She stayed there, her eye bulging down from the ceiling like the silent dome of a CCTV camera clicking on and off. There were no sounds from the hallway for several minutes. She imagined him opening the door and simply stepping out into a summer's day, bluebirds maybe, carrying a ribbon in their beaks, flying over the park.
The door slammed and she could see the reflection coming back. One tall, with heavy dark hair, one her son, being led back into the room the familiar ease of an older brother guiding a small boy through a shopping centre. Except that Josh was crying silently.
She should have stayed, should have pushed through the ceiling, should have torn away her own skin before she let someone hurt Josh, but instinct sent her squirming back up through the hole, whimpering like a child, pulling the dangling light fitting behind her like a trap-door spider. Her ankle twisted, pain shot up her leg, but she didn't scream.
She knew that figure she knew exactly whose it was. And now everything made sense.
Caffery left the Jaguar in the car park, forgot to pay and display, and raced into the building. He took the stairs two at a time, the squeal of his shoes on the shiny lino making orderlies pushing wheelchairs stop and stare.
He ran. Ahead of him, at the end of the long, polished corridor, the door to the I.C.U flew open. A nurse came out, pressing a crumpled paper towel against the bib of her uniform. As he got closer to her he could see darkness on the towel and when they passed each other he saw it was blood that was mashed into her bib.
The door opened again and this time the police officer came out, his face pale, blood on his hands. "In there." He nodded. Caffery pushed past him into the unit.
The window in the nurses' room was open, a soft breeze playing through the ward. In Peach's small annexe curtains had been pulled around his bed, and two nurses, faces set, busied themselves, silently mopping the floor and the walls. The curtain, lit from within like a vast, stretched Hallowe'en lantern, had a huge peacock-tail stain in the centre, a great, plumed splatter of blood, almost the size of a human. And beneath the bed on the floor where the nurses mopped shiny and rubbery as black PVC, more blood flattened out towards Caffery's feet.
Two miles away in Brixton DC Logan was enjoying that Red Stripe in the Prince of Wales. The marketing girls at Clock Tower Grove had been funny with him, stared at the sweat marks under his arms, so he'd given up and come back down the hill. He could fake the report, he decided. Jack Caffery, it was well known in AMIT, had gone off the rails recently: probably his head done in by his nutty girlfriend with her trick pelvis and weed habits. DI Jack Caffery was crazy. Everyone knew he was letting loose in all directions, giving everyone both barrels for no reason. And Logan had not liked the sly threats Caffery'd made about his overtime. Young Turk, my arse, Logan thought, going to the bar for a refill.
Twenty-four.
In Norfolk the forest at the top of the quarry was quiet, only the ghostly pitter-patter of rain on the leaves. Every ten minutes or so a car went by on the road half a mile away. Some had their headlights on although it was midday. Tracey Lamb lit a cigarette and leaned back against the rusty old Datsun, staring at the cars. She felt confident, pleased with herself. When she got home yesterday she had taken Carl's 'book' and sat in his bedroom, on his bed that bed was his pride and joy black and silver lacquer with mirrors set in the headboard, and started calling his friends. None of them seemed to know about Penderecki's death as if they cared and when she told them about the visit from DI Caffery they all went into a panicking free fall
"Jesus Christ, Tracey'. Don't bring your shit to my doorstep."
"It's not just my shit '
And then horrified realizations at the end of the line. "Tracey? Tracey, whose fucking phone is this? Don't tell me you're calling on your own phone?"
"Why?"
"Oh, you stupid fucking slag, you're even stupider than I thought And down went the phone. By the time she'd got to the end of the book the bush telegraph had been humming and the phones had all been taken off the hook. She had sat there smoking, among Carl's barbells, the weight-lifting belts and his DVD collection. She'd wanted to cry. The gates were closing and she'd been left outside. Penniless.
Well, fuck you all, she'd decided fuck every last one of you, you bunch of perverts. She should have given them all up to Caffery the arse holes
Now she wiped her face, threw the cigarette into the undergrowth, straightened and coughed up a little phlegm. Here the grass and ferns stood high and thick and undisturbed; this was the little clearing Carl had used for dumping dodgy vehicles. At the far end, past the dead cars and among the wild poppies and storks-bill, so far over it was almost in danger of falling into the quarry, was the caravan. It was old the rain was turning it green in places and the scratched acrylic windows were thick with condensation. Peeling letters on the side were a reminder of Carl's attempts to start a hot-dog stand. The business hadn't taken off, but the sign was still there she could see a faded stencilled price list, "Hot Dog 15p', and the nailed-up hatch he'd cut in the side. The Borstal boys used to live in the caravan when they stayed. They always seemed to be drunk on White Lightning cider and puking up into the quarry. Carl, who could always find work for an extra pair of hands, had liked having them around, especially in the late seventies when he had somehow wangled the licence to pick up wrecks from car accidents. "Cut and shunt', they called it, and most of the write-offs somehow found it back on to the streets with a little help from the Borstal boys: re sprays welding, fibreglass filling, get rid of those etched windows. Carl would pay them in duty-free cigarettes and gin from his beer runs to Calais, or he'd give them the car radios to fence if they could stop the bereaved parents claiming them. How many times had Tracey witnessed one of the Borstal boys standing in the garage explaining to a couple why they couldn't have the radio from their dead son's car: "The radio's not in a very pretty state, as it happens, probably best left well alone eh?" And if they persisted: "I never wanted to say this but you can't 'ave the radio cos there's claret all over it and something worse clogging up the tape deck." That would usually end the argument.
They'd cut up cars like abattoir animals using every spare piece. Carl really had a way with him the only thing he hadn't been able to out-think was the cancer. He got it, like a present, for his forty-eighth birthday.
"It's cancer of the sixty Capstan a day, love. It's the same way your mother went it'll be the way you'll go too. Family tradition." He'd always been rat-thin, but when he died Carl was even thinner like something from a concentration camp, she thought. And as soon as he'd gone the others lost interest and drifted away, and the wind came in off the fens and blew through the garage at night and made the corrugated iron rattle.
Now Tracey found her keys and got back into the old Datsun. She was hot in spite of the rain and immediately the windows steamed up. She put the radio on, turned the car round and drove off along the top of the quarry, the car jerking and lurching in the potholes. Wet ferns and nettles slapped down on the windscreen and behind her the caravan's little curtained window got smaller and smaller until it had disappeared in the dripping forest.
She had a plan, and had just taken the first steps towards making it a reality. She knew that there was nothing left for her here Carl's death had left her high and dry: she didn't know how she was going to make next month's rent she didn't even know how much it was, or whether Carl had a deal with the landlord. Christ, she didn't even know who the landlord was. You always kept me away from the money, Carl, didn't you? But she had some ideas. Once, twenty years ago, Carl had gone to Fuengirola he knew people out there and had some business to deal with. It was the only time he'd been out of England, and he'd come back with stories of drinking cocktails on yachts and a postcard of a little village that looked in the sun like sugar cubes stuck to the edge of the mountain. It looked like heaven up there so close to the sky, and the olive trees and the bright flowers hanging over the walls, blazing like gypsy scarves. Tracey Lamb felt sure she could be happy there. And she thought that the key to that happiness, the money to make it a reality, might come from DI Caffery's need to discover what had happened to Penderecki's boy.