"And when you see it," he looked around at the faces, "I think you'll agree that, in spite of the heavy traffic through the house, it's what we should keep from the press."
He turned back to the TV. The camera operator was climbing the stairs, the shadows danced across the landing ahead. When Caffery had seen the spray-painting he had instantly recognized it as a tool to weed out false confessions.
The camera wobbled, someone in the hallway said, "Fuck," and then in a louder voice on screen, "Have you seen this?" Darkness. A brief fumble then a flare of light, the camera aperture closed down momentarily, flinching like an iris. When the image came into focus the detectives in the SIO's room inched a little closer, trying to read the spray-painted message.
HAZARD
Caffery paused the tape, allowing each member of the team time to bend in and examine it. "Female Hazard." He flicked off the video and turned on the light. "We want this bottomed out by tomorrow I won't insult your intelligence by telling you why."
In the kitchen at the Fairoaks base the air observer took off his helmet and rubbed his ears. He still wasn't sure what he'd seen. "I'd like to have done that on maximum endurance, y'know."
The commander patted him on the back. "They said we were just a tick in the box, Howie. They don't even know if he's in the park."
"It's a kid, though."
"Maybe when we lift we'll go back, eh?"
But in the time they took to refuel, a traffic officer in Purley had been hit by a car while deploying a stinger. The offender was out of the car and running towards Croydon airfield, so India 99 rerouted to that instead. When his shift finished at 2 a.m. the air observer was finding it a little easier not to think about the hazy white doughnut shape he thought he'd seen among the trees in Brockwell Park.
Three.
Protocol at the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit in King's Hospital kept all head-injury victims on a Codman inter cranial pressure bolt and a ventilator for the first twenty-four hours, whether the patient could breathe unaided or not. Even without the heavy dose of medazolam sculling through his veins, AMIT's key witness, Alek Peach, wouldn't have been able to speak with the endotrachial tube down his throat. His wife, Carmel, was still sedated but Caffery would have gone to the hospital and paced the corridors like an expectant father all night, had DCI Souness not pulled rank.
"They'll never let you near while he's on that thing, Jack." She respected this in Caffery, this hungry, stray-dog determination, but she knew her hospital consultants well. She knew not to push it. "If he needs blood they've promised us a pre-transfusion sample. We've got the consultant's statement, and that's the most we can ask."
It was 1 a.m.: now that the team knew their parameters for the search, overtime had been assigned and the Brockwell Park area was secured, Souness and some of the other officers went home to catch a precious hour or two's sleep before sun-up. Caffery had now been awake for twenty-five hours but he couldn't relax. He went into the SIO's room found a bottle of Bell's under the desk, slugged some into a mug and sat at the desk, jiggling his knees and tapping his fingers on the phone. When he couldn't stand it any longer he picked up the receiver and got through to the I.C.U.
But the consultant, Mr. Friendship, was losing patience. "What part of "no" don't you understand?" And he hung up.
Caffery stared at the dead receiver. He could redial spend twenty minutes bullying the hospital staff -but he knew he was up against a brick wall. He sighed, put down the receiver, refilled the mug, put his feet up on the desk and sat with his tie undone, staring blankly out of the window at the Croydon skyscrapers lit up against the sky.
This case might be the one he'd waited his life out for he already knew that because of what had happened to his own brother, more than quarter of a century ago.
Quarter of a century? Is it really that long, Ewan? How long before they can't get any DNA at all? How long before a body disappears into the surrounding soil? Becomes silt…
he knew that he was going to have problems with it. He had felt them already, in the quiet interludes of the day, multiplying like bacilli.
Ewan had been just nine. The same age as Rory. There'd been an argument two brothers in a tree-house arguing about something unimportant. The older boy, Ewan, had shuffled down out of the tree, walked off in a sulk down the railway cutting. He was dressed in brown Clark 's sandals, brown shorts and a mustard yellow T-shirt (Caffery knew these details were true he remembered them doubly: once directly and once from reading them later on the police appeal posters). No one ever saw him again.
Jack had watched the police search the railway cutting, determined one day that he would join them. One day, one day, I'll find you, Ewan… And to this day he lived in the same little South London terraced house, staring out across the back garden and the railway tracks to the house still owned by the ageing paedophile whom everyone, including the police, suspected of being responsible for Ewan's disappearance. Ivan Penderecki. Penderecki's house had been searched but no trace of Ewan was found, so there they lived, Penderecki and Jack Caffery, like a bitter married couple, locked in a wordless duel. Every woman Caffery had ever slept with had tried to prise him away, tried to loosen the complex fascination between him and the big Polish paedophile, but Caffery had never wasted a moment considering the choice there was no competition. Even with Rebecca? Rebecca, too, wanted him to forget all about Ewan. Is there no competition with her?
He swallowed the Scotch, refilled the mug and took the Time Out from his tray. He could call her he knew where she'd be. She rarely slept at her Greenwich flat "Don't like to be with the ghosts." Instead she often came late to his house and simply went to bed, her arms wrapped round a pillow, a Danneman cigarillo smouldering in the ashtray next to the bed. He checked his watch. It was late, even for Rebecca. And if he called he'd have to tell her about the Peach case, about the similarities, and he knew what her reaction would be. Instead he tipped the chair forward and opened Time Out.
On the now infamous sexual assault last summer, Morant says: lYes, the experience informed my work, I suddenly realized that it's easy to look at fictionalized rape in a film or in a book and think you've understood. But in fact these are mere representations and act as safety nets against the brutality. I decided it was patronizing to give mocked-up representations." Adopting this mantra, in February she stoked controversy and media frenzy when it was revealed (strategically leaked?) that the moulds of battered and mutilated genitalia in her "Random" exhibition (inset) were casts taken from genuine victims of rape and sexual abuse.
In private Rebecca would never talk about what had been done to her a year ago. Caffery had been there, had seen her close-up, unconscious and displayed, suspended from a ceiling: a killer's bloody, valedictory exhibit. He had sat patiently through her statement for the inquest of her dead flat mate Joni Marsh, in a little hospital room in Lewisham. It had been a rainy day and the maple tree outside the window dripped steadily through the interview.
"Look, if you find this difficult…"
"No no, it's not difficult."
At that point he was already half in love with Rebecca. Seeing her bent head, those slender hands fidgeting in her lap as she tried to put it into words, tried to explain the indignity performed on her, he took pity and prompted her through the statement, broke every rule in the book to lessen the ordeal. Fed her what he knew so that all she had to do was nod. She remained shaken at the inquest she dried during her testimony and couldn't start again, and eventually the coroner had to allow her to step down from the witness stand. Even now, if Caffery tried to coax her into talking about it, she would pull up the drawbridge. Or, more infuriatingly, laugh and swear it hadn't affected her. In public, however, she used it almost as an accessory, like part of her wardrobe: