by Mo Hayder
“There are families out there, can you believe it? Making it into a day trip—kids wearing ‘Kill the Pedos’ T-shirts.”
“I know. I know.” She shook her head. “Did Josh see them?”
“Saw them, didn't know what it was all about.”
“What about Alek Peach?”
“He was just standing back among the bushes, watching. You should have seen him staring at Josh—as if he was seeing a ghost.”
“Poor bastard.” She got up, came into the kitchen and put the torch in a drawer. “I can't wait to go to Cornwall, Hal, I can't wait to get out of Brixton for a few days.” She kissed the side of his face. “Don't stay up all night.”
At four-thirty A.M., the sky over the houses in Brockley became baby-eye blue and only Venus was still shining. At the back window where Penderecki had stood so many times to watch Ewan and Jack playing in the tree house across the railway track, Caffery sat on a chair half stiff with shock. Flies had come to sip his sweat and he hadn't stopped them.
For years he had wondered how he'd feel if Penderecki died—and this was it, the end of the possibility that one day he'd discover what had happened to Ewan. Here he was, living out his fear, and it felt like having the life squeezed from him.
When the first morning goods train rattled through the cutting at 5 A.M., at last Caffery moved. He batted at the flies and stood, letting the blood come slowly back into his legs, and went downstairs into the kitchen, his eyes smarting. He ran the tap, scooped some water onto his face, and set to work.
Somewhere in this house was the answer to his question. He went into the bathroom. The boom of noise and smell when he opened the door almost made him retch. Penderecki was rotted through. He had to stand very still until the gag reflex worked itself out of his throat.
Penderecki had run the noose through a hole smashed in the plaster ceiling and over a joist—the small garden mallet he'd used lay on the floor, and the plaster in the bath showed that he hadn't taken much time in doing this. He had come in here with the tools he needed, bashed a hole in the ceiling, slung the rope up there and done the deed. The small bathroom stool was not kicked over. Dropped in the toilet was a copy of Derek Humphry's Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. Sweatshirt over his mouth, Caffery leaned over and read. One paragraph had been scored through with a pencil—angrily: “If you consider God the master of your fate, then read no further. Seek the best pain management and arrange for hospice care.” But he was familiar with the book's instructions and recognized that Penderecki had, at the last moment, abandoned his quasi-faith in God and turned instead to Humphry: “Ice will stop the air in the polythene bag becoming hot and stuffy….”
On the floor was an empty ice tray, over Penderecki's head a plastic bag. In death his face had swollen to fill the bag, pressing moist against the polythene. A bottle of vodka lay next to the door and a plate of something that looked like chocolate Angel Delight: “Power your chosen drugs and put them in your favorite pudding.” There were no flies on the pudding. They were enjoying dabbling and squelching in Penderecki too much. Caffery checked he had left no footprints then closed the door and went to search the rest of the house.
Penderecki had come to England in the forties—“Prob-ably something to do with the Yalta conference,” Rebecca said sagely. She seemed to understand the demographic waves that had brought Penderecki to the plot of land on the other side of the railway tracks to the Cafferys. Penderecki had never married and seemed to have become fanatical about a religion to which he had been unable to cling at the end. His body had hung here for what? Three, maybe four days, without anyone noticing. Perhaps there was someone still in Poland—framed paper cuttings hung on the wall, the sort of folk art distant relatives might send, but apart from this Ivan Penderecki had almost no personal possessions. Nearly seventy and the only children in his life had belonged to other people.
Caffery was prepared to pull the walls down if he thought that he'd find the smallest hint of Ewan, but the house gave up nothing. He got into the loft where the air was warm and circled with dust, but apart from an abandoned wasps' nest hanging from the rafters there was nothing. In one of the bedrooms there was a pile of H&M children's clothing catalogs—innocuous enough. Penderecki wasn't stupid—he'd known that with his police record a search warrant would be granted on the slimmest grounds. But apart from that small haul, Caffery found nothing.
In the hallway he pressed redial on the phone. The answer-phone at the Lewisham hospital oncology unit picked up. He dialed the number on the last caller ID digital display. Also the oncology unit. Someone at the hospital had rung three days ago. Since then no one had tried to contact Ivan Penderecki. And that was all.
Wherever Penderecki had hidden the little scrap of flesh and bone that had been Ewan, it wasn't in this house. The catalogs were only the tip—Caffery knew that. There was more. Somewhere. But then, of course, this was part of Penderecki's genius—his ability to hide things. Hide magazines and videos and photos and the body of a small boy.
13
July 22
AT HOME HE TOOK OFF the clothes and put them straight in the washing machine. He knew a lot about getting the smell of death out of clothes. Rebecca was still asleep. When she woke up she knew immediately that something was wrong.
“Jack? What is it? Where've you been?
” He didn't answer. He sat on the bed in his boxer shorts and lit a roll-up. The sun was filtering through the curtains, making shapes on the ceiling.
“Oh.” Rebecca rolled over onto her back and dropped her hand on her forehead. Overnight her eye makeup had smeared into panda rings. “It's about last night? Isn't it?”
He didn't answer. He didn't know what to say.
“Jack?” She sat up and put her hand on his arm. “I'm sorry—I can explain, I just …”
He smiled at her and cupped her face in a way that he knew must seem ridiculous. He didn't care. He was tired. “He's dead.”
“Who's dead?”
“Penderecki.”
“Dead?”
“He killed himself. He had cancer, I think. Hanged himself in the bathroom.”
“Is that where you've been?”
“Yes.”
“Shit!” She dropped back against the pillow, blinking. For a moment his spirits rose—for a moment he thought she was as shocked as he was; he even wondered if she understood. But then she put her hand on her forehead, rolled her eyes down to meet his and said: “So you've nothing to stay here for. You could just walk away from it all. Couldn't you?”
“No.” He shook his head. He should have known he was wrong, should have known he'd always be on his own with this. “I couldn't do that. I've got—” He looked out the window. “I've got everything.”
She sat up, took the cigarette from between his fingers and took a long drag from it. “You mean Ewan?”
He wasn't going to answer that.
“Oh.” She sighed. “Yes, you do, you mean Ewan.” He felt her tapping his shoulder and when he turned round she was holding out the cigarette to him. Not looking at him. “Penderecki's dead now but you're still not going to give up, are you?”
He didn't answer. He took the cigarette, dropped his head and looked down at his black thumbnail. She was right. It should be over. Penderecki was dead. Ewan wasn't in the house. There was nowhere else to turn. He should be able to give it all up. But he knew there was more. There had to be. Maybe another place somewhere…a shed or a garage—maybe he had rented a garage. …Wearily he got to his feet, went into the bathroom and started to run a bath.
Now Roland Klare knew what he was doing. He had gone through the book and worked out the solution to the jammed camera. What he needed was a changing bag—a dark bag in which film could be worked on without being exposed to light. It had taken a while to gather the things he needed, but Klare was nothing if not resourceful: the basis of the bag was no more than a dirty black bomber jacket found in the c
lothing bank on Tulse Hill. He had cleaned it and painstakingly stapled it closed along the front, a double seam of staples so that no light would come through. It didn't look like much, but he thought it would work.
Now he pulled the blind and sat on the sofa, the “bag” on his lap, and pushed the camera down one of the sleeves until it was in the main body of the jacket. Then he withdrew his hands, placed two broad rubber bands over the sleeves and pushed his hands back down them, making sure the bands rode up his wrists to seal the sleeves from light leaks. He found the camera, cradled it in his palms and began to work.
Klare's hands were rather large and clumsy for this—he had to take it slowly, biting the inside of his lip, his concentration was so intense, trying to keep his eyes focused on a spot on the blind so they didn't wander around as he worked. The release catch he found quite quickly. The back of the camera sprang away and he opened it, brushing his fingers tentatively over the interior. The film was in there: he could feel it, half finished, stalled in its cage. Careful not to touch the image, he patted around until his fingers found the cartridge. Good. He sat forward a little in anticipation. It was a tiny gap into which he had to push his fingers just to get a grip on the top of the canister, and when he did get hold of it he found he could only turn it a quarter of a rotation at once. But today he was feeling unusually patient. He took a breath, closed his eyes and let his fingers work in the dark like a Braille reader's, his left hand feathering over the mechanism to check that the sprockets were turning, his right tirelessly winching on the canister.
It took Roland Klare, with his big hands like spades, over an hour to get the film wound on. By the time he had finished and could flip out the canister with his thumbnail, his fingers were throbbing. He pulled the camera out of the bag, testing the winder mechanism before he put it aside, and this time, to his surprise, it jammed once then suddenly gave. He stared at it, amazed. He flicked it back and forward a few times in disbelief. Without the film inside the camera was working perfectly smoothly. Maybe it wasn't as badly damaged as he had thought; maybe the way the film had been loaded was the culprit. Pleased that he wouldn't have to discard the Pentax after all, he put it back in the biscuit tin and turned his attention to the changing bag, giving it a little shake.
The film canister was safe in there, but now Klare saw he had come to a wall. He didn't know the next step in the process—he'd have to go back to the book. He sighed. He was tired, he needed a break, so he took the bag into the bedroom, where it was dark, dropped it on the floor, went back into the living room and released the blind. The sun had climbed high in the sky over the park. He stood for a while, gazing out the window at the sun-parched trees.
Caffery stood in a phone box in a side street near the Shrivemoor offices, Souness and Paulina's red BMW gleaming in the sun a few yards away, and called Brockley station to report Penderecki's death anonymously: “My wife hasn't seen our elderly neighbor for a while—I wonder, could you …” And somehow that made him feel slightly better, somehow it released a small part of the infection. Still, he had to fight to keep his mind on the case, to stop it floating away to Brockley, to dark shadows moving along the railway line.
Souness had gone for breakfast, and the few early arrivals in the incident room were subdued. Things were not looking good. The golden hours in which a case is often solved were over. They could now define the Rory Peach case as a “sticker.” From here on leads would decay, connections would be forgotten. The lab still hadn't come back to them with what they desperately needed: DNA.
Kryotos had been unable to track down Champaluang Keoduangdy. Instead she had put a blue and white envelope on Caffery's desk for when he came in. Now he took coffee into the SIOs' room and shook out the contents of the envelope onto his desk. Two Polaroids in plastic zip-locks— blown-up copies attached—slid out. These were the photographs found in 1989 in a rubbish tip on Half Moon Lane. He'd been waiting for them, but now as he looked at them he found his mind wouldn't focus: it kept trying to saunter away, back across the railway track and into Pen-derecki's house, up the stairs, into the cupboards—there has to be somewhere else, another hiding place—
“Stop it.” He rolled a cigarette, digging his heels into the floor. He had to concentrate. He put on his glasses.
The first shot was of a young boy, maybe eight or nine. Caffery knew it was a boy for the simple reason that he was naked from the waist down—otherwise the child would have been sexless, as his face was turned from the camera. He was white, very thin, and it was clear from his posture that he'd been bound—that he'd been bound and tied to the white radiator he was sitting against. On the right of the frame was the edge of what appeared to be a melamine wardrobe and, taped to it, the side of a poster. At the edge of one of the copies an investigating officer from the eighties had circled an area on the floor and written in red the word “foot?”. Caffery examined the object. It could have been a human foot—naked, five small flesh-colored dabs. Toes? Quite slim and long—maybe women's toes? But no: looking at the second photograph he could see it wasn't a woman.
This photograph, taken from a slightly different angle, showed the bound figure of an adult male. He was no more than a crooked trapezoid of limbs, legs propped at an awkward, unnatural angle, all snapped up and oddlooking, his head on one side, facing away from the camera. His arms had been crossed over his chest and he had been bound with sheets and pillowcases, like burial winding sheets. Behind him the wardrobe was in full view—the poster was of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—and beyond that was a blurred half-image of a small blond child. Above the boy's head, tantalizingly, the bottom edge of a window frame. And that was all.
Dim old 1989. Caffery tried to stretch his mind back. He'd been doing his first board, getting a train to Luton; his girlfriend would have been—he felt into the dark well of memories—Melissa, maybe. Or Emma. She'd looked like Meg Tilly and he'd adored her for the miniskirts and unfashionable clothes she wore. That year nearly seventy people died in the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, the Afghan war ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Champ Keoduangdy had been put into Intensive Care by a length of industrial conduit and someone had dropped these photographs into a bin on Half Moon Lane.
Were they a hoax? If not a hoax, then why had no one come forward? After twelve years someone somewhere would have said something. And if these two people had died—shackled to the radiator in a child's bedroom—why hadn't the bodies been discovered? He searched the photos for more clues, tracing his fingers across the swarms of pixels, darker here, lighter here. Were there enough similarities between this and the scene at the Peaches' house to link the cases? Maybe this was a staged scene—an image of the troll's fantasy. Maybe that was him lying on the floor trussed up—and that could be, what? A younger brother? The walls—magnolia; the wardrobe—Wal-Mart? There were a million other bedrooms like it.
Suddenly he thought of Carmel, of how convinced she'd been—convinced and embarrassed—that someone had been taking photographs in their house while they were tied up. And as he thought it he had the sudden feeling that somewhere there was an obstacle, something stopping things flowing, something diverting him. A vague unease. A vague itch, DI Durham would say. Someone wasn't telling him everything.…
He smoked half a packet of tobacco and drank four cups of instant coffee thinking about it, but by the time the morning meeting started he wasn't any wiser, he was just more exhausted. He still had the smell of Penderecki in his nostrils as he went into the incident room with his notes for the meeting.
Everyone in AMIT knew that at this point in the Peach case they could allow themselves to be put in a holding pattern, to be stalled by waiting for the DNA. Or they could pursue other avenues. This meeting was to ready themselves for a day on the pavement: one pod was going out into Brixton with a liaison officer from the child protection team— they were going to talk to the kids, ask them about the mythic thing in the woods, their “troll,” treat their stories seriously. Another
pod was going to help Kryotos to trace Champaluang Keoduangdy. A third team would spend the day with local child sex offenders: they were going to push more holes into the already fractured South London pedophile networks, put a little careful pressure on the right pulse points, squeeze a little, until someone gave them a lead. It was for this reason that risk assessment officers of the Lambeth Sex Offenders Unit and two members of Scotland Yard's Pedophile Unit had come down from Victoria. Souness's girlfriend, Paulina, an intelligence officer for the unit, had used the opportunity to tag along.
It was strange to Caffery that only two people at the meeting that morning seemed to sense the tightness in him. One was Kryotos, with her unerring, almost chemical sense of him—she watched him carefully from her desk, not challenging him, just assessing. The other was Paulina, whom he had met only a handful of times.
She was wearing a modern powder-blue skirt suit and she looked like a piece of bright porcelain sitting on the desk, coolly smoking a cigarette, checking out Souness's work environment with her bland, aquamarine eyes. It seemed to Caffery that every time someone mentioned the pedophile networks Paulina would glance up at him—as if she knew how he had spent the night, as if she could sense what he was thinking. She had been the one to tell Souness about Caffery's connection with Penderecki, and he almost expected her to mention it now, to turn those unnerving eyes on him and say, “Maybe Mr. Caffery can help us here— maybe he has contact with someone who could help.”
Her focus on him seemed so acute that the moment the meeting broke up he made his excuses and went into the SIOs' room, closing the door behind him.
The crows reminded Rebecca of a school of fish, the way they climbed up the air currents, twisting above the low roofs of Greenwich, turning to display their dark undersides and changing color as one. She watched them from the table in her studio, a cup of coffee at her elbow, a cigarillo in the ashtray. She was cold. This was the flat she had shared with Joni, until the attack. Until Joni's back had been broken by Malcolm Bliss and Rebecca had been… “Oh, God.” She shuddered and picked up the cigarillo. She knew she should find a new place, get out of this flat, with the smells and memories, and the staircase leading up to Joni's room. But it was so easy just to go over to Jack's and let herself in: there was the sound of him showering in the morning, the smoky, urban smell of his suit when he came home in the evenings, sweat on his arms when he came back from his runs, his hard, hot stomach against hers in the night. Yeah—and his obsession, which is probably going to kill him.