Eleven Days (28 page)

Carrigan and Geneva picked the car up in Leeds. The train station was swarming with young men wearing tight white T-shirts, their arms clasped around tawny blondes in pencil skirts and impossible heels. They were coming in from the outlying towns to buy presents, get drunk and fight. Carrigan thanked God he was no longer working street patrol.

The car was tiny, not at all what he’d booked over the Internet. It looked more like a rich kid’s toy than something that could get them to Burnham monastery.

Carrigan was squeezed into the driver’s seat, the steering wheel crashing against his knees with each bump of the road as Geneva smoked quietly out the side window. They left the high-rise apartment blocks and grey flyovers behind them and entered a blank and featureless world, devoid of form and shape, as if some creator had wiped the slate clean, unsatisfied with his creation.

As they climbed away from the city the snow started falling in heavy spiralling drifts, the wipers working frenetically, screaming and squeaking against the windscreen. Carrigan saw Geneva texting, reading an incoming message and smiling, then trying to hide it, her brows knotted together in a tight squiggle above her eyes. He was glad there was someone whose texts could make her smile and clutch her phone a little tighter but the look in her eyes was complicated by a fleeting shadow that crossed her face.

They drove in silence for the next thirty minutes, the motorway deserted as it humped and straddled the rolling sea of moors. It was a landscape without feature, made doubly so by the thick layers of snow. Silence enveloped them so that all they could hear was the wet slap of the tyres and their own ragged breathing.

A few minutes later Geneva pointed to an unmarked road curving off from the motorway and Carrigan swerved into the narrow opening. The car heaved and groaned as the surface of the road deteriorated. The snow had been cleared overnight, great ridged humps on either side of the tarmac, but the wind was blowing it back in slanted drifts that twirled and scurried along the surface of the road.

The monks had seen their approach for miles, a tiny black speck on the horizon steadily growing in size. One of them was standing by a big wooden door built into the surrounding wall. Carrigan got out of the car, put on his jacket and rubbed the feeling back into his hands. They trudged through deep drifts, the trees sleeved with snow, the wind howling at their backs, forcing them to walk bent over, and he was out of breath by the time they reached the gate.

‘Bit far from home, aren’t you?’ the monk said, peering through old-fashioned Coke-bottle glasses at his warrant card. Despite the thin robe and bitter wind, he didn’t seem at all affected by the weather.

‘We’re here to speak to Father McCarthy,’ Carrigan said, watching his breath cloud and fog in the frigid air. ‘We’ve come up from London.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time, then,’ the monk replied, not discourteously. He looked like some minor functionary in a vast system, an apparatchik without conviction, grey and remorseless. ‘We don’t allow visitors.’

‘We’re not visitors, we’re investigating a murder.’ Carrigan’s feet were beginning to turn numb and he could feel the first dull throb of a bad headache. ‘Roger Holden gave his express permission,’ he said, his voice steady, eyes unblinking.

‘This is a private facility. There’s no visitors.’ The man tried to sound firm but the jitter in his eyes gave him away.

‘Call Holden,’ Carrigan said. ‘Ask him yourself. I don’t have time to waste.’

The monk was undecided for a moment, then, surprisingly, plucked a mobile from the folds of his gown. He looked up at Carrigan and dialled. Carrigan watched as the man talked to Holden’s secretary, his voice turning deferential and unctuous.

‘Mr Holden’s in a video conference and unavailable all day,’ the monk said, a smile appearing on his face. ‘And without talking to him, I can’t let you in.’

Carrigan took a step forward, until they were breathing the same air. ‘This is a murder investigation,’ he said. ‘This is about ten dead nuns and whether we find out who killed them or not, do you understand?’

The monk gave the slightest of nods.

‘You can let me in,’ Carrigan continued in his most reasonable voice. ‘Or you can come back with me to the nearest police station on an obstruction charge.’

The monk didn’t reply. He stared out at the white wasteland behind them, then nodded imperceptibly and turned, leaving the gate open.

They followed him into a large courtyard surrounded by huge stone walls. They had expected it to be empty and were surprised to see seven or eight priests working the frozen fields. They wore threadbare gowns and no gloves, sandals on their tiny gnarled feet, and they were wielding shovels and scythes, digging and furrowing the hard icy ground. None of the priests showed the slightest interest in them, their eyes fixed on their hands and the tools they held as they swung in some unspoken rhythm, their faces flushed and perspiring freely despite the cold.

As they neared the main building, Carrigan could see more priests milling around the grounds, each one attended by an orderly. The priests ranged in age from very young to shrivelled figures lost in their wheelchairs but they all seemed to share a certain expression, a commonality of suffering, the puffiness around the cheeks, the sadness in their eyes, a dishevelment of body and soul.

The monk led them through an airy and dark vestibule. The walls were bare stone and the cold and wet seeped through the cracks like smoke. They passed several monks kneeling in front of a large wooden crucifix, their heads almost touching the floor, and then went up a set of stairs that creaked and swayed under their feet and into another long corridor with doors evenly spaced along both sides, the smell harsh and sharp, industrial cleaning products and antiseptic mixing with the odour of confined men. The door to Father McCarthy’s room was locked from the outside and the monk reluctantly selected a key from the large silver ring hanging at his belt and turned the lock, the jambs creaking and shrieking like wild cats as they retracted.

Father McCarthy was sitting on a hard-backed chair facing a white plastic table. He didn’t look up as Carrigan and Geneva entered and introduced themselves, his eyes focused on a large bowl resting between his enormous hands. The room was small and sparse. There was a narrow metal-framed bed up against one wall, a simple table with books lying stacked and splayed on it, a jug half filled with water and a large black crucifix, the wooden floor below it worn and sanded smooth by the constant rub of knees and shins.

‘You took your time,’ Father McCarthy said, taking a big mouthful of stew, his lips smacking against the spoon. He was eating some kind of broth, a thick blood-red gloop with dark kidneys and pellets of grey meat floating inside. His face was almost perfectly rectangular and it was huge, a concrete slab of a head framing deep-set eyes, his wrists almost the width of Carrigan’s hand. His beard was wild and unruly and totally white and, when he turned his head, Carrigan thought he could see the sheen of old scars on his puckered skin. McCarthy ignored his scrutiny and continued staring down into his soup.

‘You weren’t easy to find, Holden made sure of that.’ Carrigan paused and stared at the old priest. He was somehow everything the stories and rumours made him out to be. ‘Why did he put you in here?’

‘Why do you think?’ McCarthy replied. ‘The church wants to protect its image. When they heard about the fire, they knew you would find me and maybe the press would too, and that their precious little secret would end up as tabloid fodder. So, here I am. But it’s good you finally found your way to me. I knew you would. I need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I need to resume my work.’

‘And what work is that, Father?’

McCarthy put down his spoon. ‘You know exactly what kind of work I’m referring to, detective, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

Carrigan suppressed something that was close to a smile. ‘We’re aware you knew Emily from Peru and we know what the nuns were up to.’ He took out Emily Maxted’s photo and handed it over to the priest. The paper disappeared in McCarthy’s hands as the scored and wrinkled flesh caressed the image. ‘Emily . . .’ The priest nodded softly and handed the photo back. ‘Emily was our saviour.’

Geneva tapped her pen against her notebook. ‘What do you mean by that?’

McCarthy went back to his stew, stirring the juice with his spoon. ‘When I first met Emily I knew immediately she was the one I’d been waiting for.’

‘Waiting for?’ Geneva asked, the pen sticky between her fingers.

‘They only come along once in a while. People like her. People with the true fire burning within them. The ones who’ll do anything for what they believe in.’

‘Including breaking the law?’

Father McCarthy looked at Geneva and smiled. ‘There is only one law and that is God’s law. Tell me, what import do your jails and life sentences have against eternity?’

‘Is that what you were doing at the compound? Following God’s law?’

‘I was doing what I’ve always been doing. God’s work. The work the church has forgotten about in its haste to catch up to the twenty-first century. You’ve heard about the book Mother Angelica was working on the better part of her life? The moral calculus?’

They both nodded.

‘The compound was an experiment in putting those theories into practice.’

‘I thought the book had been suppressed by the Vatican?’ Carrigan said.

Father McCarthy nodded slowly and took another slurp of his soup. ‘That it was, but random chapters, lost pages, abstracts and glosses had crept out over the years. People in the church, priests and nuns on the ground, read these fragments avidly and collected them and passed them around.’

‘Why Peru?’ Geneva asked.

‘I’d been involved in Peru since the summer of ’73, and if anything, the situation’s worse now. Sure, the dictatorship is gone, the civil war engendered by the Shining Path is over, there is a president who was voted in – but nothing has changed. The mines are operating with impunity. The rivers polluted with cyanide. Entire species are dying off. Workers are being exploited. The mine company has even bought up all the local medical clinics so that reports of toxic poisonings and industrial accidents never see the light of day. And then, on the other side, you have the drug barons. Ex-Shining Path men now forcing villagers to grow coca. Burning their fields and taking their women. The church pretended it wasn’t happening. The world was more interested in other wars. Something had to be done.’

Geneva leaned forward. ‘The sabotage and bombings? Is that what you mean by
something had to be done
?’

‘These things are sometimes necessary to stop a greater evil,’ McCarthy replied. ‘That’s what Mother Angelica’s book was about. That’s what the point of the compound was.’

‘Did you and Mother Angelica set it up together?’

Father McCarthy shook his head. ‘I wrote to Mother Angelica a few years ago and told her how we’d organised the camp according to the principles outlined in her book. I thought she would be pleased but she was a long way away, both in time and space, from what was going on in Peru, and she’d lost her fire in the intervening years. She was content with helping the homeless, handing out leaflets and sheltering escaped prostitutes.

‘We were running out of money. We needed a steady and constant tithing if we were to fulfil our mission. I wrote to Mother Angelica again and begged her to come and see what we were doing but she refused.

‘Then I met Emily. She’d become very interested in the plight of the local people. She wanted to know what she could do to help. She reminded me of Mother Angelica the first time I saw her, forty years ago on that dusty dirt road leading up to Chiapeltec. The same spirit and fire, an equal ferocity. And I knew Mother Angelica would recognise it in her too.’

‘You sent Emily back to London to galvanise the nuns into action? To help fund your compound?’

‘They had lost their way. Someone needed to show them how to get back. Like I said, Emily was our saviour. She possessed the very thing the nuns had lost – the excitement of youth and the unwavering belief in one’s own power to change the world. The nuns had already fought their battles, in South America, in Africa, in all the world’s dusty forlorn places, and they had lost. Emily spoke to us of her time in the protest and anti-war movements, the screaming barricades and late-night beatings, and there was a sparkle in her eyes as she said it – oh yes, a touch of trouble and madness too, but beneath all that lay a pure white flame of indignation. All the nuns recognised it. Emily reminded them of who they’d been and what they’d lost.’ Something in the priest’s eyes mellowed when he said Emily’s name, intoning it as if it were a benediction.

‘It all sounds very high-minded but I don’t see how these ideas led to bombed-out buses, blown pipelines and dead executives?’ Carrigan said.

‘Every action the compound took was in strict accordance with Mother Angelica’s moral calculus. Every action was weighed and discussed and deemed necessary and proportional and more likely to do good than harm.’

‘So what went wrong?’ Carrigan asked and it was hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

It seemed for a moment as if McCarthy wasn’t going to answer, his eyes locking onto Carrigan’s with such a piercing glare that it felt as if he were weighing his soul. ‘Where does anything go wrong, Inspector?’ The priest smiled. ‘You know as well as I do that there are no hidden meanings scribbled in the margins of ancient texts or obscured in the mathematical pattern of letters and spaces. There is no meaning in planetary motion or the disposition of tea leaves. Nor is there meaning in coincidence and similarity. There is nothing but actions and their consequences.

‘It didn’t take Emily long to do what she was sent to do. She convinced the nuns that sheltering escaped prostitutes wasn’t enough. That they should stop being so passive in the face of evil. She told them about the compound and the conditions she’d witnessed in Peru. A couple of the nuns came and visited. They saw what we were doing and they saw what the mine companies were doing. They embraced the cause whole-heartedly. They reported back to Mother Angelica and the money started flowing in.’