"Right." Caffery sat next to Souness, looking carefully at him. "First of all we're sorry about Rory, Mr. Peach, very sorry. We're doing everything. Keeping positive."
Hearing Rory's name Peach squeezed his eyes closed and wiped his huge hand across his face, the thumb on the bridge of the nose, the palm covering his mouth. He sat like this for long seconds, not breathing. Then he dropped his hand and moved it in a convulsive circle on his chest, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling.
Caffery glanced at Souness and said, "Alek, look, we won't take long, I promise. I know it's difficult for you but it would help if you could tell us anything you can remember what he did while he was in the house, where he kept you, whether he left the house at any point."
Peach's hand stopped circling. His face tightened a little. He dropped his eyes and stared fixedly at the pulse-oximeter clip on his thumb, as if he was trying to focus his strength and will. Caffery and Souness waited expectantly, but Peach didn't speak for some time. They weren't going to get much for their twenty minutes. Shit. Caffery sat back and pressed a knuckle to his forehead. "Look, can't you even tell us how old he was? If he was white or black? Anything?"
Alek Peach turned to look at him. His eyes drooped, showing tired inner rims. He lifted his hand, shaky, bruised and swollen from IV needles, and pointed a finger at Caffery. His expression was ferocious, as if the I.C.U ward was his living room and Caffery was a stranger who had just swung in casually off the street and sat down on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.
"You." His chest shook, straining against the cotton pyjamas. "You."
Caffery put a finger on his chest. "Me?"
"Yes, you."
"What about me?"
"Your eyes. I don't like your eyes."
In the men's, Caffery stood on the toilet and stuffed a paper towel inside the ceiling smoke alarm. He locked the cubicle, rolled a cigarette, leaned his head against the wall and smoked slowly, only relaxing when he felt the welcome thump of nicotine against his heart. Instead of recognizing Peach's distress he had instantly grown angry at the hostility. His blood pressure had risen and he had shoved his feet out across the floor, preparing to spring up. It was only the cough and warning look from Souness that had straightened him out, prevented him slamming the door as he left the ward.
"Right," he muttered to the cubicle wall. "So Rebecca's nailed it. You are a fucked-up, hair-trigger little time-bomb." He flicked ash into the toilet pan and scratched the back of his hand. She couldn't have worked it better. As if everything was conspiring to back up her diagnosis of him. As if she'd paid them -Penderecki, Peach to say it: "The stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of other's and see itself looking back."
Your eyes. I don't like your eyes.
No one would ever know or guess just how far he had been pushed. They would never know how, in the hot centre of an estuary wood, panting and tangled in blood and wire, Malcolm Bliss had sworn to Caffery's face that he'd left Rebecca dead in a nearby house. '7 fucked her first, of course."
For that Caffery had killed him, a quick turn of the wrist. The barbed wire had punctured the carotid artery and irreparably damaged the jugular. "Christ," he'd murmured to himself when he read the postmortem protocol. "You must have tightened it harder than you thought." But that was all. He was still waiting, in a sort of numb suspension, a year later, for remorse to kick in. He thought he'd covered himself. He thought everyone believed Bliss's death had been an accident. He'd never guessed that people could look at him and see the killer, the liar, looking back out of the holes in his face.
No, fuck it. You're letting her get to you. He slung the cigarette in the toilet pan. If Rebecca wasn't ready to talk to him about what had happened last year -talk to him and not to the press then he wasn't going to let her run around excavating his feelings and making crazy connections between Ewan and his own inability to stay in control.
When Souness came out of the unit Caffery's heart sank. She was tight-lipped and sat in the passenger seat on the drive back to Shrivemoor in silence. From time to time she gingerly touched her face and scalp where the sun had burned them for two days in the park. They had hoped Peach would be able to tell them enough about the behaviour of the intruder for DS Quinn and the forensics team to focus on hot areas in the house, areas where the attacker had lingered, shedding hairs or fibres. But Souness's face said that hadn't happened. Neither spoke until they got to Shrivemoor.
"Not good news, I take it."
Souness sighed and dropped the bundle of papers on her desk. "No." She flopped into the chair, leaning back, her mouth open, her palms pressed against her burning cheeks. She stayed like this for a long time, staring at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts. Then she dropped forward, feet planted wide on the floor, elbows on knees, and looked at Caffery. "We're sooooo fucked, mate. So fucked."
"No leads?"
"Oh, we've got one lead a great lead. The guy wore trainers, Peach thinks."
"He thinks?"
"Yeah." She nodded at his disappointment. "He's not sure what make, but he thought maybe they were cheap ones and suggested Hi-Tec'
"Hi-Tecs? Magic. As if we've never seen that on a witness statement before."
"Good, eh?" She scratched her chin. "I pushed him for all he could give me. He co-operated I believe him. I don't think there's more." She swivelled the chair, fired up her PC and began to type up the report for Kryotos to enter in HOLMES:
On the 14th July I was at home at number 30 Donegal Crescent. My son Rory and me were playing on the Play Station in the basement. We were supposed to be going down to Margate the next day for a long weekend. No one else was in the room. I believed at that time that my wife, Carmel Peach, was upstairs, but I hadn't seen or heard from her for some time, so at about 7.30 (p.m.) I came upstairs to see where my wife was. I had not heard anything suspicious and all the doors were locked, the windows closed.
I came into the hallway and turned to face the stairs at which point I believe I was hit from behind. Nothing was said
Caffery, standing over Souness as she typed, pointed at the screen. "Didn't he hear the window breaking in the kitchen?"
"Says not."
"So this guy just drops into their hallway? Like Santa Claus?"
"That's how it sounds."
He frowned. He put his hand on the monitor and leaned over to read the rest of the statement:
Nothing was said and from that point on I remember nothing until I woke up later with a headache and a sore throat. I do not know how long I had been unconscious. I was handcuffed to something and blindfolded and gagged. After a while I realized it was the radiators I was handcuffed to. I didn't know which room I was in, but I could hear my wife crying and it sounded as if she was in the landing which seemed to be above and behind me, so I guessed I was in the living room. And I recognized the carpet because it's new. I didn't know what time it was because it was dark, but when the sun came up I could see the light through the blindfold and I thought it was coming front the direction of the kitchen at the rear of the house. I stayed in this place for three days, during which time I did not see or hear my son, although I could hear my wife crying on and off. I do not know what happened to my son. I glimpsed the man once only under the bottom of the blindfold. I think he was very tall, even taller than I am maybe. I would say in his late twenties, maybe thirty, because he seemed strong and he must have been strong to have dragged me from the hallway into the living room. He was wearing a pair of dirty white trainers, I couldn't see the make, but they looked like old Hi-Tecs or something. He had very large feet. I heard him moving up and down the wall and at one time he stayed in the corner of the room, crouched down -I could tell that from the sound of his breathing like he was going to pounce, but he didn't. All I remember is that he sniffed a lot as if he was smelling something. It's the way my wife is sometimes she was always thinking she could smell something. On, I think, Monday morning I lost consciousness. Knowing my son I do not believe that he would have voluntarily left the house with anyone. I do not know the man who was in my house and there is no one that I know of who has any grudge against me or against my family.