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 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 pan 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 other's 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 centre 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. '7 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 people 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 pan. 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 behaviour 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 fibres. 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.'
'No leads?'
'Oh, we've got one lead a great lead. The guy wore trainers, Peach thinks.'
'He thinks?'
'Yeah.' She nodded at his disappointment. 'He's not sure what make, but he thought maybe they were cheap ones and suggested Hi-Tec'
'Hi-Tecs? Magic. As if we've never seen that on a witness statement before.'
'Good, eh?' She scratched her chin. 'I pushed him for all he could give me. He co-operated I believe him. I don't think there's more.' She swivelled the chair, fired up her PC and began to type up the report for Kryotos to enter in HOLMES:
On the 14th July I was at home at number 30 Donegal Crescent. My son Rory and me were playing on the Play Station in the basement. We were supposed to be going down to Margate the next day for a long weekend. No one else was in the room. I believed at that time that my wife, Carmel Peach, was upstairs, but I hadn't seen or heard from her for some time, so at about 7.30 (p.m.) I came upstairs to see where my wife was. I had not heard anything suspicious and all the doors were locked, the windows closed.
I came into the hallway and turned to face the stairs at which point I believe I was hit from behind. Nothing was said
Caffery, standing over Souness as she typed, pointed at the screen. 'Didn't he hear the window breaking in the kitchen?'
'Says not.'
'So this guy just drops into their hallway? Like Santa Claus?'
'That's how it sounds.'
He frowned. He put his hand on the monitor and leaned over to read the rest of the statement:
Nothing was said and from that point on I remember nothing until I woke up later with a headache and a sore throat. I do not know how long I had been unconscious. I was handcuffed to something and blindfolded and gagged. After a while I realized it was the radiators I was handcuffed to. I didn't know which room I was in, but I could hear my wife crying and it sounded as if she was in the landing which seemed to be above and behind me, so I guessed I was in the living room. And I recognized the carpet because it's new. I didn't know what time it was because it was dark, but when the sun came up I could see the light through the blindfold and I thought it was coming front the direction of the kitchen at the rear of the house. I stayed in this place for three days, during which time I did not see or hear my son, although I could hear my wife crying on and off. I do not know what happened to my son. I glimpsed the man once only under the bottom of the blindfold. I think he was very tall, even taller than I am maybe. I would say in his late twenties, maybe thirty, because he seemed strong and he must have been strong to have dragged me from the hallway into the living room. He was wearing a pair of dirty white trainers, I couldn't see the make, but they looked like old Hi-Tecs or something. He had very large feet. I heard him moving up and down the wall and at one time he stayed in the corner of the room, crouched down -I could tell that from the sound of his breathing like he was going to pounce, but he didn't. All I remember is that he sniffed a lot as if he was smelling something. It's the way my wife is sometimes she was always thinking she could smell something. On, I think, Monday morning I lost consciousness. Knowing my son I do not believe that he would have voluntarily left the house with anyone. I do not know the man who was in my house and there is no one that I know of who has any grudge against me or against my family.
'And that's it.' Souness opened a new document and began the witness assessment attachment her observations of Peach's state of mind, intelligence, ability with the English language, his emotional state (poor: Peach had been clearly confused during the interview, becoming tearful and agitated, particularly when his son was mentioned).
'What about the photos? The camera?'
'No.' She shook her head. ' Carmel must have imagined it I asked him, he definitely doesn't remember photographs.'
'He's sure.'
'Oh, aye I double-checked.'
'Shit.' While Souness typed, Caffery went to his desk. He sat down and picked off the Post-It notes Kryotos had stuck to his monitor. Messages: Rebecca had called, a few journalists wanted an interview, Kryotos wanted him to know she'd received the Quest Search disk from Registry, and that she had made a call to Missing Persons. After a period of forty-eight hours the Horseferry Road coroner's office would receive any unidentified bodies found in the Metropolitan area, but Caffery knew the call was a token gesture futile: the whole of London was burning over Rory Peach he wouldn't have made it as far as Missing Persons without someone speaking to Shrivemoor. He stuck this last Post-It to his finger and stared at it blankly. Where was Rory Peach? And were there photographs of the whole event somewhere? A camera flash. The sound of a wind-on mechanism.
These weren't easy things to imagine. Had Carmel invented it? If not, and if Alek hadn't heard it in the living room, they must have been taken in the hallway. What the fuck do you want with photographs of the poor bastards' hallway?
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. He was out of ideas. 'If we had just had some DNA we could start a screening locally.'
Souness looked up. 'Aye, and if we had a body we could get some DNA.'
'So what's our next step?'
'Och, ye know the answer to that, Jack. More in-depth interviews with the Peaches, doctors allowing, get a victimology sketched out, widen the parameters, and uh…' She paused. 'Drop the area around the park Before she
