Rebecca was sitting in her studio with the curtains open, holding a vodka and orange and staring at her solitary reflection in the dark window a few feet away. Beyond it the lights in Canary Wharf were on and the other great citadels of docklands blazed in the sky, but she hardly saw them. She was trembling.
“Right—right. OK—fine,” she said. “You didn't expect this—but that's OK, just keep calm, keep it in perspective.” She downed the drink in two straight gulps and looked at her hands. They were still shaking. “For heaven's sake, calm down—it's not the end of the world.” She went into the kitchen, sat at the table and filled her glass. Vodka: the secret drink—the alcoholic's drink. Her mother's drink. It's supposed not to smell. But Rebecca could smell it. She had learned the smell of it at her mother's breast: as a baby she had tangled the smell of vodka with the smell of milk—for years alcohol on her mother's breath could make her salivate. She swallowed the drink, made a face and looked down into the empty glass, peering at the line of orange pulp. Just get on with it—maybe you and Jack, maybe you weren't ever supposed to … She stood, almost lost her balance momentarily, recovered and took the glass to the sink, rinsed it out and poured another drink, marveling at the way the juice dropped into the clear, oily vodka. Yes, that looked good. And it tasted good—it tasted so good that she swallowed it whole and quickly poured another. Through the door she could see the stupid little sculptures lined up in the studio. “Your work!” she said out loud, holding up the glass, toasting them. They make the place look like a bloody sex shop. She should smash them all to pieces—a grand gesture—an artistic gesture. Yes! She finished the drink, put the glass down and walked decisively, in a perfect straight line, to the studio, only swaying once, pleased at how sober she was. But by the time she'd got to the door she'd forgotten what she was going to do. She stood there for a moment, her hands on the doorposts, trying to remember where she was headed and, when she couldn't remember, turned, shaking her head—silly cow—went back to the kitchen table and picked up the vodka bottle. She'd had a lot already, she thought, holding the bottle up to the light, and she supposed she really shouldn't have another. But this is different, she told herself, quite different.
She took the next drink into the bathroom, a little unsteady now that the vodka was taking effect, and stood in front of the mirror. “Cheers,” she said to her reflection. “Here's to you and Jack.” She downed the vodka in three swallows, banging the glass carelessly against her teeth. I will survive, she thought, feeling immediately sick and closing her eyes, resting her hand on the sink, taking deep breaths. What? Did you really want to end up hitched to a cop? Coffee mornings with the other wives, whining about the hours you spend on your own, and, maybe, if you're lucky, a couple of brandies with your husband in the golfclub bar on a Sunday? When she looked up the room had stopped swaying and her own stupid face was staring back at her. “Oh, just go away.” She flapped her hand at the mirror. “Go away.” She bent over the sink to rinse out the glass, but there must have been something on her fingers, because now the glass was slipping out of her grip and although she made a grab for it, her fingers didn't seem to be working properly, and instead of catching it she just knocked it sideways against the tap. It rebounded and shattered in the sink.
She stood for a moment staring at it, the noise still moving around her skull. Shit, Becky, you're drunk. She went into the kitchen and made a drink in a fresh glass. You need to be careful with the vodka. She didn't want a hangover, so after this one she was going to stop. The fridge, she thought, distractedly, why is the fridge so loud? And then she thought, You must clear up the glass, or you'll cut yourself. She put the drink down, determined to stop with the vodka now—now, before you do something stupid—got newspaper from under the sink to put the pieces in and hurried back into the bathroom, quick, too quick, sliding on something, and before she had time to realize what was happening she was on the floor, on her bottom on the floor, the newspaper still clutched in her hand.
She sat there for a moment, blinking at the wall like a doll with moving eyelids, wondering if she was going to laugh about it. She should laugh about it. She should laugh about it and then she should get up, but she didn't have the energy and the room was spinning. Get up, Becky, get up.
She roused herself, groping upward for the towel rail, pulling herself up off the floor, head still whirling. She was going to clear up the glass and then have a Horlicks and go to bed and she'd be OK, but the towel rail came away in her hand, snowing plaster down and dropping her back onto the floor, her head banging on the bath. And there she stopped, propped up against the bath, one leg tucked under her body, hair all over her face, and began to sob.
It had been one of the Russian “Lolita” websites that did it. The name Lolita. From his time in Vice he remembered a seized set of the infamous Rodox/Color Climax Lolita videos. For Lolita 1 through 12 the Dutch dealers had been careful to export the videotape cracked out of its casing so it didn't X-ray as a cassette and arouse the suspicions of customs or post office workers. Mainstream porn often came into the country like this. But Caffery wondered if Penderecki had gone one step further.
Hunched over the videos like an East End jeweler, cigarette in his mouth, glasses all the way down his nose, carefully he unscrewed the plastic casing. The shell cracked—he opened it cautiously, like a precious book, lifting out the white plastic spools. He put the cigarette in the ashtray and gently pressed the tape between his lips, softly biting it. When he opened his mouth the tape had stuck to the top lip. This was exactly what he'd betted on: the Mylar coating was on the inside. The tape had been taken off its spool, flipped over and rewound.
He dug in the Swiss Army knife, released the little white clip from the spool and flipped the tape over. It took him twenty minutes to respool it—a roll-up wedged between his teeth, the G and T dwindling in the mug. And this stray end in here—on this spool. He inserted it in the casing and tightened up the little screws. He pushed the tape in the VCR and aimed the remote control at it.
“There isn't much that's surprising in kiddie porn,” one of the “dirty squad” had told him in the eighties. “Once you get over the fact that it's kids, then it's not all that much different from adult porn. Of course, getting over the fact that it's kids is the trick. If you can't do that you're buggered. Pardon the expression.”
Caffery prepared himself, sitting down and waiting for the feelings, the panic, the sadness, to come at him. And they did: as he watched the videotapes all the feelings came back, only this time they were duller. And this time he found himself irritated by them. There you go, he thought, throwing down the Swiss Army knife, you're almost resigned to it.
Where did all these children come from? he wondered. Where were they now? This small blond girl he was looking at, she could have been only about three feet tall, standing in front of a pink-and-gold-painted dressing table, scalloped ankle socks on, her hair in bunches. Who was she? Where was she now? What had they said to convince her that it was right and good to smile and take off her clothes for the camera?
He sat through poorly lit scenes in trailers, hotel bedrooms, one on a balcony in broad sunlight—flags on a golf course visible in the distance. Slowly he began to realize exactly what he'd stumbled on to. These videos weren't porn for Penderecki's personal use, they were even more serious than that: they were first-generation tapes, he was sure of it. The quality and the manner in which they had been stored suggested they were master tapes. Caffery thought that he'd stumbled smack-bang into the middle of a pedophile ring. This was their payload, stored by Penderecki next to the railway track.
“Fuck.”
He stood up, windmilling his arms, trying to get rid of the crick in his neck. He lit another cigarette and paced the office, smoking and staring at the screen. What he should do at this point was call the pedophile unit. What he should do was call Souness at home, wake her up, get Paulina on the phone. But Penderecki had sent him these tapes for a reason. He put out the cigare
tte and went into the incident room, locked the door to the passageway and came back to the office. The tapes were staying with him, he decided, until he knew what message—or what tor-ment—Penderecki intended him to get from them.
Eleven twenty-minute tapes. Almost four hours. They seemed to constitute only five different episodes, some spanning more than three tapes, and he sensed from the quality and changing clothes styles that the sessions had taken place over ten or more years. He worked into the night, letting one play as he respooled the next. A one-man assembly line: spooling, watching, spooling, watching.
By 6 A.M. he had watched all the tapes and there was only one that he wanted to see again. It was possibly the most shocking of the tapes, for the simple reason that the abuser who leaned on the creaking fake leather sofa to unzip and fellate a boy of, Caffery guessed, about thirteen was a woman. She had been in four other tapes, but this one was the one he pushed back into the VCR and rewound.
When Benedicte could cry no longer she lay on the floor, on her back, in a straight line next to the radiator so that her ankle wasn't bent, and imagined she was still a child, her mother's face above hers, downy and warm as the underside of a wing, smiling as she bent over for a good night kiss. She thought about Josh, little Josh, when he was a baby, so new that part of her had been jealous that she would never be so new again. And Hal picking Josh up and holding him above his head and waggling him, his fat little legs wiggling with delight as if he could swim through the air. Nights when he had a fever, Hal rolling a glass over the rash, terrified that meningitis would come and steal him away. They'd always known there were black holes in the world: Sarah Payne; Jason Swift; a little boy knocked over by a truck in Camberwell; another falling from a fourteen-story high-rise. She thought of him sprawled out in front of the telly, picking a scab on his knee, and all she could think was how much she wanted to take his socks off and kiss his little toes. He could walk all over the house in his muddy boots, he could scribble on the walls, put footballs through every window in the house, steal her life, shout abuse at her—if only she could see him again just once. If only she could smell his hair again. Just once.
A little before dawn Benedicte fell asleep in spite of herself, a fevered, infected sleep with lights in her brain and voices careening around her skull.
In Croydon the bottom of the sky, jagged between the skyscrapers, had brightened to a cool opal. It was nearly 6 A.M. and downstairs, in the TSG quarters, the PA system blurted commands through the building. No one would come into the incident room for another two hours. Caffery was watching the video again, aimlessly doodling on a scrap of headed Met notepaper. The woman weighed— he'd squinted and tried to guess when he first saw her enter the frame—maybe fifteen, sixteen stone? She had a flat boxer's nose, flaky skin, dark glossy hair, and was dressed in a black camisole and satin mules. The boy glanced up occasionally at the camera, as if to say, “Am I doing it right?” and the brunette made obscene little moues as she lightly scratched the inside of his thigh with her scarlet and black nail designs. At the beginning of the tape she came into the room and sat on the sofa, and for a moment she passed close enough to the camera for a tattoo on the top of her arm to come into focus: a heart behind prison bars. Caffery absently scratched the image into the doodle.
It wasn't just the woman's appearance and the slack, rather blank way she was abusing the child on the sofa that had struck him: it was the astonishing carelessness with her identity. Maybe because these tapes were intended to be edited a surprising number of them revealed clues about the abuser—ordinarily any adult taking part in a film like this would be at pains to keep his face hidden. Identifying peculiarities would be covered, sheets hung over bookcases, labels cut out of any clothes the children wore—most pictures that made it to the Internet had identifying features airbrushed out with graphics software. Not so in these tapes. He got glimpses of faces, records, CD titles—of this tattoo. In three of the videos he could actually hear muttered conversations off camera, men speaking, commenting on the action, muttering about what they could do to the child on screen. Caffery could even hear names in the conversations: Stoney, Rollo, Yatesy. He carefully noted down everything.
There was no audio on the tapes of the brunette, but in this one there were plenty of visual clues to work with. Behind the peeling, fake-leather sofa was a veneer display cabinet, lighted from above, and he could see decorative glasses, a pile of duty-free Silk Cut boxes, a photograph in a gold frame. But more important, and more unbelievable, there was a single, blatant identifier in the earliest part of the tape. Caffery paused the tape and rewound. Played. The woman stood and crossed the room. He rewound. She crossed the room backward, sinking onto the sofa and crossing her legs. Stop. Play. She uncrossed her legs, stood and crossed the room. Stop. Rewind. Back to the sofa. Stop. Play. Back and forward. Eventually he froze the tape where he wanted it.
As she crossed the room she passed, briefly, a window. The curtains were slightly open, and although it could only have been ten frames or so, less than half a second, Caffery had glimpsed a distinctive yellow flare. He leaned forward now, staring intently at the screen, and put the aging VCR on frame-by-frame mode, letting the brunette move jerkily forward until the yellow was clear. He paused the tape. He tore the top sheet of paper from the pad and found a pen. His pulse was racing. Now that the tape had stopped he could see exactly what that yellow splash was. Outside the window of the room someone had parked a car. For two frames the number plate, although at an angle, was legible. He scribbled the number down and went into the incident room.
The PNC2 computer could fit a name to an index number in seconds. By 6:05 A.M. he knew who owned the car, and Phoenix, PNC2's newly attached database, had told him a lot about the owner. Things were starting to make sense. He pushed his chair away from the terminal, rolled it across the incident room to the tray marked “Receiver In” next to Kryotos's workstation, and picked up the sheaf of returned HOLMES Actions forms. He wanted to know if during the day the pedophile unit had detailed any of the team to speak to one Carl Lamb of Thetford, Norfolk.
19
July 24
THE HALLWAY WAS QUIET. Not silent: on the landing the electric security timer trundled through its increments, but otherwise the hall was quiet. Not a creak of board or a shift of air. At six-thirty A.M. the timer clicked through and the lamp on the landing switched off. Builders' sand had been trodden into the stair carpet and someone had been spray-painting on the walls. Visible from the hallway were the letters painted in red. To anyone mounting the stairs the final letters were visible at the bend in the staircase, across the front of the spare bedroom door: . The entire graffiti read . Next to it was the cross and circle symbol representing the female.
Caffery left Shrivemoor before anyone arrived and took all of Penderecki's tapes home. The black Beetle with the lime interior wasn't outside, and when he checked in all the rooms he found himself almost disappointed to see that Rebecca hadn't defied him and wasn't sitting up in his bed smoking a cigarillo. The sheets had been changed; she had washed the old ones and left them in the dryer. Apart from that she had left almost no sign of herself. “That's what you asked for,” he murmured, “and that's what you got.”
He wrapped the videos in two plastic bags, secured them with tape, pushed them to the darkest corner under the stairs and locked the door. He showered, slept a deep, jet-laggy sleep for two hours—on the sofa, the bedroom smelled of Rebecca—and just before 10 A.M. drank coffee and got into the car. It was a hot day—he wore a shortsleeved shirt and shades and kept the window open. He knew he looked like a gubernatorial security guard in a Southern state, Texas, maybe.
Carl Lamb had died within the last month. Judging by his criminal and prison record his death had left the world a safer place, but one thing the authorities had never picked up about him was that he had been a nonce. There was no intelligence linking him to Penderecki, and his criminal record had been for breaking and entering, grievous bodily har
m, aggravated vehicle theft and a string of credit card frauds. But when Caffery checked where and when he'd done time he discovered that he'd been in Belmarsh at the same time as Penderecki. The stray ends were beginning to come together. Penderecki had meant Caffery to take this journey.
There was a sister still alive, Tracey Lamb, age fortytwo. She had a minor criminal record, had done little bits of time here and there. Caffery wondered, as he drove through Suffolk, through quiet villages coiled with climbing roses, past white weatherboarded dovecotes, cakes of salt lick glittering in the sun, if Tracey Lamb had a tattoo on her right arm.
The roads grew emptier as he reached the poorer end of Suffolk, the north, where it bled into Norfolk. Here the population lived in isolated farmhouses or in crumbling ribbon developments, and the only signs that he wasn't alone on this planet were burned-out cars on the verges and the occasional ghost filling station with rusted-out petrol pumps on weed-covered forecourts. This was Iceni territory, blood and isolation in the air, as if Boudicca herself were shadowing him through her land. You could do anything out here and no one would know.
Rebecca's face came to him once, but it was OK, he found he could push her away. He could push her out on either side, out into the slipstream of the Jag, and off into the fields that stretched away from the car into the shimmer of midday.
He almost missed the turning in the trees. It was on a deserted, heat-cracked road, marked by a rusting sign— 4 x 4 tires—hanging from a post. He had to brake and reverse, then swing the Jag into the grassed-over drive. The ground was rutted and trees on either side created a natural alley. He was aware of things squatting out in the nettles: piles of breeze blocks, old, abandoned trailers and chassis, a rusted shipping container as tall as a man, standing up straight in the trees. After a hundred yards or so he stopped the car—safer to continue on foot, safer to let the grass muffle his footsteps—and climbed out. He was immediately struck by the quiet: the only sound was the distant mosquito whine of a jet from Honnington RAF base.