60
Flea wasn’t hungry but she needed the fuel. She sat on the ledge in the hull, her legs in the sludge, and listlessly chewed the sandwich Prody had left her. She was shivering, her whole body convulsing. The meat in it was greasy and heavy-tasting, with tiny bits of cartilage and other gristle. She had to follow each mouthful with a gulp of water to wash it down her sore throat.
Prody was dead. No doubt in her mind. At first she’d watched the rope moving back and forward, leaving a scar in the moss and slime on the wall. That had gone on for fifteen minutes. It had stopped when he’d got to the top of the forty-foot shaft. ‘Going for a walk,’ he’d yelled down at her. His voice echoed and bounced around the tunnel. ‘No signal.’
Of course there’s not, she thought bitterly. Of course not. But she’d wet her lips and yelled, ‘OK. Good luck.’
And that had been that.
Something had happened to him on the surface. She knew what the top of the air shaft was like. Years ago, on the training exercise, she’d been there. She recalled woods, bridle-paths, grassy glades and yard after yard of impenetrable undergrowth. He’d have been tired. Would probably have sat down at the top of the shaft to recover after the climb. Easy pickings for Martha’s kidnapper. And now the day was on the wane. The great circle of daylight powering down from the shaft had moved slowly across the canal, throwing down the shadows of plants. It had thinned to an irregular sliver on the moss-covered wall, like a smiling mouth. All the shadows in the tunnel were starting to run into another so when she looked through the hole she couldn’t see the corners of the tunnel any more. Could hardly see Martha’s shoe.
Prody had reacted badly to the shoe. He’d been in Traffic, first on the scene to all the unimaginable accidents. He was supposed to be unflappable, but something about the shoe had shocked even him.
She lifted her arm and studied her hand. Her fingers were patched purple and white – one of the early symptoms of hypothermia. The body-racking shivering wouldn’t last. That would go as she sank nearer to death. She balled up the cellophane, pushed it inside the bottle. There was hardly any light left. If she was going to get out of here she had to do it now. She’d spent an hour sculling around the sludge and had already found an old acrow – an iron pit prop – lying in the sump hole. It was covered with slime but not too rusted and she’d lodged its top plate under the hatch. She’d found a sturdy six-inch nail that she could wedge into the acrow-winding mechanism and for the last two hours she had been laboriously tightening it, pushing the prop up into the hatch. She planned to dislodge the windlass. And then what? Crawl to the surface and be picked off like a First World War soldier going over the top? Better than dying from cold down here.
Hey? You know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
she got to her feet, legs creaking and aching. Wearily she put the bottle into the net pocket of the rucksack, then reached for the nail to start winding the acrow. It was gone.
It had been on the ledge – right here next to her. She moved her hands frantically, skimming over the rivets and the slime. Half an hour it had taken to find that nail, feeling around in the muck at the bottom of the barge sump. She fumbled for the head torch in the rucksack, pulled it out and the nail came with it. Fell, plinkplink, on to the ledge.
She froze. Stared at the nail. It had been in the rucksack. But she’d left it on the ledge. She remembered making a careful decision to put it on there. Or did she really remember that? She put her hand to her head, momentarily dizzy. She did remember putting it on the ledge, she was sure. It meant her memory was slipping. Another symptom of hypothermia shutting her system down.
She picked up the nail in numb fingers. It wasn’t quite thick enough for the hole in the acrow and she pushed it easily into the mechanism. There were tender gullies in her palms where the nail had dug in earlier, even through the gloves, and now she lined it up with those channels, ignoring the pain, and leaned all her weight on the nail. It didn’t move. With a grunt she did it again. And again. It didn’t move. Fucking thing. She rammed at it again. Still nothing. And again.
‘Shit.’
She sat on the ledge. Sweat prickled under her arms in spite of the cold. The last time the nail had moved was more than an hour ago. And then it had been less than half a centimetre. A sign like that was telling her to give up.
But she had no other choice.
The right ankle cuff on her immersion suit felt wrong. She submerged her hand in the water and touched the ankle carefully. The cuff itself was OK but, above it, the neoprene bulged tight as if water was trapped in there. She used her hands to lift her leg out of the muck, rest it on the ledge. She strapped on the head lamp and she leaned over to study the suit. Above the ankle it ballooned out. When she moved her leg she could feel fluid sloshing around. Gingerly she slid a finger under the cuff and pulled it. Something like water gushed out. Warm. Red in the torch beam.
Fuck. She leaned her head against the bulkhead, took deep, slow breaths to stop the giddiness. The wound in her thigh had opened and that was one hell of a lot of blood to lose. If she’d seen someone else lose that much she’d be getting them to hospital. And fast.
This wasn’t good. Not good at all.
61
Damien Graham wasn’t doing himself any favours when it came to cracking people’s prejudice. When Caffery arrived at his tiny terraced house, just past six in the evening, he was standing in the open doorway surveying the street and smoking, of all things, a cigarillo. He was wearing wraparound Diesel shades and a long camel pimp coat draped around his shoulders. All that was missing was the purple-velvet fedora. Part of Caffery couldn’t help feeling a trace of pity for the guy.
As he came up the path Damien took the cigarillo out of his mouth, nodded an acknowledgement. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘’S long as you don’t mind if I eat.’
‘Nah – you’re safe, man, safe.’
This morning, catching a shave in the mirror at MCIU, Caffery’d thought he’d looked haggard. Along with his other notes he’d made an internal memo to eat something. Now he had a passenger seat full of service-station sandwiches and chocolate bars – Mars, Snickers, Dime. Typical man’s solution to the problem. He’d have to remember to sweep them somewhere safe before Myrtle next got into the car. He pulled out a Caramac and peeled it, snapped off two sections and put them into the corner of his mouth to melt. He and Damien stood with their backs to the house and looked blankly at the vehicles in the street. The CSI van. Q’s insane retro Vauxhall.
‘You gonna tell me what’s going on?’ said Damien. ‘They’re in there taking the place apart. Saying there’s some kind of camera system in my house.’
‘That’s right.’ Damien wasn’t the only one. The Blunts had the same set of paraphernalia in theirs. Turner was over there now, talking to them. In fact, everyone was out in the field. Everyone except Prody. Caffery couldn’t reach him on the phone. He’d have liked to know where he was – what he’d found out about Flea. He’d have liked to be sure that was what he was doing – looking for Flea and not nosing around the review team’s Kitson file again. ‘Damien,’ he said, ‘these cameras. I don’t suppose you have any idea how they came to be there?’
Damien made a noise of contempt through his teeth. ‘What’re you saying? You think I put them there?’
‘No. I think someone got into your house and put them there. But I don’t know how they had the opportunity. Do you?’
Damien was silent for a while. Then he flicked the stub of the cigar into the scrappy front lawn. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted, pulling the coat closer around his shoulders. ‘Maybe I do. Been thinking about it.’
‘Well?’
‘A break-in. Long time ago. Before the car got jacked. Me, I always thought it was something to do with my missus – she had some dodgy friends back in those days. We reported it, but it was weird – nothing got nicked. And now I’m thinking about it I’m starting to . . . you know . . . wonder.’
> Caffery put the last of the Caramac into his mouth. He glanced past Damien at the photos on the hallway wall: framed black-and-white studio shots of Alysha, her hair pulled back in a wide Alice band. He felt the sickening disorientation of a case that had turned a slow somersault in a matter of hours. The team was switching its focus: it had stopped studying Ted Moon and was instead studying his victims because Moon was choosing the girls in advance, and that made it a completely different investigation. Worse, everyone had the uneasy sense it wouldn’t be long before he did the whole thing again. That there was another family out there with surveillance cameras already in their house. All MCIU had to do was find out where that family was – and Caffery was sure the key lay in working out why he’d chosen Alysha, Emily, Cleo and Martha.
Damien said, ‘What’s going on? Feels like I’m being haunted. I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t suppose you do.’ Caffery crumpled up the wrapper and stuck it, with hardwired crime-scene instinct, in his pocket. ‘What’s going on is we’ve climbed up a few steps. Seen Ted Moon from a different perspective. He’s clever. Right? Look at what he’s done in your house. He could have abducted Alysha – any of the others – at any time he chose. But he didn’t. He staged it. Took the girls in a public place to make it look random. He did that to hide the fact that he already knew your girls.’
‘Already knew her?’ Damien folded his arms and shook his head. ‘No. I don’t buy that. I’ve seen the bastard’s photo. I don’t know him.’
‘Maybe not. But he knows Alysha. Somehow. Maybe he met her through friends. Did she used to stay away – at her friends’ houses?’
‘No. I mean, she was little in those days. Just a little girl. Lorna kept her with us all the time. We haven’t got family here, even. Mine are all in London, hers are in Jamaica.’
‘No close friends she went out with?’
‘Not at that age. I dunno what her mother lets her do now.’
‘Any times she was left on her own maybe?’
‘No. Really, I mean it. Lorna – for all her scabby ways – was a good mother. And if you want to know more about that time she’s the one you need to speak to.’
Caffery wished he could speak to her. With all the Interpol searches Turner had initiated, the Jamaican police had come up with nothing. He swallowed the chocolate. His mouth was furred and dry with all the sugar. It made him feel wrong and disordered and added to the maddening sense that something else was lingering on the periphery of his consciousness that he was still missing. ‘Damien. Can we go upstairs?’
Damien let out a sigh. ‘Come on.’ He stepped inside and closed the front door. He took off the pimp coat, hung it on a peg in the hall and beckoned to Caffery to follow. Up the stairs he went, ticker-tacker, fast, with his hand on the banister and his toes pointing out, his massive legs too big and strong on the old wood. Caffery followed, more slowly. On the landing they found Q. In a suit that had the glint and gleam of taffeta, he was tinkering with a tiny electronic unit that was resting on the banisters. He didn’t look up or acknowledge them as they passed and went along the landing.
The master bedroom at the front of the house was overdecorated. Three walls were painted a truffle brown, with air-brushed canvases of naked women, and the fourth was papered in flock silver and black wallpaper. The bed had a black suede headboard and silver scatter cushions, and there was an offthe-peg wardrobe system with mirrored doors.
‘Nice.’
‘D’you like it?’
Caffery pulled a Twix out of his pocket and unwrapped it. ‘Bachelor room. Not what you had when you were with Lorna, is it? Did you and she sleep here?’
‘I changed it when she’d gone. Got rid of some of her shit. But this used to be our room. Why?’
‘And before that. This was never Alysha’s room?’
‘No. She always had the one at the back. Since she was a baby. Do you want to see it? I got nothing in there, just Alysha’s stuff. For if she ever comes home.’
Caffery didn’t want to see it. He’d already been fed news on which of the rooms Moon had covered with his cameras. Damien didn’t know it yet, but there was a unit somewhere in the ceiling above his room. Q was expecting a ladder to arrive so he could get into the loft and strip the damned thing out. It was the same as it was at the Costellos’ and the Blunts’ and it didn’t entirely make sense: the cameras were not in the places Caffery’d anticipated. He’d have thought Moon would focus on places where the girls would undress. The bedrooms and the bathroom. But apart from Martha Bradley’s room there hadn’t been one camera in the girls’ bedrooms. Instead they’d been in the kitchens, the living rooms, and – most odd of all – in the parents’ bedrooms. Like here.
‘Damien, thank you for your consideration. Someone’ll be in touch. With an expense claim. For the – you know . . . mess.’ He pushed the Twix bar into his mouth, wiped his hands and went back on to the landing, past Q, and down the stairs, chewing as he went. At the bottom he glanced up at Alysha’s photographs. Three pictures, three outfits, but the poses weren’t any different. Hands under her chin. Teeth on display. A little girl trying her best to smile at the camera. He had the front door half open when something about the photos made him pause, stand still and consider them seriously.
Alysha. Nothing like Martha. Nothing like Emily. Alysha was black. Ticking away in the back of Caffery’s head was what the literature said – that paedophiles had types. Colourings and age ranges. It came up time and time again. If Moon was going to the trouble of selecting these girls, then why weren’t they more similar? All blonde and eleven? All brunette and four? Or all black and six?
Caffery ran his tongue around his mouth, dislodging the chocolate from his teeth. He thought about Martha’s tooth in the pie. And then he thought about the letters. Why, he thought, did you send those letters, Ted? Out of nowhere he thought of what Cleo had said – that the jacker had asked about her parents’ jobs. And then everything settled on Caffery all at once. He closed the front door and stood shakily in the hallway, his hand on the wall. He understood. He knew why things had felt so wrong for such a long time. And he knew why the jacker had asked Cleo the question. He’d been double-checking he had the right child.
Caffery glanced up at Damien, who was standing at the foot of the stairs lighting a cigarillo from a flat tin. He waited until he’d got it lit, then gave the guy a tight smile. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a spare one of those knocking around?’
‘Yeah, sure. You OK?’
‘I will be when I’ve had a smoke.’
Damien opened the tin and held it out. Caffery took one, lit it, drew in the smoke and paused, giving it time to damp down his pulse.
‘Thought you were on your way? Changed your mind? Stopping?’
Caffery took the cigarillo out of his mouth, blew the smoke in a long, delicious stream in front of him. Nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Can you put the kettle on? I think I’m going to be here a bit longer.’
‘How come?’
‘I need to talk to you seriously. I need to ask you about your life.’
‘My life?’
‘That’s right. Yours.’ Caffery turned his eyes to Damien. He was tasting the low, easy glow of things falling into place. ‘Because we were wrong. It was never Alysha he was targeting. He’s not interested in what happens to her. Never has been.’
‘Then what? What’s he interested in?’
‘You, mate. He’s interested in you. It’s the parents he wants.’
62
Janice Costello sat at her sister’s big wooden table in the huge kitchen at the back of the house. She’d been there most of the afternoon, ever since Nick had helped her in from the freezing garden. Cups of tea had been made, food had been offered, a bottle of brandy had appeared from somewhere. She’d touched none of it. It all looked unreal to her. Like something meant for someone else. As if there as an invisible barrier in the physical world and that everyday things – like plates and spoons and candles and potato-peele
rs – were meant to be used only by people who were happy. Not by those who felt like her. The day had dragged. At about four o’clock Cory had appeared out of nowhere. He’d come into the room and stood in the doorway. ‘Janice,’ he’d said simply. ‘Janice?’ She hadn’t answered him. It was too much effort even to look at him and eventually he’d left the room. She didn’t wonder where he went. She just sat there, arms wrapped around herself, Jasper the rabbit squashed hard into her armpit.
She was trying to remember the last moment she’d spent with Emily. They’d shared the bed, she knew that much, but she couldn’t remember if she’d been lying on her side, spooning Emily, or if she’d been on her back, her arm around her, or even, and this thought stung her more than anything, if on that occasion she’d fallen asleep with her back to Emily. The cold truth was that a bottle of prosecco had been shared and Janice’s thoughts had been more with Paul Prody asleep on the pull-out in the living room than on holding Emily, breathing her in as deeply as she could. Now she struggled towards the memory, stretched forward to it, like an exhausted swimmer straining for the shore. Searched and searched for just one scrap of Emily. The smell of her hair, the feel of her breath.
Janice leaned forward and rested her forehead on the table. Emily. A tremor went through her. The overwhelming urge to bang her head against the wood. Skewer herself. Shut her thoughts up. She screwed her eyes tight. Tried to focus on something practical. The parade of workmen who had wandered in and out of the house during the renovations – Emily had loved them: they’d let her climb their ladders, go through their tools and lunch boxes, examine the wrapped sandwiches and packets of crisps. Janice tried to find Moon’s face among them, tried to see him standing in the kitchen at the breakfast bar, drinking a cup of tea. Tried and failed.
‘Janice love?’
She jerked her head up. Nick was standing in the doorway, holding her red hair up in a coil behind her head, massaging her neck wearily.