sometimes naturally and sometimes self-consciously. Always unmissably. She knew it could make her appear brittle, but she also knew why it was there. She'd had to grow it, like a new pelt, early in life, when she realized that her father would never be prised away from his obscure metaphysical apologias, and her mother would never be tricked down from the place she floated, doped and fat on imipramine. 'The daughter of an English professor and a clinically depressed beauty', was how one journalist had summed her up. It took Rebecca a while to recognize that this was why she couldn't admit to the blank section of her memory: it was an admission that her tough little character was a lie, that she'd been left out of control for a while without a skin, open to infection. She didn't think she'd ever be able to talk calmly about it. How can you not remember?
For a year now she'd kept a lid on it until: Think about what it was like for me to find you hanging, Rebecca, hanging from a hook in the fucking ceiling. It was the first time she'd got a glimpse of what had happened that day in Kent and now she found she couldn't look at Jack's face above hers without the fear that Malcolm Bliss's would appear imposed over it. Something was on the move in her something that wouldn't let her lie flat on her back without squirming, something that wouldn't let her sleep a night through. She rolled on to her front and began to get up it was important to Rebecca, very important, that she didn't let anyone know the truth.
At home Rebecca was asleep. Or pretending to be. Two lipstick-stained cigarillo butts sat in an ashtray next to the bed on top of an article about the Turner Prize. Caffery changed into joggers, a sweatshirt and lightweight walking boots, got some tools from under the stairs and went into the back garden. He waded out through the undergrowth, past the green Express Dairies crate that Penderecki had used to stand on, through the nettles and submerged branches. The cutting was quiet, the last train gone, and down here, below the level of the city, there were cooler, clearer isotherms. Along the empty tracks the signals glowed green. Caffery crossed quickly, hearing the startled movements of an animal in the undergrowth. On the opposite side he found a fox path or maybe it's Penderecki's path leading straight to the garden.
The back of the house was silent and dark, the fence rotten with water. He moved quickly through the garden, his chest tightening as he got nearer. And now why hadn't he watched more carefully? he saw that along the metal frame of the broken old annexe flies gathered like clusters of hanging black fruit, rippling lazily.
He used his Swiss Army knife to gouge away the ancient putty of the kitchen window, flaking wood and paint on to his sweatshirt. Levering out the panel pins, he eased the pane from the frame and the stale trapped air inside the house came at him like a train. He could smell what was in the bathroom the stench that stimulates the rarely stimulated root of humanness the smell of opened human bowels, the smell of the dead sitting up in their graves and exhaling into the night. He could hear the flies No way, no fucking way, this can't be happening as he reached in, turned the key and opened the back door.
Quiet.
'Ivan?'
He stood there, counting to a hundred, waiting for a response.
'Ivan?'
He'd never addressed Penderecki by his first name before.
'Are you here?'
Still no reply. Only the pounding of his own blood in his ears. He stepped into the annexe.
Once twenty years ago, before Penderecki had got wise to him and started locking the doors Caffery had sneaked in here, and the surprise had been how ordinary the house was. Damp and fraying, but ordinary for that. Just an old man's house. Patterned carpets, a gas fire, a folded copy of the Radio Times next to the sofa. Milk in the fridge and a paper bag of sugar on the work top The home of a twice-convicted paedophile, and there was milk in the fridge, sugar on the work top and a Radio Times in the lounge. Now, as he moved through the rooms, he was struck by how little it had changed. The house was smaller, the wallpaper yellower than he remembered, a strip of it hung from the ceiling above the stairwell and the carpet was shiny with dirt. A Local Shopper newspaper lay on the doormat with a pile of flyers from local restaurants, but apart from the flies it was all so unchanged it was like having his memory shaken out in front of his eyes.
On the small window-sill at the bottom of the stairs was the digital readout that he knew Penderecki used to monitor phone calls. On top of it sat a ripped-open brown envelope. No letter inside but the return address was the Oncology Unit, Lewisham Hospital. The first clue he stuffed it into his pocket. Oh, Jesus, he thought, oh, Jesus, let this not be happening. He turned to the stairs, moving slowly, dead-fly husks crunching underfoot. Above him the living insects thrashed their wings in a single low note, in and out -as if the house was breathing with them.
All the doors on the landing were open, save the one into the bathroom. He could see the light coming from the crack under the door. The smell was denser here, and he had to lift the hem of the sweatshirt, exposing his stomach, to cover his face as he reached for the light-switch at the top of the stairs. The bulb pinged, died. Shit. Reaching inside one of the open doors, he found a switch and this time the light came on, throwing a rectangle of yellow out into the small landing. Quickly, breathing shallowly, he checked inside the doors. In two of the rooms there was nothing just an empty Coke can and a few squares of carpet on the bare floorboards. In the third he discovered where Penderecki had been living.
The mattress was covered with stained nylon sheets, worn almost to transparency, a pile of newspapers next to the bed, a cup and an empty baked-beans can with a fork sticking out of it rested on top of the pile. There was only one decoration in the room on the far wall: an Athena poster of two boys wearing straw hats, sitting on a wooden jetty, one with his arm draped around the other's shoulder. It was a photograph from the seventies the sun had been a different colour three decades ago: softer and more yellow than a third-millennium sun. The two boys looked about the same age that Jack and Ewan had been when… He had to stop.
'Shit, shit, shit let's get this over with.'
He pressed the sweatshirt into his nostrils, went back on to the landing, took a deep breath and tried the bathroom door.
It opened smoothly and there, in front of him, in the centre of the pale green bathroom, covered and moving with flies, hung Ivan Penderecki.
Somewhere someone was screaming. Benedicte fought up towards it, through hot layers of sleep, and sat up in the cool darkness of the bedroom, her pulse elevated, her skin damp.
'Muuuuuum!'
'Josh?' Sleepily she dropped out of bed and padded along the corridor. 'Coming, tadpole.' In his bedroom she flicked on the switch and stood in the doorway, blinking in the light. Josh was sitting against the bed head a pillow clutched to his chest. His feet were stretched rigid in front of him, his hair sticking up from his head as if electricity had passed through him. He was staring at a crack in the curtains.
'Mum the troll '
'It's all right, tadpole.' Benedicte went straight over and pulled back the curtain. The garden was dark and silent, the window closed. Over the fence the outline of Brockwell Park was purple against the stars and in the distance the Crystal Palace transmitter lit up the sky. 'Troll's not there, darling. Nothing there at all.' She dropped the curtain and sat down on the edge of his bed, putting a hand on his hot little forehead. 'It's Mummy's fault. I shouldn't have put you in these pyjamas, they're too warm.' She tried to pull the flannel pyjama top up over his head. 'You're wet through, I'll put you in a T-shirt '
'No!' Josh jerked away from her, moving his head so that he could see past her to the window.
'Now, come on, darling, it's the middle of the night and Mummy just wants to get you out of these wet jammies so you can go back to sleep.'
'Nooo!' He pulled his hands away. 'He's watching me. He was there.'
'Josh, I think you dreamed it the troll couldn't get this high. You're all the way up in the air here, you're quite safe.'
'You all right, peanut?' Hal was standing in the doorway blinking like a sleepy cat.
Benedicte turned. 'Oh, Hal, I didn't mean to wake you up…'
'That's OK.' He looked at his son bolt upright in bed bracing the pillow against his chest. 'What's up, peanut?'
'He thinks maybe he saw the troll '
'Not maybe.'
'He saw the troll at the window, you know, the one from the park.'
'OK, ssh, ssh.' Hal came to the bed and kissed his son's head. 'Want me to go and check he's gone?'
