could hold up her hand Caffery had sucked breath in between his teeth. 'I know, I know ye don't like it '
'No, I don't like it I still think he's in there. How could someone have left that park carrying a struggling kid and no one see him?'
'Maybe the hairn was walking.'
'No one saw him. Anyway, none of Rory's clothes are missing. He would have been naked.'
'Maybe the intruder brought his own clothes.'
'Rory was bleeding, he was probably in shock I just don't buy it.'
'Well, he's not in the park now, is he?'
'No,' Caffery admitted, ferreting under the desk for the holdall. He needed a drink. 'Doesn't look that way.' He held up a bottle of Scotch but Souness shook her head.
'Nah.' She clicked, sending the report to the printer in the incident room, and stood, stretching, looking at her watch. 'Nah, it's late. I need a kip.'
She went into the incident room to distribute the statement in the team's pigeon-holes and for a few minutes Caffery was alone. He stood, holding the bottle, looking at his eyes reflected in the window, superimposed over the Croydon skyscrapers. What if Rebecca was right? What if people saw the naked teeth of a killer every time they looked at him?
'A little thing inside you that just keeps growing and growing and if you don't get away from this house, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then bam! you'll do it again.'
He half filled a mug with Scotch, knocked it back and stared at his face, green tie unknotted and hanging loose around his neck.
It might go as far as it did last time
She was wrong, he decided. She was making it up to get him away from the house. When Souness came back he turned and looked at her. 'Danni?'
'Mmmm?'
'What do you think that was all about, before? You know, Peach giving me the old treatment about my eyes.'
'Och Christ knows.' She shrugged and bent over the workstation, closing down the computer for the night. 'Ye know how they get he's probably got post-traumatic stress. Probably felt more comfortable talking to a woman, even an ugly old dyke like me.' She straightened, pulled on her jacket, looked at him and smiled, clapping him on the back. 'There's nothing wrong with your eyes, Jack, believe me. Ask any of the lassies in the team if there's anything wrong with your eyes and you'll get the answer.' She coughed and straightened her back, running her palms down her lapels. 'Except me, of course. I don't count.'
Seven.
He called Rebecca. The whole weight of the day was on him. 'Let's just go home, cook something and go to bed…' But she was exuberant: she was in Brixton -she was at a private view at the Air Gallery on Coldharbour Lane she wanted him to pick her up. OK, she agreed, they'd do some shopping in twenty-four-hour Tesco's, get some wild rice, some lamb, a bottle of something red and cook at home. But he could tell he was souring it for her. He could tell she wanted to stay at the party.
As he parked on Effra Road a herd of bright young things passed, bussed in by the score from West London and the home counties, moving through the street on their long, alien legs, heads back, faces lit like God's own converts as they moved through the darkness towards the lights in Brixton Central. Just as if they didn't know what had happened half a mile away in Brockwell Park. Just as if they had never heard of Rory Peach. He pocketed his keys and crossed Windrush Square into Coldharbour Lane, heading for the chief source of light, a great living column of heat and colour: the Air Gallery, lifting up into the night, a huge industrial space of textured concrete and galvanized steel. As he got nearer he could see Rebecca at the foot of the building, in the entrance, sipping a cocktail and looking at her watch.
He could remember a time when she would wait for him calmly, hands behind her back, the left foot resting lightly on the right. Now she stood with feet planted wide, dressed in a short leather jerkin, bubblegum-pink combat trousers, and, of course, her new accessory: her strange unhealthy energy, unravelling out into the night around her like a veil.
'Jack.' She wormed a long brown arm under his jacket and pulled him nearer, standing on tiptoe for a kiss. Her nose was warm and her breath was sweet and orangy like Cointreau. He realized she was drunk. 'I've just been speaking to someone from The Times, and Marc Quinn's in there you know, the one with the frozen-blood head. He's in there and Ron Mue…'
'Great shall we go?'
'And I told the guy from The Times I was doing more of my vaginas '
'I'm sure he's made up about that.' He tried to take the cocktail from her but she grinned and shook the glass at him, the crushed-strawberry-colour drink rattling like ice… 'Diabolo,' she sang, curling her fingers at him. 'It's a Diiiii-aaa bolo The Devil?
'Becky,' he could feel irritation rising, 'can we just get something to eat and head home He broke off. A Japanese woman in zipped PVC platform boots and a white vinyl raincoat had appeared from inside the crowded gallery bar and was staring at Rebecca. Caffery was used to the shamanic appeal she had for strangers, but he didn't like it. He turned to the woman. 'What?'
In reply she gave him a long, cold look, lifted a camera and before he realized what was happening had fired off two flashes. 'Hey!' She slid back into the gallery bar and he caught Rebecca by the arm. 'Right, come on time to go.' He took the drink from between her fingers and put it on the pavement outside the gallery. 'Let's get some food.'
She trotted along beside him, smiling and chattering about all the journalists she'd met. He walked fast, not listening to the details. Where had she got this hard gaiety of hers? The change in her had started like a sudden fever a month after the inquest. In the first few weeks, while she was back and forward from the hospital and he had been busy with tying up the case, there had been a strange lulled silence, a dreamy fermata in which Bliss's name wasn't mentioned. Then suddenly, overnight it seemed, Rebecca began talking. But not to him to the press. To him she still wouldn't mention it directly.
'Are you ever going to talk to me about it?'
'I already have. I gave you a statement, didn't I'
And off she went to bury herself in her mad art. Plaster casts of other women's genitals. It was as absurd as it was dispiriting. Sometimes he believed she could make her heart move in the opposite direction to her body, in a way his unsophisticated heart couldn't.
'You could have been a bit nicer,' she said, as they walked around Tesco's. 'You don't know who she was she might have been with one of the papers.'
'Or she might have been a ghoul.'
'You don't understand.' She lingered a little behind him, idly looking at the shelves, swinging her arms like a bored schoolgirl. 'I have to be on display at these things it's part of the game.'
'Well, I'm not up for it.' He walked ahead, not waiting for her, trying to get this over and done with, wanting to be out of Brixton as soon as possible, subconsciously scanning the other shoppers, wondering if Rory Peach's abductor might walk past him. He half expected someone to come up to him, point a finger, and say, 'Why aren't you looking for him? What do you think you're doing, hanging around in the pasta section of Tesco's when Rory's still missing?' He threw some rice into the basket and continued up the aisle, Rebecca trailing behind. 'I'm not up for another night of watching you talk to every dickhead with a mike and a pen.'
'Ooooo-wooh,' she trilled behind him. 'Where's this coming from?'
He didn't answer. He walked a bit faster.
'Is it coming from the case we're working on?' she whispered, closing on him. 'Does it all remind us of something we'd rather forget? Is that what the mood is?'
'Shall we change the subject?'
'Oh, Jack! I was joking.' She got ahead of him, stopped to pull a bottle of red wine off the shelf and turned to
