Eleven Days (18 page)

‘And all because of this book she was writing?’

‘No,’ Spaulding admitted. ‘It would have had to have gone beyond that, something far more serious, if the diocese had taken steps to excommunicate them. We’re talking about the entire convent here, not just Mother Angelica. It’s not something the church does lightly. In that respect, the fire was very convenient for them.’

There was something about the way he’d said it that made Geneva underline the words in her notebook. She thought about what they’d found out, the nuns’ trips to Peru, to conferences that didn’t exist, the evidence left behind by the fire. ‘What about now? What’s the situation like these days in Peru? Are clergy still involved in politics?’

Spaulding nodded. ‘Though the church has succeeded in pretending the injustices don’t exist, they’re still there. Peru now has an elected president and parliament. But nothing has really changed – if anything the situation of the poor is even worse. The government has sold off most of the valuable land to foreign corporations. There’s no regulation, entire areas are being deforested, rivers polluted, and the Indians are finding the very land is disappearing from under them.’ Spaulding shook his head and took a sip of his wine. ‘Add drugs to the mix and you have a terrible situation.’

‘Drugs?’ Geneva moved her chair a few inches closer to the table.

‘Peru is the most productive coca growing region in the world. This is not a good thing for the people who live there, as you can imagine. Men with guns in open-backed trucks. Army incursions. Farmers forced to grow coca by the cartels then punished by the government for the same. It’s a mess that no one has the resolve to do anything about.’

Geneva shook her head, grateful once again that she lived in a country where things were not so fucked up. ‘Do you know what happened to Sister Rose?’ she asked. ‘The convent sent her to Peru in November of last year but I can’t find any record of her coming back into the country.’

‘That’s because she didn’t come back,’ Father Spaulding said.

‘What do you mean?’ Geneva felt a hot rush tumble through her as she clenched her notebook tightly.

Father Spaulding steepled his hands. When he spoke his voice was lower and surprisingly grave. ‘A terrible tragedy. Her body was never found. She’s still missing, probably will be until some farmer ploughs his fields and discovers her body.’

‘You think she was killed?’ Geneva said, leaning forward. ‘Isn’t it possible she just decided she’d had enough of being a nun and made her own way?’

‘Possible? Yes, but not very likely,’ Father Spaulding replied. ‘When she went missing she was on a field trip with a priest from the local parish. Two weeks later they found the priest’s head. Someone had left it in the front yard of the local church.’

She stopped at a coffee shop on her way back to the station and bolted down two macchiatos, trying to stop her head from spinning. The wine was sitting hot and deep in her belly and her head felt pleasantly light. Father Spaulding’s words streaked through her mind, the worlds he’d conjured up, theology and the plunge into thousands of years of history, lonely old men poring over brittle parchments trying to decipher the meaning of the world hidden in the obscurities of text, and she thought of Mother Angelica and her book and what a challenge and rude shock it would have been to the church to have such ideas put forward, but, more than that, to have them put forward by a woman.

She entered the station to update the incident log and type up the notes from her interview. It was early afternoon and she was glad everyone was out, her feet still a little unsteady as she walked down the long carpeted corridor towards the incident room.

She saw him walking towards her and it was too late to pretend she hadn’t.

DS Karlson nodded curtly as he passed, then she heard him stop and turn. She wanted to disappear into the ladies but it was three doors down.

‘Miller? I was just looking for you . . .’ Karlson was wearing a neat three-piece worsted suit and a tang of bitter aftershave. He stood right next to her, leaning into her space, defeating her obvious and pointless attempts to turn away. ‘I need you to sign some of the report sheets,’ he said, hovering over her as she squirmed and tried to answer him without opening her mouth.

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No, Branch wants everything up to date.’

She walked a couple of paces ahead of him. She could hear Karlson trailing behind her. She sat down and started signing off forms, Karlson standing only a foot away, wrinkling his nose and trying very hard not to smile. She gave him the completed sheets and was about to leave when he said, ‘Can you smell something?’

‘No,’ she replied, trying to talk down to the table.

‘Funny, smells like someone knocked over a bottle of cheap wine.’ Karlson shook his head in a gesture of mock bemusement, winked and walked away.

Hyde Park was a blaze of white. Fat clumps of dirty snow hanging on the branches of skinny trees. A cold snap in the wind as it came careening down from the pond. Carrigan bunched up his jacket and lowered his face against the stinging air as he made his way towards the Serpentine.

He was thinking about Emily as he trudged through the snow. How did she fit in? Was her presence at the convent no more than coincidence? A cruel synchronicity to send them spinning off into dead ends? She didn’t fit into the theory that the nuns had irked Duka and garnered his displeasure. She didn’t fit in with Geneva’s ideas on Peru. Either Emily had nothing to do with the case or she had everything to do with it.

The gallery’s foyer was almost empty, only a grungy student sitting behind a desk, desperately trying to keep his eyes open on the book he was reading. It was too cold to see art, too cold to stand and stare at paint and canvas and the student must have thought Carrigan had wandered in here by mistake, perhaps assuming there was a cafe, somewhere to sit and escape the wind.

‘Hi.’

He turned from the rows of artfully designed magazines and saw her. Donna was standing to the right of the front desk, one leg slightly crooked, her brown leather boots dark with snow. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’ Her hair was loose and kept getting into her eyes and she brushed it away and said, ‘I’m glad you did.’

They entered the gallery, several interlinked spaces, empty of everything but them and the art on the walls. Square light-boxes filled the first room. Chunky plastic devices, about two feet by two with bulbs blazing behind them, illuminating a set of fast food images. As they shuffled mutely into the room, Carrigan was blinded by luminescent photos of Big Macs, golden fried chicken, anaemic pizzas and glistening kebabs, and he realised that these images were the ones used as menus above the tills of takeaway places. The room was covered in them, sweating light and colour, these everyday images now isolated and reframed and made faintly mystical. Carrigan didn’t know if it was art but it was making him hungry.

‘I hope you don’t mind meeting here,’ Donna said. ‘I just needed . . . God . . . I didn’t realise how much I needed to get out of the house until . . .’ She reached for a handkerchief and dropped it on the floor and got to her knees and stumbled as she picked it back up. He could see the broken blood vessels in her eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday, the soft downward curve of her lids chapped and red-rimmed. She smelled of lavender and wine and something else beneath it all – a sharp and lovely citric fragrance, some expensive perfume or moisturiser. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t speak earlier, back at the house . . . it’s like I’m still expecting her to call . . .’ Donna’s lips were stained blood-red and he could tell she’d been drinking before coming here. She turned away from the wall and faced him. ‘I just can’t believe I’ll never see her again.’

‘I know,’ he replied, remembering a day twenty years ago when he’d first entered the country of grief and never-again. ‘I could tell you you’ll get over it, that time heals all wounds and all that, but I’m not going to lie to you. Your life will never be the same. You’ll always look back and see a clear demarcation. Everything will take place in reference to before or after. You should maybe think about seeing someone . . .’

Her sudden laughter surprised him. ‘That’s the last thing I need. I grew up with psychiatrists for parents.’ Her smile collapsed and he saw the years crash up against her. ‘Been there, done that, and it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Besides, Emily’s dead, there’s nothing that’s going to change that, is there?’

‘We’ll find out who did this.’ Carrigan moved closer until he could feel the heat and burn of Donna’s breath against his skin. ‘I know that’s not going to be much of a consolation, that Emily will still be gone, but I promise you she will be avenged.’

Donna placed a hand on his arm. ‘Thank you for saying that but . . . I still don’t understand it . . . any of it. What was she doing in a convent? That’s just not like Emily at all.’

He pulled away and turned to face the opposite wall, a succulent burger in pornographic close-up, each sesame seed and bead of moisture visible under the relentless light. ‘The more you can tell us about her, the more likely we are to find out why she was there.’

‘I lied to you.’ Donna put out her hand and steadied herself against the wall. ‘When I said I hadn’t talked to her for a couple of years that wasn’t true.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us when we were at the house?’ Carrigan said as gently as possible.

‘Because I didn’t want my father to know,’ Donna replied, and she seemed embarrassed by this somehow. ‘Because Emily swore me to secrecy.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

Donna looked anyplace but at Carrigan, her eyes restless and heavy. ‘She called me a couple of weeks ago.’

‘A couple of weeks ago?’ Carrigan tried to control his breathing. ‘What did she want?’

‘The usual,’ Donna sighed. ‘She only ever called when she needed help. She was always getting into trouble and we were always getting her out of it.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

Donna shrugged. ‘You name it, Emily . . . well, you probably know by now that Emily had problems. She’d had problems since we were little girls and we all thought that as she got older they would go away but they didn’t, they only got worse.’ Donna reached into her handbag and took out her phone. She pressed several buttons then tilted the screen towards Carrigan. ‘I took this a couple of weeks ago when we met.’ Donna’s eyes shaded as she realised it had been for the last time. ‘You never know, do you?’

‘No you don’t.’ Carrigan took the phone and stared at the photo under the flickering fluorescents.

Emily was sitting in a pub, her arms propped up against the table, a nearly full pint glass cradled in her right hand. She wore heavy powder-blue eyeliner and had a piercing through her left nostril, a small bronze hoop. Her hair was pink and the sudden blush of colour was shocking against her white skin. Her expression was soft, a world away from the bitter scowl of the mugshot, and you could tell she wasn’t looking at the camera but at her sister. ‘Did she say what kind of trouble she was in?’

Donna put the phone back in her handbag. ‘She sounded really strung out. We met at King’s Cross. She was always calling me when she was in trouble but normally she only needed money. This time was different. She was scared and Emily was never scared and when I said something about how it’d all work out in the end, she laughed and told me that some things cannot be righted no matter how hard you try. She said she’d done something very stupid but she wouldn’t tell me what. I asked her if she needed money. She said money wouldn’t solve this.’ Donna twirled a lock of hair round her finger, her lips tight and pale.

‘But she didn’t tell you anything about the trouble she was in?’

Donna shook her head, ‘I should have known, damn it. I knew her better than anyone else and I thought she was just being melodramatic, I didn’t . . .’ She hung her head and stared at her shoes. Her body seemed to fold in on itself.

‘Can I have a copy of this photo?’ It was the most recent image he’d seen of Emily and would be much more useful to them than a four-year-old mugshot.

Donna nodded. ‘I’ll email a copy to your phone.’

‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that.’ Carrigan pulled out his mobile and showed it to her. It always managed to raise a smile and this time was no exception. She stared at the chunky black box, already an antique, and smiled.

‘What happened between your parents and Emily? Why haven’t they spoken for a couple of years?’

The question took Donna by surprise. She looked up at Carrigan and he could see the screaming arguments, slammed doors and sleepless nights burning through her memory. ‘The things she stood for . . . the things she said . . . you know how families are . . .’

Carrigan nodded but in truth he had no idea. His father had disappeared from his life when he was sixteen and his mother certainly wasn’t like any of his friends’ mums, not with her rosary beads and
Reader’s Digest
s, her spotted half-blind Jack Russell and the permanent scowl etched on her face by her husband’s abandonment. ‘She must have been very angry and hurt by your father disinheriting her.’

Donna laughed a thin, harsh laugh. ‘The will? She didn’t care about that, money meant nothing to Emily.’

Carrigan nodded, thinking only someone who’d grown up with too much of it could ever think that. ‘What were the disagreements with your father about?’

‘What weren’t they about?’ Donna replied as they entered the second room and Carrigan was surprised to find the fast food images replaced by the illuminated face of Mohammed Atta in each light-box, his expression subtly altered between one and the next. ‘Everything she said or did our father saw as some kind of failure on his part. Remember, both our parents are child psychiatrists – when your kid grows up to be something other than you expected, it becomes a professional failure as well as a personal one.’ She raised her voice and changed pitch and stressed certain syllables to ironise what she was saying and distance herself from the memory of it, but Carrigan thought it only enmeshed her deeper in her own inescapable history and he felt bad because he’d imagined her life a gilded one, money and breeding and good luck. He should have known better, should have known that sorrow and pain lurked everywhere and came for everyone.

They left the gallery and crossed the winding strip of road that bisected the park, heading towards the small cafe overlooking the Serpentine pond. Carrigan bought them both coffees and, as he walked out onto the terrace, the trees silver and still, the lake almost frozen, he saw Donna sitting and facing the water, her hair windblown and aswirl, eyes lost in wistful haze.

‘Thank you,’ she said, raising the cup to her lips and blowing on it, white wispy vapours escaping into the chill air. A Labrador puppy came bounding up the path and stopped, tail wagging, by Donna’s feet. She ran her hands through its thick downy fur and stroked it and, for the first time, Carrigan saw her as she’d been before he’d come and broken the news and it pierced him deeply that she would only ever be this carefree and giddy in fleeting moments and that the memory of her dead sister would be like a lens through which she would forever view the world. He thought of his own dead, voices whispering to him in the crackle of night, the friends and lovers gone to earth and silence.

‘You said that Emily was always getting into trouble. When did this start?’

‘From very early on,’ Donna replied. ‘She was always in trouble at school, with her teachers, classmates, even her friends. It only got worse as she got older. She kept skipping classes, smoking and drinking during lunch breaks, seeing boys, getting caught – always getting caught as if that had been the intention all along. Everything that life threw at her just made her more furious and she would go off into these week-long depressions, sit in her room with the lights out, under the covers, moaning and crying. As she got older these periods got longer. Father and Mother tried everything, sent her to behavioural specialists, tried all sorts of pills – you can imagine what it did to them, having to send their own child to a specialist. It was the greatest sign of their failure as professionals and as parents.

‘She . . . she made several attempts at taking her own life. The usual teenager slashing her wrists, cries for help . . . but Father and Mother ignored her, believing that was the best way to deal with it. And then, one day, when she was sixteen, everything changed.

‘She’d gone to a summer camp the school had set up for kids who’d fallen behind. She’d been to these kind of places before and always ended up running away or assaulting a teacher, but this time something extraordinary happened. She stayed the whole length of the course and came back and it was like she was a new Emily.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘She’d met a couple of older students at the camp and they’d introduced her to the world of politics. At first we were all so relieved she’d finally found something which motivated and interested her, but what we didn’t realise was that she’d only managed to find a new receptacle for her rage and fury at the world.

‘She began going to student meetings, small groups in dusty after-hours classrooms watching atrocity videos and international news reports, rolling thin cigarettes and drinking cider, discussing capitalism and exploitation. She would sit at the dinner table and rant non-stop about America and imperialism, spinning wild conspiracy theories, believing that everyone who didn’t agree with her was complicit.

‘You have to understand, Emily grew up in that house surrounded by all that money and in the streets she saw men sleeping in doorways and fishing their dinners from bins outside restaurants and it made her angry and ashamed and determined to do something about it. She was so passionate and brave and principled, I always envied her so much for that.’

‘And you?’ Carrigan enquired gently. ‘After all, you grew up in the same house.’

‘I was always a little less engaged with the world than Emily and I also learned early on that the world isn’t fair and nothing we can do will change that.’

She looked away, as if Carrigan had caught her in some shameful act. ‘We were still close though, she and I, and we went to university at Leeds together, but it was never the same. I chose to study English, she took courses in politics and history. She began going on marches and protests, getting into trouble with the police. She joined a radical animal rights group and went on hunt-sab missions. I rarely saw her any more on campus, and she barely ever came home.

‘Then things got worse. You never think they can but they always do.’ A slow baleful smile appeared on Donna’s face for a brief moment. ‘It was the Easter break of our final year. I’d prevailed on her to come home for the holidays. We were having lunch and a massive argument blazed between Father and Emily, over something stupid and meaningless, foreign policy, oil, something that had nothing to do with our lives. She called him a hypocrite. Father ordered her out of the house. In the middle of Easter lunch. She took her things, dropped out of uni and disappeared. It was the first of her many disappearances. We didn’t hear from her again for almost a year.’ Donna took a deep breath and brushed the tears from her eyes. She finished her coffee and wiped her top lip.