"Yes, very good." He tried to get past her but she jumped from side to side, blocking his path.
"Oh, come on, Jack, read the dating manual. You're supposed to find my jokes funny. You're supposed to '
"Will you just thinkV He pushed a finger in her face and she shrank back a little, taken off-guard. "Will you just fucking THINK, for once." He put his face near hers, his voice low, stooping slightly so that no one else could hear. "Think about what it was like for me to find you, Rebecca, hanging, hanging from a hook in the fucking ceiling. I thought you were dead he told me he'd fucked you and then killed you. How do you think that felt, eh?"
She blinked at him and with that small reaction something hardened in his chest. He slammed down the basket, bottles clinking, and walked away, feeling for his keys in his pocket. She asked for it, she pushed me, she pushed me. He took deep breaths, half expecting her to be bouncing along at his side, poking him, telling him to take a chill pill or something. He had wanted to push her, wanted more than anything to see her rattled, and when he paused at the exit and turned round he knew he'd succeeded.
She was standing motionless in the centre of the aisle under the vast fluorescent lights, a single, small figure, quite alone in the huge supermarket, her face quite blank. He took a few steps back down the aisle. "Becky?"
Her head jerked a fraction and her chin dropped but she didn't answer. When he took her hand it was cold. So you've done it. Congratulations.
Hating himself and hating her, he led her out of the store and across Brixton to the car. They drove in silence and at home she took a bottle of Blavod and a packet of cigarillos upstairs and went to bed without eating. They didn't speak another word to each other that night.
Eight.
(20 July)
Reluctantly AMIT moved the search team from the park and extended their house-to-house parameters and witness-appeal campaign. DS Fiona Quinn went to Donegal Crescent. It was still sealed to allow the Specialist Crime Unit's chemicals to cook, but she went in and swept the corner of the room where Alek Peach's statement placed the intruder. Meanwhile Alek Peach discharged himself from hospital.
"What?"
First thing in the morning, his jacket still on, his hair wet, a cup of Kryotos's good coffee in his hand, Caffery stood in the SIO's doorway, disbelief on his face.
"Aye, this morning." Souness was sitting with one foot up on the other knee, using a screwdriver to pick a stone out of the sole of her cowboy boot. A pile of zoned search grids of Brixton generated from the Maplnfo programme sat next to her on the desk. Her sunburn had turned a little brown overnight, making her ordinary eyes a starry, periwinkle blue. "He's definitely not dying and even if he was he decided he was going to go a lot faster if he couldn't get a Superking in his mouth. The consultant's got the right arse about it."
"So where is he now?"
"At the NersessiansV
The family liaison officer had called Souness from there and told her about Alek Peach's tears: "Every inch of the sodding way from King's to Guernsey Grove." He had ignored Mrs. Nersessian standing with her arms wide open, a tragic look on her face -and had gone straight upstairs to where Carmel Peach was still lying on her side and had curled up on top of the coverlet, his arms around her. There they lay for an hour, neither speaking, chain-smoking together as if the fags were the glue in their marriage. And by the way, the officer, who had just consumed almost a pound of baklava and four Armenian demitasses, wanted to know, what was it that Mrs. Nersessian owed the Peaches? If all she wanted was a captive audience for her vine leaf mazzas, wasn't she taking the Good Samaritan thing a little far?
Caffery listened to Souness in silence. He hadn't slept last night. Rebecca had lain next to him with her eyes closed, but he didn't believe she had slept either. He knew that she was seeing a ghostly image of herself -like a kite, a body distorted and re-angled. Dangling from a ceiling. He'd picked a scab off all the things she didn't want to talk about and she'd reacted as if he'd punched her in the face. He rubbed his eyes. "Danni."
"Mmmm?"
"I'm going to take the dog team into the park, just for a while."
"Eh?" She looked up. "What're ye talking about? We've finished in there."
"The human-remains dogs this time. We're not going to find him alive, are we?" He scratched the back of his neck. "I mean, not now."
"I'll ignore that, Jack. I don't want to hear ye talk like that again."
"I still want to go."
She looked at him for a long time. "When you get a bone between your teeth, Jack…" Then, shaking her head, she went back to the stone. She freed it, chucked it in the bin and brushed off her hands. "Go on, do what you like. Just make sure ye don't tell any of the hacks what those dogs are. I'll not have that in the papers."
In the incident room Marilyn Kryotos had arrived and had taken off her shoes as was her usual habit before the team arrived at the office. She was talking on the phone and Caffery paused for a moment on the other side of the desk, watching her. She looked up and winked, and he drew a question mark in the air. She finished the call and straightened, hands pressed in the small of her back. "Intelligence unit at Dulwich."
"Well?"
"This." She handed him the notes she had made. The search word 'troll' had dragged up an old outstanding case. A violent sexual assault on an eleven-year-old Laotian boy, Champaluang Keoduangdy, in the dried-out boating-lake of Brockwell Park. "I'll try and track him down today, but in the meantime there's a DI at Brixton who was there in the eighties and might remember something."
"No one done for it?"
"Nope and it's before the nonce register."
"Set up an appointment, will you, with the victim and with the DI."
In Brockwell Park the sun edged in increments up the sky behind that great druid tor, Arkaig Tower: its shadow raced down the park to collect at its feet. Two dog-handlers in blue shirts were climbing into forensic overalls next to the unit van. Caffery could see, on the passenger seat of the van, two SIRCHIE brand anti-putrefaction masks. The dogs in the back were not the same ones that had been there for the last two days. These dogs were trained to search for dead bodies.
"You do know if we find him the dogs might, uh, destroy some evidence, don't you?" The sergeant was embarrassed. "We can't always stop them, they're hungry." There were pork trotters in a Dewhurst carrier-bag three days overripe for the dogs to blunt their hunger on if they were unable to find dead Rory Peach.
"Yes." Caffery rubbed his nose and looked across the trees. It was still there that draw he felt to the park. He just couldn't give up on it yet. "Yes, I know."
They started near the van, pounding the earth with heavy metal probes. This was familiar ritual to the dogs the noise told them why they were here. It opened the glands in their mouths and they moved in excited circles, blood-boltered, dripping saliva into the earth. Caffery's hope rose a little as the dogs pushed noses into the holes made by the probes, crawled under bushes, and sniffed around the soft black edges of the lakes. But it is not only a helicopter's thermal imaging equipment that is hampered by hot weather: heat decreases a dog's sensitivity too, and an hour into the search they had found nothing. The officers were sweating in their forensic overalls and beginning to look despondent, but Caffery didn't call a halt. He was watching Texas, the larger of the two German shepherds. From time to time the dog lifted his head, distracted, and turned in a small fidgety circle.
"Come on, boy." The handler jerked the dog back to his task. "Over here."