Carl's circle had done time at some point or another -and that included the 'biter' that DI Caffery had been asking about.
"He was a weird one, him," said Carl. "Always reckoned women were dirty. You should have seen him, he had to put on rubber gloves before he touched any of the boys in case they'd been near a woman." He lived in Brixton and although DI Caffery hadn't said where the little boy had been bitten, Tracey had a suspicion it might have been on the shoulders. But in any case her predator instinct told her that actually it wasn't the 'biter' Caffery was most interested in at all in his questions about him she sensed a cover of some sort and it was only when he began asking about Penderecki's boy that she thought he was getting to what really interested him.
Penderecki's boy. Although Tracey knew what the shifty old Polack had done to the child, she had never been told who the boy was, neither his name nor where he'd come from. But, from the way Carl had built a mile-high wall of silence around the subject, she had always guessed it was because the boy meant something to someone important. She guessed there was money in it somewhere. And maybe, she thought, that was why Caffery was so interested.
She stopped. She wasn't far now. She could see the sun glinting off Carl's abandoned vehicles on the edge of the quarry: an old Triumph, a moss-covered caravan, a picked-clean Ford. Only another ten minutes to the garage, but she stood quite still, the pain in her feet forgotten, hardly registering the clutch of pheasants that rose screeching from the trees. Something was emerging from the dank, unexercised walls of Tracey Lamb's brain. Something about DI Caffery. Maybe, she thought, maybe he wasn't the beginning of her problems after all. Maybe he was the solution.
Roland Klare had spent the morning making notes, considering short-cuts, finding new ways of looking at it, and had finally worked out what he needed: a few sheets of print paper, a litre can of fixer, and some Kodak D76 powder. The photography book was clear: it warned him that he might damage the film if he didn't use a professional safelight, but he had decided to take the gamble anyway and added a twenty-five-watt red lightbulb to his list. He had turned out his pockets and drawers and old cider bottles full of coins, and had got together thirty pounds, all of which he put into a dustbin liner, twisted up and slung over his shoulder.
It was heavy, all that change, and it took him a long time to get to the bus stop. On the bus the other passengers gave him strange looks, sitting at the back with the dustbin liner squat at his feet. But Klare was used to people moving seats to get away from him, and today he sat quietly, his eyes wandering patiently around in his head, until the bus reached Balham.
He got off just outside the photographer's shop, the shop whose dustbins he routinely purged, and before he even thought of going into the front he slipped up the road and around the back. He put down the bag of coins, pulled over an old crate and stood on it, up on tiptoe so he could peer down into the big dumpster. His heart sank. It had been emptied recently. There was nothing in there except an old cardboard Jaffa oranges box. He climbed down off the crate, wiping his hands, resigned now, picked up the bag full of coins and trudged round to the front of the shop.
Twenty-one.
Neither Caffery nor Souness could believe what the computer was telling them. They sat for a long time, chairs a few feet apart, staring at the screen in silence. They had gone into the Police National Computer and come back with a CRO number a criminal records office number for Alek Pechickjian. Indecent assault on a minor. Sentenced in 1984 to two years.
"No." Caffery shook his head. "Nah I can't believe it. Just because he's got a record, doesn't mean '
"For indecent assault? Of a minor?"
"Jesus Jesus." He put his head in his hands, his mind racing. The first of Peach's of fences was pre-1985 and not back-record converted they had e-mailed the records office for the microfiche to be couriered down but Peach's second offence, a nominal term for a pub brawl in which a seventeen-year-old's eye had been popped out, had started at the end of 1989, shortly after the assault on Champ and the Half Moon Lane hoax. Caffery stared at the screen in disbelief. All the odd loose ends in Peach's account of the events at number thirty Donegal Crescent his denial of photographs being taken, his denial that he'd heard Rory at all in those few days, the fact that his wife and son were dehydrated and he wasn't all the drifting question marks seemed to be settling silently around Caffery.
He got up and took the photo fit of Champ's attacker from the file. Then he took all the crime-scene photographs and spread them out on the desk. "What do you think?"
Souness leaned over the photo fit and shook her head. "I dunno. What do you think?"
"I don't know either." He turned it one way then the other. "Could be, could be." He picked up the crime-scene photos. "That thump he took on the back of the head, d'you think he could have…" They both leaned forward and looked at the mark that Alek Pechickjian, Alek Peach, had left.
"If he manacled that end first…" Souness pointed to the photo. "And then the hands ye know, Jack, he could actually've done it…"
"No, no, no. Hang on." Caffery pushed his chair back. They had asked Bela Nersessian to leave for a moment and she was in the incident room with Kryotos; he could see her red hair bobbing up and down, as if she'd like to get a look through the window. He leaned closer to Souness and lowered his voice. "No, look. What are we saying? That he ran out the back when the shopkeeper knocked on the door? Climbed up that tree, dumped Rory, got back to the house and tied himself up all before the police could
His voice trailed away Souness was nodding. The shopkeeper had gone all the way back to his shop to raise the alarm and in that period Peach had had more than enough time. Quite enough to make it look as if he'd been attacked. Caffery and Souness had both heard of this sort of scene staging the manic writing on the wall, that was a popular one. And they had both seen enough to know that people can, if they put their minds to it, push themselves into unimaginable positions, inflict unimaginable injury on themselves. Caffery was thinking not only of auto erotic deaths -sad souls wrapped in tent bags, in rubber masks, faces obscured by used underwear, manacled on pulleys to the ceiling but of others which could have so easily been mistaken for murder: he had once seen a suicide who had pulled out his own intestines and snipped them into pieces with sewing scissors, another who had set fire to herself in the locked boot of a car. He knew too well how murder can masquerade as suicide and how suicide can masquerade as murder.