ticked on and now his hard-on was dying. He groaned, dropped his hands from his face and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his head throbbing.
You've started something now, jack. This is all about last night.
When she came back a few minutes later she was wearing his old to welling dressing-gown. She had brushed her hair and was carrying a glass of vodka and a lighted cigarillo. She stood at the small bookshelf in the bedroom, smoking and reading the titles calmly as if nothing odd had happened. He got up and rested his hands on her shoulders. 'Look last night 'Don't worry about it.' She pulled away from him. 'I'm going to bed now.'
And that was it. He stood in the doorway, determined not to get angry as she put the cigarillo in the ashtray on the bed stand crawled under the covers, levered her knees up and rested a book on them. Her tidy little face was illuminated from the bedside lamp. Serious and intent on the book as if he wasn't there. He knew there were things he should say. Things he should be able to say. But he was tired and full of the images of Rory's autopsy and he knew this was a bad time for them to start talking. 'Right.' He turned away and went straight into the back bedroom.
This was the room he'd shared with Ewan as a child Ewan's room, he called it now. He found his trainers and pulled on jogging pants and a T-shirt. Ducking briefly to check the lights at Penderecki's over the railway, that habit he knew he would never slake, he put a door key on a piece of tape around his neck, went downstairs and slammed the door. He hadn't said goodbye to Rebecca.
As soon as he closed the front door she dropped the book on the floor and slumped down in the bed, staring at the ceiling. When the gate had closed and the street outside became quiet only the occasional car going by, the headlights crossing the ceiling she sat up, pulled the pillow from behind her head, lay back down on the bed and pressed the pillow across her face. Oh, God, Jack, this is so screwed-up. Using the weight of her forearms she held the pillow down against her nose and mouth and began to scream.
She screamed until her throat was sore and her head ached. Then she lay still with the pillow still resting across her face, muffling her breathing. The moisture in her breath wet the cotton, but otherwise her face was dry she hadn't cried.
Running, which in his twenties had been a release of energy, in his thirties had become his way of letting his mind float free. It stopped his thoughts battering themselves against the walls and tonight the release was instant. He knew exactly what the deal was: he wanted Rebecca to talk about what had happened, and in return she wanted him to turn his back on Ewan in fact, she'd like him to leave the house. In this she was exactly like the others, but only in this. Where everything else was concerned he found Rebecca utterly different she held his attention more than any of the others, he loved her more, he fancied her more. Still he didn't want to have to choose. He ran, trying not to think about it, the door key banging on his chest, wrapping itself around his mother's St. Christopher, out through the bad estates of Brockley -resolute little Brockley row upon row of artisans' cottages pecked at by von Braun's vergeltung doodle bugs The view had changed since Ewan. Now Lewisham's neon monolith, the Citibank, the faulty C blinking and fizzing and popping like an ultraviolet fly-killer, filled the skyline. Around its feet, instead of wealthy city commuters, drugs dealers bought the airy six-bedroom houses in the avenues near Hillyfields and sometimes shot one another in the dead of night.
Caffery had bought the house he lived in from his parents in his early twenties. Once it had been called Serenity, but some wag in the sixties had got up a stepladder with a handful of quick-drying cement and changed it to Gethsemane. The first thing the Cafferys did was have the whole plaque chiselled out. 'No need to bring agony here,' his mother said. 'Anyone who lives in a house with that name is going to be cursed.' Her cure hadn't worked. Maybe she had left it too late.
He continued down the road, sweat darkening his T-shirt, taking a left at the end, and went on, past Nunhead cemetery, out on to the starlit Peckham Rye with its dark moving lakes and open spaces. He wondered suddenly about Brockwell Park, about Rory's killer, about connections. Was there a pool of tricks and skewed thoughts that every paedophile in London came to drink in? He'd read once, years ago, about the world's largest organism: a fungus, it lived underground and covered almost forty acres of Michigan. Sometimes he imagined the paedophile network to be a little like that fungus: every one of them living invisibly under society under our noses every one of them connected on some fleshy outcrop to every other. Penderecki was an old man, spent, his days of boys and prison sentences over, but he was part of that network and Caffery could guarantee that the old man knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who knew Rory Peach's killer. The number of degrees of separation he could only guess at but he sensed it wouldn't be many.
He jogged back to Brockley, turning left across the railway bridge, letting his eyes skim along the tracks. The trees had still been in leaf when Ewan disappeared it would have been easy, in the dead of night, to store a body in one of them, then take it down before the leaves fell. Not a good thing to think about. He crossed into Penderecki's road and jogged past the sunburst gates, the leaded stained-glass windows, the little enclosed porches with their wall baskets and shoes lined up in neat rows. The light was on in Penderecki's bathroom and Caffery paused -just for a moment outside the house, looking up at that light with the fatal intensity of a moth. The frosted window made tinted diamonds of the light beyond, and it took him a moment to see that something was hanging just behind the glass something long and coloured, a paper lantern, perhaps, the sort you might see in a student's bed sit Not like Penderecki to decorate, or to flaunt something. Unless there was a reason. You're probably meant to see it -it's the start of something new. New torment.
He turned and began to retrace his footsteps back home, back to Gethsemane. There he took off his soaking shorts and T-shirt and stood in the shower, thinking of terraced houses and how claustrophobic they were. Then he lay next to Rebecca in the darkness, listening to her breathing.
Ten.
(21 July)
The next morning Caffery found Kryotos in tears in the incident-room kitchen. He pulled her face against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. She cried harder, her shoulders shaking. The only time he'd ever seen Kryotos cry had been at Paul Essex's funeral. It felt strangely intimate.
'Don't let Danni see me, please.'
'OK, OK, here.' He kicked the door closed, not letting go of her. 'What is it, Marilyn? Is it the kids?'
She shook her head and wiped her nose. 'Danni just spoke to Quinn about…'
'About what?' He stroked her hair. 'She spoke to Quinn about what?'
'The PM on Rory Peach.' She pressed the heels of her hands against her face. 'The photos are on your desk. Quinn wants all these tests she wants you to call.'
'What's upset you?'
'They think he was alive in the tree. They think he was alive for two days up there. He tried to get out of the ropes She tore off a piece of kitchen roll and balled it up against her eyes. 'I know it's stupid I just can't help thinking about him fighting, just skinny little arms but he still fought.'
Caffery stroked her hair and stared at the ceiling. Of course he'd known. He'd known it when Krishnamurthi had been unable to uncoil the small body. When he'd massaged the feet to see if he could flex them. When there was no smell. Had Rory been dead long enough for the rigor to have died away, he would have already been unidentifiable in this weather. As it was the boy had been smooth and perfect. The rigor hadn't even had time to reach his feet, he was so newly dead.
'Here.' He pulled her against his chest. He could feel her warm breasts under the neat white blouse. He'd never been this close to Marilyn before she smelt like a woman, she smelt of shampoo and baking and lipstick, and she smelt utterly different from Rebecca. He thought about last night, about Rebecca calmly leaving him in the bedroom, about him lying there on the bed with his useless erection, and, as if she sensed the shift, as if she was suddenly self-conscious about their closeness, Marilyn, with her face against his shirt, became still. She stopped shaking and breathed through her mouth. When she pulled away the tears had gone but she was red in the face and wouldn't meet his eyes. She went to sit at the computer terminal and as Caffery walked to the SIO's room he noticed that the back of her neck was flushed.
In the SIO's room, Souness, looking fresh in a Marks amp; Spencer's man's suit over an open-necked lilac
