“Not your fault. He's a little shit.”
“He's baiting me.”
“I know.” She kissed his back. “He makes it difficult.”
“Yeah, well.” He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. “He's always made it difficult.” She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep:
Dear Jack
After 28 years it is now time to tell you the truth what happened with you're brother and you will know when I tell you that I am teling you the TRUTH, the most TRUTHFUL thing not because I am sorry for you no but because I have “remorse” and because you DESERVE to have the truth told you.
He was not in pain Jack and not scaired because he WANTED it. He told me he would do anything for me, even would eat my doings if you know what I am saying because he loved me so much. This sounds crude to you and to me but it is the words of you're brother jack you're only brother and so I know you will see these words are sacred and not think that I invented them. And anyway I should tell you the end came because it was an acident and no more than an ACIDENT and not because I wanted a bad thing for you're brother but because it was an ACIDENT. He is at peace now. GOD BLESS US ALL
And now this spying, this creeping around his garden. Caffery rolled a cigarette. He hated Penderecki for keeping up the pressure, hated him for the constant reminders. Rebecca kissed his back again and wandered away, over to the old beech at the foot of the garden. She pressed her palms against the trunk. “This is where the tree house was, am I right?”
“Yes.” He lowered his head and lit the cigarette.
“Then …” She rested her ear against the tree trunk, as if listening for a pulse, and looked upward into the spreading branches. “How did you—oh, I see.”
“Rebecca—”
But before he could stop her she was monkeying up the trunk using the iron handholds his father had nailed into it for his two sons. She crouched like a gnome in the elbow of a branch. Astonishing how a tree can cup a human body, he thought, looking up at her. Strange that we ever crawled down, traded the leaves and nooks for the wide uncertainties of the prairie. “Come on,” she called. “It's great up here.” He put the cigarette between his teeth and followed reluctantly, feeling the familiar irregularities of the iron loops against his palms. The night was clear, the sky sprinkled with stars. When he came level with Rebecca he leaned back against the branch, facing her, his feet braced against the trunk, the bark husky and warm against his soles. Behind her, above the houses, the green millennium laser on Greenwich Park sliced the great dome of black.
“Good, isn't it?”
“Maybe …”
He rarely came up here. Once a year, maybe, and not at all since Rebecca. He thought that she wouldn't want him sitting up here dwelling on everything. The view hadn't changed much. Still the long scar of the railway. Still Penderecki's house on the other side: unpainted for years, the guttering hanging so that the back of the house was coated in moss—as incongruous in the terrace of cared-for houses as the boarded-up house next to the Peaches'.
Okay, he told himself, no more connections like that. Rory isn't Ewan and Ewan isn't Rory. Get it straight.
“Zeus was a baby in a tree.” Rebecca dangled her feet over the edge and smiled. “He was hung in a cradle and fed by the bees.… Stop thinking about him.” She grabbed his hand suddenly. “Come on, stop it. I know you're thinking about Ewan.” Caffery didn't answer. He pulled his hand from her and looked across the railway cutting.
“Jesus.” She shook her head and looked up at the stars. “Can't you see what's happening? Penderecki's got you so wound up that you carry it everywhere—the more he pushes the tighter you get. You're being eaten alive by it all, by Ewan, by that …” she nodded over the railway cutting, “that pervert.”
“Not now, Rebecca—”
“I mean it. Look at you—a fucked up, hunched-up, shriveled-up miserable git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backward through Hades by his heels and it's all because of Ewan. You're carrying him, Jack, carrying him everywhere. The smallest thing makes you explode. And now you've got a case at work that's similar—”
“Rebecca—”
“And now you've got a case at work that's similar and God alone knows what'll happen. How will you control yourself? Someone'll get hurt—might even be you. You might even end up like Paul.”
“That's enough.” He held his hand up. “Enough.” He knew where they were going. He knew that Paul Essex, the DS who had been part of the frantic hunt for Malcolm Bliss, stood for all Rebecca's fears about the job. Essex had died, on his back in a Kent forest, his blood soaking like bitumen into the ground, and all that Caffery had left of him was his driving license. He'd removed it from Essex's wallet before handing it over to his parents. Maybe Rebecca imagined that was how he, Caffery, was going to end.
“He's got nothing to do with this.”
“Yes, he has.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Because it might happen to you if you can't calm down—if you can't get Ewan off your back. And you know it. You know that if you get pushed on this it might even go as far as it did last time.”
He looked up. “What last time?”
“Ah—that made you listen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He knows what I'm talking about.” She smiled out into the darkness. “He knows to whom I allude.”
“Becky—”
“Mark my words, Jack, you'll do it again. It's like a little thing growing in you, right about …” she put a finger on his chest “… there. And it'll keep growing and growing, and if you don't get away from this house, if you don't get away from that sad old pervert over there, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then bam! you'll do it again and—”
“Stop it.” He pushed her hand away from his chest. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I know, Jack. I can see it in you. I know what happened in that wood.”
He stared back at her, speechless. Scared to ask her what she knew. In case she said it: I know you killed Bliss. I know it wasn't an accident like everyone thinks. For a long time he was silent.
Rebecca tipped her head to one side. “Why won't you talk about it, Jack?”
“No, Rebecca,” he said, pinching out the cigarette and dropping it out of the tree. His hands were shaking. “The real question is why you won't talk about it.”
She held up her hands. “We were talking about you.”
“No. If we're going down this road then we talk about everything that happened. Those are the rules.” He began to climb down out of the tree.
“Where are you going?”
“Inside. To have a run. To get away from you.”
“Hey,” she called, watching him walk back up the lawn in the moonlight, “one day you'll see I'm right.”
6
July 19
IN THE MORNING, the note from Penderecki was skewered on his gate, wet with dew. Penderecki had taken the time to write more than was his habit and Caffery, who would ordinarily have crumpled it and binned it, stood in the street, attaché case in hand, and read.
Hello Jack.
Eerie reminders of the Yorkshire Ripper tape. It made Caffery shiver—only feet from his own home on a leafy summer day with joggers and the postman and the milk float creeping along the road toward him—as if someone had breathed on the back of his neck.
And now—I truly know YOUR name. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. The LORD and not YOU will call me, when it is his will and not you'rs and grant his healing, that the soul of His servent, at the hour of its departure fro
m the body, may by the hands of His holy Angels be presented without spot unto Him. The sheep belong on GODS right, Jack. The goat's go to the LEFT. The sheep will receive heaven the goat's WILL receive hell. And from your ignorance YOU look into MY eyes and you think you see a goat. Dont you? You think I am a goat. But, GOD says the stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of OTHER's—(the good and the pure) and see itself looking back. THINK about it JACK.
Caffery got into the Jag and sat breathing in the smell of leather—already warm even this early in the morning. The stripe of the goat? A little something growing in him that would one day explode? Rebecca had shaken him up last night with her gloomy prognosis. He wondered if everyone could see it in his face. Could everyone see the word “killer” scrawled in his eyes? Was he so transparent? He rubbed his temples and started the car, adjusted the mirror and put it into gear.
In Brixton the day dragged. By late afternoon he was standing outside the Lido at the edge of Brockwell Park, drinking McDonald's coffee and smoking a roll-up. He was tired and immensely depressed. The blood on the trainer matched the DNA from Rory Peach's underwear, but there was still no sign of Rory. The search team had exhausted the possibilities in and around the park; they kept going but everyone knew that the current parameters were redundant. Rumors swept among the search teams every hour or so: “They're sending us to Battersea; someone saw a lad like Rory down there, next to the river.” Or “There's a nonce over at Clapham who lives right above an empty factory; half of us are going to be sent over there.” The operation was now costing twenty thousand pounds a day, but the reality was that none of the hundred or so calls that had come into the incident room had given Caffery and Souness any new leads. They were walking blind, and everyone knew it.
And then, at five-thirty P.M., Souness had news. “Peach is going to make it.” She came chugging along the road toward Caffery, waving her mobile in the air. “He's off the ventilator and they're letting us talk to him.”
“I thought he was dying.”
“Apparently not. We're getting twenty minutes so let's make it count.”
Caffery let Souness drive his Jaguar. She did it with a wry, self-conscious smile on her sunburned face. It wasn't a show car, nothing like the red two-seater BMW she had bought for Paulina. (“She drives it like a typical bird, Jack, just like a bird. The rearview mirror—it's not for checking the traffic behind, oh, no, no, no, no! It's for having a wee check on your lippy. Bet you never knew that.”) The upholstery in the back of the Jaguar was mended with Sellotape and both front wings were retouched fiberglass filler. It wasn't something he'd aspired to owning, it was just the only car he'd been able to afford ten years ago, but Souness treated it with a touching reverence all the way to Denmark Hill.
King's Hospital's face-lift was well under way: every conversation, every exchange was overlaid with the noise of construction. Inside the hospital it was a city—a law unto itself—with a Forbuoy's outlet, a travel agent, a bank and a post office. The corridors were polished to a squeak, and people moved with a Fritz Lang robotic ease, smooth and determined. The consultant, Mr. Friendship, tall, in a blue shirt and patterned red tie, met them outside the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit. “He's off the Hickman line and the Gambro. I've kept him on a little pain relief—but I'm surprised, and very encouraged by his response. He was hardly even dehydrated after three days without water. As a matter of fact, since we took him off ventilation,” he paused at the door and swiped his card, “he's done so well we've moved him to this progressive care section.” He led them into the front of the unit, where five empty beds were ranged along the walls. “We're getting him set for a move to another ward or even discharge. Amazingly resilient. There you are.” Alek Peach sat in profile near the window. “Strong as an ox, that one. Strong as an ox.”
An ox indeed. If a bull had ever been sat back on its haunches in a chair with a blue hospital blanket tucked over its lap it would have looked a little like Alek Peach. In spite of his defeated posture the real sense of Peach was of his size: his bones must have been massive, as dense as iron to support that height and muscle. His dyed black hair was worn slightly long, he was dressed in checked green pajamas, and under his chair was hooked a black “rebreath” rubber balloon and a catheter bag. He didn't respond when the two detectives approached. Souness moved a chair to sit down and Caffery drew the pastel green curtains around them. He cleared his throat. “Mr. Peach. Are you sure you feel up to this?” Peach turned slowly to them. His black Elvis sideburns were growing out and needed redyeing. When he tried to nod, his head seemed to droop, as if he was having problems holding up its enormous weight and it might flop forward onto his chest.
“Right.” Caffery sat next to Souness, looking carefully at him. “First of all we're sorry about Rory, Mr. Peach, very sorry. We're doing everything we can. Keeping positive.”
Hearing Rory's name, Peach squeezed his eyes closed and pressed his huge hand on his face, the thumb on the bridge of the nose, the palm covering his mouth. He sat like this for long seconds, not breathing. Then he dropped his hand and moved it in a convulsive circle on his chest, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling.
Caffery glanced at Souness and said, “Alek, look, we won't take long, I promise. I know it's difficult for you but it would help if you could tell us anything you can re-member—what he did while he was in the house, where he kept you, whether he left the house at any point.”
Peach's hand stopped circling. His face tightened a little. He dropped his eyes and stared fixedly at the pulseoximeter clip on his thumb, as if he was trying to focus his strength. Caffery and Souness waited expectantly, but Peach didn't speak. They weren't going to get much for their twenty minutes. Shit. Caffery sat back and pressed a knuckle to his forehead. “Look, can't you even tell us how old he was? If he was white or black? Anything?”
Alek Peach turned to look at him. His eyes drooped, showing tired inner rims. He lifted his hand, shaky, bruised and swollen from IV needles, and pointed a finger at Caffery. His expression was ferocious, as if the ICU ward were his living room and Caffery a stranger who had just swung in casually off the street and sat down on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.
“You.” His chest shook, straining against the cotton pajamas. “You.”
Caffery put a finger on his chest. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“What about me?”
“Your eyes. I don't like your eyes.”
In the men's, Caffery stood on the toilet and stuffed a paper towel inside the ceiling smoke alarm. He locked the cubicle, rolled a cigarette, leaned his head against the wall and smoked slowly, only relaxing when he felt the welcome thump of nicotine against his heart. Instead of recognizing Peach's distress he had instantly grown angry at the hostility. His blood pressure had risen and he had shoved his feet out across the floor, preparing to spring up. It was only the cough and warning look from Souness that had straightened him out, prevented him from slamming the door as he left the ward.
“Right,” he muttered to the cubicle wall. “So Rebecca's nailed it. You are a fucked-up, hair-trigger little time bomb.” He flicked ash into the toilet and scratched the back of his hand. She couldn't have worked it better. As if everything was conspiring to back up her diagnosis of him. As if she'd paid them—Penderecki, Peach—to say it: “The stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of others and see itself looking back.”
Your eyes. I don't like your eyes.
No one would ever know or guess just how far he had been pushed. They would never know how, in the hot center of an estuary wood, panting and tangled in blood and wire, Malcolm Bliss had sworn to Caffery's face that he'd left Rebecca dead in a nearby house. “I fucked her first, of course.”
For that Caffery had killed him, a quick turn of the wrist. The barbed wire had punctured the carotid artery and irreparably damaged the jugular. “Christ,” he'd murmured to himself when he read the postmortem protocol. “You must have tightened it harder than
you thought.” But that was all. He was still waiting, in a sort of numb suspension, a year later, for remorse to kick in. He thought he'd covered himself. He thought everyone believed Bliss's death had been an accident. He'd never guessed that peo ple could look at him and see the killer, the liar, looking back out of the holes in his face.
No, fuck it. You're letting her get to you. He slung the cigarette in the toilet. If Rebecca wasn't ready to talk to him about what had happened last year—talk to him and not to the press—then he wasn't going to let her run around excavating his feelings and making crazy connections between Ewan and his own inability to stay in control.
When Souness came out of the unit Caffery's heart sank. She was tight-lipped and sat in the passenger seat on the drive back to Shrivemoor in silence. From time to time she gingerly touched her face and scalp where the sun had burned them for two days in the park. They had hoped Peach would be able to tell them enough about the behavior of the intruder for DS Quinn and the forensics team to focus on hot areas in the house, areas where the attacker had lingered, shedding hairs or fibers. But Souness's face said that hadn't happened. Neither spoke until they got to Shrivemoor.
“Not good news, I take it.”
Souness sighed and dropped the bundle of papers on her desk. “No.” She flopped into the chair, leaning back, her mouth open, her palms pressed against her burning cheeks. She stayed like this for a long time, staring at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts. Then she dropped forward, feet planted wide on the floor, elbows on knees, and looked at Caffery. “We're sooooo fucked, mate. So fucked.”