In the TV room Josh looked up. He knew immediately from his mother's voice that he was in trouble. He moved an almost imperceptible fraction along the sofa away from her and Benedicte paused, momentarily ashamed that she could have that effect on her nine-year-old son. "Jo-osh?"
"Yeah?" He was cautious.
"That mess upstairs."
He didn't answer.
"Josh! I'm speaking to you."
"What mess?"
"You know what mess. The one in the bathroom."
Josh's mouth dropped open and he half stood. "I never I never went in there."
"Well, someone did. It wasn't Smurf she's been with me all day and the door was closed."
"I never, Mum, honest. Honest."
"Oh, for heaven's sake." She got bleach, rubber gloves and a bowl from under the kitchen sink and slammed the cupboard door. "You'll have to learn, Josh, not to lie. It's important." She went upstairs to where Ayo was cleaning the mess up with a roll of Andrex. "He's turned into an absolute liar since we got here. It's like everything's gone haywire since we moved in."
"Maybe the house is cursed."
"Probably." Benedicte unhooked the carrier-bag from the bin under the sink and held it out for Ayo to dump the used tissue. "Probably built on ancient Navajo burial ground." She didn't smile when she said it.
The mosquitoes had landed a live one. They banked and throttled next to Caffery's ears, flying in formation between the thistle and ragwort, alighting on his hands and sucking eye-popping tubes of blood up into their proboscises. He slapped at them, flicked them, but they clung, drunken and bloated, in his sweat and wouldn't move as he crouched, scraping at the earth and root matter with the claw hammer. The sun had dropped sulkily into the roofs, throwing its last rays into the bitter green cutting.
Should have brought a torch, you dickhead.
Every step, every rock he turned, he recorded, straightening up to photograph his work, flooding the little cloister with artificial blue light, making himself blind briefly. Then, at 9.15 p.m." after two hours of scraping and digging, he pushed the hammer once more into the soil and hit something unfamiliar. Something that didn't give like soil but slid and whispered. Oh, shit, here we go. Heart thumping, he threw aside the hammer and dropped forward on to his knees, scraping at the earth with his bare hands. In the dim twilight he saw a flash of plastic.
He stopped digging, rocking back a little on his heels, his chest tight for a moment he thought he might vomit. He had to close his eyes and breathe carefully through his nose until the sensation went away.
Sixteen.
It was a cheque red blue laundry bag with plastic handles and it didn't contain Ewan Caffery's remains. Caffery carried it slung over his shoulder, back down the tracks, like a weary sailor carrying his kit on shore leave it bumped on his back and left a grimy patch on his T-shirt. Night had come, the moon was out and he had to move slowly, feeling his way through the nettles with his feet. At his garden he fished inside his saturated T-shirt for the key on the tape. He was dragging, disappointed, but he wasn't going to give up. He knew that Penderecki had sent him to find this bag for a reason.
The house was cooclass="underline" the french windows stood open, and he could smell cigarillo smoke, so he knew Rebecca was here. He didn't shout up to her or go upstairs to check the bedroom. He didn't want to speak to her at this moment.
Instead he went into the living room, swung the bag from over his shoulder and emptied out the contents. He stood, looking at what was on his floor for a few minutes, then went into the kitchen. The wine in the freezer was almost frozen; he rattled the huge chunk of ice, rinsed a glass, opened the bottle and poured. The glass immediately clouded with condensation and his fingers stuck to it when he touched it. He swallowed it whole, not tasting it, refilled his glass, lit the remains of the spliff he'd left in the ashtray, and went back into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, hands on his knees, staring blankly at what Penderecki had intended him to find.
By far the largest percentage of all child pornography is home-made historically, little has been made for commercial distribution, and at one point or another Caffery had seen examples of it all. His time in Vice had been before the big split, before Obscene Publications, the 'dirty squad', had become the dedicated paedophile unit and farmed its adult porn concerns out to Vice. In his day the responsibilities of the two units had often overlapped, and he had seen most of what lay on his living-room floor before.
Copies of Magpie, the magazine for the Paedophile Information Exchange network, a stack of Dutch, German and Danish magazines Boy Love World, Kinde Liebe, Spartacus, Piccolo. Two scuffed copies of the book Show Me, three editions of the glossy Dutch publication Paidika The Journal of Paedophilia, and NAMBLA bulletins from the early eighties. A pile of zip disks secured with an elastic band. Passwords for websites, and a photocopied list, a message splashed across the top: "WARNING, WARNING WARNING!! If any of the usernames below try to join your chat room log off IMMEDIATELY'. At the bottom of the laundry bag, wrapped in Somerfield carrier-bags and taped with brown parcel tape, was a stack of unmarked videocassettes.
Spliff in his teeth he shook out the videos. He plugged the first into the VCU, found the remote control, started the tape and sat back on the sofa, holding a lighter to the joint. The screen flickered he knew what to expect. It was years since he'd looked at child pornography, years since Vice, when he'd had to look at these images and had spent each night lying awake at night, trying, like most officers new to the unit, to find a place in his head to put it all. Or, failing that, to build something around them. And the biggest fear the fear they all had, but would never share what if, what if… oh, Christ, what if I'm aroused by it? Tonight he knew what to expect, and it wasn't the pictures he was afraid of. His thumping heart was not for the children he was going to see bullied and tormented for the camera, his thumping heart was for the chance that he might see Ewan.
The tape rolled and the screen showed the scratching, the white flecks of magnetic interference. Would you recognize him? Nothing at the beginning. He sat forward with the remote control and skipped forward through the tape. The screen continued to flicker. On it went, on and on, with no image until, with a sudden creak, the tape butted up against the rollers. He'd come to the end. There was nothing on this tape. He ripped it out of the machine and plugged in a second one, started it, fast-forwarded it. Again he got all the way to the end and found no image.
"Jack?"
He looked up. "Go back to bed, Rebecca."
"What's going on?"
"Nothing really. Go to bed."
But he'd piqued her interest. She was barefoot -wearing only a pair of his grey boxer shorts and a short-sleeved vest and she padded into the room, trying to look over his shoulder. "What is it?"
"Really, Becky…" He stood up, holding out his hands, ushering her away from the stuff on the floor, from the video. "It's nothing. Go back to bed, eh? Go on."
She blew air out of her nose. "Will you come up too?"
"Yes," he said, without thinking. "I'll bring you a drink. I promise."
"OK." That quelled her. She turned obediently on her heel and went back up the stairs and Caffery sat for a moment staring at his hands, wondering what to do. Eventually he got up, got two fresh glasses of wine, and went upstairs. In the bedroom she was lying on the bed with her hands under her head. The lamp was on and her hair was loose, running down over one shoulder. She had taken off her vest and was smiling at him.
Right. He put the glasses down on the bedside table and sat at the foot of the bed. "Rebecca look." He couldn't make the complex adjustment she wanted -not now. "I'm sorry."