It was a neat square stuck on the house over the kitchen, with a big casement window. DS Quinn had pulled the curtains to stop curious eyes, but there was enough of a gap to see the trees in the park moving in the wind. The smell was stronger in here.
Caffery had the sudden sensation that something was standing in the hallway behind him. He turned quickly. The corridor was silent, just the street-lights glowing from the bedroom. You're imagining things now. Making things up… He moved quietly into the room, bending to pick up toys, turn things over, trying to imagine someone in the park looking through the window and watching Rory play. Wolverine stared silently down at him from an X-men poster next to the bed, Gundam and WWF models lay scattered on the floor try to imagine Rory crouched here playing with his toys and being watched. He turned. In the little sliver of window-pane between the curtains the bare bulb glared back. He snapped the light off and opened the curtains. The trees on the other side of the broken fence were less than fifty yards away.
He said he liked watching me in bed…
It was one of those odd cloudless nights in which the wind keeps the stars clean and the sky never seems to get properly black. In the park the trees moved as one, shivering where the wind licked at them. Caffery stood quite still, letting his attention move around the room behind him, up the walls, around the doorway then up, across the ceiling, over his head and out through the window, touching the sides of the house, down the garden path, over the fence and out, out into the night into the woods. Could someone sitting in one of those trees see into this room? Someone who liked climbing?
He went to Rory's bed and lay down, taking the torch out of his pocket and resting it on his stomach, conscious of the cold, bare window on his right. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, wondering if he was expecting something to happen something to hurtle through the window and land on him on the bed. Secret places. There is always somewhere to hide things. Not the place you expect. His movement in the room had set up a small rotation of the lightbulb above the bed. He watched it dreamily, circling circling, thinking of Ewan does everything circle back? Rory's South Park duvet smelt of fabric softener and faintly of leaves, and Caffery half closed his eyes, enjoying that smell, remembering the tree-house. Tracey Lamb… was she really lying… did she know?
He sat up, the torch rolling off and banging loudly on the floor. A fly had crawled out of the plastic rose at the base of the light fitting.
He jumped up on the bed, reaching inquisitive fingers to it, turning the rose on its axis to face him. There was a small square hole in the plastic he poked his fingers in, feeling the roughness of the edge. The square had been excised as if with a Stanley knife.
Fiona? His pulse was racing now, pressing on his ears in the silence. Fiona, this isn't you, is it? What would the science unit want with a sample of the light rose?
"Hal, I hope you're having fun in Cornwall, it's Darren, mate. Look, I'll see you when you get back but Ayo wanted me to call and say that she never got round to coming over to your house, see, and she's sorry but the ting is our baby got here last night." He paused for a moment and Benedicte had a picture of him, embarrassed, trying to be cool, shifting from foot to foot, being the big man. "He's a bit early, our baby, right, a month early, cos she, you know, someone went and got her all stressed up at work over some fink some filth, Josh, you're right about them, Josh man, and anyway little Errol, that's gonna be his name, little Errol, he's in one of them premie things -he's OK, like, but…" He paused and seemed to be wondering what to say. "Oh, man, don't get worried, he's OK, it's just we couldn't water no plants, and I'm sorry. We're going to open something together, the four of us, when you get back, and celebrate." He coughed. "Anyway, that's all, homeys. See you."
Benedicte lay against the radiator with her face in her hands.
She had a headache, cramps in her limbs, and even with the dribble of water her mouth was still so filled with a glue-like substance that closing it was uncomfortable. The papers said that Carmel Peach would have been dead within twenty-four hours in that heat if she hadn't been found. Smurf's breathing was laboured and Benedicte knew that she was deteriorating fast. She was such an old dog, a poor old dog, and so confused her eyes were dull and crusted and in the last few hours she had stopped moving, except to pant or whimper. Ben dropped her hands and took deep breaths, trying to stop herself crying. Ayo had a new baby, and she and Josh and Hal were all going to die.
Caffery found a mop in the kitchen cupboard and took it upstairs. He switched on all the lights on the first floor and stood on the landing, looking up at the hatch in the ceiling. Secret places. The attic is one of the most common places for 'missing' children to hide Always check behind the water tank. The first attending team had searched the attic at number thirty looking for Rory. Had they missed something?
He switched on the light and prodded the hatch. It swung open smoothly, and when he stood on tiptoe and pushed up his hand, he found a light switch and the rubberized feet of a stainless-steel fold-down ladder suspended in the opening. The light came on and the ribbed vault of the roof lit up like a church. Tucking the flashlight in the back of his waistband he pulled down the ladder and began to climb.
Caffery was six foot on the nose and the roof was too low for him: he had to bend his head slightly to stand. The attic was neat tea chests from some long-ago move, "Rory/clothes' written on one, "Kitchen' on another, rolls of orange insulating material and in the corner, where the shadows ran down from the walls, leaned a plastic Christmas tree and a Woolworth's bag full of red tinsel. Cobwebs strung across the ceiling clung to the lightbulb like a fairground ghost-train prop. He could feel the prickle of insulating material on his skin and that high, warm smell in his nostrils. Something was up here something that all the people who had come through the house had missed. He made a slow 360-degree turn, taking in every incongruity, and immediately he saw what he was looking for.
It was at the other end of the attic, right above Rory's bedroom: a small, indistinct pile of something, smeared like mud into the shadows, flies buzzing above it.
He picked his way across the joists, hand covering his mouth afraid of what you might find? He stopped half a yard away from the pile, waving away the flies. He was looking at a long, wet deposit of food half-eaten food slumped over polystyrene fast-food boxes, slimy hamburgers, a small pile of McDonald's cups, a pile of scrunched tissues. Off to one side a faecal mound, a tissue on top of it. And in the middle of it all a circle had been cleared in the insulating material, from the centre of which a single spiral of yellow electric light poked up into the room. When he went and stood above it he found he was looking through a hole straight down at a South Park duvet.
Someone had made a camp here someone had relaxed here, lived here, shat here, watched Rory from here, probably masturbated here. You fucker. He straightened up and looked around. Two yards away, leaning against next door's shared wall, was a piece of fibreboard. When he tried to move it he found it was light it came away easily and he pushed it to one side. He put one hand on the bare wall and leaned over to inspect what had been behind it.
Fucking hell you clever bastard.