A Dark Redemption (12 page)

Carrigan stared up at the grey tower blocks stacked against the dismal sky. Winter was finally here; frost on the ground crunching under their feet, a chill in the air which required gloves and face protection. He took a sip of watery coffee then spat it back out, watching it melt the frost surrounding his feet. He stared back up at the towering estate, counting floors, wondering if Gabriel Otto was at this moment staring back at him from one of the high blacked-out windows, watching the team stamp their feet as they waited for tactical to arrive.

It hadn’t been Carrigan’s idea. Branch had called him in this morning, all pained smiles and polite chit-chat, but he’d got to the point quickly enough. He’d heard about the AAC meeting, the bodyguards, the rebuff, and was sending a team to arrest Gabriel. How had Branch found out? Carrigan took out a pack of Tic-Tacs and swallowed several. It wasn’t something he wanted to consider right now.

He waited as the tactical support team arrived and kitted up out of the back of a police van like gladiators preparing for some dark spectacle. He stood in the cold wet wind watching the spitting rain carouse off the pocked concrete buildings, the early-morning straggle of workers hunched into themselves, eyes red and bleary, setting out into another day, knowing that at the end of it they’ll return here, to the grey gloom and cramped rooms of this dying estate.

They split into three teams. One for the stairwell, another for the lift, one outside to catch any runners. They talked and chatted for as long as possible, putting off the moment, but Carrigan could see they were all fired up and waiting to go. He remembered days when he’d arrived at work in the same state, couldn’t wait to knock heads, break doors, chase leads, but those days now existed only in memory.

‘We ready?’ The TAC-team commander’s voice cut through the drizzle and mist. Carrigan knew him but couldn’t remember where from, the years and cases running into one.

The smell of piss and vomit surrounded them as they split between stairwell and lift. That the lift even worked was a miracle in itself. Nothing had been done to prettify these common spaces. There were only old chicken cartons reeking of oil and fat, broken vials cracking under their feet, graffiti so impenetrable it could have been conceptual art.

The door splintered with one swing of the ram, snapping the morning with a scream of cracking wood. Carrigan went first, into a narrow humid hallway, books and magazines stacked up on either side of the floor, the smell of old laundry heavy in the air. He could hear the stuttered footsteps of his men behind him, see the fogging of the windows against their breath, heard shuffling and swearing in the room off to his right. He signalled the sergeant and together they took the door.

Gabriel Otto was sitting upright in bed, bare-chested and sweat-slicked, smoking a joint. His eyes turned hard and shiny as marbles when he recognised Carrigan. The bed began to move, the sheets rippling and snagging, slowly revealing a foot, an ankle, the pale white skin of a girl, her legs blue-veined and alabaster.

She raised her head, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes with a clenched fist and registered Carrigan and his men, blinking and staring at them as if they were alien creatures, things that weren’t meant to be seen when awake. Gabriel took another toke and laid the spliff in an ashtray beside the bed.

‘Put your clothes on, we’re going to the station.’ Carrigan tried not to look at the girl, her sleep-rumpled body slowly unfurling into the morning.

‘What’s going on, Gabriel?’ she said, her voice wispy and accented in the stuffy room. Gabriel ignored her, reached for the joint, about to take another drag, when Carrigan slapped it out of his hands.

‘You better get dressed.’ Carrigan smiled as he picked up a pair of trousers hanging off the back of a chair and handed them to Gabriel.

‘You’re making a big mistake‚’ the young man replied, struggling into his trousers.

Carrigan threw him a shirt. ‘Get some new lines, Gabriel. Heard that one countless times.’ He looked away, disgusted. The girl grabbed Gabriel’s hand and asked him when he’d be back, her eyes milky and unfocused, still lost in dream-melt. She pulled him down and whispered something in his ear. Gabriel turned towards her, a smile lighting up his eyes, then struck her cleanly across the face.

The sound cut through the room, through the bustle of policemen searching the flat, the buzz of the elevator and the garbled talk of neighbours gathering outside the door. The girl’s face blushed red, Gabriel’s handprint visible on her left cheek.

Carrigan leant forward and took Gabriel’s arm, twisting it behind his back and snapping on the cuffs. He used his body as a weight to pin Gabriel to the wall, breathing heavily, feeling as if his heart was about to explode. Gabriel made some kind of clicking sound with his teeth and Carrigan brought his foot down hard on the young man’s instep, feeling a small measure of satisfaction as he let out a long agonised moan.

Ex-boyfriends can be a pain but they certainly have their uses, Geneva thought, stubbing out her cigarette. She watched the people walk by, their day unclouded by death, and though she envied them this, she knew her life could be no other way. Mothers with prams, postmen and Polish builders, a young black man talking into a mobile phone across the street from her. She looked back, sure that he’d averted his eyes the moment she looked at him, and she remembered Carrigan’s reaction outside Cecilia’s flat. She looked up but the man had gone, and she shook her head, knowing she was imagining things, putting it down to her nervousness at meeting Lee again after all these years. She smoked two more cigarettes outside his house, turning up the volume on her iPod until it was so loud she couldn’t bear it. When she stubbed out the third cigarette she knew there was no more time to prevaricate or wander round these old familiar streets. She was here because a girl was lying dead in a West London morgue. She was here because no one else thought that Grace’s thesis had anything to do with her murder.

She knew Carrigan didn’t think much of her theory. He still saw it as a sex murder, lust and compulsion not politics the motivator. She didn’t think he trusted her. Branch’s involvement had pretty much guaranteed that. Yet it was strange how every time Africa came up Carrigan’s face pursed and his lips turned white. Was this something she needed to put into her report to Branch? She crushed the cigarette under her shoe until the tobacco and paper disintegrated. She thought of her mother’s constant tirades against collaborators and cowards, the usual dinnertime refrain over a couple of bottles of wine. Her mother would never forgive her. Would she be able to forgive herself, she wondered as she walked past the swinging gate and up to the front door. Are there acts you commit which cannot be forgiven – even by yourself?

The doorbell chimed a melody of something trite and heard on too many adverts. She made an effort to stand straight, stop her hands from fidgeting, her voice from cracking.

Ten years since she’d last seen Lee. Ten years and different lifetimes. But here she was. He was surprised but not that surprised when she’d called late last night. Lee could never really be surprised, she remembered, not when you believe the world is as unpredictable and chaotic as he did. Or maybe he’d changed. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been when they first met at East Anglia. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been when they moved back to London, set up in a flat off the Kilburn High Road, her walking the uniformed beat, day in, day out, in wind and rain and snow, and him packing his leather bag, furiously writing notes through the night, calling sources, off to another war zone to write his pieces on misery and suffering and pain.

But he knew Africa, she reminded herself, fighting the urge to light another cigarette, and, last night, going through the notes she’d made at the African Action Committee meeting, going through Grace’s folders full of references and citations, she realised how hopelessly lost she was in all this. To understand Grace’s death she needed to understand the context of her life.

‘Oh my God, Geneva,’ Lee said, opening the door, his face still a young man’s, breaking into a smile she remembered so well, a plump pink baby cradled in his arms.

‘Lee,’ she replied, and for a moment neither said a thing, standing frozen on either side of the door.

‘Come in, sorry,’ he apologised. The baby began crying. Lee stroked his forehead and turned back into the corridor. Geneva followed him, trying to corral all the feelings welling up inside her, Lee settled down in North London, a baby in his hands, another woman, another life. This was work she told herself, only work.

Lee led her into the main drawing room then excused himself, taking the baby upstairs. She was glad for this momentary respite. She settled down into the worn brown sofa and put her earphones away. She was dying for a smoke but there were no ashtrays anywhere nor the smell of extinguished cigarettes. She remembered their first flat, the noise and damp and constant pall of smoke. Her smoking. Him puffing away non-stop as he worked another deadline through the night. The thought made her stomach twist and she felt suddenly dizzy. She wondered whether this was a good idea. Whether she should have just contacted someone at the university for the information, but before she could rush out of the house Lee came in with two steaming mugs of coffee and a smile that took her back to younger years.

‘Oh, Geneva,’ he said again, gently setting down the coffee. His hand brushed her shoulder and she felt a tremor in her bones but that was all. Too many years had gone by for them to kiss or hug or even shake hands.

He sat opposite her on a leather chair that was falling to pieces. It was falling to pieces fifteen years ago and she suddenly had a memorysnap of the two of them making love on it some evening in the mid-nineties and the insistent smell of leather and coffee was almost too much.

‘Still a cop, then?’ His voice sounded different, lower, drained of excitement and mystery.

She nodded. ‘Still a journalist?’

Lee’s eyes clouded. ‘Yes and no. Lifestyle journalism they call it.’ His voice took on a harder sheen, his eyes looked anywhere but at hers. ‘I write about IKEA houses and Belgravia dinner parties.’ He laughed and Geneva did too, though both knew there was nothing funny about it. ‘Believe me, society dinners can get every bit as brutal and savage as civil wars.’ And this time it was the genuine Lee laugh, the one that got him out of trouble too many times to count; the one that got him Geneva all those years ago.

She stared up at the framed photos on the wall. ‘You’re happy with the choices you made?’

Lee looked away, across the hall, then back at Geneva. ‘What kind of question is that, Genny?’

The use of her nickname startled her, she hadn’t heard it spoken in so many years. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And you,’ he said, ‘what about your choices? Did you make the right ones?’

‘I’m happy being a cop.’

‘I meant Oliver.’

It was like a blow you expect and all the more painful for it. It was all the years collapsing into each other. That day on the platform at King’s Cross‚ saying goodbye. Lee crying. Her crying. Oliver waiting for her in his house up in the north. The end of childhood and the beginning of something else.

‘I didn’t leave you for him. Didn’t marry him because of you.’

‘I know, Genny, I’m not talking about that. Your mother told me what happened. The undercover work. Oliver and the other woman. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring all this up, I just want to know you’re okay.’

She reached out her hand, met his halfway across the table. Their palms fell into each other like it hadn’t been ten years. ‘I’m okay now.’

‘And you’re happy?’

She gently pulled her hand away. ‘Now you’re the one asking stupid questions.’ And for a moment the years faded and disappeared and she was sitting here with the man she loved and this was their life ten years on, in a quiet suburb, in a nice house, a baby upstairs, a life fulfilled. But when the baby started crying and Lee got up, she suddenly remembered who she was again.

Suddenly the room felt intolerable. Suddenly she felt light-headed and sick. The dark, the smell of baby things, the look on Lee’s face as he came back in. This was all a mistake, she realised, one big fucking mistake. You can never go back.

‘You said you wanted to pick my brains about Africa?’

‘It’s . . . it’s a case I’m working on.’ She was relieved for the change in topic, reached down and pulled the notes from her bag.

‘The dead girl on YouTube?’

Geneva nodded. Everyone, it seemed, now knew Grace as the dead girl on YouTube. ‘I remember you spent a lot of time in the Congo, Uganda, Sudan.’

Lee nodded. She could see a part of him slip away to God knew what horrors and frights in jungles and deserts‚ but it was a look of sad remembrance, not relief or happiness.

‘I’m having trouble with the background on this case. Grace was involved in East African politics. She was writing a thesis on insurgency in post-colonial Africa. She was from Uganda. I was at this meeting yesterday and I didn’t understand half of what they were saying. It was all acronyms, NRA, LRA, SPLA. I remembered you used to cover the region,’ she continued, hoping Lee didn’t catch the stumble in her voice. ‘What can you tell me about Ugandan politics? Especially radical stuff.’

‘Radical?’ Lee laughed. ‘It’s all pretty radical compared to what we call politics here. Where do you want me to start?’

He told her of the missionaries spreading through Uganda in the 1870s, the first whites to expand into the land. The formation of the Uganda protectorate in 1894 under the aegis of the British East Africa Company. The long bitter years of colonialism then the shock of the new world order. The Obote coup in the 1960s. Counter-couped in 1971 by Idi Amin, the years of torture, repression and economic collapse. Then the Tanzanian invasion in 1979, the deposing of the paranoid Amin and the return of Obote. Obote’s deposing by another general and his subsequent removal six months later in the bush war by Museveni’s National Resistance Army.

‘Museveni’s seen by the West as some kind of paragon. In African terms at least. But he’s not that much better than those who came before. A virtual one-party state. Torture and intimidation. Your basic African politics.’

‘What about Joseph Kony? They kept talking about taking arms against the government and against Kony.’

Lee leant back and laughed. ‘Kony’s a true character. Something only Africa could have produced. And within that, something only Uganda could have come up with. There’s something about that country which drives people to extreme religious outpourings. It’s like Jerusalem except without any historical antecedents. Cults and religious groups have always flourished there. Kony’s only the last in a long line of self-appointed mystics and leaders. In the end though, there’s no heaven on earth, no peace and goodwill, there’s only severed ears, abducted children and mass rape.’

‘My victim was looking at the use of torture as policy. How does that link with all this?’ She felt better talking about these far-flung worlds as if after all these years apart they could only talk through a barrier, like inmates in a prison.

‘Everyone uses torture and terror. It’s a way of life out there. But no one wants to admit to it. It’s all being done behind closed doors, in cells and dungeons far away in the jungle. This is no longer the time of Idi Amin where the secret police’s torture cells were located on Kampala’s main street, the windows always left open so that women on their way to market, kids coming back from school, could hear the screams twenty-four hours a day. It’s all hidden now. There’s too much at stake. Massive loans from the IMF, development grants, foreign aid – all that money disappears when allegations of torture and human rights abuses come up. They’re learning to play the game, to hide what the West doesn’t want to see and cash their cheques. The IMF and aid agencies, they don’t really care, out of sight and all that, they just don’t want to hear the screams while they’re partying. So, yes, anyone who was going to expose any of this, especially government torture, well you can imagine . . .’

She could see the faraway look in his eyes, the hunger for action and danger. It was what had attracted her to him in the first place but what happened when you could no longer achieve those goals? What happened to your life when you voluntarily gave in?

‘Now Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army are a whole different thing.’

‘We’re still talking Uganda, right?’

Lee nodded. He got up and walked over to his laptop. Unplugged the power cord and brought it back to the table. ‘Northern Uganda. Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army’s been operating there since 1987. If you want to understand Uganda you need to understand Kony.’

They sat side by side on the sofa. Lee was close but not touching. ‘It begins with Alice Auma, a native Acholi from northern Uganda, a Catholic convert who worked as a medium. One day she’s contacted by the Holy Spirit who tells her it is her God-given duty to overthrow the Ugandan government, the government that since Museveni took over has been persecuting her people, the Acholi. She starts the Holy Spirit Movement. She’s well respected and her powers are venerated. Many join. It’s a strange army, led by this woman, part saint-mystic, part holy warrior. They suffer terrible defeats at the hands of the Ugandan army. They bless stones so that they’ll turn into grenades when the enemy soldiers walk over them. They rub anointed oil on their bodies to protect themselves from bullets. They march in cross formation singing hymns. This is a popular uprising turned into holy war. The government clamps down hard and Alice is exiled, the movement splits into many splinter groups – among those is one led by Joseph Kony who says he is a cousin to Alice and that he too has received a message from the Holy Spirit.

‘He forms the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1987, a band of Christian guerrillas who want to implement a theocratic state based on the ten commandments. Many join. Kony is charismatic and charming. What’s more, under his leadership they start winning decisive battles against the Ugandan army. They had up to three thousand soldiers at one point, some say even more.’

‘Villagers?’

‘No, the villagers were sitting on the fence. They feared the LRA and they feared the government troops. Kony’s speciality was abduction. Ninety per cent of his soldiers were child abductees. They abduct boys and teach them to fight. They make them rape and kill, often their own families, to bond them to the LRA. Then they give them a gun and send them out to battle. The government soldiers have families back home; they’re doing it for the money in a country where unemployment is disastrously high. The child soldiers kill because that is all they know. The villages are in between. Kony’s men come and take food and abduct their children, then the government troops accuse them of helping the LRA and burn down their huts, ship them off to a refugee camp for their safety. They also do their fair share of raping, looting and killing. There’s nearly two million people still living in filthy refugee camps since 1996 when the government forcibly evicted them. These poor bastards are caught between. No one cares. It’s not Rwanda or Bosnia. It’s too complex, there’s no good guys and no way to see a resolution. It’s one of those wars that goes on for so long that the reason no longer becomes its meaning, only the cycle of retribution and blood. It’s the closest we humans have come to creating a perpetual-motion machine.’