by Mo Hayder
“The next family?” He looked up at her. “Do you think that's the next family?”
“Aye, aye—I wouldn't be surprised. Come on—let's get them back to Shrivemoor.” She tucked the torch into her waistband and started gathering up the photos, stuffing them into the tin. “Come on.”
She pressed the lid closed, grabbed them, squeezed her way back past the tables to the bedroom window and glanced out. In the street below cars were arriving—subtly as ants from a nest, clustering around the foot of the building.
“They're here.”
“Right.” He closed the door and came out from behind the tables. “I want to look in the cupboard in the hall.”
“I thought you'd done it.”
“Nope. Come on.”
In the hallway he stood for a moment, his hands resting on the door. Logan had been up here on the first day of the investigation—Caffery remembered seeing Roland Klare's name in his statements—but this writing, “Hazard,” was so small Logan could easily have missed it. He tried now to picture the size of the room beyond. Another bedroom? No door handle—just a brass knob, so maybe a cupboard? Just like Carmel Peach, sealed away in a cupboard, a warning scrawled across it.
“Come on, Jack.” Souness stood next to him, clutching the tin to her stomach. “We haven't got all—”
“OK.” He pushed the door. It opened smoothly and he found he was looking at another small cupboard. The bulb was out and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light, but when he did he put his hands on the edges of the door frame to keep his balance.
“What is it?”
“Uh.” He wiped his mouth. “I don't know. Give us the torch.”
Souness passed the torch to him. He clicked it on and let the beam play around the small area. At the back of the cupboard was a waist-high glass tank. Like a fish tank. “There's something at the back of the cupboard.”
“Then go and have a look.”
“Yeah.” Yeah, sure, no problem. The tank was about two thirds full of liquid, semi-opaque, and near the surface something clogged floated. Sure, something's fucking floating in it but that's no problem.
“Come on, Jack, let's get on wi' it.”
“It stinks—sure you don't want to do it?”
“Ye wee coward.”
“You do it, then.”
“No fucking way—that's a man's job.”
“Right.” He took a deep breath and stepped inside. “First off, there's something on the floor here.” He let the torch play across the wall to the right. “Clothes,” he said. “A pile of clothes on the floor.” He could come back to those later. “And, uh, then, this tank …” He stepped nearer, let the light play over it, and immediately saw that the object floating in the yellowish fluid was a tangle of clothes. Clothes floating in—he bent nearer—clothes floating in—“Jesus.” He took an involuntary step back.
“What?” Souness said. “What is it?”
“Piss. It's only about a hundred gallons of piss.”
“Jesus—”
“Crazy fucking bastard.” Caffery shone the torch into the tank. Men's clothes, a nylon zip-up top, a hooded tracksuit, three pairs of trainers. Roland Klare had been storing clothes in two feet of urine. “Crazy, crazy fucking bastard—”
Benedicte was fevered, light-headed. Her skin was scratchy, there were sores inside her mouth from her manic suctioning of the copper pipe, and her fingerpads were raw from digging into the floor. It had been a day's work to push Smurf's corpse as far away as she could. She had covered her with Hal's shirt, but the bluebottles had managed to find their way under it and were feeding on the lushest, choicest food they had ever known. They proliferated, doubling their numbers, it seemed, in her fever, every time she opened her eyes.
Sometimes she knew she was awake, and sometimes she wasn't sure. Her eyes raced around inside their sockets, lights floated in and out, and sometimes she could see her life before this—flickering along so happily, so happy and smooth, only soft edges and milky comfort and, look, there she was with Josh and Hal and Smurf, the whole family, sitting on the lawn. It was summertime—they were wearing shorts, Josh's Pocari Sweat canister on the steps, a radio playing, fresh-cut grass sticking to the back of Josh's legs when he got up to jump into the paddling pool. Then she could hear Josh downstairs crying. Josh? Was that really Josh? And the other noise? What was that? An animal grunting? Or was it a man sobbing?
Ben—come on, now, come on—wake up.
Josh? Sweating, her heart thudding, she opened her eyes in the dark room. Moonlight on the ceiling. Over in the corner the gray shape of her poor dead puppy. She was awake. Really awake. Had that been Josh, crying? She rolled onto her side so that her ear was pressed against the floorboards and listened to the house under her. Silent.
She'd imagined it.
She crunched up her eyes and tried to go back to the picture of Josh and Hal, sitting on the grass. But her brain seemed swollen, as if it were pressing against her eyes, and she just couldn't do it. She couldn't see their faces. In just four days her son and her husband had been reduced to a few blurry images—Josh a tiny, defenseless shadow with grasping hands, and Hal a dark landscape in bed next to her at night.
“Oh, Josh,” she whispered. “Hal, Josh, I love you.”
The house was silent as she closed her eyes again. Over the roof she could hear a plane. She had a sudden image of the light in the cabin, the lovely rosy light of sunset racing around the cabin—Hal and her on the way to Cuba in the days when no one went to Cuba, a travel agent would laugh if you asked to go to Cuba, and you had to fly through any number of Caribbean islands just to get there. And he had wanted to go just because he wanted to see the furniture factories in Holguín. She held her hands across her face and imagined a sea she had always wanted to visit—a magical sea, the Sea of Cortez maybe—a mysterious sea where whales came to mate and strange singing could be heard coming across the water at dusk.…
As she dreamed she twitched, lying on the floor, chained to the radiator, the flies landing on her eyes.
Coming down the front steps of Arkaig Tower, Souness started to walk more slowly. In the lift she had been flipping through “The Treatment,” the odd little vade mecum from the desk drawer, shaking her head in amazement, and now she was so absorbed in it she almost came to a halt. Caffery stopped and turned to look at her: “Danni?”
“Fucking beautiful.” She shook her head and gave a low whistle. “Fucking beautiful.”
“What is?”
She looked up. “It's all here—everything.”
He came to stand behind her, leaning over her shoulder to read: “ ‘Acute exposure to one of the female hormones, especially prolactin’—what the fuck is that, prolactin?” He tried to pull it away from her but she shrugged him away.
“Get off.” She held it nearer, reading carefully. “ ‘Milky smells—offensive. ’ Jesus, he's cracked. ‘Prolactin is heavy— ’ ”
“What's prolactin?”
“I don't fucking know, do I?” She closed the book, put it in her pocket. “We'll get it back to Shrivemoor and have a proper look. It might tell us about who the poor wee boy in the photo is.” She looked around the deserted streets. “Now. Where did we put the car?”
Prolactin, they discovered when they got the handbook back to Shrivemoor, was a hormone. Specifically, a milkproducing hormone. At some point in the last fifteen years Roland Klare, making connections where a sane mind couldn't, had decided that prolactin, along with a constellation of other female hormones, was responsible for his impotence. He believed it was present in dairy milk, in women's sweat and also in their breath, and because he imagined prolactin was “fatty” and heavier than air, he felt safest high above ground level. Caffery and Souness were starting to see the logic behind his love for shadowy air pockets in the sky: his living at the top of a high-rise, his loitering in attics. And, of course, the way he'd hidden Rory in the hornbeam.
“Maybe he was going to go back and
collect the wain when the coast was clear. Maybe he thought he'd still be alive.”
“And wanted to keep him clean until then?”
“Aye. Uncontaminated.”
They were in the SIOs' room, seated shoulder to shoulder like schoolchildren at a shared desk, staring down at the book. They didn't have long—they had already arranged an emergency meeting and the team were due any minute. Caffery had called Rebecca to make his excuses for the night. “No, honestly, Jack, it's OK. I'm watching Eurotrash repeats anyway.” He'd wanted to kiss her for it. When Souness called Paulina with the same story, she made the conversation brief, didn't allow Paulina to ask any questions. So, Caffery saw with relief, the silent pact held: Roland Klare was all they were going to talk about tonight.
They worked carefully through the notebook. This was the minute cataloging of Klare's mind, his reasoning scraped out on paper. It told them about his rituals and fears, about the manner in which he'd subdued Carmel Peach (GHB, a powerful tranquilizer), his impotence and why he'd wanted to watch Alek Peach violate his own son. It told them about his compulsion to use his own urine to “purify and neutralize prolactin colonies.” It even told them why he'd worn gloves: and it wasn't because he was clued up about forensics, as they'd assumed, but because he was scared of contamination. Ironic that a simple obsession could have kept AMIT off the scent for so long.
For the amount “The Treatment” told them about his motives and compulsions, Souness could have opened the drawer and discovered, nestled among bits of paper and elastic bands, Klare's naked, beating heart. What the book didn't immediately reveal was any clue about the little boy in the most recent Polaroids. But when Caffery turned one of the final pages he saw something that woke him up like an adrenaline jag: Identification of new source/ family achieved … … Enter new source location tomorrow … … check and neutralize all places habituated by female (done!)
He grabbed the book.
Next family: Child observed good, Father good, Problems: 1. Wife. 2. Dog is female.
“It's nae the Peaches he's talking about, is it? They didn't have a dog.”
“No. It's the next ones.” Caffery sat quite still, his memory dilating toward something. A dog—where did that fit in? And these photos of a boy against a radiator— the walls—a pale cantaloupe color, the radiator—mod-ern, straight lined, white—and there was a shape in this memory too. A hill out a window? Trees? He didn't know how many doors he'd knocked on in the first days, and either the two specially assigned DCs or Logan had revisited them all since—they had all checked out—but his memory kept on pushing—then, just when he thought it might nudge up a name, the lift bell pinged in the corridor and he lost his train of thought and was back to looking at a simple photograph of a nameless child in a nameless room and a notebook filled with scribble. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Fiona Quinn and two exhibits officers appeared in the doorway, looking around the deserted incident room as if they'd expected a welcoming committee. “Are we the first ones?”
“Yes.” They both stood. “Come in.”
Caffery and Souness made everyone coffee then they sat Fiona down. “Was Carmel Peach tested?” they wanted to know. “Did you test her?”
She frowned. They made her nervous, these two senior detectives with adrenaline on their breath. “Tested for what?”
“Drugs? A sedative? GHB?”
“No one told me to. By the time I got the statements I—”
“Have you still got a blood sample?”
“Yes—there's still a sample. I'll get it tested.”
“And did we get any urine from the Peaches' house? Had he pissed on stuff in the house?”
“There was piss everywhere—don't you remember?”
“Did you get any?”
“We were at the mercy of your statements. No one told us he'd pissed on things.”
“But you said it was everywhere.”
“We thought it was them—the Peaches.”
Caffery and Souness both sat back with their fingers to their foreheads.
“Well, I didn't know, did I?”
“No. It's OK—it's not your fault.”
The emergency strategy meeting took until 2 A.M.—the DAC attended and the borough commander cut short a golf club dinner to come to Shrivemoor. All the way through the team's discussion of how to track down Klare, Caffery couldn't stop looking at the Polaroids, at the child crunched up against the white radiator. Cantaloupe walls. Where did he know those walls from? And when he switched his attention to the blurred face of the man in the Half Moon Lane photos, again he felt that tickle in his memory. In these it was something about the shape of his head, the position he'd been bound in, his arms folded across his chest. If he was less tired, if he'd been sleeping better recently, he might be able to remember. But he couldn't. After the meeting he drove back to Brixton, to Arkaig Tower, and tapped on the window of the blue Mondeo parked just in view of the entrance. The surveillance team leader let him in and they all sat in silence, Caffery in the back, smoking, swallowing mints and painkillers and staring out at the empty streets, listening to his memory ticking away. The dog—the dog goes somewhere too—where the fuck does the dog go? It was 5 A.M. when he finally fell asleep, his glasses on, his head tipped back on the seat, a roll-up between his fingers.
32
July 28
TRACEY LAMB HADN'T SLEPT MUCH last night. She had lain awake on her bunk in the reception-wing dorm annoying the three other inmates by sucking on her raw cuticles and lighting the same roll-up every ten minutes, taking carefully rationed puffs, then pinching it out. She was regathering her confidence. She was going to be bailed in just under six days—and then she wanted to make her getaway. That would mean another bid to DI Caffery—there had to be a way of cracking that little nut.
She had convinced herself that Steven would still be alive—that the Cokes, the chocolate and the bottle of water under the sink would be enough if he had been unable to get out of the ropes, and by the morning she'd got the confidence to make the next move. The screws had decided that she wasn't high risk—that if she was allowed a phone card she wouldn't snap it in two and use it to carve up the inside of her arms—so as soon as lock-up was over she went to the phones and used two units on her card to call Caffery. She'd left his mobile number at home and all she had was his home number from directories. It was early but his answerphone picked up. She paused for a moment, then began to mumble into the receiver. “It's me—Tracey …”
It was raining. Caffery woke to the steady beat of it on the car roof and the low, bored whistling of the surveillance officer in the driver's seat. He sat up, yawning, moving his head from side to side. The radio was on low and the dashboard clock said a quarter to ten. Shit. He pressed knuckles into his eyes. He had slept longer than he'd meant to.
Outside it was dull. Rain drifted down the steamed-up windows, and the dashboard air vents had blown a clear silver hole in the windscreen. The second officer was asleep, her head crunched down sideways on her shoulder, her earring stuck into the flesh of her cheek. Maybe because she was the only woman in a car with two men, in her sleep she had instinctively crossed her hands protectively over her chest.
Caffery leaned forward to look out the windscreen. “Nothing moving out there?”
The officer met his eyes in the rearview. “Nothing.”
“Right.” He began searching his pockets for tobacco, blinking, trying to crank his mind forward. He rolled a cigarette, lit it and was about to settle back when the posture of the sleeping woman suddenly started a thought.
He stopped, the cigarette halfway up to his mouth, and stared at her—at those hands crossed pharaohlike across her blouse, as if she should be holding an amulet. He was so silent and naked in his fascination that, after a while, the other officer began to get irritated.
Brixton was soaking. Rain washed a thin soup of juices and fish blood out of the market and into the gutters. There were few hints of the huge operation
that was taking place in the hunt for Roland Klare—a couple of extra uniforms on the street, a couple of squad cars on the oneway system. Caffery stood outside the rec swimming pool, looking at the steamed-up windows. All the chlorine and shouts from the pool seemed to have ended up flattened against those windows. With Kryotos's help, and with the help of a neighbor in Effra Road, Caffery had tracked down Chris Gummer to this pool. When Gummer had stopped him on the station forecourt four days ago and talked about Rory Peach being tied up, he had made a strange, dipping gesture and crossed his arms over his chest. Caffery remembered it vividly now: it was the same way that the Half Moon Lane father and son had been fastened, with their arms across their bodies. The photos were blurred and old, but Chris Gummer was a believable match for the father.
He stood for a moment, behind the glass, looking at the swimmers. Two large women dressed in pink-flowered swimming caps sat in the shallows, swirling water around their hips, and nearby a group of bald men, hunched and thin of arm, talked in a small circle. In the deep end children shrieked and jumped off the diving boards. Chris Gummer seemed oblivious to them all.
He wore a bathing cap and was pulling his long, oily white body through the pool with a fatigued breaststroke, his head held up high above the water, eyes half closed, mouth working like a fish—