"Aye, aye I wouldn't be surprised. Come on let's get them back to Shrivemoor." She tucked the torch into her waistband and started gathering up the photos, stuffing them into the tin. "Come on."
She squeezed her way back past the tables to the bedroom window and glanced out. In the street below cars were arriving subtly as ants from a nest, clustering around the foot of the building. "Good, they're here."
"Right." He closed the door and came out from behind the tables. "I want to look in the cupboard in the hall."
"I thought you'd done it."
"Nope. Come on."
In the hallway he stood for a moment, his hands resting on the door. Logan had been up here on the first day of the investigation, Caffery remembered seeing Roland Klare's name in his statements, but this writing "Hazard' was so small Logan could easily have missed it. He tried now to picture the size of the room beyond. Another bedroom? No door handle just a brass knob, so maybe a cupboard? Just like Cartnel Peach, sealed away in a cupboard, a warning scrawled across it.
"Come on, Jack," Souness stood next to him, clutching the tin to her stomach. "We haven't got all '
"OK." He pushed the door. It opened smoothly and he found he was looking at another small cupboard. The bulb was out and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light, but when he did he put his hands on the edges of the doorframe to keep his balance.
"What is it?"
"Uh." He wiped his mouth. "I don't know. Give us the torch."
Souness passed the torch to him. He clicked it on and let the beam play around the small area. At the back of the cupboard was a waist-high glass tank. Like a fish tank. "There's something at the back of the cupboard."
"Then go and have a look."
"Yeah." Yeah, sure, no problem. The tank was about two-thirds full of liquid, semi-opaque, and near the surface something clogged floated. Sure, something's fucking floating in it but that's no problem
"Come on, Jack, let's get on wi' it."
"It stinks sure you don't want to do it?"
"Ye wee coward."
"You do it, then."
"No fucking way that's a man's job."
"Right." He took a deep breath and stepped inside. "First off, there's something on the floor here." He let the torch play across the wall to the right. "Clothes," he said. "A pile of clothes on the floor." He could come back to those later. "And, uh, then, this tank…" He stepped nearer, let the light play over it, and immediately saw that the object floating in the yellowish fluid was a tangle of clothes. Clothes floating in he bent nearer clothes floating in "Jesus." He took an involuntary step back.
"What?" Souness said. "What is it?"
"Piss. It's only about a hundred gallons of piss."
"Jesus-'
"Crazy fucking bastard." Caffery shone the torch into the tank. Men's clothes, a nylon zip-up top, a hooded tracksuit, three pairs of trainers. Roland Klare had been storing clothes in two feet of urine. "Crazy, crazy fucking bastard '
Benedicte was fevered, lightheaded. Her skin was scratchy, there were sores inside her mouth from her manic suctioning of the copper pipe, and her finger-pads were raw from digging into the floor. It had been a day's work to push Smurf's corpse as far away as she could. She had covered her with Hal's shirt, but the bluebottles had managed to find their way under it and were feeding on the lush est choicest food they had ever known. They proliferated, doubling their numbers it seemed, in her fever, every time she opened her eyes.
Sometimes she knew she was awake, and sometimes she wasn't sure. Her eyes raced around inside their sockets, lights floated in and out, and sometimes she could see her life before this flickering along so happily, so happy and smooth, only soft edges and milky comfort and, look, there she was with Josh and Hal and Smurf, the whole family, sitting on the lawn. It was summer time they were wearing shorts, Josh's Pocari Sweat canister was on the steps, a radio played, fresh cut grass stuck to the back of Josh's legs when he got up to jump into the paddling-pool. Then she could hear Josh downstairs crying. Josh? Was that really Josh? And the other noise? What was that? An animal grunting. Or was it a man? Sobbing?
Ben come on now, come on wake up.
Josh? Sweating, her heart thudding, she opened her eyes in the dark room. Moonlight on the ceiling. Over in the corner the grey shape of her poor dead puppy. She was awake. Really awake. Had that been Josh, crying? She rolled on to her side so that her ear was pressed against the floorboards and listened to the house under her. Silent.
She'd imagined it.
She crunched up her eyes and tried to go back to the picture of Josh and Hal sitting on the grass. But her brain seemed swollen, as if it was pressing against her eyes, and she just couldn't do it. She couldn't see their faces. In just five days her son and her husband had been reduced to a few blurry images Josh a tiny, defenceless shadow with grasping hands, and Hal a dark landscape in bed next to her at night.
"Oh, Josh," she whispered. "Hal, Josh, I love you."
The house was silent as she closed her eyes again. Over the roof she could hear a plane. She had a sudden image of the light in the cabin, the lovely rosy light of sunset racing around the cabin Hal and her on the way to Cuba in the days when no one went to Cuba, a travel agent would laugh if you asked to go to Cuba, and you had to fly through any number of Caribbean islands just to get there. And he had wanted to go because he wanted to see the furniture factories in Holgufn. She held her hands across her face and imagined a sea she had always wanted to visit a magical sea, the sea of Cortez maybe a mysterious sea where whales come to mate and strange singing could be heard coming across the water at dusk…
As she dreamed she twitched, lying on the floor, chained to the radiator, the flies landing on her eyes.
Coming down the front steps of Arkaig Tower Souness started to walk more slowly. In the lift she had been flipping through "The Treatment', the odd little vade me cum from the desk drawer, shaking her head in amazement, and now she was so absorbed in it she almost came to a halt. Caffery stopped and turned to look at her: "Danni?"
"Fucking beautiful." She shook her head and gave a low whistle. "Fucking beautiful."
"What is?"
She looked up. "It's all here everything."
He came to stand behind her, leaning over her shoulder to read: "Exposure to female hormones" what the fuck is that?" He tried to pull it away from her but she shrugged him off.
"Get off." She held it nearer, reading carefully. "Milky smells offensive. Prolactins are heavy " '
"What're prolactins?"
"I don't fucking know, do I?" She closed the book, put it in her pocket. "We'll get it back to Shrivemoor and have a proper look. It might tell us where those poor wee fuckers are." She looked around the deserted streets. "Now. Where did we put the car?"
They arranged an emergency meeting to hammer out plans for hunting down Roland Klare, and while they waited for everyone to arrive they made coffee, sat in the SIO's room and Caffery called Rebecca to make his excuses "No, honestly, Jack, it's OK. I'm watching Eurotrash repeats anyway." He wanted to kiss her for it. Souness called Paulina with the same story and as she talked Caffery sat, staring at his reflection in the window, listening to the conversation, waiting to hear his name mentioned. But it wasn't, and when Souness put down the phone she immediately turned her attention to the book. He was relieved the silent pact held; Roland Klare was all they were going to talk about tonight.
They sat, shoulder to shoulder, like children at school, and read "The Treatment' from cover to cover, hardly exchanging a word. They knew they were looking at the minute cataloguing of Klare's mind, his reasoning scraped out on paper. For the amount "The Treatment' told them about his motives and compulsions, Souness could have opened the drawer and discovered, nestled among bits of paper and elastic bands, Klare's naked, beating heart. It told them about his rituals and fears, about his love for shadowy air pockets high above the ground, about the manner in which he'd subdued Carmel Peach. It told them about his impotence, it told them why he'd wanted to watch Alek Peach rape his own son, it told them about his compulsion to use his urine to 'purify and neutralize'. It even told them why he'd worn gloves, and it wasn't because he was clued up about forensics as they'd assumed. Then, on one of the final pages, Caffery saw something that woke him up like an adrenaline jag: