"No I mean, not the hospital, I mean the sergeant. On the ward. It's Alek Peach. They want one of you. Urgently."
"Josh The house was silent and Benedicte's heart rate had slowed. But now she was seized with the idea that she'd been wrong. "Josh, listen can you get out of that rope?"
He nodded and redoubled his efforts, gnawing at the nylon with his teeth.
"OK, darling, OK, listen. When you're free just go straight into the hall and open the front door. Into the hall and open the door." Josh looked from his father to his mother, his eyes huge with fear. "Go on, darling. I promise you it's OK. Just hurry."
With one last tug of the rope he freed himself. He was up, staggering a little, his leg muscles cramped, shooting out a hand to steady himself, but he was up. He held out his thin arms in front of him, as if it was dark, and pattered over to the kitchen sink, turning on the tap and putting his mouth under it to drink. Benedicte could almost smell how cold the water was. When he straightened, panting, water dripping from his chin, she whispered to him, "Good boy, now go and open the door."
But Josh pulled a glass down from the cupboard, filled it with water, and knelt down next to Hal. He pulled the packing tape from his father's mouth, rested the lip of the glass against Hal's lips, tipping water into his mouth. Hal bucked a little, almost choked, then greedily swallowed the water, his Adam's apple moving madly. Benedicte watched, impatient, resisting the urge to tell Josh to hurry. He was sitting next to Hal, as expert as a nurse, running a hand over his forehead and pouring more water into his mouth. "You next, Mummy," he said.
"OK, baby but first go to the door, OK, go to the door there might be someone out there to help us."
"OK." He put the glass on the floor and stood, unsteady on his feet, looking down once at Hal, who was thrashing his head from side to side, his mouth moving, trying to speak. Josh turned to the hallway, using the kitchen cabinets to keep his balance, jolting his way to the door. Benedicte could just see the bottom of his feet and his reflection in the laminate flooring. Tiny, thin little boy. He reached up, fumbled with the catch, and opened the front door.
She stayed there, her eye bulging down from the ceiling like the silent dome of a CCTV camera clicking on and off. There were no sounds from the hallway for several minutes. She imagined him opening the door and simply stepping out into a summer's day, bluebirds maybe, carrying a ribbon in their beaks, flying over the park.
The door slammed and she could see the reflection coming back. One tall, with heavy dark hair, one her son, being led back into the room the familiar ease of an older brother guiding a small boy through a shopping centre. Except that Josh was crying silently.
She should have stayed, should have pushed through the ceiling, should have torn away her own skin before she let someone hurt Josh, but instinct sent her squirming back up through the hole, whimpering like a child, pulling the dangling light fitting behind her like a trap-door spider. Her ankle twisted, pain shot up her leg, but she didn't scream.
She knew that figure she knew exactly whose it was. And now everything made sense.
Caffery left the Jaguar in the car park, forgot to pay and display, and raced into the building. He took the stairs two at a time, the squeal of his shoes on the shiny lino making orderlies pushing wheelchairs stop and stare.
He ran. Ahead of him, at the end of the long, polished corridor, the door to the I.C.U flew open. A nurse came out, pressing a crumpled paper towel against the bib of her uniform. As he got closer to her he could see darkness on the towel and when they passed each other he saw it was blood that was mashed into her bib.
The door opened again and this time the police officer came out, his face pale, blood on his hands. "In there." He nodded. Caffery pushed past him into the unit.
The window in the nurses' room was open, a soft breeze playing through the ward. In Peach's small annexe curtains had been pulled around his bed, and two nurses, faces set, busied themselves, silently mopping the floor and the walls. The curtain, lit from within like a vast, stretched Hallowe'en lantern, had a huge peacock-tail stain in the centre, a great, plumed splatter of blood, almost the size of a human. And beneath the bed on the floor where the nurses mopped shiny and rubbery as black PVC, more blood flattened out towards Caffery's feet.
Two miles away in Brixton DC Logan was enjoying that Red Stripe in the Prince of Wales. The marketing girls at Clock Tower Grove had been funny with him, stared at the sweat marks under his arms, so he'd given up and come back down the hill. He could fake the report, he decided. Jack Caffery, it was well known in AMIT, had gone off the rails recently: probably his head done in by his nutty girlfriend with her trick pelvis and weed habits. DI Jack Caffery was crazy. Everyone knew he was letting loose in all directions, giving everyone both barrels for no reason. And Logan had not liked the sly threats Caffery'd made about his overtime. Young Turk, my arse, Logan thought, going to the bar for a refill.
Twenty-four.
In Norfolk the forest at the top of the quarry was quiet, only the ghostly pitter-patter of rain on the leaves. Every ten minutes or so a car went by on the road half a mile away. Some had their headlights on although it was midday. Tracey Lamb lit a cigarette and leaned back against the rusty old Datsun, staring at the cars. She felt confident, pleased with herself. When she got home yesterday she had taken Carl's 'book' and sat in his bedroom, on his bed that bed was his pride and joy black and silver lacquer with mirrors set in the headboard, and started calling his friends. None of them seemed to know about Penderecki's death as if they cared and when she told them about the visit from DI Caffery they all went into a panicking free fall
"Jesus Christ, Tracey'. Don't bring your shit to my doorstep."
"It's not just my shit '
And then horrified realizations at the end of the line. "Tracey? Tracey, whose fucking phone is this? Don't tell me you're calling on your own phone?"
"Why?"
"Oh, you stupid fucking slag, you're even stupider than I thought And down went the phone. By the time she'd got to the end of the book the bush telegraph had been humming and the phones had all been taken off the hook. She had sat there smoking, among Carl's barbells, the weight-lifting belts and his DVD collection. She'd wanted to cry. The gates were closing and she'd been left outside. Penniless.
Well, fuck you all, she'd decided fuck every last one of you, you bunch of perverts. She should have given them all up to Caffery the arse holes
Now she wiped her face, threw the cigarette into the undergrowth, straightened and coughed up a little phlegm. Here the grass and ferns stood high and thick and undisturbed; this was the little clearing Carl had used for dumping dodgy vehicles. At the far end, past the dead cars and among the wild poppies and storks-bill, so far over it was almost in danger of falling into the quarry, was the caravan. It was old the rain was turning it green in places and the scratched acrylic windows were thick with condensation. Peeling letters on the side were a reminder of Carl's attempts to start a hot-dog stand. The business hadn't taken off, but the sign was still there she could see a faded stencilled price list, "Hot Dog 15p', and the nailed-up hatch he'd cut in the side. The Borstal boys used to live in the caravan when they stayed. They always seemed to be drunk on White Lightning cider and puking up into the quarry. Carl, who could always find work for an extra pair of hands, had liked having them around, especially in the late seventies when he had somehow wangled the licence to pick up wrecks from car accidents. "Cut and shunt', they called it, and most of the write-offs somehow found it back on to the streets with a little help from the Borstal boys: re sprays welding, fibreglass filling, get rid of those etched windows. Carl would pay them in duty-free cigarettes and gin from his beer runs to Calais, or he'd give them the car radios to fence if they could stop the bereaved parents claiming them. How many times had Tracey witnessed one of the Borstal boys standing in the garage explaining to a couple why they couldn't have the radio from their dead son's car: "The radio's not in a very pretty state, as it happens, probably best left well alone eh?" And if they persisted: "I never wanted to say this but you can't 'ave the radio cos there's claret all over it and something worse clogging up the tape deck." That would usually end the argument.