'Jack, I can't just snap my fingers and—' He looked at Caffery's face and shook his head. 'All right, all right. I'll get the governor to OK forty-eight hours. Then we review.'
'Now, Jack, I feel I already know you well enough to give you a good telling off.' Romaine gently inserted herself under Maddox's arm and smiled up at Caffery. 'You have to learn the golden rule. No talking shop.'
'We weren't,' Maddox said.
'You're lying. I can see it in your face.'
'Ignore her, Jack. She wants me to take early retirement.'
'You have to understand my husband.' She patted his chest. 'He tries to keep everyone happy. It weighs on him.'
Maddox took the hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. 'We've stopped now, I promise. I was just looking at Marilyn's lot. You know — thinking about Steph and Laure at that age.'
'Oh yuck. Sentimentality.' She kissed him and drew back wrinkling her nose. 'Poo! I see I'll be driving.' She fumbled in her handbag. 'I thought you were working tonight.'
'I am—' He opened his mouth and allowed his wife to squirt a tiny green dose of breath freshener in. 'I've only had a couple.'
'My fault,' Caffery said. 'I'm head wine waiter—'
He stopped. Romaine's face had changed. She put a finger up to her mouth.
'Look,' she mouthed, her eyes locked beyond him, on the French windows. 'Look behind you.'
And as she spoke Caffery became aware of other conversations dying — guests pausing in mid-sentence and turning to look at the door. Odd, frozen expressions. His earlier excitement drained away.
'Look,' Romaine repeated — jabbing a finger towards the garden.
Slowly, half dreading, half knowing what he would see, he turned.
Dean was sitting on the sill, his face pale and pinched, shocked into stillness by the apparition only inches from his face. Beyond him Veronica was smiling faintly — almost fascinated. The French windows were open to the night and in the pale glow of the electric light, streaming with rain, his arms holding an odd, jumbled assortment of ochres, stood Penderecki, his thin hair wild and fluorescing in the sheet lightning.
The room dropped into absolute silence. Caffery stared stupidly into the heavy-lidded eyes, unable to decipher exactly what Penderecki was holding in his arms.
Then Penderecki licked his thick lips and smiled, taking one simple step forward. The crowd parted, he blinked slowly and with something that sounded like a sigh let the armful of bones fall into a splintering mass amongst the feet of the guests.
32
Only Logan and Essex stayed until 1 a.m. Maddox had to be at Greenwich and the other guests departed hurriedly, throwing Caffery embarrassed glances where he sat, on the stairs, gazing at his hands, breathing deeply, willing his heart to keep beating.
Veronica, surreally calm, tried to stop them leaving.
'It's nothing to get excited about. Don't go. We can always sit in the dining room.'
When she realized she was fighting a losing battle she slammed the front door closed and moodily retired to the kitchen to load the dishwasher. Logan drove to Shrivemoor for his grab bag, and Essex spent the thirty minutes administering to Caffery, doling out the remainder of the Glenmorangie in a series of short, digestible shots.
'Like a baby,' Caffery muttered, staring into the tumbler.
'Like a big, snotty, nappy-wearing baby,' Essex agreed. 'Well? Are you going to tell me?'
Caffery looked at the living room door, pulled closed so that he couldn't see the nightmarish splatter of bones on the floor. 'I think that might be my brother.'
Essex's face dropped. 'Your brother?'
'He walked down the railway track at the back of the house. September the fourteenth 1974. Never been seen again.'
And there, in the weak electric light, Caffery unburdened himself of the story, told Essex of the argument in the tree house that had given him the permanently blackened thumb, of Ewan slipping out of his reach, down onto the banks of the railway cutting — 'We called it ''the death trail''. What an irony' — of the way his mother sobbed and shouted in the back garden, biting her own arms as the police searched Penderecki's home only to emerge after ten hours with nothing, not one scrap of evidence that Ewan had ever set foot in there. Then the finger of suspicion turning to his own father, his being led away, detained for two days — 'My God, it nearly finished their marriage.'
The Glenmorangie dwindled in its bottle.
'Eventually everyone gave up, dropped it, I suppose they had to. But I couldn't. You see, I know he hid Ewan's body — just for the time they searched the house. Maybe he took it out to the countryside, there's some bits and pieces, bills, letters' — he jerked his head upstairs — 'clues I've salvaged over the years, keep trying to sort them out, sit down and get a lead from them. But I'm certain of one thing—' He swilled his drink and swallowed it whole. 'He's hung on to him. Penderecki's still got Ewan.'
'So you're waiting here. For him to return your brother?'
Caffery stared at his thumbnail, blinking painfully. 'Is that what he's done tonight? Do you think that's Ewan lying in there?'
Essex got slowly to his feet, wincing as the blood returned to his legs. 'I don't know, Jack. But we're going to find out.'
The summer storm moved south-west across Greenwich, the silver wand of the Crystal Palace transmitter trembling in the moonlight. Even the houses studding the edge of Blackheath seemed to crouch a little closer — as if they could stop the old heath rearing off in the wind.
Harteveld was silent — sitting at the mahogany table in the living room, a copy of The Times spread out in front of him, a bottle of pastis at his elbow. The pressure in the air made his temples ache — no matter how many painkillers he swallowed, how much coke he did, he couldn't get rid of the pain. And his hands. His hands were cold. Like ice. He was reading about the bodies they had found at the Millennium site. Kayleigh Hatch, Petra Spacek, Shellene Craw, Michelle Wilcox — and a girl they couldn't identify because she was so badly decomposed. He knew exactly who she was — the Glasgow street child whose death he had slept through. No-one had reported her missing.
Suddenly he swept the paper from the table, dropping his face into his hands. For several seconds he sat like this, rocking his head from side to side, raking his fingers into his scalp, as if he might be able to dislodge his thoughts with his nails. Then, trembling violently, he jerked to his feet. He grabbed the pastis and stumbled into the orangery, throwing the doors open. The wind boomed across the garden, hitting him in the face, rattling the window panes.
Toby Harteveld stood quite still, his face turned into the gale, listening to the long grasses in the parterre bowing and hissing like rain. The storm was coming. It was rushing out of the night sky towards him, moving faster than a comet, its target the very centre of his chest.
33
Where Croom's Hill twists down past the site of the old Ursuline convent, Greenwich Council Environmental Service's refuse lorry was halted in the centre of the road by an unmarked white van. Minutes later the lorry continued on its way up the hill, stopping outside the Harteveld house as usual. The van turned away and made a wide, looping swing through Blackheath, arriving at the top curve of Croom's Hill — similarly concealed from the house — just in time to meet the truck a second time. The driver took two full refuse sacks from the workers, passed them carefully to a colleague in the back of the van and slammed the doors closed. Back in the driver's seat he adjusted the wing mirror until he could see, down in the elbow of the hill, a grey Sierra parked almost out of sight under a dripping oak. The van driver didn't turn. With a minutely subtle movement he extended his thumb a small degree, holding it against the mirror.