A Dark Redemption (20 page)

Spencer pulled him up. The room tilted and span. Carrigan grabbed a table to steady himself, saw the men bloodied and bruised slowly taking their seats, Spencer leaning over them like their own shadows unloosed. He was taking out his handcuffs and notebook.

‘Assaulting a police officer’s something we take very seriously around here.’ Spencer’s voice boomed across the afternoon pub but there was no reaction on the men’s faces. They stared at each other, at their useless hands, the mess surrounding them. ‘But assaulting
two
policemen . . .’

‘You gonna put us in jail?’ one of the men sneered, massaging his jaw, blood and spit curling at the edge of his lips. ‘We’ve been there before.’

Carrigan sat down next to Spencer, felt the heat of the table, the amassed looks and imperceptible nods and tells. He took the photo of Grace’s source out of his pocket. ‘We have a fast-track programme for you.’ His voice was unrattled, calm and modular despite the pain he was feeling in his ribs and skull. ‘Prisons being overcrowded here and you not being legal residents and all.’ Carrigan watched their faces as he let the words hang in the smoky air. ‘So, for something like this, as serious as this, we just fill out a form and pass it on to your embassy.’ He scanned their eyes, saw tiny flickers at the mention of the word embassy. ‘Which means, practically speaking, forty-eight hours from now you’ll be on a plane back to your beloved homeland. What they do to you there, it’s up to them.’

He leant back in the chair, watched their eyes fall on the photograph, silent looks exchanged across the long table. ‘A nice surprise for your families, I should think, having you back for Christmas.’

Someone reached for the photo. One of the younger men, scars like ripples across his cheeks, long skinny fingers caressing the edges of the paper. ‘You only want this man?’

Carrigan nodded.

Silence. No one looking at each other. The man who’d taken the photo sent it spinning back across the table. ‘Haven’t seen him for a few weeks. He used to hang around with Solomon Onega.’ The man looked to his friends but they avoided his gaze.

‘And where can we find Onega?’ Carrigan kept his voice soft and low.

‘The Church of the Blood of the Redemption,’ the man mumbled. ‘He works there most days.’ He looked up at Carrigan. ‘What about us?’

Carrigan put the photo back in his pocket, snapped his truncheon back onto his belt. ‘Lucky you,’ he said, pointing to the stripper who was still gyrating on the stage. ‘You get to keep watching Marilyn over there to your heart’s content.’

Geneva waited as the SOAS registrar continued some private conversation on the phone. She stared at the sterile room, the cold white lights, the framed photographs of old alumni, feeling unreasonably tetchy. She’d made the appointment after her meal with Carrigan last night but this morning it seemed the registrar had more important things to do. Finally, tired of waiting, the case going on without her somewhere in Peckham, Hackney, Streatham, she walked up to his desk, loudly slamming her Coke can down on the table, watching his eyes follow the liquid as it splashed onto the wood.

‘Yes?’ His voice sounded weary and tired but when he looked up and noticed her something in his expression softened and he coughed, apologised, put down the phone and smiled. ‘What can I help you with?’

She flashed her warrant card, noticing his surprise, the way he looked from the card back up to her face as if convinced of some deception.

‘I need to see your records for Grace Okello, East African History, third year.’

The man’s eyes lingered on her chest before he nodded and turned to an old computer, his fingers hovering hesitantly over the keyboard. Geneva stood there and waited. She wanted to be out in the streets following their new lead yet Carrigan had expressly told her to come here today. She felt that after last night something had changed between them and she’d woken this morning feeling better than she had in a long time.

‘That’s strange.’ The registrar swivelled his seat, his eyes hovering over her breasts as if drawn there by gravity. ‘Are you sure she was a registered student?’

Geneva looked blankly at the man, mid-forties, balding, his life sequestered behind a computer screen, having to watch young boys and girls blossom into their lives in front of him year after year, and she suddenly felt sorry for him, a snap twinge she quickly had to bury. ‘Of course she was,’ she replied a little too sharply. ‘Can you please check again?’

The registrar nodded, turned back to his computer, shaking his head. ‘We don’t seem to have any records for a Grace Okello.’ He turned back to Geneva, his face a mess of confusion. ‘I’m sorry, the system’s normally airtight.’ He saw Geneva’s expression and blushed. ‘But I can check the basement. Even if somehow it got deleted from the server the original documents will be stored there.’

Geneva flashed him her best smile. ‘I’d be extremely grateful.’

The man shuffled off, taking one last look at her breasts, promising he’d be back within five minutes. Geneva sat back down in the chair trying to understand what this could mean – had someone expunged Grace’s records or was it only a technical glitch? She was jolted out of her thoughts by the vibration of her phone. She picked it up, hoping it was Carrigan, but the voice on the other end was the last person she’d expected.

‘Hello, Geneva.’

Her hand tightened against the phone. She swallowed but her mouth was desert dry. ‘Oliver.’

‘Been trying to get hold of you,’ her soon-to-be ex-husband replied. The voice that had once sent her body into shuddering delight now made her feel like something was crawling up her arm. ‘Wanted to have a chat, no lawyers, none of that, just you and me like old times.’

She stared at the dirty wooden floor, the tips of her shoes. ‘That’s not going to happen, Oliver. You know that.’ She heard him breathing on the other end of the phone, a silent measured pulse that made her want to scream. ‘What did you want?’

‘Saw you on the telly this morning. You looked good. It’s nice to know you’re doing well.’

‘Oliver, the only thing I want from you is to tell me you’ve signed the papers.’

‘That’s what I was calling about. We need to talk,’ he answered, his voice now steely, ‘about the house.’

‘What’s there to talk about?’ She saw people in the office looking at her, realised she’d been raising her voice. ‘The lawyers agreed, a fifty-fifty split.
You
agreed.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Oliver replied. ‘My lawyer looked at it and reckons that because I paid the deposit, your contributions only amount to rent and the house is legally mine.’

Suddenly the room was spinning, her eyes watering, the registrar coughing and trying to get her attention. She was about to say something to Oliver but there was nothing she could say. She snapped the phone shut and went up to the desk.

‘No mobiles in here.’ The registrar was pointing to a sign behind her.

‘Police business,’ she replied curtly. ‘Did you find anything?’

The man shrugged. ‘This is certainly most unusual. You’re absolutely sure she was a student here?’ Geneva nodded. ‘Well, I went through the files and it seems there’s not one piece of paper relating to a Ms Grace Okello.’

‘None at all?’ Geneva stared at him, not having expected this. ‘How could that happen?’

The registrar shook his head. ‘If it was just the computer it could be a glitch, but the computer and paper files? I’m going to have to go to the dean with this, it’s highly irregular.’

Damn right, Geneva thought as she made her way to the library. Why would anyone want Grace’s records to disappear? She thought about the man in the photo, Grace’s source – there was no way someone like that could have got access and removed both the electronic and paper files, it was too professional, too sophisticated a job. Which made her think about Carrigan’s speculations last night, the strange suited men she’d seen in Branch’s office at the weekend, the name Ngomo echoing through every nook and cranny of this investigation.

She needed to know more about General Ngomo if she was to understand this case. Carrigan was beginning to see her side of the story. The involvement of the Ugandan embassy, Branch’s adamant denials, the missing records from the university – it all pointed to something more complex than a random sex murder and she knew she needed to immerse herself in whatever she could find out about this man as a hunter must study his prey.

The books, monographs and archived periodicals arrived. The librarian passed them to her, his glasses so thick she could see her reflection twice in them. He made no comment, just handed over the material, torture and guerrilla warfare no different to him than worker relations in pre-industrial Britain or the taxonomy of tropical butterflies. She thanked him and carried her precious bundle to a table, this weight in her hands, holding so many lives and deaths.

The silence enveloped her. The smell of wood and old pages fluttering in the air-conditioned room comforted her in a way she found surprising. She’d spent her life trying to get away from books and now here she was, her mother’s daughter despite herself. She thought it funny, but not really, how we always become the very thing we spend our lives running away from.

She arranged the material chronologically. She piled up a collection of monographs on the conflict in northern Uganda. There were reams of Amnesty International reports, taxonomies of death, an accountant’s version of the apocalypse. She should have felt disheartened but this was the part she liked most about murder-work, the way each death, each investigation, opened up a world entire and infinite.

After an hour her eyes became more practised and she could glance down a page and ascertain almost immediately whether there was mention of Ngomo. She made notes in her small spiral notebook. She read testimonies of torture survivors, the cruel imagination of men making her heart shrivel. She scanned demographic surveys, PhDs dense and packed with statistical data. Kony appeared in every monograph, every dissertation, like the archetypal enemy, a four-letter cipher for the blood and horror of the interior.

She kept searching until she found a list of current warrants the Ugandan government had issued against rebels and soldiers.

The main charge against Ngomo was for the murder of the aid workers – the video that had been passed from hand to hand, TV station to TV station, as everyone watched four young girls crash against the end of their lives. There was a lesson there: you could kill as many Africans as you wanted but kill a white woman and your name hits the top of the list. It seemed this was the big mistake Ngomo made. The increased pressure from the West led to further government incursions, further massacres, Ngomo retreating deeper into the tribal heartlands, beginning his own campaign known as ‘The Days of Blood’.

The aid workers hadn’t been found until five years ago, their bodies excavated by accident while another organisation was building irrigation systems in the north. There was a side column about hapless tourists ending up in the clutches of Kony’s men. Kony’s LRA had taken over half of northern Uganda. Guide books hadn’t been updated. She squinted at blurry photos of gaunt white men and women being led dazed onto planes at Entebbe, the lucky ones, the ones that had made it out of the bush. She was about to go on to the next sheaf of reports when something caught her eye like a thing glimpsed from a passing car.

She borrowed a magnifier from the librarian and hunched over one of the photos. If she looked too close all she saw were dots, a pointillist abstract, but from a distance all she could see was a grey blur. Yet one of the faces . . . there was something about it. Two white men boarding a plane, thin, bearded and ravaged. The caption said they were freed by government soldiers. She looked again, put aside the magnifying glass and brought the paper up to her face. There was something familiar about the man on the right, his pose, the way his shoulders tumbled from his neck.

She looked behind her. The librarian and students were busy, heads down in their books, no one watching her. She looked up but didn’t spot any CCTV cameras. She looked around again, then took a deep breath and carefully ripped out the photo, the sound of the paper tearing louder than she would have thought possible, her palms sweating as she stared up and scanned the room before pocketing the scrap of newspaper, feeling her heart like a crazed bird hammering at the cage of her ribs.

She continued going through the material, trying to not let her imagination get carried away. In a newspaper article from 2004 she read about Ngomo’s disappearance. The Ugandan government must have been sure of his death; the warrant against him was rescinded that year. There were sightings of him in Zurich and Paris. Rumours of political asylum in the UK, the same story Lee had heard. She wondered how such a man could slip through so many nets but it happened all the time. Look at Karadžić, all those years practising alternative healing, his beard and face grown long, riding the Belgrade transport system, unnoticed, unknown. Did he feel a withering as he rode those anonymous buses? This man who’d commanded armies and battalions, who’d overseen camps of such bewildering brutality? Did he sit on the bus and see his life shrunk to nothing? Perhaps he even wanted to be caught, his face back in the headlines, his crimes once again news. It made her think of Milton – was it better to be a slave in heaven or to rule in hell?

She was going through the last pile of articles when she happened to look up at the exact moment that Gabriel Otto was entering the library. His gaze immediately caught hers, recognition flashing through his face, and then he swiftly turned, knocking one student almost to the ground, and disappeared back into the main hall.

Geneva looked down at her notes, looked back up at the entrance, and decided to follow him.

Carrigan and Spencer headed back out into the rain and wind. Darkness had settled on the market while they’d been inside the pub and now it seemed as if the road were a theatre and a whole new troupe of actors had come in to replace the day shift. Gone were the traders and old ladies with their tartan shopping trolleys. Gone the housewives and art students, families and schoolgirls. In their place young men stood on corners strutting and pounding their stuff. People walked faster, their heads bowed, avoided all contact and huddled into the relative safety of buses or pubs looking like civilians caught out by an unexpected curfew.

‘Surprised me to hear this guy you’re looking for hangs out at the church,’ Spencer said as they crossed the high street, ducking into a narrow leaf-strewn alley and heading towards the grey stone building, its spire like a black finger pointing at the sky. ‘It’s one of the few places we have no trouble with.’

‘With a name like the Church of the Blood of the Redemption?’ Carrigan’s shoulder and back burned with pain and his breath was short and laboured.

Spencer laughed. ‘More of a social mission than church these days. They emphasise the redemption part over the blood.’ They passed by back gardens strewn with old furniture, discarded toys and broken bicycles. ‘The priest in charge has more or less converted it to a home for ex-child soldiers. A rehab unit. The socials come in every day and help with counselling.’

The door to the church was opened by the priest himself. Father Piper looked as if he’d just been woken from a ten-day nightmare. The old man’s eyes seemed desiccated, squinched into the hollows of his eye sockets. His beard was white and ran down one side of his face in a strange zigzag, the canyon of an old scar shining pink in the bulblight. Though he was skinny and short Carrigan could see the fibrous muscles running up and down his arms like someone who’d worked their whole life in the fields.

‘We’d like to talk to Solomon Onega,’ Spencer said.

The priest didn’t look as if he’d heard, turning and silently walking back into the emptiness of the church. ‘I hope he hasn’t been in trouble,’ he finally said, stopping to right a hymn book that had fallen from the pew. ‘He’s one of our few regulars.’

‘Just helping us with our enquiries,’ Spencer blandly replied.

They walked past the nave and vestry, the hanging garments like ghosts of former masses, the smell of incense and wood filling Carrigan’s nostrils with memory and longing. Father Piper explained how so few people had come to church over the last ten years, either moving away from the old Catholic rite towards louder and more ecstatic forms of worship or abandoning church altogether for the altar of the glowing TV set, the panoply of saints and sinners on daytime chat shows. ‘But more and more I see these children. These children like no children should be,’ the priest continued, the words coming faster now. ‘They come here to this country and everything they have learned comes with them. War owns their souls. They join gangs and teach English kids lessons learned on different shores. The elders, the people from the tribe who would traditionally take care of these lost kids – they don’t want to go near them. They remember the night-time raids, the blood and suffering, the laughter of small children.’

They went through another door and down some stairs into a musty, badly lit basement. It took Carrigan a few seconds to make shapes out of the gloom, see a group of boys sitting on the floor, listening to an older man talking in Luganda, a blackboard behind him with pictures of chickens and rabbits pinned to it.

Piper explained that he had to get back to his chores and left them in the basement. Carrigan watched as Solomon Onega pointed to the diagrams on the blackboard, making rabbit noises or dog barks when he lighted on the relevant animal. The kids stared at him as if hypnotised. There was none of the fidgeting or playing up endemic in classrooms these days. Solomon leant down and pulled a handful of stuffed animals out of a large brown box. He held each one up, said something, then handed it out. Some of the boys took the toys warily, as if not yet sure of their intention, while others held them tightly against their faces and began crying. There were Snoopys, stuffed dogs of all varieties, Miffy rabbits, beavers and bears and others whose shapes seemed a melting of several species into one.

When he was finished Solomon walked straight up to them. They introduced themselves and then Carrigan flashed the photo of Grace’s source. Solomon took it from him and smoothed it out.

‘I knew one day police would come asking me about him.’

They were sitting in the church kitchen. Massive pots of stew simmered on a four-ring hob watched over by two portly women who couldn’t stop laughing. A radio played airy calypso songs. Solomon Onega sat opposite them on the only table, a scarred and chipped Formica construct wobbling precariously under the weight of their elbows.

‘His name is Bayanga,’ he said, still holding the photograph.

Solomon was small and wiry but gave the impression of someone whose body had been packed into too tight a skin. Muscles and tendons rippled the surface of his neck and arms as if trying to fashion a way out. His voice was soft and serene but the signs were there for them to see, the thin scar where his stubble had never grown back, the one eyelid slightly drooped, the way he awkwardly positioned himself on the chair. ‘It is the name he chose for himself when he went to war.’

Carrigan wrote it down, trying to keep his hand from shaking.

Bayanga.

He said the name silently to himself. It was a fitting name for this ghost he’d been chasing through the London streets all week. ‘You know him from back home?’

Solomon shook his head. ‘From here. He was the first person I talked to when I arrived.’ Something in his eyes seemed to drift back to previous days, a sudden vacancy registering there.

‘You said you knew we’d eventually come asking about him.’ He’d thought Solomon would be even harder to reach than the men back at the pub but he seemed genuinely happy to talk to them.

‘Men like Bayanga, the police always eventually come round, doesn’t matter what country.’ Solomon took a long sip from a can of Coke, wiped his lips. ‘When you first arrive in London you always have one phone number you picked up somewhere on your way to England. Every community has its numbers, its places of sanctuary.

‘When I got here it was cold, grey, a thin sky you couldn’t even see. I phoned the number, the man on the other end asked me some questions then gave me directions to the house.’ He laughed but Carrigan could hear a sadness in it as if Solomon couldn’t believe he’d been that person only a year ago.

‘It smelled like a prison. I’d been in enough to know. The smell of human fear and dreams, intermingled with sweat and alcohol. Over a hundred men crowded into a small three-storey house in North London. Everyone called it the Village but it was an ironic name for it was as far from the feeling of a village, a community, as you could get and still be under one roof. You never knew how many people lived there, everyone was in and out, some working nights, coming in tired and bitter in the morning, others setting off as dawn broke, heading for the first trains, jobs sweeping and mopping up before the white workers got there.

‘I was shown to a room on the second floor. There were several men lying on sheets of cardboard. It was hard to tell how many, they lay stacked, arms and legs intertwined, pressed against the corners where there was more heat. Bayanga was the only one who acknowledged my entrance. He held out his hand and welcomed me. He pointed to a filthy piece of cardboard, oil-smeared and ripped at the edges, which lay in one corner of the room.
That’s my bed
, he said,
but you can use it while I am at work
. I was so tired that first morning, so overwhelmed by this city that seemed so strange, I just thanked him, moved over to the corner and fell asleep.’

Spencer leant across the table. ‘Who else lived in the Village?’

‘Men like me. Like Bayanga. Many with missing fingers, limps, the constant dream of blood.’ Solomon abruptly looked up and seemed to be scanning their faces for something. ‘You think we’re so different from you? But the line that divides us is very thin. Let your policemen go on strike. Let your CCTV cameras malfunction. How long do you think it would take for London to turn into Nairobi or Lagos?’ He sat back and watched the two detectives. ‘The measure of a man is what he does when no one’s looking, when the only law is the one in his own heart. You people always talk about wanting to know yourselves but if we could truly read our own hearts we would run away in abject horror at what we had seen.’

Solomon finished his Coke and wiped his lips, then lit a cigarette. ‘So yes, every night there were fights. I’d wake and see two men in the centre of the room arguing, the flash of a knife and then that smell would fill the air and take me back to Africa – the smell of fresh blood – there’s nothing like it in the world. At first it makes you sick, really sick, then you don’t notice it for a time until one day you realise just how much you miss it.

‘But I never saw Bayanga get involved in these fights and arguments. He would just sit cross-legged in the corner of the room with a smile on his face like this was arranged purely for his entertainment. I had met many men like him back home and I hoped that here I wouldn’t have to meet any more.’

‘But you became his friend?’ Carrigan asked.

‘He became mine, which is not the same,’ Solomon replied. ‘I was new, didn’t understand the city, didn’t know how the trains ran, how the streets unfolded. I imagine it would be like if you were suddenly to find yourself in the bush. All your points of reference, everything you know, would be gone. You would be in a world so utterly alien and hostile and yet you would see the natives going about their lives and their lives would strike you as strange and abhorrent and yet they survived in this environment and you would know that you must become a little more like them if you too were to survive.’

‘Did Bayanga use drugs?’

Solomon shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t even drink alcohol. All I ever saw him drink was milk.’

Carrigan looked at Spencer. ‘What did he do for money?’

‘Money?’ Solomon coughed on the cigarette smoke. ‘We had no money. We ate food that people threw away. One of the men who lived in the house collected food from outside restaurants, from those black plastic bags they leave on the street. Bayanga showed me this and said what kind of people can they be, to throw all this good food away? He was always laughing at English people. He saw a city laid low by welter and waste. By money, bad dreams and secular arrogance. He saw emptiness and hunger in all the white faces, a hunger for something they would never have. He would quote the Bible as he showed me well-dressed men drunk and drooling, passed out on pavements outside pubs. He said we had arrived in the fallen world and that we had to be careful.’

‘You said you thought Bayanga was helping you but you realised differently. What happened?’ Behind them Carrigan could hear the sounds of kids playing, high voices shrieking with pleasure and astonishment, the contented barking of a dog.

‘One day, I came back from the street and saw him sitting alone in the room. I took out my bottle of wine and sat next to him. I could tell something was different. He seemed brighter, more excited, not as bitter as he often was and he started telling me about how when he had the money he would move from this hell-hole and into one of those nice houses we always passed on our way to the Village. How he would buy himself a suit and a car and ladies to go with it. I’d never known Bayanga to resort to these common fantasies and so I asked him how he would get this money. He laughed and said it was almost a done deal. He told me that he’d been walking in the city and had bumped into someone he knew from back home. The man called him a week later and offered him a proposition. He said that perhaps there was a job for me too in this.’

Carrigan rubbed his chin, the sound like an angry insect trapped inside a clenched fist. ‘He said he met someone from back home? From Uganda?’

‘That’s what he told me. I asked him what kind of work, wondering if it was drugs. He said the kind of work we used to do back home and smiled. In that smile I knew that things had changed for him as much as I knew that I would never be part of it. The kind of “work” we used to do back home was how we always talked about fighting, killing, the work of war.’

Carrigan felt the blood coursing through his veins, the sensate feel of his own body. ‘
He
said it was killing work?’

‘He didn’t need to say it like that. It was obvious what he meant.’

Carrigan felt the scratch of his pen against paper as he wrote it all down, trying not to leap to conclusions, not to see that one name glowing insistent in front of him, Geneva’s voice ringing in his ears with
I told you so
.

‘You never saw this man?’ Carrigan asked.

Solomon shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I even fully believed him until he came home that day with the phone.’

‘Phone?’ Carrigan looked up from his pad. ‘When was this?’

‘A couple of weeks ago. He came in, it was morning and he was smiling and couldn’t wait to show me his new phone. It was one of those big ones with a screen and internet.’

‘An iPhone?’ Carrigan interrupted.

‘I don’t know,’ Solomon admitted. ‘He also gave me twenty pounds from a large roll he had in his pocket. This was the first time I’d ever seen him with more than loose change. He told me everything was going to plan, said he still had room for me if I wanted to join him. I thanked him and said no. I told him I was working here, had met the priest, that this was the work I wanted to do.’

Carrigan noted it down, his handwriting speeding up as he tried to preserve all this new information. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘A couple of days after that. He gave me his corner. Said he was moving to a better place. Said I could have joined him if I had been more of a man but that was not the man I wanted to be.’ Solomon shook his head, pointed to the darkness of his makeshift classroom. ‘We all have to make our decisions, Inspector, that’s the easy bit. The hard part is we have to live with them. I learned this in Uganda. I was lucky enough to have a second chance, to make another choice, but Bayanga would always make the same choice no matter what. The work of killing, some men are forced into it but others, it finds them like a long-lost brother.’