Twenty-three.
The ward had settled now and was quiet, the only noise the whir of syringe drivers, the occasional equipment alarm. It was a warm day and the window in the nurses' room was open a crack, the curtains lifting as a mild summer breeze moved through the ward. Ten minutes before lunch one of the staff slipped silently along the ward. She stopped outside the private room, as if something had just struck her, and stood for a moment, one foot stretched out slightly behind the other, then turned the handle and went in, closing the door behind her. Less than a minute later the door opened and the same woman came out. She headed quickly away from the room, her body stiffer than before, her pace suddenly abrupt.
Ayo thought herself a good nurse: a nurse of the critically ill, she rarely had a problem finding the human vibration in everyone, never had any problem reaching under the wires and tubes and finding the warm pulsing soul. But when she had pushed the door open and looked at Alek Peach lying on the bed well, Alek Peach was like no one I've ever seen… It was as if there was a shell lying on the bed, an empty husk. He breathed, his heart moved, his vital functions were good, sound but the warmth had gone from him. It had all leaked away.
Ayo wondered where her compassion had gone. When he'd opened one eye and fixed it on her she'd instinctively taken a hurried step backwards. He frightened her. Quickly, before he could speak, she had left the room, and now, as she marched up the ward, she decided she was going to ask Detective Inspector Caffery what he wanted with Peach, exactly why they needed an armed officer at the end of the ward, why he had lied to her just to get into the private room. The police usually only mounted a guard if the patient was the victim of a drugs feud and needed protection. Or if he was a suspect.
That thought made her stop and turn to look back to Peach's room. Beyond the glass door a shadow moved. It was just a nurse in there, changing drips, but still it made Ayo stiffen. Bloody hell, Ayo, apologize to that detective ~ say you're sorry about the business this morning, that you had to take orders from above, and then maybe you should tell him about your mad brain and how it's run away with ideas.
Yes that would give her something to tell Benedicte when she got back: "I only went and told the bloody police, didn't I?" She could picture it: the Churches, exhausted from the journey, pulling up in the driveway, the car covered in sand, looking up and seeing their front door kicked in, police tape all over the place. "I'm so embarrassed, Ben, but I'd found out something weird, I found out that Rory Peach had been peeing on things in the house you know, like josh did. God, Ben, I'm such a drama queen I'm sorry."
She tried to shake it off, clear her mind For God's sake, girl, get a grip, your poor child is going to have a wild woman for a mother but she couldn't escape the feeling that Peach's eyes were following her, could reach her, even out here.
The photograph Roland Klare was holding up to the window showed a man having intercourse with a boy. In fact, the man was forcing intercourse on a young boy that was clear from the child's expression, and from his posture. The man's face was blurred, slightly tilted on one side, but it was a face that Roland Klare had seen a lot of recently. It had been all over the news this week. It was Alek Peach's face.
At that moment, hundreds of feet below, a policeman on his beat walked along the front of Arkaig Tower and, suddenly nervous, Klare closed the curtains. He couldn't be seen all the way up here in the sky, he knew that, but nevertheless he felt safer taking the photograph to the sofa, where he sat and stared at it, his heart pounding.
The team was amazed. The DNA found on Rory belonged to his father, Alek. And there was more: the fibres that had fluoresced under the Crimescope light in Rory's wounds had been identified. They had come from the T-shirt Peach had been wearing during the supposed attack on his family. Although he had claimed not to have seen or heard his son the entire time they were kept in the house, somehow fibres from his T-shirt had got underneath the ropes binding his son. And now that the team was starting to ask questions about him they had weeded out a couple of people who had always wondered just a suspicion, mind whether Mr. Peach hadn't been in the habit of clouting Rory once in a while.
"The clanging of things falling into place is deafening." Souness was at her computer, firing off e-mails, sucking on a can of Dr. Pepper. She looked up at Caffery standing in the doorway of the SIO's room. "What? You got nothing better to do than stand around wi' a gob on?"
"Danni." He closed the door and came in. "Look '
"Oh, God," she sighed, "I know you so well you want something, don't you?"
"I want you to speak to that knob shine down at King's for me. Friendship. He won't give me the time of day, won't let me speak to Peach."
"Don't worry about that, Jack. Give Alek time to get better, then we'll come down on him." But she saw that wasn't going to be enough for him, so she pushed away the keyboard, leaned back in her chair, her hands folded across her stomach. "Jack? You've not arrested him, have you? Before he went into hospital?"
"No."
"So the detention clock's not on? None of this counts towards our thirty-six?"
"None of it."
"He's under guard and not going anywhere?"
"That's right."
She opened her hands. "Then what's up? Why the urgency? Let the consultant take his own sweet time."
"Oh, God…" He fell into his seat and rubbed his eyes. "Look I don't know how I know, but I promise you it's not that simple." He sat forward, steepling his hands and pointing them at her. "I am so sure he's got someone else, Danni. Once he's safe inside a house, got everyone safe and gagged, he can come and go as he likes'
"Jack "
"and if he's got someone else then how long do you think they'd survive? Four days? In this weather, without any injuries, five days if they were very fucking lucky? He got up and put his hand on the door.
"Now please, please speak to that arse hole at King's."
Benedicte worked, sawing with the grip rod, growing sicker and shakier by the minute. She didn't care how much sound she made now that she knew the troll had gone. Hair-fine pieces of wood peeled away, then larger, curly pieces. Every few minutes she had to stop and get her breath back, sitting with her legs splayed on either side of the area she was working at. Then she'd topple on to her side and fasten her mouth to the radiator pipe, sucking as much water as she could into her parched mouth. She was getting weak, but she wasn't going to give up.
It took almost three hours for her to scour a line about half a centimetre deep. A fragment of wood had come away it was only the size of a sugar cube, but it had left a two-finger hole in the plank. She dropped the tack strip and inched the bra wiring into the hole, pushing it so it poked back up through the knot hole and created a handle. She sat on the floor, her feet planted against the wall, giving her something to strain against, gripped both ends of the wire and pulled. The blood vessels in her head ballooned with the effort: Can your veins pop? she thought. Can they just burst?
London was melting. The earth in Brockwell Park was cracking, long open sores in the ground, and in Brixton market girls sashayed down the street dressed only in denim shorts and seersucker bikini tops, hair tied into bunches with pink ribbon. On the edge of the steaming swimming-pool Fish Gummer was tired. Ever since he'd had the encounter with DI Caffery he'd been irritable. That's the last time I'll ever speak to the police. Today's class was the 'otters', the eight-to nine-year-olds. He stopped and narrowed his eyes at them lined up on the water's edge, standing with arms at their sides like penguins in multicoloured arm-floats. "Well? Who's missing?"