"You know, it's funny that you like the troll for the Peach case…" Durham tugged at his chin and watched Caffery put his glasses back on and go back to his notebook. '… because the first thing I thought about when I heard the whole Donegal Crescent thing was the Half Moon Lane photo hoax."
Caffery looked up. "The Half Moon…?"
"Never heard of it?" Durham gave his wattle a reassuring squeeze. "No, why would you? It was twelve years ago. More. Nothing to do with Champ, just happened at the same time. Two Polaroids found in a council bin on Half Moon Lane."
"And?"
"Oh, it all blew over it was just a prank. But at the time it really griefed us some, I can tell you. Got the locals running appeals all over the place. A poster outside all the stations do you know this child? could be in danger, etc'
"I don't remember it."
"Well, the father we called him the father, we don't know for sure the father and the kid, a little lad, were both tied up, naked. The posters were a shot in the dark the boy's own mother wouldn't have recognized him from the photograph, they were so blurred and if you ask me the quality was even worse after the secret squirrels had been at it. Image enhancement my arse. Not that I'd like that to go any further, you understand."
"You think it was a hoax?"
He shrugged. "I don't know for sure, but in the end we decided it had to've been a prank because no one ever came forward no one was found, no one reported missing. The paedo unit at the Yard's got it on their books but here in Brixton we never heard anything more about it."
"Where did the photos go?"
"After the Denmark Hill lab, I suppose back here, but we clear our Book 66 out every year so they've probably gone for retention at Charlton or Cricklewood. I'll check the property vouchers if you want." Durham stood, pulling at his chin, looking at Caffery. Then he paused and, placing both hands on the table, leaned forward. "The reason it's funny is because it happened at the same time the Champ case was still active and when those photos came in I got a little itch on them. Know what I mean? I always wondered if it had anything to do with this troll character with the guy who did Champ. You know, here." He tapped his chest with a biro. "In my giblets. Nothing to go on, of course, just that little itch."
Twelve.
At midnight, when Caffery finally got home, Rebecca did it again. This time it was in the kitchen. She had been sitting on the table, drinking vodka from a champagne glass, hardly speaking as he poured himself a drink but when he drew the blind behind her, put his hands either side of her, when his jacket dropped open and he kissed her, she sweetly opened her legs and it happened all over again: she let him make her come, twice, and when he pushed himself up and undid his flies she sat up straight and turned her head away. "I'm sorry," she said, and slipped off the work top straightened her dress and left the room.
Caffery dropped forward, hands on the table. He took long, deep breaths and stared blankly down at the wet print she'd left on the table. Don't lose your temper. Don't prove her right. He waited until his pulse had slowed, then zipped up and followed her through to the living room where she sat silently watching the TV without the sound on.
"Rebecca."
"Mmmm?" She wasn't looking at him. "What?"
"I know why this is happening, Rebecca. I do know."
"Do you?"
"And you need to talk about it. You need to talk about what happened."
"I never stop talking about it."
"I don't mean to the press, I mean to me." Impatient now, he buckled up his belt. "Or just leave me be, Becky, just leave me be. Unless you want to give me a blowjob instead of giving one to the whole London art scene, then just leave me be."
For a moment she seemed to be about to say something but she changed her mind and dropped her hands on the sofa with an exasperated sigh. "God! What's got into you?"
"What do you think's got into me? I'm standing here, look at me, a raging hard-on, and you' he gestured at the TV 'you're watching the fucking television."
"Don't lecture me, Jack, when there's a few things of your own we don't exactly rip apart and put under the microscope."
"OK." He stopped her, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "This is disintegrating." He turned to the door. "When you want to talk you know where I'll be."
"Where?"
"In the bathroom having a wank."
He jerked himself off in the shower then pulled on his running gear and left the house without speaking, slamming the door behind him.
The night sky was the colour of sea. The deep blue that can sometimes be seen curled in the paw of a coral atoll. It was warm and someone's late-night music pounded out of a bed sit window and up into the starlit sky. Sweat dribbled into his eyes he concentrated on making his heels hit the tarmac straight and tried not to think about Rebecca. But his mind kept orbiting back to it, back to the stalemate they were in. Neither of them was going to give way, that was clear, they'd just get harder and harder in their determination. Shit, Rebecca. He loved her, he had no question about it, had a real tenderness for her that was hard to heal, but from where he stood he couldn't see a way past these rigid battle-lines they stood in.
"Jack," Rebecca said suddenly, sitting up on the sofa and turning to the door. Her sudden sense of him was almost as if he'd walked in. "Jack, it's because' she held her fists hard against her stomach it's because I'm wounded. Big bloody wound." She paused, open-mouthed, staring at the empty doorway letting what she had just said sink in. Then her face crumpled and she laughed out loud at the stupid drama. "Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm wounded! Wounded? Poor, poor wounded Becky!" She jumped up, went into the kitchen for the champagne glass and came shimmying back into the living room, twisting her free hand in front of her face, a long-nailed Shiva dancing on the bare floor. "Wounded you silly cow, wounded, wounded, wounded!" There was some grass she kept in an old Oxo cube box on the mantelpiece and she sang as she rolled a joint, sipping the vodka, her tongue getting numb and furry. She knelt down, put the glass on the floor, lit the spliff, took a few hits then suddenly rolled on to the floor, on her back, her hands over her eyes. "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God."
They were in a hole. The pair of them, deep in a hole: Jack, with his determined tearing apart of himself over Ewan it terrified her where that all might end and then, on the opposite side of the battlefield, she stood, with her mouth healed over, her eyes shut. All Jack wanted was for her to sit and discuss it calmly, to flush it through, make it clean again. I don't blame you, Jack, I don't blame you. She wanted, really wanted, to tell him. But she couldn't, and that was where the wound was. In her memory. Because what Jack didn't know was that all the way through Joni's inquest, through him patiently taking her statement in the hospital room overlooking the dripping trees, through him gently prompting her when she dried, through her pretending to cry when the coroner asked her a question she didn't know the answer to -even when she alluded to it in the press all along Rebecca had been telling a lie. The truth was something she hardly dared admit, even to herself. She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the ceiling. The truth was that of the attack in the little Kent bungalow a year ago she could remember nothing.
The pavement was warm, it had trapped the day's heat. He had been going for half an hour when he became aware of his surroundings. This was Penderecki's street he was running down. He'd come here without thinking about it drawn by some internal compass. He slowed to a jog, looking at the houses.
It was one of those peculiarly neat roads that bring with them the odd aroma of a seaside town, as if you might see Vacancies signs propped in front of the lace curtains. Penderecki's was half-way along it, flush with the others, but so luminous a landmark in Caffery's conscience that sometimes it seemed to him to protrude from the other houses, proud-bellied. He approached, feet curling down on to the pavement, and stopped outside, resting his hands on the gate, bending over for a moment, catching his breath, his sweat dripping in dark coins on the pavement.