His stomach turned over at the thought, the same way it did when you went to pour milk in your tea and found it had gone off. He remembered seeing some kids once, larking around on a building site, using a broken-off branch to fish a dead rat out of a rain puddle. They had flicked the rat up in the air, then run away screaming as it plopped down again in the water. The memories repelled him and yet they persisted. You couldn’t not watch them playing with the rat, couldn’t not smell the curdled milk in its plastic container, even though it would make your guts heave and you knew that perfectly well before you started.
So long as you weren’t forced to drink the milk or pick up the rat in your bare hands, it was okay. It was interesting even. The rat he remembered especially, because he had been back to the building site later to photograph it.
He leaned forward and kissed Sonia’s neck. A strand of her loose hair tickled his lips, and a wisp of his own breath came back at him, rebounding off her skin in a puff of warm air.
She turned in his arms and kissed him. Her saliva tasted faintly of orange juice.
“I’ll have to go in, in a minute. I’m supposed to be writing an essay on nuclear power.”
“That’s OK,” Kip said. “I’ll text you later.” He stood up from the grass. He wondered when he would next get to have sex with her, then wondered if that was how it was for his father with Grace Hemingway. The idea of his father thinking about sex unsettled him even more than the thought of the rat.
“Thanks for the photo,” said Sonia. “I’ll buy a clip frame for it tomorrow.”
“Be careful,” Kip said, and then wondered what the hell he was on about. It was just a stupid photograph, nothing to be careful of there. He hurried away, leaving via the side gate without turning back, not wanting her to see that he was blushing.
He caught the bus from outside the old Capitol cinema on the London Road. He climbed up to the top deck, where he sat alone apart from a gaunt and elderly black man reading a Metro. It was just about beginning to get dark. Kip looked out at the amethyst sky, the latticework of interlinked streets, shop fronts and garage forecourts, the chequered fabric of gardens and railway lines. He saw London as a labyrinth, with no way out. Even if you fled to the edge, to the boundary posts at Morden or Edgware, there would still be more roads, more alleyways, more cemeteries. It was the kingdom of the Manor Park Monster. Kip wondered where in his kingdom the monster was hiding at that moment.
The streetlights were coming on all over town, and soon it would be dark for real. He got off the bus opposite the garage. Lee High Road smelled of diesel fumes and dying hydrangeas. When he got home he discovered his father had arrived there before him. The back door was standing open into the garden. Lynn and Andy Kiplas sat together at the kitchen table with their elbows touching. Lynn was laughing, small creases at the corners of her eyes. Kip looked at his father, not speaking. Andy Kiplas glanced quickly away, then asked Kip if he would like a beer.
Kip saw the monster again three days later in Manor Park Gardens. Some people thought that this was where Rebecca Riding had gone missing, but it wasn’t so. Manor Park Gardens was a landscaped park with a lake and ornamental waterfowl, popular with families and joggers. As a kidnapping site it was close to useless. Kip reckoned the only time you could get yourself kidnapped from the gardens would be first thing in the morning before it got busy, but even then there were the groundsmen and the dog walkers, commuters using the park as a cut-through to Lee station.
Rebecca Riding had been abducted at around 3.30 in the afternoon, not from Manor Park Gardens but from Manor Park itself. Manor Park was a rough triangle of land sandwiched between Weardale Road and Manor Lane, hemmed in on one side by a swampy and narrow section of the River Quaggy. Sometimes you would see rubbish floating in the water and once there had been a child’s tricycle but Kip liked Manor Park because it was quiet, the tall terraces of Manor Lane backing directly on to the tussocky grass and stands of nettles like the last, abandoned houses in a zombie movie. Kip liked to photograph these houses, even though someone in one of the flats there had once leaned out of the window and called him a Peeping Tom.
This was the first time he had been back to Manor Park since Rebecca Riding’s abduction. He had wondered if the place were still being treated as a crime scene but if there had ever been police tape or anything else of that kind it was gone now. To Kip the park seemed unnaturally quiet, expectant, but he knew he was probably imagining it. He took some photos of the park railings and the children’s play area, hoping that no one would see him doing it and wishing he knew exactly where the abduction had taken place. He knew his interest in the monster was growing. He disliked this feeling, distrusted it, but was unable to let it go. He would have liked to discuss it with Sonia but was afraid she might start to think he was weird, one of the lonely serial-killer types who bought true-crime magazines and hung around Cromwell Road and the corner of the modern housing estate that had once been Rillington Place. The day after he gave her the photograph of the monster, Sonia told him an obscure theory some crime writer had concocted about how a famous English painter was really Jack the Ripper. The theory was connected with art, though, so it seemed it was all right to talk about it.
The monster was not connected with anything. He was just a monster.
Kip came out on to Manor Lane and crossed quickly into Manor Park Gardens. The sky was a high, dense blue, the sun dripped white light on the water. People sprawled on their backs in the grass, reading paperback thrillers. Kip knew he was invisible here. It was even OK to take pictures. He took a few shots of the fountain, a Dalmatian dog, some kid on a skateboard, but he knew already that the photos would not be much good. The park was not his thing. He preferred the tatty shop fronts and crumbling façades of the terraces on Lee High Road. He turned to go, walking across the grass in the direction of the park exit on Old Road. Then he saw the monster, sitting on one of the benches facing the lake.
He stopped where he was, raising the Nikon cautiously as if afraid the man might take flight, then fired off seven, eight shots, using the zoom lens to capture him in profile. As he lined up the final frame the man turned his head slightly, giving Kip a better view of his face. Seeing him again, Kip thought he looked less like the photo fit, less like a cornered rat and more like a ruined accountant who had just been fired. It was definitely him, though. Kip recognized him by his jacket. He appeared to be watching the ducks, plump mallards, a male and three females, dipping in and out of their limber reflections in a way that made the real ducks look blockish and unnatural as decoys. Kip wandered slowly in his direction, pretending to look at the lake. There were three children on the wooden landing stage, throwing bread crusts from a plastic bag. A horde of ducks surged towards them across the water. Kip slipped the Nikon back into its case and sat down on the bench. He watched the children, who had started to argue over who was in charge of the bread, and smoothed the leather case of the Nikon with the tips of his fingers. The park was full of people – onlookers, witnesses – and yet he could not escape the thought that he had put himself at risk somehow by coming here.
He turned to glance at the man beside him. He tried to make the glance seem casual, but was aware even as he did so that the movement was too rigid, too snatched, to appear anything but unnatural, the inept glance of a spy who was new on the job. The monster was staring right at him. His eyes were grey, the colour of tap water with a single drop of black ink dispersed in it. His expression was perfectly calm.