by Mo Hayder
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Broke a bottle. Out here on the patio. The door was closed.”
“I heard it.”
“Exactly.” He could feel a little pulse of excitement flickering at the side of his mouth. “So why didn't Peach hear this back door being broken into?”
“You're saying he's lying?”
“No—I believe him. I believe him one hundred percent when he says he didn't hear that glass breaking on Friday night. Because …” He laid the crime-scene photos out on the worktop. “… because I think the glass broke on Monday.”
“Duh—sorry, Jack, I'm not with ye.”
“OK, OK.” He handed her the photos and went to the back door. “Now, the glass fell in onto the floor when the door was closed—see on the photos?”
“Aye.”
“Which is why we all—even Quinny—assumed the offender did it breaking in. He smashed the glass, put his hand through and unlocked it. The door opens …” He pushed it open to demonstrate. “It opens outward.”
“So the glass on the floor wouldn't have been disturbed.”
“Exactly.”
“But?”
He nodded. “But if that's what happened then Alek would have heard it—even from downstairs.”
“So you think—?”
“So I think it happened on Monday when the offender was leaving. Maybe it fell out when he slammed the door, or maybe Rory kicked it out in the struggle. It's the sound the shopkeeper's dog heard. Look,” he tapped the first photo, “this is how the kitchen looked when we got here. Glass on the floor.”
“Aye.”
“There was a rainstorm on Monday morning—a cloudburst. If the window had already been smashed those curtains should've been damp, but they weren't. And that glass on the floor from the break-in—it hasn't been moved around, right?”
“Uh …” She squinted at it. “No—that's just fallen straight out. Just sat there, hasn't it?”
“So all the time he was moving around in here it didn't get moved? Not once?”
“Could he not have just avoided it? Walked round it?”
“Then how did he get his prints under the glass?”
Souness was silent. She rubbed her head until the skin under the colorless hair became pink.
“Look at this photo.” He handed her the photo taken after the glass had been removed and the ninhydrin developed. He carefully counted the crosshatched trellises on the lino. “There.” He stood with his feet on either side of two faint brown stains just next to the door—the ninhydrin glove prints. This part of the floor had been under glass when the police arrived. “His prints were there before that window smashed.” He leaned forward, tapping the photo to make the point. “He didn't come in through that back door.”
“Then how? Everything else was battened down. Peach says all the doors were locked—the TSG had to use the sodding Enforcer to get in.”
“Exactly.” He took the photos from her and dropped them into his briefcase. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think Peach let him in.” He took his glasses off and looked at her. “I think Alek Peach knows exactly who did this to them.”
The snuffling stopped as abruptly as it had started. Benedicte held her breath—Think, Ben, think—What the—? Out of the hissing silence came the sound of water being poured onto the door. She rocketed back against the radiator. Petrol—it's petrol—
The noise stopped and then she heard the long release of gas, or air. He was spraying something. Hair spray? Something to start the fire? Smurf growled softly, her fur pumped straight up along her spine and around her neck like a lizard ruff. Then in the hallway the thing, the troll, huge—oh, Jesus, he sounds too heavy to be human— turned and lumbered away, banging against the walls like a cornered sow, slithering and bumping down the stairs.
Then, quite suddenly, silence.
“Hal? Josh?” That breathing sounded like an animal. Not a human being …
“Josh?”
Still there was silence. That could mean anything. It could, she realized with a lurch, mean Josh had already been taken. “JOSH!!!” She bawled so loudly that Smurf lifted her old, deaf head and howled along with her. “JOSH, PLEASE!!”
When she couldn't scream any longer, and when there was no noise from downstairs, no exploding thump of fire, she dropped exhausted on the floor, shaking uncontrollably. “Oh, Josh,” she wept. “My little baby boy.”
Caffery stopped outside the Blacka Dread music shop on Coldharbour Lane to let Souness trot back down the road and pick them up some food from a takeaway. He smoked a cigarette while he waited and watched the local pond life—a white guy in a leather deerstalker hat was dealing on the corner next to the Joy clothes shop, and from the Ritzy came a trio of trendy young black guys in sharp fawn leather jackets, with bleached blond hair and goatees. They saw the dealer and subtly crossed away from him to the other side of the street. A girl on a creaky bike, her mirrored Indian skirt caught in the mudguard, shouted something to the dealer as she cycled by.
Caffery lit another cigarette and leaned back, suddenly realizing that he was opposite the deli Rebecca sometimes came to for mozzarella, still dripping in its muslin. Closed now, but he remembered her wandering with her bright, intrigued eyes among the loops of mountain salami, seagreen olive oil bottles, dusty tins of something untranslatable: “Probably merda d'artista,” she had whispered to Caffery, who had stood speechless, transfixed by a row of air-dried serrano hams hanging by the knuckles along the back of the shop: afraid that Rebecca would look up, scared of what she would make of those odd, dangling shapes. Now, from the car, he could see them, ghostly in the blue light of a fly killer. He wished he had taken her by the arm then and said, “Do you ever think about how Bliss left you—suspended just like that, suspended like a piece of meat?”
“Oh, God—not this again.” He rubbed his face wearily, wondering what she was thinking—wondering where she was. He knew she wasn't at home crying, scrubbing herself in the shower; he knew she wasn't shivering in a blanket in a medical examination room at the local station, dark rings around her eyes. He had a sudden picture of her looking over her shoulder at him, watching his face. What was she thinking? Rapist? Maybe she was happy he had been proved the foxy, unclean thing she said he was. Maybe there was no working back from that.
“Hey!” Souness was tapping on the window. “Will ye take that glaekit expression off your face and let me in the shagging car?” She was sweating from standing in the steamy takeaway. She'd got gungo pea soup in polystyrene cups and two Jamaican patties. “It's all I could find. Don't worry, it's all vegetarian—no billy goat in any of it.”
They ate on the way back to Shrivemoor—Souness got soup on her tie and patty flakes all over her suit, but she didn't notice. She was still thinking about Alek Peach: “So why not just fess up and tell us who it was?” At Shrivemoor she swiped her card and they got into the lift. “It's his own wain, for Christ's sake.”
“Guilt. Maybe he's into something—maybe with the business, maybe …I don't know, but maybe he's in so bad that this was a reprisal. He'd feel guilty, wouldn't he? Wouldn't he feel guilty if he'd done something that had brought this on to his family?”
“I don't know.” She stared blankly at her fractured reflection in the aluminum lift walls. “He'd have to be well shitted up by whoever it is not to report them.” She sighed. “But I'm with you—something's not adding up.”
“Less and less is. He says he couldn't hear Rory the whole time he was tied up. Don't you think that's odd?”
“Hmmm …”
“If he couldn't hear Rory, how come Carmel could? She was,” he reached up and knocked on the ceiling of the lift, “upstairs—and she could hear him crying. But Alek couldn't.”
“I did wonder.” She looked at him sideways. “You think he's lying?”
“Look at the inconsistencies. The photographs Carmel heard being taken?
The ones Alek knew nothing about? And this holiday thing. Luck? Or was it not such a coincidence, after all? Maybe someone knew they were going on holiday, someone knew they wouldn't get disturbed.” The lift doors opened and Caffery got out, walking backward, looking at Souness. “Now I keep asking myself, how would a stranger know that they were going on holiday? Wouldn't it be more likely that it was someone they knew?”
“OK. OK.” She swiped her card and they went into the deserted incident room. The monitors were dark and silent: Kryotos, as she did every day, had washed every-one's mugs and left them on a tray in the corner. Souness put her hands on the desk and leaned over toward him. “Jack. I think you're on to something. I don't know what but I think you've got a point.…”
Benedicte lay on her back, exhausted, thirsty. She had felt through every inch of her prison, moving her body like a sidewinder, rubbing her elbows raw. She could reach the wardrobe but even at full stretch the door and the window fell more than a yard from her fingertips. She used every atom of energy trying to buckle the copper pipe—she had pulled so hard at the handcuff that her ankle had swollen and was almost enfolding the cuff. The handcuff screws were ruined, she'd jabbed at them so much with the wire.
It was dark, but she'd learned quickly how to estimate time. Trains, distant, on the other side of the park—she'd heard them once or twice before in Brixton: sometimes at night the sky lit up momentarily like white lightning from an electrical fault on the rail, and once, the June night that England had beaten Germany in the Eurocup, she'd heard the drivers blowing their horns at each other. Now the trains had a beautiful cadence in the quiet, they reminded her that people were out there, and the rhythm of them began to make sense. When they stopped she estimated it must be between twelve and one in the morning. From downstairs she had heard nothing. Now she could smell the liquid she'd heard pouring onto the landing floor. It wasn't petrol, it was urine. He had come up here, stood only a few feet away from the bathroom, and pissed against the door. The disgusting little shit. Just be grateful, she told herself, that it wasn't petrol.
She sat up and began to unroll her buckled body. Urine. She had avoided that indignity until now—but she knew there was no point in holding on. “Gotta pee, Smurf.” She had to stop herself from apologizing to the dog. “It's got to be done.” She pulled her trousers and knickers down over the free foot and crumpled them around the bound ankle. With a pinched, contrapuntal squirm, she rotated herself so that she was crouching facing the radiator, holding on to it for balance, and crab-shuffled one leg sideways so she was as far from the shackled foot as possible. She held the trousers clear with one hand, feeling like crying as the carpet under her foot grew wet and warm. She hoped, dear God, she hoped they'd be out of here before she had to move her bowels.
Suddenly in the hallway downstairs something moved. The front door slammed. Benedicte stayed quite still, facing the radiator, trousers around one foot, hardly daring to breathe.
That was it! He's gone? Then …
“Josh?” Her voice rose frantically and, forgetting the mess under her on the floor, she hopped around like an injured animal, getting hopelessly, pathetically tangled in her trousers. “HAL? JOSH? JOSH—GIVE ME BACK MY SON! JOSH!” She hammered on the wall, screaming, bawling. And when no one answered she collapsed on the floor, on her back in her own urine, put her hands over her face and sobbed.
In the back of the cupboard in the incident room kitchen Caffery found a dusty, forgotten bottle of Tesco's gin and some flat tonic water. He and Souness had spent an hour sitting at Kryotos's workstation, finishing off the Laphroaig and hashing through their next move. Bela Nersessian, they both agreed, was the person to speak to. They'd bring her to the office and start lightly, just casual inquiries into Alek Peach, his personal life, his business dealings if he had any. The family liaison officer set up the interview for the following day, and Caffery felt a small lift of spirit. Souness, too, was satisfied that they had a new direction. At 11 P.M. she decided she was over for the night.
“Ye should do the same.” She stood in the doorway with her jacket on, trying to scratch off the soup on her tie, spitting on her finger and rubbing fruitlessly at it. “You'll be no good to me, Jack, shagged out.”
“Yup.” He held a hand up. “I'm right behind you.”
But he wasn't. He had no intention of going home. When she had gone he took Penderecki's cache from the lockup file and sat with a mug of warm G and T at his elbow, staring out the window, absentmindedly stacking the videos like skyscrapers. Several times he picked up the phone and put it down. Rebecca hadn't called and he didn't know how to approach her. Dark fathoms under your feet, Jack. At eleven-thirty he pushed the tapes aside, swallowed the G and T, took off his glasses and dialed her mobile.
She answered, sounding a little indistinct.
“Rebecca—where are you?”
“In bed.”
“My place?”
“No. Mine.” He pictured her dreamy and warm, one long brown arm stretched out across the pillow, her hair pulled above and behind in a long helix—serpentine, like a diving mermaid's. “I'm in my bed.”
“Look—” He took a deep breath. “Rebecca, I love you—I really—” He stared out at the lights of Croydon not knowing how to put it. But this is as far as I can go. I can't give it up—I can't leave that house and you're something I don't understand anymore—
“I'm sorry, Rebecca—”
“You're dumping me.”
“No—I—look, I've tried—I've tried hard, but—”
“You are, you're dumping me, aren't you?”
He sighed. “What would you want me to do after last night? You couldn't go on with me after that—you don't want that.”
“Don't tell me what I want!” Her voice rose. “How dare you tell me what I want? I don't know what I want so how can you possibly know?” She stopped. He could hear her breathing at the other end of the line, as if she was trying not to cry.
“Look …” He wound the phone cord around his finger and found himself saying, “If it would make you feel better then report it. Tell them I raped you. Tell them what you said about Bliss too.”
“What?”
“Report it.” It would be suicide, the end of everything if she did, but he suddenly realized he didn't much care anymore. “Seriously—get it over with. I'm not going to fight.”
“You're crazy.”
“No. I'll take the consequences.” He paused. “Rebecca?”
“What?” Her voice was small, distant.
“I'm sorry. I really am.”
“Yes.” She put the phone down.
Jesus. He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the dead receiver in his hand. Then he hung up and sat forward, rubbing his eyes, pulling his hands down his face. “Fuck fuck fuck.” What have you done? What have you done? How did it ever get this screwed up? He'd had no indication, no reason to expect that the words were suddenly going to come out like that. How does it feel? he asked himself. Does it feel good to self-destruct? Do you feel free?
He sighed and pressed his fingers against his forehead. It's all over, then, isn't it? He put his hand on the phone, changed his mind, let his breath out, sat forward and rolled a cigarette. He stared out at the night as he smoked. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't go home. When he'd finished the cigarette, he stood, took the Half Moon Lane photos from the envelope on the windowsill, looked at them for a long time, then put them back into the envelope. Then he went into the incident room and detached Marilyn's zip drive from her computer, brought it back into the SIOs' room and plugged it into his own PC. He took Penderecki's disks from his locked filing cabinet and sat down at his desk. The zip disks were labeled from one to nine and each one contained up to a hundred jpegs, harvested from Russian websites, from ever-moving newsgroups. Caffery had been on a day course to Hendon to learn how woefully ill-equipped the police were to do anything about tracking the posters of these photographs. The process of serving warrants on ISPs was length
y and the perpetrators knew it—as soon as they felt the ground getting hot beneath their feet they'd move to another service provider. Among the files, Caffery found saved newsgroup postings where users dealt passwords for sites, tips on masking ISP info, adverts for “cop software” “to tidy up your hard-drive sectors for those awkward technical support visits …” He found the address of a safe mailbox to dump AVI and JPG files, the entire series of the notorious “kindergarten” photos, updated URLs for Russian “Lolita” websites, binary newsgroup postings with familiar file names: FreshPetals.jpg, Buds.jpg, SweetAngel.jpg. That night he saw every type of child porn imaginable. Some of the photos wouldn't have looked out of place in a high-gloss coffee table book—beautiful, soft-focus blond children in T-shirts and shorts, bare-chested under dappled trees—but some of the files at the other end of the spectrum made his stomach turn, weathered to it though he was. He had to drink a little more G and T and press his palm flat on his stomach. Some of the photographs were so cropped it was impossible to tell the sex of the child.
He worked on, until he had a blister on his thumb pad from moving the mouse, imagining that he would find a clue in the corner of a photo—for fuck's sake, what are you expecting to see? And then, very suddenly, he sat back and released the mouse. It was one-thirty A.M., the traffic noises outside had long died away, and the building was quiet. He turned slowly to look at the videocassettes. Something had occurred to him. He had just realized why there were no pictures on them.
Quickly he went into the exhibits room and got latex gloves from the evidence grab bag—when he handed the tapes over he didn't want the unit thinking he'd jumped into them like a nonce—filled up his mug and switched off all the lights in the incident room. But it is classic nonce behavior, Jack. Just think how this would look, sad old sack with his booze and his smutty vids. Back in the office he found the old Swiss Army knife in his jacket pocket, pulled up a chair and positioned the Anglepoise over the desk.