Ngomo’s house was in one of a series of terraces backing onto the railway embankment and each time a train thundered past, the windows shook in their frames as if convulsed by an inner weather.
‘That’s it.’ Geneva’s voice floated through the rain and traffic din as Carrigan stared at the properties, wondering if the residents had got used to the regular shake and rumble of the passing trains or whether they bit down, ground their teeth and locked their jaws every time it came. But most of all he was thinking about Ngomo. From lord of the bush to this. From enormous skies and unfenced miles to this small three-bedroom house, the railway tracks his new sky, the identical houses across the street his vista.
Behind them, the constables were getting ready out of sight, finishing their teas, stubbing out cigarettes. He’d driven over to the judge’s after the surveillance car had arrived at Ursula’s house the previous night. The warrant sat in his pocket as he stared at the curtained windows, the trashed front garden, the broken roof tiles shimmering in the harsh sunlight.
No one answered the buzzer. Carrigan let his finger rest on it, hearing the muted echo fade into silence.
One of the uniforms walked up the drive, a ram firmly in his hands. He gave Carrigan a smile as he lifted the device and thrust it through the door, splintering it open.
Carrigan pushed the door ajar, stepped inside, stood still. He felt nothing, no sense of someone being in the house, that coiled tension in the air he always dreaded. He turned and motioned to Geneva, told the uniforms to stay outside, monitor front and back exits.
He cautiously entered the hallway. A small table held a phone and a leather address book. There were no decorations on the walls, just a rack with two coats and an old-fashioned trilby. Two doors led into the front and back rooms. A staircase rose steeply in front of him. He stood looking at the doors, then the stairs, wondering which to try first. He could hear Geneva breathing behind him, short, urgent swallows. He was reaching for the living-room door when the house started to shake.
A booming detonation exploded above them like a thousand footsteps dancing on a wooden floor. He felt the door knob tremble in his hand, the floorboards shuddering beneath his feet, and then it was over, at least until the next tube train thundered past.
He wiped his hand on his shirt, wishing he’d brought some water, something to get rid of the horrible taste in his mouth, then reached for the door. He could sense Geneva’s impatience like something trying to burst out of her skin. He let the door swing open, waited, heard nothing, and entered the room.
He blinked but he knew it wouldn’t change what lay before him.
‘What? What is it?’
He watched her come in, her gaze immediately directed towards the recliner chair in the middle of the room. Her eyes widening, then something worse – the very same thing drowning his stomach like acid, the knowledge that they’d got here too late or that they’d got it all wrong.
General Ngomo was sitting in his brown recliner. He was facing the TV and wearing a bathrobe but he wasn’t watching anything. His eyes stared out of their sockets, his hands were bound to the armrests by makeshift ties and his feet were pocked and bloody, but it was his neck that Carrigan and Geneva couldn’t keep their eyes off.
It looked like his neck was pregnant, or like a python that had dislocated its jaw in order to swallow a much larger prey. The skin around the swelling was purpling, yellow and brown flecks circling it like tiny planets. Ngomo’s neck veins stood out in stark relief like a renaissance sculpture’s, his mouth half open not in a scream but in a last reach for unattainable air.
Carrigan turned and saw Geneva staring up at the ceiling. ‘Did you hear something?’
She met his eyes. ‘I don’t know, maybe.’
‘Call the SOCOs, report the body, don’t let the uniforms fuck-up the crime scene. I’ll go check.’
She started to object but he’d turned and was already up the stairs. She looked at Ngomo, wanting to tear his eyes out, those stupid staring eyes, for being dead, for not being able to tell them what happened, why he killed Grace. And then she stopped herself. Tried to focus on the scene, what was there, physical evidence, and not think about what this spelled for the case.
The stairs creaked under Carrigan like loose-lipped neighbours. He stopped and waited for the next train to scrape and scream across the rails and he took them two at a time, making it to the top at the same instant as the noise faded into the distance.
He stopped and waited but, as downstairs, there was no movement. Ngomo had been dead for over an hour, the coagulated blood along his wrists and mouth attesting to this, but judging from his body temperature he hadn’t been dead for that much longer, which meant Bayanga could still be in the house. The sensible move would have been to flee straight after the murder but, as they were quickly realising, nothing about Bayanga was within the definition of sensible.
There were three doors leading from the landing. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. The carpet was worn and revealed a cross-hatched underlay that looked like diseased skin in the pale light.
The first bedroom was empty. The sheets were still rumpled and crevassed from a night’s worth of bad dreams. The windows were fogged with small beads of condensation, each mirroring the room entire. Carrigan took a deep breath of the stale air, the smell of old men and restless nights the same the world over, and tried the bathroom.
It was a narrow room, only three feet wide, with a browned ceramic bowl at the end. Toilet rolls lay scattered and unfurled on the cistern lid. The room was clean but there was no allowance of comfort to it, no rug or splash of colour nor even a toilet seat. The floor was bare wood boards, unvarnished and unsanded, the only window too high to reach.
He heard Geneva talking on the radio downstairs as he crossed the empty landing towards the second bedroom. He expected to find it as stripped and utilitarian as the other rooms but he was wrong.
The room didn’t look as though it belonged to this house, not to the austere monkish ambience of the other rooms but to some other place, a place that would be called home, where you’d return from your day to the smile of your wife, the small hands of your children.
Carrigan closed the door behind him. The rain whispered on the ledges as he turned on the light, a piercing 100-watt bouncing off the collection of framed photographs and certificates, the glass gleaming opaque, resisting intrusion. At first he could see only his own reflection and then, as he stepped closer, he saw the face in each of the photos, the name on the certificates, and hung his head.
Geneva heard the sirens as they approached, the frenetic stutter of their piercing whine cutting through the rain and inner beat of her bloodflow. She called up to see if Carrigan was all right but his answer sounded muted as if he were somewhere else, his voice only a shaky transmission. She was about to climb the stairs when she saw him, ashen, coming down the hall, shaking his head.
The sirens whooped to a stop before she could ask him anything. The heavy clop of massed footsteps sounded outside. The interior of the house was suddenly bathed in swirling blue neon, Carrigan’s face flashing at the top of the stairs. ‘Quick.’
She looked behind her, saw the cars and men gathering outside and set off up the stairs. The SOCOs entered the house as Carrigan showed her into the second bedroom. They heard the unmistakable bellow of Branch’s voice reverberating through the floor and then a train came rushing through and blotted everything out.
Everything but the room.
She stood there and stared and didn’t say anything. He let her take it in, remembering his own sense of dislocation and shock when he’d understood what this meant. He watched the same realisation rip through her body, the muscles in her shoulders and back tensing, drawing her into herself, her head turning, not knowing where to look or quite what she was looking at.
‘What the Jesus fucking hell is going on here?’
Carrigan turned to see Branch, red-faced, tie askew, spittle flying from his lips. ‘What the fuck is that down there?’
‘That was General Lawrence Ngomo.’ He watched Branch take this in, his eyes shrinking into small dark pools. ‘The man we suspected was behind the murder of Grace Okello.’
‘Is he fucking suspected of his own murder too?’ Branch pushed past Carrigan and entered the room. He stopped and surveyed the photos on the wall. ‘Jesus Christ, it just gets better.’ He looked at Carrigan, then at Geneva, as if he wasn’t sure which one was more to blame. ‘So tell me this hasn’t just got a million times more screwed up then it already was?’
Geneva began to say something but Branch interrupted. ‘That was a rhetorical question, Miller. Any idiot can see that you’ve got another dead bloody African and what the fuck is that in his throat? Don’t tell me he choked trying to swallow his fucking dinner.’ Branch snapped his head towards Carrigan. ‘Are you fucking listening?’
But Carrigan was lost in the wall of photos, in how wrong they’d been, how totally and utterly wrong and how stupid they were for not having seen it, especially when the video clip had made it so clear. He cursed himself for not having listened hard enough.
‘What is it with you two?’ Branch looked from Carrigan to Geneva and back. ‘And what the fuck is up with all this?’ He gestured around the room. ‘Some sort of stalker’s shrine?’
Carrigan sensed that neither he nor Geneva wanted to put it into words. Once spoken there would be no room for anything else. He turned to Branch. ‘We thought Ngomo had hired Bayanga to kill Grace but we were wrong.’ He pointed to the photos and graduation degrees, the honours and swimming trophies, the encased preservation of this museum room.
‘Ngomo wasn’t Grace’s killer. He was her father.’
He hadn’t thought it would be possible to feel this cold in Africa but once again he was wrong. His body shook against the hard edges of the chair, his teeth loudly snapping against one another, the muscles in his legs convulsing to some hidden beat. This was the way fear played itself out, a sudden physical reaction, that bitter taste in your mouth, the palpable presence of your own heart. In the end even your body betrayed you.
There was nothing restraining him to the chair. Every shudder rocked him against the cracked metal and threatened to throw him onto the floor. His feet were bare and he could feel small wet things crawl across his toes, the cement hard and unyielding beneath him. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the room.
Eye-patch watched him as if he were a part of the landscape; there was no expression on his face, no reaction to Jack’s muscle spasms or pleas for water. He could have been a wax dummy and in the mean splintered light the young soldier almost looked like one, the skin drooped and folded as if one side of his face had been exposed to tremendous heat.
The room was small, without air, but Jack felt the cold like something physical attacking his bones. Eye-patch sat behind a gnarled wooden table, his feet up, a badly rolled cigarette jumping between his fingers, a poster behind him revealing a cruel glint of blue sky.
‘You look like a man who wants to help his friends.’ Eye-patch leant forward, placing arms long and sinewy as sticks of liquorice on the scarred wooden surface of the table. His fingers had once been broken then set wrongly. The nails on his left hand had stopped growing, fallen away, leaving half-moon slivers of pink and red at the edges of his cuticles.
‘Where are they?’ Jack was surprised by the sound of his own voice, the fear and apprehension underlying each word.
Eye-patch nodded. ‘They are not very far from here,’ he told him, his voice slow and measured as if searching for each word and its definition one at a time. ‘But what will happen to them is in your hands.’
The sentence hung in the air like the rancid smoke of the soldier’s cigarette. Jack swivelled his head, fighting the instant explosion of nausea in his stomach, but there was nothing but the room, the soldier and him.
‘You want some water, a cigarette?’ He smiled revealing a set of crooked teeth, splayed and misaligned as if not meant for that particular mouth. Jack nodded and watched as Eye-patch went over to a small sink, the tap constantly dripping, and filled a glass with brown water. He handed it to him, his fingers touching Jack’s skin, making him recoil and nearly drop the glass. He drank it down in one go. It tasted strange; metallic and bitter.
‘Good,’ Eye-patch said. ‘A man needs water like he needs the truth.’
Jack wasn’t sure what he meant but he nodded anyway hoping for a refill.
‘Without one a man becomes an enemy of his own body,’ Eye-patch solemnly continued. ‘Without the other he becomes an enemy of his own soul.’ He took the glass, got up, turning his back on Jack and headed for the sink.
Jack frantically looked around. The only door was to the right of the table. He could see through the half-inch gap the dark outlines of two teenagers standing guard. There were no windows or other doors. He thought about escape – but only for a second. Even if he were fast enough to creep up on Eye-patch what would he do then? Try to bargain Eye-patch’s life for Ben’s and David’s? He ground his bare feet into the floor, felt the sharp sting of the concrete, the soft crush of an insect below his left heel.
‘Now,’ Eye-patch said, returning to the table and handing Jack the glass, ‘it is time for you to decide if you want to help your friends or not.’
Jack gulped at the water as he considered the few options available to him.
‘You are good friends, no?’
He put down the empty glass and nodded.
‘It is important, you know. Most men go through life and they have friends but they are not friends, not real friends. You do not know if friends are really friends until you have something to lose.’
Jack was trying to keep up with the soldier’s logic, but like everything else in the last few days it made as much sense as a rabbit speaking Chinese.
‘This . . .’ Eye-patch pointed to his missing eye, ‘. . . is how you measure friends.’ He carefully licked the end of a new cigarette shut and placed it between his lips. ‘I too had good friends but when they had to choose between my eye and their comfort, it became very clear just how good these friends were.’ He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, puckered his lips and spat out a thin string of tobacco. ‘But it is better a man learns this sooner rather than later, don’t you agree?’
Jack wasn’t sure what he was agreeing to but he nodded anyway.
‘You have been friends for a long time?’
Jack realised that if he pretended this was an ordinary conversation, the kind you have on planes and boats, waiting for a bus or in empty cafes, then the fear and chill which had consumed his body might start to fade. ‘Ben and David know each other from childhood. They grew up together. I met them three years ago when we started university.’
Something in Eye-patch’s expression changed. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, placed it carefully over the edge of the table and nodded. ‘I too once thought I would go to university.’ His voice seemed different now, softer, more resigned.
‘What stopped you?’ Jack asked, knowing immediately it was the wrong thing to say.
‘When there is a war there is only one kind of studying that needs to be done. There is no use for history or geography. These will not help you in the bush.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jack replied quietly, suddenly aware of how different their lives were, how choice figured so little for most of the world, so he was surprised by Eye-patch’s laughter, a full throaty amusement lodged deep in the soldier’s throat.
‘Do not be. Sometimes you find the world and sometimes the world finds you. I was lucky. I didn’t know who I was and I might never have found that person if war hadn’t intervened.’ He put the cigarette back into his mouth, puffing until thick plumes of smoke flowered from its tip. ‘Perhaps you too were on the wrong road and now you have the chance to find the right one. Perhaps it was God who brought you here, or fate . . . if you prefer.’
‘I don’t believe in God or fate,’ Jack replied, trying not to think about the gazelle crossing the Jango Road.
‘Then I feel sorry for you,’ Eye-patch said mournfully. ‘You come from a place where you celebrate your advances, the progress your race has made, but look at you, you are empty and in need of something you cannot even name. Yes,’ he nodded sagely, ‘perhaps you have truly come here for a reason.’
‘We were trying to get to Murchison Falls. We took the wrong road.’ Jack felt the cold snuggle up against him once more, the chill in his lungs every time he took a breath.
Eye-patch ground the dead cigarette under his boot and reached for a stained brown folder lying to his right. He began flicking through the pages, humming to himself. Next to the folder Jack could see his own notebook lying like an accusatory witness.
‘No, I think you took the right road, the road you were always meant to take.’ Eye-patch put the folder down and stared up at Jack. ‘What would you have done if none of this had happened, if you’d boarded your flight back to London?’
Jack wasn’t sure what he meant‚ but he knew that the longer they talked the longer it would be until the other things, the things that weren’t talking. ‘We’d just graduated; we were going to find jobs.’ He stared down at his bare feet. London seemed like something from another lifetime.
‘What kind of work were you going to do?’
He wasn’t sure if Eye-patch was genuinely interested or whether this was all just a part of his interrogation technique. ‘I told you, I’m a musician.’
‘And your friends?’
‘Ben’s going to be a lawyer and David’s entering the seminary in September.’
‘It seems you have your whole lives planned out in front of you.’
Jack was about to say something but this time managed to keep his mouth shut.
‘Then why,’ Eye-patch turned and picked up the notebook, ‘with all this future ahead of you would you involve yourself in spying against Uganda?’ His tone hadn’t changed, nor had his facial expression, but the words came out like hard shards of glass.
‘I wasn’t spying,’ Jack protested. ‘I write songs in there.’
Eye-patch flicked through the pages again. ‘Yet you felt the need to write in code?’
Eye-patch’s calm tone of voice was exasperating him, it would almost have been better if he’d been shouting. ‘It’s not code, it’s musical notation.’ He tried to think how to demonstrate this, the steady progression of notes and staves, bass clefs and crotchets, but looking at the walls of this abandoned schoolroom he knew that Eye-patch had never seen sheet music before. ‘Look,’ Jack said, leaning forward, gesturing for the notebook. Eye-patch slid it across the table. Jack picked it up, flicked it open, staring at the jumble of his own script. It was hard enough for him to decipher it. He laid the notebook flat on the table, placed his finger at the start of a bar of music and hummed as he traced the notes lifting and falling. ‘It’s musical notation, for a song. I write songs.’ He hummed the melody he’d written three days previously in Kampala. Eye-patch showed no expression but let Jack finish the song.
‘I see,’ he said when Jack had passed the notebook back, ‘but you too must see my problem.’ He leant back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. ‘As I said before, if this were true you would be saying it‚ but if you were a spy and this was code you would be saying the same thing. You see my problem now? How can I tell when the liar and the honest man say the same thing?’
‘I’m not lying,’ Jack shouted.
‘Prove it.’
‘What?’
‘Sing. Sing for me your songs then I will decide if you are a singer like you claim.’
Jack closed his eyes and dry-swallowed. His heart felt like something alien to his body, too large and too fast, a thing made for a much larger receptacle. His voice cracked on the first note, the words shearing away into silence and coughing. He tried again, focusing on the blue sky of the poster behind Eye-patch, wondering what the rest of the picture held.
He sang quietly in his chair, the first side of his soon-to-be-released album, then the second. Eye-patch remained silent and still, occasionally nodding his head, which Jack took to mean he was starting to believe him. He ran out of songs and began to sing other people’s songs, songs he’d practised in his bedroom, songs he’d listened to late at night, his ear pressed tight against the radio.
‘Very good,’ Eye-patch interrupted after a couple of hours, passing Jack a glass of brown water. When he moved forward, Jack caught a glimpse of the poster behind him and it was as if a door had been opened, letting in a fan of fresh air. Eye-patch sat back, repositioning himself so that Jack could now see the whole poster. The blue canopy was only a small part of the image, the rest was covered by a gleaming white mountain ascending towards the sky. He focused on the clean white planes of the mountain as he continued singing, making up songs, doggerel, ad jingles, whatever came to mind.
Every time he stopped, Eye-patch barked a single command – ‘
Sing!
’ – and he began again. Occasionally he was given water as the room filled with cigarette smoke and night. He sang through the dark and into the day, light leaking through the cracks in the schoolroom walls, singing beyond tiredness and fatigue, his voice a small cracked thing and each time he stopped there it was again: ‘
Sing!
’
He concentrated on the poster of the mountain and thought about Ben and David. He wondered where they were right now; they could have been two doors down and neither would know; they could be dead; they could be free. The thoughts paralysed him, brought the cold rushing back in, and he focused on the mountain. If he squinted hard enough he could see two or three tiny blue dots halfway up the face. He imagined himself one of these, a climber on his second day in, slowly making his way up from base camp, and as the songs fell out of him, songs he didn’t remember he remembered, songs he swore he’d never sing again, he saw the blue dots making their ascent and he did his best to follow their careful progress.
‘Enough!’
He’d been singing all day and most of the night. Every time he opened his mouth, his lips pulled away from each other taking layers of dry skin, his throat so desiccated he could no longer swallow without an immense act of will. He stopped in the middle of a Will Oldham song he barely remembered. He stared down at his feet and watched the roaches scuttling across the concrete.
Eye-patch pulled something out of the top drawer of the desk and laid it on the table. ‘You now have to make a choice,’ he said. ‘You have to decide whether you want to help your friends.’
‘Of course I do,’ Jack croaked.
‘Then tell me who you are spying for, sign this paper and I promise all will be well for them.’
‘I’m not . . .’ and then he stopped, knowing there was no point any more. He understood that there was only one way to save Ben and David and that all options had narrowed down to this.
‘I was spying for England.’ He thought it would be harder to say but the words came out as if he were reciting his name.
A long smile cracked Eye-patch’s face open, revealing the buckled teeth and wet pinkness of his tongue. ‘Good. That is good,’ he laughed, ‘but we already know you are spying for England, this is not news. You want to help your friends, you will tell me what this book says, what you have already sent back home to your employers.’
Jack stared at the poster but he could no longer see the blue dots. Had they achieved the summit? Were they now on the other side making the dangerous descent? ‘You promise my friends won’t be hurt if I tell you?’
It had been his decision which road to take, his idea of going to Africa in the first place. If it wasn’t for him Ben and David would never have been in this situation. The logic was inescapable.
He gave Eye-patch details and information, motives and reasons, map coordinates and targets. He didn’t know what would happen when the soldiers discovered he’d been making it all up but he never got the chance to find out.