'Mmmm?' She wasn't looking at him. 'What?'
'I know why this is happening, Rebecca. I do know.'
'Do you?'
'And you need to talk about it. You need to talk about what happened.'
'I never stop talking about it.'
'I don't mean to the press, I mean to me.' Impatient now, he buckled up his belt. 'Or just leave me be, Becky, just leave me be. Unless you want to give me a blowjob instead of giving one to the whole London art scene, then just leave me be.'
For a moment she seemed to be about to say something but she changed her mind and dropped her hands on the sofa with an exasperated sigh. 'God! What's got into you?'
'What do you think's got into me? I'm standing here, look at me, a raging hard-on, and you' he gestured at the TV 'you're watching the fucking television.'
'Don't lecture me, Jack, when there's a few things of your own we don't exactly rip apart and put under the microscope.'
'OK.' He stopped her, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. 'This is disintegrating.' He turned to the door. 'When you want to talk you know where I'll be.'
'Where?'
'In the bathroom having a wank.'
He jerked himself off in the shower then pulled on his running gear and left the house without speaking, slamming the door behind him.
The night sky was the colour of sea. The deep blue that can sometimes be seen curled in the paw of a coral atoll. It was warm and someone's late-night music pounded out of a bed sit window and up into the starlit sky. Sweat dribbled into his eyes he concentrated on making his heels hit the tarmac straight and tried not to think about Rebecca. But his mind kept orbiting back to it, back to the stalemate they were in. Neither of them was going to give way, that was clear, they'd just get harder and harder in their determination. Shit, Rebecca. He loved her, he had no question about it, had a real tenderness for her that was hard to heal, but from where he stood he couldn't see a way past these rigid battle-lines they stood in.
'Jack,' Rebecca said suddenly, sitting up on the sofa and turning to the door. Her sudden sense of him was almost as if he'd walked in. 'Jack, it's because' she held her fists hard against her stomach it's because I'm wounded. Big bloody wound.' She paused, open-mouthed, staring at the empty doorway letting what she had just said sink in. Then her face crumpled and she laughed out loud at the stupid drama. 'Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm wounded! Wounded? Poor, poor wounded Becky!' She jumped up, went into the kitchen for the champagne glass and came shimmying back into the living room, twisting her free hand in front of her face, a long-nailed Shiva dancing on the bare floor. 'Wounded you silly cow, wounded, wounded, wounded!' There was some grass she kept in an old Oxo cube box on the mantelpiece and she sang as she rolled a joint, sipping the vodka, her tongue getting numb and furry. She knelt down, put the glass on the floor, lit the spliff, took a few hits then suddenly rolled on to the floor, on her back, her hands over her eyes. 'Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.'
They were in a hole. The pair of them, deep in a hole: Jack, with his determined tearing apart of himself over Ewan it terrified her where that all might end and then, on the opposite side of the battlefield, she stood, with her mouth healed over, her eyes shut. All Jack wanted was for her to sit and discuss it calmly, to flush it through, make it clean again. I don't blame you, Jack, I don't blame you. She wanted, really wanted, to tell him. But she couldn't, and that was where the wound was. In her memory. Because what Jack didn't know was that all the way through Joni's inquest, through him patiently taking her statement in the hospital room overlooking the dripping trees, through him gently prompting her when she dried, through her pretending to cry when the coroner asked her a question she didn't know the answer to -even when she alluded to it in the press all along Rebecca had been telling a lie. The truth was something she hardly dared admit, even to herself. She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the ceiling. The truth was that of the attack in the little Kent bungalow a year ago she could remember nothing.
The pavement was warm, it had trapped the day's heat. He had been going for half an hour when he became aware of his surroundings. This was Penderecki's street he was running down. He'd come here without thinking about it drawn by some internal compass. He slowed to a jog, looking at the houses.
It was one of those peculiarly neat roads that bring with them the odd aroma of a seaside town, as if you might see Vacancies signs propped in front of the lace curtains. Penderecki's was half-way along it, flush with the others, but so luminous a landmark in Caffery's conscience that sometimes it seemed to him to protrude from the other houses, proud-bellied. He approached, feet curling down on to the pavement, and stopped outside, resting his hands on the gate, bending over for a moment, catching his breath, his sweat dripping in dark coins on the pavement.
He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the house. How long would it be before one of the team came knocking on this door asking about the troll? How long before Danni's girlfriend, Paulina, with her agile little mind and her databases, would point out the similarities between what had happened to Rory and what had happened two and a half decades ago to Ewan? Again he got that image, that slow spreading image of fingers reaching out under the soil. Of Penderecki touching fingers with the troll.
He straightened. Tonight something about Penderecki's house struck him as odd. The bathroom light was still on and the giant lantern, red and yellow and grey, was still hanging there. He thought it looked a little bigger. He stood for a moment, frowning, then slowly pushed open the gate.
He had never walked up Penderecki's path before -on the few occasions he had ventured to the house he had used the back route and travelled under darkness because Penderecki, being a criminal, knew his rights inside out and would have snapped restraining orders, quia timet orders, down on his head without blinking. The front garden was a mass of candy floss-pink mallow, like crystallized sweets, thin as paper, gone native and seeming to move as if there was a breeze here. Long grasses brushed at his aching calves. At the bottom step he paused.
The front door still had its original leaded glass a hill and a windmill, sun rays delineated in black. As he climbed the two steps he knew, he could hear them, the hum of them, the hum of wet bodies sucking and breeding, and then he could see them, individuals blackening the rays of the glass sunrise, and instantly he knew that whatever was hanging in Penderecki's bathroom, it wasn't a Chinese lantern.
What Rebecca did remember was this: Night. She is in bed with Jack.
In the morning they wake up. It's raining.
After Jack has gone to work she has coffee and toast.
She notices Joni hasn't come home.
She phones around and discovers that Joni is at Bliss's flat.
She puts on old shorts and a T-shirt and begins the cycle journey to his flat.
Blank.
Blank.
Blank.
A flash of light and something a knife? A hook?
Blank.
Blank.
Another light a doctor shining it into her eyes.
Blank.
Just a little scratch hold still, you won't feel a thing.
Blank
Jack, in his hired mourning suit, bending over her hospital bed on his way to Essex 's funeral.
Jack again. Taking her statement. When she passes her hand over her face, embarrassed to admit that she can't remember, he looks at her sympathetically and gives her a prompt trying to make it easier on her.
Did you see Bliss take Joni?
Take her?
Into the hall where we found her.
Oh, yes, that. I Yes, I saw that happen. He carried her.
From a distance Rebecca's most striking feature was her resilience: she wore it like a bright red winter coat
