'No.'
'It can multiply the sample thirty-four times. It's only approved for major crime '
Then do it. You've got our lab cost code it should have already been started.'
'That's what I was trying to say. It has been. It's already been started.'
The envelope was on the doormat when he came in. The conversation with Fiona Quinn had finished him for the day. He had lost his temper with her you just can't help proving Rebecca right, can you? and had left Shrivemoor early, knowing he should just go home and sleep. He drove to Sainsbury's where he bought four bottles of Pinot Grigio on sale, a bottle of Laphroaig, a carton of Coke bottles, milk and some Nurofen. Just before he left the shop he saw a bunch of sage green leaves mixed with peonies. He hesitated then bought two bunches. For Rebecca.
Now he picked up the letter and took it into the kitchen. He put it on the table, then stood for a moment and stared at it. It had a second-class stamp on it. It had been posted on Wednesday afternoon and was from Penderecki he could tell from the writing. Maybe posting this had been the last thing he had ever done.
Caffery emptied the carrier-bags, stopping from time to time to go back to the table and look at the envelope. He carefully put one bottle of wine in the freezer, another in the fridge, looked through the cupboards for a vase, and when he couldn't find one took a plastic lemonade bottle from the bin, cut off the top, peeled away the label and filled it with water. He put the flowers in it, rested it on the window-ledge in the living room, rolled himself a spliff using the sensi that Rebecca kept in the Oxo tin, and then, when he could bear it no longer, he lit the joint, sat down at the table and opened the envelope.
It contained just one sheet of paper. There was no need for a note or explanation. The single sheet of paper told him everything he needed to know. It was a map.
Fifteen.
It took Caffery about twenty minutes to understand exactly what the map represented. He sat at the kitchen table, next to the open window, turning the paper over and over in his hands, holding it up to the light. The little rectangle represented a building 'cottage' written next to it in Penderecki's distinctive hand. Caffery knew the slang for a public toilet but the odd ladder rungs lying next to it? Steps? He turned the paper through ninety degrees, laying the ladder on its side. It was broken half-way along; a double-headed arrow joined the separated rungs, and scratched above the arrow: 10 – 140. The rungs to the right of the arrow were numbered: 141, 142, 143, 144, 145. He ran his fingers over the paper. Above rung number 145 was another arrow, at its head an X, circled twice.
He turned the paper through forty-five degrees, twisted it on its side and suddenly the meaning was blazing out at him. Oh, fuck, of course. Of course. He sat up, his heart pumping. The railway line -Penderecki's natural warren, he used it to come and go, he was as at home down there as the rats and the foxes. The lines on the map were sleepers. And if these lines represented the railway sleepers, then the rectangular box probably represented oh, shit, yes -the unused public toilets just up the road from Brockley station? The X was one hundred and forty-five railway sleepers past the station.
'X marks the spot,' he muttered, stubbing out the spliff. Penderecki could still jerk his strings even past life he had the power. He found tools in the cupboard, a small camera in Ewan's room and took the backdoor key from above the lintel. 'This had better not be a dead end, you old fucker, you old fucker.'
The sun was sinking low over the roofs and in the back gardens along the rail cutting children shrieked, hung on climbing frames, chased each other in circles. Caffery used a fox track two yards into the undergrowth, parallel to the railway moving carefully, quietly, his head down: the Transport Police, who resented the 'real' police, would be in hog heaven to find one of his kind wandering down the track. It was oddly silent down here. A sort of muffled, suspended silence. Occasionally the rails would hum and a train would race past, making the air thunder, and for a moment the cutting would hold its breath. But then the train would pass and the stillness would descend again, grass pollen floating to earth like duck-down.
He couldn't help thinking about Ewan as he walked along here, with the smell of the tracks after a day in the sun, metal and hot black engine oil. He thought of the two of them, racing up and down the cutting, playing cowboys and Indians, setting traps for each other. Ewan oh, Jesus. He rubbed the sweat off his face with his T- shirt he didn't want to imagine what he might find down the track.
He reached the public toilets their graffitied backs staring out blankly over the track (Tracii sucks cock -Shaz sucks pussy), tiny windows, like gun slots in a pillbox, smashed and plugged with chip board
Checking the map, he positioned himself with New Cross behind him, Honour Oak ahead, and began to count along the sleepers.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen
Stepping over dead rats, dried toilet paper, sun-bleached Coke cans.
Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two this had better not be a wind-up.
Outside Brockley station the land on either side of the railway lost its undergrowth and lay as flat as an alluvial plain, dusted with thistle and dock leaves, until about ten feet away from the railway line where the banks right- angled abruptly upward in great walls of vegetation, so deep and entwined that anything could live in there capuchin monkeys, maybe, chattering and swinging on vines. Up ahead a footbridge, remote and spindly, like a bridge slung over a jungle gorge.
One hundred and forty-three, one hundred and forty-four, one hundred and forty
The hundred and forty-fifth sleeper. He stopped. Dropped the hammer and stood, feet straddling the sleeper, facing at right angles away from the line, in the direction of the arrow on the map. Immediately he could see that someone had been here before. Someone had walked back and forward in a straight line between this sleeper and the foot of the bank -under tender new ivy shoots the vegetation was dead and trampled. Just do it, don't stop to think. He went to the bank and began tugging at the woodbine, tearing open a hole large enough to get into. Then he ducked inside.
It smelt of stinging nettles and dandelion, of fox dirt and oil, and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light. He stopped, wiping the sweat from his face, getting his bearings, and now he found he could straighten up in here. Someone had cleared a dome shape in the hanging undergrowth in front of him was the bank, behind him curtains of ivy and bramble. And down here? Down on the ground? He crouched and found dried stems and root matter. He tore at it, tugging the meshwork away.
In spite of what he'd expected, in spite of the fact that he was prepared, when he saw what was under the roots his heart began to race. He didn't really believe what he was seeing. A small circle of ground, about two foot by three, had been disturbed within the year. Few plants had taken root there.
He sat down next to the circle, next to the turfed-over clumps of brown Eocene London clay, rested his hands on his ankles, and began to shake.
'You can see the balloon at Vauxhall.' Ayo Adeyami went straight into the family room at the back of the house and knelt on Benedicte's sofa, opening the window and leaning out. 'And look! The London Eye.'
'I know.' In the kitchen Benedicte pulled off her shoes and gave Smurf a bowl of water. They'd been for dinner at Pizza Express and afterwards had agreed to leave the men, Hal and Ayo's husband, Darren, in the pub 'just for one pint'. The two women had come back here with Josh and Smurf. Ayo was going to water Benedicte's plants while they were in Cornwall and she still hadn't seen the house.
She was enthralled. 'It's brilliant! Absolutely brilliant.'
'I know.'
'No need to be smug.'
'I know. Hey!' From the kitchen she leaned across the low units and spoke to Josh, who had already flung himself on the floor in the family room and was watching The Simpsons, his chin in his hands. 'Hey, brat, keep the volume down, OK. Come on we've got guests.'
Josh grumbled about it. But he turned the sound down and dropped the control.
'Good.' Benedicte got a bottle of Freixenet out of the fridge. 'That fireplace,' she said to Ayo, putting the bottle between her thighs and trying to prise out the cork. 'That fireplace is Travatino limestone.'
'Is it crap.' Ayo looked over her shoulder and grinned. 'It's cast concrete. Darren put one in our place.'
