'There was a rainstorm on Monday morning a cloudburst. If the window had already been smashed those curtains should've been damp, but they weren't. And that glass on the floor from the break-in it hasn't been moved around, right?'
'Uh…' She squinted at it. 'No that's just fallen straight out. Just sat there, hasn't it?'
'So all the time he was moving around in here it didn't get moved? Not once?'
'Could he not have just avoided it? Walked round it?'
'Then how did he get his prints under the glass?'
Souness was silent. She rubbed her head until the skin under the colourless hair became pink. 'Uh…'
'Look at this photo.' He handed her the photo taken after the glass had been removed and the ninhydrin developed. He carefully counted the cross-hatched trellises on the lino. 'There.' He stood with his feet on either side of two faint brown stains just next to the door the ninhydrin glove prints. This part of the floor had been under glass when the police arrived. 'His prints were there before that window smashed.' He leaned forward, tapping the photo to make the point. 'He didn't come in through that back door.'
'Then how? Everything else was battened down, Peach says all the doors were locked the TSG had to use the sodding Enforcer to get in.'
'Exactly.' He took the photos from her and dropped them into his briefcase. 'You know what I think?'
'What?'
'I think Peach let him in.' He took his glasses off and looked at her. 'I think Alek Peach knows exactly who did this to them.'
The snuffling stopped as abruptly as it had started. Benedicte held her breath Think, Ben, think What the? Out of the hissing silence came the sound of water being poured on to the door. She rocketed back against the radiator.
Petrol it's petrol
The noise stopped and then she heard the long release of gas, or air. He was spraying something. Hairspray? Something to start the fire? Smurf growled softly, her fur pumped straight up along her spine and around her neck like a lizard ruff. Then in the hallway the thing, the troll, huge oh, Jesus, he sounds too heavy to be human turned and lumbered away, banging against the walls like a cornered sow, slithering and bumping down the stairs.
Then, quite suddenly, silence.
'Hal? JOSH!' That breathing sounded like an animal. Not a human being… 'Josh!' She bawled so loudly that Smurf lifted her old, deaf head and howled along with her. 'JOSH!!!'
When she couldn't scream any longer, and when there was no noise from downstairs, no exploding whump of fire, she dropped exhausted on to the floor, shaking uncontrollably. She rolled on to her side and pulled her fingernails along the marbled, transparent flesh on her inner arm, scratching and gouging, and trying not to think about what might happen to Josh.
Caffery stopped outside the Blacka Dread music shop on Coldharbour Lane to let Souness trot back down the road and pick them up some food from a take away He smoked a cigarette while he waited, and watched the local pond-life a white guy in a leather deerstalker hat was dealing on the corner next to the Joy clothes shop, and from the Ritzy came a trio of trendy young black guys in sharp fawn leather jackets, with bleached blond hair and goatees. They saw the dealer and subtly crossed away from him to the other side of the street. A girl on a cranky bike, her mirrored Indian skirt caught in the mudguard, shouted something to the dealer as she cycled by.
Caffery lit another cigarette and leaned back, suddenly realizing that he was opposite the deli Rebecca sometimes came to for mozzarella, still dripping in its muslin. Closed now, but he remembered her wandering with her bright, intrigued eyes among the loops of mountain salami, sea-green olive-oil bottles, dusty tins of something untranslatable: 'Probably merda d'artista,' she had whispered to Caffery, who had stood speechless, transfixed by a row of air-dried serra no hams hanging by the knuckles along the back of the shop: afraid that Rebecca would look up, scared of what she would make of those odd, dangling shapes. Now, from the car, he could see them, ghostly in the blue light of a fly-killer. He wished he had taken her by the arm then and said, 'Do you ever think about how Bliss left you suspended just like that, suspended like a piece of meat?'
'Oh, God not this again.' He rubbed his face wearily, wondering what she was thinking wondering where she was. He knew she wasn't at home crying, scrubbing herself in the shower; he knew she wasn't shivering in a blanket in a medical examination room at the local station, dark rings around her eyes. He had a sudden picture of her looking over her shoulder at him, blood on her mouth, watching his face. What was she thinking? Rapist? Maybe she was happy he had been proved the foxy, unclean thing she said he was. Maybe there was no working back from that.
'Hey!' Souness was tapping on the window. 'Will ye take that glaekit expression off your face and let me in the shagging car?' She was sweating from standing in the steamy take away She'd got gun go pea soup in polystyrene cups and two Jamaican patties. 'It's all I could find. Don't worry, it's all vegetarian no billy goat in any of it.'
They ate on the way back to Shrivemoor – Souness got soup on her tie and patty flakes all over her suit, but she didn't notice. She was still thinking about Alek Peach: 'So why not just fess up and tell us who it was?' At Shrivemoor she swiped her card and they got into the lift. 'It's his own wain, for Christ's sake.'
'Guilt. Maybe he's into something maybe with the business, maybe… I don't know, but maybe he's in so bad that this was a reprisal. He'd feel guilty, wouldn't he? Wouldn't he feel guilty if he'd done something that had brought this on to his family?'
'I don't know.' She stared blankly at her fractured reflection in the aluminium lift walls. 'He'd have to be well shit ted up by whoever it is not to report them.' She sighed. 'But I'm with you something's not adding up.'
'Less and less is. He says he couldn't hear Rory the whole time he was tied up. Don't you think that's odd?'
'Hmmm…'
'If he couldn't hear Rory, how come Carmel could? She was,' he reached up and knocked on the ceiling of the lift, 'upstairs and she could hear him crying. But Alek couldn't?'
'I did wonder.' She looked at him sideways. 'You think he's lying?'
'Look at the inconsistencies. The photographs Carmel heard being taken? The ones Alek knew nothing about? And this holiday thing? Luck? Or was it not such a coincidence after all? Maybe someone knew they were going on holiday, someone knew they wouldn't get disturbed.' The lift doors opened and Caffery got out, walking backwards, looking at Souness. 'Now I keep asking myself, how would a stranger know that they were going on holiday? Wouldn't it be more likely that it was someone they knew?'
'OK. OK.' She swiped her card and they went into the deserted incident room. The monitors were dark and silent; Kryotos, as she did every day, had washed everyone's mugs and left them on a tray in the corner. Souness put her hands on the desk and leaned over towards him. 'Jack. I think you're on to something. I don't know what but I think you've got a point…'
Benedicte lay on her back, exhausted, thirsty. She had felt through every inch of her prison, moving her body like a sidewinder, rubbing her elbows raw. She could reach the wardrobe but even at full stretch the door and the window fell more than a yard from her fingertips. She used every atom of energy trying to buckle the copper pipe she had pulled so hard at the handcuff that her ankle had swollen and was almost enfolding the cuff, and the handcuff screws were ruined she'd jabbed at them so much with the wire.
It was dark, but she'd learned quickly how to estimate time. Trains, distant, on the other side of the park she'd heard them once or twice before in Brixton: sometimes at night the sky lit up momentarily like white lightning from an electrical fault on the rail, and once, the June night that England had beaten Germany in the Eurocup, she'd heard the drivers blowing their horns at each other. Now the trains had a beautiful cadence in the quiet, they reminded her that people were out there, and the rhythm of them began to make sense. When they stopped she estimated it must be between twelve and one in the morning.
From downstairs she had heard nothing. Now she could smell the liquid she'd heard pouring on to the landing floor. It wasn't petrol, it was urine. He had come up here, stood only a few feet away from the bathroom, and pissed against the door. The disgusting little shit. Just be grateful, she told herself, that it wasn't petrol.
She sat up, began to unroll her buckled body. Urine. She had avoided that indignity until now but she knew there was no point in holding on. 'Gotta pee, Smurf.' She had to stop herself apologizing to the dog. 'It's got to be done.'
She pulled her trousers and knickers down over the free foot and crumpled them around the bound ankle. With a pinched, contrapuntal squirm, she rotated herself so that she was crouching facing the radiator, holding on
