He jumped up on the bed, reaching inquisitive fingers to it, turning the rose on its axis to face him. There was a small square hole in the plastic he poked his fingers in, feeling the roughness of the edge. The square had been excised as if with a Stanley knife.
Fiona? His pulse was racing now, pressing on his ears in the silence. Fiona, this isn't you, is it? What would the science unit want with a sample of the light rose?
"Hal, I hope you're having fun in Cornwall, it's Darren, mate. Look, I'll see you when you get back but Ayo wanted me to call and say that she never got round to coming over to your house, see, and she's sorry but the ting is our baby got here last night." He paused for a moment and Benedicte had a picture of him, embarrassed, trying to be cool, shifting from foot to foot, being the big man. "He's a bit early, our baby, right, a month early, cos she, you know, someone went and got her all stressed up at work over some fink some filth, Josh, you're right about them, Josh man, and anyway little Errol, that's gonna be his name, little Errol, he's in one of them premie things -he's OK, like, but…" He paused and seemed to be wondering what to say. "Oh, man, don't get worried, he's OK, it's just we couldn't water no plants, and I'm sorry. We're going to open something together, the four of us, when you get back, and celebrate." He coughed. "Anyway, that's all, homeys. See you."
Benedicte lay against the radiator with her face in her hands.
She had a headache, cramps in her limbs, and even with the dribble of water her mouth was still so filled with a glue-like substance that closing it was uncomfortable. The papers said that Carmel Peach would have been dead within twenty-four hours in that heat if she hadn't been found. Smurf's breathing was laboured and Benedicte knew that she was deteriorating fast. She was such an old dog, a poor old dog, and so confused her eyes were dull and crusted and in the last few hours she had stopped moving, except to pant or whimper. Ben dropped her hands and took deep breaths, trying to stop herself crying. Ayo had a new baby, and she and Josh and Hal were all going to die.
Caffery found a mop in the kitchen cupboard and took it upstairs. He switched on all the lights on the first floor and stood on the landing, looking up at the hatch in the ceiling. Secret places. The attic is one of the most common places for 'missing' children to hide Always check behind the water tank. The first attending team had searched the attic at number thirty looking for Rory. Had they missed something?
He switched on the light and prodded the hatch. It swung open smoothly, and when he stood on tiptoe and pushed up his hand, he found a light switch and the rubberized feet of a stainless-steel fold-down ladder suspended in the opening. The light came on and the ribbed vault of the roof lit up like a church. Tucking the flashlight in the back of his waistband he pulled down the ladder and began to climb.
Caffery was six foot on the nose and the roof was too low for him: he had to bend his head slightly to stand. The attic was neat tea chests from some long-ago move, "Rory/clothes' written on one, "Kitchen' on another, rolls of orange insulating material and in the corner, where the shadows ran down from the walls, leaned a plastic Christmas tree and a Woolworth's bag full of red tinsel. Cobwebs strung across the ceiling clung to the lightbulb like a fairground ghost-train prop. He could feel the prickle of insulating material on his skin and that high, warm smell in his nostrils. Something was up here something that all the people who had come through the house had missed. He made a slow 360-degree turn, taking in every incongruity, and immediately he saw what he was looking for.
It was at the other end of the attic, right above Rory's bedroom: a small, indistinct pile of something, smeared like mud into the shadows, flies buzzing above it.
He picked his way across the joists, hand covering his mouth afraid of what you might find? He stopped half a yard away from the pile, waving away the flies. He was looking at a long, wet deposit of food half-eaten food slumped over polystyrene fast-food boxes, slimy hamburgers, a small pile of McDonald's cups, a pile of scrunched tissues. Off to one side a faecal mound, a tissue on top of it. And in the middle of it all a circle had been cleared in the insulating material, from the centre of which a single spiral of yellow electric light poked up into the room. When he went and stood above it he found he was looking through a hole straight down at a South Park duvet.
Someone had made a camp here someone had relaxed here, lived here, shat here, watched Rory from here, probably masturbated here. You fucker. He straightened up and looked around. Two yards away, leaning against next door's shared wall, was a piece of fibreboard. When he tried to move it he found it was light it came away easily and he pushed it to one side. He put one hand on the bare wall and leaned over to inspect what had been behind it.
Fucking hell you clever bastard.
Nine or ten breeze blocks had been removed. Bracing his feet on two joists Caffery rolled up his sleeve, and slowly, slowly, as if he was feeling for something sharp, he put his hand into the hole. In the silent, unblinking darkness of the neighbouring attic his disembodied hand clenched and unclenched, patted blindly up the walls. He retreated and pulled the torch from his waistband, leaning forward a little to shine it into the darkness, and found he was staring into an identical attic. This one was unused there was no bric-a-brac piled up and the only chink in the geometry was the access hatch outlined in light from the hall below and the sound of a television playing downstairs. He shone the torch against the far wall and saw what he was expecting: another piece of MDF propped against the far wall.
Someone had burrowed along the top of the houses until they could get to Rory Peach.
Quickly he switched off the torch, climbed down the ladder and went into the street, walking backwards into the middle of the road, hands in his pockets, head back, looking at the roofs. These were terraced houses, low-pitched roofs: none of the attic spaces was big enough to convert, and if someone had a mind to, and an understanding of the flesh and bones of a building, they could probably make their way from one end of the street to the other. If they could find a way into one of the other houses from the street
He stopped.
Two doors down from the Peaches was the boarded-up shell he and the TSG officer had searched on the first day. Shit yes. He reached in his pocket for his mobile, trying to find DS Fiona Quinn's number in the memory.
Twenty-eight.
A hyena, DS Quinn knew, leaves its footprints she had always known its tail had brushed the walls somewhere inside number thirty: she just hadn't known exactly where to look. This was a familiar problem for forensic investigators: without good witness statements to direct them they were walking blind they couldn't cover an entire house with fingerprint dust, they had to be told where to focus. But now, with this strange eyrie, all sorts of possibilities had opened up. She knew she could get mitochondrial DNA from the pile of faeces; she also believed there might be other body fluids up here saliva, blood or semen that could give her a full profile.
Now she moved carefully around the attic, dressed in the ghostly protective suit that shielded her from the UV light she was using. The equipment she'd brought was her bazooka the "Scenescope': a combined long wave UV source and camera on a jointed wand, it could detect the smallest amount of body fluid.
Caffery remembered a time when these alternative light sources needed four men to carry them, remembered hearing how the technicians at the Brighton bombing sat in the corridor and used their feet to push the Scenescope's baby brother, the Crimescope, into the lift. Now the equipment arrived coolly in a tiny portable black box. But safety restrictions were still tight. The rest of the SSCU team had set up in the front bedroom, as far as possible from the light source, and sat with Caffery and Souness, crowded around the monitor, watching the screen, the only sound the big Scenescope fan whirring and the creak of joists as Quinn moved around overhead. The camera transmitted a distinctive blue circle to the monitor, a spotlight sliding along textured surfaces that looked like nothing more than skin under a microscope, until it slipped over a dab of something organic and a cold white flare raced down the wand to the screen and Quinn knew where to scrape for a sample.