Tracey Lamb knew the moment she got through the door. She didn't see them, and they'd been clever, hiding their car, but she knew. She dropped the bucket and turned to bolt. A uniformed arm came out, pushing the warrant into her face. "Miss Tracey Lamb?"
"You never fucking asked to come in my house!" She thrust away the hand and swivelled so that she could look back up the hallway and see the extent of it. "You never fucking asked."
"I Didn't have to, Miss Lamb. You weren't here."
"No! You cuntsV
Everywhere the house was being clawed at. They were walking around in their shirt-sleeves, ignoring her wails, in and out of the rooms, snapping on their latex gloves. At the top of the stairs she could see a step-ladder placed in the attic access panel, and a woman's elegant ankles in tan high heels, cut off just below knee height. She could hear someone walking around up there and see the flash of a torch.
"Get out of my fucking attic!" she yelled up the stairs.
An officer put both hands on her shoulders. "Miss Lamb, I think you'd be better off just letting us get on with it."
"You fuckers oh, God She knew she couldn't fight this. Caffery that bastard that fucking-shit-for-brains piece of filth. She sank to the floor, her hands in her hair. "You fuckers."
The woman in the attic came carefully down the steps and passed an old blue shoebox, covered in cobwebs, to the PC at the foot of the ladder. He turned and carried it down the stairs.
Lamb saw him coming towards her and was furious. "Don't you dare take my things." She grabbed hold of his leg. "Give me back my things give me that."
"Yowl" The PC tried to wrench away his leg, holding the shoebox in the air out of her reach, but Tracey clung on. "Get off get her off me, someone!"
"Miss Lamb," another officer said. "That contains evidence."
"I know what it fucking contains. It's my bollocking shoebox '
"Get her off me '
With unexpected speed Lamb jumped up and swung out her arm, catching the PC enough of a blow for the box to tumble to the floor. "Jesus, you cow The contents spilled out, slithering along the floor. For a moment everyone fell quiet, staring at the images among their feet. Even Lamb was momentarily shocked by what she saw. She stood over them, her body curled forward, her knees half bent, her face white as if she had been about to fall to her knees.
"Tracey, let's make this as easy as '
"FUCK OFF."
There were thirty or so photographs the old type of print with a small white border around them, the images grainy. They showed a tiny blonde girl of about six sitting on a garden bench. In some of the photos she wore hot pants with bib and braces, a bunny rabbit embroidered on the bib. Her hair had been back-combed and given a shoulder-length sixties flip, like an adult. In some shots she was pictured playing with a beach ball; in others the bib was peeled down and she was proudly baring her thin white chest, her head tilted on one side for the camera. In two photographs, which had fallen near the back door, between the feet of an embarrassed officer, one slightly covering the other, the same little girl was on a bed. She was straddling the face of a grown man. No hot pants in this one. No knickers.
"No!" Lamb fell forward, landing face down on the photographs. "No they're mine, don't take them, pleaseV She moved her arms compulsively up and down like an exhausted swimmer trying to stay afloat, gathering the images under her body, one Wellington boot coming adrift.
"Come on, Miss Lamb." The silence in the hallway broke, and someone put a hand on her shoulder. "Get up. And pull your skirt down too you're showing the world what you've got."
"Get the fuck away from me She batted the hand away. "Let go."
The PC, afraid Lamb might roll on to her back and kick at him worse, that he'd see more of what was under her skirt backed away a touch, looking up at his colleagues for help.
"Miss Lamb," a WPC tried, 'that's crucial evidence you've got there. If you don't let me near it I'll have to arrest you. Can't you see what's happening to that poor little girl there?"
Tracey Lamb, lying like a frog on the floor with all her limbs moving at once, became still at this sentence. The two officers exchanged glances, wondering at this sudden hiatus. Then Lamb rolled on to her side and covered her face, her chest convulsing, tears making mirrors of her red cheeks.
"Miss Lamb, you have to get up have you seen '
"Yes, I have seen, I do know," she wailed. "Of course I've seen. Who do you think she is, you cunts? Eh? That "poor little girl" just who do you think she is?"
They had to drag her, one on either side, out of the house and over to the car, past the rusting oil containers, the old ivy-covered engine hoist. The arresting officer had just spent a day at Hendon learning the Quik-kuf arrest technique. By the time Caffery arrived at 11 a.m. the PC was using a ballpoint to close the double-locking pins of the handcuffs and Tracey Lamb was under arrest.
It took until lunchtime for the MG 1-16 forms to be filled in and signed so that Tracey Lamb could be officially charged with the indecent assault of the boy in the video. The interviewing officers members of the paedophile unit down from Scotland Yard had brought the video with them. They'd had it for ten years and had been looking for her all that time. A wig, they told her, didn't make much difference in identifying her. After she'd been charged they agreed with the custody officer that she could be bailed.
Outside, on the trimmed lawn in front of the police station, she lit a cigarette and stood for a moment, ignoring the council workers coming in and out of their offices for sandwiches, and gazed up over the unfinished stump of the cathedral tower, out to the clouds moving in ranks across the sky. Shit. She couldn't believe it just couldn't believe it. They'd warned her that there might be other charges under the Obscene Publications Act, which 'might arise in the course of our investigation', but the duty brief, Kelly Alvarez, a little Mexican-looking woman in a navy suit with a grubby lifeboat sticker on the lapel, told her it wasn't as bad as she thought. They only had one tape, and the photos taken of her as a child would help establish 'the enormous influence your father and later your brother exerted over you. Don't worry, Tracey, we might, if we're lucky, get away with a non-custodial."
But she couldn't accept it. She'd been hauled in before, of course, done her own bits of time here and there, but what really slaughtered her was the money. When the unit had dragged her out of the house and into the panda car she'd caught sight of Caffery standing just inside the trees, watching, a stuck sort of look on his face. Now she didn't know what to think.
"How did they find me?" she wanted to know. "Who fitted me up?"
Alvarez shrugged. "They've had the video for years."
"But how did they know it was me?"
"I'll find out I promise. Now, don't worry about this, Tracey it's not the end of the world."
"Of course it's not," she muttered to herself now, walking away from the station, down the sunny Bury streets. Like a bag lady in your Wellingtons. "Not the end of the fucking world."
She paused, the cigarette half-way to her mouth. A familiar car. Just crouching like a cat at the corner of the road. Quickly she turned on her heel and walked in the opposite direction, pulling the collar of the T-shirt higher as if it might make her invisible.
Caffery had seen her coming out of the turning ahead and started the car. He was wired, so alert his eyes hurt in those few hours that Lamb had spent in the police station everything had come into focus: now he understood the tail on the country lane yesterday. Souness's red BMW. Rebecca hadn't gone to the police, it was all down to bottle-blonde Paulina -infant-blue eyes and a pedigree car. An intelligence officer for the paedo unit, in the incident room she had latched on to him instantly. She must have heard about Penderecki's death, must have been watching him. Souness hadn't said anything about it over dinner last night. She must have known she knew that Paulina had taken the car so what was all that trust and love and tolerance shit last night? Now he was in the business of waiting for the other boot to fall, waiting to get the first sinister hint that Souness or the paedophile unit were talking to the CIB Let's count your breaches of the discipline code, shall we? Corrupt practice, abuse of authority. He knew the whole thing was about to crash around him and now he just had time to give it one last shot.