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 knobshine 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 arsehole 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?”
The children all bent forward to look up and down the row.
“Josh.” One of the boys gave him a toothless grin.
Josh Church was new to the class. He’d come only twice, dropped at the door from a big yellow car. “Well? Have any of you seen him? Any of you live near him?”
The children all looked at each other and shrugged. Josh was so new that no one had got to know him that well. None of them cared whether he was there or not.
“All right.” He blew his whistle. “Get yourselves a float if you need it, and get into the water.”
DC Logan stood in the incident-room doorway, coffee cup in his hand, examining his tie as if he suspected he’d spilled something on it. When Caffery stopped next to him, he dropped it and looked up guiltily: “All right?”
“How many houses did you do on the house-to-house?”
“Uh—I—well, y’know, I tried to do them thoroughly.”
“Right—” Caffery put his hands in his pockets and stood a little closer, murmuring into Logan’s ear. “I’ve just had your overtime sheets in, and checked them next to the number of statements you took this week and there’s a problem …” He dropped his chin and raised his eyebrows.
Logan knew what he was saying. He lowered his eyes.
“It’s OK, you can make up for it,” Caffery murmured. “I’ve got a little job for you.” He checked over his shoulder. Danni had her feet on the desk and was speaking into the phone. “There’s a Mapinfo sheet and instructions in my pigeon-hole. You will knock on twenty doors before the sun goes down. Just so you know.”
Logan stood, hands limp at his side, until Caffery had gone. Then he straightened his tie and looked over at Kryotos: “What the fuck’s got into him?” he mouthed.
Kryotos shrugged and turned away.
“Here we go.” It had taken almost five hours but at last Ben felt the wood crack between her hands. She scrabbled at it, her fingers bleeding now, and slowly enough of the board splintered for her to see into the space under the floor. She put her head down and peered in. The cavity was about ten inches deep, warm with incubated air. Pipes and wires zoomed in from the side of the house and snaked away from her into the darkness. It didn’t smell musty or spidery, instead it smelt of new wood and mastic. She sat up and pulled away the remainder of the plank then pushed her face back into the hole.
Now what? Close to her eyes was a round electrical junction box screwed to a joist, tentacles of white cable exiting north, south, east, west, like a tiny octopus. One of the leads docked with the top of a black cylinder standing proud of the plasterboard. It took Ben a few moments to recognize that she was looking at the metal sheath of a light fitting—the recessed lighting in the kitchen—somewhat bigger than a beaker, inverted and pushed up through a circular hole.
My God—this type of fitting, she was sure, was simply pushed up from below into the plasterboard, nothing holding it up, no screws or nails. She recalled Darren, Ayo’s husband, pulling one out to work on it in their kitchen in Kennington—she remembered seeing it dangling from its cord.
She lay on her belly and cupped her hand over the top of the lamp, pressing it down. It moved with a long, soft, sucking sound—like jelly from a mould—and dropped out of sight, the wires catching the weight, daylight flooding into the space from below. Ben sucked in a breath. The light swung under the ceiling like a pendulum, the wires banging against the sides of the hole, and when nothing happened, when no one charged up the stairs and slammed into the door, she felt brave enough to get her face into the hole and see what was going on down there.
She lay down on her front, her arms out in front of her like an obedient schoolgirl in a diving lesson, fingers pressed together, children, and thought of Josh running out of the swimming-pool from his new lessons and jumping into the car: “Mum, what’s a aquadynamic?” The plasterboard ceiling cracked suddenly under her weight. She recoiled, horrified, pulling her head out, her hair catching on nails so that she came out backwards with a snarled crown. “Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus—”
She crouched there for a moment, panting, expecting the ceiling to collapse. But when it didn’t her heart slowed a little. She pushed her hair from her eyes and slowly, carefully, bent down again. This time she was more cautious. She spread her hands across the floor like a gecko, and slowly wormed her face into the airless space, stealthy as a hunting cat, until she could see into the circle vacated by the light fitting.
It was bright down there, bright and open. And ten feet below her, in the kitchen beneath, Hal lay on the floor. On his back, his face almost directly beneath the hole.
Oh my God—
His feet were up, at an odd angle, both ankles individually cuffed to the big oven handle; his hands had been stretched above his head and fastened by electric flex to the squat feet of the washing-machine. His shorts had been removed and put back on with both legs forced into one leg opening, secured with the orange and blue bungee cords from the Daewoo roof-rack, and his mouth was covered with a piece of brown parcel tape. A large stain, a corona of his own filth, surrounded him. Now Ben realized she could hear him snoring, as if he had simply got bored with the whole thing. As if he’d eaten Christmas dinner and drifted off in front of The Wizard of Oz.
She manoeuvred her face so her mouth was at the opening and whispered softly: “Hal?”
Parallel to Brixton Hill, along the route of the old river Effra, consigned to the underworld since the last century, ran Effra Road, a hill that linked the lower, fashionably self-conscious slopes of Brixton with the poor council estates at the Streatham end. On this, one of the hottest days of the year, DC Logan was climbing the hill with slow deliberation, cooking in his own sweat. The sun had heated up the earth until the paving stones lifted at odd angles. In front gardens cats slept under bushes, twitching their ears at the midday insects. Jesus, he thought, what I could do to a cold Red Stripe is criminal.
Up ahead on the left was the new housing development, Clock Tower Grove—he could see the hoarding and the flags—and beyond them a concrete joist swaying in the claws of a crane. There were some bigger houses at the back overlooking the park. He supposed he’d have to go and find out if any of the places were finished, if anyone had moved in yet. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. There were eighteen more addresses to make that day—he wasn’t going to hang around at any of them. If no one answered the door he was out of there.
Meanwhile, in number five, Clock Tower Walk, Hal opened his eyes and thought he was seeing an angel. A sweet geometry—her face in a circular frame. At first the eyes, those eyes like mirrors, seemed to take up the whole of the room.
Benedicte?
“Hal,” she whispered.
And then he thought, for the first time, that maybe they had a chance. He tried to jerk his head up in reply but he had been bound so he couldn’t move. Tears slid from his eyes.
“Hal,” she murmured, her voice faint and sick. “Josh? Is he …?”
He moved his eyes sideways, showing her the direction.
She pulled back from the hole and tried to reposition herself to get the angle right so she could see into the family room. She could feel the uneven temperature of the air, she could smell her own breath in the tiny space. As if all her tension and sickness had been converted to chemicals and breathed out through her lungs. She pushed her face into the hole until her flesh and eyeball bulged down into the room. Her eyes clicked open and closed. Rotated and froze.
Fastened to the radiator in the family room, curled up like a little fern, his knees pulled up under his chin, was Josh. Although he was grey and washed out his expression was calm, his eyes fixed, concentrating on trying to unpick the rope that bound him to the radiator. On the wrist he had already freed were deep furrows, shiny and red, and there was a rash on his mouth where a tape had been.
“Josh?” Softly at first, because she couldn’t believe she wasn’t seeing a mirage. Then: “JOSH!”
He didn’t react immediately, just remained staring at the ropes. It took him a while to break his trance, then his eyes rolled towards her, blinking.
“Josh!”
“M-mummy?”
Her child had changed. His head was thin, his eyes huge. He looked like Hal—like a tiny twenty-year-old Hal with veins standing up on his forehead and hands. Poor progeric child—he reached a hand up to her, not saying anything, just reaching it out in the air, the palm towards her, as if he was trying to feel her face. Check it was real. Then he dropped his hand, turned away from her and started pulling on the rope.
“Josh!”
“Daddy’s not well,” he whispered, not looking up. “He can’t talk.”
“I know, darling. Have you had something to drink?”
He shook his head.
“No?”
“A little bit.” He wouldn’t look at her. He’s already a little man, she thought, already being the big little man.
“Do you feel all right, baby? How’s your tummy?”
“Feels funny. I’m thirsty, Mummy.”
“That’s OK, we’ll get you something to drink.”
“I never meant to, Mummy, I had to go wee-wee on myself, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s OK. Don’t worry.” Upstairs, with her bleeding fingers and her exhausted mind, she wanted to cry. This little boy, whom she had thought would be the casualty, was sitting up and getting on with it. He had nearly undone the rope. Instead of sobbing and despairing, like she had, he had been determinedly and silently getting on with escaping. “The nasty man’s gone now.”
Josh nodded. “He’s gone. He’s been horrid and the police are going to beat him up and put him in prison and kill him.”
“Did you hear Mummy calling?”
“Yes—I couldn’t say nothing because I had a thing on my mouth.”
“Don’t worry about that sweetheart. I love you.”
“Me too.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“Getting out of the rope. I’ll come and I’ll get you.” He was quiet for a moment. Then without looking at her, “Mummy?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe he killed Smurfy.” His chin trembled. “Cos I—cos I don’t know where Smurf is.”
“Oh, Josh—” Benedicte’s throat was tight. “You are such a—such a good, such a clever … brave, brave little boy. Don’t worry about Smurf, peanut, she’s with me. She’s feeling a little bit poorly but she’s up here and she can’t wait to see you. She sends you her love and a big lick on the face.” She paused because now she could see that his fingers were bleeding. “Josh, I love you, darling, Mummy loves you so, so much—”
In the hallway the doorbell rang. Josh’s head snapped up, staring in horror at the door and Ben froze. No! She couldn’t believe it.
“Josh,” she hissed. “Quick now. Come on now, baby, move it now—” Beneath her Hal jerked frantically and noiselessly on the floor and Ben’s voice rose hysterically: “Come on, Josh. MOVE IT. Just MOVE!!”
He pulled frantically at the rope, tugging and pulling, biting it, the blood from his fingers staining his mouth. His teeth were strong but the rope was embedded.
“Quickly!”
He pulled harder, eyes on the door, preparing for the menace to hurtle down the hallway. Then Benedicte saw her little boy make a decision.
“No!” she screamed. Another crack ricocheted along the plasterboard. “No! Josh, RUN, Josh, please RUN.”
But he couldn’t have freed himself in time. So he took the brown parcel tape from the floor and pressed it to his mouth, smoothing it down with the flat of his palms, swivelling his little body round, pressing the rope behind him and turning so he sat with his back to the radiator. Ben’s heart squirmed. “God, no.” She began to weep, long silver threads falling out of the ceiling and landing next to Hal’s face. “No!”
And then the doorbell rang again.
Everyone froze. Ben stopped crying and Hal stopped thrashing on the floor. Josh’s eyes flew to his mother. The troll never rang more than once. For a long time no one dared to breathe. The bell rang yet again and in the hallway the letterbox clanged.
“Hello?” A man’s voice. “Hello-oh?”
The police—maybe Ayo’s sent someone—maybe … Benedicte opened her mouth to call out, but something stopped her, a survival instinct, maybe, a survival instinct older than her own cells. No, it’s a trick—it’s him. It must be him. In the family room Josh was scrabbling at the rope again. “Josh, don’t say anything, don’t move,” she hissed. “Keep quiet.” He obeyed her, kept quite still, and in the silence she could hear her heart thudding. It’s OK, she told herself. If it is the police they’ll see something’s wrong—they’ll know something’s wrong and they’ll come and find us, I’m not giving myself away if it’s him—
The doorbell rang once more. She sucked in a breath, biting her lip, the look in her eyes keeping Josh pinned where he was. The sound of the bell hung in the silence. To anyone on the garden path at the front of the Churches’ deluxe polished oak door, with double glazing and thermal seals, the house would have appeared quite uninhabited.
Souness came in, placed both hands on the desk and leaned forward. “Right.”
“OK.” Caffery threw his pen down on the desk. “Lecture?”
She nodded. “Lecture. I got through to the consultant. We had a wee slanging match about my DI.”
“Great.”
“Jack, what were ye thinking?” She pulled up her chair and sat down. “Can you imagine the field day Peach’s brief’ll have?”
“I don’t care, Danni, I’ve got to speak to him. He’s got someone else. I know it.”
She closed her eyes, pursed her mouth and shook her head. “Jack, you’re squeezing me. I’ve spoken to the gov and what he’s saying is clear: you’ve got your man, put the resources into closing it, put your energy into being ready for the interviews when Peach is well enough. We’ve got another critical incident come in this morning, they want this Peckham rapist off the back-burner and we just haven’t got the manpower, Jack, for what, in the cold light of day, is a domestic incident, we haven’t got—”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be on the case anyway.”
“Don’t talk nonsense—”
“Maybe I’ve lost my perspective.”
“Oh, please, cut the melodrama—” She stopped. Caffery had stood up. “Jack? Ye’ve to try to see it from my point of view.”
“I’d love to, Danni,” he picked up his keys, his cigarettes and put them into his pocket, “but to be honest I don’t know if I could get my head that far up my own arse.”
Souness shot to her feet. “Don’t ye speak to me like that.” She lifted her finger to him, her lips a dry, angry pink. “I did nothing to merit that—I’ll discipline ye for it.”
“Thank you.” He stood, pushed some papers into a drawer and locked it. Pressed pens into the pen tidy and pushed his chair firmly under the desk so that it lined up perfectly. Suddenly his taste for the job had turned. “I think I’ll go now. Since there’s nothing else to be done but sit around with our feet up and wait for Peach to get better.”
“Go on, then, fuck off home.” She rubbed her head until it was hot. She was furious. “The rest should do you some good.”
But when Caffery turned to the door Kryotos was standing there holding a green message form. “What?”
“Call from the hospital.”
“That’s OK, Marilyn.” Souness reached past Caffery and took the form. “I got through to them on another line.”
“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 ICU 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.