by Mo Hayder
“Marilyn, thanks, but—”
“But you'll get your own breakfast? Something not so sweeeet?”
He smiled. “I'm sorry.”
“You do know, of course, that other people are falling all over themselves for my banana cake?”
“Marilyn, I don't doubt that for a moment.”
“You wait, Jack.” She lifted the tin on one palm like a waiter and turned for the door, her nose in the air. “One of these days I'll break you.”
4
July 18
MRS. NERSESSIAN'S HOUSE, with its modern leaded windows and carefully painted wagon wheel on the front wall, gleamed like a polished stone. It took her several minutes to unlatch all the chains on the front door. Caffery realized that he must have had a vague image of the person who would be Carmel Peach's friend, and it wasn't Bela Nersessian: she was a short, red-haired woman—sepia skin, long earrings, ruched black blouse embellished with gold necklaces. As soon as she saw Caf-fery's warrant card she gripped his wrist with varnished fingernails and pulled him into the house.
“She's in the bedroom, the poor love, having some quiet time. Come on.” She beckoned him. “Come with me.”
They went upstairs, past framed family photographs, four pictures of the Virgin Mary in mother-of-pearl frames, a glass chandelier pinging with cleanliness. Bela Nersessian went slowly, clutching the banister and turning slightly sideways in her tight knee-length skirt. Every few steps a new thought came to her and she would pause and turn to him. “Now, if I was the police I'd be searching those lakes in the park.” Or: “I've had an idea. Before you leave we'll say a little prayer for Rory, Mr. Caffery. Shall we do that?”
On the top landing Mrs. Nersessian switched on a small crystal-based lamp, plumped up a yellow silk cushion on a small chair, then stood at the bedroom door, smoothing her blouse and taking a deep breath.
She knocked on the door. “Someone to see you, Carmel, lovey.” She pushed open the door and stuck her nose inside. “There you are, love. I've got someone to see you, OK.” She stepped back out of the room and stood on tiptoe to whisper in Caffery's ear: “Tell her I'm praying, darling, tell her we're all praying for Rory.”
The bedroom smelled of perfume and smoke. It was full of pink satin—on the bed, the radiator, the dressing table—like the inside of a jewelry box. The room was at the back of the house: had the curtains been open the park would have been visible, but maybe the neat little WPC sitting on a pink chair near the window, her hands crossed on her lap, had worried about Carmel seeing the park, because the curtains were firmly closed.
When the WPC saw Caffery she half stood—“Sir”— and sat down, nodding at the bed. On the bed, facing away from the door, wearing a large T-shirt with a 1998 World Cup motif on the back and a pair of white leggings, lay Carmel Peach, a raw-skinned woman with thin limbs and chapped red arms. In front of her rested a packet of Superkings, a lighter and a crystal ashtray. He couldn't see her face but he could see that both her wrists were bandaged: Carmel Peach, everyone knew, had tried hard to pull her own hands off in order to escape from the handcuffs and reach her son.
He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment. You've been here before, Jack, haven't you? He remembered standing uselessly in the doorway while his mother lay on the bed and cried her heart out for Ewan. And if she thinks about you at all it's only to wish that you'd piss off.
“You're the CID, aren't you?” She didn't turn to look at him.
“Yes. I'm with AMIT. Do you feel better now?”
She stared resolutely at the curtains. “Have you—you know?”
“Mrs. Peach—”
She lifted her hands briefly as if to stop him from speaking, then subsided. “Just tell it to me straight.”
“I'm sorry.” He looked around the room, shaking his head for the benefit of the WPC, glad Carmel couldn't see his face. “I'm sorry. There's no news yet.”
She didn't respond at first. Her bare feet stiffened briefly, but that was all. Then, just as he was about to continue, she suddenly, violently jackknifed her body on the bed and hammered fists into her stomach, groaning and writhing, rucking the cover into pleats. The WPC stepped forward. “It's all right, Carmel love, it's all right.” She gently caught Carmel's hands and stroked the backs of them with her thumbs. “There we go. There we go.” Slowly Carmel became still. “There we go. We know you're upset, but you don't want to hurt yourself, too, do you, love?”
The WPC looked up at Caffery, who stood in the doorway, appalled, rooted to the spot. He should have stepped forward, should have grabbed Carmel's hands like that, but all he could do was remember—stop thinking about it—remember his mother biting her arms as the police searched Penderecki's old house across the tracks, actually chewing her own arms to relieve what was inside. He realized he was as helpless now as he had been then to deal with female grief.
The WPC sat down and Carmel subsided. She seemed to be concentrating on her breathing for she took four deep breaths, wiped her forehead and shook her head.
“And Alek? What about Alek?”
“I—he's—he's still at King's. They're doing everything they can for him.”
“But they can't save him.”
“Look, Carmel, I would be failing in my duty if I didn't advise you to expect the worst.”
“Oh, just shut up—for fuck's sake, shut up, can't you?” She put her face in her hands. “Get the doctor back,” she demanded. “Get him to give me something more. Look at me, for fuck's sake, I need something stronger than what he's given me.”
“Mrs. Peach, I know it's difficult for you. But it's important that you tell us everything you can remember. As soon as I've taken an initial statement from you I'll get your GP back.”
“No—now! Get me something to make it stop.”
“Carmel, the doctor's given you something and we're doing everything we can.” He took a step inside the room, looking for somewhere to sit, finding a pink cane chair with a teddy on it. He put the bear on the floor and sat down, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward to look at Carmel. “I've got fifteen of my own men out there, another twenty uniformed officers and I don't know how many volunteers. We're taking it very seriously, putting everything we've got into it. When we've gone through what you can remember I'm going to have an officer come over and talk to you—he's specially assigned to you, OK? He'll be available to you whenever you want.”
“But I don't …” Her body twisted with anguish. “… I don't remember what happened.” She dropped her face into her hands and began to sob softly. “Oh, God, my little boy's gone and I don't even remember what happened.”
It was a long time since the Amateur Swimmers' Association had changed its code of conduct: in response to changing awareness of child abuse it now recommended that teachers minimized physical contact with children and taught lessons from the pool edge. Not all swimming pools enforced the recommendations, and often the choice of whether to get in or not varied according to the teacher, but there was one teacher at the Brixton Recreation Center who adhered rigidly to the recommendation. Relatively new to the pool, it hadn't escaped anyone's attention that Chris “Fish” Gummer always kept a distance from the children he taught. In fact, he sometimes appeared positively to dislike them.
“Almost as if he's nervous of them,” the lifeguards would say to each other, watching him in his baggy red drawstring swimming trunks, wearing his red bathing cap although he wouldn't get into the water (he insisted upon the cap, with its under-chin strap fastening, maybe because his hair was so thin that he looked bald from a distance). “You wonder why he puts himself through it.” They traded ideas for what Gummer reminded them of—a penguin, a fish, a flying bomb. Most of the names fitted, but Fish was probably the best: his smooth body with its rather small, triangular head, the ovoid weightiness in his middle, his legs big above the knee, tapering at the ankle, and then, comically tacked onto those slender ankles, overlarge feet, which he held turned out at forty-five de
grees. The fine hair on his chest and legs slicked down to nothing when wet. “You must've got webbed feet,” people told him. But he didn't: he examined them and found that his toes, instead of being flat and spatulate, were rather long and slender. But, fish or not, he made an unlikely swimming teacher. For one thing he was older than the other instructors.
“Probably a perve.”
“Nah, he'd never've got the job.”
They had had it drilled into them: This post is exempt from section 4 (2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. As far as the recreation center personnel officers were concerned, no criminal offense expired. Ever. It didn't matter how many years ago it had happened.
“Unless he ain't got a record,” one of the lifeguards muttered. “Because he never got caught.”
“Or 'cause he changed his name.”
“He couldn't change his name if he had a record, could he?”
“Couldn't he?” One of the older lifeguards cracked his knuckles and stared out at Gummer, who stood at poolside waiting for two of the girls to pull on their Rollo swim belts. “Why not?”
At that the lifeguards all fell silent and turned to look at Gummer. He seemed particularly harried today. It was the turn of the Squids, the six-and seven-year-olds, and the two girls seemed to be having problems getting into their belts. But Gummer wasn't about to crouch down and help. “You're all a bit slow today, aren't you? What's going on?”
Behind him one or two of the children whispered something. He turned. “What? What's got into you all?” No one spoke. There were more parents than usual today in the viewing gallery, he'd noticed, and some members of the class were absent. “Something's going on,” he said, turning back to the two girls. “Isn't anyone going to tell me?”
“Rory,” the taller of the two said suddenly. She was a solemn girl from Trinidad, whose hair was beaded in rows, and she wore a pink Spice Girls swimsuit. Her toenails were painted the same color. “It's 'cause of Rory.”
“Rory?” He raised his eyebrows. “What are you talking about?” “Rory off of Donegal Crescent.” “What about him? What happened to Rory?” Neither girl spoke. The little one, a smaller, darker skinned girl in a green two-piece, put her finger in her mouth. “We saw the police.” “And did the police tell you what happened?” The two girls looked at each other, then back at him. “No? No one told you what happened?” “No.” The bigger girl shook her head. “But we know what happened anyway.”
“You know what happened? Well, that's very clever of you, isn't it?” He put his hands on his knees and bent a little, his eyes narrowed. He was conscious of being monitored from the viewing gallery—the parents were all sitting together with their wary, watchful expressions, little glittering eyes on him as if they suspected him of something. “Well? Come on, then, what happened?”
“It was the troll.”
“Ah, yes.” He had wondered when this would come up. He straightened, picked up a pile of frog floats, threw them into the pool and stopped for a minute to watch them bob off. He rubbed his hands on his T-shirt and turned back to the girls. “The troll.”
The smaller girl looked down at her feet.
“Have you ever seen the troll?”
“No,” said the taller girl.
“So how do you know all this? Have any of your friends seen the troll?” She shrugged. She turned her toes inward and tugged at the legs of her swimsuit, jiggling a little as if she wanted the toilet. “Did you hear me? I said, have any of your friends ever seen the troll?”
She nodded, not meeting his eyes.
“Which friends have seen him?”
“Some of them,” she said, looking away casually at the water. He knew she was lying. “He lives in the trees in the park.”
“Yes?”
“And he climbed up the drainpipe of that house. The drainpipe of Rory's house.”
“I see.”
“Climbed up the drainpipe and murdered them. Ate them in their beds.”
At this the little girl in the green two-piece began to cry. Tears slipped over her lower lids and onto her knuckles.
“OK, OK.” Fish straightened up, nervous now that there were tears. “I think we're jumping to conclusions a bit here. No one knows what happened.” Anxious that the parents didn't see what was happening he positioned himself so that the child was hidden from the gallery. “No one knows if it was the troll yet, do they? Do we? Eh? Do we?”
Eventually he got her to nod her agreement, but she didn't stop crying, her finger still stuck in her mouth. “Right.” He turned and clapped his hands at the others. “Come on, nothing to get excited about. Let's have you in the pool. Take a float if you need one.”
Later, walking home with his swimming kit in his battered red holdall, he passed four of the gates into the park and found that they were all closed, police notices propped in front of them. He continued on his way, unusually agitated, and when he got home he swallowed his pills immediately, washing them down with black coffee. Then he went to the window, his hands shaking.
A number of windows in Brixton had a view directly over the park. Some belonged to the twin towers at the north, some to the half-built houses on the Clock Tower Grove Estate, and some, like Gummer's, belonged to the council flats above the row of shops on Effra Road. He opened the window and put his head out tentatively. From here Donegal Crescent was almost a mile away and he couldn't see the police tape or the small gathering of journalists and onlookers at the Tulse Hill end of the park, but he did notice the quietness. On a summer's day like this the park was usually spotted with bright dresses and children, but today the great expanse of wood was silent, only the dull click-click of insects and the sound of a car radio coming from Effra Road. Beyond the treetops he got a glimpse, in the distance, of empty lawns stretching up to the top of the hill. He closed the window and drew the curtain.
It took Carmel a long time to stop crying. Caffery and the WPC had exchanged one embarrassed glance, then gone back to staring at separate patches of wallpaper until the Ativan began to work, something softer crept through Carmel's veins and she stopped weeping. She reached over and patted the bed, feeling around for the Superkings. Slowly, falteringly, she lit a cigarette, pulled the ashtray toward her and began to speak. “Even though I told them all this already? In the ambulance?”
“I'd like to hear it again. There might be something we missed.”
But it amounted to little more than a rehashing of the statement she'd given the divisional CID officer. There were few new clues to hang on to. She recalled feeling unwell after eating dinner and that she had sent Rory downstairs to play on the PlayStation with Alek before going to the bedroom to lie down. She had been concerned because they were planning to drive to Margate the following day and she didn't want to be ill. That was all she remembered until she woke up in the airing cupboard. There had been no noises, no one suspicious in the neighborhood and, apart from the illness, nothing unusual about the few hours that led up to the attack. “We was supposed to be going on holiday the next day. That's why no one come for us. They must've thought we was away.”
“You told the CID officer you heard something that sounded like an animal?”
“Yes. Breathing. Sniffing. Outside of the cupboard.”
“When was this?”
“The first day, I think.”
“How often did this happen?”
“Just that once.”
“Well, um, do you think there was an animal in the house? Do you think the intruder brought a dog with him?”
She shook her head. “I never heard nothing else, no barking or nothing, and it weren't no dog. Not unless it was standing up on its, you know …” She tapped the backs of her calves. “Standing up on its back legs.”
“What do you think it was?”
“I don't know. I ain't never heard nothing like it.”
“Did you hear Rory or Alek at all in that time?”
“Rory.” She squeezed her eyes closed and nodded. “Crying. He
was in the kitchen.”
“When was this?”
“Just before you lot come.” The words dragged a little jerk out of her as if the effort hurt her. She tamped out her cigarette, lit another from the carton and started to cough. It took her a long time to regain her composure. She wiped her eyes, then her mouth, pushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “There was something I never told them last night.”
Caffery looked up from his notes. “I'm sorry?” The WPC was looking at him in surprise, her eyebrows raised. “What did you say?”
“Something else.”
“What was that?”
“I think he took photographs.”
“Photographs?”
“I saw the flash going off under the cupboard door. I could even hear it winding on. I'm sure that's what it was—photographs.”
“What do you think he was photographing?”
“I don't know. I don't want to know.” She started to shake again, rubbing her arms convulsively. “It was so fucking horrible. I was soft—so bleeding soft that I just sat there like a fucking frightened mouse for them three days. I never knew he was going to take Rory. If I'd of known what he was going to do …”
“You weren't a coward, Carmel. Just look what you did to your arms trying to get out. You tried as hard as anyone could have been expected—” Caffery stopped, suddenly self-conscious. Don't—you'll only make things worse. Quickly he found his attaché case on the floor. “Look, I know how difficult this is but we need you to sign something. It's not a statement, just a couple of release forms. We found a picture of Rory, a school picture, and we'd like your permission to reproduce it—to show people. And I've taken some of Rory's clothes and his schoolbooks.”
“His clothes? Schoolbooks?”
“For the dogs. And—”
“And?”
And to scrape. For his own DNA so we have a hope of identifying him. Since, although I'm not going to say it, I think, Mrs. Peach, that your son's probably already dead.