Eleven Days (25 page)

The detainees from the raid were already sequestered in separate interview rooms when Carrigan got back to the station, their details being checked by constables and the attendant analysts recently brought into the case. Carrigan had gone through the interview strategy with his team earlier, his voice curiously detached. They all knew him well enough to know it was better to keep quiet when he got like this.

They’d watched the surveillance tapes until their eyeballs ached. There was no doubt it was Viktor who’d entered the premises a few minutes before the raid. The house had been searched top to bottom but no trace of Viktor had been found nor any way he could have escaped. Carrigan couldn’t fucking believe it – the one man who had a definite link to the case had somehow managed to disappear right before their eyes.

They didn’t have an Albanian translator but they didn’t need one as the two bouncers didn’t say a word between them. The first man spent the whole interview shaking his head genially and throwing his arms up in the air. The second man, the one with the widow’s peak, was different.

Carrigan and Karlson sat opposite him in interview room number two. He was in his early thirties, his skin puckered and pitted with old acne scars. He smelled of lamb and wood-smoke.

‘Where is he?’ Carrigan sent the photo of Viktor spinning across the table.

The man could have been deaf for all the reaction he showed. His absolute stillness was unnerving. He leaned back in his chair and didn’t answer any of their questions. His top row of silver teeth gleamed like spent shell casings in the stark white light of the interview room.

‘We know he went inside. We saw him. Did he take the drugs with him?’

The man kept smiling, his eyes fixed on Carrigan’s. They’d been in the room for forty-five minutes and he’d barely blinked. Carrigan could feel a drop of sweat making its way down his spine. It was no wonder the girls had been so terrified.

Carrigan took out the photos nestled in the green file beside him. The first was of the convent before the fire. He slid it across the desk. The man looked down at it as if it were a scrap of litter, then back up, his expression unchanged. ‘The nuns warned you not to sell drugs in that alleyway, right? But you didn’t listen and you didn’t like them telling you how to run your business. You made several visits and, when they refused to stop, you burned down the convent and got rid of your little problem for the price of a box of matches.’

There was no reaction. If he looked closely, Carrigan could see his own reflection, fuzzy and upside down, in the man’s gleaming wall of teeth. ‘We know Duka was involved. We have Viktor on tape, visiting the convent.’ He took out Emily’s photo and flicked it across the table. ‘What do you know about her?’

The man picked up the photo, looked at it, then crushed it in his hand, sending the crumpled ball spinning back across the table.

The woman was sitting by herself in a separate interview room. They’d left her there for the last hour and a half so that she could take stock of her situation. It was a general rule that the longer someone sat in an interview room by themselves the more compliant they became. They stared at the walls, at the constantly buzzing video camera, at their own faces in the one-way mirror. Expectation was often worse than reality.

Carrigan entered, followed by DC Singh. ‘Do you understand why you’re here?’ he said, taking his seat.

The woman was wearing a lace top and short leather skirt. Her hair was in a tight, intricate bun that looked glazed. Her lipstick was smeared and her nails clattered rhythmically on the table.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ she said, sounding almost as if she meant it.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Carrigan replied. ‘You were caught in a house that was being used as a brothel. The girls, at least a couple of them, are underage. It’s obvious you were the manager, madame, whatever.’ He paused and watched as her face twitched and reacted, this last piece of information sinking in. ‘Now, maybe we can’t prove the rest. Maybe your bodyguards don’t say anything, probably the girls will deny it all. But you were still found in an house with underage girls and that’s a very serious offence here.’

The woman kept drumming her nails on the surface of the table. Under the harsh glare of the lights you could see the wrinkles and hard years etched on her face, all the small and not-so-small things she’d had to do to survive. Carrigan suspected she’d been a trafficked girl herself, working the endless night shift until she got too old, her skin too loose, her body wasted, and then instead of selling her off to someone else, they turned her into procurer and jailer. He rested his head in his hands, appalled by this cruel and logical cycle.

‘I told you, I know nothing, now why you keep me here?’

‘That might work if we hadn’t found a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girl on the premises.’ He took out the photos and laid them flat on the table. ‘This man assaulted a police officer. He’s also wanted in connection with a murder and arson we’re investigating,’ Carrigan said, seeing the slight flicker of dread pass through the woman’s eyes as she glanced at the photo of Viktor.

‘He was sent by Duka to burn down the Sisters of Suffering convent last week, wasn’t he?’ He saw something in the woman’s expression shift. ‘I know you wouldn’t have had anything to do with the murder of ten nuns but maybe you overheard something. Tell me what you know and I’ll make the charges go away.’

The woman looked down at her hands, the skin folded and wrinkled like topography. ‘There’s nothing you can threaten me with that they won’t deliver a hundred times over.’

‘We can protect you,’ Carrigan insisted, sensing a tiny crack in her wall. ‘We can have you moved to a different city, give you a different name, you’ll be untraceable and you’ll be free.’ It was his best shot. It was all she understood and all he could offer her.

But the madame only laughed that thin derisive wheeze again, empty of any human referent. ‘You can protect me?’ she said. ‘You think so? Well, answer me this, detective, can you protect my son? My ten-year-old son who I haven’t seen for three years?’

Carrigan was suddenly confused. He saw a spark in the woman’s eyes that had previously been absent, a slight awakening from the torpor and crushed fatalism of a few minutes before. ‘Son?’

‘You think you know how this works but you know nothing,’ she replied. ‘Can you protect my son? Can you? My son who’s being held by these men back home? You think I do this for fun? For money? The longer you hold me here the more likely it is they will do something to my son, so please, I do not know anything, I do not see anything, either lock me up or let me go before they think I have talked to you.’ She looked him directly in the eyes, her last and everything in that naked glare.

Brothels in Bayswater were nothing new. The area had always been a conveniently located carnal playground, a pocket of anonymity and licence snuggled deep inside the heart of the city; a place where Victorian gentlemen had frequented the lavender-scented parlours of Porchester Terrace, returning soldiers had celebrated their survival in dusty Praed Street walk-ups, and where Rachman had ruled over a vast empire of sex and cold-water flats. The oil boom sheiks of the 1970s and wayward minor Gulf royals had gentrified the business at the same time as introducing a new undercurrent of medieval slavery and micro-audited profit margins. The break-up of the former Soviet Union had turned it into a finely tuned production line. Every building in the city had a story to tell and it was seldom a happy one.

Geneva sat at her computer, reading up about this, trying to control the rage racing through her. The girls they’d taken in had ranged from thirteen to seventeen years old. They were scared and broken. They whimpered and cried in the van on the way to the station. They’d been raped daily for as long as they could remember. And the men who’d made sure they did their job, who knew where to place a fist so that the bruise wouldn’t spoil a customer’s pleasure – those men were sitting in the room behind her.

She bumped into Carrigan in the corridor. He looked pained and drawn and she wondered, not for the first time, how long he could keep this up.

‘SOCOs found a hidden door in the kitchen pantry,’ he said. ‘It leads out into the back alley. That’s how Viktor got away. Bloody uniforms didn’t spot it.’

‘What about the girls?’

‘I want to try talking to them,’ Carrigan said. ‘Then we’ll speak to someone in immigration, see if we can get them sent back to their families. There’s no way I’m releasing them back into the arms of those men.’

Geneva felt a little bit better as they headed back to the interview rooms.

The girls they’d found had all been seen to by FLOs, social workers and other support staff. Their reports made Carrigan’s eyes water. They were mainly from Moldova, Belarus, the Ukraine. Trafficked through Sofia and Tirana, those beautifully named cities of sin and suffering. They were all in an advanced state of psychological distress, their bodies riddled with hidden bruises and cigarette burns.

Carrigan entered the first interview suite and saw the girl he’d discovered sleeping. She was the youngest one they’d found. She was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room, her back against the wall, and she was crying and talking to herself, nodding vigorously, then shaking her head in mute disagreement. The social worker was sitting on a folding chair and when she saw Carrigan she gave him a look that spoke of profound sadness and frustration.

‘I’ve got something for her,’ he told the social worker, slowly making his way across the room. The girl flinched at each footstep, burying her face deep in her hands. Carrigan leaned down and took out the Snoopy he’d retrieved from under her pillow. She looked up, her eyes red and wet, and hesitated. Then she quickly grabbed the stuffed dog and clutched it tightly to her chest, sniffling into its downy fur. Carrigan got up, nodded to the social worker and left.

He stood in the corridor and thought about what he’d seen and what he’d heard. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that they’d been wrong but he knew they were. He searched the incident room and interview suites until he found Geneva.

‘I think we’ve got this all wrong,’ he said.

Geneva was nodding before he could finish. ‘We have,’ she replied. ‘Come . . .’

He followed her into the second interview suite. He kept his distance this time, sitting at the back of the room as Geneva took the chair opposite the girl.

At least she was a bit older, this one, maybe sixteen. Geneva placed a can of Coke in front of the girl, then said, ‘Please tell us what you just told me.’

The girl opened the Coke and took a long sip. She was obviously a teenager but her eyes looked as weary as an old woman who’d seen several husbands and most of her children die.

‘We talk to each other a lot,’ the girl said, her voice heavily accented and hesitant. ‘There is no one else we are allowed to speak to. Girls are moved from house to house, every week sometimes, so that we do not form any bonds, do not get comfortable and because . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Because the men, they like, how you say? Variety? So yes, they switch us from house to house. I myself have been in about fifteen different houses since I came to this country. You never know when they’ll take you somewhere else, how much worse it will be, what kind of men keep guard in the new place. But the girls talk and there are always rumours.’

‘Rumours?’

The scrape of Carrigan’s chair as he edged forward startled the girl.

‘They say that if you manage to escape there are people who will help you hide.’

Carrigan felt the skin tighten against his bones and tried to keep as still as possible.

‘What kind of people?’ Geneva asked.

The girl laughed derisively. ‘This, you understand, is like saying if you win lottery you can buy a new house. Escaping is almost impossible, only a few girls manage it. They make sure of that.’

Carrigan remembered the bolts on the door to the upstairs room, the two bouncers whose job wasn’t to keep the customers in line but the girls. He couldn’t stop thinking about these young women, the dreams they’d have nurtured about England, the rock bands and nightclubs and glamour parties, and then they finally make it here and all they see of the country is the interior of a locked room, the sweating overweight face of the bank manager pummelling their thighs.

‘But there is this rumour that everyone keeps repeating,’ the girl continued. ‘That if you manage to escape there is a place near here where you can find shelter, a safe house, where they will keep you hidden from the men that will be sent to find you.’

‘Do you know where?’ Carrigan asked.

The girl shook her head. ‘No. These are rumours, like I said, but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that if you manage to escape there is a group of women who will provide sanctuary and that these women are not ordinary women but women of God.’

‘Women of God?’

The girl frowned. ‘Yes . . . you know . . . ?’

Carrigan leaned forward, the pulse hammering in his neck. ‘Do you mean nuns?’

The girl’s eyes lit up, ‘Yes, exactly. Nuns.’

Vasily Grossman

The nuns had been sheltering escaped women and if the women knew about it, it was almost certain their captors did too. Geneva sat, thought about this, made notes, avoided going home. She told herself it was the case pressing against her, the spinning puzzlement of facts rolling through her brain, but when she closed her mouth she could still taste eagle-neck’s fingers and feel the hot wet pulse of him on her tongue, and knew it was nothing to do with the case.

She spread the files and papers and interview transcripts across her desk. The incident room had been chaos all afternoon, the subjects from the raid being processed and booked, and now the girl’s story about the nuns sheltering escapees had changed everything yet again. Geneva looked at the grainy photos from Peru, the picket lines and clenched fists, and wondered whether she’d been wasting her time – worse – whether she’d convinced Carrigan to allocate personnel and resources that could have been better used elsewhere. She scratched her wrist until the itching stopped and opened a fresh can of Coke. She hadn’t thought it would be like this. She’d been on the murder squad just over a year now. It was what she’d thought she’d always wanted, but she hadn’t realised the responsibility embedded in every choice she made, the lives and futures dangling in the balance. She knew she had to do better – work longer hours, read through everything again – whatever it took.

She printed off a large-scale map of Peru from the Internet and spread it out in front of her. The country looked hunchbacked and folded, an afterthought in the shadow of the Andes. She remembered from Emily’s diary that the compound was located in the San Gabriel province and she quickly found the region, nestled between mountain and river. The nearest big town was Cusco. These coincidences no longer surprised her. The money from the nuns’ bank account was funding Father McCarthy’s compound.

It took her half an hour to find the right number. Another forty-five minutes to get clearance to make the call. Countless forms to fill out and endless waiting. She didn’t know what she was expecting. She didn’t know if the person on the other end would even speak English.

Commander Gamboa of the Cusco police force spoke English extremely well. He spoke it in that formal, almost stilted way that people do when they’ve learned it from old TV shows and news reports and it made her feel curiously homesick, the ghost of her mother rising through every inflection and malapropism.

‘I was on my way out,’ he said.

‘Lucky I caught you, then.’ She explained who she was and what she was working on. Gamboa kept saying
yes yes yes
, his impatience mounting, but when she mentioned the Tomorrow Foundation his tone changed completely.

‘We have been very interested in that,’ he said.

When Geneva told him about the convent and the money transfers he suddenly forgot the meeting he was rushing off to.

‘We suspect the nuns were funding some kind of compound through this foundation but we have no idea why or what its purpose is.’

She heard something that might have been a chuckle on the other end of the line but there was so much static and buzz that it was hard to tell. ‘So, you know about the compound?’

Geneva felt her stomach tumble. She wondered whether to bluff him but ended up going with the truth. ‘Yes, we do.’

‘Wait just one minute,’ Gamboa said and disappeared off the line. He came back and told her he had the files up on his computer. ‘As you can imagine,’ he continued, his voice steady and soothing and so far away, ‘we have been keeping an eye on this place for the last couple of years.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘We’re not sure,’ Gamboa admitted. ‘It first came to our attention four years ago. No one knows how it started. One day there was just the bare ground and the next there was a small wooden shack. The fence went up first. The villagers asked the workmen what they were building but the workmen didn’t know. The fence was laid over a large parcel of land. The land, when we traced it, was owned by the Tomorrow Foundation. Soon villagers reported construction day and night, power tools and diggers and bright lights.

‘In town they began to notice a steady stream of outsiders passing through. They would stop for a night then disappear into the compound and were not seen again. We, the police, began to get interested. We saw priests and bishops, lawyers and soldiers come through town heading for the compound. A very curious collection of people. No one would tell us what it was or why they were headed there. The army provided us with some aerial shots but all we could see was how well organised and constructed it was.

‘Shipments were being delivered by truck almost daily. We stopped several of these trucks and searched them but all we found were sizable quantities of food, tinned food, enough for years, even for a large group of people. There was no law against buying food so we had to let them go but then, roughly a year ago, we noticed that activities at the compound had stepped up and we began to hear rumours of priests making large purchases of guns and ammunition in Cusco and that was when we became really interested.’

Geneva thought about the timing of this, the £240,000 coming in from the convent every year. ‘Did you come across any English nuns during the course of your investigation?’

‘We came across many nuns and priests,’ Gamboa replied. ‘Did you have anyone in particular in mind?’

She told him what she knew of Sister Rose, her trip to Peru and subsequent disappearance.

‘I know of the case,’ Gamboa said. ‘We never found out who killed the priest she was travelling with and we never found her body. Unfortunately, this is not so rare here as to warrant further inquiry.’ Gamboa paused and she could hear a fan spinning somewhere in the room behind him.

‘Do you have a person named Emily Maxted in your records?’

Gamboa was silent but she could hear him punching keys. ‘Yes, here we go,’ he said. ‘She was arrested for taking part in an anti-mining protest in the Altiplana. When it was discovered she was a foreign national she was released and deported from the country.’

‘When was this?’ Geneva asked.

Gamboa took a minute to look it up. ‘October 2011.’

‘Any record of her linked to the compound?’

‘No, not that I can see,’ Gamboa replied. ‘You know, I went up there one time. They had armed guards at the gate but they let me and my partner in. We met the English priest, Father McCarthy, and he showed us around and told us that the compound was there to help minister to the spiritual needs of the people, but I saw the locked doors, the safety provisions and alarms, the frightened look in people’s faces.’

She heard the slow pulse of the phone’s static holding all the words Gamboa hadn’t been able to say. ‘What happened?’

‘We were taken off the case.’

Geneva gripped the phone tightly between her fingers. ‘Why?’

‘The federal police took over,’ Gamboa replied. ‘It’s standard procedure when these kinds of issues are involved.’

‘Issues? What do you mean?’

There was a pause and she thought he’d said all he was going to say and then she heard him light a cigarette, the slow sizzle and exhale. ‘The compound had been mentioned in connection to a spate of incidents.’

‘Incidents? What kind of things are we talking about?’

‘I’m afraid that is classified. You’ll have to go through Lima to get that information.’ He paused and she could hear him scratch his stubble. ‘Or you could use the Internet,’ he whispered, and hung up.