped away and you could never get it back. This was the most delicate point in a case – the choices he made now would determine the investigation’s success or failure. He popped two codeines from their silvery jacket, dry-swallowed them and went back to the files.
Max’s revelation had been like a concrete block thrown into the investigation pool. It was something they’d all considered and weighed and hoped wasn’t true but now they knew it to be so it only brought forth deeper and darker questions. They would need to go through everything again. To look at it in the light of this and see what new connections presented themselves.
Max had protested and pleaded when Carrigan asked him to explain but he’d eventually come out with it. Katrina Eliot had disappeared in November of last year. Max apologised for not telling Carrigan earlier. He sweated and shook his head and said a lawyer from the management company had visited him a few days after Katrina’s disappearance and explained that if he wanted to keep his job, it would be wise to keep his mouth shut. Things like that weren’t good for business.
Carrigan had ordered up the case files on Katrina Eliot as soon as he got into work. Her last known address – the Milgram. They hadn’t made the link because Katrina had only been reported missing – without a body, the case had stalled. Carrigan had the files laid out in front of him but he found it hard to tear himself away from Katrina’s photo. She was almost identical to Anna – the same blue eyes, long hair and forlorn expression. They could have been sisters.
Katrina Eliot had last been seen at a bowling alley in Bayswater. She’d complained of not feeling well about an hour after arriving and had gone outside to get some fresh air. When she didn’t reappear, her friends assumed she’d gone home. That was the last time anyone had seen her.
She was twenty-one, originally from Leeds, and had just graduated from the University of Lancaster. She’d spent the summer travelling then relocated to London to start her own band. She was staying at the hostel to save money and performing weekly to tiny audiences in the upstairs rooms of decrepit pubs. She liked Eminem and Cath Kidston shoes. She’d moved into the hostel in late August and had gone missing on 15 November. Anna had checked in two weeks later. Their paths hadn’t crossed. It made Hoffman’s theory of a stranger killing more plausible. The drinks. The dizziness. The fact they’d slept in the same room.
Carrigan ignored the phones, went online, and checked out Katrina’s band. They weren’t bad. There was definitely something there between the crackle snap of drums and ringing guitars and Carrigan felt a distinct buzz as the chords tumbled through him. It had been a long time since he’d properly listened to music and, until now, he hadn’t realised quite how much of himself, or the world, he’d shut out. The band had been halfway through recording a demo when Katrina disappeared. There were messages of hope and condolence from friends and fans in the comments section. A tribute site to her life. More ripples.
Carrigan stretched, yawned and popped his shoulders. Lightning illuminated the city as if God were photographing his creation. Jennings was reading and shaking his head simultaneously. The phones kept baying, the rain tattooing the windowsills. Katrina’s parents had travelled down from Leeds and filled out a missing persons report after not hearing from their daughter for two weeks. By then it would have been too late. Every detective knew the initial twenty-four hours of a case were far more likely to yield results, that ninety per cent of abducted women are killed in the first ten hours. Carrigan glanced out at the rain and considered choices and paths taken, his own African odyssey and how it had shunted his life onto an entirely different track, managing to wipe out his youth with one swift flourish. He often wondered if the two tracks – his life as it was now and his life if Africa hadn’t intervened – would meet up at the end or remain for ever separate, disappearing into different horizons.
He made notes and kept reading. It was only the dogged persistence of Katrina’s parents – who turned up on the steps of the station every morning demanding an update from the officer in charge, who bombarded the phones with voicemail messages and flooded cyberspace with pleas and petitions – only this that had turned the case into something more than one of a thousand forgotten reports hiding in the darkness of a computer database. Her parents had been unusually persuasive. Carrigan could see that DI Tony Forsyth of the Mis/Pers unit had marshalled all his resources in trying to find Katrina – he’d interviewed the hostel staff, her friends and bandmates, and constructed a solid timeline for her last day – but he’d never been able to find out what had happened to her after she left the bowling alley.
These kinds of cases were always the hardest. Carrigan thought of them as pure cases. There was no relevant backstory, history or simmering resentments coming to the boil. There was only the killer and how much he’d left of himself. There was CCTV footage of Katrina going up the stairs. Carrigan and Jennings watched it several times, mesmerised by the knowledge of what came after, the small unrecorded moments lost to history.
‘It’s the bloody same.’ Jennings’s voice was dry and uncharacteristically bitter. He took the file from Carrigan and scanned it. ‘Not to mention the hostel.’
‘Look at the pho
tos.’
The similarity between the two girls registered on Jennings’s face, the corners of his mouth turning pale. ‘If there’s two, what’s to say there isn’t more? What’s to say he hasn’t been getting away with this for years?’
‘We don’t know that,’ Carrigan replied, though he’d been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘We might be lucky. We might have discovered him early.’
A car alarm went off in the street below followed by a staggered chorus of canine howls. Jennings was staring off into space instead of going through his stack of files. Carrigan called out his name but there was no reply.
‘Jesus, at least tell me to mind my own business or shut up,’ Carrigan said. ‘But, either way, you need to pull yourself together.’
Jennings continued staring at the rain, transfixed and oblivious as a moviegoer.
‘Look,’ Carrigan continued. ‘I know I’m pretty crap at this side of it but if you need someone to talk to . . .’
‘What’s the point in talking?’ Jennings turned so quickly he knocked a stack of files to the floor. ‘Not going to make anything better, is it? Not going to change anything. After we found the body, I went home and sat on the sofa and cried.’ Jennings stared at the rain-smudged city and seemed to be speaking to his own reflection. ‘And when Rose asked me what was wrong, I started going off on her. I’ve never done that before.’ He looked up. ‘What’s the point? It never ends, does it?’