"Please."
"And I'll bring you a, uh…" She gestured at the tray of chocolates. "A truffle, if you can bear it." She poured coffee from a cafetiere into two Isle of Arran mugs, spooned sugar into an earthenware pot and set it on a tray. "Go through and sit down. Make yourself at home."
He went into the family room. Here the walls were a fresh, cantaloupe colour, the sofas in pale, glazed linen and other things told him this family was doing well the gleaming wide-screen TV still with a piece of polystyrene packaging clinging to its shoulder. He sat down on one of the sofas facing out of the window. The dog, which had curled up in a patch of sun, blinked sleepily at him. Everywhere Pickfords boxes lay half unpacked.
"Just moved in?"
"Four days ago." She took milk from the fridge and filled a small glass jug. "The first ones on the estate. And I mean, how crazy is this} Sunday we're straight off to Cornwall for ten days."
"Nice."
"Absolutely lovely, if you haven't already been living out of boxes for weeks. This place was finished early so we went for it. And we couldn't cancel our holiday." Josh reappeared from the cloakroom and scampered over to the tray of chocolates. "We couldn't cancel Helston, could we, tadpole? The seals?"
"Nope." He stood on a stool and pulled the chocolates nearer. "Seals out of the sea."
The dog limped over to Caffery, looked up at him mournfully and rolled on to her back. "Hello." He began to scratch her, when something just above his field of vision, something in the woods, moved suddenly. He stared out of the window. For a moment he had thought he saw a shadow racing in there, but now whatever he'd seen was gone, an animal, a trick of the light, or one of the search team, and Benedicte was coming in with the coffee and he had to cool his imagination.
"Thanks." He took the cup and sat back, his eyes straying to the window. The trees were silent. Nothing out there. Nothing at all. "You're close to the park here," he said. "Very close."
"I know'
"Where did you move from?"
"Brixton."
"Brixton? I thought this was Brixton."
"I mean the centre Coldharbour Lane. I don't know what we wanted to escape from most the drugs or the trendies. But I don't really know Donegal Crescent and that side of the park." She stopped herself and looked back to the kitchen where Josh was using a knife to lever the chocolates from the baking tray. "Tadpole, bring that little saucer through and then you can go in the paddling-pool." "Snot a paddling-pool. It's a '
"I know, I know. It's a secret location in the Pacific Ocean." She shot Caffery an amused look. "OK," she told Josh. "Bring the saucer through and you can go to Tracy Island."
"Kay." Pleased, Josh slipped off the stool and padded through carrying a saucer with four newly dipped chocolate truffles, as shiny as if they were still wet.
"That's it." She settled down with her coffee. "Pass them round. Then you can go out."
"Thank you." Caffery took a chocolate.
"That's OK." Josh still had a smudge of brown on his chin and a crumbly fingerprint of drying chocolate on his thigh. He leaned forward a little, his face serious, his brows drawn together in adult concern. "You do know it's the troll, don't you?"
Caffery paused, the truffle half-way to his mouth. "Sorry?"
"Come on, brat." Benedicte pulled Josh by the T-shirt to where she sat. "Let me have a chocolate."
Josh dropped his head. "It's the troll," he murmured.
"Of course, darling." She took a chocolate and put it into her mouth, rolling her eyes in amusement at Caffery.
But Josh was suddenly determined. "The troll climbed in the window and stole that kid out of his bed." He put the saucer on the floor and stood, crunched up like a gnome, his face contorted, hands in front of his face like claws. Make-believe climbing. "Up the drainpipe, probably." He dropped his hands and looked seriously at his mother. "He eats kids, Mum, honest."
"Josh, really." Benedicte met Caffery's eyes, her face colouring with embarrassment. She leaned forward and slapped her son lightly on the legs. "Now, come on, enough of that. We don't want Mr. Caffery to think you're a baby, do we? Go and put the saucer in the sink."
The troll.
The more Caffery tried to question Josh about it, the more outlandish and garbled the ideas got until they were back to one central fact: the troll lived in the woods and had a habit of eating kids. Benedicte Church was embarrassed that her son was taking a local kids' story as fact. "They just like to scare each other," she said. "They're so impressionable at this age."
At what age? He wanted to say. At thirty-five, like me? Because a picture of the troll had already begun to impress itself on the underside of his mind -spreading like a stain. At the end of the day, when he left Clock Tower Grove, he had an overpowering urge to get away from the park, with the sun running all over the horizon, the silhouettes of a tired and disillusioned search team dotted against it. A feeling was creeping up on him. He didn't know where it was coming from, and he didn't know how to put it into words. But that would come, he was sure of it. It would come.
"Troll?" he asked Souness later, in the SIO's office. "Does that mean anything to you? A troll?"
"Eh?" Souness ran the palm of her hand over her bristly number-two cut and frowned. She was back from the press interviews, a line of makeup on the collar of her blouse, and was sitting at her desk staring down at the screen of her new mobile, pressing buttons with her thumb, trying to make sense of it. "Eh?" She looked up at him. "What're you talking about?"
"The kids in Brixton were rabbi ting on about a troll everywhere I went."
"The only troll I know is San Francisco slang an old queen who likes gorgeous young meat. A tree jumper. A dirty, ugly old gay guy who only wants to have sex with cute young thangs."
"So it just means a nonce?"
"In my world, aye."
He sat, chin resting on his hand, and stared at his reflection superimposed over the long strings of London lights.
"You got the message about the photos?" he said after a while. " Carmel thought he took photos while he was there."
"Yeah." She looked up. "I've got some of the lads on to it already."
"If there are photos somewhere out there shit." He shook his head.
"I know. Wouldn't you love to see them?"
"What do you think?" It was nearly midnight -they'd had to call in the teams. They'd found nothing. There was no sign of Rory in the park so Souness had extended the parameters to include every street that backed on to it. Tool sheds were searched, garages, empty property. Still no Rory. Every resident was questioned carefully but no one had seen anything. Rory Peach, it seemed, had disappeared in one of the most densely populated areas of the country and no one had seen a thing. Not a soul in Donegal Crescent had heard the glass shattering on the Friday evening; nor had anyone heard the intruder leaving the house. The media spent the day pestering AMIT for news but there was none. They knew about as much as they had this time last night. What kept drilling through Caffery's tired mind was a sentence an officer had said to his mother twenty-eight years ago: "You'll have to accept that you may never know." Nor were any of the team taking it easily an eight-year-old child had been separated from his family for the second night in a row: he'd already had to talk two of the younger ones out of a nose-dive depression.