Nine or ten breeze blocks had been removed. Bracing his feet on two joists Caffery rolled up his sleeve, and slowly, slowly, as if he was feeling for something sharp, he put his hand into the hole. In the silent, unblinking darkness of the neighbouring attic his disembodied hand clenched and unclenched, patted blindly up the walls. He retreated and pulled the torch from his waistband, leaning forward a little to shine it into the darkness, and found he was staring into an identical attic. This one was unused there was no bric-a-brac piled up and the only chink in the geometry was the access hatch outlined in light from the hall below and the sound of a television playing downstairs. He shone the torch against the far wall and saw what he was expecting: another piece of MDF propped against the far wall.
Someone had burrowed along the top of the houses until they could get to Rory Peach.
Quickly he switched off the torch, climbed down the ladder and went into the street, walking backwards into the middle of the road, hands in his pockets, head back, looking at the roofs. These were terraced houses, low-pitched roofs: none of the attic spaces was big enough to convert, and if someone had a mind to, and an understanding of the flesh and bones of a building, they could probably make their way from one end of the street to the other. If they could find a way into one of the other houses from the street
He stopped.
Two doors down from the Peaches was the boarded-up shell he and the TSG officer had searched on the first day. Shit yes. He reached in his pocket for his mobile, trying to find DS Fiona Quinn's number in the memory.
Twenty-eight.
A hyena, DS Quinn knew, leaves its footprints she had always known its tail had brushed the walls somewhere inside number thirty: she just hadn't known exactly where to look. This was a familiar problem for forensic investigators: without good witness statements to direct them they were walking blind they couldn't cover an entire house with fingerprint dust, they had to be told where to focus. But now, with this strange eyrie, all sorts of possibilities had opened up. She knew she could get mitochondrial DNA from the pile of faeces; she also believed there might be other body fluids up here saliva, blood or semen that could give her a full profile.
Now she moved carefully around the attic, dressed in the ghostly protective suit that shielded her from the UV light she was using. The equipment she'd brought was her bazooka the "Scenescope': a combined long wave UV source and camera on a jointed wand, it could detect the smallest amount of body fluid.
Caffery remembered a time when these alternative light sources needed four men to carry them, remembered hearing how the technicians at the Brighton bombing sat in the corridor and used their feet to push the Scenescope's baby brother, the Crimescope, into the lift. Now the equipment arrived coolly in a tiny portable black box. But safety restrictions were still tight. The rest of the SSCU team had set up in the front bedroom, as far as possible from the light source, and sat with Caffery and Souness, crowded around the monitor, watching the screen, the only sound the big Scenescope fan whirring and the creak of joists as Quinn moved around overhead. The camera transmitted a distinctive blue circle to the monitor, a spotlight sliding along textured surfaces that looked like nothing more than skin under a microscope, until it slipped over a dab of something organic and a cold white flare raced down the wand to the screen and Quinn knew where to scrape for a sample.
"See that?" Caffery tapped the screen. "That's the hole in the floor for him to watch Rory."
"What the hell is going on?" Souness said softly. She had been called away from a charity gala in Victoria and was still dressed in a black silk suit and bow-tie. She'd grumbled about having to leave the event, but if Caffery had expected proof that she knew about Paulina and Lamb, if he'd expected tension in her voice, it wasn't there. She had driven over immediately, stopping on the way at Brixton station to pick up PC Palser the first attending officer who'd searched the attic. Now Palser was sitting awkwardly in the corner, staring at his hands, embarrassment written all over him. Souness was showing him her back, allowing him to stew a bit.
"And what's all this about our dentist friend?" she asked Caffery, unhooking her bow-tie and undoing the wing collar, letting it sit gaping around her neck. "And Champ?"
"Peach's cast doesn't match either bite. Champ doesn't recognize him. He's absolutely one hundred per cent certain it's not him."
"So what's going on with the DNA? Is there a mistake?"
"Quinny says they'll run it again, but…"
"But what?"
"I don't know." He chewed the cuticle on his black thumb. "I just don't know."
They wanted to take PC Palser into the attic to get his version of events, so when Fiona Quinn had finished they all went on to the landing. She met them at the bottom of the ladder looking positive.
"We've got a lot. A lot." She pulled off the lightweight TV-screen goggles and blinked: for the first time in forty minutes her view of the world wasn't via the cathode-ray tube. "Jack, I promise you, I'll have got something out of this."
"Can you get me anything in twelve hours?"
"Why? What's going on?" She unzipped the front of her suit the "Area 51 radiation suit', she called it -and shrugged it down off her T-shirt. "Someone's not telling me something the goalposts have moved."
"You can say that again." He drew his hand down over his chin, feeling the incipient stubble there. "If I told you what we're thinking you wouldn't believe me."
"You want the lab to rerun the DNA test?"
"Yes."
"Will do." She turned to PC Palser and gave him a sympathetic look. "All right, son?"
"Yes," he mumbled, not meeting her eye.
"Good. It's clear up there, so go ahead."
Palser was silent as the three of them climbed up to the loft. It was only as he began to show them how he'd done the original search of the attic that he got his blood back. "No one said it was food I was looking for," he protested. "I was looking for a kid. No one said nothing about food."
"But this was all here when you searched the attic -all of this?"
"Yes. But I was in a hurry, I mean, I don't remember the…" He pointed, embarrassed. "It didn't smell like this then."
"How about this? Did you see this when you came up?"
Caffery was crouched at the very edge of the roof, where it sloped down to the joists, resting his weight forward on his knuckles and staring down at the soffit the section under the joists on the roof overhang. Someone had removed the weatherboarding and he could see directly down into the back garden. There were two unwashed milk bottles on the patio twenty feet below. Someone had cut themselves a hunting hole if they had lain flat here and hung a small way through that hole their face would have been directly in front of Rory's window.
Outside, the night was unusually cool. As if all the heat had risen into the sky. Caffery and Souness stood for a while looking up at the clear stars, letting the wind ruffle them a little and take the smells away. The SSCU van's doors were open, and they could see the technicians busily chopping up samples, freezing what they could in the on-board freezers. These days, they routinely froze most samples -no one quite understood why, but DNA just popped right out of the frozen stuff in a way that it didn't when it was at room-temperature. Caffery rolled a cigarette and stared up at the sky, at the sickle-shaped moon so luminous and solid, it appeared cut out and pasted on the sky. He imagined Tracey Lamb looking at the same moon. Not now not that now He looked sideways at Souness. "Danni?"
"Aye?"
"Is there something you want to tell me?"
She looked at him, surprised. "No. Should there be?"
"No."
"What's this? What's with all these glaekit questions? What's going on?"
"Oh, nothing." He lit the cigarette. "Really, nothing." He believed her she didn't know. If there was a connection between Paulina and what had happened to Lamb that morning, Souness knew nothing about it.