by Mo Hayder
‘What did he look like?’
‘White, tall – I think, but everyone looks tall when you’re ten. Especially when you’re a short-arse into the bargain, like me.’
‘Did he mention where he lived?’
Michael bites his lip, staring into mid-air, concentrating hard. ‘This was years ago, mind? I’d forgotten about it all until now.’ He shakes his head. ‘No. I’m sorry. Nothing.’
Caffery picks up the loupe. ‘May I?’
‘Go ahead.’
He examines the ring through the glass. It’s astonishing the clarity the loupe gives the marks. It’s high time he got his eyes retested, he decides.
‘The symbols? Mean anything to you? This triangle with the star burst?’
‘Masonic, I guess. Not that I know anything about the Masons. I mean – no disrespect – but it’s more of a cop thing, isn’t it, the Lodge?’
‘Depends on the cop.’ Caffery sits back and looks again at the photograph. ‘What about this – the winged figure. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘No. It’s nothing to do with the jewellery business. I’ve never seen it before.’
‘You don’t remember him saying what it was about?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I mean – you know. Years and years ago and all that.’
Caffery gets to his feet. ‘Don’t be sorry. That you remembered anything at all is a result. You’d be surprised – a lot of people can’t remember anything from their childhood. It’s just a blur.’
‘Well, that’s probably because they’ve reason to forget. I’ve got nothing to forget. I had a good childhood. I miss it.’
‘Then you’re luckier than most. Much luckier.’
Sunset
EVENING SEEMS TO fall over The Turrets faster than usual. The shadows lengthen rapidly, and almost ahead of time a dark stain creeps up at the edges of the sky. Ian has been down to the bottom of the drive to collect the company car the men left down there earlier, and now he is back at the house, next to the telephone junction box. He is smoking a cigar and watching the few clouds on the horizon. He is thirty-three years of age and he reckons he’s seen sunsets in more different countries than most men his age. He’s seen the Northern Lights, and he’s seen the skies in Africa. He hasn’t stayed still very long.
He stubs out the cigar by pinching the end of it. Lets the ash fall to the ground and pockets the stub for later. He doesn’t throw things like that away, it goes against his training. Ian was in the Foreign Legion for five years and in the Legion you are taught to live like animals, to waste nothing. It’s a hard life – and full of desperadoes. Full of life’s chancers. Anyone with little enough to lose that he can walk through a door in Marseilles, five skiddies and a toothbrush in his bag, and know his life has changed entirely. It was like being in some crazy film – The Matrix – bam!: everything changes when you swallow that red pill. But it was perfect training for the job he’s in now.
When he left the Legion the trend among his peers was to go into security. One firm in particular caught Ian’s eye: Gauntlet Systems. They were using a weapon called the Wolf Missile, and the rumour went that it was named after the killings here in the Mendips all those years ago. No one who lived in this area at the time of the Wolf murders could fail to be affected by it, and Ian was no exception. Curiosity drove him into the company, though he never foresaw it leading back here, to Litton.
Ian is cold. He’s been out here at the telephone junction box for almost half an hour and he’s only in his T-shirt. He collects his tools together and goes back inside.
The kitchen lights are on. Honig is in Oliver Anchor-Ferrers’ comfortable leather recliner, his legs stuck out a long way, his pose restful. He’s wearing a wine-red polo-neck and jeans, but his feet are bare. In front of him the television flickers – a comedy programme – the canned laughter floating through the room. A plate with a piece of Mrs Anchor-Ferrers’ cake rests on the chair arm. Honig is eating slowly, his eyes locked on the screen.
Ian clears his throat to get Honig’s attention. ‘Got the car back, but I can’t get the phone reconnected.’
Honig seems to stop chewing for a moment, but it’s just a pause, then he continues eating, not taking his eyes off the television or giving any indication he’s heard. The onscreen audience laughs and he joins in. A lazy, huffing laugh, that makes his cheeks puff out. Ian waits until the noise on the screen dies down, and a little incidental music plays, then he tries again.
‘Just thought you should know, I disabled it, but I can’t re-enable it now. There’s something wrong with it.’
Once again Honig puts back his head and laughs at something on the television.
Ian waits. ‘So,’ he says, louder this time. ‘I’m here to report that I can’t get the phone reconnected.’
At last Honig turns his eyes to Ian. They’re pale and calm. And completely uninterested.
‘I thought you were the technical guy – you’ve had enough time to study the place.’
It was dawn yesterday morning when Ian disconnected the phone, and he was in a hurry. There were so many other things to organize before the Anchor-Ferrers arrived. Gauntlet were worried that there was a hole in their intelligence about the house’s alarm system, something that didn’t quite add up, as if Oliver Anchor-Ferrers had added something extra to the system that hadn’t come out in the research. Ian isn’t too worried about that; he’s quietly confident there’s nothing else to look for. Nevertheless, setting up a signal to disable the alarm when the phone wires were cut tested his technical knowledge to the hilt. ‘I’ll look at it again tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow’s not good enough. We need to send the videos.’
‘We don’t need ISDN – we can do it from the cell phone. There’s reception at the bottom of the driveway.’
‘A file that big?’
‘Yes. We can sex it up a bit, make it a piece of art.’
‘Let’s do it.’ Honig kills the television, pushes himself out of the chair, shoves his feet, sockless, into a pair of boots and pulls on his jacket. He hooks the keys up from the table and turns for the side door, but stops for a moment. He turns to look back at the kitchen, and gives a long sniff.
‘What is it?’
Honig shakes his head. ‘Can you smell something?’
Ian sniffs. ‘What can you smell?’
‘It’s probably those fucking innards. Three days – no wonder they stink. In the morning we’re taking them out of the scullery and into the forest. Get rid of them.’
The Railway Cutting
IT’S A STRANGE thing, but there have been moments today when Caffery has imagined someone speaking to him. A man’s voice – an older man. It’s impossible to distinguish words, but the voice seems to be pleading. Caffery dismisses it as tiredness. That and the endless drone of London traffic.
When he leaves the jeweller’s he calls Johnny Patel and, instead of turning west, he heads across London Bridge and down towards the part of town North Londoners like to pretend doesn’t exist. South London, the badlands. Specifically Lewisham, the borough that has the highest violent crime rate in the UK. It is his home turf, but somehow today he feels like a visitor here. In the countryside, a year can pass on the clock and on the London clock it’s just a second – a flickering mosaic of light and colour in which lives change beyond recognition. Always regenerating, always new. It used to be normality to him, now it’s like a fast edited animation. His head struggles to keep up with the visual input.
He passes the graffiti-strewn estates and the dank railway bridges, the parks and the high streets. The takeaways, the Chinese fish-and-chip shops, the Indian pizza parlours. And when he stops, puts on the handbrake and turns to stare at his surroundings, his heart pounds as if he’s doing something he could get stopped for, questioned.
He is in the road he grew up and lived in for nearly forty years.
He gets out of the car and walks back a hundred yards to a place where cars used to
cross a small bridge which straddles a railway cutting. As a child he was always told by his parents that the cuttings were built in the nineteenth century by Gurkhas using pick-axes and shovels. He still doesn’t know if that’s true, but what he can see is that they’re not designed for modern traffic because he finds the bridge has been closed. There’s a notice saying it’s structurally unsound.
He stands on the bridge and peers down along the railway cutting. The lights on the gantry above are red, sending an eerie glow out over the tracks. Caffery’s old house is on the right, set a hundred feet from the embankment. There’s a tree in the back garden, hanging over the fence. It’s been pollarded since Caffery left here, but it draws him nevertheless. That’s where their tree house used to be. Thirty-five years ago there was a tree house.
Caffery measures the gap with his eyes – as he has over and over again – from the back of his old home to the back of Penderecki’s garden.
Penderecki’s house has a fresh coat of paint, there’s been a glass extension added. There are blinds at the windows – blue, with big pink dots. In the old paedophile’s garden a children’s climbing frame with tyre swings stands in the middle of the lawn. There’s a fading plastic Wendy house on his left. Penderecki would love that irony – that children are living here. If spirits do exist then he’d be happily flitting from one bedroom to the other, watching the children in the bathtub. Caffery wonders if the family who live here now know about the house’s past. There’s a piece of rusting barbed wire at the end of the garden; it must be the same wire that’s been here for years, because it sags in the place Caffery has always climbed over it.
He routinely broke into Penderecki’s house in the three decades after Ewan’s disappearance, when he was still living here. He’s torn the place apart – been through it a hundred times. He’s thought of everything. He’s pulled up floorboards and searched in chimneys and through the attic. He’s been round the tiny garden like a bloodhound, pulling up stones and pushing a reinforcing rod into the earth every few centimetres. Nothing.
Derek Yates has to know what happened that day. He just has to.
The Peppermint Room
MATILDA HEARS THE back door slamming. She watches the arc of headlights cross the ceiling, and listens as a car reverses out of the old outbuilding behind the house. She is manacled by the ankle, though she hardly needs to be. There’s no fight left. Her body is transparent, just a shell – no substance and no desire for anything.
Honey made her undress. He humiliated her. But in the end that was all. The assault she’d expected didn’t happen. Instead he told her to get dressed and brought her back to the room. ‘You look so much better, Mrs Robinson. I don’t mean you look better dressed – that would be disrespectful. I mean your face – you look almost normal.’
She pressed the back of her hand into her eyes, made it appear as if she was pushing the hair from her face. She was not going to cry. She would not cry.
‘Thank you,’ she said, when he finished manacling her to the radiator. ‘Thank you.’
Honey – or whatever his real name is – might be a father, she decides. He might have children, because he knows how to twist the screw. He knows how to work everything. He hasn’t raped her, he’s done something worse, because however much he’s humiliated her it is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the fear he’s instilled in her that the next time – whenever the next time is: tonight or tomorrow – it will be Lucia.
That fear sits in Matilda’s throat like a stone, not moving, not getting any smaller. That’s the cleverness of the men, they know exactly how to hurt a parent.
George Clooney
IT TAKES CAFFERY almost an hour to drive the two miles through London traffic from Lewisham to Catford, and when he arrives shops are closing, people are making their way home. Johnny Patel’s first-floor office window is the only one with a light on; the row of shops below have grilles on the windows. An accumulated black grease of urine and dirt seems to coat every doorway.
‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ Patel stands in the scruffy doorway to his office, cigarette ends and chewing gum under his feet, and scrutinizes Caffery. ‘I’d hoped for a bit of a paunch at least, but it seems that’s too much to ask. Ungrateful effing bastard. I should slam the door in your face.’
‘Always a pleasure, Johnny. Always a pleasure.’
‘What have you done to yourself? Here, let me get a good look.’ He turns Jack so he can examine him in better light, squinting at his face. ‘Is it Botox? If it is, it’s a bloody good job they’ve done. Fillers? You know what – I couldn’t tell, I really couldn’t.’ He stretches his neck out, pointing at his face, inviting Caffery to scrutinize his skin. ‘What do you think? George Clooney or is it a fail? More Shane Warne? You can tell me the truth. Come on.’ He nudges Caffery. Leans closer. ‘I’ll give you a hint – I’m hoping for the Clooney answer.’
‘It’s Clooney. Definitely Clooney.’
‘You don’t even know who Shane Warne is, do you?’
‘Johnny, you haven’t changed a bit.’
Patel laughs. He stands back and lets Caffery into the dingy hallway. Years ago this scuffed industrial carpet with the fag burns, the staircase with the ochre line of hand grease on the wall from years of human traffic, wouldn’t have been noteworthy. Caffery would have just walked straight past it. But his eyes have got used to the clean green of the countryside; his vision is stripped clear and he sees the scruffiness in detail.
Patel leads Caffery up the flight of stairs. The office is a single room with a partitioned glass area at the far end, rows of dormant computers placed at regular intervals along one side. On each available piece of wall is a whiteboard with names scribbled on it. He is struck by how much it resembles the incident room of a working police station. This is Patel’s own business and if Caffery had to guess at the staff demographic it would be: 50 per cent totty and 50 per cent overweight ex-cops all sitting at the work stations, their eyes glued to the screens. Once a cop, always a cop, he supposes.
Patel takes him to a glass cubicle where a desk light is on. He’s got three thirty-inch monitors on his vast desk and each has lines of names scrolling down the screen.
‘You’re not going to like it.’ Patel swings a chair round for Caffery to sit. ‘While you’ve been sitting in traffic I’ve been name-crunching.’
‘And …?’
He sighs. ‘It’s a needle in a haystack. As a population we’re not in love with the idea of marriage any more, but back then we were crazy about it. Matilda and James, they weren’t common names in the eighties, but I’ve put in a parameter of two years – starting from the beginning of 1981 – and you’re still talking thirty to forty thousand weddings.’
‘Forty thousand? Jesus.’
‘Yes. And so far about thirty-five between a James and Matilda. That’s just in inner London boroughs – assuming they were married in London. I mean, I know you got terrier genes in your DNA, Jack, but even you won’t be able to bottom out that many.’
‘Shit.’ Caffery folds his arms and drops his head back, staring up at the ceiling. Patel’s right. Even if there was an entire police unit devoted to the task it would take weeks to track down every last name on the list.
He reaches into his rucksack and pulls out the photos of the ring. He puts them on the table. Patel looks down at them. Shakes his head and looks up. ‘I dunno. Nothing’s jumping out at me.’
‘What about the winged figure? Mercury presumably.’
‘Mercury the messenger – didn’t one of the phone companies use him as a logo or something? And the triangle … Masonic?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Were you ever Lodge?’
‘Christ no. You?’
Patel points to his face. ‘‘Scuse me, Jack, with the length of our friendship have you still not noticed? I hate to break this to you without warning, but Jack, I’m not white. I don’t know, the Lodge might have changed now, but back in the day there was no w
ay. No way at all. I never even got the invite.’ He pulls his iPhone out and starts scrolling down his contacts. ‘However … it just so happens I am the networking king, and I know someone who studies heraldry and guilds. Want me to give them a call?’
‘Of course.’
Patel finds the number. He dials it. Caffery hears a woman’s voice answer.
‘Hey, it’s me.’ The woman says something and Patel’s smile fades. ‘Yeah, well, I can explain that … Hang on.’ He puts a hand over the phone. ‘I’ll take this outside,’ he mutters. ‘Won’t be a second.’
He leaves the room and the last thing Caffery hears him say is, ‘I’m at the office, I promise you that’s where I am.’
The door slams and Caffery is left in the office alone. He stares at the computer screen. He wonders if it would be like this if he’d stayed in London. Working in a scummy office over Catford High Street. Married, seeing women on the side. In the street below someone is shouting, a dog is barking. He can see a man in a filthy parka, his hair tied back in a ponytail, standing in the door of an off-licence, yelling abuse into the interior.
When Patel comes back Caffery hasn’t moved. Caffery watches his old friend, one eyebrow raised.
‘What?’ Patel says. ‘What’s that look for?’
‘Nice to see you’re still the person I once knew.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘You’re wearing a wedding ring, though I’m sure it’s not the same marriage that I helped you destroy. Was that the new Mrs Patel you were speaking to?’
‘You know what, Jack – they say a suspicious mind is always a guilty mind. How do you know the person I just spoke to is anything more than a friend?’
‘OK, that’s a challenge. Tell me – what’s her name?’
Patel shakes his head. Rubs his forehead. ‘Nina. Why?’