She sat up, took the cigarette from between his fingers and took a long drag from it. "You mean Ewan?"
He wasn't going to answer that.
"Oh," she sighed. "Yes, you do, you mean Ewan." He felt her tapping his shoulder and when he turned round she was holding out the cigarette to him. Not looking at him. "Penderecki's dead now but you're still not going to give up, are you?"
He didn't answer. He took the cigarette, dropped his head and looked down at his black thumbnail. She was right. It should be over. Penderecki was dead. Ewan wasn't in the house. There was nowhere else to turn. He should be able to give it all up. But he knew there was more. There has to be. Maybe another place somewhere… A shed or a garage maybe he rented a garage…
Wearily he got to his feet, went into the bathroom and started to run a bath.
Now Roland Klare knew what he was doing. He had gone through the book and worked out the solution to the jammed camera. What he needed was a 'changing bag' – a dark bag in which film could be worked on without being exposed to light. It had taken a while to gather the things he needed, but Klare was nothing if not resourcefuclass="underline" the basis of the bag was no more than a dirty black bomber jacket found in the clothing bank on Tulse Hill. He had cleaned it and painstakingly stapled it closed along the front, a double seam of staples so that no light would come through. It didn't look much, but he thought it would work.
Now he pulled the blind and sat on the sofa, the 'bag' on his lap, and pushed the camera down one of the sleeves until it was in the main body of the jacket. Then he withdrew his hands, placed two broad rubber bands over the sleeves and pushed his hands back down them, making sure the bands rode up his wrists to seal the sleeves from light leaks. He found the camera, cradled it in his palms, and began to work.
Klare's hands were rather large and clumsy for this he had to take it slowly, biting the inside of his lip his concentration was so intense, trying to keep his eyes focused on a spot on the blind so they didn't wander around as he worked. The release catch he found quite quickly. The back of the camera sprang away and he opened it, brushing his fingers tentatively over the interior. The film was in there: he could feel it, half finished, stalled in its cage. Careful not to touch the image, he patted around until his fingers found the cartridge. "Good." He sat forward a little in anticipation. It was a tiny gap into which he had to push his fingers just to get a grip on the top of the canister, and when he did get hold of it he found he could only turn it a quarter of a rotation at once. Today he was feeling unusually patient. He took a breath, closed his eyes and let his fingers work in the dark like a Braille reader's, his left hand feathering over the mechanism to check that the sprockets were turning, his right tirelessly winching on the canister.
It took Roland Klare, with his big hands like spades, over an hour to get the film wound on. By the time he had finished and could flip out the canister with his thumbnail, his fingers were throbbing. He pulled the camera out of the bag, testing the winder mechanism before he put it aside and this time, to his surprise, it jammed once then suddenly gave. He stared at it, amazed. He flicked it back and forward a few times in disbelief. Without the film inside, the camera was working perfectly smoothly. Maybe it wasn't as badly damaged as he had thought; maybe the way the film had been loaded was the culprit. Pleased that he wouldn't have to discard the Pentax after all, he put it back in the biscuit tin and turned his attention to the changing bag, giving it a little shake.
The film canister was safe in there, but now Klare saw he had come to a wall. He didn't know the next step in the process he'd have to go back to the book. He sighed. He was tired, he needed a break, so he took the bag into the bedroom where it was dark, dropped it on the floor, went back into the living room and released the blind. The sun had climbed high in the sky over the park. He stood for a while, gazing out of the window at the sun-parched trees.
Caffery stood in a phone box in a side-street near the Shrivemoor offices, Souness and Paulina's red BMW gleaming in the sun a few yards away, and called Brockley station to report Penderecki's death anonymously: "My wife hasn't seen our elderly neighbour for a while I wonder, could you…" And somehow that made him feel slightly better, somehow it released a small part of the infection. Still, he had to fight to keep his mind on the case, to stop it floating away to Brockley where dark shadows moved along the railway line.
Souness had gone for breakfast and the few early arrivals in the incident room were subdued. Things were not looking good. The golden hours in which a case is often solved were over. They could now define the Rory Peach case as a 'sticker'. From here on leads would decay, connections would be forgotten. What they needed desperately was DNA, but the lab hadn't come back to them yet.
Kryotos had been unable to track down Champaluang Keoduangdy. Instead she had put a blue and white envelope on Caffery's desk for when he came in. Now he took coffee into the SIO's room and shook out the envelope on to his desk. Two Polaroids in plastic zip locks blown-up copies attached slid out. These were the photographs found in 1989 in a rubbish bin on Half Moon Lane. He'd been waiting for them, but now as he looked at them he found his mind wouldn't focus: it kept trying to saunter away, back across the railway track and into Penderecki's house, up the stairs, into the cupboards there has to be somewhere else, another hiding-place
"Stop it." He rolled a cigarette, digging his heels into the floor. He had to concentrate. He put on his glasses.
The first shot was of a young boy, maybe eight or nine. Caffery knew it was a boy for the simple reason that he was naked from the waist down otherwise the child would have been sexless as his face was turned slightly away from the camera. He was white, very thin and it was clear from his posture that he'd been bound that he'd been bound and tied to the white radiator he was sitting against. On the right of the frame was the edge of what appeared to be a melamine wardrobe and, taped to it, the side of a poster. At the edge of one of the copies an investigating officer from the eighties had circled an area on the floor and written in red the word 'foot?". Caffery examined the object. It could have been a human foot naked, five small flesh-coloured dabs. Toes? Quite slim and long maybe women's toes? But no: looking at the second photograph he could see it wasn't a woman.
This photograph, taken from a slightly different angle, showed the bound figure of an adult male. He was no more than a crooked trapezoid of limbs, legs propped at an awkward, unnatural angle, all snapped up and odd-looking, his head on one side, facing away from the camera. His arms had been crossed over his chest and he had been bound with sheets and pillowcases, like burial winding sheets. Behind him the wardrobe was in full view the poster was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one and beyond that was a blurred half-image of the small blond child. Above the boy's head, tantalizingly, the bottom edge of a window-frame. And that was all.
Dim old 1989. Caffery tried to stretch his mind back. He'd been doing his first board, getting a train to Luton, his girlfriend would have been he felt into the dark well of memories Melissa, maybe. Or Emma. She'd looked like Meg Tilly and he'd adored her for the mini-skirts and unfashionable clothes she wore. That year nearly seventy people died in the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, the Afghan war ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Champ Keoduangdy had been put into intensive care by a length of industrial conduit, and someone had dropped these photographs into a bin on Half Moon Lane.
Were they a hoax? If not a hoax then why had no one come forward? After twelve years someone somewhere would have said something. And if these two people had died shackled to the radiator in a child's bedroom why hadn't the bodies been discovered? He searched the photos for more clues, tracing his fingers across the swarms of pixels, darker here, lighter here. Were there enough similarities between this and the scene at the Peaches' house to link the cases? Maybe this was a staged scene an image of the troll's fantasy. Maybe that was him lying on the floor trussed up and that could be, what? A younger brother? The walls magnolia; the wardrobe MFI? There were a million other bedrooms like it… Suddenly he thought of Carmel, of how convinced she'd been convinced and embarrassed that someone had been taking photographs in their house while they were tied up. And as he thought of it he had the sudden feeling that somewhere there was an obstacle, something stopping things flowing, something diverting him. A vague unease. A vague itch, DI Durham would say. Someone wasn't telling him everything.