by Mo Hayder
In central Brixton the traffic was already heavy. He parked in a turning off Acre Lane and wove through the cars, the thump-thump-thump of subwoofers resonating against his stomach muscles. Amazing to think that this was less than a mile from Brockwell Park. Rory Peach, had he been able to sit up, would have been able to look down from his tree—His tree? His tree? You make it sound as if he chose it—and see these darkened stretches of decaying municipal pride. The person who had put Rory up that tree had form. Which meant that he had almost certainly made and developed connections in prison—segregated prison units were key cogs in pedophile networks, seeding beds for ideas and plans, where contacts and lifelong friendships were made. AMIT were going to concentrate one of their pods on moving through the nonce register and Kryotos's Quest Search results, speaking to convicted pedophiles in the Brixton area, trying to tap into that vast underground switchboard. He thought about those invisible connections, the creeping circuitry that linked every sick thing to every other sick thing. And inevitably, as it always did these days, his mind circled back to Penderecki. Penderecki. He thought about him as he crossed to the police station. How long would it be before Penderecki was grilled? How many degrees of separation? And what if? What if …?
DI Durham was welcoming. He remembered the 1989 attack well. “Yeah—little Champ. Nasty.” The office window was level to a streetlight that came on red as they talked. Durham, in navy blue shirt and tartan tie, had been in Brixton fifteen years. He played with his double chin as he spoke, squeezing it and massaging it as if it had appeared overnight. “Dug that out for you.” He slammed the filing cabinet and put the file in front of Caffery. “Is it the Peach thing, then? Is that what you're thinking?”
“I don't know yet.” He opened the file. November 1989 and thirteen-year-old Champaluang Keoduangdy had been attacked in Brockwell Park and so badly injured he had spent a week in hospital. “I was searching for a nonce called the troll and this case came up.”
“That's right—it's all in there.” Durham leaned over and picked out Champ's statement between thumb and forefinger. “That's what Champ called the guy who did him. A troll. Don't know why.” He paused. Caffery had sat forward, hands flat on the desk, and was staring at something in the file. “You all right there, son?” He didn't answer. He felt as if something had landed claws first on his shoulders. This was the forensic medical examiner's report. The assault on Champ had indeed been violent: the attacker had almost ripped a chunk of flesh from the boy's shoulder. Caffery closed the file and looked up at Durham. He knew the color had left his face. “He was bitten?”
“Didn't you know?”
“No …” he said faintly.
“Oh, yeah—took a great chunk out of his shoulder. Sometimes we do see that with these attacks. Nasty.”
“No other assault?”
“Just the piece of electric conduit—rammed up him so hard he was in Intensive Care for a week, poor little sod.”
Caffery rubbed his temples. He could feel the beginnings of a lead. He took off his glasses and stared at a point just below Durham's chin. “Tell me something, have you heard about Rory Peach?”
“Heard what about him?”
“Same injury. Exactly the same. Shoulders bitten, a chunk almost taken out.”
Durham didn't speak for a moment. His mouth, which was slightly twisted as if he doubted everything he saw, tightened further as he took in this new information. He coughed loudly, rapped his fingers on the desk for a few seconds and sat down opposite Caffery. “Right, then.” He pinched his double chin so hard it began to go red. “Right—I'll give the wife a call, tell her to put aside a plate for the microwave.”
When Hal got home that night Smurf came into the hallway and rolled onto her back to please him, her belly pink and balding, the same color as when she was a puppy. “Hello, old girl.” He bent over and scratched the dog's chest, threw his wallet onto the windowsill and went into the TV room. He kissed Josh on the head, then got a beer from the fridge and stood watching Ben cook. Her eyes, an unusual, almost metallic gray, seemed even brighter than usual tonight. The first present Hal ever bought Ben was a moonstone—the same color as her eyes.
“Hal, are you sure you can't smell something?”
“Smell what?”
“I don't know, I can still smell something.”
“Where?”
“In here.” She walked into the hallway.
“What is it?” Hal followed her with his beer. “Is it a farty smell?”
“No. It's like really dirty clothes, you know, or like rubbish.” She stood in the hallway, the dripping wooden spoon in her hand, and sniffed. Since they'd moved in she could smell everything much more intensely. At first she'd had an alarm bell that she might be pregnant again, but she was on the Pill and she didn't have any other symptoms. Maybe she just wasn't used to the new environment.
“You sure there's not something we've forgotten to unpack?”
Benedicte shook her head. All the food had gone straight into the kitchen—she'd unpacked it herself. And, anyway, it had all been dry food, or tinned.
“Then you're imagining it.” He put his arms round her waist. “You're going bonkers, old woman.” He tried to push his hands up the old blue shirt she wore but she laughed.
“Stop it, you raddled old fool.” She pulled away from him. “Come on—make me a glass of something while I do the dinner. Talk to me, tell me dirty stories while I'm washing the potatoes.”
He made her a G and T and sat in the family room with Josh, watching her cutting up leeks. Upholstered like a mother almost from the start, sometimes Benedicte fretted about her weight—but he adored every inch of her, and the big, funny secret was that she loved sex as much as he did. They'd taken to it in their teens like kids to candy and had never gone elsewhere for it. Look at us, they'd joke. No one would guess we're goers. As a couple they were as untrendy as carpet slippers—and yet Hal believed that if there was a love story to be told it was theirs. He still got a faint sick feeling when he considered the possibility of losing her.
“It's Dad farting, that smell,” Josh said after dinner. He stood in his pajamas and opened the fridge on a late-night chocolate hunt. “He's always farting. He can fart at will.”
“Don't be jealous.”
“Ha-al—Jo-osh, for heaven's sake, some manners, please.”
Hal put both hands on the worktop, bent over slightly, scrunched up his face and farted. Josh giggled, hand over his mouth.
“Oh—sorry,” Hal apologized. “I didn't mean to do that.”
Benedicte shook her head. “Yes, you did.”
“No, really, I didn't.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“I meant it to be much louder—I meant it to sound like … this.”
Josh raced around the kitchen squealing with laughter and Ben turned away disgusted. “Nil points for presentation, Norway.” She wrapped the remaining squares of chocolate and put them back in the fridge. “And nil for originality. And stop making faces behind my back.”
Hal smiled. He could still make his wife laugh. As she took Josh to clean his teeth he poured coffee from the cafetiere and went to stand at the back door. The kitchen opened onto a red-cedar patio, open runner steps leading into the square garden, which had been laid with heavyduty grass and a dog-ear picket fence: seven feet high, so in their meager, hard-won ten square meters of South London the Churches had total privacy. Maybe that would change when the neighbors moved in—maybe they'd lean out the windows and watch him cutting the grass, watch Josh in the paddling pool.
He looked up at the windows next door, still darkened, taped Xs still on the panes, his gaze drifting past them to the giant megaliths Arkaig and Herne Hill towers on the distant edge of the park—a sweet reminder that, for all their security fencing and spot-lighting, they still lived in Brixton. Hal shivered, suddenly conscious of the park's wolflike gaze coming from beyond the back fence and, as if the night had suddenly got cold, he wen
t back inside, closing the door and locking it. He'd stopped liking the park after what had happened this week.
Caffery and Durham sat in the deserted office well into the night. From outside floated the otherworldly scream of sirens, the pulse of car stereos in dark alleys. The two men heard none of it. They were wrapped in a little pool of focus over the statements and reports in the Keoduangdy file. They studied the photofit of the attacker, they sent off requests for information about Champ's whereabouts, checked if he had a criminal record and searched for him on the electoral register. There were three Keoduangdys in Birmingham and another two in East London, but none with that first name. Still, they faxed Plaistow and Solihull and kept calling around. The night drew in around the building, but their light burned on. Champ's attacker had never been found. Champ, who had been living on Coldharbour Lane at the time, hadn't got a good look at him and his explanation of what he had been doing in Brockwell Park was less than convincing. His statement was full of contradictions and half-facts.
“But one thing he was sure about,” said Durham. “His attacker took photos of him, even after he fainted—he remembers a flash going off as he was coming round …oh, and something else.” He scratched under his chin. “He kept asking him a weird question.”
“What?”
“Do you like your daddy.”
“Do you like your daddy?”
“Uh-huh. Do you like your daddy? It's gay speak. Mind you, that's about all he was certain of. Not a good witness.” Durham thought that the investigation had never got a good head of steam for the very reason that Champ was reluctant to talk. And that when he did talk he rambled, contradicted himself. That and the fact that he was Laotian. “Nobody really pulled their fingers out on it—half of them couldn't even pronounce his name. And it never happened again so it just sort of slipped. You know how it goes.”
“Maybe he got put away for something else.” Caffery took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve. “Our Peach man's been inside.”
Durham frowned, raised questioning eyebrows.
“The child had belt marks around his neck.”
“Ah.” Durham nodded. He knew what Caffery was talking about. A prison habit. For Durham, whose fourteen-year-old daughter lived horses and horsemanship, the practice that inmates had of subduing their victims with a belt around the neck always put him in mind of a halter—an unwilling horse snaffled into submission, muscular piston thighs squeezing its flanks. It was the first conclusion an investigating officer would come to, seeing telltale marks like that.
“You know, it's funny that you like the troll for the Peach case …” Durham tugged at his chin and watched Caffery put his glasses back on and go back to his notebook “… because the first thing I thought about when I heard the whole Donegal Crescent thing was the Half Moon Lane photo hoax.”
Caffery looked up. “The Half Moon …?” “Never heard of it?” Durham gave his wattle a reassuring squeeze. “No, why would you? It was twelve years ago. More. Nothing to do with Champ, just happened at the same time. Two Polaroids found in a council bin on Half Moon Lane.”
“And?”
“Oh, it all blew over—it was just a prank. But at the time it really griefed us some, I can tell you. Got the locals running appeals all over the place. A poster outside all the stations—‘Do you know this child? Could be in danger, ’ etc.”
“I don't remember it.”
“Well, the father—we called him the father, we don't know for sure—the father and the kid, a little lad, were both tied up, naked. The posters were a shot in the dark— the boy's own mother wouldn't have recognized him from the photograph, they were so blurred, and if you ask me the quality was even worse after the secret squirrels had been at it. Image enhancement, my arse. Not that I'd like that to go any further, you understand.”
“You think it was a hoax?”
He shrugged. “I don't know for sure, but in the end we decided it had to've been a prank because no one ever came forward—no one was found, no one reported missing. It is on the books at the Yard, but here in Brixton we never heard anything more about it.”
“Where did the photos go?”
“After the Denmark Hill lab, I suppose back here, but we clear our Book Sixty-six out every year so they've probably gone for retention at Charlton or Cricklewood. I'll check the property vouchers if you want.” Durham stood, pulling at his chin, looking at Caffery. Then he paused and, placing both hands on the table, leaned forward. “The reason it's funny is because it happened at the same time the Champ case was still active, and when those photos came in I got a little itch on them. Know what I mean? I always wondered if it had anything to do with this troll character—with the guy who did Champ. You know, here.” He tapped his chest with a Biro. “In my giblets. Nothing to go on, of course, just that little itch.”
12
AT MIDNIGHT, WHEN CAFFERY finally got home, Rebecca did it again. This time it was in the kitchen. She had been sitting on the table, drinking vodka from a champagne glass, hardly speaking as he poured himself a drink—but when he drew the blind behind her, put his hands on either side of her, when his jacket dropped open and he kissed her, she sweetly opened her legs and it happened all over again: she let him make her come, twice, and when he pushed himself up and undid his fly she sat up straight and turned her head away. “I'm sorry,” she said, and slipped off the worktop, straightened her dress and left the room.
Caffery dropped forward, hands on the table. He took long, deep breaths and stared blankly down at the wet print she'd left on the table. Don't lose your temper. Don't prove her right. He waited until his pulse had slowed, then zipped up and followed her through to the living room, where she sat silently watching the TV without the sound on.
“Rebecca.”
“Mmmm?” She wasn't looking at him. “What?”
“I know why this is happening, Rebecca. I do know.”
“Do you?”
“And you need to talk about it. You need to talk about what happened.”
“I never stop talking about it.”
“I don't mean to the press, I mean to me.” Impatient now, he buckled up his belt. “Or just leave me be, Becky, just leave me be. Unless you want to give me a blowjob instead of giving one to the whole London art scene, then just leave me be.”
For a moment she seemed to be about to say something but she changed her mind and dropped her hands on the sofa with an exasperated sigh. “God! What's got into you?”
“What do you think's got into me? I'm standing here, look at me, a raging hard-on, and you—” he gestured at the TV “—you're watching the fucking television.”
“Don't lecture me, Jack, don't lecture me when there's a few things of your own we don't exactly rip apart and put under the microscope.”
“OK.” He stopped her, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “This is disintegrating.” He turned to the door. “When you want to talk you know where I'll be.”
“Where?”
“In the bathroom—having a wank.”
He jerked himself off in the shower then pulled on his running gear and left the house without speaking, slamming the door behind him.
The night sky was the color of sea. The deep blue that can sometimes be seen curled in the paw of a coral atoll. It was warm and someone's late-night music pounded out of a bed-sit window and up into the starlit sky. Sweat dribbled into his eyes—he concentrated on making his heels hit the tarmac straight and tried not to think about Rebecca. But his mind kept orbiting back to it, back to the stalemate they were in. Neither of them was going to give way, that was clear; they'd just get harder and harder in their determination. Shit, Rebecca. He loved her, there was no question about it, he had a real tenderness for her that was hard to heal, but from where he stood he couldn't see a way past these rigid battle lines they stood in.
“Jack,” Rebecca said suddenly, sitting up on the sofa and turning to the door. Her sudden sense of him was alm
ost as if he'd walked in. “Jack, it's because—” she held her fists hard against her stomach—“it's because I'm wounded. Big bloody wound.” She paused, open-mouthed, staring at the empty doorway—letting what she had just said sink in. Then her face crumpled and she laughed out loud at the stupid drama. “Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm wounded! Wounded? Poor, poor wounded Becky!” She jumped up, went into the kitchen for the champagne glass and came shimmying back into the living room, twisting her free hand in front of her face, a long-nailed Shiva dancing on the bare floor. “Wounded—you silly cow, wounded, wounded, wounded!” There was some grass she kept in an old Oxo cube box on the mantelpiece and she sang as she rolled a joint, sipping the vodka, her tongue getting numb and furry. She knelt down, put the glass on the floor, lit the spliff, took a few hits then suddenly rolled onto the floor, on her back, her hands over her eyes. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”
They were in a hole. The pair of them, deep in a hole: Jack, with his determined tearing apart of himself over Ewan—it terrified her where that all might end—and then, on the opposite side of the battlefield, she stood, with her mouth healed over, her eyes shut. All Jack wanted was for her to sit and discuss it calmly, to flush it through, make it clean again. I don't blame you, Jack, I don't blame you. She wanted, really wanted, to tell him. But she couldn't, and that was really where the wound was. In her memory. Because what Jack didn't know was that all the way through Joni's inquest, through him patiently taking her statement in the hospital room overlooking the dripping trees, through him gently prompting her when she dried, through her pretending to cry when the coroner asked her a question she didn't know the answer to—even when she alluded to it in the press—all along Rebecca had been telling a lie. The truth was something she hardly dared admit, even to herself. She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the ceiling. The truth was that, of the attack in the little Kent bungalow a year ago, she could remember nothing.