'Kay.' Pleased, Josh slipped off the stool and padded through carrying a saucer with four newly dipped chocolate truffles, as shiny as if they were still wet.
'That's it.' She settled down with her coffee. 'Pass them round. Then you can go out.'
'Thank you.' Caffery took a chocolate.
'That's OK.' Josh still had a smudge of brown on his chin and a crumbly fingerprint of drying chocolate on his thigh. He leaned forward a little, his face serious, his brows drawn together in adult concern. 'You do know it's the troll, don't you?'
Caffery paused, the truffle half-way to his mouth. 'Sorry?'
'Come on, brat.' Benedicte pulled Josh by the T-shirt to where she sat. 'Let me have a chocolate.'
Josh dropped his head. 'It's the troll,' he murmured.
'Of course, darling.' She took a chocolate and put it into her mouth, rolling her eyes in amusement at Caffery.
But Josh was suddenly determined. 'The troll climbed in the window and stole that kid out of his bed.' He put the saucer on the floor and stood, crunched up like a gnome, his face contorted, hands in front of his face like claws. Make-believe climbing. 'Up the drainpipe, probably.' He dropped his hands and looked seriously at his mother. 'He eats kids, Mum, honest.'
'Josh, really.' Benedicte met Caffery's eyes, her face colouring with embarrassment. She leaned forward and slapped her son lightly on the legs. 'Now, come on, enough of that. We don't want Mr. Caffery to think you're a baby, do we? Go and put the saucer in the sink.'
The troll.
The more Caffery tried to question Josh about it, the more outlandish and garbled the ideas got until they were back to one central fact: the troll lived in the woods and had a habit of eating kids. Benedicte Church was embarrassed that her son was taking a local kids' story as fact. 'They just like to scare each other,' she said. 'They're so impressionable at this age.'
At what age? He wanted to say. At thirty-five, like me? Because a picture of the troll had already begun to impress itself on the underside of his mind -spreading like a stain. At the end of the day, when he left Clock Tower Grove, he had an overpowering urge to get away from the park, with the sun running all over the horizon, the silhouettes of a tired and disillusioned search team dotted against it. A feeling was creeping up on him. He didn't know where it was coming from, and he didn't know how to put it into words. But that would come, he was sure of it. It would come.
'Troll?' he asked Souness later, in the SIO's office. 'Does that mean anything to you? A troll?'
'Eh?' Souness ran the palm of her hand over her bristly number-two cut and frowned. She was back from the press interviews, a line of makeup on the collar of her blouse, and was sitting at her desk staring down at the screen of her new mobile, pressing buttons with her thumb, trying to make sense of it. 'Eh?' She looked up at him. 'What're you talking about?'
'The kids in Brixton were rabbi ting on about a troll everywhere I went.'
'The only troll I know is San Francisco slang an old queen who likes gorgeous young meat. A tree jumper. A dirty, ugly old gay guy who only wants to have sex with cute young thangs.'
'So it just means a nonce?'
'In my world, aye.'
He sat, chin resting on his hand, and stared at his reflection superimposed over the long strings of London lights.
'You got the message about the photos?' he said after a while. ' Carmel thought he took photos while he was there.'
'Yeah.' She looked up. 'I've got some of the lads on to it already.'
'If there are photos somewhere out there shit.' He shook his head.
'I know. Wouldn't you love to see them?'
'What do you think?' It was nearly midnight -they'd had to call in the teams. They'd found nothing. There was no sign of Rory in the park so Souness had extended the parameters to include every street that backed on to it. Tool sheds were searched, garages, empty property. Still no Rory. Every resident was questioned carefully but no one had seen anything. Rory Peach, it seemed, had disappeared in one of the most densely populated areas of the country and no one had seen a thing. Not a soul in Donegal Crescent had heard the glass shattering on the Friday evening; nor had anyone heard the intruder leaving the house. The media spent the day pestering AMIT for news but there was none. They knew about as much as they had this time last night. What kept drilling through Caffery's tired mind was a sentence an officer had said to his mother twenty-eight years ago: 'You'll have to accept that you may never know.' Nor were any of the team taking it easily an eight-year-old child had been separated from his family for the second night in a row: he'd already had to talk two of the younger ones out of a nose-dive depression.
'And funnily enough,' Souness switched off the mobile and put it into her pocket, 'I think I know exactly what's worrying ye.'
Caffery who had pushed back his chair and was considering unzipping the Nike holdall in which they kept their Scotch straightened. He put his hands on the desk and paused, almost as if he hadn't heard. Then he looked at her sideways. 'What?'
'What I mean is She leaned back in her chair and un popped the top button of her trousers, getting her stomach comfortable for the first time that day. 'What I mean is that I think it all sounds a little bit too much like what happened to Ewan.' She raised her eyebrows. It wasn't a statement and she was neither smirking nor reproaching him. She was asking him to talk about it. 'That's what I meant.'
'OK.' He held up his hand. 'You can stop there.' Any reference to Ewan always felt like something moving slyly around in the folds of his brain, digging fingers into the most private clefts. He rarely even said his brother's name and to hear someone else borrow it calmly like this, like it's a name no different from Brian, say, or Dave, or Alan or Gary, it's Jesus, it's like finding a strange hair in your mouth. 'I suppose at this point I'm supposed to ask you how you know about it.'
'Everyone knows.'
'Great.'
'Half of B team were at your party when Ivan Penderecki when he, well, let's not go into that now, eh? But Paulina still gets little bits of intelligence on him coming through the paedo unit from time to time. Between getting her nails done and putting another zero on my Barclaycard statement, she did a bit of digging and, oooh, an interesting little fact pops up. Penderecki is linked to a twenty-five-year-old missing-persons case. And the name? Ewan Caffery. Just so happens that the name DI Jack Caffery is in every newspaper at the time and, well, it don't take much for a suspicious dyke to jump to conclusions.' She bent over and scooped the bottle of Bell 's from the holdall, opened it and dropped large doubles into each of two mugs. 'Here.' She pushed one across the desk and settled back. 'I've known since before I started in AMIT. Before I even met ye.'
'Well.' Caffery slumped into the chair, pulling the Scotch towards him. 'Welcome to my nightmare, DCI Souness. It's nice to know you've been enjoying it for so long.'
'Ahh, now, ye see, you're being a bit of a wee girly about it, aren't ye? There ain't no law says you can't see this as genuine friendly concern, Deeetective Caffery.'
'Yeah.' He stared into the mug. There was a dried coffee rim half-way down.
'Och, come on, Jack, I'm trying to help. In my clumsy way.'
'I know, look, I'm sorry. I get a bit…' He put a fist to his chest.
'A bit tight here about it, eh?' She downed her whisky and refilled her mug. 'I know, I do know. But if you made an allegation against Penderecki?' She paused for a response. 'Jack? Make an allegation, and the case'd be reviewed and someone else could stay up all night and worry about it.'
He shook his head wearily. 'Nah. That's OK.'
'Been suggested before?'
'I've lost count of how many times. He's too clever. He'd turn it around and before you know it I'd be the one in the frame malicious allegations, harassment, yadda-yadda.'
'And not because you know you'd never be allowed near the case?'
'There is that, yes. That detail hasn't escaped my attention.'
'You're a wee barn pot if you don't mind me saying.'
