by Mo Hayder
It's him, Caffery thought, it's him.
He knocked on the window. Gummer looked up, saw Caffery and trod water for a while, as if deciding what to do. Then his face changed. He took a gulp of air and continued swimming to the far end of the pool. Caffery knocked again, and this time Gummer didn't even look round.
“Fair enough.” He pushed the red emergency handle and stepped out onto the pool edge. Somewhere an alarm screamed, and the lifeguards at their station looked around in confusion. Gummer reached the side of the pool and suddenly realized what was happening. The lifeguards were blowing whistles. He clung to the edge, wiping his eyes and staring at Caffery walking toward him.
“What?” He moved along the side toward the shallow end, looking up at him. “Stop following me.”
“Get out of the pool. I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Get out and I'll tell you.”
A cropped-haired woman in shorts and flip-flops jumped in front of Caffery and stood, heels together, back erect, like a traffic gendarme, her hand extended at shoulder height, palm out, as if Caffery might stop through the pure ferocity of her expression.
“Yeah, c'mon, c'mon.” He pulled his warrant card from his pocket and flicked it at her. “Out of my way.”
“I have to think about the health of the other swimmers.…” But she was already backing off, her confidencepunctured by the card, wondering if their speculations about Gummer had been right after all. “Your shoes, sir …” she finished lamely.
“Come on, Chris.” Caffery kept pace with him. Bloodshot eyes in a white face, the slick rubber cap corrugating the skin on his forehead. “We need to talk. There's something you forgot to tell me.”
“Go away.” Gummer stretched his feet down in the water until he found the bottom. “When I wanted to talk to you, you wouldn't talk to me.” He pushed himself off the side and began to wade away, out into the center of the pool, his thin white arms held straight out at the sides. Caffery walked calmly down to the shallow end and before the lifeguard could stop him, he had stepped, fully dressed and still in his shoes, into the shallow end of the pool. Swimmers scattered, shocked by this lean man wading out among them, and in the center of the pool Gummer saw that the game was up. He turned, holding up spadelike hands, his mouth quivering. “All right, all right! That's enough.”
They talked in a corner of the cafe. Both of them smelled of chlorine—Caffery's trousers were wet to the knees. A group of teenage boys in FILA sports jackets were using a glue stick to fake bus passes at another table. They kept jumping up to buy chocolate and Red Bulls from the vending machine, and Caffery sat with his back to them, looking across the table at Gummer, who had bought a cup of coffee and two chocolate bars, which he unwrapped, broke into four pieces and positioned on a paper plate in front of him. The chocolate remained untouched for the rest of the conversation.
“Chris, look.” His tobacco had survived the swimming pool. He sprinkled a little into a cigarette paper. “I'm sorry about that. But I needed to talk to you.”
“I really needed to talk to you.” Gummer had dressed in a worn checked shirt, frayed in places, his fine, baby hair dripping onto the collar. His face was as shiny as a peeled egg. “That's why I came all the way to Thornton Heath. But that didn't make any difference, did it?”
“I'm sorry. I learned my lesson.”
He shrugged and let his gaze wander away somewhere over Caffery's head. Blood rimmed his eyes. Caffery lit the cigarette and pulled the little foil ashtray toward him. “Chris, tell me something. How did you know about Champaluang?”
“I told you. It was in the paper.”
“And that's the first time you heard someone mention the troll?”
He nodded. “You should have listened to me.”
“You're right.” He turned the cigarette round and round in his fingers, looking at it thoughtfully. “Chris, tell me if I'm wrong, but when you heard about Champaluang, you must have wondered …I mean, help me out here, but when you heard about the troll you must have wondered if it wasn't the same person who was in your house.”
Gummer took a sharp breath. His mouth moved a little, but no sound came out. He dropped his eyes and hunched his shoulders forward, his hands wedged between his knees. Caffery saw that he was shaking.
“Chris?”
He didn't look up. Caffery tapped ash into the little foil ashtray, looking at the top of his head—at the skin through the hair—wondering where to go next. “I think that the troll was in your house once, Chris. Maybe a long time ago. Am I right?”
He didn't respond. Caffery thought about the Half Moon Lane photos in his pocket. Show him the photographs? What if you're wrong? “Let's put it this way. People have some screwed-up fantasies—don't they?” he began. “Don't you think it's amazing the things that some people get off on?”
Gummer shrugged. He kept his eyes fixed on the chocolate.
Oh, Christ, he's going to be difficult.
“For example, some people …” He shifted in his chair and crossed his legs. “Some people's fantasy might be— uh—watching a man rape a child, say. Do you think that's possible?” Gummer gave a little cough and put his hands up to his face, pressing the tips of his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes. Caffery could see the scalp flush red with blood. “A boy, for example. Some people might have a fantasy about that—do you think?”
Gummer dropped both hands flat on the table and took deep breaths through his nose. His eyes were closed and Caffery could see the corneas moving beneath the eyelids like a shadow show.
Don't give up—
“A man doing something to his son, for example.”
“I'm not a pedophile,” he said suddenly, opening his eyes. “I loved my son more than anything.”
“Why didn't you go to the police?”
“I tried to—tried to talk to you. You wouldn't listen.”
“I mean before. When it happened.”
He took in a sharp breath and shook his head convulsively. “No, no, no, no, no.” He swung his head from side to side, overemphasizing it like a child. “No—my wife said no. We weren't to go to the police.”
“She didn't want the truth to get out?”
“Are you surprised?”
“They could have done something.”
“Could they?” He fiddled with the fraying cuff of his shirt and stared at the chocolate. “Could they have stopped her going? Could they have stopped her taking my son away?”
“I don't know,” Caffery said. “I don't know.”
“She took him away—she couldn't bear me to get near him afterward. I don't know where they are now.” He reached inside his zip-up holdall and pulled out a photograph. It was battered and had been mended with Sellotape. He pulled his shirt down over his hand, carefully rubbed clean a small area of the table and put down the photograph, lovingly, smoothing down the edges.
“Your son?”
“My son. I've got more pictures at home but this one's my favorite. Look at it.” He tried to hold the edges down with his long white fingers. “It's in a mess. I try, but I can't help it getting in a mess after all this time. She's wrong about me, my wife. I'm not a pedophile, you know, I'm not a pedophile. Just because a person does something like that doesn't mean he wanted to—or wants to again. I'm not a pedophile.”
“But the kids …” Caffery nodded over his shoulder at the swimming pool. “Why do you work here?”
“I don't touch them! Not ever. But I care about them, you see—I do—they're the only contact I have—she took my—” He shook his head. “I'm not a pervert.”
“I know that. I know you didn't have a choice.” He watched Gummer's nearly motionless head. He wasn't enjoying this—he didn't like making people cough out their pain like this. “He said he'd kill your boy if you didn't— am I right?”
He nodded. A milky tear dropped out of his eye onto the table. Caffery edged a little nearer. “That's what he did, isn't it
, Chris? He said he'd kill your boy.”
“He was going to crush his head with a paving stone. A paving stone out of the back garden if I didn't. Oh, God—” He suddenly reached inside the holdall and pulled out a bottle of pills, tapped out two onto the palm of his hand and swallowed them.
“What's that?”
“Calms me down.” He stuffed the bottle back in the bag then sat forward and turned his hands over, showing Caffery the insides of his wrists. He looked up. His eyes were red and swimming in tears—as if they were bleeding. “It's wrong. I know, it's wrong to give up. But sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time.”
The boys at the vending machine had noticed that Gummer was crying. One by one they turned to stare. Caffery leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Chris, I think we should take this somewhere else, don't you? Will you come to the station with me?”
He nodded and gazed out the window at the rainy streets, biting his lip. “Is it what happened to that family? The Peaches?”
Caffery didn't answer. He got to his feet, put his hands on the table and spoke in a low voice, “I wish you'd talked to someone back then.”
“The world was a different place back then.”
Champaluang's attack had happened a few days after Gummer's wife had left. Gummer had read about the attack in the South London press and was seized with the notion that the man Champ called the troll was the same teenager responsible for destroying his life. He watched the papers like an owl after that, but until the intruder at Donegal Crescent, he hadn't seen one incident with the hallmarks of the troll on it. When he and Caffery got to Shrivemoor they found out why.
Klare had been in high-security psychiatric facilities for eleven years. Kryotos had the file on her desk and was photocopying pages from it. “Stabbed a WPC in Balham in 1989. He'd tried to abduct a little boy from outside a supermarket.” This was his “index offense,” the offense that first put him into the mental health system. It had happened when he was just eighteen. The WPC had cornered him in a stairwell on a council estate and he'd jumped at her with a penknife. The child was unharmed but the WPC had suffered severe cuts to her hands.
“The abduction charge fell through.” Kryotos spoke quietly. Gummer was sitting on a chair next to the SIOs' room, just out of earshot. He looked as if he might cry. “The boy's parents didn't press charges, didn't want to put him through the trial, so they charged him with the assault on the WPC.” For this he had been convicted and held for over ten years under Section 41 of the Mental Health Act, until fifteen months earlier, when he was considered stabilized on clozapine, and the home secretary lifted the restriction order, sending him for a year to a halfway hostel before, in April, releasing him back into the community. “Even if I'd had time to feed all the house-to-house interviews into HOLMES and seen his CRO—” She shook her head. “It was for assault. It never went down as an abduction. He'd've still slipped through.” She paused and looked at him, standing there in front of her all disheveled.
“You stink, Jack. You smell like a swimming pool.”
“Thanks, Marilyn.”
“That's OK. Want some shortbread?”
“No thanks, Marilyn.”
“One day I'll stop asking.”
“No, you won't.”
Souness and the rest of the team were in Brixton so Caffery took Gummer into the SIOs' room, sat him down and got the story from the beginning.
It had started in 1989. The Gummers had planned their holiday quite openly and none of their friends ever found out that they hadn't made it to Blackpool, that they had never even left Brixton. But something went wrong on that holiday, everyone agreed; they were never the same afterward. No one knew about the tall youth who had appeared out of thin air in the hallway of the little terraced house. No one knew how he'd tied Gummer's wife in an upstairs bedroom, “X” spray-painted on the door. No one knew about the act Gummer was forced to perform on his own son, nor that afterward, curled up in the corner and crying, he'd had to watch Klare make his own attempt on the boy. Klare had been impotent. Frustrated, full of rage, he had bitten a hole in the boy's back.
“Did he use a belt?” Caffery felt sorry for Gummer, who sat with his arms wrapped around his knees as if it were cold, his shoulders hunched, staring blankly out at rainy Croydon. But he knew he had to ask. “Did he use a belt? Around your son's neck?”
“No. Not a belt. But he beat him. And he bit him.”
So that's a skill you learned later, in prison, you bastard. “Anything he said? Anything in particular you remember?”
“No. I've gone through it a hundred times. Oh, I mean of course there were excuses, you can imagine the sort of thing, said he didn't mean it—that he had to do it—et cetera, et cetera.”
“He had to do it?”
“Oh, yes.” Gummer twisted his mouth up as if the memory were a sour spot on his tongue. “Oh, yes. A few times he said it—said he couldn't help it—had to treat himself—it was madness to me, all just an excuse—”
“The Treatment.”
Gummer paused. “What?”
“The Treatment,” he said softly, thinking about the little notebook in Souness's drawer. He looked up at Gummer. “He's schizophrenic, we think. He's—”
“He's mad—that's what he is.”
“Yes. Maybe.” Caffery tapped his fingers on the desk. “Anyway—go on, Chris, go on.”
After the attack Gummer had tried to persuade his wife to go to the police but she had resisted and, in a few bitter and well-chosen words, spelled it out to him: if he went to the police then the rest of the world would know what he'd done. A child molester! Never, ever, ever let anyone know. It will stay with us until the day we die. But keeping the secret eventually got too much and she had packed up her records, her Jane Fonda workout videos and her son, and left, leaving Gummer in London with nothing: no pillows, no sheets, no towels—just a sticky bottle of tomato ketchup in the fridge and the round conviction that he was a pervert because of what he had managed to achieve. “With my son, my own son. I wouldn't have thought it possible, if it hadn't happened.”
“Did you have an attic?”
“Yes. There was an attic in that house.”
Caffery pictured Klare, in the attic like a patient spider, just watching and waiting, waiting for a moment when he could scamper out and do what he wanted without interruption. “I think that's where he came from.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Found out afterward. He left by the front door—just opened it and walked out—but how did he get in? I found the mess he left afterward when I got a ladder up there.” He shrugged. “Looking back I realized my wife had sensed something was wrong.”
“Before?”
He nodded. “She kept saying she could smell something—she said there was a smell in that house. I couldn't smell it but it was driving her crazy trying to get rid of it before we went on holiday—she said something had died under the floorboards. If she'd got her way she would've had me rip the place apart. Now I wish I'd—”
He stopped. Caffery had just sat back so fast it was as if someone had wrenched him back by the collar. “Your wife smelled the stuff in the attic before.”
“She kept moaning about it—I couldn't smell it myself, but they say women have a better sense of smell than men.”
Caffery stood and went into the incident room, rapping his knuckles on Kryotos's desk. “Marilyn. How far's Danni?”
“She just called—she'll be back in fifteen or so.”
“Right. Can I leave Gummer with you until she's back? You could make him some tea or something.”
“I'll give him some shortbread. Where are you going?”
“Brixton. Tell Danni I'll call her later.”
33
WHAT PITCHED HER OUT OF THAT LONG, trancy sleep? The voice? Benedicte thought so. A man's voice, murmuring. She opened her eyes. A bluebottle was picking its way carefully through the crust on Smurf's nose.
She stared blankly at it, lying on her side, trying to decide if she was dreaming or really hearing a man's voice in the kitchen below.
Hal? Was it Hal? What's happening? She raised her head. Maybe the troll had gone. Maybe Hal was talking to Josh. Yes, that's what it sounds like—he's gone and I missed it because I was asleep. She rolled onto her front and fanned her hands out on the splintered boards. The skin on her arms had taken on the papery, transparent look that dried honesty got—she almost expected to see the little veins in her hands turn blood-black and noded like seeds. Her throat was so dry it seemed no longer a functioning part of her body, but a long, living welt running under the muscles.
Another sentence spoken from below.
Hal?
Moving painfully she shuffled sideways and dropped her face into the gap between the boards. Everything was taking longer than it should, every move made her vision swim, the edges of light and matter blur. She wriggled her hand out until it cupped the light fitting. The light was on, she could feel the heat of it against her palm as she applied a silent, steady pressure downward on it. With a quiet swoosh it fell down into the room below, circling wildly on the wire. She lay for a moment, panting, exhausted by the effort. I'm ill, she thought. He's killing us.
Gathering all her energy she inched her face into the gap, and immediately she could feel different air on her face, dry, full of the kippery smell of an animal's bedding.
My God. Is he still here?
And then she saw. She wanted to jerk back out of the hole but she couldn't move. She was transfixed.
Hal was gone. Only the man-shaped stain where he had been. And in his place the upholstered armchair which belonged next to the window in the living room. Sitting in the chair, facing away from her, into the family room, just ten feet below her, the troll. He had stripped down to T-shirt and jeans and was crouched on the chair like a bird, his hands between his legs.
Silently, carefully, she sucked in a breath. You should have known—should have known. All the lights in the two rooms were on, the curtains were drawn. A camera lay on the floor next to him. He hadn't heard her push the light through because he was intent on watching something out of sight in the living room. His face was creased and reddened, there was a diamond point of saliva on the lower lip, and now that she looked closer she saw his belt and fly were open and he was using one hand to massage himself. Oh, God. A bubble of nausea rose in her throat. Oh God—the bastard. He stopped masturbating for a moment to spit on his palm and Benedicte got a glimpse of the little white pudding of his penis—not even hard.