The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  Carrigan tried to keep his handwriting steady as he noted it down. ‘Did you eventually remember where you recognised her from?’

  Farouk looked at the constellation of shells starring the table.

  ‘Where was it?’

  Farouk wiped his nose with his sleeve. There was a yellow stain where he’d performed the same action countless times before. ‘The Internet.’

  ‘That’s a big place. Stop fucking around and tell me.’

  ‘Sites . . .’

  ‘Sites? What kind of sites?’

  ‘Sites with women on them.’

  31

  She had to try the key three times before the lock agreed to co-operate. Her flat felt damp and musty. The living room was silent and strangely comforting and for a moment Geneva simply stood, letting the chatter and spark of the last few hours dissolve into the thick darkness, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the solicitor’s phone call. Oliver never gave up. It made him a brilliant lawyer and a terrible husband. Dropping the case meant he’d have to pay back her share of the house sale. Why would he do that?

  She flung open windows and felt the air rush across her skin. There were no messages from Jim and several from her mother. She deleted them all. She knew what her mum was going to say, these things never changed, the way parents still saw you in shorts and smudged face even when you were approaching your forties. She would have to call her mother back but not tonight. She heated up a supermarket pizza and ate it while flicking through the news – Snowden in Moscow, Assange cowering in a broom cupboard in London, chemical rain on Raqqa and tanks on the Steppe, torture, execution, corruption and economic failure. All over the world, millions of little lights were going out.

  There was nothing new in all this. Men had always found fresh and devious ways to kill other men, children were always dying and women were always being exploited. What had changed was that everyone now owned a camera and every possible evil, every gang rape and supermarket bomb, disease and natural disaster was on film, endlessly repeated to an audience who could do nothing but watch and seethe.

  She switched it off and lay in bed, unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about what was lying in her desk drawer.

  After an hour of telling herself she wouldn’t, she got up, headed to her desk and took the small baggie of weed from the drawer. She opened the seal and a rich, ripe smell rushed up to greet her, setting off a thousand memorysnaps. She knew it was wrong, against the law, worse for her than for other people, but the alternative was spending the entire night staring at the ceiling then coming into work tired and grouchy, missing something important and getting the next girl killed.

  She didn’t have any papers so she unpacked one of her cigarettes, crumbled the sticky weed and mixed it in with the tobacco then carefully funnelled it back into the cigarette. She put on some Pavement, loud swervy grooves and fucked-up rhythms that suited her mood perfectly. She smoked the joint down to the filter, her body feeling weightless, went to bed and fell asleep instantly.

  In the dream she was traversing endless corridors and a bell was ringing. A loud, insistent pulse that followed her through the black hallways until she found the room that held her father. But the door wouldn’t open and the ringing wouldn’t stop. She snapped awake and sat up in bed but the ringing still didn’t stop. It was coming from somewhere inside her flat. Her heartbeat snickered up her throat as she reached under the bed for her spare baton.

  Trying to make as little noise as possible, Geneva shook off the sheets and crossed the room. Slowly, she turned the handle and nudged the door open. The ringing was instantly louder. She waited for some errant shape or figure to rush the bedroom but there was nothing. She flicked the baton so that it extended to its full length and entered the hallway.

  She looked left towards the living room. The corridor was empty and seemed undisturbed. The alarm was making it hard for her to isolate any untoward sounds. She slowly made her way to the living room and kicked the door open with the point of her foot. She stood back and surveyed the room but nothing looked out of place.

  She checked the kitchen last. The ringing doubled in volume when she opened the door. She shook her head and dropped the baton when she saw what was making the noise.

  She crossed the tiny room and turned off the oven. The alarm stopped but a faint ghostly echo continued in her ear. Had she forgotten to switch it off after taking out her pizza? It was possible but why was the alarm ringing? She hadn’t set the timer. In fact, she couldn’t remember ever having used the timer in the three years she’d lived here. She stared at the oven’s dark mouth for several minutes then went back to bed, keeping the baton pressed to her body throughout the night like a wayward lover’s arm.

  32

  Carrigan spent an hour uploading files onto his computer when he got home. It was his usual routine, a way to unravel from the day’s adrenaline, but tonight it wasn’t working. The mountain of photocopied reports beside his desk never got smaller no matter how much work he put in. There were always more cases, more people lost to the world and never coming back. He tagged body types. Weapons. Locations. Timeframes. Wounds. The more data you inputted, the more connections showed up. Everything was linked, if not in one way then in another.

  A strange, lopsided melody began to play inside his head, slashing guitars and a woman singing about dead oceans. He had no idea where he’d heard it before but it kept him company as he opened a new document and began writing up a report of his interview with Farouk. After a little encouragement, Farouk had provided more detail. Carrigan had assumed Farouk meant porn sites but he hadn’t meant that at all.

  Farouk apologised for not remembering which site he’d seen Anna on. He said he flicked through so many every day, viewed so many different girls, that it was impossible to tell where a particular one came from. But he remembered the clip. With the honed eye of a stalker or novelist he recalled details most people wouldn’t have even noticed. He said the quality wasn’t very good, grainy and dark with no close-ups. He said he only remembered it because there was something strange about the clip, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on but which had made him uneasy enough to turn it off. Farouk swore there was no sex in the clip, that he didn’t use the Internet for sex, that it was reserved for rarer pleasures.

  Carrigan completed the report, emailed it to Branch and scanned his inbox. Hoffmann had sent his preliminary profile through. The sight of the profiler’s name at the head of the email pulled Carrigan back through five years as if they’d been nothing but a momentary dream. He thought he’d come to terms with everything that had happened but, of course, he hadn’t. Hoffmann’s surprise appearance was yet another bump he’d not seen coming. He couldn’t tell if it was coincidence or a cruel joke played on him by Quinn.

  The song kept repeating in his head, frustratingly familiar yet just out of reach, and he caught himself humming the melody as he made his way to the kitchen. There was nothing in the fridge, but in one of the cupboards sat a bottle of Wild Turkey he couldn’t remember buying. The first drink burned his throat. The second was much better. He had several more, skimming the profiler’s report, but all he could think about was that day five years ago.

  It had been a while since he’d got this drunk and he’d forgotten how the past could swerve and spin and surprise you with such impossible clarity. He saw Louise’s face in stunning detail, the erasures of time supplanted; memory, as always, failing the very thing it strives to protect. He remembered her on that first day, in the slicing wind off the East River and as she was in those final weeks, curled up into the bareness of herself. He saw the sofa she used to sit on, the dog they loved and raised and lost, the daughter they never had – she’d be eighteen now, tall, arch and geeky, a girl of her generation, shopping together for an iPad to take to college, and it made him think of Anna and Katrina, both trying to make their way in the city, enflamed by art and life but, in the end, finding only suffering and death.
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  And suddenly he knew exactly where he’d heard the song before.

  He went to Katrina’s website, found the page containing sound files and clicked the second track down. The music was strangely intimate, the dead girl’s voice filling the yawning emptiness of his flat. He played it twice and, as he did so, he scanned the band’s Bio and Blog pages. In the past, you very rarely got to know the victims – all you had were the tainted testimonies of those close to them, but now you could read their actual words, hear them speak and see how they interacted with the world, their little jokes and snaps of rage. In one way, it made the investigation easier, but it also made it that much harder.

  Carrigan put the song on repeat and flicked through the site, seeing the tributes fans and friends had put up, reading through the band’s gigography and staring at photos of Katrina screaming into a microphone at various concerts throughout the capital.

  Below the pictures was a set of links. One for each member of the band. Next to Katrina’s name was the Twitter symbol, followed by Facebook and Flickr. Carrigan clicked on the first link but Katrina’s Twitter account had been deleted. He wondered whether the killer had also targeted her through social media. Her Facebook page had been inactive since she’d disappeared. He made a note to get Berman to look into it first thing tomorrow then clicked on the Flickr link.

  Katrina had posted 1,345 photos in the previous two years and she had a good eye for composition; most looked professional, whether of a sunset over Silvertown or the band rehearsing at a rain-soaked festival in Frankfurt. It was the vast number of photos that surprised him. Carrigan had only ten or twenty from his own youth, cameras being expensive and clunky back then, and he wondered how having your life detailed so minutely would change the way you saw yourself and those around you.

  He drained the bottle, the table swerving away from him as he browsed through the rest of the photos. They were mainly from Katrina’s backpacking trip. Carrigan liked these the best – the exotic locations and goofy holiday grins. Katrina on the steps of Angkor Wat; Katrina half-hidden down a VC tunnel; Katrina on the beach with other girls – guitars, bottles of beer and thin straggles of smoke swirling into a postcard sky. Others were of local colour – men without teeth peddling single cigarettes, mummified women squatting in the main street; a distant shipwreck; a beached fish . . .

  He thought it was the booze or maybe the pills. He rubbed his eyes and scrolled back but it was the same. He opened the photo in a new window and enlarged it, his eyes widening as he studied the group of girls.

  They had their arms around each other and smiles on their sunburnt faces. Behind them was the beach, the sun setting somewhere over to their left. There were six girls in the photo. Katrina stood on the far right of the group. Carrigan zoomed in on the girl standing on the far left until the magnification turned her into pixelated chaos.

  He pressed a button and waited as the printer chugged and wheezed. He snatched the photo out of the tray before it was finished and stared at it, finally believing his eyes now that it was there on paper.

  Katrina was standing on a beach next to five other girls. It was the perfect snapshot of a summer evening. A group of friends surrounded by palm trees and glary light. Carrigan had enlarged the photo to show only their faces. He scanned the girls again but his eyes kept sliding to the one on the far left. Standing at the opposite end from Katrina, in a red bikini and holding a large red cocktail, was Anna Becker.

  III

  33

  It was chaos. Noise and movement, a hall full of geeks. Carrigan scanned the room. The high arched roof rose above him and made it feel as if he were trapped in the belly of a whale. People ducked and staggered between stalls. Bloggers sashayed on free booze and donned insect-like devices. Hawkers jostled and cried and pestered passers-by with leaflets extolling their latest software. Sirens whooped and beeped and echoed across the cavernous Art Deco interior.

  How they were supposed to find DS Neilson, Carrigan had no idea.

  Neilson was a friend of Berman’s but also a sergeant in the computer crime division. She’d called Carrigan back and suggested they meet here, opening day at the Earls Court surveillance tech trade fair. Stretching in every direction were rows of walled-off cubicles, poster-splashed sales points and wired-up demo spaces.

  ‘The photo means we have to look at everything again,’ Geneva said as they traversed an aisle full of mechanical dogs doing parlour tricks. ‘How the fuck could we have missed this?’

  ‘We didn’t have enough data,’ Carrigan replied while texting Neilson. Earlier, over coffee, he’d updated Geneva on Farouk’s info, then shown her the beach photo. He’d loved the way her eyebrows had shot up when she recognised first Katrina, then Anna. He sent the text then glanced at a booth to his right, seeing Geneva displayed on their 80-inch TV screen. She was saying something, her lips moving, while underneath, subtitles scrolled:

  The photo means we have to look at everything again.

  A grinning salesman beckoned them over. The sign above his head said: Read My Lips – Lip-Reading Algorithms at the Touch of a Button.

  Geneva saw herself and cringed. She felt dull, hungover and ashamed of her own weakness in succumbing to the weed last night. ‘Why couldn’t we have met Neilson back at the station?’

  Carrigan glanced at his phone, memorising the directions Neilson had just texted back. ‘Computer crime are giving one of the keynotes tonight. She said she couldn’t leave and, besides, we’re the ones asking for a favour,’ Carrigan explained as they navigated alleyways of blinking screens and trailing wires, the noise unbelievable, a symphony of competing and counterpointing shrieks.

  ‘Okay, so Anna and Katrina knew each other,’ Geneva said. ‘Let’s think about this a moment. It doesn’t change the profile. We’re still looking for the same man.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Carrigan replied. ‘But we need to rethink our suppositions. Obviously, we also need to find out where that photo was taken and when.’

  ‘The last tweet he sent Anna was of a beach.’ Geneva took out her phone and scrolled until she found it. She tilted the screen towards Carrigan. It could have been any beach. There was no way to tell.

  ‘The photo does change the profile,’ Carrigan said. ‘Hoffmann thought the hostel was the killer’s hunting ground and that the girls had drifted into his orbit but it’s the other way around. The girls are the connection – not the hostel. We’ve been focusing too much on the Milgram. We should have been looking for links between the girls.’

  ‘You’re right, we should have been, but that’s all beside the point now. We’re getting close to him. If he posted any clips of Anna to a forum then we can trace him. That’s our most viable lead. All you have is a photo of two girls on a beach somewhere. By itself, it doesn’t mean anything. We don’t even know what country it was taken in.’

  ‘I know a way to find out.’ They finally reached the Met’s booth but there was no sign of Neilson.

  ‘How?’

  Before Carrigan could answer, a woman approached him. He was about to tell her he wasn’t in the market for gadgets when he saw the stern crease of her eyebrows. She held out her hand.

  ‘You’d thought with a name like mine I’d be some snow-white Nordic see-through type? Sorry to disappoint you.’ Neilson was small and slight with a steadiness that impressed Carrigan as they shook hands.

  ‘I know it’s a bit much to take in.’ She brushed back her short dreads, her eyes scanning the room even as she was speaking to them. ‘But I thought you might find this a bit of an eye-opener. David told me about your problem.’

  ‘David?’ For a moment, Carrigan had no idea what she was talking about. He’d popped a couple of pills earlier and had to force himself to focus.

  ‘David Berman? He told me what you’re looking for. But you should know – I’ll listen to what you have to say then make a decision if this case is right for my team. Most cases that people think are right for us are not. We’re a very specialise
d unit and we have very narrow parameters as to what we do.’

  Neilson walked fast, as if in training or pursuit, her entire body telescoped down to this one activity. She pointed to a booth studded with cameras, hundreds of tiny screens, each displaying a different part of the fair. ‘Real-time surveillance,’ she explained as they strolled past the bulging glass. ‘We’ll never have to leave the station again.’

  Carrigan couldn’t tell if this was something she was happy about or not. Looking around him he suspected she was right and he wondered how much room there’d be for cops like him in the new electronic policing.

  ‘We have to keep up,’ Neilson said, and for a moment, Carrigan thought she meant physically and that this was why they were setting such a fast pace.

  ‘Otherwise, we’re fucked,’ she added. ‘We’re fucked anyway. The tech’s too sophisticated and unruly, but this way, maybe we’ll be a little less fucked. The future came too fast. We weren’t prepared for it.’ Neilson stopped every now and then to chat with people manning the booths, swapping tips and gossip and making notes in a small red notebook she kept in her back pocket.

  As they traversed the aisles, Geneva ran through the basics of the case, Neilson stopping her occasionally and asking seemingly random questions. Geneva told her about the abduction, the drugs and the Twitter trolling. Neilson perked up at the mention of the latter as she led them past the last booth and into a separate, roped-off enclosure.

  ‘You should see this,’ Neilson said as she approached the table. Geneva and Carrigan looked at each other, equal parts frustration and puzzlement on their faces. They were standing in front of a desk. The word INFOCATCHER stood in stark relief on the wall.