“Yes, hello?” A woman’s voice on the answerphone in the hallway, the sound echoing through the house. Upstairs, stretched out on the floor next to the radiator, Benedicte jerked awake, pawing blindly towards the sound.
“Hello, this is a message for Mr and Mrs Church. I hope I’ve got the right number, my name is Lea and I’m calling from the Helston Cottage Agency, and, um, we were expecting you at Lupin Cottage in Constantine on Sunday, and I’m just calling because we haven’t heard from you and we’re just checking that everything’s OK. And, um, what it is, Mr Church, what it is, is because we haven’t had a, you know, an official cancellation we’re going to have to, I’m sorry to say, we might have to charge you for Lupin Cottage if we don’t hear from you and you might lose your deposit—so, well, maybe you’ve been delayed, but do give me a call and let me know. Right.” She paused for a moment. “Right. That’s all. So goodbye now.”
“No!”
“Oh, and it’s about nine a.m. on Thursday. I might try to give you another call at the weekend just to make sure everything’s OK. Thank you.”
The receiver clunked down, the tape whirred, a series of clicks and the ageing answerphone rewound the tape.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Benedicte sprang forward, roaring at the door. “I’ll kill you.” She hammered on the floor with her broken-up hands. “You fucking bitch! You and your fucking deposit, you shitty bitch. Hal!—Josh! Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I love you so much, I love you so much …”
Tracey Lamb’s mood was good. Cooking, she told herself, you’re cooking now. She put her hair in rollers, big pink rollers that glistened like sugar sponge. When it was set she didn’t brush it out. She sprayed a little mist in it, pulled on wellington boots and, carrying a cup of tea, a bucket full of bits and pieces, keys, and with her sputum cup in the pocket of her cardigan, she left the house by the back door, thinking about sangria and cheap, strong cigarettes. She was singing to herself.
She took the Datsun up to the quarry and parked it facing into the trees. An anorectic brindled dog was sitting in the undergrowth staring up at the caravan.
“Go on!” She kicked at the dog and it slipped back into the hedgerow, its legs so bent that its stomach almost dragged the ground. “That’s it, go on. Git.” She put the mug of tea on the bonnet of a rusting old Ford Sierra and fished in her pockets for the keys. Carl had always told her to lie about what she was keeping in the caravan, but Carl was dead now and she no longer had a reason to obey him.
Caffery and Rebecca slept together in an exhausted knot on his bed, her face resting on his hand so that he could feel it twitch and move as she dreamed. She had kept on her underwear and T-shirt, and although he had his arm around her he tried to keep it unsexual, tried to keep a segment of air between their bodies. In the morning he pulled out his arm carefully and got up without waking her. He showered, shaved carefully, dressed in a well-cut Italian suit, the legacy of an ex-girlfriend, put on a grey Versace tie and began to move his mood round to bargaining with the bank manager.
When he went downstairs Rebecca had woken and was walking around the kitchen in jeans, making coffee, diminutive as a young boy with her new haircut. When she saw him in the suit she whistled. “My God, you’re so gorgeous.”
He smiled.
“Where are you going?”
“Just the office.” He straightened the tie and poured some coffee. She looked rested. In fact, considering last night, she looked incredibly well. For a moment he felt hopeful for them, as he sat at the table with his coffee and watched her moving around, opening the fridge; for a moment he thought it could all be easy, but then he thought, Maybe it’s just the heroin—don’t they say that about heroin? At first it makes you look just great … and then he thought about where he was going today and how by rights he should cancel it, how by rights he should make an effort in return for what she’d done, and the whole thing made his mood crash so quickly that he got an instant headache. He downed his coffee, stood and kissed her quickly on the forehead. “I’m just going to the office.”
When he’d gone Rebecca went into the garden and lay on her back in the grass. It was a perfect day—so blue, just a few clouds running Grand Nationals across the sky. She lay in silence, waiting to find out how she felt about it all. She’d done it. She’d taken steps, big, big steps. She’d stuck her finger up at one of London’s biggest art critics and now she supposed she should start unpicking it, wondered about making amends. But she couldn’t convince herself she’d done the wrong thing: every time she tried to be strict with herself and give it serious consideration, her thoughts floated away, like a bubble from one of those silly children’s games. Maybe it was the heroin—maybe that’s why the junkies put up with puking for the first few rounds, just to get this numbness for a while. Shouldn’t it have worn off by now? She had the sense that something very important had happened, that she’d been spun round to face in the right direction, and that she should be feeling very scared and very exhilarated. But then she thought about Jack, nuzzling a kiss in her new-cut hair—Jack, you didn’t get angry, you didn’t tell me to leave—and she knew that it was OK and that, after all, she could be quite calm. When she dropped her hands over her face she found, oddly, that she was smiling.
The brain is something like a blancmange on a stem, floating perilously around the skull in a protective whey. Its tissue cannot be compressed without damage, nor can it survive even short periods without oxygen. Thus there are many ways to damage this sensitive, unfathomable organ: it can be pushed against the skull by a leak of blood or a tumour, it can be starved of blood by trauma or stroke, it can be twisted and whipped around inside the skull so quickly that its connective tissues are sheared, it can be forced downwards through swelling and bleeding until it is almost pressed out through the hole at the base of the skull, or it can be shaken up like a plastic snowstorm and hurled against the skull. If a young child were to be thrown backwards on to a concrete floor, for example, there is a chance that his brain, responding to suction forces and the laws of acceleration and deceleration, would be thrown backwards and then forward from the impact site, where it would be grazed and ripped on the jagged interior of the skull diametrically opposite. This peculiar phenomenon is a “contrecoup” injury and it is exactly the injury that Ivan Penderecki inflicted on the small boy he had imprisoned in a chilly Nissen hut on the Romney Marshes.
Carl Lamb, by a peculiar quirk of fate, saw the whole thing. It was a cold October night in the 1970s and he was standing at the window of the hut, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the big Polish man to finish with the child so that he could have his turn. A struggle started, and when the child fell Lamb knew immediately that something was wrong—there was no blood, but there was something sinister about the way the boy’s eyes dilated, the way he became suddenly limp.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, chucking the cigarette out of the window and starting to panic. “Fuck—what’re we going to do?”
But in Penderecki’s eyes it wasn’t what they were going to do, it was what Carl was going to do. He was going to be the one to deal with it, to dispose of the child. Carl was young, still in his early twenties, and still a little in awe of Ivan Penderecki, who in those days was the mogul of the ring. So he obeyed without argument, gathering up the broken, still pulsing thing from the floor, expecting that within minutes he’d be holding a dead body. A body he’d have to find a hole for. On the long drive home, with the child on the back seat twitching under a blanket, he passed reservoirs and lakes and even drove under the big river Thames, which snaked under the moonlight out to the estuary. He should have stopped and launched him there and then, but somehow he didn’t have the juice for it. He’d done a lot in his short life—but he’d never got rid of a body before. Something, maybe cowardice, maybe an overpowering sense of the significance of what had happened, made him keep driving.
Back in Norfolk he put the boy on the sofa, got a beer, put some music on and sat down in the armchair to watch him die, wondering how he was going to dispose of him, wondering if he could cut up a body without puking. Minutes turned to hours, the boy’s face swelled monstrously, hours turned to days and he breathed on, a glittering string of saliva connecting him to the pillow. His right arm and leg drew up on themselves like bird’s claws, but by the third day, when Carl put a hand on his shoulder and shook him, he sat bolt upright, and vomited down his mustard yellow T-shirt.
“Fucking animal.” Tracey, still a teenager in those days, was furious with this intrusion. She stomped out of the house and went to stand next to the hangar, lighting a Marlboro and turning her back angrily on the house. Carl ignored her. He paced the room looking at the boy, wondering if he could kill him here and now. He should just drive him out to the motorway, he decided, and dump him on the hard shoulder—but he didn’t know how much he remembered of the night in the Nissen hut, who he could finger. Maybe he should just drive him down to London and dump him on Penderecki, but Penderecki was still an intimidating prospect. So he was stuck. He examined the child, trying to decide if he would be worth something to someone. The right side of his face was ruined, swollen and drawn downwards as if melted. He dribbled constantly. Basically he was useless. Over the next few days Carl made up his mind countless times that he was going to do it—he was going to kill him. But countless times he found he didn’t have the courage. And then, suddenly, something put an end to all his indecision. Suddenly Carl noticed that the boy was changing.
It was a slow process, but gradually, miraculously, the paralysis in his face began to correct itself and the dribbling stopped. He still grimaced and jerked, his head zagging back and forward like a baby trying to get out of a high chair, and when, a month or so later, he got up and tried to walk, his right foot pointed down like a horse hoof, but somehow Carl found all that easy to overlook. New possibilities were opening up to him.
The change in Carl’s attitude didn’t escape Tracey’s attention. She was glad. He had stopped being surly and losing his temper every five minutes. One night she heard noises coming from the bathroom, noises that echoed around the dark house, animal screams and the thudding of a body being battered against the cast-iron bathtub. When she tiptoed upstairs she met Carl coming out of the bathroom, a grim look on his face. He was sweating, he didn’t meet her eye, and she knew, without knowing how, that from now on the boy was going to be Carl’s special friend.
And she was right. When he got boozed at the weekends Carl would come down the stairs in a T-shirt and Y-fronts, a fag in his teeth, down to the living room where she and the boy watched TV on a Saturday. He never spoke, he didn’t snap his fingers or beckon or anything, he’d just switch on the light so they’d both look up and he’d stand there until the boy got up and limped out of the room. Tracey would turn up the volume on the TV and smoke a bit faster on those nights, trying not to think about what was going on upstairs. For days after these episodes the boy would go off into long periods of non-communication—he would sit in the corner rocking, a blanket over his head, a steady whinnying coming from his mouth.
“Just make out like it’s our brother,” Carl said. “Say he was born like that, OK? And we’ll call him something else—call him, I don’t know, call him Steven.” And so it was established—Steven was his name, he was their idiot brother. The Borstal boys liked to beat “Steven” up: Tracey often found him lying on his side in the hangar, rocking and whimpering amid the engine oil, and after a few years Carl also lost his taste for him. Steven had started smoking on the sly and tearing photos of Debbie Harry and Jilly Johnson out of the News of the World to Sellotape on the wall. One morning Carl had woken up and found the pile of part-worn tyres in the garage burnt to a cinder from one of Steven’s carelessly dropped cigarettes. He’d cracked the boy’s nose open for that. He didn’t have a child’s body any more and was showing signs of growing up and now Carl prowled the house losing his temper every five minutes, if not with him then with anything he encountered: with Tracey, with the cars in the garage, with the Borstal boys. Steven was a young teenager now, an overgrown child in cancer-shop trousers whom Carl didn’t fancy and didn’t have the ingenuity or energy to get rid of. He started locking him in his room at night with a slop bucket and nothing else. “It’s for your own good, you little fucker.”
Tracey was pleased—at last it seemed that Steven had reached the end of his useful life. But then one day, by chance, Carl discovered that Steven had been doing the work of the Borstal boys. While they sat back with their plastic bottles of cider and watched, it was Steven who was lugging the piles of car windows etched with vehicle identification numbers into the trees to smash. It was Steven who was doing the work with the anglegrinder, removing chassis numbers or cutting panels out. It was Steven who was growing bigger and more muscular and skilled around the garage. He couldn’t string a sentence together but he could weld a plate over a chassis number in seconds. A light seemed to come on in Carl’s head. If Steven could do the Borstal boys’ jobs then, “What the fuck am I doing wasting me gin and Silk Cuts?” Before long he had set him to work—he became a little grease monkey, filling and beating and grinding and “I don’t even have to find him a mask for the resprays,” Carl said. “He don’t know any better. Absolutely pukka.” Now any Borstal boy who couldn’t help Carl in the bedroom was redundant, and the caravan stood empty for long periods of time.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, Steven said Penderecki’s name. That really made Carl sit up and pay attention: “What d’you say?” He glared at him from over the News of the World. “What was that?”
“AhhhBan.”
“Whassat?” Carl looked up at his sister, standing there biting her nails and pulling a face. “Whatsee say?”
“I don’t fucking know, do I?”
“Iibaaan.”
“Fuck me.” Carl crumpled the newspaper and jumped up. “He said Ivan. Didn’t you? Didn’t you say Ivan?”
“Unnng!” Steven tugged his head back and his hands jerked up under his chin. “Ung.”
“What’s Ivan?” Tracey said. “His name?”
“Nah—that’s Penderecki’s name, isn’t it?”
“Uh-hh.” He jerked his head back, his claw hand flailing under his chin. He had odd, wandering irises, which skittered across the top of his eyes like windblown leaves across a lake.
“Say it again. Who broke your head, eh?” Silence. “Come on, you stupid little shit, who done your head? Was it Penderecki?”
Silence.
“Come on—was it Penderecki what broke your head?”
A sudden jerking and rolling of his eyes. “Ung!”
“Who?”
“BBeMBe—rrrrr-kki—”
“That’s it!” Carl was amazed. “And who helped you? Eh? Who helped you after? Was it me? Was it Carl?”
“Ung—ung!” He jerked his head and rolled his eyes. That meant yes. Carl sat down on the sofa with an odd look of revelation in his eyes.
“That Polish piece of shit!” He slammed his fist into his palm and Tracey shrank back a little, not sure what was coming next. “I’ve got him, that piece of shit.”
The way Carl explained it to her, that Penderecki was getting old, slowly drying up, becoming inactive, losing all interest in little boys and forgetting he had anything at all between his legs, that there was some leverage to be had here, that he, Carl, could drop hints about what really happened to the boy and soon have Penderecki eating out of his hands, it all made sense to Tracey in a way. He’d have a place to crash in London whenever he needed it, he’d have Penderecki’s contacts if he wanted them, he’d have a second place to stash his collection of tapes if things got dodgy at the garage.
“Or if I have to go away for some reason. He’ll guard them with his fucking life if he knows what’s good for him.” Carl was in a good mood now. “So, Tracey, you ain’t to talk about who Steven is, right? If Ivan ever turns up here for some reason, don’t you never let on—if there’s talking to be done it’ll be me does it.”
So Steven became part of the house and they got used to him wandering around. He had a favourite hat—a knitted Manchester United bobble hat that he wore pulled down over his forehead: “Bobah,” he called it, no one knew why. If he was separated from Bobah he would cry—so when she was feeling spiteful Tracey hid it from him until she had managed to get him curled up on the kitchen floor in tears. Afterwards he never seemed to bear any resentment towards her, he seemed to forget about it almost as quickly as it had happened. In fact, Tracey realized that he didn’t have much of a memory for anything that had happened since he came to Norfolk. He craved chocolate and got fat on Caramel bars; over the years he had crushes on Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears. When Carl wasn’t around Tracey tormented Steven. She made him clean the house, and would sit on the sofa painting her toes, listening to him in the hallway, ringing out each task he did: “Duh–ddinnn, now,” he’d warble. That meant dusting. “Hooooberiinnnn” (Hoovering) or simply: “Kerneaninnn, now” (cleaning).
“What do you put up with him for? He’s a fucking mong. Why you hanging on to him?”
“Tracey, it’s none of your fucking business.”
But she thought it was her business—she was savvy enough to know that Carl wasn’t telling her something about the boy. She felt sure that there was something else about Steven. Maybe Steven meant something to someone important—and if she knew anything about Carl there was probably money involved somewhere along the line.
And so it went. When Carl died Tracey was left to deal with “her brother.” She’d entertained some ideas about approaching Penderecki—she turned the idea around for hours as she sat watching Ricki Lake and marching through her supply of Silk Cut. But then DI Caffery had knocked on the door and everything had fallen into place. Now she saw why Carl had clung to the boy—there was money involved. Just what she’d always thought. She wasn’t the slow-thinking mule Carl said she was, after all.
The first thing she decided to do was find somewhere to put Steven—she didn’t want Caffery coming back and finding him pottering around the house clutching a duster and grinning idiotically. So yesterday she had put him in the Datsun—”Look, you can bring Bobah too,” and taken him out to the caravan at the top of the quarry. “Later I’ll bring Britney.”
“Bwidney—”
“I’ll bring her over too. I promise.”
And she did. She brought all of his Britney posters and his one Britney tape and the Walkman Carl had given him four Christmases ago, and settled him down with some Caramel bars and Cokes, padlocked the caravan and stood outside in the rain, smoking a cigarette and watching the cars go by on the road with their headlights on, thinking that she was very brave and very clever. And today, back at the caravan, on the day that Caffery was due to come up the A12 with the money, she was feeling even braver. It was sunny and clear. She paused briefly outside the caravan to spit on the ground. She had to find a way of establishing that “Steven” was indeed the same boy Caffery wanted. Inside he was warbling along to a song—”ooopsh, ah did id ug-ed.” Britney fucking Spears. The only tape he had and he never seemed to tire of listening to it. Over and over again, and still he didn’t know the words. She unlocked the padlock and went in. The curtains were wet with condensation and the caravan stank of mildew.
“Listen, Steven.” She put down the bucket and sat on the bunk next to him, lifting one of his earphones. “Steven …”
He grinned at her, flopping his head back and forward. “Traith—”
She smiled, trying to look patient. “Look.” She took the headphones off and rested them on the bed, switching the Sony to the off position. “I’ve got something I want to ask you. OK?”
He paused for a moment thinking about this, his eyes skittering around, his hands moving one over the other.
“I said OK?”
He seemed to focus. He nodded hard, so hard that his heels knocked against the floor. “‘Kay.”
“Good. Now listen. Do you remember the name of the bloke in London?”
Steven stopped nodding. He made a little choking sound and his eyes wandered away and came to rest on Britney Spears, pasted up on the back of the door: Britney lying back on a yellow pickup truck in a red and white cheerleader outfit.
“Steven?”
He bobbed his head up and down and now she saw he was mouthing something. She bent closer.
“What’s that? What you saying?” He put his finger up his nose. “No, come on, don’t do that.” She snatched his hand away. “Now, come on, you used to know it, you little shit—come on, the man what broke your head?”
He frowned suddenly and his eyes glazed over. He tipped his chin back and flapped his face towards the windows as if he was laughing. But he wasn’t laughing. He was nodding.
“You remember?”
“Uuuungh.”
“What’s his name?”
“AahhhBaaan …”
“Ivan? Is that what you said? Ivan?”
“Ungh.” He jerked his head up and down, eager to please.
“Good. Now if someone asks you, ‘Who did this to you?’ you say, ‘Ivan, Ivan Penderecki.’”
“Aaaahh-Baannn Bemmb-bbbemmb—” He looked as if he was going to weep with the effort of getting the words out. “Aaah-Bann. Bember—Ahhbann Bemmberedddih!”
It was good enough. Tracey sat back, satisfied, and lit a cigarette. She felt confident now—very confident. Britney Spears, in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt, smiled sideways at them out of a hot day in Times Square.
From the Jaguar parked outside the bank in Lewisham Caffery called Souness: “I’m not going to make it this morning. I’m sorry, I’m—I don’t know, food poisoning from last night or something.”
“Oh, Jesus, Jack.” The two DCs she’d assigned to him were waiting in the office. “They’re sitting here like a pair of wee bairns waiting for their daddy to come and tell them what to do.”
“OK, OK—put them on.” He spoke for ten minutes to one of the DCs, giving him the door-to-door parameters he wanted them to cover—Logan had already done the west of the park and he wanted the two DCs to start on the east side. Afterwards he spoke to Kryotos, asking her to contact Champaluang Keoduangdy and arrange a late lunch meeting.
“I thought you were dying?”
“Marilyn, please, I just need a little rest.”
“OK, I’m with you, I won’t say a dickie bird.”
“The phone’ll be off the hook so if you need me use my mobile.”
“Will do. Oh, and Jack?”
“What?”
“The dentist. From Kings. Remember?” She paused. “He called again, Jack. Can you please—?”
“Yeah, yeah. OK. Leave it with me.”
After the call he took off his tie and put it into his pocket. He had felt like a catalogue plate sitting there with the bank manager. But he’d got the money—it was in a brown banker’s envelope in his breast pocket—he had his bargaining tool. Pathetic, so obsessed that you’ll pay more than a month’s salary for the ramblings of a washed-up old con and then lie about it to everyone. After this, he made a promise to himself: after today he was going to put it all behind him. He pointed the Jaguar towards Norfolk, opening the window, keeping the radio off. If nothing happened today it was going to end: he was going to hand it all over to the paedo unit and tell Rebecca she’d got what she wanted and that the Ewan story was over. But as he drove he couldn’t help catching sight of his eyes in the rear-view mirror and all he could see in them was hope—as if he really expected to pull the car up at Lamb’s and see Ewan saunter around the corner of the house, out into the sunlight, still wearing his shorts and little mustard T-shirt.
And now think what you’re really going to see.
An old child’s shoe, or a fragment of bone probably. Three thousand pounds and the prize would be delivered with a saintly relic’s ceremony. I hold in my hand a genuine piece of the True Cross. Or another animal carcass, green with burial. He knew he was going to be screwed around with—he just wished he could get rid of that bubble of hope in his chest.
Tracey Lamb knew the moment she got through the door. She didn’t see them, and they’d been clever, hiding their car, but she knew. She dropped the bucket and turned to bolt. A uniformed arm came out, pushing the warrant into her face. “Miss Tracey Lamb?”
“You never fucking asked to come in my house!” She thrust away the hand and swivelled so that she could look back up the hallway and see the extent of it. “You never fucking asked.”
“Didn’t have to, Miss Lamb. You weren’t here.”
“No! You cunts!”
Everywhere the house was being clawed at. They were walking around in their shirt-sleeves, ignoring her wails, in and out of the rooms, snapping on their latex gloves. At the top of the stairs she could see a step-ladder placed in the attic access panel, and a woman’s elegant ankles in tan high heels, cut off just below knee height. She could hear someone walking around up there and see the flash of a torch.
“Get out of my fucking attic!” she yelled up the stairs.
An officer put both hands on her shoulders. “Miss Lamb, I think you’d be better off just letting us get on with it.”
“You fuckers—oh, God—” She knew she couldn’t fight this. Caffery—that bastard—that fucking-shit-for-brains piece of filth. She sank to the floor, her hands in her hair. “You fuckers.”
The woman in the attic came carefully down the steps and passed an old blue shoebox, covered in cobwebs, to the PC at the foot of the ladder. He turned and carried it down the stairs.
Lamb saw him coming towards her and was furious. “Don’t you dare take my things.” She grabbed hold of his leg. “Give me back my things—give me that.”
“Yow!” The PC tried to wrench away his leg, holding the shoebox in the air out of her reach, but Tracey clung on. “Get off—get her off me, someone!”
“Miss Lamb,” another officer said. “That contains evidence.” “I know what it flicking contains. It’s my bollocking shoebox—”
“Get her off me—”
With unexpected speed Lamb jumped up and swung out her arm, catching the PC enough of a blow for the box to tumble to the floor. “Jesus, you cow—” The contents spilled out, slithering along the floor. For a moment everyone fell quiet, staring at the images among their feet. Even Lamb was momentarily shocked by what she saw. She stood over them, her body curled forward, her knees half bent, her face white as if she had been about to fall to her knees.
“Tracey, let’s make this as easy as—”
“FUCK OFF.”
There were thirty or so photographs—the old type of print with a small white border around them, the images grainy. They showed a tiny blonde girl of about six sitting on a garden bench. In some of the photos she wore hotpants with bib and braces, a bunny rabbit embroidered on the bib. Her hair had been backcombed and given a shoulder-length sixties flip, like an adult. In some shots she was pictured playing with a beach ball; in others the bib was peeled down and she was proudly baring her thin white chest, her head tilted on one side for the camera. In two photographs, which had fallen near the back door, between the feet of an embarrassed officer, one slightly covering the other, the same little girl was on a bed. She was straddling the face of a grown man. No hotpants in this one. No knickers.
“No!” Lamb fell forward, landing face down on the photographs. “No—they’re mine, don’t take them, please!” She moved her arms compulsively up and down—like an exhausted swimmer trying to stay afloat, gathering the images under her body, one wellington boot coming adrift.
“Come on, Miss Lamb.” The silence in the hallway broke, and someone put a hand on her shoulder. “Get up. And pull your skirt down too—you’re showing the world what you’ve got.”
“Getthefuckawayfromme—” She batted the hand away. “Let go.” The PC, afraid Lamb might roll on to her back and kick at him—worse, that he’d see more of what was under her skirt—backed away a touch, looking up at his colleagues for help.
“Miss Lamb,” a WPC tried, “that’s crucial evidence you’ve got there. If you don’t let me near it I’ll have to arrest you. Can’t you see what’s happening to that poor little girl there?”
Tracey Lamb, lying like a frog on the floor with all her limbs moving at once, became still at this sentence. The two officers exchanged glances, wondering at this sudden hiatus. Then Lamb rolled on to her side and covered her face, her chest convulsing, tears making mirrors of her red cheeks.
“Miss Lamb, you have to get up—have you seen—”
“Yes, I have seen, I do know,” she wailed. “Of course I’ve seen. Who do you think she is, you cunts? Eh? That ‘poor little girl’—just who do you think she is?”
They had to drag her, one on either side, out of the house and over to the car, past the rusting oil containers, the old ivy-covered engine hoist. The arresting officer had just spent a day at Hendon learning the Quik-kuf arrest technique. By the time Caffery arrived at 11 a.m. the PC was using a ballpoint to close the double-locking pins of the handcuffs and Tracey Lamb was under arrest.
It took until lunchtime for the MG 1–16 forms to be filled in and signed so that Tracey Lamb could be officially charged with the indecent assault of the boy in the video. The interviewing officers—members of the paedophile unit down from Scotland Yard—had brought the video with them. They’d had it for ten years and had been looking for her all that time. A wig, they told her, didn’t make much difference in identifying her. After she’d been charged they agreed with the custody officer that she could be bailed.
Outside, on the trimmed lawn in front of the police station, she lit a cigarette and stood for a moment, ignoring the council workers coming in and out of their offices for sandwiches, and gazed up over the unfinished stump of the cathedral tower, out to the clouds moving in ranks across the sky. Shit. She couldn’t believe it—just couldn’t believe it. They’d warned her that there might be other charges under the Obscene Publications Act, which “might arise in the course of our investigation,” but the duty brief, Kelly Alvarez, a little Mexican-looking woman in a navy suit with a grubby lifeboat sticker on the lapel, told her it wasn’t as bad as she thought. They only had one tape, and the photos taken of her as a child would help establish “the enormous influence your father and later your brother exerted over you. Don’t worry, Tracey, we might, if we’re lucky, get away with a non-custodial.”
But she couldn’t accept it. She’d been hauled in before, of course, done her own bits of time here and there, but what really slaughtered her was the money. When the unit had dragged her out of the house and into the panda car she’d caught sight of Caffery standing just inside the trees, watching, a stuck sort of look on his face. Now she didn’t know what to think.
“How did they find me?” she wanted to know. “Who fitted me up?”
Alvarez shrugged. “They’ve had the video for years.”
“But how did they know it was me?”
“I’ll find out—I promise. Now, don’t worry about this, Tracey—it’s not the end of the world.”
“Of course it’s not,” she muttered to herself now, walking away from the station, down the sunny Bury streets. Like a bag lady in your Wellingtons. “Not the end of the fucking world.”
She paused, the cigarette half-way to her mouth. A familiar car. Just crouching like a cat at the corner of the road. Quickly she turned on her heel and walked in the opposite direction, pulling the collar of the T-shirt higher as if it might make her invisible.
Caffery had seen her coming out of the turning ahead and started the car. He was wired, so alert his eyes hurt—in those few hours that Lamb had spent in the police station everything had come into focus: now he understood the tail on the country lane yesterday. Souness’s red BMW. Rebecca hadn’t gone to the police, it was all down to bottle-blonde Paulina—infant-blue eyes and a pedigree car. An intelligence officer for the paedo unit, in the incident room she had latched on to him instantly. She must have heard about Penderecki’s death, must have been watching him. Souness hadn’t said anything about it over dinner last night. She must have known—she knew that Paulina had taken the car—so what was all that trust and love and tolerance shit last night? Now he was in the business of waiting for the other boot to fall, waiting to get the first sinister hint that Souness or the paedophile unit were talking to the CIB—Let’s count your breaches of the discipline code, shall we? Corrupt practice, abuse of authority. He knew the whole thing was about to crash around him—and now he just had time to give it one last shot.
He put the car into gear and slid along next to Lamb before she could turn into a side-street. He opened the passenger window. “Tracey.”
She ignored him, kept on walking, and he had to edge the Jaguar forward, one hand on the steering-wheel, leaning across the passenger seat: “Tracey—listen—this wasn’t mine—I swear—I didn’t have anything to do with it.” He held his hand over the envelope in his breast pocket to stop it falling out on the seat. “The money’s here. It’s right here.”
“Bit fucking late now, isn’t it?”
“No—we can still talk.” He looked up at her. “We can still talk.”
She stopped. She tucked her bottom lip under her long teeth and bent a little, trying to see what was inside his pocket. So intent, so fascinated, she had the wet mouth of a dog running a scent line. He’d got her by the nose.
She took a step closer and slowly he opened his hand away from the pocket to show her. That’s it, that’s the way—just a little nearer … Reflected in the car’s wing mirror someone walked across the lawn from the courthouse and Caffery registered it momentarily, a passing flash of anxiety that he might be seen with Lamb, and that momentary lapse cost him the day. When he looked back the line had broken. She’d seen the simple flicker of his attention and followed his eye, seen what he was looking at, and lost her faith. She took a step back, glancing up at the courthouse, her eyes darting back and forward.
“Tracey—”
“What?”
“Come on—talk to me.”
“No. There’s nothing to tell. I was lying.” She was backing away now.
“Shit.” He slammed his fist on the steering-wheel and put the car in gear. “Tracey.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” She set her face and walked away. He had to shoot the car forward to keep up with her.
“Tracey!”
“I mean it—I was lying. You’re not stupid, you knew I was lying.” She took a last puff on the cigarette. She didn’t want to stop to tread on the butt so she threw it through the opened window of the Jaguar, crossed her arms resolutely across her breasts and turned into the abbey grounds where the car couldn’t follow.