A Dark Redemption (23 page)

The door crashed open, sending searing sunlight into the room, making Jack’s eyes squint and water with tears. Two soldiers entered, agitated, both talking at once to Eye-patch, both running their words together, their eyes flicking wildly. Eye-patch listened, nodding his head, then pulled out a thick wooden stick from his belt and smashed the younger soldier over the head with it. The boy collapsed to the floor and Eye-patch leant over him, coiled and ready to strike again, then put the stick back in his belt. He left the room, the upright soldier helping his comrade up, blood pouring from his head filling the air with a hot salty tang. A few minutes later Eye-patch came back, his face tight and contorted as if his skin had been shrink-wrapped to his bones.

‘Get up!’ he shouted at Jack, the genial tone of earlier now gone entirely. Jack tried to do as he was told but fell to the floor. He hit the concrete full in the face and saw two of his teeth skitter out from under him. Before he could move the soldiers were lifting him and dragging him out of the room.

The sun was worse than the cold floor, exploding like a poisonous flower in his head. He wanted to wilt, fall back down, let the earth cover him, but the soldiers kept frog-marching him past the barracks, the schoolyard, the playing grounds, and finally back out into the bush, the camp a misty haze in the distance. They dropped his body to the ground and disappeared.

He waited for several hours for the bullet‚ but no bullet came. He waited for men to come out of the reeds with machetes and smiles on their faces‚ but no men came. He waited for some animal to smell his fear and blood and come stalking out of the bush, but no animal came. He waited for Eye-patch to return, tell him that he was sorry but there was only one punishment for spies, but he would never see Eye-patch again.

He lay face down listening to the reeds part as the footsteps of the soldiers drew nearer‚ but it wasn’t death that was coming.

They dropped him next to Jack, dust rising in the air as the soldiers left the clearing and headed back towards the camp. Jack turned to see Ben’s torn and bloodied face, a huge purple swelling under his right eye. He felt for Ben’s breath but there was none. He looked around the small clearing but there was no one there and he began to scream. The hours and minutes inside that small room burst out of him like some well dug deep into his soul and then he heard something move and he stopped.

He turned quickly, expecting more soldiers, but instead he saw Ben shuffling and moaning on the floor next to him.

For a moment they looked at each other like strangers caught face-to-face in a lift, and then they began to laugh, hugging each other in the thick wet grass. But just as suddenly as the laughter had started it was gone.

‘Where is he?’

Ben looked away, shook his head. Jack grabbed him with all the strength he could muster, the buried rage of the last two days burning through his fingers.

Ben pulled free, his hand shielding his face. He turned and vomited onto the ground, a deep tumultuous wrenching that continued long after there was nothing left to expel.

‘We need to go back and get him.’ Jack looked around the clearing, saw the spire of smoke from the camp a few hundred feet away. He started to get up, a swooping dizziness exploding behind his eyes.

Ben grabbed his leg, his fingers gripping tightly. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘He’s gone, Jack.’

‘Then we need to find him.’ Jack tried pulling away but Ben’s grip was surprisingly strong.

‘You don’t understand.’ Ben let go of Jack’s leg and turned away, unable to face him. ‘David’s dead.’

Photographs.

Black-and-white, colour, sepia-tinted. Sun blanched, faded, and creased from too much folding.

Photography as the persistence of memory and metonym of a life.

A face, a body, a pair of hands in close-up. Some so clear it was as if the person depicted therein was actually in the room while others were so faded it was impossible to tell what they represented, as if the paper itself had forgotten the image bestowed upon it.

A whole arc of history from black-and-white schoolyard Polaroids to digitals so sharp they looked as if they couldn’t possibly be real. Photographs laid out side by side on the table in front of them. Every photo different but with one constant.

Grace.

They were in the incident room, eighteen hours after the discovery of General Ngomo’s body, still sorting out his treasure chest of memories and eating Chinese takeaway from silver boxes. Ngomo’s flat had been searched but they hadn’t found Grace’s computer or any other evidence linking Ngomo to the crime scene. All of Ngomo’s personal possessions had fit into two cardboard boxes which now lay at their feet. Geneva was sorting through the photos as Carrigan stared at the cross-hatched scars on the table, rubbing his head, feeling the past invade him like some foreign entity. The memory of seeing Ben again in that wet jungle clearing was still so fresh after all these years, the joy followed by the bitter realisation.

He unsnapped two paracetamol from the foil and dry-swallowed them, then went back to the layout of photographs, picking one up, examining it then replacing it in its rightful place, a chronology of Grace from birth to death. He looped some noodles onto his chopsticks, feeling Geneva’s silence behind him, the hard warm shadow of her presence.

She hadn’t said much since he’d told her the story on the way over from Ngomo’s. It was a story he thought he’d never tell again‚ but once the initial words came out everything else seemed to follow as if a plug had been pulled and the words were water rushing down a drain.

‘You’re eating too fast.’ She looked up from her box of noodles. ‘You’ll get stomach ache.’

Carrigan nodded but didn’t slow down. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said, remembering how when he’d told her the story of what had happened to him in Africa it was as if he were confirming something she’d already known.

Geneva sipped her Coke and stared down at the kaleidoscope of images, trying to make sense of it all: Grace staring back at her from her high-school graduation, Grace about to board an aeroplane, Grace in a white dress holding a bottle of beer somewhere in the jungle. She’d only just begun taking in what they’d seen in Ngomo’s upstairs room when Carrigan had finally told her what had happened in Africa.

‘That stuff in Uganda, why didn’t you mention it before?’ She tried not to sound accusatory but there was no other way to say it, and besides she felt, if not a little betrayed, then something close; they were supposed to be partners on this case.

He turned so quickly that he sent some of the photos flying to the floor. She was about to pick them up but then stopped.

‘It had nothing to do with the case.’

‘How can you know that?’ Her voice sounded brittle, like metal scraping against metal.

‘I just know.’

She saw his face stretched long and thin, the sleepless nights and early-morning calls and wondered what he’d been like before Africa.

‘Explains that twitch every time Uganda came up.’

He put the last photo in its place. ‘You noticed?’

‘Hard not to, though I’m sure everyone would just put it down to too much coffee.’ She picked up a photo of Grace with an older woman, both elegantly dressed, standing in front of a white church with an impossibly tall spire. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to David?’

It was suddenly there again, the darkness in his eyes, the sense of a locked room inside his head. He looked down at the table as if the answers were inscribed on its knotty surface. ‘The embassy tried locating the body after we arrived in Kampala but it was a war zone up in the north; no one wanted to go there to search for one corpse. We buried him in an empty grave in his father’s church. There’s not even a coffin, only a damn stone.’

Geneva caught the bitterness in his voice and pushed aside the noodle box, reaching inside her pocket. She took out the newspaper clipping she’d found at the library and silently handed it to him.

He wiped his hands on his jacket and took it from her. He smoothed out the folds and stared at the badly reproduced black-and-white photo. At first there was nothing and she watched as he brought the clipping closer, squinted, and then, all of a sudden she saw it in his eyes.

‘That’s me?’ he said, pointing to the left-hand side of the photo.

Geneva nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘Where did you find this?’ He tried to make out the two dark body-shaped smears with their arms round each other at the centre of the print.

‘Press took it when you left Uganda.’

He turned towards her. ‘Did Branch ask you to do this? To investigate me?’ He dropped the clipping onto the table.

‘No, of course not,’ she replied, though that was exactly what Branch had asked her to do – how to explain that she’d fudged her reports in Carrigan’s favour? ‘I stumbled on it while looking into Ngomo at SOAS.’

Something crossed his face. ‘But we weren’t in one of Ngomo’s camps, we were in an army camp.’ He picked up the photo and looked at it again. She could see the sudden concern darkening his expression.

‘They get it wrong a lot of the time,’ she offered, realising that something had changed between them and that what she’d thought would be a peace offering had turned out to be anything but.

‘You should have been looking into Ngomo, not wasting your time on me.’

‘I wasn’t—’ Geneva began as the door opened and DC Jennings walked in then stopped, sensing he’d disturbed something.

‘What is it?’ Carrigan snapped.

Jennings looked down at the floor, unprepared for Carrigan’s tone, the icy silence between the two detectives. ‘I . . . I’ve just come back from—’

‘Where’s everyone else?’ Carrigan wiped some Chinese food off his shirt and stared at the young DC.

Jennings started to say something then changed his mind. ‘DC Singh’s out at SOAS trying to track down Bayanga. Berman’s getting a fix on where Bayanga sent his emails from. Um . . . I’m not sure where Karlson is, said he was following a lead.’

Carrigan nodded. ‘And what about Gabriel?’

Jennings stared down at his shoes. ‘He hasn’t been to lectures today, hasn’t been seen at SOAS at all and he missed his weekly AAC meeting.’

‘Shit.’ Carrigan looked up at the whiteboard. Gabriel had been either the last or the last but one person to see Ngomo alive.

‘He’s gone, sir,’ Jennings continued. ‘I tried his flat, no one there, his phone’s been disconnected and the mobile’s just going through to a dead tone.’

Was it possible that Bayanga and Gabriel were working together? Carrigan rested his head in his palm – nearly two weeks into this case and there was still so much they didn’t know. He thought about the surveillance car he’d reassigned to Ursula’s house – would they have seen Ngomo’s killer if he’d left them to do their job? How long before Branch found out?

‘We’ve got to keep trying,’ Carrigan muttered pointlessly, then saw that Jennings was still there, shuffling nervously as if trying to dance without moving his feet. ‘What is it?’

‘Umm . . . sir . . . I was trying to tell you when I came in.’ He stopped, looked for confirmation to go on, took the silence as such. ‘I’ve just talked to the SOCOs. They’re almost done in the general’s flat. They found some letters hidden under the carpet in the top room.’

Carrigan frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

‘I tried, sir.’ Jennings was looking paler and paler.

‘Well?’ Carrigan had retrieved the photo of himself and now held it in his hands as if it were some obscure talisman, his fingertips daubed black by the printer’s ink.

‘There were seven letters, sir. They found them under a loose bit of carpet next to Ngomo’s desk. They’re going over them right now, said they’ll be done in a couple of hours and have them delivered to you.’

Carrigan checked his watch, he wanted to go over to the SOCO lab immediately and see why the letters were the only thing Ngomo had bothered to hide but he was due to meet Myra Bentley for the results of the post-mortem on Ngomo. ‘Did you at least get a chance to look at them?’

Jennings nodded. ‘Only a brief glimpse, you know what the SOCOs are like – but enough to see that each letter started with
Dear Daddy
,’ he paused as Geneva and Carrigan took this in, both of them looking down at the photos chronicling the moments of Grace’s life, ‘and each was signed,
Your loving daughter
.’

Carrigan stared at the shrivelled lump of meat on the table. Spotlights bathed it in harsh white glare but couldn’t hide the labyrinthine passageways and dappled folds of the dark-hued tissue.

They’d had to cut open Ngomo’s neck to remove it.

He bent down but there was no smell to it, the thing already worn and dry as antique leather. He tried to imagine it once beating, a small red muscle sustaining life, and a sharp pain flared behind his eyes. He stepped back, felt the iron grip of Myra Bentley’s fingers on his arm.

‘Too much last night, huh?’

He could swear she was enjoying this. He steadied himself on the table and nodded, it was easier than trying to explain the real reason. He popped two more painkillers, the bitter residue coating his tongue, the taste of Chinese food still lingering in his mouth. He couldn’t wait to get out of here, back to the incident room, wondering if the letters had arrived from forensics yet, what new secrets they would reveal.

‘I do love you, Jack Carrigan,’ the pathologist smirked, taking a long flat spatula made of shiny steel from her instrument table. ‘Never fail to surprise me.’ She used the spatula to prod and poke at the heart. ‘Can’t wait to tell my colleagues about this.’

Carrigan waited for her to expand but she was hunched over the table like a human comma. He stared down at the heart – it looked like something you would find in a field, a fire-blackened root vegetable of some sort.

‘It’s what killed him, in case you’re wondering.’ She put the scalpel to one side. ‘Stuffed deep down his throat, crushing the windpipe. Someone held it down until the job was done.’ She pointed to two shallow indentations on the surface of the heart. Carrigan leant forward and saw the distinctive ridges belonging to a set of fingerprints.

‘Forty years I’ve been doing this and I’ve never seen a person choked to death on someone else’s heart.’

‘I’m glad you’re entertained.’

Bentley continued prodding, making the organ emit small popping sounds. ‘Made my day, this has.’

Carrigan looked down, saw the floor spinning away from him and blinked. All he could smell was the sharp bite of disinfectant and underneath that something sweeter and far more sickly.

‘It’s definitely Grace Okello’s heart,’ the pathologist continued, her voice as affectless as if she were reading out train times. ‘Not that we have that many stray hearts, but we did check.’

‘This was her father.’ Carrigan was glad to see – if only for the slightest of intervals – the look of professional curiosity wipe itself from Bentley’s face.

‘A poetic sense of humour, your guy.’

Carrigan looked at the old woman. ‘Too poetic.’

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Bentley continued, interrupting his thoughts. She was still using the blunt end of the spatula to prod the heart. ‘To get it down Ngomo’s throat it was pummelled and squashed totally out of shape and yet look,’ another prod, the black muscle collapsed then went back to normal as if nothing had happened, ‘even dried out as it is, it retains its shape.’ She finished her inspection and turned towards Carrigan. ‘The
resilience
of human tissue is really a thing to behold, don’t you think?’

It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed how she spoke about the human body as if it were some deity, enthralling in its absolute mystery. He stared down at the organ and thought how small it was, he’d never thought a heart would be that small. That feeling crept into his belly again, uneasy and memory-soaked, but he told himself it was only too much coffee, too many pills, too many days in a row.

‘Oh, and I thought I probably should mention it,’ the pathologist continued, ‘not that it has any bearing on the case, or none that I can see anyway . . .’

‘Please.’ He just wanted to get out of there, out of the harsh bright lights, the gleaming metal furniture, the humming of the dead behind their freezer doors.

‘Ngomo had cancer.’ Bentley coughed into her handkerchief. ‘Pancreatic, pretty far gone, probably knew he had it too. Only a few months left. It would have been very painful . . .’ She stopped for a moment as if to contemplate the gravity of this. ‘Though, I dare say, this was probably worse.’