A Dark Redemption (17 page)

The bar was dark and dingy, the way bars were in his memory, but this was just the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. There was only one occupied table, four male students, drunk already, their voices rising with each sip of their beers. Carrigan walked over to the bar and stood there for a couple of minutes as the barman resolutely ignored him, chatting on a mobile phone and stacking bottled ales.

Carrigan was glad for the pause, it gave him time to think, to clear his head which was still reeling from Cecilia’s revelation. The music screamed with wailing guitars, the smell of old beer and chips hung in the dull air. He remembered another student bar, very much like this one, the three of them sitting around a table like conspirators, degrees in pockets, planning their trip to Africa. He felt a sharp pain rattle through his chest. He missed David so much and all these years of pretending he didn’t, of trying to carve out a new life for himself, made the pain all that much more acute now.

‘What can I get you?’ The barman looked at Carrigan with barely concealed antipathy. He was tall and wore long blond dreadlocks slung across his shoulder like a lion’s mane. His T-shirt declared capitalism is dead and his face was decorated with hoops and piercings, tattooed bar codes and silver rings.

Carrigan pulled out his warrant card, watching the barman’s eyes turn narrow and guarded when he saw what it was. The music got louder, Carrigan sure the barman had just raised the volume. His ears began to ring, a high-pitched whine that was a constant reminder of Africa. ‘Can you turn it down, please?’

The barman looked up from his chores. ‘Listen, old man,’ his accent pure Notting Hill, public schools and Sunday-afternoon cricket matches. ‘If it’s too loud for you, you can always leave.’

Carrigan bit his lip, turned and walked over to the jukebox. The drunks stared up from their pints as he took the cable and wrenched the plug out of the wall with one quick snap of his wrist. The music died mid-song. The students shot him dirty looks but, drunk as they were, even they could see the tightness in his features, the thinness of his lips, and decided that, actually, no music was fine by them.

Carrigan reached the bar and placed both his arms across the wooden surface. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Flash.’

‘That’s what you use to clean the toilet with. What’s your real name?’

Flash looked left and right then whispered ‘Tarquin’ so quietly Carrigan barely caught it.

‘Hmm,’ Carrigan snorted, ‘I think I prefer Flash. There was a birthday party here two weeks ago, Friday the seventeenth. I need to get in touch with whoever was organising it.’

The barman tossed back his mane of hair and looked down at the scratched surface of the bar. ‘Can’t remember,’ he replied, turning his back to Carrigan and started stacking bottles again. Carrigan laid Grace’s photo flat on the bar. ‘How about her? She was here that Friday. I don’t suppose you remember serving her?’

Flash turned back and glared at Carrigan. He picked something out of his teeth with a long curved fingernail. Carrigan could smell the man now, unwashed clothes, stale smoke and something else, far less pleasant, underneath. ‘What? You expect I’m some fucking memory man?’ Flash replied. ‘You know how many people come here on a Friday night?’

‘But a big birthday party, lots of tips, you’d remember that surely?’ Carrigan could feel the moment slipping, he’d come here flushed with hope that Cecilia’s statement would be the break they’d been waiting, praying, for but now he realised he’d been as foolish as his most callow constable.

‘I do my job, serve up the drinks, anything else – not my concern.’ Flash turned back to the refrigerators and continued stacking.

‘Come here,’ Carrigan said, his voice thick with authority. Flash slowly turned and shuffled up to the bar. Carrigan reached forward and grabbed the young man by one of his long dreadlocks. He immediately regretted it, the hank of hair greasy and sticky in his grip, revulsion crawling up his throat, but he held on. ‘You know cops have this extra sense thing,’ he said, twisting the young man’s hair, ‘like a sixth sense. Like how I can see your future by just looking into your eyes.’

Flash struggled against Carrigan’s grip but there was nothing he could do. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Carrigan replied. ‘And guess what? I see you with short hair, a suit and a BlackBerry in your hand. A nice blonde wife from Hampshire and a flat in Limehouse close to your office in the city.’

Something in Flash’s eyes recoiled as if he’d inadvertently caught a glimpse of his true self in a passing mirror.

‘Serving people, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Must be hard these days,’ Carrigan continued, changing the subject, ‘what, with girls looking much older than they actually are. Would be easy to make a simple mistake, serve someone under-age, get yourself into a lot of trouble.’ He let go of Flash’s hair and wiped his hand on his trousers, registering the barman’s eyes, the way they widened then shut down. ‘Now you wouldn’t want me sending in uniforms on a regular basis, making ID checks, would you? Might drive some of your customers away, having the police in here all the time.’

Flash’s face blanched; he tried to hide it but it was no good. ‘What do you want?’ he said under his breath.

Carrigan pointed up at the CCTV camera. ‘How long do you keep the security tapes before you recycle them?’

The barman smiled. ‘Wiped every week,’ he replied with great satisfaction. Carrigan held his jaw rigid, tried not to let the disappointment show.

‘But you do remember the birthday party, right?’

The barman shrugged. ‘What, someone snuck a fag? You’re here to solve the mystery of the missing Marlboro?’

‘No,’ Carrigan calmly replied pointing to the photo of Grace. ‘This girl was murdered last week and we believe she met her killer here.’

The barman stopped what he was doing, stared at Carrigan as if suspecting this was some kind of joke, then picked up the photo and studied it. ‘I know the day you’re talking about but I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t remember her.’

Carrigan nodded. ‘You don’t happen to know the name of the person whose birthday it was?’

Flash put the photo back down, actually thought about this for a second or two. ‘’Fraid not. Some girl, that’s all I know.’

‘Shit!’ Carrigan slammed his fist down against the bar, making Flash jump as if he’d been on the receiving end of an electric shock. Carrigan looked down at the photo of Grace, silently mouthing an apology, and started to gather up his things.

‘But you should check Facebook,’ Flash said.

Carrigan looked up. ‘What?’

‘Facebook. You know what that is, old man?’ He smiled, revealing teeth yellow as corn husks.

Carrigan nodded though he’d never actually been on the site himself and had no real idea what its purpose was.

‘They posted all the photos there. Sent us a link. There’ll be the name of the lucky girl at the top of the page.’

But it wasn’t her name that Carrigan was interested in any more as he waited for the surly barman to copy the address off his laptop.

He rushed into the incident room, his jacket all rumpled, hair messed up by the wind and rain.

‘Sir?’ DC Singh raised her head from her desk, flicked back her hair. ‘I was just wondering . . .’

‘Not now‚’ Carrigan cut her off, marched past Berman and Jennings and entered his office. He’d left the window open and one quarter of the room was covered in rainwater. He put his coffee down on the table, the smell making him feel human again. He could see the others staring through the glass partition, wondering what was up, but he ignored them, booted up his computer and sat there feet tapping, his fingers unable to sit still as he waited. He took a sip of the coffee, restraining himself, wanting to make it last, and thought about David again, the student bar bringing back sour memories, and then when his browser was ready he typed in the Facebook link that Flash had given him.

He thought it would be simple. He thought it would be easy. He thought all he needed to do was type in the address and he’d find what he was looking for.

But first he had to sign up. There was a box on the right-hand side of the screen asking for his personal details. He typed slowly: name, username, password, confirm password . . . then clicked. The screen refreshed but it was the same screen. He stared at it, frustrated, not sure what he’d done wrong. His password was highlighted in red, he must have typed it differently the second time. He corrected the mistake and pressed enter.

Nothing. The screen refreshed and told him there was something wrong with his fields. He shook his head, ground his feet into the floor and re-entered all the information from scratch. This time the site accepted his registration but just as the new page was loading the browser crashed.

He refreshed it and entered his details for the fourth time. Watched as a new page unscrolled in front of him. There were so many options, so many boxes to fill, and what the hell was a ‘profile’ anyway? He tried entering the address he’d been given but the site kept demanding he create a profile first. He started filling out the form, ran out of time, the page refreshed, and he lost all the data he’d inputted.

‘Shit!’ He punched the keyboard in frustration, catching the end of his coffee cup and sending it flying across the desk, covering the computer in thick sweet liquid. He cursed, reached into his drawers for some tissues and tried to soak up the worst of the mess but it seemed to just make it spread faster and there was now an acrid burning smell coming from his hard drive. He got up, brushed the coffee off his trousers and stuck his head through the door. ‘Berman!’ he shouted, watching as the constables snapped their heads up then quickly back down when they registered his expression.

Berman got onto the site in less than a minute. Carrigan stood behind him, taking deep breaths, telling himself this was probably nothing, another dead-end, no reason to get too excited.

‘You know how Facebook works?’ Berman looked up from the screen.

‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ Carrigan replied. ‘Just see if they’ve posted photos of the birthday party.’

Berman nodded, his left hand shooting down and worrying the ends of his prayer shawl. His other hand skimmed across the keyboard, clicking furiously. ‘Two hundred and forty-four of them.’

‘Jesus!’ Carrigan shook his head.

‘Digital cameras,’ Berman replied. ‘People just snap away, doesn’t matter what they’re snapping.’

A bit like mobile phones and Twitter, Carrigan thought, people talking just for the sake of talking, yet it was this very randomness he was pinning his hopes on. He watched as Berman clicked and a new window opened, a prompt asking whether they wanted to see the pictures individually or as a slideshow.

‘One by one – and slowly,’ Carrigan said, pulling up a chair and taking a seat next to Berman.

Berman clicked photo after photo. The birthday girl was blonde and lovely. Carrigan felt something in him ache – she reminded him of Louise the first time they’d met, across an interview table, her beauty untarnished by the clients she represented, her voice the only thing he could hear that day.

Most of the photos were blurry, indistinct, people smeared in bouts of movement or shot in such close-up all he could see was bad skin and gleaming teeth. They looked so young these students, so unencumbered by life.

Berman quickly flicked through a set taken at the birthday table, endless bottles of wine and half-filled glasses surrounding the group. ‘Faster,’ Carrigan ordered, tapping his foot, impatient, wondering whether this was all another crazy waste of time when he suddenly grabbed Berman’s arm and said, ‘Stop.’

There she was. Grace. Sitting at a table, a huge smile on her face, caught in the margins of the photo. Carrigan felt his heart speed up, saw that Berman was now staring at the screen with a new concentration. They both looked at the shadowed form of the man’s back. The man sitting opposite Grace. Her killer.

The party had started to break up and the photographer was now moving around the room. Berman flicked through the next sequence but there was nothing but smiles, misty eyes and raised toasts. Then he stopped, staring at the screen, holding his breath. Carrigan pushed his chair forward and leant across Berman. ‘Oh my God.’

They were staring at a photo of the birthday girl. She was standing to the right of the frame, holding a bottle of champagne and the waist of a young man. But it wasn’t that which drew the two detectives’ eyes, it was the background.

They could see the back of Grace’s head, her luxurious bounty of hair, one hand raised in the middle of some unknowable gesture. Across from her sat a young black male, his face illuminated by the camera flash.

‘Can we get this any bigger?’

Berman clicked some keys and the picture opened up in a new browser window. He clicked and panned until the man’s face was at the centre of the photo.

Carrigan blinked twice as he finally stared into the killer’s face. He looked so young, terribly young, that at first Carrigan felt a slight disappointment, but there was something about his eyes, the more you looked at them the more they seemed to be looking at you.

As he stared at the image of Grace’s killer he saw the eyes which had stared back at him that first day outside King’s Court.

Time began to move in strange currents, simultaneously speeding up and slowing down as Jack opened the car door and saw the soldiers’ guns shaking in their drunken hands, the flare of birds tearing the night sky above them.

They’d been told about these sudden roadblocks – hushed voices in their Kampala hotel relating stories of miraculous escapes, ugly situations diffused with a timely joke. He hoped this was all it was, another all-purpose story to reel out at future dinner parties.

‘Passports!’ The lieutenant was younger than them but the oldest of his group. He looked barely past puberty. He gestured with his rifle and watched as Ben and David got out of the car and took their place next to Jack in the clearing. The other soldiers stood by the roadblock passing a bottle of murky liquid among themselves and laughing, their voices echoing through the jungle night.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Ben whispered as he handed his passport to the lieutenant.

Jack saw David mumbling to himself, his head hanging down and the small blue book fluttering in his hands as if it were some rare butterfly longing for the sky.

The lieutenant flicked through their passports, pressing his face close to the pages as if this would divine the truth of these items. When he got to Ben’s and saw the folded money, he paused, and Jack held his breath, watching the lieutenant’s eyes look up and find Ben.

‘You must think we are animals,’ he said, his voice surprisingly soft and melodic.

Before Ben could reply the lieutenant turned to his men and barked an order and suddenly they were inside the car, going through their stuff, throwing things out onto the dark muddy track.

‘We were trying to get to Murchison Falls,’ Jack explained, the moment contracting and pulsing, a strange feeling, like slipping out of time, his head rattling with possible outcomes, every click and cough magnified.

The lieutenant smiled revealing a mouth totally barren of teeth, pink as a baby’s fist. ‘This is restricted territory,’ he replied curtly, his eyes scanning the interior of the car like a pair of searchlights.

‘But the guide book said the park was open.’

The lieutenant looked at Jack. ‘How can a book know the truth of the world?’ He seemed genuinely perplexed. Jack was about to reply when one of the soldiers handed the lieutenant something he’d found in the car. He took it, nodded and looked it over. Jack felt his heart skip as he recognised his own notebook.

‘What’s this?’ The lieutenant waved it around as if it were too hot to hold.

‘It’s my notebook, I write songs in it.’ Jack’s voice quivered and he felt Ben’s hand light reassuringly on the back of his arm.

The lieutenant flicked through the pages of melodies and themes, bass clefs and crotchets. He shook his head then looked back up at them. ‘If that is so then why is it written in code?’

The truck crashed against the dirt road, sending dust and small stones into their faces and hair. They were handcuffed to a pole at the back of the truck’s open bed. They were facing away from each other, keeping their eyes closed against the wind and grit.

The truck lurched and span and Jack couldn’t hold it in any longer, puking over his own clothes, the fear and nausea drowning his lungs. He hung his head and concentrated on the rusty flaked bed of the truck but all he could hear was a strange breathless burble of words and then he realised it was David, his voice cracked and faltering, the Lord’s Prayer coming out of his mouth and just as quickly disappearing in the wind and jungle screams.

‘Stop fucking praying,’ Jack snapped. ‘You’re freaking me out.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ The panic in David’s voice made Jack wish he hadn’t interrupted. ‘What are they going to do to us?’

‘Nothing,’ Ben said firmly. ‘It’s just a stupid misunderstanding.’ He had to raise his voice to be heard above the truck’s motor. ‘They’ll take us to their commander who’s bound to be slightly more intelligent and they’ll realise they made a mistake.’

‘What if they don’t? What if—’

‘Shut up, Jack,’ Ben screamed. ‘Now’s not the time.’

Jack turned his head and faced the road, seeing the jungle fly by in their wake, the smear of colours, green and black and blue, like something painted by a lunatic.

The room was small and hot and stank of sweat and shit. A one-eyed soldier was sitting behind an old wooden desk going through their papers, passports, toiletries, tickets. He stroked a thin goatee which hung like moss from his chin as he consulted the documents with all the seriousness of a small-town bureaucrat. His eye-patch was made of red leather, scuffed and faded like an old cricket ball. He held out the notebook. ‘Whose is this?’ His voice was flat and grainy as if he were wrestling the very words in his mouth.

‘It’s mine,’ Ben replied before Jack had a chance to answer.

‘He’s lying.’ Jack stepped towards the desk. ‘It’s mine. It’s got my name on it.’ He turned and glared at Ben – he wasn’t David, didn’t need Ben to protect and shield him from the vagaries of the world.

The soldier flicked through the book then put it to one side. ‘You are a spy.’

Jack didn’t know what to say – for a moment he didn’t even understand and then he did. ‘We’re tourists,’ he protested.

Eye-patch shook his head and wiped sweat from his brow. He held the notebook up, pointing at one of the scrawled pages. ‘This is not English. This is code. Only spies use code.’

Jack understood how quickly things had changed. ‘It’s musical notation,’ he replied and tried to explain what the symbols stood for then grasped that the soldier had probably never even seen a piano before let alone written music. It was infuriating, trying to explain something so obvious and realising that what you took for granted was not really so.

Eye-patch considered this, looking back down at the notebook, flicking through its damp pages, then putting the notebook up against one ear, his face clenched in mock concentration. ‘Music? This is not music.’

Jack watched as Ben and David were quickly surrounded. He could feel the air literally stop in his throat, something he’d always thought only a metaphor, and he had to will himself to take another breath. The soldiers took Ben and David, leading them through the door into a corridor shrouded in darkness. David looked back at the last moment and Jack saw tears running down his face.

‘Where are you taking them?’ Jack screamed, finally letting the rage, frustration and weariness explode through him. Being reasonable hadn’t helped, maybe outrage would.

‘This is a war,’ the soldier stated flatly. ‘In war spies must be killed.’

‘It’s
my
notebook.’ He felt a thin red thread of panic uncoil in his stomach like some long-sleeping sea monster finally woken. ‘Let them go, it’s nothing to do with them. You can keep me till we get this sorted out but please let them go. I told you we’re not spies, it’s . . . it’s just fucking ridiculous.’

Eye-patch shook his head sadly as if admonishing a favourite nephew. ‘And if you were spies . . . would you not likewise say that you were not?’ He paused looking down at Jack. ‘You are an intelligent man, yes?’

Jack nodded.

‘Then you must see my problem. How can I tell the true man from the false?’