‘But you still moved down to London together?’ Geneva asked.
‘I thought that once away from the buzz of student life she’d get better, realise the world was much bigger and more complex than she’d painted it. But London only made Emily worse. She no longer had the constant rush of meetings and seminars to go to. She was now in the real world and the real world came crashing up against her. She hardened in turn, became less communicative, except when railing against something or other she’d read on the Internet. Those were not good times. We argued all hours, furiously, with our words and with our hands, at the top of our voices. She’d call me a stooge, a collaborator, a capitalist pig. She spent entire evenings putting my family on trial. She would storm out, lose herself in the London night, be gone for days at a time and come back with a strange vacancy in her eyes and a small offering – a cake she knew I liked, or a paperback, or a bottle of wine – for the worry she’d caused me.’
‘Do you have any idea where she went?’
Shorter poured himself a fresh drink. ‘No, but she found what she was looking for in London, meetings and action groups, angry young men and women whose lives had left them with nothing but hate.
‘We stopped sleeping together. We stopped talking to each other. We set up a couch in the living room and on the nights Emily did return, she would sleep there. She began hanging out in the squats of east London. These Dickensian hell-holes, no water, no electricity, rats, and food left rotting for days. These people wanted to save the world but they couldn’t even keep their own house in order. They pretended that cleanliness was a bourgeois concept, that washing and changing clothes were just another surrender to the system.’ Shorter lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling.
‘She began to get more secretive. She disappeared for days at a time, often coming back bruised and bloody, her eyes burning fiercely.’ Shorter paused, took a deep breath and his eyes drew hard and tight. ‘And then Nigel entered the picture.’
‘Nigel?’ Geneva looked up from her notes, catching the shift in Shorter’s tone.
‘He called himself Nigel the Nail – he used to say he didn’t want to be a thorn in the side of the government but a great big fucking nail. That tells you as much as you need to know about how Nigel saw himself. He was the self-appointed guru of the squat set, older by a generation, regaling them with stories of manning the barricades during the strikes of the Thatcher years, his time in prison, his days in Belfast and the West Bank.
‘Emily had been so uncommunicative for so long and suddenly she was talking all the time, about Nigel and how he did this and did that, and it was obvious she’d fallen in love with him.
‘A month or two after she met him, she told me it was over. Nigel came to help her pack her things, to make sure I didn’t cause a scene, she said – as if I even cared enough by that point. Nigel stood there sneering and making remarks about my furniture, my accent, the kind of coffee I had in the cupboard. Emily took her clothes and very little else. That was the last time I saw her.’
Shorter sat back in his chair and stared vacantly at the wall, slumped and drained. ‘It’s easy to see now she was in a downward spiral. But at the time you always think this will pass, that things will get better. But they never do, and every day you become a little less blind, and it freezes your heart to look at the only person you’ve ever loved and see no future at all in their eyes.’
There was nothing to say to this. They thanked him and left him there, his face white and his Christmas ruined.
*
As soon as Geneva was back in the car she immediately began typing into the onboard computer. Carrigan waited, the screen angled away from him so that he couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Instead he watched her face as it changed from worry and frown to a quick delicious smile.
‘What is it?’
‘Nigel the Nail’s got some previous.’
Carrigan nodded and started the car. ‘From what Shorter told us about him, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.’
‘Well . . .’ Geneva said, drawing it out. ‘Does it surprise you that four of those charges were for arson?’
33
Nigel Burton, AKA Nigel the Nail, had been remarkably easy to find. ‘Amazed you didn’t see him on telly last week,’ a gruff sergeant from the Public Order Unit had explained. ‘He’s marshalling one of those anti-Tesco protests. Loves the camera, our Nigel does, loves getting arrested too, good for his image and all that.’
Carrigan let Geneva do the driving so he could study Nigel’s file on the way over. He didn’t even notice Geneva’s music or the spiralling south London snow, his eyes and thoughts completely ensnared by Nigel’s arrest sheet.
He’d been in trouble since the age of fifteen. Burton, or Nigel the Nail, as he was now legally known after a deed poll change, had been arrested seventeen times. He’d spent a total of thirty-eight months in various low-level prisons and each time he was released he wasted no time before reoffending.
Nigel’s first arrests were nothing unusual – possession of class B drugs, a minor infraction in a pub at closing time, the charges later dropped – but then he had got serious and most subsequent arrests were for public disorder issues, mainly stemming from his participation in violent protests and riots. However, what Carrigan was most interested in were the four counts of arson Nigel had been charged with. Two Starbucks, a suburban branch of NatWest and a synagogue. None of the charges had been proven; witnesses had backed out, evidence got misplaced, and Nigel always had a crew of cohorts on hand to provide him with a timely alibi. According to the sheet, Nigel was now living in a squat in Balham and leading the protest at the new Tesco Express.
Carrigan looked down at the print-outs, confused, feeling a slight judder of disorientation. His mind reeled back through the last few days. They’d been digging deep into the convent’s secret history. They’d been following up the drugs in the neighbourhood angle. They’d been tracking the Peruvian connection. He didn’t know where or how Nigel fitted in, but his form for arson, and his relationship with the eleventh victim, changed everything.
They turned into a narrow high street and Geneva pulled the car to a stop outside a row of cracked and leaning terraces. A huge hand-daubed banner was spread along the facade of three of the houses. Red paint read Tesco Brings Nazism to Your Street and Smash the Supermarkets. The lettering was crude and a misspelling had been painted over twice. Across the road, in the middle of a small parade of shops, was a Tesco Express, one window covered by a sheet of rough splintered plywood.
‘Democracy in action,’ Carrigan said as he pulled on his jacket and headed for the squat’s front door.
Except there wasn’t a front door. The council had removed it and replaced it with large grey Sitex screens. The screens had been pulled open and now stood flapping in the wind. Carrigan heard the dull thump of electronic music echoing from inside and could see the shadowdance of people flickering across the windows.
‘Ready for this?’ he asked Geneva.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘but that never stopped me doing anything before.’ She smiled and then her mouth curled up into a frown.
‘What?’
‘You look way too much like a copper,’ she said.
‘I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not?’
She looked him up and down, ‘I know we’re not exactly undercover but it would help if we didn’t immediately look like the enemy.’ She made him take off his jacket and put it back in the car. His tie was similarly disposed of. ‘Lucky you got a beard,’ she said, shuffling closer to him. ‘But it’s too neat.’
Before he could react she leaned forward and ran her fingers through his beard, fluffing and messing it.
Carrigan smiled, feeling . . . he didn’t quite know what . . . as they stepped through the Sitex screen and into a dark corridor reeking of weed and booze and body odour. Music was seeping from every corner of the house, several different tracks clashing and crashing in a dissonant caterwaul.
He couldn’t believe people lived like this, life reduced to the bare essentials and often not even that, no water or electricity or heating. And yet what were your options if you were young and starting out in London? The rents so high that an entire segment of society was now kept off the property ladder. He looked around the crumbling corridor. The squatters had followed their own logic and beliefs – they didn’t think it was morally just that buildings should be vacant – but they missed the bigger picture, and Carrigan thought back to last night’s conversation. If every marginalised group took the law into their own hands, society wouldn’t last very long.
‘You want to try in there?’ Geneva shouted above the dull thump of drum and bass, nodding towards a door on their left.
Carrigan went in first and was greeted by a thick fog of cannabis smoke. The room was shaking with the music, the walls convulsing and throbbing like beating ventricles. Sweat popped on his forehead and under his collar, the heat and musk of fifty or sixty bodies dancing and swaying to the deep rhythmic pulse, the room itself seeming to breathe in time with the beat.
They let their eyes and ears adjust and tried to spot anyone resembling Nigel but it was impossible, and they left, their bodies still vibrating with the deep rumbling bass drones. They passed through a dangerously leaning partition wall that had come loose and ducked through a hole into a large hallway. The walls were painted in bright lurid colours, daubed with monosyllabic slogans and the ubiquitous anarchist sign. Carrigan heard something behind him and stopped. He thought he saw a flash of yellow hair but when his eyes focused there was nothing but the empty hallway. He turned and followed Geneva through the winding labyrinth, realising they were in the house next door now, that all the houses were connected and that the squatters had erected makeshift walls and corridors to guide them through.
In the next room, people were slumped on sofas and bean bags, listening to music that seemed to consist of nothing but fire alarms, fax screeches and klaxons calls. The occupants were passing around a large cylinder of gas between them. A face mask was connected to a white rubber tube and each person took long hungry pulls, their expressions distorted by the mask. Geneva went around asking if anyone knew Emily or had seen Nigel but it was hard to tell if the people in the room even registered her or merely thought she was part of their shared hallucination.
They left the room and realised that they were now lost, not sure how many of the connected houses they’d passed through. Carrigan felt his head swell with the roar and scream of the music and quickened his step, leading Geneva down a long reeking hallway and into a dead end.
‘Christ!’ he said, turning round, and that was when he saw the girl.
She was blonde and small, her T-shirt dark against her flat torso. She had large green eyes and a slender neck that didn’t look like it could support the weight of her head. She didn’t say anything but beckoned them with her hand and, before they could stop her, she’d turned away and they had little choice but to follow.
Through the darkness and muck, through corridors and barriers, through noise and heat and broken walls until the girl ducked under a low-hanging beam and into a dark cramped room. Carrigan went first, Geneva following, watching their back.
‘Close the door.’
They did as they were told and stood in total darkness, every muscle and fibre of their bodies attuned and tense.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want anyone to see me talking to you . . . I saw . . . I saw it on the news,’ the girl said, switching on a small electric light which radiated across her face, making her look like a gilded angel. ‘I’m not doing this for you,’ she made clear to them, her accent rough and common and slightly exaggerated, a distinct middle-class burr underneath. She looked all of fourteen, a slim nothing of a girl, long blonde hair matted and split, her face a mask of scary blankness. Another one of those girls, Geneva thought, who created a web of chaos around them, shiny black ravens in a hurricane. ‘I’m only doing this for Em.’
‘You knew Emily?’ Geneva asked.
The girl nodded. ‘Yeah, we used to hang out a bit when she was staying here.’
‘She lived here?’ Geneva took a step forward and looked around, realising that this was the girl’s bedroom, the hairdryer on the chair, the crumpled magazines and pillows and empty food cartons. ‘How long ago?’
The girl sniffled and lit a cigarette, the smoke filling the room and shrouding her face. ‘She first turned up, I think it was March of last year. She was one of Nigel’s.’
‘One of Nigel’s?’
The girl looked at Geneva, totally ignoring Carrigan. ‘You know, one of his girls? He always has a new one around. The ones he can mould, the ones that fall under his spell. He turned up with her one night, likes showing off his new recruits. Introduced her to everyone.’ The girl took quick, angry drags off her cigarette. ‘We started seeing her more and more and one day she was crashing here, permanent like, and before we knew it she was doing all the talking and planning. Nigel found a right one when he found her.’
‘What kind of stuff are we talking about?’
The girl ground out her cigarette and glared at Geneva.
‘It’s okay, we’re not interested in anything but finding out who killed Emily.’
‘You mean that?’ she said, and when Geneva nodded, the girl seemed to accept it. ‘Nigel’s part of what he likes to call the movement. He organises and mobilises people for protests – war, student fees, human rights violations, doesn’t matter what.’ The girl’s lips were thin and pinched and it was hard to believe she was so young. ‘Emily was just like him. She lived for the moment we hit the streets, came up against the cordons and looked into the eyes of the enemy. She was one of those people who only found themselves in the crowd, in the flash and roar of running battle. She was only ever happy when she was fighting. That’s why Nigel loved her, she was his mirror in so many ways.’
Geneva lit a cigarette for herself then another for the girl. ‘How long did she stay here for?’ she asked, trying to get a sense of the timeline, the blank space between Emily leaving Geoff Shorter and the fire in the convent.
‘She was here six months, maybe a little less. Then they went abroad, her and Nigel, and when they came back she’d changed.’
‘Abroad? Where?’ Geneva tried to keep the excitement out of her voice, tried to tell herself this was probably nothing, just another step out of many that Emily had taken to get to the convent on that particular night.
The girl looked down at the floor or at her torn trainers, the toes poking out, it was hard to tell. ‘I think it was Nigel’s idea. He’d come into some money. No idea where they went but they were gone three weeks and when they came back Emily was different.’
‘Different how?’ Geneva and Carrigan looked at each other.
‘More focused. As if all her stray particles had finally come to rest. She began to miss meetings and marches, went out for days at a time, never telling anyone where she’d been. She started criticising Nigel and the things we were doing. He confronted her one night, both of them screaming at each other in the kitchen, Emily laying into him for not having enough commitment, for only being interested in causes that got him on TV. The next day she was gone. Left all her stuff and didn’t bother telling anyone.’
‘Her stuff?’ Carrigan said.
‘Just left it here. I kept it in case she came back but she never did.’
‘Do you still have it?’
The girl went over to a corner of the room. She reached behind a thin mattress that lay flush against the wall and pulled out a small canvas bag and handed it to Geneva.
Geneva opened the flap and gazed down at the contents. There was a toothbrush and an electric razor, a couple of faded paperbacks, a stack of scratched CD-Rs, a few blurry photos, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and a black notebook.
‘We’d also really like to talk to Nigel.’
‘So would I.’ The girl shrugged and scratched her wrist. Geneva saw that the skin was red and dry, striated with white crescents and old cutting scars. ‘He was supposed to be here for the protest party but never showed up . . . first I ever heard of Nigel missing a party.’
‘How long has he been gone?’
The girl thought about this, her lower lip pressed between her teeth. ‘I haven’t seen him for five days. The news people were back yesterday, I’m surprised he missed that.’
Five days, the day of the fire. ‘Did Nigel or Emily ever mention anything about nuns?’ Carrigan asked.
The girl looked at him as if he were mad.
Geneva handed her a card, said to call if she remembered anything else and thanked her. The girl whispered, ‘Good luck,’ but when they turned, she’d already disappeared back into the darkness.
When they made it back through the connected rooms and corridors to the main hallway, they saw them.
Two men stood against the front door blocking their path. They were young but heavily muscled, one with a green Mohican, the other shaved except for one black lock, gelled and twisted around his neck in the shape of a noose. They both wore torn T-shirts, snarls, and old scars across their faces.
Carrigan instinctively moved closer to Geneva. He looked at the door, then he looked at the men. Mohican was reaching into his pocket. Noose extended his arm across the door in a challenge. Carrigan could see Geneva gripping the bag with Emily’s things tightly in one hand, the other resting on her hip. He glanced behind him and saw that others had left the party and were gathering to watch the action. A group of men and a couple of women stood a few feet away, swigging cider, laughing, and blocking their escape.
Carrigan quickly ran through their options. He knew they’d been stupid in coming here alone but he’d also known that coming in with a full team would have ruined whatever chance they’d had at finding anything. He felt his body tensing, his hand reaching down for the snap stick he wore on his belt.
‘C’mon then,’ Mohican snarled. ‘I can’t wait to fuckin’ have you.’
Carrigan saw him smile then pull something from his back pocket. It took him a few seconds to realise it was a chunky black padlock. It was tied to a long rope and the man began to swing it in front of him in long extended arcs. Carrigan heard Geneva breathing heavily beside him, the rumble of her fear, the tightness in his own throat.