to it for balance, and crab-shuffled one leg sideways so she was as far from the shackled foot as possible. She held the trousers clear with one hand, feeling like crying as the carpet under her feet grew wet and warm. She hoped, dear God, she hoped they'd be out of here before she had to move her bowels.
Suddenly in the hallway downstairs something moved. The front door slammed. Benedicte stayed quite still, facing the radiator, trousers around one foot, hardly daring to breathe.
He's gone? Then what about…
lJosh?' Her voice rose frantically and, forgetting the mess under her on the floor, she hopped around like an injured animal, getting hopelessly, pathetically, tangled in her underwear. 'HAL? JOSH? JOSH -GIVE ME BACK MY SON! JOSH!' She hammered on the wall, screaming, bawling. And when no one answered she collapsed on the floor, on her back in her own urine, put her hands over her face and sobbed.
In the back of the cupboard in the incident-room kitchen Caffery found a dusty, forgotten bottle of Tesco's gin and some flat tonic water. He and Souness had spent an hour sitting at Kryotos's workstation, finishing off the Laphroaig and hashing through their next move. Bela Nersessian, they both agreed, was the person to speak to. They'd bring her to the office and start lightly, just casual inquiries into Alek Peach, his personal life, his business dealings if he had any. The family liaison officer set up the interview for the following day, and Caffery felt a small lift of spirit. Souness, too, was satisfied that they had a new direction. At 11 p.m. she decided she was over for the night.
'Ye should do the same.' She stood in the doorway with her jacket on, trying to scratch off the soup on her tie, spitting on her finger and rubbing fruitlessly at it. 'You'll be no good to me, Jack, shagged out.'
'Yup.' He held a hand up. 'I'm right behind you.'
But he wasn't. He had no intention of going home. When she had gone he took Penderecki's cache from the lock-up filing cabinet, and sat with a mug of warm G and T at his elbow, staring out of the window, building houses from the videotapes. Several times he picked up the phone and put it down. Rebecca hadn't called and he didn't know how to approach it. Dark fathoms under your feet, Jack. At 11.30 p.m. he pushed the tapes aside, swallowed the G and T, took off his glasses, and dialled her mobile.
She answered, sounding a little indistinct.
'Rebecca where are you?'
'In bed.'
'My place?'
'No. Mine.' He pictured her dreamy and warm, one long brown arm stretched out across the pillow, her hair pulled above and behind in a long helix -serpentine, like a diving mermaid's. 'I'm in my bed.'
'Look He took a deep breath. 'I'm sorry -Rebecca, I love you I really I He stared out at the lights of Croydon not knowing how to put it. But this is as far as I can go. I can't give it up I can't leave that house and you're something I don't understand any more. 'I'm sorry, Rebecca '
'You're dumping me.'
'No I look, I've tried very hard I've tried hard, but something's happening to you and I just seem to make it worse '
'You are, you're dumping me, aren't you?'
He sighed. 'What would you want me to do after last night? You couldn't go on with me after that -you don't want that.'
'Don't tell me what I want!' Her voice rose. 'How dare you tell me what I want? I don't know what I want so how can you possibly know?' She stopped.
He could hear her breathing at the other end of the line, as if she was trying not to cry.
'Look…' He wound the phone cord around his finger and found himself saying, 'If it would make you feel better, then report it. Tell them I raped you. Tell them what you said about Bliss too.'
'What?'
'Report it.' It would be suicide, the end of everything, if she did, but he suddenly realized he didn't much care any more. 'Seriously get it over with. I'm not going to fight.'
'You're crazy '
'No. I'll take the consequences.' He paused. 'Rebecca?'
'What?' Her voice was small, distant.
'I'm sorry. I really am.'
'Yeah.' She put the phone down.
Jesus. He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the dead receiver in his hand. Then he hung up and sat forward, rubbing his eyes, pulling his hands down his face. 'Fuck fuck fuck.' What have you done? What have you done? How did it ever get this screwed up? He'd had no indication, no reason to expect that the words were suddenly going to come out like that. How does it feel? he asked himself. Does it feel good to self-destruct? Do you feel free?
He sighed and pressed his fingers against his forehead. It's all over, then, isn't it? He couldn't sleep, he couldn't go home. He sat forward, and rolled a cigarette, staring out at the night as he smoked it. When he'd finished it, he stood, took the Half Moon Lane photos from the envelope on the window-sill, looked at them for a long time, then put them back into the envelope. Then he went into the incident room and detached Marilyn's zip drive from her computer, brought it back into the SIO's room and plugged it into his own PC. His hands were shaking as he took Penderecki's disks from the filing cabinet and sat down at his desk.
The zip disks were labelled from one to nine, and each one contained up to a hundred jpegs, harvested from Russian websites, from ever-moving news groups Caffery had been on a day course to Hendon to learn how woefully ill-equipped the police were to do anything about tracking the posters of these photographs. The process of serving warrants on ISPs was lengthy and the perpetrators knew it as soon as they felt the ground getting hot beneath their feet they'd move to another service provider. Among the files Caffery found saved newsgroup postings where users dealt passwords for sites, tips on masking ISP info, adverts for 'cop software' 'to tidy up your hard drive sectors for those awkward technical support visits…'. He found the address of a safe mailbox to dump AVI and JPG files, the entire series of the notorious 'kindergarten' photos, updated URLs for Russian 'Lolita' websites, binary newsgroup postings with familiar file names FreshPetals.jpg, Buds.jpg, SweetAngel.jpg. That night he saw every type of child porn imaginable: some of the photos wouldn't have looked out of place in a high- gloss coffee-table book, beautiful, soft focus, blond children in T-shirts, shorts, bare-chested under dappled trees -but some of the files at the other end of the spectrum made his stomach turn, weathered to it though he was. He had to drink a little more G and T and press his palm flat on his stomach. Some of the photographs were so cropped it was impossible to tell the sex of the child.
He worked on, until he had a blister on his thumb pad from moving the mouse, imagining that he would find a clue in the corner of a photo for fuck's sake, what are you expecting to see? And then, very suddenly, he sat back and released the mouse. It was 1.30 a.m.' the traffic noises outside had long died away, and the building was quiet. He turned slowly, an odd sensation racing across him, to look at the videocassettes. Something had occurred to him. He had just realized why there were no pictures on them. Quickly he went into the exhibits room and got latex gloves from the evidence grab bag when he handed the tapes over he didn't want the unit thinking he'd jumped into them like a nonce filled up his mug and switched off all the lights in the incident room. But it's classic nonce behaviour, Jack, Just think how this would look, sad old sack with his booze and his smutty vids. Back in the office he found the old Swiss Army knife in his jacket pocket, pulled up a chair and positioned the Anglepoise over the desk.
Rebecca was sitting in her studio with the curtains open, holding a vodka and orange and staring at her solitary reflection in the dark window a few feet away. Beyond it the lights in Canary Wharf were on, and the other great citadels of dock lands blazed in the sky, but she hardly saw them. She was trembling. 'Right -right. OK fine,' she said. 'You didn't expect this but that's OK, just keep calm, keep it in perspective.' She downed the drink in two straight gulps and looked at her hands. They were still shaking. 'For heaven's sake, calm down it's not the end of the world.' She went into the kitchen, sat at the table and filled her glass. Vodka: the secret drink the alcoholic's drink. Her mother's drink. It's supposed not to smell. But Rebecca could smell it. She had learned the smell of it at her mother's breast: as a baby she had tangled the smell of vodka with the smell of milk for years alcohol on her mother's breath could make her salivate.
She swallowed the drink, made a face, and looked down into the empty glass, peering at the line of orange pulp. Just get on with it maybe you and Jack, maybe you weren't ever supposed to… She stood, almost lost her
