"Well." Caffery slumped into the chair, pulling the Scotch towards him. "Welcome to my nightmare, DCI Souness. It's nice to know you've been enjoying it for so long."
"Ahh, now, ye see, you're being a bit of a wee girly about it, aren't ye? There ain't no law says you can't see this as genuine friendly concern, Deeetective Caffery."
"Yeah." He stared into the mug. There was a dried coffee rim half-way down.
"Och, come on, Jack, I'm trying to help. In my clumsy way."
"I know, look, I'm sorry. I get a bit…" He put a fist to his chest.
"A bit tight here about it, eh?" She downed her whisky and refilled her mug. "I know, I do know. But if you made an allegation against Penderecki?" She paused for a response. "Jack? Make an allegation, and the case'd be reviewed and someone else could stay up all night and worry about it."
He shook his head wearily. "Nah. That's OK."
"Been suggested before?"
"I've lost count of how many times. He's too clever. He'd turn it around and before you know it I'd be the one in the frame malicious allegations, harassment, yadda-yadda."
"And not because you know you'd never be allowed near the case?"
"There is that, yes. That detail hasn't escaped my attention."
"You're a wee barn pot if you don't mind me saying."
"Thank you. I'm going to assume that's a compliment."
Souness smiled, a small smile. "I just don't want this Peach thing bollixing with ye more than it has to. Don't want it touching your personal life. That's my small concern."
Caffery tried to smile back. This was the time he should say it that he probably shouldn't be on the case at all, that she was right, that already it was spilling over and getting out of control. Instead he wiped his forehead, finished his drink and said, "Ewan was nine, Rory is eight I hadn't even made the connection." He stood, went to the door and called DC Logan into the SIO's room. Logan came in, raising an eyebrow when he saw them sitting together.
"Sorry." He coughed pointedly, as if he'd interrupted something.
"I want to add something to the intelligence search you know how to use CRIS, don't you?"
"Sir."
"And tomorrow get the locals to go back into the collator's records for ten years with the same key word. "Troll". Find out if anyone knows anything about a nonce in Brockwell Park called the troll." He stopped. He'd only just seen it. Logan was trying to hide a smile. "Hey?" He put his face closer to Logan 's. "What is it?"
"Nothing, sir." But before he dropped his eyes Caffery saw him glance briefly at Souness at the top buttons of her shirt undone, at the opened bottle of Scotch. Caffery's tie was off and Souness's boots were on the floor. "Nothing," Logan said again, colouring, and turned away. "CRIS and the collators. Right away."
When Caffery closed the door and turned round, Souness had her elbows on her knees, her face dropped in her hands, and was laughing so hard her shoulders were shaking. "Can ye believe it?" She looked up, her face shiny. "Och, I love it I hoove it! I'm getting laid by the Met's pin-up boy." She wiped her face. "Look at me! Diesel dyke stamped all over me, but they still need a compass and map. It's like a giant panda walked into the room they'd go, "Yeah, looks like a giant panda, smells like a giant panda, but it can't be a giant panda, I mean what the fuck would a giant panda be doing here?" '
In spite of himself Caffery caught himself smiling. Later, he stopped her before she left the office: "Danni, thank you. I know I've made you late for Paulina, so thank you for talking to me."
Caffery's little Victorian cottage was quiet. He parked his battered old Jaguar carefully next to Rebecca's black VW Beetle and went inside, un knotting his tie. She was still awake in spite of the hour there was warmth and noise coming from the living room at the back of the house and in the hall a pair of green metallic sling backs scuffed heels, lay toppled over, the words Mill Mill fading and worn on the inside. He paused, as he always did these days, wondering what mood she would be in, before he opened the door.
She was doing a shoulder stand on the sofa, giggling as she watched her bare toes wriggle. She wore khaki shorts and one of his grey T-shirts: a bottle of Blavod leaned drunkenly against the cushion and a cigarillo smouldered in trie ashtray.
"Happy?"
"Oooops!" She dropped her legs with a bang and twisted round, grinning up at him. He saw with relief that she was calm. Flushed and tipsy but mellow.
"You look happy."
"Uh-huh." A CD played in the background something smooth, Air or someone like it. "Drunk."
"You lush." He bent over and kissed her. "I've been calling you all day." He went into the kitchen, hung his jacket on the back of the door and got his Glenmorangie and a glass.
"I've been in Brixton with some Slade finalists. They think I'm God or something."
"Shameless." He pulled off his shoes and collapsed on the sofa, uncorking the whisky. "Egotistic little tart."
"I know." She coiled her hank of spice-coloured hair into a long snake, laid it over one shoulder, and clambered across to him. Good gymnast's legs she had always lightly tanned, the colour of sesame oil. "Ouch," Souness once admitted, after half a bottle of Scotch. "She's the sort of woman you feel right here. In your groin."
"I saw someone I knew on the news." Rebecca rested her arms on his shoulders and kissed his neck. "Just from behind. I knew it was you from your backside. And because you looked pissed off, even from a distance."
He downed a glass, refilled it and linked his fingers through hers. In the last three days they hadn't had time together he'd realized it that morning when the sound of one of the indexers crossing her legs in her fawn Pretty Pollys had popped a sweat on his forehead.
"You must be knackered."
"I've got a four-hour turnaround. Back to the office by five."
"It's a little kid, isn't it?"
"Mmmm. Yes." He held up her hand and studied her fingers. Her pearly clean nails against his. The thumb on his left hand was black, it was a bruise that wouldn't grow out. His own stigmata injured the day Ewan went missing, never changing in twenty-five years. "Let's not talk about it, eh?"
"Why not?"
Why not? Because already Ewan was wilfully superimposing himself over a picture of Rory Peach and you've spotted that, Becky, I know you've already spotted the resemblance and if we start, if I let you, we'll be talking about Ewan before I can put the brakes on, and then the mood will change and I'll say something about you, maybe, and Bliss, and… "Because I'm tired. I've had it all day."
"OK." She bit her lip and thought about this. "Well," she tried, working her fingers inside his shirt and smiling. "How about this? Are you horny?"
He sighed and put down his glass. "Of course."
She giggled. "Yeah, stupid question. I mean, when are you not?"
"I thought I was constantly pissed off?"
"No. You're constantly randy is what you are. Pissed off is what you do between having hard-ons."
"Come here." He pulled her astride his lap and worked his hands up her T-shirt. "Did you see Time Out?"
"I know." She began to unbutton his shirt, closing her eyes when he found her nipples and worked them between his thumb and forefinger. "How ace am I, then, eh?" she murmured dreamily, her head back. "Oh, God, that's nice. Did you read it, then?"
"Yes. I'm proud of you."
But he was lying. He shuffled down the sofa a few inches and moved his hands across her skin, like oil against his hard fingers, down the whole width of her pelvis, and the long fierce muscles of her stomach. Rebecca had told him that her body had changed since her artwork had taken off she said her skin was smoother, her waist thinner; that she didn't get calluses on her feet any more and that these days she walked more slowly. But what Caffery saw was the opposite: a hardening, a quickening. And he knew it dated back to the assault. To Bliss.
Reflecting this switch came the new artwork, the sculptures. Before the assault Rebecca's work had been something quite different. Now the colours had disappeared and her work was sharper.
Something in her had shifted, but she still wanted Jack and here he was, still hopelessly and helplessly attracted to her, in love with her in spite of how she had changed she was the sweet weight in his heart and in his cock. Just the smell of one of her cigarillos in an ashtray could give him a hard-on.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her face above him, eyes closed, a calm, distant smile on her face. I should close the curtains, he thought distantly, looked at the dark window, and saw the white smudge of a face, a snout-like impression and the telltale frosting of excited breath on the panes
"Shit!" He pulled Rebecca's T-shirt down.
"What?"
"Move it. Quick."
Rolling her away, he sprang to his feet, and slammed open the french windows. Penderecki had reached the foot of the garden, running for the back fence. Caffery sprinted the forty feet in seconds, but Penderecki was prepared: he had brought a green plastic milk crate that he used to hike himself over the back fence, and scurried away into the undergrowth of the railway cutting, leaving behind just the crate and the sound of his wheezing trailing in the air. Caffery, shoeless, shirt undone, picked up the crate and threw it after him.
lDo that again and I will kill you." He stood in the garden his mother had planted, watching the larval shape of the old man scuttling away through the undergrowth. "I mean it I've got your blood in my mouth, Penderecki." He dropped his hands on the wire fence, letting his breathing slow, trying not to be drawn, trying to pull his anger back in. "I've got your blood."
It's just a new way of him disturbing the silt. Ignore it. Ignore it
He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbour's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you. Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them.
Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan had survived and lived as Penderecki's lover until he had suddenly, spontaneously stopped breathing one night; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a paedophile himself, operating from Amsterdam… Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will. It was his work to ignore them all.
Someone touched his shoulders. He started. "Rebecca." He shook his head. "I'm sorry." He was still shaking with anger.
"Not your fault. He's a little shit."
"He's baiting me."
"I know." She kissed his back. "He makes it difficult."
"Yeah, well." He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. "He's always made it difficult."
She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in
Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep: