‘How long has he been in your sights?’
They were in room 9, a bland office in a bland office block in south London – Jed Nichols, the DCI attached, and Serrailler. Nichols was Afro-Caribbean, taller than him, lithe and very focused – Simon had never met a man more intense about his job, more dedicated, more … the word ‘enthusiastic’ seemed wrong in context, but it was right. He wore jeans and an open-neck denim shirt. Purple Converse trainers. A thin gold wire bangle on his left wrist, thin gold earring in his right ear. Simon had liked him on sight, as he had bounded down the stairs to meet him in the lobby.
‘We ought to be several steps ahead of them,’ Jed had said, ‘and we’re not, we’re always, always behind – a combination of this being a rapidly expanding area of crime, an explosion of people with Internet access and technological expertise, plus the usual …’
‘… lack of resources.’
Jed had nodded.
Two laptops open on the desk. No pens, no paper. No waste bin. No traces. They took their empty paper cups away and dropped them in a container outside.
Will Fernley.
His face was on Simon’s screen, several times over. The images ranged from his official police and prison ID photos, to more personal ones. Will as a teenager, leaning on a gate. Will as a young man at Oxford. Will with an older man, both walking across a field carrying shotguns. Will in a touched-up professional portrait, aged thirty. Will in morning suit as someone’s best man. Will, presumably, with a jacket over his head and handcuffed, being led by two shirt-sleeved police officers.
He was rather gentle-looking, with an engaging smile, clean-shaven, light brown hair, worn slightly long – a young man at ease with himself, confident, relaxed, open, his expression without any angst. An untroubled face.
They spent a few minutes looking at it in silence. Then Jed leaned back, hands behind his head.
‘Thoughts?’
Simon looked one last time, then turned away. ‘First thought is an odd one maybe. I am still absolutely certain that I’ve never seen him in my life before – as I said to Lochie and Linda. Quite certain. But looking at these – I know him.’
Jed nodded.
‘He’s a type,’ Serrailler said. ‘A classic upper-middle-class, public-school- and Oxbridge-educated son of a country landowner. He’s pretty conventional though he probably sports jeans rather than pink cords – his dad wears those – and he wouldn’t be seen dead in tweeds except when shooting. Or brogues. He’s easy to talk to, gets on well with most people, affable, good host. He’s an open book. I know him.’ He paused and looked out of the window onto a section of corrugated roof. A pigeon. A rectangle of blue sky. Like being in prison, he thought. Better get used to it. ‘But obviously I don’t. I don’t know the half.’
‘You do know the half and you’re spot on about it. You probably even know three-quarters. It’s the hidden part you don’t know. No one does. Has anyone ever known? Fernley himself doesn’t know because he won’t let himself. Most of the time he can’t admit that this part even exists.’ Jed jumped to his feet and paced a few times round the room. ‘Or so the psychs would tell us.’
‘You don’t agree?’
He shook his head. ‘Not my concern. It’ll be yours though. You’ll be the one who hears all about that hidden person. You’ll have a deeply hidden persona of your own before long. Listen –’ he leaned over Simon, hands on the table – ‘I know there’s a why, I know there’s a whole string of whys – but what I’m here for – what we’re all here for – isn’t to dig out the why, it’s to dig out the truth – the facts. Who. Where. When. How. Not Why. That’s someone else’s job. We’re here to catch them. To stop them doing any more damage. We’re not even here to prosecute and punish – we pass that on. I want to ferret out every one of these child abusers and every scrap of information they’ve got about the others. Who. Where. Everything we do in here, every day, is about that. You know what abusers are? Thieves and robbers. They rob children, they rob them of their innocence and their trust and their sense of self-worth. They rob them of their childhood and a childhood is something you can never get back.’
His voice had grown not more strident but quieter and quieter as his words became more passionate. Now, he went silent and did not catch Serrailler’s eye.
You, Simon thought. That’s why. Somehow, sometime, it happened to you.
‘This is only a sample of what Fernley had on his computer. You ever seen any of this stuff before?’ He held up his hands. ‘Not a leading question, sorry – but you haven’t worked in this area much and your average CID officer doesn’t come on it very often, not in this category. We’re dealing with level 5 child pornography.’
‘I know.’
‘You wouldn’t be on this job if you couldn’t cope with looking at it, goes without saying – all the same, it doesn’t make for easy viewing, Simon. One tip – it’s a weird thing, but it takes on a life of its own. It’ll try to burrow its way into your head, into your memory, into every corner of your waking and sleeping. Don’t let it. There’s a trick you’ll learn, with experience – not sure how it’s done, to be honest, you just find yourself doing it and you get better at it. You watch and you let it slide over the surface of your mind but you don’t give it permanent space inside your head. Make sense?’
‘Perfect sense.’
‘Only with that knack comes the risk – that you’ll stop being disturbed by it and start to get used to it, which is one thing, but getting used to it must never mean “accepting”. You never accept it, you never tolerate it, you never stop being 110 per cent focused on eliminating it from God’s earth. Right – leave you to it. Back in an hour.’
It was one of the most draining hours of Serrailler’s life. He began by reminding himself of Jed’s advice and had to remind himself of it several times as he viewed the material from Fernley’s laptop. When he had finished going through it, sometimes flipping over images so fast he barely noted what they contained, he closed the computer and instinctively drank an entire glass of water. He did not let his mind recall what he had seen. Instead, to steer himself in another direction entirely, he tried to remember a poem – any poem – and hit upon one he had learned at school.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean …
After a while, he recalled the whole of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and repeated it twice, so that the images in his head were of the bearded old man, the huge bird, the still ship and the sea under a burning sky.
‘OK?’ Jed looked into Serrailler’s face the moment he came through the door.
‘Yes.’
‘So?’ He set down two cups of black coffee.
‘If I was up for this at the start …’ He realised that he was clenching his fist round the paper cup.
‘Good man. You won’t have to look at this stuff again. No point.’
‘What’s next?’
‘Read through the account of Fernley’s trial. Not that he gives anything away. Read his file – everything we know about him down to the brand of boxers he wears, everything we’ve got about his life, from birth. It’s all been put on disk. You don’t have to stay here to go through it. You sign it out and keep it on your person at all times when it isn’t in the laptop. You sign it back in when you’re done.’
Jed signed him, his laptop and ‘all material’ out of the building, the reception clerk took his pass, the door locked behind him and he was on a scuzzy London backstreet, with the sound of metal on metal from a bodywork repair shop and the smell of rain on dirty pavements.
Dearest Simon
I hope you reached wherever you were going safely and I do understand that you can’t make contact. Of course I do. It’s your work and I have never, ever minded it taking you away for long hours or days and even weeks – as maybe this will? – because you are so totally committed to your job. How could anyone mind that?
But this isn’t really about work, as maybe you already realise, this is about something that’s gone wrong and someone who longs for that not to be the case and to know how to put it right. I love you – that is the simple truth. It’s not something fleeting or shallow. I don’t doubt that you love me and that you have committed yourself to our relationship in a way you have perhaps never done previously with anyone. Yet I feel what was a hair’s distance between us is widening to a gap and I don’t want it to become a chasm.
I need you to talk to me and tell me what you want me to do, how you want me to be with you. I need you to tell me because I just cannot guess – or not all of the time and then it is only about unimportant things. What have I said or done that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy? What has happened to distance you?
I love you so so much and it is lonely and bleak without you, but all this makes it much worse. It isn’t that you are absent in person, it’s that I feel your absence from me in some deeper way. Even when you’re there. We were so happy together – even through the hardest time, we seemed so able to cope and support one another, because we loved. What’s changed?
If you can find a way to communicate – preferably to talk, but if not, email is fine – just tell me what has happened, what I have done, what you want me to do. I can’t bear any sort of coldness to develop. We’re too close for that and I love you too much.
I am working at the bookshop all next week, to give Emma a break. Wish me luck.
You thought I wouldn’t like to be in the flat by myself and I did wonder, because of the empty offices below and no one about at night. But I love it. I love the flat whenever I’m there, but best of all with you – that goes without saying.
Look after your so-beloved self.
Rachel
He had checked into the office block that was a standard chain hotel, showered, changed, glanced into the bar thinking he might get a drink before heading out to eat, saw what it was like, and just headed out. He had walked a mile or so before finding a decent Thai restaurant, eaten well, drunk a couple of cold beers, and walked back. He felt perfectly at ease – just glad he was a copper and six foot two.
He stopped at a late-night supermarket and bought a bottle of overpriced Famous Grouse. Put up the Do Not Disturb notice on his door, then locked it. Half drew the curtains, though there was only the playground of a junior school opposite, with black metal poles at intervals between twelve-foot-high wire panels. He gave the room a quick check, sat down at the flimsy table and opened up his laptop.
Dearest Simon …
He read the email through, then read it again more slowly and as he read he felt the long-familiar knotting in the pit of his stomach, the needles of panic and anxiety probing their way into his mind.
Dearest Simon …
He closed his eyes. Images. Images. He opened them again. Got up. Poured a whisky and ran the tap until the water was as cold as he could make it. Sluiced it round his throat. Topped up his glass.
Images.
Let them slide over the surface. Don’t let them burrow.
He read the email again.
Listen, you jerk – this is the woman you fell in love with. The woman with the heart-shaped face and violet eyes. The woman who had an affair with you while looking after her sick husband, and who never once made you feel bad about that. The woman who would marry you tomorrow, love and look after you for the rest of your life, maybe even have children for you. The one woman who actually got through to you so far as to come and live with you in your sacred space.
Rachel.
So now what?
What do you want?
He could answer that immediately. He had no idea what he wanted but he knew what he did not. He had always known that. He did not want a wife, a family, an invasion of his space, a dependent being, someone who tried to second-guess him or look into his mind, let alone his soul. He did not want to be disturbed or disarranged or invaded. He loved Rachel. Yes, he could answer that easily enough, but in his own way, on his own terms. He knew himself too well and far better than anyone else knew him. Cat thought she knew him but she didn’t, his mother had once thought so, but had also come to understand that she didn’t. Rachel? Maybe she knew him better than he thought, but if she did, he couldn’t cope with it.
Dearest Simon …
What had she done? What had happened between them? How could she start to put things right? What, why, how, supposing, if …
Please. Please. Simon?
The image he had now was of her face and her eyes and the expression in them, the last time he had seen her – puzzled, thoughtful, anxious.
He had to let that image glide over the surface of his mind, too, and leave it there.
He looked at the email again, without reading it. She wanted a reply. Deserved a reply.
He had none.
He took the disk out of his inner pocket and inserted it into the drive. The machine whirred softly for a few seconds, then the screen flickered.
He began to read about Will Fernley, the man he must get to know as well as he knew himself.