It was one of the hottest Julys London had seen and Caffery knew what could happen to a body in forty-eight hours of this heat. He knew that if Rory wasn't found before tomorrow morning there was no way he would allow a relative to identify him.
“And?” she repeated.
“And nothing. Just for the dogs. You can sign it now, if that's OK.”
She nodded. He handed her the forms and a pen.
“Mrs. Peach?”
“What?” She signed the papers and held them limply over her shoulder without turning.
“I'm having trouble getting Rory's age. Some of the neighbors say nine.” He took the papers and put them in his case. “Is that right?”
“No. That's not right.”
“No?”
“No.” She rolled over to look at him. For the first time he saw her face full on. Her eyes, he realized, looked dead, the way his mother's had after Ewan. “He's not nine until August. He's eight. Only eight.”
Downstairs Caffery paused to thank Mrs. Nersessian. “It's my pleasure, darling. Poor thing, don't even ask me to imagine what she's feeling.”
The tiny living room was immaculately clean and choked with possessions—a silver punch bowl on the polished table, a collection of Steuben glass animals on the glass shelves. On the plastic-covered sofa a dark-eyed girl of about ten, in shorts and red-striped T-shirt, stared mutely at Caffery. Mrs. Nersessian clicked her fingers. “Annahid, go on. Get your little dvor upstairs. You can watch your videos but keep the sound down. Rory's mama's asleep.” The child slowly peeled her thighs from the plastic and disappeared from the room.
Mrs. Nersessian turned to Caffery and put her hand on his arm. “Nersessian. That's an Armenian name. Now, you don't meet an Armenian every day and you need to know before you come into an Armenian household that you got to be prepared to eat.” She slipped into the kitchen and began fussing around, opening the fridge, getting her good crockery from the shelves. “I'm going to get you a little pistachio loukoum,” she called through the door. “And some mint tea and then we'll say a little prayer for Rory.”
“No—I just came to thank you, Mrs. Nersian—”
“Nersessian.”
“Nersessian. I'll pass on the tea if that's OK, Mrs. Nersessian. We're trying to beat the clock on this.”
She reappeared in the doorway holding a tea towel. “Come on, darling, you need to eat. Look at you—no fat on you. We all need to eat at a time like this—keep our spirits up.”
“I promise I'll come back and have some tea with you—when we've found Rory.”
“Rory.” She pressed a hand over her heart. “Just the mention of his name! Poor soul. But God is protecting him. I feel it in my heart. God is watching him and—An-nahid!” she said suddenly, her eyes fixing on something behind him. “Annahid! I said—”
Caffery turned. “The troll did it.” The little girl was standing in the doorway, addressing him directly, as vehement as a resistance messenger, her brown eyes huge and serious. “The troll climbed out of the trees and did it.”
Mrs. Nersessian made tut-tutting noises and shooed Annahid away, flicking the tea towel at her. “Go on, go on.” She turned to Caffery, her painted eyes half closed, pressing her hair lightly into place. “I'm sorry, Mr. Caffery, I am truly sorry about that. The things the kiddiwinks dream about these days.”
There are vortexes and whirlpools in Brixton like nowhere else in London. Hot, funky Caribbean blood finds a home under the austere ceilings of cool nineteenth-century houses, and since the eighties the new breed had been moving to town: the art crowd. Primarily white. Primarily trendy. They moved here for the local “color” and then slowly, insidiously, pushed it off the streets. Gentrification writ big. On the station platform a statue of a Windrush boy, like a latter-day Dick Whittington—bandanna around his neck, tiny bag at his feet—stood with arms folded, one foot bent back against the wall, ignored by the trendy new Brixtonites pushing and shoving to get on the train with their Gucci briefcases.
On this school summer holiday the streets were steaming. Lambeth council cleaners had been through, hosing last night's jittery ravers back down into the underground station, and the sun was burning the water off the pavement. Over the park another helicopter circled, sun glinting from it. A TV news team, drawn by the noises coming from South London, had cruised over to see if there was something to which it could turn its jaw. The camera crew could look down and see the odd, pistonlike movement of the search and investigation officers at work: the Police Search Advisory Team moved in formation across the park, and other dark figures, detectives, radiated out through the surrounding streets.
Good morning, madam, sorry to bother you, I'm with the CID—
Is this about what was on the TV this morning? The little kiddie?
In and out of houses: down the front paths like morning rush-hour businessmen and back up the next path:
There was an incident last night. Do you remember where you were?
Never liked that park. See them trees over there? All sorts of things is coming out of them trees. It worry me some, know what I is saying?
The search team, with their red coats and black and yellow sticks, were professionals, but they all found something odd about the clump of woods around the ponds. It was high summer but there was a Bavarian darkness in the trees, too thick for London. They tried to keep it light, joked about it, swore that at any minute an allosaurus or something was going to come steaming out of the vegetation—but no one felt comfortable that day. In the ponds the frogmen did more safety checks on each other than they would ordinarily.
Caffery came out of the Nersessians', rolled a cigarette, and walked for a while along the park perimeter, watching. Woods: he didn't like them, hadn't liked them for almost a year now. It wasn't the sight of the trees, or the sound of the breeze manipulating the branches: it was the smell. Leaf mulch and damp bark. The smell could catapult him back eleven months in a breath—back to the attack on Rebecca, back to the day she wouldn't talk about, back to the wall that stood between them, and then the pressure in his chest would suddenly become so great he imagined that if he looked down he'd see his heart poking out through his ribs.
He turned his back on the trees and looked up at Arkaig and Herne Hill towers. From a distance they looked proud, like Rhine castles above the trees, but closer up the land they stood on amounted to little more than a scrap of balding grass and dog shit. Used condoms and syringes decorated it, and flyblown derelicts slept in the sun. A pod of AMIT detectives had been assigned there—as Caffery lit his cigarette he could see two of them moving along the balconies. He was about to head away, to the east, to join the house-to-house pod working on Effra Road, when something made him stop. The back of his neck prickled. He'd had the brief, unsettling sense that something was behind him. Heart thumping, he swung round. But there was nothing, only the search team moving silently through the park, insects hovering, traffic on Dulwich Road and a few fluffy white clouds low on the horizon. Jesus, Jack—he took a few puffs on the cigarette and pushed it through the grating of a drain—you think the team is jumpy—
It was a DC Logan of AMIT who visited Roland Klare at his flat in Arkaig Tower. Klare didn't like the police, didn't trust them, and this one seemed particularly dismissive of him: in fact, he seemed more interested in the view over Brockwell Park than in asking any questions. He stood at the window, right next to the Pentax in the biscuit tin, and looked down at the billowy treetops. “Nice view.”
“Oh, yes, a very nice view.”
“Well,” DC Logan tapped his hands on the win-dowsill—so close to the camera—and turned, wrinkling his nose and looking suspiciously around the flat, taking in the piles of objects on the tables, the boxes all annotated and arranged one on top of the other.
Klare didn't avoid his eyes: he expected this reaction, knew quite well that his system would seem disordered to someone who didn't understand why he had to scavenge and curate like this. But it was all clean,
no one could say it wasn't, and that almost excused the fact that sometimes even he lost track of what it all meant, where and why it had started. “Now, then,” Logan sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs and pulled his jacket around his stomach, “this incident last night.”
“Ye-es?”
Klare sat down too. He had decided that there was a way of answering the questions truthfully without giving away anything about the camera. He folded his hands in his lap, tried to stop his eyes flickering and admitted that, yes, he'd been in the park last night but, no, he hadn't seen anything unusual. Logan asked him again, “Are you sure? Think carefully,” and Klare did. He put his head back and closed his eyes. There wasn't anything unusual about the camera, he decided. Technically it wasn't unusual. Nor was there anything unusual about the gloves—anyone who kept half an eye open could see all sorts of flotsam and jetsam lying around the park. And the camera was worth money.
“No.” He opened his eyes and shook his head decisively. “No, nothing unusual.” And Logan seemed to accept that.
Afterward Klare stood in the window and watched him leave the building, no bigger than a microbe all that way down on the forecourt. When he was sure the detective had gone he drew the curtains in the living room, blotting out the sun and the fractured, dried-out park, picked up the camera and began in earnest to try to free the film. When he couldn't, upset by the visit and angry with the of-ficer's cold disapproval, he sat down on the sofa, breathing hard, staring at his hands.
Meanwhile, down on Dulwich Road, Logan met the other officers with nothing to report. He held his hands up, as if to say “empty-handed.” He hadn't even the whisper of a suspicion of how close he'd just come, close as a breath, to the only piece of evidence that could have closed the case for AMIT in hours.
5
THE ARTIST'S IMPRESSION ON the hoarding outside the Clock Tower Grove Estate, a Hummingbird Houses development overlooking the eastern flank of Brockwell Park, showed trees in blossom, blue skies. Professionals with suitcases walked along pavements bordered by shrubs and glass-globed streetlights. The skies were blue and there were no biscuit-brown machinery tracks on the roads, no windows marked with taped Xs. The girls in the marketing suite would protest “It's not finished yet, not till autumn, three months to go”—and they'd direct any inquirer up a side entrance, along a brick herringboned street and into Clock Tower Walk, to a collection of four-storyed terraced town houses at the rear of the development, overlooking Brockwell Park: own back gardens, own garages, £295,000 a pop and completed three months ahead of schedule. An exclusive street for the middle-management classes who couldn't quite reach Dulwich Village—even on financial tiptoe.
One family had already moved in, just in time for the summer holidays. Number five's railings and woodwork were painted glossy black and two small bay trees, topiaried into cones, stood on either side of the small flight of steps. On the building site a workman often sat on a pile of steel girders in his lunch hour and watched the blonde as she ferried her son back and forth in the lemon-yellow Daewoo. The workman looked after his body—at the moment he was on a high-protein diet—and whenever he needed inspiration he'd look at the blonde. She was pretty, but in his opinion her weight spoiled the effect of her beauty. In fact, when he thought about it, the whole family could have done with dropping a few pounds. They didn't look healthy. The shiny hair, the sun-brushed skin, the good clothes—none of it could make up for those extra pounds, he'd think, as he munched his tuna and wholemeal sandwiches.
That July afternoon he had spent a good part of the day watching the search teams in and around the park, and had even given a statement to the plainclothes officer who had appeared on the building site. He was packing up to go home when he spotted a dark-haired man in his thirties on the doorstep of number five. The workman supposed he could have been another police officer, but looked more like a City type, with his well-cut hair and well-cut suit. The blonde answered the door.
“Hello.” She had a tidy little face, a sweet crescent of pale skin under honey-blond hair. She was wearing white trousers and a fisherman's striped T-shirt. An old black Labrador stood next to her. Caffery knew instantly that he had wandered off the track and into classier waters.
“Afternoon.” He showed his warrant card. “Name's DI Jack Caffery.”
“Like the beer?”
“Like the beer.”
“Is it about the little boy?” She had very large, almost silvery eyes. He imagined if he stood any nearer he'd be able to see a perfect reflection of himself. “Little Rory?”
“Yes.”
“You'd better come in, then.” Bending over to take the old dog by its collar and turn it round she beckoned Caffery in with the other hand. “Come through—kick the door closed. My son and I are making chocolate truffles. We're past the crucial point but you'll have to let me just clean up a bit.” She paused in the hallway to open a cloakroom door and switch on the extractor fan. “Sorry, there's a bit of a smell in here. Can you smell it?”
“No.”
“My husband says it's my imagination.”
“Women have a better sense of smell, you know.”
“Ah, yes—all the better to detect a dirty nappy.”
“Your husband here?”
“Still at work. Come through.”
She led him to the back half of the house, a single huge space divided into two at waist height by cabinets. On the right an airy modern kitchen, light-filled: Scandinavian lines, skylights and raw wood, recessed lighting and heavy glass jars in rows. On the left a spacious family room with seagrass floors and sunlight streaming through huge clean windows. Designed so that one could cook a meal, hold a conversation and watch television all at the same time. Modern living.
“Oh, hi,” Caffery said.
“Hi.” In the kitchen a boy of eight or nine—slightly sloping eyes, nose rather pointed, like an elf's, and shortish hair sticking up from a tanned forehead as if he'd just come in from a beach volleyball match—stood to attention, hands at his sides, pretending he hadn't been doing something punishable while his mother's back was turned. He was wearing flip-flops and a T-shirt over blue swimming trunks and had chocolate smeared around his mouth.
“Oh, yes, sorry about him—he's the hound.” She smoothed back the hair from her son's forehead. “My little boy, Josh.”
Caffery extended his hand. “Hi.”
“It's OK,” Josh said somberly, shaking his hand. “I'm mad, not bad.”
Caffery nodded. “Sometimes the mad ones are worse.”
“And I'm Benedicte Church.” She smiled sweetly and shook Caffery's hand. “Ben for short.” She bent over her son, hands on his shoulders.
She was not the average middle-class housewife. She was enormously pretty, Caffery thought, with rather short legs and a round bottom. He imagined it would take a long time to tire of a bottom like that. He caught himself staring as she pushed her hair from her face and murmured to her son, “Tadpole, go and wash your face, OK? Then we can all have a chocolate.”
Josh went into the cloakroom and when she could hear the tap running she dropped her chin and leaned a little closer to Caffery, her smile gone. “It's horrible, isn't it?” she whispered. “The TV's really vague. I mean, do we need to worry?”
“There's no harm in being aware.”
“Heard the helicopter last night.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the park. Only a few feet beyond the back-garden fence the trees started, as immediately thick and dark as if this were the dense heart of a forest. “Whenever I hear them looking for someone I always think of the Balcombe Street siege. Convinced the police are going to chase them through my front door and then we'll be kept hostage for days on end. But there you go.” She smiled. “Paranoia can be a beautiful thing for the easily bored. Coffee?”
“Please.”
“And I'll bring you a, uh …” She gestured at the tray of chocolates. “A truffle, if you can bear it.” She poured coffee from a cafetiere into t
wo Isle of Aran mugs, spooned sugar into an earthenware pot and set it on a tray. “Go through and sit down. Make yourself at home.”
He went into the family room. Here the walls were a fresh, cantaloupe color, the sofas in pale, glazed linen. And other things told him this family was doing well—the gleaming wide-screen TV still with a piece of polystyrene packaging clinging to its shoulder. He sat down on one of the sofas facing the window. The dog, which had curled up in a patch of sun, blinked sleepily at him. Everywhere Pickfords boxes lay half unpacked.
“Just moved in?”
“Four days ago.” She took milk from the fridge and filled a small glass jug. “The first ones on the estate. And I mean, how crazy is this? Sunday we're straight off to Cornwall for ten days.”
“Nice.”
“Absolutely lovely, if you haven't already been living out of boxes for weeks. This place was finished early so we went for it. And we couldn't cancel our holiday.”
Josh reappeared from the cloakroom and scampered over to the tray of chocolates. “We couldn't cancel Helston, could we, Tadpole? The seals?”
“Nope.” He stood on a stool and pulled the chocolates nearer. “Seals out of the sea.”
The dog limped over to Caffery, looked up at him mournfully and rolled onto her back. “Hello.” He leaned over and began to scratch her, when something just above his field of vision, something in the woods, moved suddenly. He half sat up. For a moment he had thought he saw a shadow racing in there, but now whatever he'd seen was gone, an animal, a trick of the light, or one of the search team, and Benedicte was coming in with the coffee and he had to cool his imagination. “Thanks.” He took the cup and sat back, his eyes straying to the window. The trees were silent. Nothing out there. Nothing at all. “You're close to the park here,” he said. “Very close.”
“I know.”
“Where did you move from?”