A Dark Redemption (13 page)

She thought back to Gabriel’s impassioned speech the previous night. The call to arms. She could understand his position, her mother would even donate time and money, but Geneva couldn’t see how more guns could help. She looked up at Lee and there he was, the twenty-two-year-old boy she met at university again, his face younger, his eyes bright. She blinked away the thoughts swirling through her head and took out Grace’s notes and essay plans. ‘There’s a lot of references to something called the Black-Throated Wind. I think Grace was concentrating on that from the look of things. Do you know anything about them?’

Lee’s face became tight, his lips almost disappearing. He looked away. ‘It’s not a them, it’s a him.’

Geneva felt her skin tingling at the word ‘him’. ‘Who is he?’

‘His name is Lawrence Ngomo but he called himself the Black-Throated Wind. He had many other names too.’ Lee shook his head. ‘I met him once . . . Shit, Genny, you still smoke?’

She nodded, took out her pack of Lucky Strikes. ‘You allowed to smoke in the house?’

Lee shook his head. ‘No. Haven’t touched one of these for seven years.’ He took two cigarettes out of the pack and put them both in his mouth, lighting them simultaneously before passing one to her. It was a gesture she remembered well and something in her chest felt like it was popping. Her hands shook as she took the cigarette. ‘Shouldn’t we go outside?’

Lee stood up and opened the window. ‘Fuck it, I haven’t done this in too long.’

He sat back down next to her. ‘Ngomo’s a piece of work,’ he continued, coughing, taking deep drags on the cigarette. ‘He’s belligerent, violent, paranoid, and holds grudges for ever. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions when I interviewed him. When I asked him why he agreed to do the interview he told me he fancied killing a white man today but that he’d changed his mind.’

Geneva smiled. ‘Nice. Who is he?’

‘He was one of Kony’s lieutenants. Then he split off, set up his own splinter faction. Called himself the Black-Throated Wind. There’s a lot of rumours and not much fact. People saw him as some kind of religious saviour. They say he modelled himself on Savonarola, the medieval Florentine monk who created the bonfire of the vanities. Ngomo didn’t burn luxuries, though, he burned villages – he believed that the land was cursed by blood and that only through fire, by clearing the land and starting again, could peace come.’

‘He had followers for this?’ She was always amazed at how people fell so willingly for anyone who promised a return to some mythic former age.

‘Many. You have to realise that someone like Ngomo makes the world very simple and a lot of people are drawn to that. They believed him a saint, something more than human, sent down from heaven to purge the land. Many people claim to have seen him walking across the surface of Lake Albert. They say he recreated the Eastern Wall of the Jerusalem temple in the bush, stone by stone; that he translated the Bible into Luganda, changing a word here, a word there, until it’s meaning had changed too.’ Lee took a deep breath, crushed out his cigarette. ‘There’s substantial evidence he was involved in the murder of those aid workers back in 1990, you remember that?’

She shook her head.

‘Four British girls on their gap year, trying to do something meaningful rather than just getting drunk and sunburned, working for one of the food-aid NGOs. One was the daughter of a backbench MP, one was a doctor’s daughter . . . good girls from good families. When they didn’t turn up at their base in Gulu, a massive search entailed but it was fruitless. A few weeks later a video began turning up in West African markets and backroom shops. The video showed the girls praying, then cut to a shot of them dead on the ground. There were always rumours that an unedited version existed but it was never found. There was a lot of noise in the British press at the time, a speech in parliament, but the Ugandan government insisted that the girls’ killers were themselves dead, the result of army gains in the north.’

She scribbled it all down feeling something in her blood fizz and jump. ‘What happened to Ngomo?’

‘He disappeared around seven years ago. Some of those closest to him said he’d had a revelation in the bush, saw God, renounced the sword; others say his body is rotting in the long grass, shot by an eight-year-old near the town of Baringo.’

‘What do you think?’

Lee’s face creased into a grin she knew well. ‘I think he’s a lot closer than that.’

She looked across the room and their eyes met. ‘Lee?’

He stared down at his shoes, ‘I think he got out when he could. There was an international warrant for his arrest that was rescinded seven years ago; they’ve never done that before. I think he gave up names and positions in return for immunity.’

‘You think he’s living
here
?’

Lee got up, went upstairs, came back down with an old dusty file. He flicked through it then stopped and pulled out a yellowed copy of the
Daily Mail
from two years ago. He sat down and opened the paper, turning to the centre spread.
WAR CRIMINALS LIVING LARGE IN LONDON
, the headline ran, eight grainy black-and-white photos underneath. Lee’s finger hovered over the second from last, an old man with grey hair and a black moustache, the name Lawrence Ngomo in 10-point type under it. ‘I think he made a deal, got some kind of immunity and residence here,’ he stopped and looked at her, something flickering behind his eyes. ‘It makes you wonder though‚ what he could have given them that was worse than the killing of the aid workers.’

The interview room was cold and damp. It hung in their nostrils and crept through their clothes as they sat across from Gabriel Otto, watching him strip a packet of cigarettes to fine cardboard streamers.

‘What are you going to make out of that?’ Carrigan leant forward, his breath heavy with coffee and fatigue, the exertion of the arrest having taken its toll. ‘A key to get out of this room?’

Gabriel continued stripping the pack, ignoring the two detectives, his eyes focused intently on the object in his hands.

‘You missed one,’ Geneva said and Gabriel looked up, his lips slowly peeling into a smile.

‘You could be halfway pretty if you tried.’

Geneva felt Carrigan tense, a slight shift in the room’s pressure. She looked at him, shook her head and turned back to the suspect.

‘Why did you kill her, Gabriel?’ Her voice was cold and uninflected. ‘Or should I call you Derek?’ She stared into his eyes, forcing herself not to smile.

His head snapped up, a look of pure malevolence in his eyes. ‘No one calls me that.’

Geneva pulled a sheet of paper from her file, slid it across the desk. ‘Your parents did, at least according to your birth certificate.’

Gabriel dropped the shredded cigarette pack and stared directly at Geneva. She could feel the skin on her arms contract, a tiny burst of panic deep down in her gut.

Gabriel put his hands on the table, his fingers skinny as pencils. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

Geneva leant forward and pushed a stray hair neatly behind her ear. ‘When did you last see Grace?’

‘Don’t remember,’ he replied, his voice steady and even. ‘Maybe the day before she was killed, maybe the week before . . . who keeps track?’

‘How about on the night of her murder?’ Geneva kept her hands on the table, noticing Gabriel staring at her fingers, admiring her nails. ‘We have witnesses who saw you, who heard you arguing with Grace the night she was killed. Those courtyards carry sound. You were Sunday night’s entertainment, the building’s very own reality show. Then she threw you out. You banged on her door and shouted and threatened to kill her.’

‘Wouldn’t be a relationship if you didn’t threaten to kill the little woman every now and then.’ He glanced at Carrigan.

‘Except this time you went ahead and did it.’

Gabriel sighed theatrically, his eyes roving Geneva’s neckline. ‘You’ve got nothing,’ he said, his voice like a kid who didn’t get the birthday present he’d been expecting. ‘How do I know that? Because I did nothing apart from argue with her and bang on her door a few times.’

‘So you admit you were there that night,’ Carrigan said.

Geneva tapped out a cigarette and offered Gabriel one. ‘Just as long as you don’t destroy my pack.’ She lit it for him, his hand cupping hers before she could pull away.

‘I told you. I didn’t kill her.’

‘You need to convince us of that. Everything says you did it. The witnesses, the forensics, the video footage.’

Gabriel slammed his hand flat on the table. ‘When I left she was still alive. Alive enough to fucking shout and call me a collaborator.’

Geneva’s eyes flicked up. ‘Collaborator? What did she mean by that? Who did she think you were working for?’

They both caught the momentary look of panic in Gabriel’s expression. ‘Okay, okay, fuck it‚’ he finally said, looking down at the table. ‘If I tell you what happened then you’ll let me go, right?’

Geneva nodded.

‘We were supposed to be going out that night but at the last minute she called to say she couldn’t make it.’

‘Seems you’re not short of company,’ Carrigan interrupted, liking Gabriel less and less. ‘Why didn’t you take one of your other girlfriends?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Gabriel replied. ‘White girls are good for sex,’ looking directly at Geneva. ‘A bit of fun here and there. Grace was different. She was from home.’

‘You mean Harlesden?’ Geneva flashed her teeth.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Gabriel snapped.

‘Why do you call Uganda home, Derek, when you were born and raised in North London?’ Carrigan was impressed by her change of tone, hard and sharp one moment, the next sounding like a kindly schoolteacher, the type you’d spill all your secrets to.

‘My father is Ugandan,’ he replied. ‘Your country brought him here to work, he never had a choice. Africa will always be home to black-skinned people, makes no difference where you ship us to.’

Geneva didn’t want to hear his brand of fashionable rebellion; she was sure it went down well with the home-county kids at SOAS but both she and Carrigan had seen enough not to be moved by rhetoric and imprecation. ‘Tell me about Sunday night, Derek.’

‘Don’t call me that again.’

Geneva smiled. ‘I promise.’

Gabriel seemed to take this at face value. ‘There was a Ugandan band playing at the Empire that Grace wanted to see but it was sold out. I’d managed to get a couple of tickets. Then she calls me up that afternoon, says she can’t make it. Just like that. I said‚
What the fuck?
She told me she was meeting someone and then she hung up on me.’

‘So you went over to King’s Court to talk to her?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘She was seeing someone else, I was sure of it. Why else break such a date?’ Carrigan could think of a multitude of reasons but kept his mouth shut; Gabriel’s bitterness towards Grace was serving them well. ‘She let me into the flat. She was all dressed up. She’d never dressed like that for me.’

‘Dressed how?’ Geneva stubbed out her cigarette, her eyes never leaving Gabriel’s.

‘She was wearing traditional clothes, her mother’s. It’s a sign of respect back home. I asked her who was she seeing tonight, who was so fucking important? She refused to tell me, asked me to leave.’

‘So you got mad at her, well that’s understandable,’ Carrigan muttered conspiratorially.

‘Of course I got mad. I paid a lot for those tickets, even booked a restaurant for afterwards.’

‘Lucky girl didn’t know what she was missing,’ Carrigan replied.

‘I said to her, tell me who you’re meeting, all dressed up like that,’ Gabriel continued, oblivious now to the detectives, his mind reliving the evening’s slight. ‘She just stood there shaking her head, saying‚
You don’t understand
. I told her I understood fine. She said‚
You never understand
. And then she started laying into me about the AAC, saying I was only doing it to get girls, that I had no heart, that it didn’t matter to me what was going on in Uganda. I told her I wasn’t leaving. I wanted to see who her new man was. She told me it wasn’t a boyfriend. She said it was work. I laughed. This is not an original excuse. This is half past six on a Sunday evening. She said she was meeting an important source, someone who knew stuff they shouldn’t. She said the man only agreed to meet at her flat. She said this would bring it all together. I didn’t believe her. I called her a liar and a whore. She pushed me out of the room. She slammed the door and said she never wanted to see me again. I banged on her door and told her exactly what kind of girl she was.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I went home. I called Greta, this girl I sometimes hang with, and we went to the show. She didn’t get it but we had a nice time and I went back to her place. That’s all. I never saw Grace again until I switched on the news.’

Gabriel crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. The room was cloudy with smoke and Carrigan felt that old hunger rising up inside him as he thought about what Gabriel had said. ‘Try this for a minute,’ he suggested. ‘Imagine you’re the policeman and I’m the one feeding you this bullshit story. Would you believe me?’

Gabriel shrugged, his shoulders angular and spiky, tiny knots of bone.

‘You weren’t particularly upset when we saw you at the AAC meeting.’

‘Don’t give a fuck for her any more. She used me. She fucking used me and then when she had someone better she let me go. You think I’m going to cry over something like that?’

‘What do you mean she used you? You sound like a girl,’ Carrigan said.

‘Not like that, man. She used me for my connections. For her fucking thesis. She cosied up to me, came to all the meetings, hooked up with a lot of émigrés from back home. She was always looking for information, always working out who could help her and who couldn’t.’ Gabriel’s smile was strange and unsettling. He leant back in the chair. ‘At first I really thought she had another boyfriend, then I realised no, she was right when she said she didn’t care about that. It was this source that mattered to her more.’

‘And she didn’t tell you anything more about this man she was supposed to meet, this “source”?’

‘Nah. And if she did, by that point I wasn’t listening. All I know is she seemed excited, and Grace only ever got excited when it was about her work. It was like some fucking mission for her.’

Geneva opened the green file lying on the table, thinking back to how Cecilia had used almost the same words to describe Grace. She took a grainy photograph from the file, looked at it for a few seconds, then slid it towards Gabriel.

Gabriel sprang back and almost toppled from his chair, as if the photograph were a snake thrown across the table.

‘So, you do recognise him?’ Geneva said, watching Gabriel’s face drop for the first time that afternoon.

Carrigan briefly glimpsed an image of a black man with a small moustache and receding hairline. They hadn’t talked about this before starting the interview. He wondered who the man was as he watched Gabriel looking everywhere but the photo. Geneva was biting the inside of her lip, trying to keep her face blank, but there was no disguising the glee in her eyes.

‘Of course I recognise him,’ Gabriel said, still avoiding the photograph. ‘Find me anyone from Uganda who doesn’t recognise the Black-Throated Wind.’

Carrigan looked at the photo, seeing a grainy image of a man who could have been any of a thousand men. Where had she got it from? Was this Branch’s idea or had she found it in the box of Grace’s work notes? Was she still pursuing her thesis theory despite his objections and all the evidence to the contrary?

‘Tell me about him.’ Geneva placed her hands on the table, fingers slowly spreading like a fan. Gabriel scraped his chair forward. He took a deep breath, turned over the photo so that only the gleaming white back reflected into the room. ‘The Bible says thou shalt not
murder
, not, as is commonly thought, thou shalt not
kill
. You understand the difference?’

‘I understand that everyone has a different understanding of the difference,’ Carrigan replied. Geneva looked at him, a smile of mild surprise perched on the left side of her mouth.

‘Well Ngomo certainly understood,’ Gabriel continued. ‘The Black-Throated Wind.’ He said the name with a chilly reverence, a name only to be whispered in shadowed rooms and subterranean spaces. ‘You know why the Bible speaks to us Africans? Why we believe in it as a literal thing?’ He didn’t give them a chance to answer, in full oratory mode now, his fists clenching the table. ‘The Bible speaks to us because we live in a biblical world, a world of flood, famine and plague. The Bible is never metaphor for us, it is always a literal telling, the flesh and blood of God. You need to understand this if you want to understand Uganda. If war is your god then the battlefield becomes your church, the blood and bullets your sacraments. A man like Ngomo who has no ideology, no politics, whose world isn’t filled with complications and mitigations – for a man like that, it is easy to succeed. With only one road ahead, you make many miles.’

‘Do you think that Grace’s source may have been Ngomo? Do you think it’s possible Ngomo set up a meeting and killed her?’ Geneva turned the photo over, General Ngomo somehow looking more sinister now, his face peppered with stray ash from the table.

Gabriel laughed as if he’d just heard the world’s funniest joke. He shook his head. ‘You cops are so stupid.’ He took Geneva’s empty cigarette pack and began stripping it. ‘I’ve told you everything I can about that night; now either release me or charge me and let me see a lawyer.’

There was a collision on the south side of the Great West Road, almost directly opposite his flat. A still-steaming snarl of metal and glass spread across two lanes. The rain had turned from drizzle to downpour. Red and blue lights cut through the mist and haze like lighthouse beacons. Carrigan locked his car, briefly considered crossing over to the accident site where two constables were stretching crime-scene tape while medics crouched on the ground, their arms in frenzied movement, their faces intently clenched. But there was no need for him there. They were doing what they could. The traffic was filtered through the left lane and already there was a chorus of horns, a symphony of different timbres and tones clashing against the bullet spray siren of the approaching ambulance.

He could see the vehicle involved, a family SUV, the tyres shredded, thin black tendrils hanging from the undercarriage. A dark smear of blood on the asphalt was already washing away in the rain. Slivers of glass sparkled and shone in the paramedics’ searchlights like tiny stars against the deep black ripple of tarmac. There was blood on the inside of the windscreen, shrill and bright compared to everything else in the night. In the back seat there were children’s toys scattered and upside down, handbags and summer hats. He tried not to stare but there’s no way you can look away. He could see it in the cars that were passing at a crawl, their occupants’ eyes all turned towards the scene trying to glimpse something while hoping not to. They’d drive a little slower tonight, he knew, hold their wives’ and husbands’ hands after dinner, have trouble falling asleep hearing their child in the cot next to the bed breathing a little too heavily. But tomorrow they’d be driving again as they always did, convinced of their immortality. He didn’t begrudge them their curiosity; in the deepest nights he knew this was part of the reason he’d become a policeman. He turned, shaking the images from his eyes, and that’s when he saw the car.

It was the fact that they weren’t looking at the accident which made him notice them. Parked on the other side of the flyover, the two occupants shrouded in dark and breath mist. From where they were sitting they had a clear view of his front door. He tried to think of other reasons for them being there, then crossed the road and headed towards his flat.