He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbour's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you. Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them.
Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan had survived and lived as Penderecki's lover until he had suddenly, spontaneously stopped breathing one night; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a paedophile himself, operating from Amsterdam… Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will. It was his work to ignore them all.
Someone touched his shoulders. He started. 'Rebecca.' He shook his head. 'I'm sorry.' He was still shaking with anger.
'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 27 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 sc aired because he wanted it. When I depuced him and when I told him to suck on my cock he did it 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 upwards, 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 hand-holds 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 didn't change 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'.
OK, he stopped 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, shrivelled-up miserable git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backwards 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 licence. 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 don'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? 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 on one side. 'Why won't you talk about it, Jack?'
