by Mo Hayder
‘The monsty got him.’ Jenna started to cry softly.
‘Don’t be silly.’
Maddox shot Caffery a look, eyebrows raised. Caffery shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me.’
‘Monsty’s ate-n him.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Veronica said softly, coming out onto the patio to look wonderingly into the garden. ‘There are no monsters in your garden. Are there, Jack?’
Caffery put the bottles down on the patio and walked slowly down the steps onto the lawn. ‘Paul?’ The flower beds were silent, the small ghostly spots of clematis stellata blooms floated in the darkness. He lifted the weeping willow and looked underneath. Over the railway cutting the darkness was thicker. Penderecki’s lights were off.
‘I’ll kill him for this.’ Maddox came up behind Jack. ‘I’ll kill you for this, Essex. Joke’s over. You’re upset ting the kids—’ He stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘That?’
Something dark hurtled at them out of the shadows. Maddox ducked instinctively and on the patio Dean cried out. Caffery jumped back, breathing hard—‘Jesus!‘—and then, in the shock, he saw it was Essex loping towards them across the lawn, an ape hip-hopping out of the jungle, arms swinging.
‘Ki-ai, ki-ai.’
‘Idiot.’ Caffery shook his head, laughing. ‘You. You’re dead meat.’
On the patio the guests dissolved into giggles.
‘Bloody deranged lunatic.’ Maddox held his finger up. ‘You’ll pay for this.’
Essex was wounded. ‘Ki-ai, ki-ai? Munen mushin?’
‘Where’d you hide?’
He ran his hands over his hair and shook his head. ‘Oh, they just, y’know, took me away in a space craft.’
‘Did sexual experiments on you, I suppose?’
‘Wow, it happened to you too? Spooky.’ He put his arms around Maddox and Caffery, propelling them towards the house. ‘What year is this? Is that lovely Mrs Thatcher still on the throne?’
In the living room Jenna stared at Essex, not knowing whether to cry or laugh. Kryotos, flushed, thumped him on the bicep. ‘Don’t do that again, you big—you big walrus.’ She smiled, put protective hands over Jenna’s ears and dipped her head to Veronica. ‘God didn’t give them enough blood to service their brains and their winkies. And if they try and use both at the same time—oh!’ She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘Calamity is not the word for it.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Veronica said tonelessly.
The rooms grew hotter and closer with the threat of rain. More people arrived, and in the living room the pile of ficelle baguettes was reduced to a scattering of crumbs, the ice in the stainless-steel buckets melted, the platters of cheeses and chorizos lay plundered and abandoned. Someone had found a CD of Strauss waltzes and Marilyn was dancing with Essex, bumping into people and giggling. The room blazed intermittently with the metallic blue of heat lightning.
Caffery nursed his wine in the corner, watching Dean. He was about the same age Ewan had been. To Dean the room had the same dimensions, the same fears, the garden the same dark excitements. Standing upright he was eye level with the dado rail, just as Ewan had been.
‘Nice house.’ Maddox came up behind him. ‘You didn’t get this on a DI’s salary.’
Caffery turned, reverie broken. ‘No, no.’ He looked into his wine glass. ‘Parents. Left me with it.’
‘They left it to you?’
‘No. Left me with it.’ He smiled and swirled the wine. ‘They sold it to me knock down, very knock down. They were glad to see the back of it. Of me too.’
‘Still alive?’
‘Sure. Somewhere.’
‘Interesting.’ Maddox nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s interesting you’ve never mentioned it before.’
‘Yeah, well—’ He shifted his feet, cleared his throat. ‘Wine?’
‘Go on, then. One more won’t hurt.’ Maddox held the glass up. ‘Romaine’s given Veronica’s cooking the official thumbs up. She’s done well tonight.’ He half emptied his glass. ‘But I’ll have to be making tracks, mate. I want to stop in at Greenwich, see how Betts is doing.’
‘How was it going?’
‘At time of going to press? Pretty shit.’
‘It’s not going to work, is it?’
Maddox considered Caffery’s face for a moment then took his arm and led him to one side. ‘Between you and me?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll never make it stick. Not in forty-eight hours.’
‘I won’t say I told you so.’
‘Thanks.’ Maddox sighed. ‘Tomorrow morning nine a.m. our first extension starts, and when that’s up we’ll have to charge him, sufficient evidence or not: serology are dragging and the search on the flat turned up zilch, the clerks in the warrant office reckon we’re pretty fucking funny, laughing into their spritzers all over Greenwich. And—’
‘And?’
Maddox drained the glass and swilled the wine around his mouth as if he didn’t like what he was about to say. He straightened up. ‘He’s given us a lead. Says the girls had a punter in Croom’s Hill. Dropped the last one of them off there ten days before we brought him in. Thinks it was Shellene Craw. Says he had sex with her. Accounts for the hair.’
‘Croom’s Hill?’
‘Yeah. Know it?’
‘Steve.’ Caffery leaned in and spoke excitedly. ‘It’s come up; this afternoon Essex and I were working on it.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘He’s affluent. I mean really up there in the top one hundred. But he’s got a little problem: hot and cold running category As. Does a nice Columbian, and the opium is Golden Triangle. A regular little Khun Sa; he’s also the majority shareholder of HCC Plc.’
‘Who are?’
‘Pharmaceutical company. Heard of Snap-Haler?’
‘Somewhere.’
‘For asthmatics. HCC’ve just won the worldwide licence, stocks are soaring, life is sweet. He’s also—’
Thunder cracked over the garden, vibrating a tray of fine-stemmed glasses so polished that their trembling scattered the light. Some of the women jumped and Marilyn giggled at her own nervousness. Essex unwrapped himself from her and moved to shut the French windows, but Veronica put a cool hand on his arm.
‘No, leave it. I like the rain.’ She gazed off into the garden as if she was waiting for something to happen. The drops began splattering on the patio, the smell of wet earth drifted into the room. Jack turned back to Maddox and murmured in a low voice:
‘He’s also on a steering committee at St Dunstan’s.’
Maddox was silent, staring out at the rain. He closed his eyes briefly then straightened his tie and nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘He trained to be a doctor. Shoots up for his party guests. I was ready to put someone else in the frame—a technician from St D’s—though it was shaky, then bingo this one comes up and the pennies drop—everything just slots in—and now you come along and chuck Croom’s Hill into the pot.’ He lifted his glass, drained it in one. ‘Give me surveillance. A week. I’m so confident I’d go out there now and do it myself.’
‘Jack, I can’t just snap my fingers and—’ He looked at Caffery’s face and shook his head. ‘All right, all right. I’ll get the governor to OK forty-eight hours. Then we review.’
‘Now, Jack, I feel I already know you well enough to give you a good telling off.’ Romaine gently inserted herself under Maddox’s arm and smiled up at Caffery. ‘You have to learn the golden rule. No talking shop.’
‘We weren’t,’ Maddox said.
‘You’re lying. I can see it in your face.’
‘Ignore her, Jack. She wants me to take early retirement.’
‘You have to understand my husband.’ She patted his chest. ‘He tries to keep everyone happy. It weighs on him.’
Maddox took the hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. ‘We’ve stopped now, I promise. I was just looking
at Marilyn’s lot. You know—thinking about Steph and Laure at that age.’
‘Oh yuck. Sentimentality.’ She kissed him and drew back wrinkling her nose. ‘Poo! I see I’ll be driving.’ She fumbled in her handbag. ‘I thought you were working tonight.’
‘I am—’ He opened his mouth and allowed his wife to squirt a tiny green dose of breath freshener in. ‘I’ve only had a couple.’
‘My fault,’ Caffery said. ‘I’m head wine waiter—’
He stopped. Romaine’s face had changed. She put a finger up to her mouth.
‘Look,’ she mouthed, her eyes locked beyond him, on the French windows. ‘Look behind you.’
And as she spoke Caffery became aware of other conversations dying—guests pausing in mid-sentence and turning to look at the door. Odd, frozen expressions. His earlier excitement drained away.
‘Look,’ Romaine repeated—jabbing a finger towards the garden.
Slowly, half dreading, half knowing what he would see, he turned.
Dean was sitting on the sill, his face pale and pinched, shocked into stillness by the apparition only inches from his face. Beyond him Veronica was smiling faintly—almost fascinated. The French windows were open to the night and in the pale glow of the electric light, streaming with rain, his arms holding an odd, jumbled assortment of ochres, stood Penderecki, his thin hair wild and fluorescing in the sheet lightning.
The room dropped into absolute silence. Caffery stared stupidly into the heavy-lidded eyes, unable to decipher exactly what Penderecki was holding in his arms.
Then Penderecki licked his thick lips and smiled, taking one simple step forward. The crowd parted, he blinked slowly and with something that sounded like a sigh let the armful of bones fall into a splintering mass amongst the feet of the guests.
... 32
Only Logan and Essex stayed until 1 a.m. Maddox had to be at Greenwich and the other guests departed hurriedly, throwing Caffery embarrassed glances where he sat, on the stairs, gazing at his hands, breathing deeply, willing his heart to keep beating.
Veronica, surreally calm, tried to stop them leaving.
‘It’s nothing to get excited about. Don’t go. We can always sit in the dining room.’
When she realized she was fighting a losing battle she slammed the front door closed and moodily retired to the kitchen to load the dishwasher. Logan drove to Shrivemoor for his grab bag, and Essex spent the thirty minutes administering to Caffery, doling out the remainder of the Glenmorangie in a series of short, digestible shots.
‘Like a baby,’ Caffery muttered, staring into the tumbler.
‘Like a big, snotty, nappy-wearing baby,’ Essex agreed. ‘Well? Are you going to tell me?’
Caffery looked at the living room door, pulled closed so that he couldn’t see the nightmarish splatter of bones on the floor. ‘I think that might be my brother.’
Essex’s face dropped. ‘Your brother?’
‘He walked down the railway track at the back of the house. September the fourteenth 1974. Never been seen again.’
And there, in the weak electric light, Caffery unburdened himself of the story, told Essex of the argument in the tree house that had given him the permanently blackened thumb, of Ewan slipping out of his reach, down onto the banks of the railway cutting—‘We called it ”the death trail”. What an irony‘—of the way his mother sobbed and shouted in the back garden, biting her own arms as the police searched Penderecki’s home only to emerge after ten hours with nothing, not one scrap of evidence that Ewan had ever set foot in there. Then the finger of suspicion turning to his own father, his being led away, detained for two days—‘My God, it nearly finished their marriage.’
The Glenmorangie dwindled in its bottle.
‘Eventually everyone gave up, dropped it, I suppose they had to. But I couldn’t. You see, I know he hid Ewan’s body—just for the time they searched the house. Maybe he took it out to the countryside, there’s some bits and pieces, bills, letters’—he jerked his head upstairs—‘clues I’ve salvaged over the years, keep trying to sort them out, sit down and get a lead from them. But I’m certain of one thing—’ He swilled his drink and swallowed it whole. ‘He’s hung on to him. Penderecki’s still got Ewan.’
‘So you’re waiting here. For him to return your brother?’
Caffery stared at his thumbnail, blinking painfully. ‘Is that what he’s done tonight? Do you think that’s Ewan lying in there?’
Essex got slowly to his feet, wincing as the blood returned to his legs. ‘I don’t know, Jack. But we’re going to find out.’
The summer storm moved south-west across Greenwich, the silver wand of the Crystal Palace transmitter trembling in the moonlight. Even the houses studding the edge of Blackheath seemed to crouch a little closer—as if they could stop the old heath rearing off in the wind.
Harteveld was silent—sitting at the mahogany table in the living room, a copy of The Times spread out in front of him, a bottle of pastis at his elbow. The pressure in the air made his temples ache—no matter how many painkillers he swallowed, how much coke he did, he couldn’t get rid of the pain. And his hands. His hands were cold. Like ice. He was reading about the bodies they had found at the Millennium site. Kayleigh Hatch, Petra Spacek, Shellene Craw, Michelle Wilcox—and a girl they couldn’t identify because she was so badly decomposed. He knew exactly who she was—the Glasgow street child whose death he had slept through. No-one had reported her missing.
Suddenly he swept the paper from the table, dropping his face into his hands. For several seconds he sat like this, rocking his head from side to side, raking his fingers into his scalp, as if he might be able to dislodge his thoughts with his nails. Then, trembling violently, he jerked to his feet. He grabbed the pastis and stumbled into the orangery, throwing the doors open. The wind boomed across the garden, hitting him in the face, rattling the window panes.
Toby Harteveld stood quite still, his face turned into the gale, listening to the long grasses in the parterre bowing and hissing like rain. The storm was coming. It was rushing out of the night sky towards him, moving faster than a comet, its target the very centre of his chest.
... 33
Where Croom’s Hill twists down past the site of the old Ursuline convent, Greenwich Council Environmental Service’s refuse lorry was halted in the centre of the road by an unmarked white van. Minutes later the lorry continued on its way up the hill, stopping outside the Harteveld house as usual. The van turned away and made a wide, looping swing through Blackheath, arriving at the top curve of Croom’s Hill—similarly concealed from the house—just in time to meet the truck a second time. The driver took two full refuse sacks from the workers, passed them carefully to a colleague in the back of the van and slammed the doors closed. Back in the driver’s seat he adjusted the wing mirror until he could see, down in the elbow of the hill, a grey Sierra parked almost out of sight under a dripping oak. The van driver didn’t turn. With a minutely subtle movement he extended his thumb a small degree, holding it against the mirror.
He waited until the two men in the Sierra nodded in response, then started the van and headed up the hill.
In his walled garden Harteveld saw none of these exchanges. He was propped against a stone bench, blinking at the morning with bloodshot eyes. Next to him, in a bed of violets and moon daisies, lay an empty pastis bottle and a small pile of cigarette ends. He had been there all night, listening to the storms and sirens chase each other up and down Greenwich, not taking shelter, but waiting motionless as the clouds swelled and broke, dropping their rain on his face, turning the maze of paths into rushing gullies. The sheet lightning had turned the bone-white church spire blue, and by morning fruit trees had lost branches, the lawns were boggy and the lovely irises along the west wall lay exhausted and flat. The orangery doors stood open to the morning and the copy of The Times, which had been lifted from the living room floor by the winds, was distributed around the orangery and patio. Kayleigh Hatch’s face hung in
the branches of a cedar of Lebanon.
Now, as the shadows in the gardens faded and the new sun dried out the rain-drenched cobwebs in the copper beeches, Harteveld began to stir.
In the Sierra, Betts turned and looked at Logan. Somewhere in the alley next to Harteveld’s house a car had started. Presently garage doors opened, and a green car, a beautiful, high-reared classic car, swung out into the alley. It turned left onto Croom’s Hill and headed off into the bright morning.
Betts’s mouth twitched slightly as he reached for the ignition.
Five miles away, in Shrivemoor HQ, Caffery’s phone rang.
‘DI Caffery? Jane Amedure speaking. Your SA at the Forensic Science Services. I’m in receipt of two black plastic dustbin liners and contents. I can run a GC/MS on those compared to the ones submitted from the autopsies, and have the results later today.’ She cleared her throat. ‘And, uh, something else came my way from DS Essex this morning.’
‘Yes,’ Caffery said dully. He was exhausted. ‘That was personal. From me. We’re not reviewing it yet. Not officially.’
‘I know, DS Essex filled me in. If it doesn’t go any further I might be able to sneak it in under operation Walworth.’
‘Good of you.’
‘Yeah well, I heard the story.’
‘Anything you can tell me?’
‘Not much visually, they’re old and very fragmented. In the event they prove to be human I’ll run a mitochondrial DNA test, so I need to know if your mother is still alive? Hello?’
‘Yes, hello.’
‘I said is your mother still alive, or one of her relatives?’
‘Yes, she’s—you think they’re human?’
‘I can let you know for sure later today, maybe tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, Dr Amedure. Thank you very much.’
He replaced the handset, leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window for several minutes. He had a blunt, toxic pain between his eyes. He’d got to bed at 4 a.m. On Betts’s return they had worked for an hour. While Veronica wrapped her mother’s goblets and placed them in a tea crate, Essex shut himself in the living room, tagging and bagging the bones, carefully, as if he was turning Caffery’s emotions in his hands. By ten the next morning, just as Gemini’s extended period of detention was starting, everyone at Shrivemoor knew the story, knew about Ewan and Penderecki, understood Caffery a little better. The women in the incident room looked at him with something new, something, he imagined, curiously like fear. if he let it, he could be undone in the time it took Amedure to make a report on the bones.