by Mo Hayder
Caffery closed the curtains around the bed, went to Peach's side, rested both fists on the side of the bed and bent until his mouth was next to his ear: “It's time you were straight with me, Alek.”
Peach's eyes fluttered. His head moved and a small groan escaped him.
“I don't give a shit if you're not well enough to talk to me, I don't give a shit.”
Above the bed the heart monitor began to stammer. Somewhere, in some distant nurses' station, Caffery could hear it trigger an alarm. He moved even closer until he felt he was almost inside Peach's ear. “If it's you and you've got someone else, you're going to tell me who. I don't care if you die but I'm not going to let it happen to someone else.”
Peach's face suddenly changed. He licked his lips with a pale tongue. He blinked once or twice then snapped his eyes open, rolling them sideways. Caffery almost took a step back, there was such anger, such empty malice in his eyes. Then Peach's mouth began to move. His voice was whispery—too low to be heard above the machines.
“What? Say it again, you little shit.”
A nurse, summoned from the coffee room by the monitor alarms, appeared, shocked-faced, in the doorway. “Sir! Please, we have to ask you to leave—” In the ward outside someone was shouting about getting Security. “Sir—please!” But Peach's mouth was still moving, and Caffery bent nearer, straining to hear what he was saying.
“What? Say it again.”
Just as the unit manager arrived, just as Caffery knew he was going to be thrown out, Peach opened his mouth one more time, and this time was loud enough to hear: “Fuck you,” he was saying. “Fuck you.”
The slit in the pipe was weeping, not even a trickle, more a slow, barely perceptible ballooning—a single drop seemed to take several minutes to form. Nevertheless Benedicte fastened her mouth to it and sucked. It was only enough to wet her tongue and leave its metallic taste in her mouth, but she pressed her cracked lips to it with the desperation of a baby, forming a vacuum, and slowly, painfully drew another weak drop onto her tongue. She pushed her body nearer, hugging the radiator with one arm, working it, working it, but after twenty minutes, and less than a thimbleful of water, she was exhausted. She dropped on her back, panting. “Oh, shit.”
It took a long time to get her breath back. When she had, she brought Smurf to the pipe and tried to encourage her to drink, but the Labrador just turned her head away and sighed. “Okay, Smurf, you stay there.” It hadn't been much water, but Ben felt stronger, knowing what she'd achieved. “Won't be long now.”
She turned her attention back to the boards. In the planks between her hands there was a join, a knothole on the inner edge of one. She could widen it enough to get her fingers in. And if that didn't work she'd already made up her mind: she was going to use the grip rod to saw through her ankle. The thought didn't even make her feel ill.
The incident room was buzzing. The team was rested, and now that they had new leads they were ready to roll. Caffery had been home for a shower and a change of clothes—no sign, he noticed, that Rebecca had been there. Now he was refreshed, feeling clean under his arms and in his hair. He was determined to speak to Peach again, get some space, get a little leverage going. If Mr. Friendship wouldn't listen to him, maybe he'd listen to Souness.
He arrived in the incident room just as Kryotos's phone was ringing. She leaned over and hooked up the receiver on one finger. “Yup?” She tucked it between her chin and her shoulder, and put both hands on the desk, staring down at a pile of forms as she listened. Caffery came and stood next to her, looking at her face. “For you,” she mouthed.
“OK. In my office.”
She put the call through. In the SIOs' office he nodded at Souness and caught up the phone.
“DI.”
“Jack,” Fiona Quinn was breathless, “wanted you to be the first to know. That DNA's come back.”
“Jesus.” He closed the door and pulled the chair up to the desk, his heart pounding. “And?”
“And we got a full male profile. Full. Came up as bright as the Oxford Street Christmas lights.”
Caffery clicked his fingers frantically at Souness. She looked up in surprise.
“What?”
“DNA,” he mouthed, his hand over the receiver.
She used her heels to rodeo the chair over to his desk. She sat close to him, trying to overhear the conversation. He almost had to keep her from grabbing the phone.
“What've we got, Fiona?”
“You're not going to believe it.”
“I might. Try me.”
The sky over Brockwell Park was a calm, pearly blue, only a few clouds strung along the horizon, as if they were heavier than the blue color and had sunk down to the edges. Roland Klare could have seen the sky through his window, but at the moment he wasn't interested in patterns in the sky: he was farther back in the flat, in the cupboard, bathed in red light, tongue between his teeth as he cut the negatives and placed the first in the enlarger.
He knew he was getting close and had to stop his knee from jerking in a nervous tic as he moved the lamphouse up and down, trying to get the print to fit on the paper. He adjusted the focus, switched off the red bulb and flicked on the enlarger light. A triangle of white flooded down onto the paper, perfect against the blackness of the cup-board—just as it appeared in the book. The timer was broken but Klare was ready—he had read somewhere that the word “photography” equaled one second, so he sat on the stool, staring down at the paper, his hands between his knees, and muttered the words out loud: “One photography, two photography, three photography.” When the twenty seconds he'd calculated were up he switched off the enlarger light and, illuminated only by the red safelight, carried the paper over to the litter tray, where he'd prepared the developing solution. He stood over it, swirling the paper around, keeping count in his head, peering down at the magical picture creeping across the paper.
“A hundred and two photography, a hundred and three photography, a hundred and—” He stopped counting. The print was taking shape. It was still blurry, and it was too dark in this light to see properly, so he quickly splashed around some stop bath and fixer—hardly able to keep still as he waited for the allotted time—then carried the dripping print into the kitchen, ran it under the tap and peered at it. The picture was a little hazy, either from the damaged enlarger or maybe because the original hadn't been properly focused. Heart thumping now, Klare took it to the living room window and held it up to the sunlight.
23
THE WARD HAD SETTLED NOW and was quiet, the only noise the whir of syringe drivers, the occasional equipment alarm. It was a warm day and the window in the nurses' room was open a crack, the curtains lifting as a mild summer breeze moved through the ward. Ten minutes before lunch one of the staff slipped silently along the ward. She stopped outside the private room, as if something had just struck her, and stood for a moment, one foot stretched out slightly behind the other, then turned the handle and went in, closing the door behind her. Less than a minute later the door opened and the same woman came out. She headed quickly away from the room, her body stiffer than before, her pace suddenly abrupt.
Ayo thought herself a good nurse: a nurse of the critically ill, she rarely had a problem finding the human vibration in everyone, never had any problem reaching under the wires and tubes and finding the warm, pulsing soul. But when she had pushed the door open and looked at Alek Peach lying on the bed—well, Alek Peach was like no one I've ever seen … it was as if there was a shell lying on the bed, an empty husk. He breathed, his heart moved, his vital functions were good, sound—but the warmth had gone from him. It had all leaked away.
Ayo wondered where her compassion had gone. When he opened one eye and fixed it on her she instinctively took a hurried step backward. He frightened her. Quickly, before he could speak, she had left the room, and now, as she marched up the ward, she decided she was going to ask Detective Inspector Caffery what he wanted with Peach, exactly why they needed an armed offi
cer at the end of the ward, why he had lied to her just to get into the private room. The police usually only mounted a guard if the patient was the victim of a drugs feud and needed protection. Or if he was a suspect.
That thought made her stop and turn to look back to Peach's room. Beyond the glass door a shadow moved. It was just a nurse in there, changing drips, but still it made Ayo stiffen. Bloody hell, Ayo, apologize to that detective— say you're sorry about the business this morning, that you had to take orders from above, and then maybe you should tell him about your mad brain and how it's run away with ideas.
Yes—that would give her something to tell Benedicte when she got back: “I only went and told the bloody police, didn't I?” She could picture it: the Churches, exhausted from the journey, pulling up in the driveway, the car covered in sand, looking up and seeing their front door kicked in, police tape all over the place. “I'm so embarrassed, Ben, but I'd found out something weird, I found out that Rory Peach had been peeing on things in the house—you know, like Josh did. God, Ben, I'm such a drama queen—I'm sorry.”
She tried to shake it off, clear her mind—for God's sake, girl, get a grip, your poor child is going to have a wild woman for a mother—but she couldn't escape the feeling that Peach's eyes were following her, could reach her, even out here.
“Oh!” The photograph Roland Klare was holding up to the window showed a man having intercourse with a boy. In fact the man was forcing intercourse on a young boy— that was clear from the child's expression, and from his posture. The man's face was blurred, slightly tilted on one side, but it was a face that Roland Klare had seen a lot of recently. It had been all over the news this week. It was Alek Peach's face.
At that moment, hundreds of feet below, a policeman on his beat walked along the front of Arkaig Tower and, suddenly nervous, Klare closed the curtains. He couldn't be seen all the way up here in the sky, he knew that, but nevertheless he felt safer taking the photograph to the sofa, where he sat and stared at it, his heart pounding.
The team was amazed. The DNA found on Rory belonged to his father, Alek. And there was more: the fibers that had fluoresced under the CrimeScope light in Rory's wounds had been identified: they had come from the T-shirt Peach had been wearing during the supposed attack on his family. Although he had claimed not to have seen or heard his son the entire time they were kept in the house, somehow fibers from his T-shirt had got underneath the ropes binding his son. And now that the team was starting to ask questions about him, they had weeded out a couple of people who had always wondered—just a suspicion, mind— whether Mr. Peach hadn't been in the habit of clouting Rory once in a while.
“The clanging of things falling into place is deafening.” Souness was at her computer, firing off e-mails, sucking on a can of Dr Pepper. She looked up at Caffery standing in the doorway of the SIOs' room. “What? You got nothing better to do than stand around wi' a gob on?”
“Danni.” He closed the door and came in. “Look—”
“Oh God,” she sighed, “I know you so well—you want something, don't you?”
“I want you to speak to that prick down at King's for me. Friendship. He won't give me the time of day, won't let me speak to Peach.”
“Don't worry about that, Jack. Give Alek time to get better, then we'll come down on him.” But she saw that that wasn't going to be enough for him, so she pushed away the keyboard, leaned back in her chair, her hands folded across her stomach. “Jack? You've not arrested him, have you? Before he went into hospital?”
“No.”
“So we're not eating into our detention time?”
“No.”
“And he's under guard and not going anywhere?”
“That's right.”
She opened her hands. “Then what's up? Why the urgency? Let the consultant take his own sweet time.”
“Oh, God …” He fell into his seat and rubbed his eyes. “Look—I don't know how I know, but I promise you it's not that simple.” He sat forward, steepling his hands and pointing them at her. “I am so sure he's got someone else, Danni. Once he's safe inside a house, got everyone safe and gagged, he can come and go as he likes—”
“Jack—”
“—and if he's got someone else then how long do you think they'd survive? Four days? In this weather, without any injuries, five days if they were very fucking lucky.” He got up and put his hand on the door. “Now please, please speak to that arsehole at King's.”
Benedicte worked, sawing with the grip rod, growing sicker and shakier by the minute. She didn't care how much sound she made now that she knew the troll had gone. Hair-fine pieces of wood peeled away, then larger, curly pieces. Every few minutes she had to stop and get her breath back, sitting with her legs splayed on either side of the area she was working on. Then she'd topple onto her side and fasten her mouth to the radiator pipe, sucking as much water as she could into her parched mouth. She was getting weak, but she wasn't going to give up.
It took almost three hours for her to scour a line about half a centimeter deep. A fragment of wood had come away—it was only the size of a sugar cube, but it had left a two-finger hole in the plank. She dropped the tack strip and inched the bra wiring into the hole, pushing it so it poked back up through the knot hole and created a handle. She sat on the floor, her feet planted against the wall, giving her something to strain against, gripped both ends of the wire and pulled. The blood vessels in her head ballooned with the effort: Can your veins pop? she thought. Can they just burst?
London was melting. The earth in Brockwell Park was cracking, long open sores in the ground, and in Brixton market, girls sashayed down the street dressed only in denim shorts and seersucker bikini tops, hair tied into bunches with pink ribbon. On the edge of the steaming swimming pool Fish Gummer was tired. Ever since he'd had the encounter with DI Caffery he'd been irritable. That's the last time I'll ever speak to the police. Today's class was the Otters, the eight-to-nine-year-olds. He stopped and narrowed his eyes at them, lined up on the water's edge, standing with arms at their sides like penguins in multicolored arm floats. “Well? Who's missing?”
The children all bent forward to look up and down the row.
“Josh.” One of the boys gave him a toothless grin.
Josh Church was new to the class. He'd come only twice, dropped at the door from a big yellow car. “Well? Have any of you seen him? Any of you live near him?”
The children all looked at each other and shrugged. Josh was so new that no one had got to know him that well. None of them cared whether he was there or not.
“All right.” He blew his whistle. “Get yourselves a float if you need it, and get into the water.”
DC Logan stood in the incident-room doorway, coffee cup in his hand, examining his tie as if he suspected he'd spilled something on it. When Caffery stopped next to him, he dropped it and looked up guiltily: “All right?”
“How many houses did you do on the house-to-house?”
“Uh—I—well, y'know, I tried to do them thoroughly.”
“Right.” Caffery put his hands in his pockets and stood a little closer, murmuring into Logan's ear. “I've just had your overtime sheets in, and checked them next to the number of statements you took this week and there's a problem.” He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows.
Logan knew what he was saying. He lowered his eyes.
“It's OK, you can make up for it,” Caffery murmured. “I've got a little job for you.”
He checked over his shoulder. Danni had her feet on the desk and was speaking into the phone. “There's a Mapinfo sheet and instructions in my pigeonhole. You will knock on twenty doors before the sun goes down. Just so you know.”
Logan stood, hands limp at his side, until Caffery had gone. Then he straightened his tie and looked over at Kryotos: “What the fuck's got into him?” he mouthed. Kryotos shrugged and turned away.
“Here we go.” It had taken almost five hours but at last Ben felt the wood crack between her h
ands. She scrabbled at it, her fingers bleeding now, and, slowly, enough of the board splintered for her to see into the space under the floor. She put her head down and peered in. The cavity was about ten inches deep, warm with incubated air. Pipes and wires zoomed in from the side of the house and snaked away from her into the darkness. It didn't smell musty or spidery; instead, it smelled of new wood and mastic. She sat up and pulled away the remainder of the plank then pushed her face back into the hole.
Now what? Close to her eyes was a round electrical junction box screwed to a joist, tentacles of white cable exiting north, south, east, west, like a tiny octopus. One of the leads docked with the top of a black cylinder standing proud of the plasterboard. It took Ben a few moments to recognize that she was looking at the metal sheath of a light fitting—the recessed lighting in the kitchen, somewhat bigger than a beaker, inverted and pushed up through a circular hole.
My God—this type of fitting, she was sure, was simply pushed up from below into the plasterboard, nothing holding it up, no screws or nails. She recalled Darren, Ayo's husband, pulling one out to work on it in their kitchen in Kennington—she remembered seeing it dangling from its cord.
She lay on her belly and cupped her hand over the top of the lamp, pressing it down. It moved with a long, soft, sucking sound—like jelly from a mold—and dropped out of sight, the wires catching the weight, daylight flooding into the space from below. Ben sucked in a breath. The light swung under the ceiling like a pendulum, the wires banging against the sides of the hole, and when nothing happened, when no one charged up the stairs and slammed into the door, she felt brave enough to get her face into the hole and see what was going on down there.