A Dark Redemption (14 page)

He’d bought it for the view. That was the joke he told everyone who came here. Except it wasn’t a joke. The three-bedroom terraced house sat alongside the Great West Road overlooking the Hogarth roundabout and M4 flyover. His living-room window looked out onto the grey stretch of the approach ramp as it spiralled high into the drizzled sky. The traffic never stopped. The city never stopped. He liked nothing better than to sit in the evenings and stare out at the snake of cars hitting the ramp at sunset, the majority heading for the airport, for queues and flights, sunshine and wonder. It had been twenty years since he’d been abroad but he loved looking at their faces, rapt in streetlight fix, staring exultantly at the black road ahead and the sky above as if they’d already forgotten who they were.

He picked up his mail and entered the flat. He sensed a difference as soon as he stepped into the living room. He stopped and looked, sniffed. Nothing he could point a finger to, a subtle disturbance of air, a vague unfamiliar smell. He felt the sweat rolling down his back as he checked the front room and bedroom but everything seemed in place. He stared through the window out into the night but the car that had been parked there was gone, a pale scar where it had sealed the asphalt from the rain. He checked the other rooms and then made himself a drink. It was only when he was sitting in his chair that he saw it.

A small brown envelope lying underneath the phone. He put his glass down slowly, careful not to make a sound. He walked over, pulled out a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket, snapped them on and picked up the envelope.

There was no name written on the front and it hadn’t been sealed. He felt his fingers tremble as he took out the photographs and stared at them. A picture of him standing outside Ben’s house a few days ago. Another of him greeting Ursula at the door. He glanced to the left, thinking he’d heard something, but it was just the boards settling. There was another photo of him saying goodbye to Ben by his front door. Then a new set. Susan and Penny, Ben and Ursula’s daughters, on their way to school, standing around the playground, waiting to be picked up outside the gates. Carrigan took a deep breath, flicked through the photos again and carefully placed them back in the envelope.

He poured himself a long drink of whisky and sat down in front of Louise. He touched her photo, feeling a slight electric charge leap across his fingers, and told her about his day, the weather and the lunch he’d had – omitting the three Dime bars – and then he told her like he always did how much he loved her, how the days dragged interminably without her. Finally, he kissed his fingertips and pressed them against the cold glass. He took a deep breath, feeling her in every crevice and fold of his heart, then made himself a microwave meal which he binned half-eaten, the taste bitter and lingering. He checked the flat again, room by room, until he was satisfied there was nothing else amiss, and then he moved the armchair so that it was facing the door. He sat there until morning, waiting and watching.

More paperwork. Geneva loved it. Most other cops dreaded the moment they had to sit behind a desk and go through pages and pages of seemingly pointless information. They would rather be out on the street, chasing the case, but Geneva knew the case lay in these pages and not out in the greater city beyond.

The music screamed loud, too loud, on her earphones, drowning out the drone of the cranes outside. The light glowed green and sickly no matter how many fluorescents and table lamps were switched on. The pages began to merge, words and dates no longer differentiated among the mass of notes, ticks, coffee stains, ash and heat. She kept rubbing ointment on her fingers: the stress of the last few days making her skin break out in rashes, red patches and migrating itches.

Grace had begun her thesis with the intention of covering ten or so rebel movements from different African countries. It was a compare-and-contrast exercise. Charles Taylor. Joseph Kony. Robert Mugabe. The names were familiar and not, sound-grabs caught in passing from TV sets and stray conversations. She read long detailed descriptions of factional dissent, bush tactics, demographic fixing. She flicked and faded, faded and flicked, Coke keeping her wired, too far to sneak out for cigarettes.

She was going through Grace’s recent notes when she noticed that something had changed in her approach. She flicked back, scanned and skimmed the previous term’s work, noted that the change had occurred around last January.

She leant back and thought about this. She shuffled songs until she found one that suited her. She tried to recall what both the professor and Cecilia had said. She thumbed through her notebook, seeing the scrawled reminders of the two interviews, desperately hoping she’d written it down.

Miles Cummings had mentioned that Grace’s appearance and performance had begun to change when she came back from the Christmas holidays. Geneva took a long drink of Coke and flicked to her notes for Cecilia. There it was again: the Christmas holidays.

Grace had gone off to the Christmas holidays the same Grace she had always been, yet when she came back everything was different. Not only that, but the scope of her thesis began to change radically. From looking at ten different rebel groups, Grace had focused on just one: a small splinter faction of the Lord’s Resistance Army led by General Lawrence Ngomo, aka the Black-Throated Wind.

Geneva swivelled back on the chair, blood pounding through her fingers. She held her breath, released slowly. She had to double-check, verify, find out more before she could be sure, before she could go to Carrigan with this. She’d seen his reaction when she’d pulled out Ngomo’s photo in the interview room, his face falling as if they’d been friends and she’d betrayed him in some small but essential way.

The door opened and Geneva jumped, gathering herself together as she saw DS Karlson come in, two mugs of tea in his hand. ‘Sorry, I’m late, was chasing something up,’ he said by way of apology, handing her a mug and taking a seat next to her. She pulled down the sleeves on her shirt to hide the red patches and began explaining what she’d just discovered.

‘You sure the dates match?’ Karlson was wearing one of his expensive suits, she could see the fine tailoring and raised stitching, the shoes polished until they resembled something made of onyx. She wondered how long he spent on grooming every morning – much longer than her, she was sure.

‘Both mention the Christmas holidays. Something happened to her during the break – it’s not just what people said but also the scope of her dissertation. There’s all these references to finding the “tapes” – she never fully explains this.’

Karlson smiled one of those smiles; she couldn’t tell if it was directed at her or for his own benefit. ‘I take it, then, that you don’t buy Carrigan’s sex-predator theory?’

She looked up from her notes, trying to read Karlson’s face, but it was inscrutable, the eyes hooded and bright. ‘The more I find out about Grace the less I like that idea,’ she replied, grateful for the opportunity to sound out her theories. She told him about Lee’s assertion that Ngomo was living in London. ‘You should have seen Gabriel’s face when I passed him the photo.’

Karlson ran his fingers through the stubble on his head, the sound crisp and sharp in the still room. ‘So Grace was researching this General Ngomo and somehow he finds out about it; he’s been here several years, presumably living under the radar, and suddenly all this is going to disappear because of some student writing her thesis.’ Karlson looked up, thought about it, but she suspected he was thinking about something else. ‘Makes sense . . . more so than Carrigan’s theory that this is just about sex.’ He took out an unusually shiny apple and began eating it. ‘I don’t understand why he shut you down so quickly.’

Geneva felt her skin itch, resisted the maddening impulse to scratch. ‘You know him better than I do.’

Karlson laughed, almost choking on a piece of apple, coughing and righting himself. ‘Doesn’t like to be contradicted, our Jack,’ he replied. ‘We’ve all learned to keep our mouths shut.’

She thought about the report she had to write for Branch, due on Monday. ‘Not the first time, then?’

Karlson turned to her, his voice dropping low. ‘Not by a long shot.’ He smiled, moving his chair closer. ‘Why would he be so reluctant to follow all possible leads?’

‘I was asking myself the same thing,’ she replied, then caught something in Karlson’s look. ‘You’re not going to tell Branch, are you?’ She was suddenly aware that she might have said too much. She caught herself scratching her wrist, stopped.

Karlson shook his head. ‘I think we’re better off giving Carrigan enough rope, eh?’

‘You don’t like him much, do you?’

Karlson shrugged. ‘He used to be a good copper is what I heard, but he’s got sloppy these last few years. Makes our job that much harder. You remember the leaked government report on police profiling?’

Geneva nodded, it had done more damage to the Met than any hectoring
Independent
editorial or police cock-up.

‘It was Carrigan who left the file in a coffee shop.’

She recalled the ensuing scandal, the helpful member of the public who found the document and passed it on to a journalist. She could picture the whole scene in her head, Carrigan taking the last sip of his coffee, his mind elsewhere. ‘What did they do to him?’

‘Moved him to a different station but this was after his wife . . . they were feeling more generous than they ought to have been, a slap on the wrist, nothing more.’

The mention of Carrigan’s wife piqued her interest. She continued going through Grace’s notes, flicking through sheet after sheet, trying to hide her expression from Karlson. ‘I noticed he wears a wedding ring – what’s up with that?’

Karlson ran his fingers through his lapels, straightening them and flicking off imaginary lint. ‘Never took it off,’ he replied cryptically.

‘Divorced?’ She thought of Oliver’s voice on her answering machine, the years she wished could be erased from the ledger of her life.

Karlson shook his head, his teeth glinting as he grinned. ‘Nah, killed herself, didn’t she? Can’t blame her, though, probably couldn’t stand Carrigan any longer, took the easy way out.’

Geneva stared at the page in front of her but the words had become fuzzy. She wanted to turn and punch the smiling sergeant in the face. Her stomach dropped abruptly as she realised that while she thought she’d been grilling Karlson about Carrigan, it had actually been the other way round. What had she said? Would this come back to haunt her later? Of course it would, she told herself, everything you say is only stored away until the day it can be used to hurt you. She smiled thinly and chewed the end of her pencil, wondering what she’d just got herself into then, so that she wouldn’t think about that, she began thinking about what could possibly have happened to Grace over the Christmas holidays.

She focused back on the pages in front of her, Grace’s elegant handwriting filling her vision while Karlson started on another apple. More than ever she felt the answers would be found somewhere in here.

Grace’s notes from this year were focused exclusively on General Ngomo. There was a brief summary of his life previous to joining Kony, a short précis worthy of
Who’s Who.

Lawrence Ngomo was born in the Kitum district of northern Uganda sometime in the 1950s. Kitum was part of Acholiland, the ancestral home of the Acholi people. He grew up in the brave and terrifying new world of decolonisation. There were rumours he began a course at university, later to be pushed out during the crackdown on the Acholi people instigated by a president unsure of their loyalty and troubled by their strange ways, their beliefs in spirit mediums and dark angels. The next time Ngomo appeared it was as a senior member of Kony’s LRA, rampaging through the north-east of the country. There was no indication of what happened in between. It was up to her to connect the dots. One day Ngomo is a student, the next he’s a lieutenant in a rebel army. She knew no life was as simple as that, no trajectory so deliberate as when traced out in print.

She imagined a young man setting out one morning like every morning before, making his way to classes, books in hand, some lunch packed in a small sack, another day of lectures and essay preparations, just another day. Then he’s turned away from the main gates or, even worse, called out of the classroom to attend the principal’s office. There’s the tense and confusing meeting with the head of the university who apologises profusely and then throws his hands up in the air as if saying,
What the government asks, I can but do
. The awkward moments when Ngomo is sitting there, the words tumbling through him, then the realisation that it’s over. There won’t be that walk tomorrow, there won’t be those books under his arm, no more packed lunches, no more essays. Does he argue? Does he shout? Does he try to persuade the principal that he has no politics?

Then comes the blank time. The passage between diligent student and rebel commander. It was easy to trace a line where there was none. It was easy to say that his expulsion from university on the grounds of tribal origin put him on this road which ended with a green uniform and a crouching serenity in the bush, a path that would lead to the days of the Black-Throated Wind.

‘Oh my God.’ Geneva’s head snapped up.

Karlson put his apple down and leant over. She could smell the heady scent of his aftershave as she ran her finger down the page of scrawled transcripts. ‘Grace interviewed an ex-child soldier a few months ago; she quotes him in full – listen to this:
General Ngomo liked to get close. He
liked to participate when he could. He enjoyed looking into a man’s eyes and telling him that he was sorry for what he was about to do but souls needed saving and it wasn’t his to question the role that God had made him for. Then, while the soldiers held the captive down, Ngomo cut him open and extracted his heart. I saw this myself several times. He had a medium-sized leather bag with him at all times, into which he placed the heart. They say he kept the heart of every man he killed – that deep in the jungle he’d built some kind of temple and in the deepest room of that temple was a pit filled with thousands of dry and desiccated hearts. He called it his storeroom for the Rapture.
’

Karlson let out a deep plume of air, taking the transcript from her, rereading it, his eyes widening with every word, but Geneva was oblivious. She was on hands and knees, unpacking Grace’s boxes until she found what she was looking for. It was under all the other books and papers, a slim pamphlet hued in dark red lines. She pulled it out and stared at the cover. The Black-Throated Wind appeared across the top. Below that, the graphic that had so disturbed her when she’d first seen it: a severed human heart suspended in space, dripping streamers of bright-red blood.