by Mo Hayder
“This is on the edge of Brockwell Park,” he said evenly.
“Just to give you some geography, that tower you can just see in the distance is Arkaig Tower on Railton Road, which the divisionals know and love as Crack Heights.”
The camera tracked down the path to the doorstep of number thirty and turned to pan across the street, the little scrap of grass opposite, the neighbors' faces shocked white ovals against the evening sky. Any point that could be observed from the Peaches' house could also be a vantage point for a potential witness. The camera recorded everything then swung 180 degrees and faced the house head on. The number 30 in gold screw-on numerals filled the screen.
“All the doors and windows were closed.” The camera ran itself around the splintered front door—opened with the Enforcer battering ram—zooming in on an intact lock. “The territorials had to batter their way in. The only thing not locked was the back door—we think it's our point of entry. Watch.”
They were inside the house now, the camera flooding the hallway with halogen light. Slightly worn wallpaper, a gray cord carpet protected by a heavy-duty plastic runner. Two framed prints cast long, bobbing shadows up the hall and a child's turbo water gun lay on its side on the bottom step. Up ahead, at the end of the hall, a doorway. The tape blurred for a moment, helical scan traces across the screen, and when the picture steadied the camera had gone through the doorway and was in a small kitchen. A glazed terra-cotta chicken eyed the camera beadily from next to the bread bin, and the checked curtain covering the door wallowed in the breeze revealing a broken pane, flashes of the darkened yard, a glimpse of the trees in the park beyond.
“Right. Important.” Caffery rested his elbow on the monitor, leaning over to point at the screen. “Glass on the floor, door unlocked. This is not only the point of entry but also the exit point. Intruder breaks window and lets himself in—we think this is sometime after seven P.M. on Friday evening.” The camera zoomed through the broken window and out into a small yard beyond: a carousel clothes dryer, a child's bike, some toys and four overturned milk bottles, their contents rancid and yellow. “The intruder then stays in the house with the Peach family until Monday afternoon, when he's disturbed—at which point he picks up Rory Peach and leaves through the same door.” The camera pulled back into the kitchen and panned the room, pausing at a set of bloody drag marks on the doorpost. Caffery tapped the remote control on his leg and looked around at the silent faces, expecting a reaction. But no one spoke or asked questions. They were staring at the blood on the screen.
“The lab thinks his wounds aren't fatal at this point. The received wisdom is that the intruder carried him out of the house—through this broken fence here and into the woods. He's probably found a way to stanch the blood flow, maybe a towel or something, because the dogs lost him early. Right.” The camera was moving. “Good, now I'm going to show you where the family were found.”
A woman's face came briefly in and out of shot: DS Quinn, the crime-scene coordinator, the most experienced CSC in South London. After she and Caffery had orchestrated the video she had returned to the kitchen to ensure that the glass from the break-in was carefully photographed and removed. Then she had called the Specialist Crime Unit biologists down from Lambeth. While Caffery was with the helicopter crew, the scientists had come through the house, dressed in protective suits, applying their specialized chemicals: ninhydrin, amido black, silver nitrate.
“Alek Peach—that's Dad—was found here, handcuffed at the wrists to this radiator, and by the ankles to this radiator. You can tell the position he was in from the mark he's left.” Caffery pointed it out to the team—a large dark stain on the shag-pile carpet, stretching between the two radiators in the living room. “He's got a wound to the back of his head so we won't be talking to him for a while. Maybe not at all. And the second place—watch, you'll see it now we're going upstairs—is where Carmel was held.”
Carmel, who was now sedated at the hospital, had given something of a statement in the ambulance. Although a cursory examination showed no head wounds it was assumed she had lost consciousness at some point: apart from making dinner at 6 P.M. on Friday, she remembered nothing until she had woken gagged and cuffed to a water pipe in the airing cupboard on the first-floor landing. There she had remained until the shopkeeper had called through the letter box three days later. She hadn't seen or spoken to the intruder, and, no, there was no reason, business or personal, that someone would want to hurt her family. When the paramedics helped her out of the cupboard they angled the stretcher so that she faced the stairs. They didn't want her to turn and see what was spray-painted on the wall behind her.
“And when you see it,” he looked around at the faces, “I think you'll agree that, in spite of the heavy traffic through the house, it's what we should keep from the press.”
He turned back to the TV. The camera operator was climbing the stairs; the shadows danced across the landing ahead. When Caffery had seen the spray-painting he had instantly recognized it as a tool to weed out false confessions.
The camera wobbled, someone in the hallway said, “Fuck,” and then in a louder voice, on screen, “Have you seen this?” Darkness. A brief fumble then a flare of light; the camera aperture closed down momentarily, flinching like an iris. When the image came into focus the detectives in the SIOs' room inched a little closer, trying to read the spray-painted message.
Caffery paused the tape, allowing each member of the team time to bend in and examine it: “Female Hazard.” He flicked off the video and turned on the light. “We want this bottomed out by tomorrow—I won't insult your intelligence by telling you why.”
In the kitchen at the Fairoaks base the air observer took off his helmet and rubbed his ears. He still wasn't sure what he'd seen. “I'd like to have done that on maximum endurance, y'know.”
The commander patted him on the back. “They said we were just a tick in the box, Howie. They don't even know if he's in the park.”
“It's a kid, though.”
“Maybe when we lift we'll go back, eh?”
But in the time they took to refuel, a traffic officer in Purley had been hit by a car while deploying a stinger. The offender was out of the car and running toward Croydon airfield, so India 99 rerouted to that instead. When his shift finished at 2 A.M. the air observer was finding it a little easier not to think about the hazy white doughnut shape he thought he'd seen among the trees in Brockwell Park.
3
PROTOCOL AT THE Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit in King's Hospital kept all head-injury victims on a Codman intercranial pressure bolt and a ventilator for the first twenty-four hours, whether the patient could breathe unaided or not. Even without the heavy dose of medazolam sculling through his veins, AMIT's key witness, Alek Peach, wouldn't have been able to speak with the endotrachial tube down his throat. His wife, Carmel, was still sedated, but Caffery would have gone to the hospital and paced the corridors like an expectant father all night, had DCI Souness not pulled rank.
“They'll never let you near while he's on that thing, Jack.” She respected this in Caffery, this hungry, stray-dog determination, but she knew her hospital consultants well. She knew not to push it. “If he needs blood they've promised us a pretransfusion sample. We've got the consultant's statement, and that's the most we can ask.”
It was 1 A.M. Now that the team knew their parameters for the search, overtime had been assigned and the Brockwell Park area was secured, Souness and some of the other officers went home to catch a precious hour or two's sleep before sunup. Caffery had now been awake for twentyfour hours but he couldn't relax. He went into the SIOs' room—found a bottle of Bell's under the desk, slugged some into a mug and sat at the desk jiggling his knees and tapping his fingers on the phone. When he couldn't stand it any longer he picked up the receiver and got through to ICU.
But the consultant, Mr. Friendship, was losing patience: “What part of no don't you understand?” And he hung up.
Caffery s
tared at the dead receiver. He could redial— spend twenty minutes bullying the hospital staff—but he knew he was up against a brick wall. He sighed, put down the receiver, refilled the mug, put his feet up on the desk and sat with his tie undone staring blankly out the window at the Croydon skyscrapers lit up against the sky.
This case might be the one he'd waited his life for—he already knew that because of what had happened to his own brother, more than a quarter of a century ago—
Quarter of a century? Is it really that long, Ewan? How long before they can't get any DNA at all? How long before a body disappears into the surrounding soil? Becomes silt …
He knew that he was going to have problems with it. He had felt them already, in the quiet interludes of the day, multiplying like bacilli.
Ewan had been just nine. The same age as Rory. There'd been an argument—two brothers in a tree house arguing about something unimportant. The older boy, Ewan, had shuffled down out of the tree, walked off in a sulk down the railway cutting. He was dressed in brown Clarks sandals, brown shorts and a mustard-yellow T-shirt (Caffery knew these details were true—he remembered them doubly: once directly and once from reading them later on the police appeal posters). No one ever saw him again.
Jack watched the police search the railway cutting, determined one day that he would join them. One day, one day, I'll find you, Ewan.… And to this day he lived in the same little South London terraced house, staring out across the back garden and the railway tracks to the house still owned by the aging pedophile whom everyone, including the police, suspected of being responsible for Ewan's disappearance. Ivan Penderecki. Penderecki's house had been searched but no trace of Ewan was found, so Penderecki and Jack Caffrey lived on, like a bitter married couple, locked in a wordless duel. Every woman Caffery had ever slept with had tried to pry him away, tried to loosen the complex fascination between him and the big Polish pedophile, but Caffery had never wasted a moment considering the choice—there was no competition. Even with Rebecca? Rebecca, too, wanted him to forget all about Ewan. Is there no competition with her?
He swallowed the scotch, refilled the mug and took the Time Out from his tray. He could call her—he knew where she'd be. She rarely slept at her Greenwich flat—“Don't like to be with the ghosts.” Instead she often came late to his house and simply went to bed, her arms wrapped round a pillow, a Danneman cigarillo smoldering in the ashtray next to the bed. He checked his watch. It was late, even for Rebecca. And if he called he'd have to tell her about the Peach case, about the similarities, and he knew what her reaction would be. Instead he tipped the chair forward and opened Time Out.
On the now infamous sexual assault last
summer, Morant says: “Yes, the experience
informed my work. I suddenly realized that it's
easy to look at fictionalized rape in a film or in a
book and think you've understood. But in fact
these are mere representations and act as safety nets
against the brutality. I decided it was patronizing to
give mocked-up representations.”
Adopting this mantra, in February she stoked
controversy and media frenzy when it was revealed
(strategically leaked?) that the molds of battered
and mutilated genitalia in her “random” exhibition
(inset) were casts taken from genuine victims of
rape and sexual abuse.
In private Rebecca would never talk about what had been done to her a year ago. Caffery had been there, had seen her close up, unconscious and displayed, suspended from a ceiling: a killer's bloody, valedictory exhibit. He had sat patiently through her statement for the inquest of her dead flatmate, Joni Marsh, in a little hospital room in Lewisham. It had been a rainy day and the maple tree outside the window dripped steadily through the interview.
“Look, if you find this difficult …”
“No—no, it's not difficult.”
At that point he was already half in love with Rebecca. Seeing her bent head, those slender hands fidgeting in her lap as she tried to put it into words, tried to explain the indignity performed on her, he took pity and prompted her through the statement, broke every rule in the book to lessen the ordeal. Fed her what he knew so that all she had to do was nod. She remained shaken—in the inquest she cried during her testimony and couldn't start again, and eventually the coroner allowed her to step down from the witness stand. Even now, if Caffery tried to coax her into talking about it, she would pull up the drawbridge. Or, more infuriatingly, laugh and swear it hadn't affected her. In public, however, she used it almost as an accessory, like part of her wardrobe:
Cue outraged women's groups, garnering
glee from the tabloids and schizophrenic cat-
and-mouse, press-dodging games from Morant.
On future ambitions? “Being banned by Giuliani—
that would be quite fun.” And most oft-repeated
hack question? “When are you going to chuck in
the art and do what you really want to do—
model?” Random 2 opens at the Zinc Gallery,
Clerkenwell, August 26-September 20.
As long as the world thinks she's resilient, that's all she cares about. He closed the magazine, rested his face for a moment on his crossed hands and tried not to think about her, tried not to think about Ewan and tried not to think about Rory. Out of the window, beyond his bowed head, London's midnight lights sparkled like luminous-spined sea creatures.
“Coffee?”
He jerked a little where he lay. Opened his eyes. “Marilyn?”
Marilyn Kryotos, the manager—the “receiver”—of the cumbersome HOLMES murder database, stood in the doorway staring at him. She wore pink lipstick and a navy-blue dress, one lapel pinned with a mother-of-pearl brooch in the shape of a bunny. “Did you sleep here?” She sounded half impressed, half disgusted. “In the office?”
“OK, OK.” He straightened from the desk, pressing knuckles into his eyes. It was a little before dawn and the night was pink around the bottom of the Croydon skyscrapers. A fly floated feet up in the mug of scotch. He checked his watch.
“You're early.”
“First light. Half the team are here already. Danni's on her way to Brixton.”
“Fuck.” He groped for his tie.
“Do you want a comb?”
“No, no.”
“You need one.”
“I know.”
He went to the twenty-four-hour filling station opposite the office, bought a sandwich, a comb, a toothbrush, and hurried back, past the area maps lining the corridor, stopping to pick up the spare shirt he kept in the exhibits room. In the men's he stripped off his shirt, splashed water across his chest, under his arms, and bent to put his face under the tap, wet his hair, then went to the air dryer, lifting his arms, pushing his head under it to dry his hair. He knew he was in the silent eye of the storm. He knew that as the country woke, as televisions came on and the news spread, the incident-room phone would begin to ring. Meanwhile there was red tape to wade through, community-impact assessment meetings to be arranged with the borough commander, and case reviews to think about. The stopwatch had started and he had to be ready.
“Did you get that thing about Rebecca?” Kryotos stood in the incident room, holding a coffee mug and a cake tin.
“The Time Out, you mean?” He took the coffee and together they went back into the SIOs' room.
“She looked lovely in it, didn't she?”
“She did.” He put the coffee on the desk and picked up the new murder manual—the blue-and-white loose-leaf file that had appeared on the windowsill of every police station since the Lawrence inquiry—and leafed through it, running down a mental checklist of all the tasks he should complete today.
“I called the hospital,” Kryotos said. “Alek Peach made it through the night.”
“Seriously?” He looked up. “Can he talk?”
“No.
He's still got that tube thingy down his throat, but he's stable.”
“And Carmel?”
“Came out of her sedation and she's busy getting herself discharged.”
“Jesus, I wasn't expecting that.”
“Relax. There's an officer with her. She's going to a friend's.”
“OK. Speak to the uniform and tell him to call when she's settled.”
“Her. It's a WPC.”
“Her. Tell her to call when Carmel's settled and say I'll be on my way, and then, Marilyn, can you get a Quest Search off to Hendon for me?”
“Yup.” She put down the tin, found a pen in his desk, sat down in Souness's chair and jotted down the key search words he gave her. “Abduction,” “intruder,” “handcuff,” and “child,” with an age range of five to ten. He didn't have to be careful what he said to Kryotos—she was probably the most level-headed member of the team. No matter what the crime, she handled the details that passed through her hands with a calmness he sometimes envied.
“Is that it?”
“No.” He thought for a moment, closing the murder manual and putting it back on the windowsill. “Let's see, ‘sex offenders. ’ Include that, OK? And do the usual check of the nonce register.”
“Right.” She recapped the pen, pushed herself to her feet and picked up the tin. She paused, smiling at his hair, which was still slightly rumpled. If anyone suggested she had an unprofessional fondness for DI Jack Caffery, who was two years her junior anyway, she would develop a high color and abracadabra a healthy marriage out of her hat with two robust children, Dean and Jenna—proof that she and Jack Caffery were colleagues and friends and nothing more. The only person utterly convinced by her argument was Caffery himself. “Banana bread.” She tapped the lid of the tin. “Me and Dean made it. I know it sounds a bit bonkers but you can stick it in the toaster, put some butter on it and, oh, God, even though I say it myself, it is to die for.”