"So remember back to when you joined. Do you remember what was in your head?"
"Oh, aye. I was excited. Came straight out the moment I got into Hendon I came out. But," she said, emphasizing the word with a little jab of the kebab, "I never used it, Jack. Even when the world changed and I could've used it, I never did." She put the food in her mouth, chewed. "Of course, that doesn't mean I never kissed a little ass. No. Nor kissed a little pussy neither."
"And you still love it?"
"Kissing pussy?"
He smiled. "The force."
"Aye. I still love it. Every minute of it."
"And you never feel you got in for the wrong reason?"
"No." She forked rice cubes into her mouth and looked around the restaurant, chewing hard, focusing her eyes on a point somewhere above his head. "But, then, nothing happened to me like what happened to you when you were a wain."
At that Caffery cleared his throat and sat back a little, looking down at his food. He knew Souness was waiting for him to pick up the baton. Suddenly he wasn't very hungry. "You know, don't you…" he looked up at her '… you know I only joined the force because I had some fucked-up idea I was going to find Ew He paused. "Find my brother."
"Aye, it doesn't take a genius to see that."
He sat forward. "But, Danni, I can't disentangle it. I get a case like Rory Peach and suddenly I'm ten years old again, fists up and wanting to take them all on wanting to bare-knuckle fight."
"So ye get angry from time to time. What of it?"
"What of it?" He pulled out his tobacco and quickly rolled a cigarette. "What of it? Well," he said, holding a lighter to the cigarette, 'well, one day it's going to go too far, I can see it. One day someone's going to push me and I'll do something I can't go back on." He dragged on the cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs, head back, eyes closed. Then he let out the smoke and rested the cigarette in the ashtray. "It's all about perspective that's what they'd call it, isn't it, perspective? Look at what I did at the hospital look at the way I laid into you, trying to batter it into you that there's someone '
"Ah, wait," Souness said. "I know what you're going to say."
"Do you?"
"Yes." She dipped the meat in peanut sauce and ripped a piece off the skewer with her teeth. "Aye, and I've been thinking about it too. You think there's still someone out there. Another family."
"Yes. I told you, I'm a dog with a bone." "s OK, Jack," she said, chewing hard. "I've spoken to the gov about it I can give you two of the outside team. Do whatever you want with them just bring them back with a smile on their faces. OK?"
He stared at her. "You're feeding me."
"No. No, I'm not. I think ye might just have a point. Now instead of sitting there with your mouth open like an eejit say thank you."
He shook his head. "OK," he said. "OK thanks, Danni thanks."
"It's nothing. Now, put that out," she jabbed the skewer at his cigarette, 'and just get on with your food. You look like a proper meal would kill you at the moment."
He stubbed out the cigarette, but when he pulled his plate towards him he found he still couldn't concentrate on the food. "What went on in that house, Danni?" he said after a while. "What the fuck went on in there?"
She used a fork to push the rest of the meat off the skewer into the sauce. "It's simple. Rory Peach got raped. By his father. It happens, you know."
"Then what was going on in that family?"
"I don't know." She forked some beef into her mouth and chewed. "I often wonder what it'd be like to rape. It's one of those things women wonder about not to be raped, but to be the one who rapes. Not very PC for an old dyke, is it?" She took a swig of Singha and wiped her mouth. "I had a conversation once with this rapist, and you know what he said? He said and I can remember every word, because it was then that I knew that whatever I did, however much I strapped my chest down and cut my hair, I'd never really understand what it feels like to be a guy he said," she sat forward and looked Jack in the eye, 'he said: "It's like your heart is sticking out, it's like you're biting down so hard on leather that your jaw cracks, it's like the hard-on to end all hard-ons, it's like having your soul dragged out through your dick." Souness sat back, stabbing her fork into the meat. "Pretty loony tunes, eh?" She stopped. Caffery had stood up. "Hey, where ye going?"
"Do you want another drink?"
"Yeah." She was bewildered. "Yeah, go on then, another beer." She put the food into her mouth and chewed as she watched him go to the bar, wondering what she'd said. Something was definitely a bit tangled in Caffery there was no doubt about it. Sometimes he had the eyes of a lion on a lead. When he got back with the drinks he was quiet.
"Jack what is it? Come on, talk to me."
"I think I'll call Rebecca."
"Aye, Rebecca. How is she?"
"She's fine."
"Good. Well, send her my love, then." She leaned over and took his plate. "You're not wanting this, are ye?"
"No go ahead."
She scraped what he hadn't eaten on to her plate, and started to fork her way through it. The meal finished early and Caffery found he didn't need the extra money he'd got from the cash point
On the phone Rebecca's voice was indistinct. "Jack -where am I – I mean, God," she took a breath, "I'm sorry, I mean where are you?"
"Are you all right?"
"I'm – I dunno drunk, I think. I think I'm lost, Jack."
"Where are you?"
"At the y'know, at the gallery."
"The same one I got you from before?"
"I think so."
"I'm only over the road. Wait for me."
The Satay Bar was only a hundred yards from the Air Gallery. He went inside, his tired eyes smarting in the smoke, and wove through the bar, past hanging aluminium panels, cast resin columns, tungsten pinpricks of lights, not meeting the cool, otherworldly gazes of all the modern faces in the semi-darkness. When he eventually found Rebecca, on the first floor, he stood for a moment and stared, as if he was seeing into another world.
A fully lit glass cabinet displayed models of pathology specimens in coloured fluid. In front of it, on matching chairs, sat four girls with pale East European faces and geometric haircuts. They wore intent expressions and were leaning forward listening to the man who sat on the red plastic sofa opposite them. He was tall and stricken-looking in a black polo neck and Caffery recognized him as a journalist from a late-night Channel 4 show.
"Like Michelangelo's blocked windows in the Medici library these are vaginas that go nowhere," he was saying, biting with precision on the ends of his words. "They invert the natural order of a phallo-centric society; they create the organic, the organ like, where a male-obsessed perspective thinks there should be a space. They are saying, "Look! Look at the tribal ness look at the vagina-ness do not ignore it!"
Rebecca sat next to him as he talked about her work. She was folded into the crease of the sofa, dressed in a T-shirt and a dragonfly-blue skirt. Her chin was down on her chest, her hands were loosely wrapped around an open bottle of absinthe resting on her bare knees and, although no one seemed to have noticed, she was fast asleep.
"Becky." Caffery put himself between the small audience and the sofa and held a hand out to her. "C'mon, Becky."
The journalist stopped talking and turned to look at him: "Yes?" He pressed a hand on his chest and lowered his chin. "Did you want to ask something?"
Caffery bent down to see Rebecca's face. "Rebecca?" She didn't stir. She'd had her hair cut since he'd last seen her. It stood in wild tufts around her little smudged face. Two clumps of black eyeliner had collected in the corners of her eyes and she looked like nothing so much as a casualty at a teenagers' drinking party. A little drunken pixie. "Becky come on." He took her hand, peeling the fingers from the bottle, and she stirred a little.
"Uh?" She looked up and her eyes zigzagged across his face. "Jack?" Her breath was sour.
"Come on." He took the bottle from her hands and put it on the table. "Let's go." He draped her hand over his shoulder, and bent down to put his arm round her waist.