He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the house. How long would it be before one of the team came knocking on this door asking about the troll? How long before Danni's girlfriend, Paulina, with her agile little mind and her databases, would point out the similarities between what had happened to Rory and what had happened two and a half decades ago to Ewan? Again he got that image, that slow spreading image of fingers reaching out under the soil. Of Penderecki touching fingers with the troll.
He straightened. Tonight something about Penderecki's house struck him as odd. The bathroom light was still on and the giant lantern, red and yellow and grey, was still hanging there. He thought it looked a little bigger. He stood for a moment, frowning, then slowly pushed open the gate.
He had never walked up Penderecki's path before -on the few occasions he had ventured to the house he had used the back route and travelled under darkness because Penderecki, being a criminal, knew his rights inside out and would have snapped restraining orders, quia timet orders, down on his head without blinking. The front garden was a mass of candy floss-pink mallow, like crystallized sweets, thin as paper, gone native and seeming to move as if there was a breeze here. Long grasses brushed at his aching calves. At the bottom step he paused.
The front door still had its original leaded glass a hill and a windmill, sun rays delineated in black. As he climbed the two steps he knew, he could hear them, the hum of them, the hum of wet bodies sucking and breeding, and then he could see them, individuals blackening the rays of the glass sunrise, and instantly he knew that whatever was hanging in Penderecki's bathroom, it wasn't a Chinese lantern.
What Rebecca did remember was this: Night. She is in bed with Jack.
In the morning they wake up. It's raining.
After Jack has gone to work she has coffee and toast.
She notices Joni hasn't come home.
She phones around and discovers that Joni is at Bliss's flat.
She puts on old shorts and a T-shirt and begins the cycle journey to his flat.
Blank.
Blank.
Blank.
A flash of light and something a knife? A hook?
Blank.
Blank.
Another light a doctor shining it into her eyes.
Blank.
Just a little scratch hold still, you won't feel a thing.
Blank
Jack, in his hired mourning suit, bending over her hospital bed on his way to Essex 's funeral.
Jack again. Taking her statement. When she passes her hand over her face, embarrassed to admit that she can't remember, he looks at her sympathetically and gives her a prompt trying to make it easier on her.
Did you see Bliss take Joni?
Take her?
Into the hall where we found her.
Oh, yes, that. I Yes, I saw that happen. He carried her.
From a distance Rebecca's most striking feature was her resilience: she wore it like a bright red winter coat sometimes naturally and sometimes self-consciously. Always unmissably. She knew it could make her appear brittle, but she also knew why it was there. She'd had to grow it, like a new pelt, early in life, when she realized that her father would never be prised away from his obscure metaphysical apologias, and her mother would never be tricked down from the place she floated, doped and fat on imipramine. "The daughter of an English professor and a clinically depressed beauty', was how one journalist had summed her up. It took Rebecca a while to recognize that this was why she couldn't admit to the blank section of her memory: it was an admission that her tough little character was a lie, that she'd been left out of control for a while without a skin, open to infection. She didn't think she'd ever be able to talk calmly about it. How can you not remember?
For a year now she'd kept a lid on it unticlass="underline" Think about what it was like for me to find you hanging, Rebecca, hanging from a hook in the fucking ceiling. It was the first time she'd got a glimpse of what had happened that day in Kent and now she found she couldn't look at Jack's face above hers without the fear that Malcolm Bliss's would appear imposed over it. Something was on the move in her something that wouldn't let her lie flat on her back without squirming, something that wouldn't let her sleep a night through. She rolled on to her front and began to get up it was important to Rebecca, very important, that she didn't let anyone know the truth.
At home Rebecca was asleep. Or pretending to be. Two lipstick-stained cigarillo butts sat in an ashtray next to the bed on top of an article about the Turner Prize. Caffery changed into joggers, a sweatshirt and lightweight walking boots, got some tools from under the stairs and went into the back garden. He waded out through the undergrowth, past the green Express Dairies crate that Penderecki had used to stand on, through the nettles and submerged branches. The cutting was quiet, the last train gone, and down here, below the level of the city, there were cooler, clearer isotherms. Along the empty tracks the signals glowed green. Caffery crossed quickly, hearing the startled movements of an animal in the undergrowth. On the opposite side he found a fox path or maybe it's Penderecki's path leading straight to the garden.
The back of the house was silent and dark, the fence rotten with water. He moved quickly through the garden, his chest tightening as he got nearer. And now why hadn't he watched more carefully? he saw that along the metal frame of the broken old annexe flies gathered like clusters of hanging black fruit, rippling lazily.
He used his Swiss Army knife to gouge away the ancient putty of the kitchen window, flaking wood and paint on to his sweatshirt. Levering out the panel pins, he eased the pane from the frame and the stale trapped air inside the house came at him like a train. He could smell what was in the bathroom the stench that stimulates the rarely stimulated root of humanness the smell of opened human bowels, the smell of the dead sitting up in their graves and exhaling into the night. He could hear the flies No way, no fucking way, this can't be happening as he reached in, turned the key and opened the back door.
Quiet.
"Ivan?"
He stood there, counting to a hundred, waiting for a response.
"Ivan?"
He'd never addressed Penderecki by his first name before.
"Are you here?"
Still no reply. Only the pounding of his own blood in his ears. He stepped into the annexe.
Once twenty years ago, before Penderecki had got wise to him and started locking the doors Caffery had sneaked in here, and the surprise had been how ordinary the house was. Damp and fraying, but ordinary for that. Just an old man's house. Patterned carpets, a gas fire, a folded copy of the Radio Times next to the sofa. Milk in the fridge and a paper bag of sugar on the work top The home of a twice-convicted paedophile, and there was milk in the fridge, sugar on the work top and a Radio Times in the lounge. Now, as he moved through the rooms, he was struck by how little it had changed. The house was smaller, the wallpaper yellower than he remembered, a strip of it hung from the ceiling above the stairwell and the carpet was shiny with dirt. A Local Shopper newspaper lay on the doormat with a pile of flyers from local restaurants, but apart from the flies it was all so unchanged it was like having his memory shaken out in front of his eyes.
On the small window-sill at the bottom of the stairs was the digital readout that he knew Penderecki used to monitor phone calls. On top of it sat a ripped-open brown envelope. No letter inside but the return address was the Oncology Unit, Lewisham Hospital. The first clue he stuffed it into his pocket. Oh, Jesus, he thought, oh, Jesus, let this not be happening. He turned to the stairs, moving slowly, dead-fly husks crunching underfoot. Above him the living insects thrashed their wings in a single low note, in and out -as if the house was breathing with them.