Reluctantly AMIT moved the search team from the park and extended their house-to-house parameters and witness-appeal campaign. DS Fiona Quinn went to Donegal Crescent. It was still sealed to allow the Specialist Crime Unit’s chemicals to cook, but she went in and swept the corner of the room where Alek Peach’s statement placed the intruder. Meanwhile Alek Peach discharged himself from hospital.
“What?”
First thing in the morning, his jacket still on, his hair wet, a cup of Kryotos’s good coffee in his hand, Caffery stood in the SIO’s doorway, disbelief on his face.
“Aye, this morning.” Souness was sitting with one foot up on the other knee, using a screwdriver to pick a stone out of the sole of her cowboy boot. A pile of zoned search grids of Brixton generated from the MapInfo programme sat next to her on the desk. Her sunburn had turned a little brown overnight, making her ordinary eyes a starry, periwinkle blue. “He’s definitely not dying—and even if he was he decided he was going to go a lot faster if he couldn’t get a Superking in his mouth. The consultant’s got the right arse about it.”
“So where is he now?”
“At the Nersessians.’”
The family liaison officer had called Souness from there and told her about Alek Peach’s tears: “Every inch of the sodding way from King’s to Guernsey Grove.” He had ignored Mrs Nersessian—standing with her arms wide open, a tragic look on her face—and had gone straight upstairs to where Carmel Peach was still lying on her side and had curled up on top of the coverlet, his arms around her. There they lay for an hour, neither speaking, chain-smoking together as if the fags were the glue in their marriage. And by the way, the officer, who had just consumed almost a pound of baklava and four Armenian demitasses, wanted to know, what was it that Mrs Nersessian owed the Peaches? If all she wanted was a captive audience for her vineleaf maznas, wasn’t she taking the Good Samaritan thing a little far?
Caffery listened to Souness in silence. He hadn’t slept last night. Rebecca had lain next to him with her eyes closed, but he didn’t believe she had slept either. He knew that she was seeing a ghostly image of herself—like a kite, a body distorted and re-angled. Dangling from a ceiling. He’d picked a scab off all the things she didn’t want to talk about and she’d reacted as if he’d punched her in the face. He rubbed his eyes. “Danni.”
“Mmmm?”
“I’m going to take the dog team into the park, just for a while.”
“Eh?” She looked up. “What’re ye talking about? We’ve finished in there.”
“The human-remains dogs this time. We’re not going to find him alive, are we?” He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, not now.”
“I’ll ignore that, Jack. I don’t want to hear ye talk like that again.”
“I still want to go.”
She looked at him for a long time. “When you get a bone between your teeth, Jack …” Then, shaking her head, she went back to the stone. She freed it, chucked it in the bin and brushed off her hands. “Go on, do what you like. Just make sure ye don’t tell any of the hacks what those dogs are. I’ll not have that in the papers.”
In the incident room Marilyn Kryotos had arrived and had taken off her shoes as was her usual habit before the team arrived at the office. She was talking on the phone and Caffery paused for a moment on the other side of the desk, watching her. She looked up and winked, and he drew a question mark in the air. She finished the call and straightened, hands pressed in the small of her back. “Intelligence unit at Dulwich.”
“Well?”
“This.” She handed him the notes she had made. The search word “troll” had dragged up an old outstanding case. A violent sexual assault on an eleven-year-old Laotian boy, Champaluang Keoduangdy, in the dried-out boating-lake of Brockwell Park. “I’ll try and track him down today, but in the meantime there’s a DI at Brixton who was there in the eighties and might remember something.”
“No one done for it?”
“Nope—and it’s before the nonce register.”
“Set up an appointment, will you, with the victim and with the DI.”
In Brockwell Park the sun edged in increments up the sky behind that great druid tor, Arkaig Tower: its shadow raced down the park to collect at its feet. Two dog-handlers in blue shirts were climbing into forensic overalls next to the unit van. Caffery could see, on the passenger seat of the van, two SIRCHIE brand anti-putrefaction masks. The dogs in the back were not the same ones that had been there for the last two days. These dogs were trained to search for dead bodies.
“You do know if we find him the dogs might, uh, destroy some evidence, don’t you?” The sergeant was embarrassed. “We can’t always stop them, they’re hungry.” There were pork trotters in a Dewhurst carrier-bag—three days overripe—for the dogs to blunt their hunger on if they were unable to find dead Rory Peach.
“Yes.” Caffery rubbed his nose and looked across the trees. It was still there—that draw he felt to the park. He just couldn’t give up on it yet. “Yes, I know.”
They started near the van, pounding the earth with heavy metal probes. This was familiar ritual to the dogs—the noise told them why they were here. It opened the glands in their mouths and they moved in excited circles, blood-boltered, dripping saliva into the earth. Caffery’s hope rose a little as the dogs pushed noses into the holes made by the probes, crawled under bushes, and sniffed around the soft black edges of the lakes. But it is not only a helicopter’s thermal imaging equipment that is hampered by hot weather: heat decreases a dog’s sensitivity too, and an hour into the search they had found nothing. The officers were sweating in their forensic overalls and beginning to look despondent, but Caffery didn’t call a halt. He was watching Texas, the larger of the two German shepherds. From time to time the dog lifted his head, distracted, and turned in a small fidgety circle.
“Come on, boy.” The handler jerked the dog back to his task. “Over here.”
But in the dog’s odd lapses Caffery sensed something. Every square inch of the park had been searched—there had to be an angle he was missing: a light was being shone dead into his eyes and still he couldn’t see it.
You’re the one who thinks that he knows, thinks he has a special tap into the mind of the killer, and yet you can’t see what happened here.
“What’s a troll, Danni?”
“A troll? A troll’s just an old queer who likes gorgeous young meat. A tree jumper.”
He thought about Rebecca the other night, squatting in the tree like a leprechaun. Zeus was a baby in a tree. He thought about the little boy in the Clock Tower Grove Estate pretending to climb a drainpipe. And then suddenly he had it. He was right—Rory was still in the park. And he thought he knew where.
At 12.30 p.m. Hal Church came home for lunch from his furniture-design studio in Coldharbour Lane. He was a largish man—with his sleeves rolled up, sandy hair receding from a tanned forehead, he looked far more the broad-shouldered artisan than the designer.
Benedicte was in the kitchen unpacking Tesco’s bags and Hal placed his hands on her hips, kissed the back of her neck then gently inched her sideways so that he could reach a bag of pretzels in the cupboard. Around their feet Josh jumped like a small cricket from bag to bag, opening them, pushing his nose in them.
“Mum, where’s the Sunny Delight?”
“Sunny Delight.” Hal put a hand to his forehead. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. An orange kid. I’m going to have an orange kid.”
“Da-aad!” Josh spun round on his heel, his hands over his face. “Don’t mess wid my head.”
“Hey, wassup, orange kid?”
Josh giggled, and came back at his father. “You come diss me and you is in some serious trouble, man.”
“Josh,” from the bag Ben pulled a ball of mozzarella, moving in its whey, and placed it on the worktop ready for the pizza she was going to make, “will you stop talking like that? It’s not funny.”
Josh dropped his head and made a face at his father.
“Josh. Come here.” Hal bent over until his head was close to his son’s. “You’s pretty fly for a white boy,” he whispered.
“Word!” Josh gave his father the Brixton salute. “Boyacasha.”
“For heaven’s sake, you two, just can it.” Benedicte poked Hal in the belly. “Go on, let him have some juice, his knuckles’ve been scraping the ground all afternoon.”
“Why don’t you just get him a packet of Rothman’s while you’re at it? Josh? You will tell us when you want to go into detox, won’t you, son?”
“Hey, Dad.” Josh put the Sunny Delight on the kitchen top and stood on tiptoe to get a glass. “Mummy had to call the filth.”
“The police, Josh, not the filth. Where do you pick these things up?”
“The police?” Hal looked at Ben, concerned. “How come?”
“We had to get the filth.” Josh put the glass on the counter and used his teeth to open the bottle. “Because of someone tried to steal Smurf.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Benedicte murmured, sliding her eyes meaningfully in their son’s direction. “Josh, not your teeth, please. You never know when you might need your teeth.” She took it from him and used her own teeth to tear off the plastic strip. “Now take your drink through, OK, peanut? If you’re good we’ll fill up the paddling-pool and get Tracy Island out.”
“Ye-es!” Josh saluted, excited, and zoomed into the other room, almost spilling his drink as he went. “Virgil Tracy to control, launching Thunderbird Four pod NOW!” He threw himself at the sofa. “F-A-B!”
When he was settled in the family room, still within earshot but absorbed with the TV, Hal opened the pretzels, found a bottle of Hoegarden and turned back to Benedicte. He worked with linseed oil and maple, and the oils had coloured his palms so that his heart line was deeply, permanently ingrained. As faithful as a beach donkey, his family was everything to him: any real or perceived threat to them he felt like gunfire. “Well? What happened?”
“God, it was really creepy.” She put the kettle on and pushed the hair out of her eyes, keeping them on Josh to make sure he wasn’t listening. The Simpsons was starting and she could see him sitting on the sofa with his knees up, clutching the glass of orange juice to his mouth, eyes pinned on the screen. “Outside the ruddy camping shop on Brixton Hill, of all places. First thing this morning. I tied her outside because she was whingeing about being left in the car and I’m standing at the counter buying an icebox for Cornwall and I turn round and—” she waved her hand in the air “—and there’s this bloke. Molesting her.”
“Molesting her?” Hal chucked a handful of pretzels into his mouth. “What do you mean molesting?”
She put a finger to her mouth. “Sexually,” she hissed. “He put his hand between her legs.”
“What?”
“I know. I told you—creepy. He had her tail in one hand, held up like this—sort of like you’d hold up a … um, I don’t know, like you’d hold up a cow’s tail. You know, like the vets do. And he was bent over and staring, as if he was trying to, God, it’s so disgusting, but like he was trying to smell her, or just sort of see up her, you know. So I—well, I shouted, and everyone in the shop’s staring at me, but I thought, Well, I’m not going to let him get away with that—”
“Who was he?”
“He was a, uh, white guy, tall—he’d been in the shop behind me when I was buying all the stuff for Cornwall. I noticed him ‘cause he had a hood on, and he was standing in the corner like he didn’t want to be seen or something. I thought he was staring at me then, but he went out and I forgot about it and the next I know he’s got Smurf’s tail up in the air—”
“Bastard—”
“—and anyway, I thought, I’m not going to let him get away with that so I ran out of the shop and I’m shouting and screaming like some total nutter.” Benedicte opened the fridge and rummaged for the milk. “But he went down Acre Lane and I’d let go of Josh so I had to go back and—”
“Jesus—”
“—and I called the police and told them, I mean, poor Smurf, deaf as a post and there she was having her pounani looked at like some common tramp.”
“You’re laughing.”
“I’m not laughing. I called the police. Like we haven’t seen enough of the police in the last few days. I had to call them, not that there’s anything they can do.” She stopped. She was frowning into the fridge.
“And?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, look at this!” She slammed the door closed and turned towards the family room. “Josh!”
“What’s he done?”
“He’s been moving stuff around again. Josh!”
He looked up innocently. “Wha’?”
“Come here!”
“I’ve never heard anything so screwy.” Hal tipped more pretzels into his mouth. “Looking up Smurf’s bum.”
Obediently Josh dropped off the sofa and came over into the kitchen. Benedicte bent to speak to him. “Have you been moving everything around in here?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ye-es.”
“If you put the milk on the wire bits it tips over, I’ve told you.” She looked inside the fridge again. “Well, if you haven’t been doing it then I don’t know who has. The fridge goblins, I suppose.” She took the milk out and held it up to the light. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Eugh!” Hal made a face. “That is disgusting. I can smell it from here.”
“God.” She looked faint. “It smells like piss.”
“Here—let me.” He took it from her and, holding it at arm’s length, went to the sink. Shaking his head, he turned on the waste-disposal, rinsed the bottle, put it in the bin and let the tap run until the disposal unit was clear. “Gurgh! When did you get it?”
“It’s not past its sell-by date.”
“Maybe the fridge is buggered.” Hal opened it and looked dubiously at the dial. “I’ll get on to it when we get back from Cornwall.”
In the park Caffery took the young sergeant to one side. “This is going to sound like a stupid question.”
“Try me.”
“Is there any way of getting the dogs to search up?”
“Up?”
He nodded up into the trees. “In the branches.”
“Sure.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah—well.” The PC rubbed his face, reddening slightly. “You know how it goes, aircrafts, y’know, come down, don’t they? Sometimes, um, things get caught in trees.” He looked upwards. “But why?”
“I dunno.” Caffery turned to check that no one was listening. If he was wrong he didn’t want to have to explain. “Look, it’s just an idea. There’s no harm, is there?”
“OK.” The PC went to the van and found a light, galvanized-steel stick, about the size of a walking-stick with a green plastic handle. “Texas?” The shepherd’s head snapped up and he watched with small quizzical eyes as the handler tapped the trunk of a chestnut tree. He tapped up in the branches and the dog understood. His head jerked forward and he trotted after the officer, tail lowered, nose pointing straight up into the leaves. Caffery followed a few yards behind.
They circled the park. It was 1 p.m. when the dog stopped in front of a huge hornbeam dripping with caterpillars. He reared up on his hind legs, placed his paws against the tree-trunk, and there he stayed.
He was at the exact spot where Roland Klare had recovered the Pentax camera and pink gloves three days before.