He smoked half a packet of tobacco and drank four cups of instant coffee thinking about it, but by the time the morning meeting started he wasn't any wiser, he was just more exhausted. He still had the smell of Penderecki in his nostrils as he went into the incident room with his notes for the meeting.
Everyone in AMIT knew that at this point in the Peach case they could allow themselves to be put in a holding pattern, to be stalled by waiting for the DNA, or they could pursue other avenues. This meeting was to ready themselves for a day on the pavement: one pod was going out into Brixton with a liaison officer from the child protection team they were going to talk to the kids, ask them about the mythic thing in the woods, their 'troll', treat their stories seriously another was going to help Kryotos to trace Champaluang Keoduangdy. A third team would spend the day with local child-sex offenders: they were going to push more holes into the already fractured South London paedophile networks, put a little careful pressure on the right pulse points, squeeze a little, until someone gave them a lead. It was for this reason that risk assessment officers of the Lambeth Sex Offenders Unit, and two members of Scotland Yard's paedophile unit had come down from Victoria. Souness's girlfriend Paulina, an intelligence officer for the unit, had used the opportunity to tag along.
It was strange to Caffery that only two people at the meeting that morning seemed to sense the tightness in him. One was Kryotos, with her unerring, almost chemical sense of him she watched him carefully from her desk, not challenging him, just assessing. The other was Paulina, whom he had met only a handful of times.
She was wearing a modern powder-blue skirt suit and looked like a piece of bright porcelain sitting on the desk, coolly smoking a cigarette, checking out Souness's work environment with her bland aquamarine eyes. It seemed to Caffery that every time someone mentioned the paedophile networks Paulina would glance up at him as if she knew how he had spent the night, as if she could sense what he was thinking. She had been the one to tell Souness about Caffery's connection with Penderecki, and he almost expected her to mention it now, to turn those unnerving eyes on him and say, "Maybe Mr. Caffery can help us here maybe he has contact with someone who could help."
Her focus on him seemed so acute that the moment the meeting broke up he made his excuses and went into the SIO's room, closing the door behind him.
The crows reminded Rebecca of a school of fish, the way they climbed up the air currents, twisting above the low roofs of Greenwich, turning to display their dark undersides and changing colour as one. She watched them from the table in her studio, a cup of coffee at her elbow, a cigarillo in the ashtray. She was cold.
This was the flat she had shared with Joni, until the attack. Until Joni's back had been broken by Malcolm Bliss and Rebecca had been… "Oh, God." She shuddered and picked up the cigarillo. She knew she should find a new place, get out of this flat, with the smells and memories, and the staircase leading up to Joni's room. But it was so easy just to go over to Jack's and let herself in: there was the sound of him showering in the morning, the smoky, urban smell of his suit when he came home in the evenings, sweat on his arms when he came back from his runs, his hard hot stomach against hers in the night. Yeah and his obsession, which is probably going to kill him.
She sat back in her chair and stared around her. The shutters were open flat white oblongs of light lay on the polished oak floors and along the right-hand wall her sculptures were lined up on a trestle table, ready to be taken to the gallery next month. Like little men, or little towers. Ridiculous. Jack's right they're ridiculous. On the left, stacked against the wall, her old paintings, the ones Jack liked, done before the attack. The artwork seemed to have come from two different places, two different mothers. On the left the old. On the right the new. And between them, poking out of the ceiling in the centre of the room, glinting slyly and scattering a secretive glitter on the walls, a butcher's hook.
Rebecca had got up on to a stool and screwed it into the plaster the morning after Jack turned on her in Tesco's. Of course it wouldn't take any weight -certainly not the weight of a body but she wanted it there: she thought it might help kick over the blank on her timeline. But so far it hadn't worked. So far the blank was still there an absence, a space a space with shape and weight and texture and it was directly here, under the hook, between the old paintings and the new. The attack. "How did you get from there to She clenched the cigarillo between her teeth and reached her arms up above her, trying to make a bridge, an electric charge to leap between the two. "From there to there." She tried to picture Malcolm Bliss she must have been in the room with him in that little bungalow… and Joni must have been there too but it felt like forcing a tired muscle, like trying to push her thoughts through a needle eye, and suddenly instead of Bliss she saw Dali's spindle-legged camels and the image of the bungalow slipped out of reach and she was left again with just the hook in the ceiling and nothing else.
Shit shit shit.
She pinched out the cigarillo and stood up. Her memory wouldn't make the jump here and now, so there was absolutely no reason to think it might when she and Jack were in bed. She was being ridiculous -ridiculous and childish. She ought to just toughen up. She pushed her hair off her face and tied it in a knot at the back of her neck. She was going to go over to Jack's tonight and they were going to start all over again.
Fourteen.
The 'barracudas' the ten-year-olds, just the age they started to be trouble were showing off. They made Fish Gummer uncomfortable.
"Can we do a trick now?"
"Yeah, let's do that trick thing."
"No, no." He checked the big clock at the far end of the steamy pool. "I think we're finished now it's gone half past."
"Yeah, let's do that." A muscular Nigerian girl in a lemon-yellow swimsuit was jumping up and down excitedly. "Let's do that thing where we swim through your legs."
"Absolutely not."
"The other teachers let us do it."
"I don't care."
"You get in the pool and we swim through your legs '
"Underwater '
"Yeah like mermaids '
"No, I don't think so."
Three of them slithered towards him at the edge of the pool, their wet, glowing little faces smiling up at him. "We hold our breath like this A head disappeared under the water.
"Yes yes yes!" a girl in pink squealed, throwing an exuberant backward roll in the water.
"No!" He was getting anxious. The remaining two had reached the pool edge and were giggling uncontrollably.
"That's it," giggled another. "We all hold our breath." She pinched her nose and disappeared into the water.
"And you put your legs open and we swim through them '
Now he saw a little hand come out of the water, groping for his ankle. "No!" He wrenched his foot away and fumbled for the whistle on the tape around his neck, a look of rigid fear on his face. "Just stop!" he said. "I said no. Absolutely no." The hand subsided and all the children flicked up their legs like dolphins and came to the surface, spluttering and shocked. They stared at him in stunned silence, getting their breath back, not knowing how to react.